Monthly Muse: 7/2023
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the July 2023 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
I considered mentioning Elon Musk’s reaction to the Unabomber’s death in my essay this month. However, there was already more than enough to discuss, so I decided against it. I believe Musk’s reaction still merits some consideration, which I’ll offer in this Monthly Muse.
Forbes reports:
Elon Musk, a businessman who’s building some of the most advanced technology the world has ever seen, suggested the Unabomber may have been right about the rise of tech creating too many problems for humanity. Musk tweeted, “he might not have been wrong,” in response to a tweet about Ted Kaczynski, the 81-year-old terrorist who died in prison on Saturday.
The article goes on to point out the obvious contradiction between Musk’s push for brain chips, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and humanoid robots and the Unabomber’s critique of the “industrial-technological system.” This contradiction is real, of course, but simply pointing it out misses the ideological significance of Musk’s statement.
Musk’s edgelord online persona is an outgrowth of what German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls “enlightened false consciousness.” If false consciousness refers to the inability of the exploited to see class relations as they are, enlightened false consciousness implies that they do see class relations as they are but continue to act as if they do not. The worker still suffers from false consciousness, but it is a false consciousness that is “enlightened” because he is aware that he is suffering from it. He knows the truth about the social order, but chooses to continue living in falsity.
Elon Musk’s comment on Ted Kaczynski is what happens when enlightened false consciousness takes root in the ruling class. Musk is a technologist who does what he does not under the pretense of saving or bettering humanity but, rather, simply because he can. Or because it is inevitable that someone else will do it if he doesn’t. It is altogether possible that Musk sees where his technologies are leading, toward (in the Unabomber’s words) a world in which “there will be no place left where an individual can hide from mind control and surveillance by super computers.” Despite his accurate understanding of the situation, Musk prefers to act as if he does not understand it, thereby promoting a form of elite enlightened false consciousness.
If my analysis is correct, I believe it has serious implications for anyone who wishes to resist the likes of Musk and his “online Twitter surrogates.” It’s not that Musk and his ilk advocate a future which they sincerely believe to be good. They may very well know that their actions will lead to a technocratic dystopia not unlike the world described in the Unabomber’s manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The struggle, then, for those who want an alternative future is not simply to best Muskian technocrats in straightforward debate. I think something quite different (and more difficult) is required. This something would require, at minimum, a political analysis of the ideological weaponization of enlightened false consciousness by a highly influential segment of the ruling class.
What do you think?
Provocation
“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are ‘true’ or ‘false,’ but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world.”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World