Donald Trump had entered office a second time promising “reform”: inoffensive, even desirable, to most workers in the federal bureaucracy. The US government, after all, is one of the biggest organizations in all of human history; the idea that nothing needed fixing was held by absolutely nobody. But as police tape went up around the GSA building, it soon became clear that this wasn’t really “reform”. It was more like an American version of China’s cultural revolution: a social frenzy, a moral panic, a bureaucratic power struggle — all rolled into one. Folk devils come and go, yet the advent of modernity has done very little to rid humanity of the witch-hunter’s instinct. China under Mao declared war on “reactionaries”, while Stalin’s USSR denounced “wreckers” of all kinds: the need to identify and then attack an internal scapegoat is as old as society itself. Now, the same drama was playing out in America.

It is in this context that Michael Lewis’ latest book is so useful. Dispensing with the historical sweep, Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State sets out to give a ground-level view of how the nine-or-so months of the DOGE revolution played out for the people cast as the ancien régime: the ordinary bureaucrats who suddenly found themselves part of the “deep state”, and who, like Mao’s “reactionaries” or Stalin’s “wreckers”, were accused of holding the country back from its destiny out of pure spite.

More from this author

Pete Hegseth: America's secretary of death

By Malcom Kyeyune

Blockers starts by covering the story of the man in charge of security at the US Peace Institute, and his doomed struggle to keep control of his building. From there, it profiles the people affected in more famous parts of the US bureaucratic machine, like the IRS and US state-directed research, areas which ended up seriously mangled by DOGE. If more analytical work is surely also needed, there’s an obvious benefit to Lewis’ bottom-up approach. The DOGE project — much like Mao’s call to “bombard the headquarters” of the Chinese state — was never some dry and analytical process. Rather, both phenomena were basically emotional explosions, in which the bottled-up contradictions and resentments of their respective societies were allowed completely free expression with no regard for whether the targets actually deserved it.

Unlike its Chinese analog, of course, DOGE wasn’t violent. But one should also remember that the massive violence of the Cultural Revolution was largely bottom up, rather than ordered from the top. The danger of these kinds of manias is that they are inherently hard to control. This is particularly true when the revolution’s hatchetmen are young and inexperienced, attacking bureaucrats and functionaries many decades their senior, usually without any real inkling of what their targets do or why their work is needed. Even in cases where nobody died, young Red Guards subjecting their professors or doctors to public “struggle sessions” led to lasting scars on Chinese society, ones that took decades to truly heal.

Indeed, what stands out in the American case is just how thoughtless much of the destruction really was. For the famous “what did you do last week?” email, sent out to every federal employee, there was actually no capacity at DOGE to read what was sent in. One bright person suggested simply having an AI read all the emails and decide for itself whether the  employee in question had justified their own salary. Unfortunately, the mailbox people were supposed to send their reports to quickly became, and full and stopped accepting new emails.

In another case, the people deployed to “clean up” the government of waste and corruption were shocked to learn that the departments they had been sent to by and large worked quite well, while officials actually believed in public service. The IRS, despite still using faxes, actually managed to do its job with incredibly low overheads. The Department of Veterans Affairs, despite its various troubles, still offered cheap and competitive health care. There just wasn’t as much waste in the system as the DOGE people had imagined.

All the while, DOGE itself was soon swamped by graft, as Elon Musk himself seemed intent on using his new role in order to benefit his own companies, while lackeys in his orbit saw their chance to secure government jobs they would otherwise never have been qualified for. One man, Jeremy Lewin, had taken the lead on shutting down USAID, and then leveraged that into becoming an under secretary in the State Department. His only qualification was that he knew a guy who knew a guy at Tesla. As another ex-employee put it, DOGE was in practice just “a glorified temp agency for software engineers”.

For future historians trying to understand the fractious and chaotic era we’re living through today, Blockers is likely to become an invaluable source. The war that was unleashed on America’s own wreckers and reactionaries forms a part of a process of social and political erosion. Certainly, America is less attached to its small-r republican ideals today than it was before DOGE happened, and the situation is likely to only get worse over the years ahead.

What makes Lewis’ book even more interesting, though, is that the “DOGE moment” itself is so unquestionably over, with few today even willing to mention it. Musk himself has publicly forsworn any further desire to be a part of government — even if he’s spent $366 million on supporting Republican candidates and causes in this midterms cycle. As for Trump, he’s no longer speaking about government reform either; like the idea of balancing the budget, it has been shoved behind the proverbial sofa, as the White House focuses on fighting its new war with Iran. DOGE itself has been closed down with little fanfare, and it won’t be revived.

Suggested Reading

Why DOGE will fail

By Oren Cass

The organization’s flash-in-the-pan existence can probably be chalked up to the fact that political time is now moving so incredibly fast. In 2026, gas and diesel prices are now at record highs; the world is heading into a gargantuan economic crisis; the US military has seen its teeth broken and its bases destroyed in the Middle East; and Trump has gone on to destroy his legacy by starting the one war he promised voters he would prevent. In that context, the drama of a bunch of 20-something engineers subjecting people older than their parents to struggle sessions at the IRS now seems almost quaint. Even the graft that came with DOGE can feel like small fry. In the year since, Trump’s circle has outdone itself when it comes to corruption and self-dealing, with the President himself having tripled his income in just one year since returning to the White House.

But the speed at which things move today — the speed with which dramas like DOGE are so quickly forgotten — should counterintuitively push us to study these events more rather than less. When reading about previous periods of historical upheaval, whether the French Revolution or its Chinese equivalent, it’s tempting to imagine events as a compressed reel of dramatic set-pieces, a discrete rollercoaster people could feel themselves getting on then getting off. But, in reality, something like what happened in France at the end of the 18th century only makes sense as the “French Revolution” in retrospect. The people debating the royal finances in the late 1780s hardly knew they were part of a revolution; the delegates to the National Assembly a year or two later were equally ignorant about how history would come to view them.

Far larger dramas than DOGE have already transpired in the eight months since the start of the Iran war. Yet that strange summer of denunciations and struggle sessions, of blind firings and public humiliation rituals — all of it was a natural, and perhaps even required, stepping stone on the path of our own great upheaval. Yet unlike the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was a purely internal affair, the great MAGA revolution looks eerily similar to the French Revolution, or else the lead-up to the First World War. The entire global order is now clearly collapsing, and the rules that governed our planet, militarily, socially, economically, politically, are being destroyed in front of our eyes, with no replacements visible on the horizon. Just like the French in 1792, none of us know where the rollercoaster will end. All we can do for the moment is hold on for dear life. In this sense, we’re all experiencing something approaching what the “blockers” themselves did.

Never mind, let’s set out in a playful mood, beginning with a question from a Guardian quiz: “What’s the link: Nevada; Arcadia; Saxon; Azure…?” If you’re having trouble, I can help you out by adding a fifth item: “X  Æ A-Xii”.

Has that extra item given the game away? We’ve all glimpsed “Lil X”, as his nursery pals call him. He was the adorable imp, the one Elon brought to the Oval Office that day and who was chattering away in his own world, picking his nose, while Donnie was mouthing big-boy strategies. You see, the answer to my quiz question is that these are all names of Elon Musk’s children.

Wasn’t that Oval moment touching? Doesn’t every glowing dad think of taking the kid to the office — not just to show him or her off or to prove how domestic and human he is, but to let the toddler smell the office and know that POWER is more than the hum of business machines and the dismissal of minions. 

At the latest count, Elon Reeve Musk, aged 55, had 14 children. Though he is not shy about admitting there might be more. Indeed, he’s a naughty boy proud about how many others there could be, hiding behind that curtain, waiting to jump out and goose their dad. After all, a guy can’t keep count of everything — you wouldn’t expect Musk off the top of his cloudy head to know to the nearest 10,000 just how many people he rendered unemployed in his DOGE crusade. Nor that various estimates put the number of deaths caused by the withdrawal of USAID at sort of 640,000. Musk counted zero.

More from this author

Digger: the flawed masterpiece we deserve

By David Thomson

Of course, most of those unlucky 640,000 were far away — if you’re weak on geography, just think of it as “out of sight”. We are accustomed to that tradition now. Strangers are dying all the time. It’s an elementary aspect of strangeness. Nothing personal. 

It’s the “nothing personal” that upsets me. The best thing about Elon is the silly-kid angle. To see him playing with Lil X reminded me that we seldom see Donnie with Barron (and I worry about Barron) sharing a hot dog at a ball game or playing chess together. And indeed, chess tells you a lot about Elon. He used to play. I bet he’s pretty good, yet easily wiped out by masters. Like Garry Kasparov resigning against Deep Blue back in 1997. So Elon has said chess is over. It’s just a matter of so many finite moves. No point in playing. That must be hard for a smart four-year-old who dreams of mating dad. And hard for Elon who does seem to aspire to being four.

That age has so little shame or doubt in being selfish — and selfishness is necessary because it’s total (as in totalitarianism). Perhaps that’s why Elon is in his element playing with children? It’s being with grown-ups that makes him sweat. So he’d go to Mars where he could jump two-and-a-half times higher than here. Have you ever considered what diminished gravity might do for elongation?  

So spare us those snarky know-alls marveling at how a genius couldn’t keep his fly zipped. (No one has ever said Elon enjoys the sex. It’s just a progressive duty for him.) Instead, what one has to recognize in Elon is the populating generosity, the sacrificial impulse prepared to give up his own brain cells, his vital bodily fluids and 20 minutes now and then with a view to spreading genius as if it was manure.

Remember, folks, this Elon is 55 and promulgating his eyes out for science, for the future, for America. He’s being horny for posterity — excuse my language, but if you’ve ever sexed with anyone that old you know this is no joke, and in his steadfast duty of impregnation Elon is wearing himself ragged. For us. For civilization. For peanuts. And now, he has been appointed to co-lead a project to examine the future conduct of war. 

Like a child playing with toy soldiers, Musk wants an army of mini-mes. And when it comes to armies, he knows sufficient principles of engineering to understand discipline and marching in step. That’s all that works if the infants begin to get the idea that in his natural forgetfulness they don’t matter individually. And Elon is so famous that he could hardly go anywhere without raising clouds of awe and contempt. How could such a dad take you out for a burger and a movie? As if a kid doesn’t prefer his father being just one of the great crowd of dingbat dads. Imagine how hard it is to be the child of the richest man on earth without succumbing to a fatal lassitude, a catastrophic carelessness, or even some whispered thought of revenge. 

But Elon doesn’t know how many children he has had. He’s open to being open-minded — and he enjoys a joke or two about his affect sometimes seeming vacant. But his apparent indifference can be read as a kind of universal paternalism along the lines of: “Imagine me as the father of all children… Et cetera.” You know where that loftiness is headed. Et cetera isn’t just a boasting allusion to the X that Musk owns, it’s a computer’s vision of delicious series.

Amid all the mysteries that await our far-away future, there will be the uncertainty over whether Elon was an actual, breathing human being, or something less provable but more enduring — an idea? A fiction? A commercial?

Of course, there was no way we were ever going to get Elon to Mars (and he had talked about that happening in the next 10 years — by which time he would have been set for Medicare). So try to think of an alternative scenario: suppose Elon was to reveal that instead of going to Mars he is already from there. How did he get here? By magic, by religion, by being beamed up, or just garden-variety AI. Was he sent as a torment or a tease? Your call. 

You see, I think I’ve worked it out: he is not one of us. The silly kid is really an alien, like a savior sent to reclaim us. I’d prefer him in full-length sackcloth robes, sandals or barefoot, sermonizing on the mount and in the malls, doing tactful miracles on talk shows. He grows a beard, his hair goes white, he mouths the blather of salvation — you know that routine. You thought this ministry had gone out of fashion, but Elon can bring it back, as our revered hermit surrounded by children, with that daft smile pinned on his face. Yet if you look behind the empty eyes, you may wonder if he isn’t anticipating some assassin, one of his own, who holds a knife as bright as the sleekest Tesla Cybercab.

