Tressie McMillan Cottom, Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work. NYTimes, Feb. 12, 2025.
Musk’s escapades are political posturing staged like a video game side quest. The DOGE playbook is to target an office of which most Americans have only a vague notion. Then Musk’s operatives label the office a villain in overblown comic terms — “a criminal organization” as Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development. Then, the executive branch uses DOGE to pick a fight it knows it can win.
Musk’s fans love his narration of power as a vicarious gamelike experience of dominance. These fans don’t find the DOGE escapades chaotic or confusing. If anything, the bombastic flouting of norms and laws makes the world more sensible to them. It is government and civic life they don’t understand. Musk clarifies a scary world for them, putting it in terms they understand. Bad guy. Good guy. Evil. Villain. Kill. Win.
This is propaganda, but it is also a skilled manipulation of content in a content-saturated culture. Increasingly we cannot escape the closed world of bite-size performativity that feels like the real world. All of our emotions are fuel for the content machines that don’t care what we feel, only that we do.
Welcome to the metaverse. We foot the bill and the game-masters reap the profits:
It is fast becoming clear that this content-driven chaos is going to be the M.O. of Trump 2.0. Trump may have learned in his first term that there is a political price for not feeding your loyalists enough content. Governance got in the way of the content machine he built on the campaign trail. Since then, he has had four years to refine his strategy. Chaos is central to his deployment of unchecked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.
That is Musk’s utility to Trump. He is willing to fill in for Trump by consistently producing DOGE’s bureaucratic takeovers as content. [...]
What we have is a president who made his career as a real estate developer and an empowered minion leading the federal government to move fast and break things. It is a politic of socialism-for-me and scarcity-for-thee: chasing government contracts while simultaneously compromising the government’s ability to pay its bills.
There's more at the link.
I recommend you haul yourself over to scaredketchup's YouTube channel for some alternative programming. I stuck two of scaredketchup's apocalyptic post-nuclear satyrathons here: THIS Revolution's NOT gonna' be televised. It's on YouTube, baby, and it's coming in hot. Hot! Hot! Hot!
Ugh . . . (From your sister): Every now and then I watch Gad Saad to keep apprised of his self-proclaimed only-virtue-possible viewpoints. When asked if Musk's over all effect would be positive or negative, he said "Positive". With not a single mention of the illegalities at work. The end justifies the means?
ReplyDeleteGad Saad is a trip. Rather a bit self-satisfied, no?
DeleteAlso, Musk taking his 4-year old child to the press conference with Trump because "I thought he would like it" is clearly also some part of the game scenario. An attempt to turn down the volume on his overblown terms? his lying? What parent in their right mind thinks this is conference a child would like? Though I have to say, the child, sitting on his father's shoulder, stuck his fingers in Musk's ears. Demonstrating he knows how his father moves in the world? (He actually mimicked him quite a bit, within seconds of gestures even without seeing him.)
ReplyDelete"Musk taking his 4-year old child to the press conference with Trump because "I thought he would like it" is clearly"... delusional. Did the 3rd 4th or nth mother consent?
ReplyDeleteIf you, Bill or I, or the nth mother had Musk's record below, and we took our "... 4-year old child to the press conference" we'd have the child removed asap. Good to be rich!
Vivian Jenna Wilson...
"In regards to the two arm gestures given by Musk at Trump's inauguration, Wilson said "I'm just gonna say let's call a spade a f***ing spade. Especially if there were two spades done in succession based on the reaction of the first spade." Implying that she agrees with commentators who have called Musk's movements a "Nazi salute."
"He and his daughter are estranged because she is transgender, and Musk has said publicly that his daughter is "dead" since she transitioned."
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-daughter-attacks-trump-executive-order-addresses-salute-2019456
gwern: "Elon Musk & Bipolar Disorder"
" ... executives at his companies like Tesla rely on manipulation of his distractibility & outlasting his attention span to avoid disastrous decisions by the “king-crazy” Techno-Emperor of the Universe."
"Musk has (thus far) married 3× and had 1 mistress and unknown number of girlfriends at SpaceX & elsewhere3, had >11 children, & a flight attendant sex scandal4"
https://gwern.net/note/elon-musk
I've seen a tweet where the child's mother, Grimes, said she didn't know about this and didn't like it.
DeleteThis week a relative lost access to her daughter. Total. By the court. Notneven allowed to say goodbye.
DeleteThe father somehow- read more money - had Mother in a seperate room in the court, awarded access and the father left the court with the child, about 8yrs old.
The mother may have 1 hr access after 6 weeks.
She and close family are shellshocked. Appeal likely to cost $100k and 4mths before court. The father has wealth and couldn't care less about stringing out.
Money and courts are trauma inducing.
Did you notice the child was only mentioned as a second derivative and catalyst?
Shocking vile punitive and revenge by Lawfare!. NOT in the best interests of the child. Or social cohesion or future mental health.