The Fallacy of Musk's Vision for the Future: Harvard historians dissect his Marvel Hero worldview in depth

Producer: The Secret Garden of the Cattle Herding Class

Source: Fast Company

Compiled: Sail2008

Editor-in-Charge: Sunnisky

Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepolay unveils Musk's mysterious cloak, deeply interprets his Marvel hero worldview and vision of the future, and dissects the fallacies in it.

Speaking of Elon Musk, it's hard to distinguish him from mythology. But in the recent futuristic big-creative podcast "The Evening Rocket, hosted by Rufus Grystom," Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Leporé unveiled Musk's mysterious cloak by reviewing the science fiction novels that accompanied him, giving an in-depth look at his worldview and vision of the future. Here are the highlights of this podcast:

Musk is a real-life Marvel hero

RUFUS: Jill, I've heard you say you're not interested in the biographies of the rich and famous at all. At the moment you're not even particularly interested in Elon Musk in this section. That being said, Musk is a very interesting guy, and I think all of us have a love-hate relationship with him.

Jill: I don't think I have some kind of love-hate relationship with him. In fact, it is difficult to think of him as a real person. His role on the Internet is that of his own Marvel hero. I don't think anyone who notices that feels like he's a real person. This is part of the consequence of playing Marvel heroes in real life.

Science fiction isn't a user guide, but Musk doesn't understand it

Rufus: Born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971, Musk has been obsessed with space travel comic books since he was a child. He was an avid book lover, and the Guide to the Galaxy was his bible. The book has some intriguing connection to the apartheid era in South Africa, where Musk grew up. You say in the podcast, "The culture of apartheid manifested itself in a strange way in the vision of the future of Silicon Valley in the 1990s. "Can you unfold it a little bit?"

Jill: In the process of making this series, I was fascinated by Musk's deep feelings about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the frequency with which it was used as a reference point. He wanted to name the first spaceship to fly to Mars after the spaceship in the novel. But then I found out that Douglas Adams was a staunch opponent of apartheid in South Africa, and that the typewriter he used to typewrite the screenplay for the Hitchhiker series had a sticker that read, "Stop apartheid."

So, when I listen to The Guide to the Galaxy, I'm not thinking about the Galaxy, I'm hearing complaints about institutions of gross economic inequality, especially about apartheid. When I started thinking about it seriously, I had to ask myself, how can you sit idly by? In other words, how can you base your vision of the future on the basis of satire on the future? What Douglas Adams said was, "We shouldn't send rich colonists to other planets to colonize space, because that would be wrong." In order to prove that it was outrageously wrong, he also wrote a satirical work. But it became Musk's guide to life, and he used it to justify himself in doing it, which is exactly what the novel opposes.

Not only Musk, Butzos also has his science fiction reference points, or Zuckerberg, who says the metaverse was inspired by Neil Stephenson, hey, Neil Stephenson's metaverse is dystopian okay.

Why do these people, who have been reading science fiction, often as a sharp social critique, read it as a user guide?

If billionaires take over the space race, space exploration will no longer be a public good

RUFUS: If early space travel, like the $55 million SpaceX space trip for one seat, marked the way we were headed, that's a big problem. I guess Musk would say that the vision is the same as Tesla's: first launch an eye-catching high-end sports car, then gradually reduce the price, and then come up with a worldwide solution.

Jill: Yes, he can say that. But we all recognize that the auto industry is a private industry, and until recently we didn't acknowledge that the same is true for space exploration.

In the 1960s, the U.S. government invested heavily in space exploration and lunar missions. Whether you approve of it or not, or approve of it, at least it is subject to the ordinary process of political wisdom.

In fact, people are not in favor of doing so, and it has even caused great controversy. Gill Scott Herron (the father of black rap) launched White Society on the Moon, and many people headed to the Kennedy Space Center the day before the launch of the Apollo program in 1969. People would say, "If this is what the federal government wants to do, then we taxpayers have to oppose it." ”

But when the man, who may be the richest man in the world, funds the project, there is no possibility of opposition. It is said that he will not have to pay taxes, because he will bring the light of human consciousness to the stars. This completely subverts the traditional concept that space exploration is a public good.

Technology alone will not save humanity

RUFUS: Playing a supporter of Musk for a while, I was struck by the fact that the pace of technological acceleration is undoubtedly accelerating. So I think Musk might say, "On the one hand, we really need to use these technologies to solve things like global warming." On the other hand, it is wise to fear threats that are vital to humanity. "I think some of the potential existential threats, from biohacking to artificial intelligence, may be real. As William Burroughs said, "Sometimes paranoia holds all the facts". I think if Musk had been involved in this conversation, he would have said, "I'm really trying to help the human species use technology to accelerate preparation for bad outcomes, and that could actually be worse than we thought." ”

Jill: I admit that this is partially true, but not all of it. "Let's design solutions to the problems we have created" is a light statement, but what about historically?

I wrote a book about American history a few years ago, and when I wrote about it in 1945, I said that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were moments when technology was changing faster than human moral judgment. So what are the consequences of not taking the time to anticipate the consequences before using nuclear weapons? Exactly 50 years of chaos. We have spent decades studying the effects of radiation poisoning on the Japanese. This requires studying the properties of radioactive fallout, carl Sagan's research on nuclear winter. It took us decades to realize that a nuclear attack, both scientifically and morally, is a terrible idea and must not be done.

So it's strange to think that threats are coming and that we should come up with technological solutions to eliminate them, rather than stop creating them. In fact, this is not a technical problem, but a moral and political problem.

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