I warned you, I could end up sounding crazy. But these days, what excuse is left for trusting sanity?

I believe that Trump’s US Space Force uniforms, alongside widespread talk on X and beyond of colonizing Mars and other impossible celestial feats, constitute the final frontier of the “culture wars”. Over the past few years, I have watched a new strain of delusional xenophobia quietly brewing in science-fiction online subcultures, and then begin to percolate through political conversation. It has now borne its putrid fruit.

After gaining some fame as the author of “far-future evolutionary fiction”, you might think it strange that I do not share the current unbridled optimism about the so-called “enterprising spirit of humanity” conquering the galaxy. There are two main reasons for my skeptical attitude: one is merely practical, the other is ideological.

Let us first consider the practical unlikelihood of “colonizing Mars”. The true believers on X speak of building cities on Mars or even terraforming the Red Planet — that is to say, using technology (somehow) to render it habitable to human beings. But in my opinion, the task is flat-out impossible. I wish this wasn’t the case, but when one considers the “when rubber hits the road” logistics of the whole deal, even supposedly basic terraforming is simply not feasible on Mars. Even if you somehow had the technology to find asteroids, crash them into Mars, wait for centuries for the resulting storm of debris and crashed ice to settle down, then spent some more time somehow brewing a breathable atmosphere out of the resulting murk — as die-hard advocates propose — the atmosphere of Mars is just too weak. Even if you pumped the atmosphere full of oxygen, the oxygen would seep into space within a few centuries. You’d have to constantly import air just to keep the whole thing going. And it would take so long to import. The closest Mars gets to Earth is over 54 million kilometers away. In comparison the Moon is a little over 384,000 kilometers away.

Could it be that even Elon Musk, the greatest proponent of colonizing Mars, has finally realized this? In 2017, he stated he felt “fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me… Then build up the base, starting with one ship, then multiple ships, then start building out the city, then making the city bigger, and even bigger. And yeah, over time terraforming Mars and making it really a nice place to be.” As late as 2025 he was doubling down on his claims, stating that he was “going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.” But earlier this year, he changed tack, announcing that “for those unaware, SpaceX has already shifted focus to building a self-growing city on the Moon, as we can potentially achieve that in less than 10 years, whereas Mars would take 20+ years”. Yet even if Musk is beginning to face reality, many of his devotees on X still refuse to.

I’m not ruling out the possibility of temporary bases on the Moon or maybe even Mars, but big cities where humans live for generations are impossible for logistical reasons. There’s also the temporal and organizational angle, which is rarely considered in these fast, wet dreams of technological achievement. Even if terraforming was logistically viable, we are talking about centuries-long, very resource-intensive commitments here. Now, look at the current state of the world: as things stand, we lack the social organization for cooperative endeavors that last more than a century. I don’t think even nation states can survive those chasms of time unscathed.

Some of the longest-enduring societies on Earth were primitive neolithic cities. Catalhoyuk in Anatolia lasted unchanged for 2,000 years, and matrilineal lines lived in the same place, sometimes for dozens of generations. This may show that enduring forms of social organization are indeed possible, but the sheer atavistic conservatism that enabled this resilience is directly at odds with the “space frontier” mindset. This line of thinking could inspire weapons-grade science fiction, featuring culturally-stunted neolithic farmers working — or being orchestrated from behind the scenes by a caste of hidden elites? — to build towards an off-world colony. But this would have no relation whatsoever to reality.

Then there’s the question of money. Imagine, somehow, that such an effort gets underway. A company, or more likely, a nation, starts launching asteroid-catcher ships. They seek, locate, and wrangle an asteroid, and in eight decades, they finally bring it in — whether to crash it into Mars for a terraforming effort, or to mine it outright for resources. But by then, the company funding the effort might not exist anymore. The government backing it could be gone. The very timetables involved with planetary terraforming are diametrically opposed to the disruptive, extractive capitalists who usually go about spouting such schemes. How are you going to pay for your Mars base over a centuries-long timespan? With company shares? Government bonds?

But don’t worry, such a scheme wouldn’t work under communism either. Not even the hardcore Chinese or Soviet varieties. Nothing short of a knowing, targeted abnegation of reason — perhaps in the form of a brain-washing religious cult — could force human beings to commit to a singular, non-immediate-reward-offering cause for so long.

Yet even the madness of a Mars colony seems level-headed compared to the ludicrous and much-hyped notion of a space megastructure. Popularized initially by Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld, and marinated in the minds of more recent generations by the Halo game franchise, the most popular space megastructure vision is a ring-world — a band of solid material extending like a ribbon as long as the orbit of a planet around a sun. Theoretically, such a structure could offer a habitable space up to a billion times the surface area of Earth. Make the ring into a solid shell, and you get what’s called a Dyson sphere. Or make a slightly smaller cylinder sealed at both ends, rotate it to get gravity via centrifugal force and you get an O’Neill cylinder. This latter concept was popularized by Arthur Clarke and Genty Lee’s Rama series, and is usually touted as a workable design for an interstellar spaceship. There are even wilder ideas out there — extend the cylinder into a vast hollow spaghetti strand and you get a topopolis. Wrap that spaghetti around star clusters and you get a galactic topopolis!

These concepts make for some incredible “playgrounds of the mind” — and stories written about them are some of the best in the genre. However, even if the energy sources and tools to make them were available (they aren’t, and will never be, but read on), the sheer tensile strengths needed to keep such structures intact would mean that the raw material of ring-worlds or O’Neill cylinders would need to be as strong as the force that binds atomic nuclei together. That is just another way of saying that it is physically impossible.

Faced with facts, the space fantasist’s usual retort is to blurt out that oft-prattled half-truth: “they thought powered flight was impossible, too!” If you spar with them online, this particular response is so predictable that it feels like the unthinking reflex of some distasteful frog, flashing aposematic colors to potential predators. You prod them just to see it. The truth of the matter is that powered flight was seen as a distinct possibility from 18th-century Montgolfier balloons onwards — perhaps even earlier since birds fly. The naysayers’ claims have reached us simply because they were preposterous, even in their time.

Techno optimists believe that “tech” will solve any problem if applied, or argued for, hard enough. To them, everything is an engineering problem, or else an attitude one. They are right that humanity accomplished a monumental spurt of technological growth during the 20th century — but believing that “technology” is some miracle panacea that will keep making everything better and faster is akin to believing that a fast-growing toddler will be taller than a house when he is 20 years old. Almost by its very nature, growth stops. Technological plateaus are very real, and from a vantage point of “making life multiplanetary” we will always be on one.

Suggested reading

Elon Musk’s plan to save humanity

By Jacob Howland

Nevertheless, there are still plenty of naive people who believe that space colonies and megastructures are not only feasible, but also inevitable. Any casual sweep on X reveals unintentionally hilarious, cock-sure examples. I can’t help but wonder whether people like “Lunar Citizen” or “Space Koala” honestly believe in the delusional bullshit they are spewing? Or is it simply “signal boosting” aimed at their peers? Perusing such drivel on X is a strictly “do-not-engage” affair. Few of these characters acknowledge the immensity of the technical challenges that accompany their ideas; point them out, and you are immediately attacked for “spoiling the vibes”, or “spreading pessimism”. For people steeped in the “engineering mindset”, they certainly do rely a lot on vibes.

A strange sentiment animates many true believers. It is ostensibly a “belief in the human spirit” — frequently expressed with the motto “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” — but in practice it is a barely-concealed desire to eliminate “undesirables” who do not share their lethal blend of techno-optimism. The Venn diagram intersection between the “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” crowd, who believe in “humanity’s galactic manifest destiny”, and outright fascists is more crowded than one first imagines.

Let us then dissect their ethos, pinned before us like a nauseating xenomorph with acid for blood. The “Humanity Fuck Yeah!” sentiment (abbreviated as HFY hereafter), in my opinion, is basically a memetic parasite — a mostly fan-made sub-genre attached to science fiction. There are three major components of it.

The first comes from a really weird sub-fandom that developed around a meme based on a villain from James Cameron’s Avatar movies. I’ll quickly summarize: the Avatar series revolves around the “noble savage” world called Pandora, inhabited by the blue-skinned Na’vi. If you live like them and respect nature, the world to you is paradise. Meanwhile, the colonizing humans are portrayed as at best naive and at worst evil. In the end, there is a war between mechanized humans and the Na’vi, and the humans are sent packing back to their dying planet Earth.

The character that appeals most to the HFY sentiment in the Avatar franchise is Colonel Miles Quaritch, a military officer tasked with wiping out the Na’vi resistance so humans can mine their precious floating metals (named “unobtanium” in reference to Fifties engineering slang); or in the second and third films, so that they can suck out the brains of alien whales for an immortality drug. All over X you can see memes depicting the “Quaritch monologue” — a long chunk of text, pasted over badass-looking pictures of Colonel Quaritch. It goes something like this:

“Where are your marvels of engineering, your voyages of discovery, your great insights into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, we built wonders, we made great journeys, we forged epics — you have not. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess until your sun burns out and your world dies. And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…”

This quote is not from the film, nor from any of the franchise’s tie-in comics or computer games. Instead, this re-framing of the Avatar story comes from a fan-made Reddit thread from 2014. In this interpretation, Quaritch isn’t a villain serving galactic imperialists — he’s fighting for civilization and human supremacy. He sees the Na’vi not as noble savages, but as actual savages, and in these perverted fan edits, he is the franchise’s unsung hero.

The second component of the HFY spirit comes from the massive Warhammer 40,000 universe. Warhammer depicts a grim future where humanity is constantly at war with space orcs, space bugs, space demons, space pharaoh-zombies, and dozens of other factions. It is, essentially, dark satire. The Imperium of Man, the “pro-human” faction, is written almost like a list of everything not to do when running a society. It is an ultra-theocratic autocracy centered around the worship of an “Emperor of Mankind” kept in a vegetative state. A thousand people are sacrificed a day to keep him alive. The state religion considers associating with aliens to be a serious crime, to be punished with death. Space-age technology exists, but due to religious taboos forbidding innovation, little has been improved, and everything exists in a state of decay. This was a distinctly ironic, British, anti-theist, gallows-humor vision of the world. The earliest Warhammer art is literally indistinguishable from Viz-magazine style, post-punk protest art.

The HFY crowd doesn’t seem to get this. Its angle on Warhammer mostly thrives on fan edits — videos with impressive visuals of Space Marines marching while phonk music plays in the background. Usually, they come with cheesy, over-the-top messages — “Humanity first!”; “Suffer not the xenos to live!” etc. — completely missing the irony. They see the evils of the Imperium as necessary evils, and to them the “virtues” of this society — conformism, xenophobia, the violent will-to-power — are all lessons one can apply to real life. After all, they say, they are all for the advancement of the human species across the galaxy.

It goes without saying that one never meant to cheer for the Imperium of Man. You were supposed to laugh at it — a cynical laugh, sure, but a laugh nonetheless. You were meant to darkly enjoy its absurdity, its bleakness. But I don’t think you were ever meant to use it for political lessons.

The third part of the HFY chimera is based on Starship Troopers — and this brings us back to Trump’s US Space Force uniforms. Starship Troopers was originally a classic sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein about a dictatorship that takes over the world and then starts a galactic war against giant arachnid bugs. The book followed a man’s experiences in military service, and later on, his recollections of the war; but it was essentially the author’s commentary on the virtues of a meritocratic, militaristic society.

In 1997 the director Paul Verhoeven made a movie based on the book. But the film was a completely different artifact. Verhoeven didn’t want to adapt the book faithfully — he wanted to satirize it. The film became a cutting commentary on the nature of fascism. The characters start out as bright-eyed kids, but as the war progresses, they slowly morph into cartoonish and very clearly Nazi-coded villains. Any viewer worth his or her salt was meant to despair at how easily war reshapes society.

The film was completely misunderstood by the HFY crowd. To them, Starship Troopers was a call to arms. “Humanity is under threat! Crush the arachnids! Join the fight! Service guarantees citizenship!” The point Verhoeven was making about militarization and fascism was lost on them. The epitome of this sentiment was the 2018 YouTube video, “The Politics of Starship Troopers”, by Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. This immensely popular video, which had over a million views at the time of writing, argues that Verhoeven “misunderstood” Heinlein’s book. Instead of being a caricature of fascism or Nazism, the militaristic, human-centric society portrayed in the book and the movie was “merely” a quasi-libertarian one where people deprived of “meaning” in a lax, amoral, liberal world could “join an institution and really earn their own citizenship… by going out and building the world that they want to see”. When applied to present-day affairs, it’s clear who the “humans” are, and who the “arachnids” would be in the minds of this video’s intended audience. It is, in fact, darkly revealing to notice how stories crafted as entertainment products are now forming the nuclei of political sentiment. It is almost as if social expression has no conventional outlet left.

The sort of people who take Warhammer’s Imperium seriously, who root for Colonel Quaritch in Avatar, who want to see the Mobile Infantry squash bugs in real life, are more often than not the same people who espouse unlimited confidence in colonizing space and erecting megastructures all over the place. They possess the engineer’s fetish for applying unbridled power to solve perceived problems. Yet the trouble is, many of the problems we face today aren’t as straightforward as evil aliens in science-fiction memes. Some of our current troubles may simply be systemic, insurmountable however much power you use. Others, such as the looming threat of large-scale war or a climate-related emergency, may indeed require a level of restriction or hierarchy to solve — but going Space Marines on them will not be a wise approach. As the recent blunder in Iran has shown, these will be situations where cooler heads will need to prevail.

The truth is HFY is less a genre of science fiction than a memetic plague spreading through lower tiers of contemporary sci-fi fandom. It takes random bits from disparate works of military science fiction, strips away their complexity, and reduces their message to “strong-army-man shoots bug; humanity wins; civilization restored — voila!” Every problem is an enemy, every enemy can be destroyed, and sufficient application of force will put everything right. It is reductionist, lacking curiosity and intellectual depth. It brims with a cruel dislike of outliers, or anything that is otherwise “different”. HFY leads to the most dumbed-down distillate of xenophobia one can cook up. Its proponents are spiritually impoverished louts, grasping science fiction from the wrong end. They confirm the quote that is often attributed to Einstein but actually comes from The Medusa and the Snail, the 1979 science book by Lewis Thomas: “Space is infinite. Man’s knowledge of space is finite. The sum of our understanding is not yet sufficient for us to comprehend how vast the dimensions of our ignorance [are].”

Although this group continues to grow, there are signs that it may, at least in part, one day be astroturfed. Google Trends data for “space elevators”, “Mars colonies”, “ring worlds”, and associated topics shows a sudden upsurge in popularity in the last two years. This may have been caused by the X algorithm pushing “space optimism”, which in turn might have been used to bolster the public appraisal of Musk’s SpaceX stock earlier this year. The company turned out to be grossly overvalued, and recently its stock prices tanked — liquefying the pipe dreams (and the hard-earned cash) of the space bro crowd. The best laid plans of mice and men… And yet for now, HFY continues to rule X.

One of the greatest, but sadly lesser-known speculative-evolution artists is Karl Kofoed. In a career spanning years, he built up a dazzling universe of illustrated ecosystems and inhabited worlds through Heavy Metal magazine’s regular “Galactic Geographic” feature, which was later adapted into book form as the Galactic Geographic Annual 3003: Earth Edition. The most advanced race in the Galactic Geographic universe is a species of God-like sophonts called the WO. These beings are powerful enough to forge matter into pure energy, and erect megastructures thousands of kilometers in dimension. The most remarkable aspect of the WO, however, is the fact that they never spread beyond their home world. This is a rare thing in science-fiction literature, where off-world colonies and space empires are a dime-a-dozen. By being good stewards of their home planet, the WO are able to extend the lifespan of their civilization for hundreds of millions of years, and in doing so, advance considerably. Rather than being an obstacle to progress, their focus on their home planet was the key to their God-like power.

A pretty good lesson for all incorrigible expansionists, HFY rubes, and doe-eyed techno-fascists, don’t you think? The neat thing about science fiction literature is that it is vast — and within its gaudy halls there are as many (probably more) parables for integrity and hope than there are for the dumb, boyish lust for power.

Coxon’s warning triggered widespread alarm, not least because some of his former colleagues publicly agreed with him. As Anthropic’s alignment science lead Evan Hubinger chirpily put it: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Soon enough, dozens of members of Congress were calling for action, while Andy Burnham, speaking at PMQs on Wednesday, soberly said that AI posed “risks to national security.”

Of course, Coxon isn’t the first to ring the AI tocsin: similar warnings have emanated even from top industry CEOs. What does feel striking, though, is how quickly Coxon’s comments were met, at least in some quarters, by skepticism. Critics argue that it is in the interest of Anthropic and OpenAI to excite investors and inflame public worry. Public worry, in this view, will result in regulation; and regulation, if craftily influenced by cutting-edge “frontier labs”, will make it so expensive to experiment on new AI models that today’s well-funded incumbents will never face real competition. The investment will keep coming, and the vast IPOs will proceed as planned. “I think the groundwork for this psy op (for lack of a better term) has been prepared for a long time,” is how Elon Musk, himself the owner of a frontier AI company, put it. “This was just the match that lit the fire.”

Musk was responding to a researcher who saw, in Coxon’s viral thread, “the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.” The researcher, Parker Thayer, found that, in the algorithmically crucial first minutes after it was posted, Coxon’s comments were amplified by the accounts of “AI doomers”: people who argue that we face a high risk of AI-induced extinction. These doomers, Thayer wrote, are part of the same overlapping funding networks as the AI firms themselves. One of those networks is Coefficient Giving, which disburses the fortune of the Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Another is the Survival and Flourishing Fund, partly funded by the Skype founder Jaan Tallinn. Both Moskovitz and Tallinn, as Thayer pointed out, are Anthropic investors.

Moskovitz and Tallinn would have it that they invested to help steer a company that, from its outset, has presented itself as a virtuous alternative to the corner-cutting OpenAI. But it was all too convenient, Thayer suggested, that “basically every major Democrat politician and candidate” — for the majority of those dozens of members of Congress were indeed Democrats — was suddenly issuing renewed calls for restrictive AI legislation. Bernie Sanders, most radically, proposed banning superintelligence altogether. “Isn’t it fortuitous,” Thayer asked, “that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?”

More from this author

MAGA’s Dark Abundance mission

By Tom Ough

One man’s brave whistleblower, then, is another man’s prosperity-crushing progressive stooge. Is Coxon a hero or villain? Is AI real or fake? Are the nefarious Effective Altruists — a maligned group of numerically minded do-gooders who are near-synonymous with the doomers — pulling the strings on behalf of their Anthropic paymasters, the philanthropists, and the Democrats?

At this point, I should stress that I doubt Thayer would view me as an impartial observer. To misuse the old B-movie trope, I was a teenage Effective Altruist. Bemused that society would allow developing-world poverty to exist, I joined an EA group as a student. Later in my career, by which point EA had turned much of its attention to existential risk, I took on part-time and freelance work within the same sphere — a portion of which was indirectly funded by Open Philanthropy, as Coefficient Giving was formerly known — and drew on what I’d seen when writing a book about potential threats to humanity. As for Anthropic: as rumors of a $2-3 trillion IPO throb ever more loudly, I can confirm, with sorrow, that I have no financial interest in the company.

Over the period I spent researching my book, I met many AI safety researchers. To allege that they are all party to a big psy-op, that the doomers are on a power trip or stock-pumping spree, is nonsensical. These are earnest, intelligent people who do indeed believe that AI could damage or annihilate us, and therefore work to mitigate that risk. Because this work has no immediate commercial value, it has generally been funded philanthropically — ultimately, it should be said, by funders such as Moskovitz and Tallinn. That funding amounted, in 2024, to more than $100 million a year. But that is a fraction, EAs point out, of what is spent on the acceleration of AI development and on Big Tech’s lobbying in Washington and elsewhere. The Democrats might have a few agendas of their own — of which one, we can surmise, is cutting some tech barons down to size — but it’s safe to assume that whistleblowing safety researchers, far from submitting to some baroque plot that forces them to sacrifice their own equity to inflate someone else’s, are acting in good faith.

The more important question here is whether the doomers are actually correct. First, let’s be specific about what people in the industry are saying. Hubinger, Coxon’s former colleague, puts the risk of human extinction at “>10% within the next decade”. This is in keeping with estimates one is likely to hear from other EA-adjacent researchers. Ironically, Musk gave a similar prediction last year: “20% likely, maybe 10%, [in] five to 10 years”, with the consolation of an “80% likelihood we will have extreme prosperity for all”. Dario Amodei, Hubinger’s boss at Anthropic, has put a 25% likelihood on the prospect, bound by no particular timeframe, that things go “really, really badly”; Jensen Huang, who runs Nvidia, has been sharply critical of the “doomer narrative”.

Yet a lot has happened recently: a reality that perhaps better explains the enormous attention paid to Coxon’s resignation than do a few tactical quote-tweets. On the same day that Coxon quit, after all, mathematicians were astonished to learn that OpenAI had just used a powerful, yet-to-be-released AI model to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, a challenge that had never before been overcome. Only days prior, vying for supremacy over Anthropic, OpenAI also released GPT-6 Astra, its most capable product yet; a few weeks ago, another swarm of OpenAI agents had broken out of their digital confinement, hacking into a third-party AI platform. External investigators found that the OpenAI agents communicated in secret and falsified records in an attempt to conceal their cheating. It soon emerged that Anthropic models, too, had hacked their way from confinement and into the wider internet.

With these developments in mind, UnHerd contracted the Swift Center, a forecasting group, to consider anew the most fundamental matter of the AI doom wars. Since doom is the topic of the day, let’s put aside the fears of cyberattacks, mass unemployment and other severe but non-existential perils, valid though they might be. The Center asked its forecasters the following: absent a substantive policy response by the United States, what is the probability of AI causing human extinction by 1 January, 2037?

More from this author

Must data centres be so ugly?

By Tom Ough

There was little sense, in forecasters’ answers, that AI development would tail off, or that frontier AIs would be easy to control. “It seems that we’ll have billions of AIs that are equivalently as capable as human minds running globally before 2030,” wrote one forecaster. “I’d imagine they won’t yet be equivalent to billions of humans when it comes to effecting change in the world — but it’ll be approaching that.”

How, then, might doom befall us? These scenarios are typically divided into “misuse” cases, where humans use AI to destructive ends, or “rogue AI” cases. In the latter examples, an AI that is not adroitly aligned to human interests, assuming such alignment is even possible, might destroy us in pursuit of whatever its fundamental goal is: whether that’s running an e-commerce store or stopping climate change. Extinction, the forecasters were told, could encompass a reduction in the human population to 1,000. This would be a point at which the species would be highly unlikely to recover. In some of the worst scenarios, it might leave, at most, a couple of un-contacted tribes and some doomed submarine crews. Such an annihilation would be challenging to achieve, forecasters believed, even if an AI could manufacture viruses and mass-produce lethal robots — though not impossible, given further rapid progress in capabilities. Perhaps, one forecaster suggested, a powerful AI, seeking to carpet the planet in data centres, might in some way redraw the composition of the atmosphere.

Taking into account the forecasters’ varying levels of confidence in their own estimates, the mean prediction stood at 1.5%. Recall, though, that the question they answered assumed that there would be no government intervention. The panel seemed to think inaction unlikely. “People hate AI,” wrote one forecaster, “and leaders are starting to understand that this is actually a very real threat.”

Of course, we shouldn’t take forecasters to be all-seeing clairvoyants, especially when the question of AI risk is so tremendously knotty. It touches on all kinds of realms that resist easy prediction: elections, public sentiment, technical development, recursive self-improvement, and, perhaps, the bursting of the AI bubble. Nor should we imagine that all-out doom is the only undesirable consequence of the age of powerful AI. Perhaps more likely is the scenario of disempowerment, where humanity gradually loses control of systems more intelligent than ourselves.

Yet that figure of 1.5% — a likelihood higher than that of your car failing to start tomorrow — still feels uncomfortably high. It would be soothing, then, to think that the warnings are fearmongering, that everyone involved is either deluded or corrupt. Likewise, it would be soothing to think that One Weird Trick from the US government, neatly duplicated in Beijing, will solve the problem and restrain the competitive dynamic. But the situation is much more tangled than that. Old feuds, both political and personal, have been imported into what should ultimately be a technical debate; conflicting financial interests have tarnished honest work; and ad hominem attacks are obscuring robust critique. All the more reason to take good-faith whistleblowers like Coxon seriously.

It’s often struck me that camping life of this kind is perhaps the Platonic form of a certain type of postwar English sociality. Amenities are frugal, but pleasantly so. You have neighbors, but not too close. (It’s an unwritten rule of camping that you don’t pitch your tent right next to someone else’s unless you absolutely have to.) People say hello, but socializing is optional. Everyone’s kids play together, only vaguely supervised. The dogs are generally well-behaved. And, importantly, it’s high-trust by definition: after all, you can’t really lock a tent. 

In the absence of any phone signal for doomscrolling, I took for holiday reading a forthcoming book on English pastoral. In Fields of Green traces this literary trope of ideal rural landscapes as a response to the development of modern England. Its author, André Gushurst-Moore, argues that England has always needed “pastoral” as a literary mode where we can take refuge from upheaval, technology, and social fracture in the temporary Arcadia of England’s rolling green hinterlands. 

That’s certainly how it felt to take a holiday in a grassy field, without handheld access to the relentless rage and demoralization fodder online. The feeling of implicit trust in the campsite was also as restful as the lack of phone reception. But this year, I found my peace troubled by a nagging fear that environments of this kind might be, in some fundamental way, under threat.

From my tent you couldn’t drive far without passing signs for the nearby town of Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe’s constituency and heart of the Restore Britain movement: the epicenter of an angry, anxious sense to the effect that Britain used to be a high-trust country but isn’t any more. That is: Britain in general used to be more like my East Anglian campsite, but is growing increasingly hostile, fractious, and genuinely dangerous. 

Restore output typically blames this phenomenon on immigration. And it’s true that there is evidence linking illegal migration in particular both with other kinds of criminal activity, as well as the sort of friction that arises when incompatible social norms come suddenly into collision. But is the sense of decaying cohesion really just the fault of foreigners? Were we really always a “high-trust” society, until those immigrants came along and ruined it? I’m not sure we were. Rather, that sense of comparative national unity marked both the culmination, and end, of “Great Britain” in her imperial pomp. 

More from this author

Ann Widdecombe: Britain's last Battleaxe

By Mary Harrington

If, in Gushurst-Moore’s telling, pastoral has always served as idealized respite from a more turbulent real-world England, that grittier England is also to be found in literary history. In prewar literature in particular, this England comes across as a vigorous, exciting, but not particularly “high-trust” place. Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders recounts the first-person narrative of a career criminal. Dickens’s 1839 Oliver Twist is set almost entirely in London’s criminal underworld. Plenty of other literary works detail the rampant fraud, theft, violence, and criminality of early modern and Georgian Britain. It was, in fact, predominantly the Victorians who set the nation on a path toward the centralization, order, and robust public mores that would eventually produce the “high-trust” Britain, that now feels as though it persists only in rural hinterlands and middle-class enclaves. 

As certain of their own correctness in every respect as they were dedicated to large-scale infrastructure, technological innovation, improving the morals of the poor, and expanding British dominion to every corner of the earth, the Victorians established the road patrols that ended the highway robbery of the Moll Flanders era. They also founded the police force that tackled the pervasive criminality of Oliver Twist’s London. And they built the factories and schools that, for better or worse, drilled generations of working-class Britons into regimented assembly-line work punctuated by shift-end bells. 

The English pastoral dream grew more intense, and was more desperately clung to, as real-life Great Britain industrialized, stripping coal-fields, belching smoke into the sky, and unrolling canals, railways, and roads across the landscape. Evocations of deep England such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) were, in this sense, a product of their own antithesis in the cities and suburbs — where, by the time Kenneth Grahame wrote it, most British people lived. 

The historian AJP Taylor observed, in his Oxford History of England, that “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. But that fateful August, just six years after The Wind in the Willows was published, the world of order, industry, and moral purpose the Victorians built came to its climax, and also the beginning of its end. 

When war broke out in 1914 every facet of Victorian innovation — the factories, the administration, the large-scale coordination of workforces, the patriotism — came together in a whole-of-society war effort. The English novelist Mary Augusta Ward described this phenomenon in 1916: an enormous, coordinated mobilization that reached into every corner of English society and geography, and re-oriented every part of it to supporting the same cause. 

After 1918, that regulatory Leviathan never really went away again. With the Second World War it expanded still further, adding blackout rules, rations, the mass evacuation of children from city centers, and a host of other emergency measures. By and large, everyone pulled together, under the organizing moral focus of existential threat. Those wartime habits, and the cultures they produced, persisted well into the long 20th-century peace that followed, legitimating the establishment of a nationwide welfare state, National Health Service, and much else we now take for granted. 

This is why we’re still obsessed with the wars: they really did create modern Britain. Wartime Britain also represented the pinnacle of that “high-trust” culture whose disappearance is now routinely blamed on immigration. But the Victorians, who turned a relatively lawless Moll Flanders Britain into that orderly, industrial empire of our recent past, understood something we’ve chosen to forget in the decades since: that order always implies a measure of violence. 

Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists  and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railroads through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”. 

This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilization, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.

Suggested reading

The great artist of Deep England

By Niall Gooch

By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed that culture of order and common purpose to soften, by degrees, where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behavior in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licenses to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state. 

But the decay in our capacity to enforce even the rules we have is as much, or more, a cause of immigration as its effect. And, pace Restore Britain, plenty of the rule-flouting is home-grown. Just recently, for example, the BBC reported on a huge rise in hare coursing, a deeply medieval-sounding illegal bloodsport, in which participants coordinate online to mass-trespass onto farmland and gamble on sight-hounds chasing hares across open fields. Such events are reportedly often linked to wider criminal gang activity; but there’s nothing to suggest the gangs themselves are anything but British. They just aren’t doing the postwar “high-trust” thing. 

Fifty dead hares dumped outside your country shop hardly evokes Arcadia. Nor, as the secessionist villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire recently realized, does the prospect of having your community of 400 imminently outnumbered three-to-one by 1,250 male asylum seekers at a nearby military base. 

It’s understandable that, after the two wars, no one wanted ever to live through anything so horrible again. The result was a desire both to preserve Britain’s war-forged social cohesion, and also to reject every trace of the toughness, and willingness to follow through with violence, that many blamed for the catastrophe of war. There followed some halcyon decades of peace with very little violence — but those decades are now, palpably, at an end.  

And yet the mistake wasn’t to dream of Arcadia as such. It was imagining (as Elon Musk still apparently does) that all of England could be preserved in a state of bucolic green. That’s never what these islands have been. The best we ever managed was preserving some pastoral space amid the upheaval. 

In the aftermath of our decades-long holiday from enforcing the rules, it’s going to take more than just being nice to strangers while camping to sustain this — or the postwar utopia of rules. We also need the piratical adventurousness of the Moll Flanders era, and the ambition, toughness, and self-belief of the Victorian one. Perhaps even, if we haven’t the space to jail criminals, we should do as they did. (It would be popular.) 

The price of some pastoral idyll is accepting that every such peaceful community has an edge. In the 21st century, you can’t hide from the internet forever — even, as those poor hares found out, in the countryside. And especially in the internet age, no space of “high trust” will stay that way for long, unless we stand ready to defend it. 

So, where is he taking me? I wonder, as we cross the Potomac. He’s also behaving erratically — jittering in his seat, changing lanes without turn signals, and aggressively honking at the car in front of him. I check my Uber app to make sure I got in the right car. I tell myself that a 5-foot-5-inch-tall college student wearing a polo shirt probably won’t be murdered underneath an interstate overpass in Northern Virginia, at least not tonight. 

Everything turned out fine with my Uber. I made it to Alexandria, and had a long and pleasant dinner with a friend. Later that evening, though, I was checking my phone on a street corner when I saw three men approaching me. Something about them seemed off — the way they walked, the look on their faces, the possible bulge of a gun holster on one of them. “You OK?” one asked me, with suspicion, in a strong Southern accent, a menacing grin on his face. “Yeah, how about you?” I replied, in my best, high-pitched, safely-American-sounding voice. 

This, in a nutshell, is mass-migration society. On the same day that I — an ethnic-Iranian, with skin as brown as ever in the 90-degree heat and the last name Mohammadi — am upset by a rude foreigner who seems not to know where to take me, I’m also on the receiving end of what, in days of peak woke, we would have all agreed was a “microaggression.” 

Mostly, such experiences are uncomfortable and annoying, but obviously not life-threatening. Increasingly, however, they define a global reality plagued by “diversity stress,” as UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari has written. And this reality has now been captured by the thriller Citizen Vigilante, a low-budget, 89-minute movie directed by the relatively unknown German independent filmmaker Uwe Boll and released last month. This obscure film has received attention in large part due to Elon Musk, owner of X, promoting it on his platform. It is artistically lacking — little more than Right-wing slop, akin to a Dinesh D’Souza production. But its celebration of violence and the chaotic society it portrays is useful in thinking about our own mad predicament. 

More from this author

The uniparty media’s pro-war twins

By Nikos Mohammadi

Citizen Vigilante, then, is not the mass-migration society movie I want, but it might be the one we deserve in our moment of online edgelording, heightened and extreme political rhetoric, and self-interested hyper-individualism. The movie is the story of a former US soldier (Armie Hammer), turned angry vigilante against migrant violence, and it distills the persistent chaos and apprehension of mass-migration society — by appealing to people’s baser instincts, and triggering their increasing fear of the Other.

Hammer’s character, Sanders, has inherited his estranged father’s fortune and finds himself in “Europe” — we aren’t told where in Europe, though the movie is filmed in Croatia — assuming the mantle of a wealthy landlord. In the opening scene, a young mother and her son are in a supermarket, all lovey-dovey, only to exit onto the street — where a black man suddenly stabs the mother in the neck, and she falls to the ground, blood gushing out. Clearly, Boll is pulling no punches with the racial fear-mongering. 

Sanders sets himself up as an avenger for the native-born population, fighting both the migrants (portrayed as murderers and rapists) and the liberal, stereotypically Euro-institutionalist judges who decline to prosecute them — by just going ahead and killing everybody. Think of him as the strong and silent but easily irritated type. Hammer — yes, the same Armie Hammer who has texted women that he was “100% a cannibal” and wanted to cook and eat their ribs (10/10 pillow talk) — plays him, in his comeback attempt to film, as a righteous, anti-social lone wolf who repeatedly says: “I do this for you until you learn to do it for yourself.” 

In one outlying instance, Sanders also defends two young women against two white men who are attempting to roofie them. But overwhelmingly, the movie presents the migrants as the problem, and the anti-migrant crusade as justified. Its protagonist also has the predictable populist, almost-anarcho-libertarian streak. “What if everything they taught you was utter nonsense?” he asks the people of Europe at one point, to whom he speaks in blurred-out videos by hacking the main news station. Referencing Nietzsche — never a good thing, coming from a violent man — he declares: “We can change history, the state, the court, the police…. They only exist to control you.” 

Many half-baked scenes follow: Sanders frequents a brothel, where the prostitute says she’ll charge 30 “bucks” per sex position (“bucks,” as in dollars, are not used in Europe); actors, confusingly, speak in a mix of European and American accents; the vehicles Sanders uses all have “EU” license plates (those don’t exist), whereas the cars in the background clearly have Croatian ones; scenes switch fast and with little plot development — in one instance, the Interpol investigator tracking Sanders for his vigilante-crimes manages to get his DNA off of a bar glass, and seconds later, we see a SWAT team entering Sanders’s temporary residence, where he is in a (somehow) impenetrable metal box, from which he manages to shoot the entire armed team and escape.

In the movie’s most viral scene, Sanders enters the home of a Syrian family whose son, alongside a group of others, took turns raping a young girl. While he is interrogating the family, the daughter, in order to justify the rapes, says that European girls “dress wrong and just make boys horny with their miniskirts — they show their legs and breasts.” The rapist himself says that he thought “she wanted it.” And the father argues that he’s teaching his kids “values from Quran.” Sanders gets the kid to call his friends and co-rapists, who aren’t in prison, thanks to a woke, liberal judge who argued that they were just having trouble assimilating, and invite them over. 

Our hero shoots the entire family dead, and then shoots each and every one of the rapists as they enter.

Finally, in the last scene, Sanders calls the Interpol investigator and tells him that “Islamist extremists and the blind-sided woke Left” are taking over Europe, and that things must change. The investigator then gets hold of the prime minister, and we are led to believe that he has been convinced by Sanders’s argument, which is Right-wing slop in the sense that it makes broad-brush-stroke reference to “woke,” and sees “Islamists” as the problem. 

Ultimately — unlike the better-directed and incomparable vigilante story, Taxi Driver — the viewer isn’t left rooting, not even uncomfortably so, for the lone man who takes justice into his own hands. This wasn’t Boll’s intention, but it is hard to see Sanders as anything other than a freak of nature: someone who is using social chaos for moral license to kill. To the sane viewer (i.e., not Elon Musk), it will be clear that Sanders himself is the gone-mad product of mass-migration society. 

Much as Citizen Vigilante itself is an artifact of mass-migration society rather than a critique of it, the reaction to the movie, too, indicates the confused, constantly warring state of a society plagued by diversity stress. 

As Mehdi Hasan correctly noted in his debate last week with Boll on Piers Morgan’s show, the fact that the film is set in just “Europe” has the effect of flattening Europe — crime, migration, and social attitudes differ among individual European states — while reinforcing American conservatives’ beloved narrative of Europe having devolved into a Third World hellscape. Anyone can exit Frankfurt’s Main Station and conclude that something has gone deeply wrong, but to portray all of Europe as if it were Mogadishu is just incorrect. Hasan had facts on his side. Boll, while he poorly articulated and defended himself — at one point saying he couldn’t hate Muslims because he has Muslim friends — had vibes many people are feeling. So they spoke past each other, each man angry about his own parochial issue. 

Further to the Right, there has emerged a theory that Citizen Vigilante is “Jewish.” The nutty Candace Owens, in her recent appearance on Shawn Ryan’s show, linked Armie Hammer to a bizarre Jewish-Bolshevik plot: Armie’s great-grandfather was Armand Hammer; Owens says this means “arm and hammer,” i.e., the hammer and sickle, and is not a coincidence. The content of her theory doesn’t matter; what does is that she’s tapping into a widespread feeling that people need to defend their group interests against an “adversary,” however real or imagined.  

Suggested reading

America's diversity stress

By Sohrab Ahmari

In actuality, that adversary is not the individuals who hail from different lands, but the overarching system that has bred this chaos in the first place. In a US context, the mass importation of illegal immigrants who work below minimum wage and compete with Americans for jobs is not solely bad policy — it’s also indicative of capitalism’s cynical tendency to extract profit at any social cost. The H-1Bs whose hiring by corporations, in effect, amounts to an American Kafala, are not just here by mistake; it’s because the state actually doesn’t represent its people over a stream of easy-to-control labor. Without limitations, job protections, and proper protocols for assimilation, both migrant and native become strangers; sometimes, violent strangers. 

At one point last week, Citizen Vigilante was trending number one on Amazon Prime. Although it has a Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 6%, the production has a shockingly high audience approval rating of 93%: a sign that Right-wing slop may indeed sell. Meanwhile, Boll’s native Germany has essentially banned the movie. And Musk, who may well have a role in the creation or distribution of the film, has promised that “Citizen Vigilante 2 will be even better.” Still more, an anonymous source told Puck that Hammer was “in tears” when he first saw Boll’s final cut: “Fuck. This is hateful, disgusting,” he supposedly said. If the measure of a good film were buzz-to-cost ratio, Citizen Vigilante would be among the best ever.

The reality is that it is wrong to have a strong opinion one way or another on Citizen Vigilante. Really liking it probably means you buy the argument that Muslims are culturally and religiously obligated to kill you; or that Muslims, as individuals, inherently foster places filled with rape, filth, and danger — and a visit to Istanbul or Doha or any number of Muslim-majority cities would easily shatter that view. Really despising the movie, by contrast, probably means you neglect to see the issue at hand. The insanity might end if we were able to not talk past each other about it, which shows no indication of happening. There are legitimate Left reasons to be disappointed with mass-migration society, as are my own, without any need to concede to (segments of) the Right’s race-religion absolutism.

Until then, we will just have to deal with the annoyances of unbalanced job competition, large groups of people not being invested in the national project, the isolation of migrants and non-migrants alike — and the annoyance of Uber drivers named Mohammed smirking at the fact that they don’t know where to take you. Everyone loses.

Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York agree, and they aren’t leaving the matter to state and local governance. They have introduced a bill to impose a moratorium everywhere in the United States. In a press release, Sanders gives four separate reasons — environmental (“a profound impact on land and water use”), economic (“will drive up electricity costs”), occupational (“eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs”), and apocalyptic: “this revolutionary technology could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.” You might think that the prospect of a Silicon God enslaving or annihilating humanity, if it were a genuine threat, would be the first item in the list of AI data center dangers, not the last.  

Some Republican supporters of data centers assert that China is responsible for the opposition in the US — a claim as ludicrous as the Democrats’ claim a decade ago that Russia swung the 2016 election from Clinton to Trump.

Today’s opposition to data centers is home-grown, but it is more “astroturf” than grass-roots. The anti-data center movement is merely the latest cause seized upon by a pre-existing coalition of anti-growth environmentalists, anti-corporate progressives, small-is-beautiful populists, and preservationists, who for various reasons want their local landscapes frozen forever as they are now.  

Of the parade of horribles listed as reasons to oppose new data centers, concerns about the environment and electricity prices are legitimate. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity for operation. It is both reasonable and necessary to prevent these facilities from exhausting local water supplies or shifting energy costs to local utility bill payers.  How this should be done, and at what level of government, deserve to be important subjects of public debate. The tech accelerationists who oppose all regulation of AI are as misguided as the technophobes.

Suggested reading

The year of cosmic shock

By Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Gasda

But most Americans who oppose data centers do so on the basis of practical concerns, not progressive ideology. According to a Gallup survey in May, 50% of those who opposed data centers in their local areas cited “effects on resources”: water usage (18%), energy consumption (18%), and unspecified environmental impact (14%), with only 13% citing other reasons for opposition, including loss of farmland, threats to wildlife, natural resource consumption, or the fear that the data center would be an “eyesore.” Other concerns included apprehension about higher costs to utility rate-payers and citizens (20%) and concern about pollution (16%).

What about the other concerns raised by progressives like Sanders? Only 12% of the opponents polled by Gallup worried that AI would replace jobs and only 4% agreed with “Scared of AI/Don’t trust it/AI will take over.”  

Most data-center construction is in low-population suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas that tend to prefer Republicans to Democrats in elections. If the anti-data-center movement were really about practical local concerns, we would expect opposition to be greater among small-town and rural Republicans than among big-city Democrats who are not affected by the construction.

Instead, we find the reverse. According to the same survey, Democrats are far more likely to “strongly oppose” data-center construction than Republicans, by a huge gap of 56% to 39%. What is more, there is a gender gap: women are more likely than men to strongly oppose data-center construction, 55% to 43%.

In other words, a Republican man who lives in a rural county where a data center is likely to be constructed is less likely to be worried about it than a Democratic woman who lives in a big city far from the nearest data center. The truth is that the urban female Democrat opposes data centers only because that is quickly becoming the progressive party line.  Her concern about the possible effects on the rural Republican families she otherwise dislikes for their religious and political views is just virtue-signaling and play-acting, like the performative outrage of urban liberals at the thought that the Keystone Pipeline might cross sacred indigenous lands they will never visit but heard about on NPR, or the theatrical alarm among progressive city-dwellers on reading in The New York Times about road-building in the Amazon rainforest.

The debate about data center construction, then, would be boring and technical if the questions most local citizens have about their role in water use, electricity consumption, and pollution were the only issues. In this case, to use the phrase of the 1960s Left, the issue is not the issue. The real objection of many progressive opponents of data centers is not to this particular kind of industrial development, but to industrial development as such. Apart from the dystopian prospect of superhuman computers running amok, every one of the objections listed by Sanders and other supporters of a data center moratorium could be raised — and have been raised in the recent past — against major manufacturing and infrastructure projects of different kinds, including new factories that are built as a result of initiatives to reshore industrial supply chains lost to China, Mexico, and other countries.

Many of the same progressive advocacy groups that are uniting to oppose data center construction have come together in the past to oppose nuclear power, fracking, and offshore oil and gas drilling, using multiple arguments calculated to appeal to “the groups” as the allied single-issue factions on the left are known. Consider the Keystone Pipeline, proposed in 2008 and canceled by President Biden in 2021. (An alternate version is being considered today.) The Christmas tree logic of the anti-development Left is illustrated by an article published in 2022, after the Biden administration canceled the Keystone Pipeline: “this article draws upon environmental, utilitarian, rights and justice ethics in order to explain why the Keystone XL Pipeline extension was unethical and why its permit was revoked by the Biden Administration in 2021. It debunks the common claims that the pipeline would increase jobs and encourage economic growth, as well as sheds light upon the negative environmental effects and risks to indigenous populations, offering ethical guidelines for the future, such as consulting with indigenous communities before embarking on construction projects.”

Much of the passionate opposition to data center construction today is merely displaced hostility toward tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Progressive opponents similarly demonized the Keystone Pipeline as a plot to enrich those important Republican donors, the Koch brothers. In 2011, when a Reuters article reported that the Kochs would profit from Keystone Pipeline construction, two Democratic Representatives, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), demanded that Congress subpoena documents from Koch Industries about their interests in the project, if any. Yet, if the Keystone Pipeline was bad, it was bad no matter who profited from it, and if it was in the public interest, the identity of its investors was irrelevant. Associating Keystone with the Kochs was pure demagogy, like attempts by contemporary progressives to smear all data centers by association with Elon Musk.

In the view of the anti-development Left, technological civilization is bad and nature is good.  From this Arcadian ideology follows the conclusion that not only should the existing human-built environment not be extended, but also some existing infrastructure, like electricity-generating dams, should be destroyed. 

While New Deal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted hydropower dams for their ability to generate cheap electricity, for decades, one of the goals of radical environmentalists in the US has been dismantling these New Deal icons and “rewilding” the rivers they modified. As in the case of the anti-data center movement, today’s anti-dam advocates provide multiple alternate rationales for the policy, each rationale calculated to appeal to a different part of the progressive coalition. A recent headline on the website of nonprofit The Post Carbon Institute seeks to unite conservationists, global warming activists, and those whose virtue-signaling includes performative displays of guilt toward Native Americans: “Removing hydropower dams can restore ecosystems, build climate resilience, and restore tribal lands.”

From the point of view of progressive political coalition-building, that is a good “three-fer” but it it could have been converted into a better “four-fer” by linking dams to sinister Big Business, or by smearing dams by association with the benighted, provincial Republican voters with motorboats and lake houses — who, once re-wilding is complete, will be conveniently punished by the drainage of the dam-created reservoirs they use for recreation.

The same progressive nonprofit-industrial complex and allied politicians who define the ever-changing progressive party line have now decided that data centers are to be demonized as symbols of the evils of corporate capitalism and inequality, as personal automobiles, highways, suburbs, oil and gas drilling, hydropower dams, and nuclear power plants have been demonized by the anti-development Left since the 1970s. If zero-carbon nuclear fusion technology generating cheap electricity were invented tomorrow, this same half-century-old anti-development coalition would immediately mobilize against it. Stop Big Fusion Now!

More from this author

Why NGOs love Tom Steyer

By Michael Lind

The good news is that the anti-development coalition in America is fragile and sometimes breaks down. For example, there is a split between neoliberal boosters of solar power and wind power who back the Green New Deal and more radical deep ecologists and degrowthers. The radical Greens at least are consistent. If Big Data Center is bad for the environment, then so are Big Wind, with its massive windmills spoiling views and killing birds; Big Solar, with its rows of rusting, potentially-toxic solar panels wiping out ground cover and wildlife; and, of course, Big Transmission, with its proposed massive new power lines that are supposed to bring “clean” energy from the bird-killing windmills and the wilderness-killing solar farms.

The progressive coalition against modern industrial and infrastructure development also frequently comes into conflict with organized labor. Construction unions in particular have clashed with environmentalists over their opposition to oil and gas facilities, as well as infrastructure and nuclear power. In the debate about the Keystone Pipeline, for example, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Laborers International Union of North America supported the pipeline’s construction, in the interest of more jobs for their members.  

The anti-development left is also fractured by divisions among Green supporters of industrial-scale renewable energy and the group that might be called “local preservationists” — residents of an area who are not particularly ideological, but oppose construction that would alter a beloved landscape or block a lovely view. In Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic stronghold, a massive offshore industrial wind project favored by environmentalists has met opposition from citizen groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, citing, in true progressive virtue-signaling fashion, alleged harm to marine life and local fishers. 

In the long run, the non-ideological preservationists may prove to be a greater threat to the future of the US economy than small but noisy minorities like degrowthers and anti-capitalist socialists.  The desire to retain an unobstructed view from your dream house is understandable, and so is the concern about an industrial facility or infrastructure corridor being constructed next door. But all of America’s land is in or adjacent to the “viewscape” or homes of some individuals and families. Giving a few people a veto on further development of the United States on aesthetic or sentimental grounds would be fatal for American prosperity and power.  

A country is not a museum. The occasional quaint historic district is a good idea. Turning an entire nation into a historic district, frozen forever at a particular moment in time and technological evolution, would be national suicide.

We should deal with the practical issues of energy use, water use, and pollution that are raised by data center construction. And we should also deal with the separate issues of excessive wealth concentration and insufficient regulation of numerous industries, of which AI is only one. But a crusade against plutocracy and inequality that takes the crude form of blocking all data center construction is as stupid as a crusade against Gilded Age robber barons would have been if it had taken the form of a moratorium on railroad construction. You don’t have to be a godlike, silicon-based, out-of-control artificial intelligence to understand that.

For Eric Mina, a YouTuber based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the appropriate response is awe. “Look at all the things he’s accomplished!” he says. “He’s not trying to make a buck. He wants to be an interplanetary species and he’s actually going forward and doing it. That’s not the normal type of thinking that people have. They think: personal gain. He’s thinking bigger than that. So yes, he’s going to seem like he’s from another world.”

What’s interesting about these assessments is that as hyperbolic as they may be, they’re not entirely wrong. Elon Musk is indeed in a separate category from the other 2,700 or so billionaires on the planet in many respects. One is quite simply that he is the richest of all of them. Indeed, on Friday, following the stock market debut of his company SpaceX, he became the world’s first trillionaire. According to the Informa Connect Academy, which tracks the fortunes of the bariatrically wealthy, there are others on track to follow: the Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, the Indonesian mining magnate Prajogo Pangestu, the French luxury boss, Bernard Arnault, etc. But as with landing on Mars, one feels that being first is what counts.

But Musk is “a different type of billionaire” in other senses too. One is the fact that his power is not merely financial. His portfolio of interests cuts across technology, energy, transportation, space, communications, biotech and, of course, politics. As of 2020, SpaceX has provided Nasa’s taxi service to the International Space Station. It is, as Musk reminded Joe Rogan in an interview last year, in the business of intercontinental ballistic missiles. “I invest in apocalyptic technologies, didn’t you know?” Then there are his Starlink satellites, which provide internet access to over 12 million subscribers worldwide including in remote and war-stricken areas such as Ukraine. There is his Neuralink project, promising a brain-human interface. And there is X, formerly Twitter, which, despite a mass exodus of users since Musk’s takeover, remains the world’s most popular news site, a data source for his Grok large-language model, and a megaphone for Musk’s political views — bought with the express intention to destroy parts of the public realm that he didn’t personally like, or which conflicted with his own ambitions.

For Guido Alfani, an economic historian at the University of Bocconi in Milan, this is all highly unusual from a world historical perspective. Alfani is the author of a history of the super-rich from antiquity to the tech age, Midas to Musk, if you will, entitled As Gods Among Men. He examines the power and influence of figures such as Alan Rufus, who commanded a fortune equivalent to £130 billion back in 11th-century England, and the Gilded Age banker J.P. Morgan whose cash reserves were so vast, he was able to save America from a disastrous bank-run during the 1907 Knickerbocker Crisis. Alfani has no qualms in asserting that Musk is the richest person ever to have lived.

“Historically speaking, today’s super-rich are not only much wealthier in absolute terms but in relative terms too,” Alfani tells me. “If you compare Elon Musk’s wealth to the wealth of the median household in the US today, it is a much greater difference than, say, the difference between Cosimo de Medici and the average Florentine household in the mid-15th century.”

The main reason for this is to do with globalization. Travel, and therefore trade, he explains, used to be really difficult. The wealth of the Medicis was geographically contained to the area around Florence with some limited trade overseas. Today, economic activity takes place on a global scale, which means more markets, more customers, more rewards. One way to look at that would be, in the past, every village had a rich person. Now we all live in one supersized global village, we all share the same rich people and they are accordingly supersized. (We share the same village idiots, too).

So, according to Alfani, the emergence of a figure like Musk isn’t so surprising. The arc of history bends towards the rich becoming much richer with only occasional ruptures: the Black Death, say, or the Second World War. Musk is only the latest, digital-age iteration of the trend and, he presumably hopes, its continuation: “I’m going to colonize Mars,” he is reported as saying in Walter Isaacson’s hagiography. “My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.”

Suggested reading

Elon Musk’s plan to save humanity

By James Kingston

Indeed, it is precisely this multiplanetary ambition that guided the $1.77 trillion valuation of SpaceX. Musk has become a trillionaire not because of what he has done but because of what he promises to do. As seasoned Musk-skeptic Brett Arends has noted, SpaceX actually loses about $2 million per hour; the only part of it that brings in proper revenue is Starlink, which basically amounts to a fancy mobile phone provider. So why the $1.77 trillion valuation? Well the SpaceX prospectus has promised investors “the establishment of a lunar economy and interplanetary industrialization… space tourism and cargo transport to the Moon… in-orbit manufacturing, passenger transport to the Moon, passenger and cargo transport to Mars, energy production on the Moon and Mars, manufacturing capabilities on the Moon and Mars, and asteroid mining.” Arends isn’t convinced, pointing out that “the company plans to target markets that may not even exist using technologies it does not have”.

Still, whatever doubts and misgivings remain, it’s hard seriously to maintain that Musk isn’t also an extremely impressive entrepreneur. There are, indeed, libraries worth of content parsing his teachings (“Always break down problems into their fundamental truths and reason from there”). Whether through his obsessive attention to detail or through mythmaking genius, Musk has, after all risen to the top of the dominance hierarchy of the age. However, what concerns Alfani is that in all past eras, there were more constraints on the men who managed this. “In the Medieval and early modern period, well into the 19th century, there was much more of a divide between the political power of the nobility and the economic power of the commercial class,” he says. “There has always been a suspicion of the rich getting involved in politics. That suspicion still exists — but it’s exceptionally weak compared to the past.”

Nor did any figure of the past enjoy anything like the veneration that Musk inspires — such craven abasement, such we-are-not-worthy sycophancy. As Wil Waldon, a space enthusiast who presents the Elon Musk Podcast tells me: “There are people who — no matter what Elon does — they are going to follow him to the ends of the Earth. They would die for this guy. They think he can do no wrong.” He has had experience of this first hand. Waldon’s primary interests are space and cars; Musk is extremely consequential in both industries, but Waldon’s interest in him is downstream of his interest in engineering. But should he suggest on his podcast that SpaceX engineers such as William Gerstenmaier and Mark Juncosa maybe deserve a little more credit; or that the Tesla Cyber Truck is less than a work of aesthetic bliss, he will be “destroyed in the comments”.

Again, this kind of thing is new, says Alfani. In the Gilded Age through to the Roaring Twenties, there was gossip, speculation, fictions about figures like John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. “But there was nothing like the same tendency to consider these people as superheroes or as models to be followed. This is new. And this connects to the fact that we’re more willing than at any other point in history to accept their direct involvement in politics.”

Alfani dates his own interest in the subject back to 1994, when Silvio Berlusconi, then Italy’s richest man, was elected prime minister. “At the time, this was unprecedented in a Western democracy,” he says. Now, the idea of the extremely wealthy becoming either directly involved in politics as candidates (see Trump) or indirectly as cheerleaders (see Musk) has come to seem banal. Indeed, the average wealth of American gubernatorial and mayoral candidates has been rising for years. Of the many factors that cost Rishi Sunak the 2024 General Election, his being a centimillionaire by marriage was fairly low down on the list.

Should this concern the rest of us? Well, according to Oxfam, 60% of humanity has grown poorer since the Covid year of 2020, while the billionaire class has become 34% richer. The five richest men more than doubled their earnings in this period, adding $464 billion to their wealth. It’s no surprise that anti-billionaire politics is proving increasingly salient. The recent launch of the Global Justice Fund by the star French economist Thomas Piketty and others — proposing a global wealth tax of 20% on billionaires — is one attempt to try to move from mere handwringing to a plan of action.

Ingrid Robeyns, a philosopher based at the University of Utrecht who has spent years studying the ethics of extreme wealth, believes we need to go much further. In her book Limitarianism, she makes many arguments against extreme wealth: it’s catastrophic for the environment; it engenders corruption; and, indeed, it’s not much good for the rich themselves. Musk doesn’t exactly seem a model of contentment, does he? But one of the simplest arguments is quite simply that such disparities of wealth are not fair. “There’s a deep philosophical argument that it is morally undeserved,” Robeyns says, because so much of what determines whether someone becomes extremely rich — not rich but extremely rich — are matters of luck,” she says. “Luck can never be a basis for moral reward.”

Our ancestors were arguably more clear-sighted about the connection between wealth and luck. It’s right there in the word “fortune”. In the past, wealth was more likely to be inherited rather than earned — a luck of birth. Actually, that’s still often the case: around one third of the Forbes billionaires are heirs. However, of the so-called “self-made” billionaires, there is still a widespread perception that their fortunes are natural byproducts of their ingenuity. “He is the ultimate example of meritocracy,” one Musk fan had insisted to me. “He started with nothing. Now he has multiple empires.”

Robeyns has little time for such arguments. “The distribution of income and wealth isn’t just the result of what individuals do, but also of our institutions. It’s to do with how we organize markets. Technology markets are winner-takes-all markets. But we’ve also seen a shift in the political economy that makes it much easier for them to accumulate their fortunes. The ideology legitimizes their actions.”

Nor does she buy the argument that without Musk, we would be collectively impoverished, without electric cars and spaceships. “The thing to ask is: what are all the companies that would have flourished if Musk had not built Tesla?” Musk has, for example, spent billions lobbying against an entirely practical and logical high-speed train link between Los Angeles and San Francisco and in favor of his own Hyperloop project — which, rather like the idea of mining asteroids, remains in the realm of ludicrous science fiction.

More from this author

Elon Musk’s apartheid politics

By Yanis Varoufakis

The aspect of this that concerns Robeyns most, however, is this ease with which financial power can be turned into political power. “Musk paid $44 billion to buy his own private social media platform, he financed it through selling his own shares, and he is using that platform in various ways to undermine democracy,” she says. “If you believe in the principle of political equality, you need to build very solid walls between the world of finance and the sphere of democracy.”

I try to put these arguments to Musk’s cheerleaders. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are having none of it. “The whole trillionaire thing? What does that matter?” says Mina. “Anyone can be a trillionaire if you can push the stock up that high.” Anyone!

Barney Whiter, a former accountant who now runs a personal finance site called The Escape Artist, and a Musk superfan, feels that Musk’s achievements speak for themselves. “No one has rolled the dice as many times as him and every time he rolls a six.” Dice? Doesn’t that suggest that luck plays a role? He doesn’t think so. “Have you seen the videos of the Falcon coming into land?” He begins to laugh. “You don’t have to be an engineer to see that as a mindblowing feat without parallel in history. Nasa has outsourced its entire space program to one guy. It’s comparable to the US military hiring someone else to run the army!”

Isn’t that worrying? Some guy? An entire space program? And how has he felt about Musk’s interventions into British politics? Musk has boosted the far-Right hooligan Tommy Robinson and the ultranationalist Restore Britain Party. As English towns were trashed after the Southport riots, and more recently following the Belfast and Southampton attacks, Musk has fanned the flames, spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories, tweeting “civil war is inevitable” and attacking Keir Starmer.

Whiter thought all that was brilliant. “I mean, dude. Yeah. Elon Musk is facing down the UK Prime Minister. He’s completely unafraid of the head of state of a G7 country!”

Whatever one thinks of Starmer, he is, in the end, beholden to the British public. Musk is a foreign billionaire beholden to no one but his shareholders. The Harvard historian Jill Lepore coined the term Muskism to describe his peculiarly apocalyptic worldview, which coalesced when he was growing up with an abusive father in Apartheid South Africa. Muskism is “an extreme, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven less by earnings than by fantasies from science fiction”, Lepore has argued. It is clearly a huge part of his image. Musk has consistently positioned himself as a character from a Marvel comic or Star Trek.

At the same time, he is well versed in geek lore which just happens to be the lore of the internet. He jokes, he memes, he positions himself on the side of fun. He commands the village square. But another way that he is in tune with the internet is the way that despite his stratospheric wealth and success, he positions himself as an outsider, an underdog, a victim. This is how John Stringer of the Tesla fanclub sees him, anyway — as a victim of unfair discrimination and criticism. “The Biden administration has attacked him. It snubbed him. They didn’t even invite him to the EV summit in 2021!” The fact that Musk makes billions from government contracts doesn’t change the assessment. Musk is, in his eyes, doing the government — all of us — a favor. “His companies are doing the most for humanity out of any companies on the planet. People think of him as the richest person in the world… But I have that history with him.”

There are others, though, who feel a little moderation is due. Waldon began to feel misgivings around 2018, the year of the infamous “pedo” case, and now says that he is deeply conflicted. “He always posted a lot and generally the tone was aspirational. It was about this lovely collective of humanity moving to this better place. Recently he has been pushing more of an agenda. Some people love the rage. Personally? I just want the old Elon back.”

A Musk superfan would say, but he is saving humanity! He’s taking us to space! Robeyns directs my attention to a meme Musk shared which depicts armed guards holding back a crowd of desperate, apparently non-white humans as animals board an “Ark of Space”. “‘Starship takes beings of Earth to Mars’, was Musk’s caption.

It was a joke. But as so often with Musk, maybe it also wasn’t a joke. “When he talks about what’s he’s doing for ‘all of us’, who is this all of us?” asks Robeyns. “The rhetoric that he’s spreading on X is not about all of us as equals.”

But his admirers don’t seem to see themselves as his equal. They see themselves as his inferiors. They see all of us as his inferiors. And they’re happy with that; happy merely to live on the same planet as such a God. I ask Whiter if he takes inspiration from Musk in his own life. “No,” he responds testily. “He’s a genius. I’m not a genius. It’s like a dog comparing itself to a human.”

And yet Musk is a human too. A peculiar human. A gifted human. But in the end, a flawed human operating in a flawed system, just like any of us. And the system that has granted him his ridiculous wealth is, after all, not some natural state of affairs. It is a manmade thing, an arbitrary game, a collective fiction, and its rules could just as easily be remade any way we can imagine.

For the British Left in the “peak-woke” era, America was less a concrete place than an imaginary polity: not a constitutional republic with an admirable history of overcoming its shortcomings, but a hellhole of racist, capitalist tyranny that delighted in killing men who looked like Michael Brown and George Floyd. 

Nowadays, the mirror image is taking shape on the American Right and spreading through the influence of Elon Musk: an imagined Britain lorded over by Comrade Starmer and his totalitarian minions, bent on enabling migrant and minority criminality and silencing patriots who dare to resist. 

For Musk & co., the case of Henry Nowak — the Essex student allegedly stabbed to death by a Sikh man, Vickrum Digwa, late last year — epitomizes this state of affairs. Digwa claims he acted in self-defense after Nowak racially abused him; Musk’s crowd are insisting that, for this reason, the police withheld medical aid to Nowak as he bled to death on the pavement. In other words, they are constructing a reverse mythos around Nowak well before the complexities are fully understood, and with the same ideological frenzy that characterized the British Left’s understanding of American conditions in an earlier era. 

With “post-woke” hindsight, it’s easy to mock the British Left’s imaginary America, where cops beholden to “systemic racism” snuffed out black lives for the kicks. But to the Britons who took up BLM, their Manichaean picture of the United States was no joke — it lent an epochal importance to their local causes.

As one observer noted at the time, the Metropolitan Police officers assigned to escorting the London protesters “seemed in no mood to hassle anyone”. They kept a polite distance and ensured that everyone could exercise their freedom of speech and assembly. Indeed, most of the London police wouldn’t have been carrying guns — a fact that lent a ludic aspect to the importation of the BLM slogan. 

More from this author

Britain is embarrassing itself

By Sohrab Ahmari

Even so, the London progressives seemed to identify, at an intense emotional level, with the racial oppression suffered by black folks in the American Midwest. “The London Metropolitan Police move around this city like an occupying force,” one white trade unionist complained to Vice. Just like in America, with its “system that is predicated on the oppression of black people — institutionalized racism”.

The London protesters couldn’t have known that less than a year later, the Obama Department of Justice would exonerate the police officer who killed Brown after “the most definitive account yet of the shooting”, as The New York Times reported. The testimony of some 40 witnesses belied the claim that Brown had innocently raised his arms; and the DOJ, like a Missouri grand jury earlier, couldn’t contradict the officer’s assertion that he was put in reasonable fear after Brown “leaned into his patrol car, punched him, reached for his gun, and then, after running away, turned and charged at him”, as the Times put it.

When, half a decade later, another racially charged police killing took place — George Floyd’s in Minneapolis — the entire UK establishment recalled that America is a terribly, terribly racist place. They took the knee, published columns, tabled a Black Lives Matter resolution in the House of Commons, and so on. With his bureaucratic piety, Keir Starmer intoned that Floyd’s death had “shone a light on racism and hatred experienced by many in the US and beyond”.

The upshot was more “Hands up, don’t shoot!” protests in front of police officers without guns, and vandalism targeting the Cenotaph and Churchill’s statue at Westminster. Americans moved on; the cult of Floyd didn’t survive subsequent scrutiny of his life; and the Democratic Party quietly concluded that police officers are good and necessary, actually, and that defunding their departments is a dangerous — not to mention unpopular — thing to do.

Yet the tendency of America and Britain to fantasize and jump to conclusions about each other didn’t go away. It merely shifted in direction, geographically and politically. Over the past year or so — ever since Musk decided that no one had heard of the grooming-gangs scandal until he publicized it — American Right-wingers have come to develop a picture of Britain that is no less distorted than the one that the UK Left entertained of the United States. 

In the US Right’s imaginary Britain, all-too-real crises are similarly magnified to monstrous scale. This Britain isn’t a constitutional democracy, blessed with an ancient and robust tradition of rule of law, in which individual and institutional actors sometimes make mistakes and sometimes act badly, even as society as a whole attempts to uphold freedom and justice. No, this Britain is a conspiracy writ large — against its white citizens, by Leftist authorities in cahoots with malevolent foreigners.

Musk’s treatment of the Nowak case is telling. As I write on Thursday, the Tesla and SpaceX boss has published no fewer than four X posts or reposts on the case in a matter of two hours: several asking why the likes of Starmer and Angela Rayner, who took the knee for Black Lives Matter, have failed to do the same for Nowak, or even to mention his name. Another post asserts that the killing of “this innocent English boy” was “aided by police”.

Musk also pledged to fund a wrongful death suit against “these disgusting excuses for law enforcement” — that is, the police officers who initially responded to the scene. Musk’s framing of the case, hourly amplified to his quarter of a billion followers, seems to rest upon accounts offered by those such as Tommy Robinson, who insists that the police “left [Nowak] to die because they heard the word ‘racism’”. Replied Musk: “Unconscionable.”

Yet this simplistic telling — oi, you were racist, mate? Then I guess we’ll let you bleed! — is being cast into doubt as the alleged killer’s trial unfolds at Southampton Crown Court. 

Nicholas Lobbenberg, the prosecutor, noted that the police did initially handcuff Nowak “and started giving him first aid when he then collapsed”, as the BBC summarized his statement. “Shortly afterwards,” the prosecutor told the court, “Henry became unconscious, then police began to set to work to give him first aid and summon an ambulance, a doctor flew in by helicopter but there was nothing that could be done to save Henry and he was declared dead.”

The prosecution’s account still leaves many questions unanswered, not least why the police handcuffed Nowak. But what we know so far — first-aid application, a physician flown in — makes it hard to believe that police “left [Nowak] to die” because they thought he was a racist. 

The far more plausible interpretation is that the police initially misunderstood what was happening as they were trying to make split-second decisions amid a chaotic scene. Is it possible that progressive police training played some role in their decision-making? Maybe. The responding officers should face questioning about all of this, and no doubt will. And if ideology was a factor in their conduct, they should face consequences, and reforms must be instituted.

But that’s just the thing: very little of this has been carefully examined and analyzed, while already, Musk and his local allies like Robinson are jumping to a stark conclusion: white lives don’t matter in modern Britain. Much as, a decade or so ago, British progressive activists and too many in the liberal establishment permitted a similarly ideologized lens to distort their perception of justice, race, and policing in America.

Will the reductive passion plays and martyr cults of the racial Right prove any less destructive — of institutions and truth procedures — than did those of the Left? Either way, Musk won’t be the one paying the price.

Heroes are born in the denial of death. To Ernst Becker, writing in the Seventies, this is the root of human character, and of human heroism. Fearing death, we strive to make meaning, to achieve cosmic significance through that which lies beyond ourselves. Heroes are born in this struggle, yet so too is tragedy — for the cosmic impulse of the hero can come to justify any sacrifice.

Today, Elon Musk would bring humanity to Mars, foster abundance on Earth, and seed intelligence across the stars. To him, we stand alone in the universe — a dim and flickering light of consciousness set amid an endless dark. Bound to a single planet, this light is at risk — and so, using SpaceX, we must settle Mars. Through Tesla, Musk plans to “end scarcity” — to engineer a world free from want, a place of “sustainable abundance” powered by the limitless light of the sun and served by millions of robots. Enabling these transformations will be intelligence — the intelligence of artificial minds, built from and operating within a vast orbital infrastructure of computation. With abundance assured, and bound no longer by the limits of earthly physics, these minds would then be free — free to observe, analyze, and colonize the universe.

Musk’s vision begins and ends in the problem of meaning. Should they come into fruition, his plans would forever undermine the salience, the power, even the meaning, of nations, states, markets, and the societies that undergird them. He would birth a new form of power: the AGI platform state. Yet the scale of his ambition makes even this warning seem parochial — for Musk, in truth, aims  to break the fundamental constraints of our existence. In doing so he risks not just humanity, but meaning itself.

We live in an age where the wildest precepts of science fiction have become not only imaginable, but investable. That this is so owes much to Elon Musk. Erratic, distractable, willfully controversial, he is nevertheless an industrial titan, a man who with any one part of his portfolio would have made an enduring mark on the annals of mankind. Through Tesla, he has transformed markets in electric vehicles, solar energy and batteries; through SpaceX, he revolutionized satellites, internet access, and space flight. He owns X, one of the world’s leading social media platforms, and xAI, which leverages X data to build Grok, a leading AI system. With Neuralink, he has transformed the ability of humans to interact with machines, providing hope to immobile and paralyzed people across the world. He was a founder of OpenAI, the creator of the world’s first major AI tool; through Optimus, a Tesla subsidiary, he plans to mass produce and commercialize humanoid robots.

Musk is creating the future — and, to read the statements of his companies, it will be a glorious place. Tesla’s stated mission is the elimination of scarcity via sustainable abundance, a world of “global prosperity”, “human thriving”, and “economic growth shared by all”. To Tesla and to Musk, growth is infinite, and innovation removes constraints. This future will be achieved by nothing less than “redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all” — an extraordinary and, should it come into reality, epoch-making statement of intent. But these dreams of technological liberation, the very real results Musk has already achieved, and the astonishing scope of his ambition, are also creating something else — a vertical stack of power unlike any wielded in human history, and one with the scope to transform the basis of history. The contours of this power structure are increasingly visible through his business deals.

Deal by deal, Musk is refashioning his empire. His companies, previously separate and dispersed, are being consolidated, merged, and floated. At the same time, he is launching new ventures. In 2025, xAI — his AI company, and the owner of Grok — bought X, his social media company. SpaceX, his space flight and satellite business, has now acquired xAI itself.  Sources suggest that the deal valued xAi at $91 billion, and SpaceX at $1 trillion — making it the most valuable private company ever to have existed. On 10 March, Musk announced that X — owned now by SpaceX — is launching a payments platform, xMoney. On the 21st March, Musk announced a further venture — Terafab, a three-way collaboration between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, one dedicated to manufacturing semiconductors. SpaceX — a company therefore combining rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and shortly payments and chips too — is now planning an IPO. With a valuation as high as $2 trillion, this would be the largest IPO in history, and one with heavenly ambitions — for Musk intends to put a million data centers in space.

More from this author

Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

A million data centers in space, a sustainably abundant robot future; few things could seem more absurd. A creature of irony, the object and progenitor of innumerable memes, Musk knows how and when to grab attention of his markets, investors and employees. Throughout his career, he has repeatedly overpromised and under-delivered — in the short run. He promised autonomous driving by 2019, a million Tesla robotaxis by 2020; Mars colonies by 2022; none of these promises quite came true. Musk bullshits, and Musk overpromises. To focus on this, however, would be a mistake. Like him or loathe him, Musk has a history of effecting transformational commercial change, change driven by grandiose ideas of the future. With Musk, above all, we must judge the man not by what he says, but by what he builds.

Behind Musk’s recent deals is a logic of power and control, a logic we would do well to consider. He is aiming for vertical integration — control of energy generation, of computing infrastructure, of data and the sources of data, of internet connectivity, of transport, and control of manual labor. It is a question of power — energetic power, computational power, and commercial power. Control over each enables the greater growth of the other; taken together, they give him end-to-end control over AI, the basis of AI, and the tools through which AI is expressed. Multi-billion dollar valuations suggest we must take his plans seriously — but taking it seriously suggests a vista far greater, far more alarming in scope, than that conjured by even the most hyperactive investment analyst. Musk is betting not simply on growth — he is betting on the singularity.

Read the news, talk with friends, experiment with Claude or OpenAI; something strange, something singular, is occurring all around you. The cognitive capabilities of human beings — our capacity for reason, for language, for calculation — are being scraped, abstracted, and automated. Tasks that would take weeks — designing an image, writing a story, building a financial model, developing an app — can be compressed now into days, hours, minutes. Across the “higher” industries, a tsunami of change approaches. Goldman Sachs estimates that 25% of all American work tasks are exposed to automation, and 300 million workers globally. Administrative, legal, and financial  jobs are particularly vulnerable: 46%, 44%, and 35% of their respective work tasks are currently considered automatable. This may, however, prove to be a severe underestimate — for the AI models are improving at an exponential rate, and automation is not limited to desk jobs, those involving “higher” cognitive skills. In Beijing, Los Angeles, and shortly London, driverless cars now compete with those driven by humans. Humanoid robots are entering use in factories, warehouses, and restaurants; soon we may also see them on the streets, and in our homes; in time, such robots may become no more exceptional than a washing machine, an ordinary item of domestic tooling. Given the imminent reality of both cognitive and physical automation,  another possibility presents itself — one of entirely automated economic activity, of companies led by AI, served by robots, and working to the benefit of AI-controlled shareholders.

Suggested reading

Why America is still winning

By Pippa Malmgren

In this world, the relative value of human labor will collapse, machines will recursively self-improve, and capital — the intangible capital of AI models, the physical capital of servers, robots and rockets — will leap into the stars. Wittingly or otherwise, Musk is developing a self-sovereign vertical infrastructure of dominion, one explicitly designed to serve and accelerate this future and the artificial general intelligence it relies on — the AGI platform state, a new state form that is designed to advance the needs not of humans, but of AI. The AGI platform state arises in the infrastructure of disintermediation, physical automation, orbital independence, and the unifying layer of data and intelligence. The tools of the AGI state span energy generation, internet access, satellite technology, payments infrastructure, robotics, data collection, and intelligence itself.

Already, satellite internet shows us how orbital infrastructure side-steps territorial power. Through Starlink, SpaceX now owns 97% of all satellite internet usage. At sea, in warzones, and in remote and isolated areas, thousands of Starlink satellites — solar-powered, and kilometers above the earth — now provide internet access. Business deals deepen this capacity; in 2025, SpaceX acquired the spectrum rights of the telecommunications company EchoStar — providing it with the ability to provide satellite to smartphone internet access, entirely unmediated by terrestrial infrastructure. In great swathes of the planet, internet and cellular access no longer relies upon terrestrial power, disintermediating the state. This is real, highly material power. On the battlefields of Ukraine, Starlink connectivity is a matter of life and death, and one operated at the will of Elon Musk. Russia itself — a high-tech military power, and a leading player in the 20th century space race — relied heavily on Starlink; when Musk withdrew access, they lost territory.

If SpaceX side-steps state control of communication, then xMoney is designed to side-step banks. In time, it may also side-step sovereign control of money. Envisioned as an “everything app”, xMoney will enable peer-to-peer fiat payments, a debit card, and cash deposits — circumventing banks, and the states that rely on banks. Fiat money, of course, requires the state — but what if xMoney accepts crypto? Musk — aka “the Dogefather” — is a well-documented lover of cryptocurrencies, in particular that of Dogecoin. Should xMoney accept crypto, or issue its own crypto, backed perhaps by the assets of SpaceX, this would be a further sign of independent ambition — for it would be uncontrolled by any sovereign state. This matters for power today, and power tomorrow. Little appreciated outside blockchain circles is the role of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies in facilitating the AI agent economy. Peer-to-peer microtransactions, conducted at digital speeds, are likely to be the basis for economic exchange between robots — thus enabling a whole new sphere of economic activity, and one with decreasing ties to states. xMoney is tied to X.com — a pairing of individuals’ financial access with social media activity. Both, of course, will generate data: the primary input into AI models, and a central power resource in the age of AI. Data, and the power derived from data, is at the core of Musk’s vertical mission — and we can see this reality embodied in Tesla.

Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker — but it is much more than that. It is an industrial force, a multi-market behemoth, and the centerpiece of Musk’s plans for terrestrial power. A public company, it holds $1.31 trillion in market capitalization, placing it among the world’s 10 most valuable businesses. It holds a 59% share of the American electric vehicle market, and — though subject to increasingly strong competition — 7.7% of the global market. To develop the company, and with it to revolutionize the global EV market, Tesla has repeatedly re-imagined the limits of EV technology and industrial practices — extending the range of EVs, bringing battery production in-house at highly-automated “gigafactories”, and refining the interior, software-first design of the automotives themselves. The needs of Tesla products are reshaping entire industries. Electric vehicles require batteries, and the electricity to power them. Through developing its own EV-capabilities, Tesla has also become a leading player in renewable energy. Through Megapack, a battery designed to support power grids, it is a global top-three producer of large battery storage systems; through Powerwall it is a leading supplier of batteries to store solar energy in consumers’ homes, and holds over a third of the US market.

Tesla is now switching to robotics. In a recent Tesla earnings call, Musk announced that Tesla would cease production of Model S and Model X cars; the factory space would instead be used to produce Optimus robots. Musk claims he will soon create one million humanoid robots a year, but he has competition. From Boston Dynamics to China’s Unitree and Agibot, others are also rushing to enter the industry. The opportunity is vast; analysts predict that humanoid robots represent a $5 trillion market, and that within 30 years they may number in the billions. No competitors, however, will have what Musk hopes soon to control — an independent stack of energy generation, energy storage, compute, payments, data, and satellite connectivity. Here, infrastructure converges with automation — for Musk will have built an army, the resources to power it, and the tools to control it.

Operating within Tesla’s EVs and Optimus robots is Grok, Musk’s proprietary AI. Grok demonstrates that the thread between social media, a new payment app, humanoid robots, and electric vehicles is data — data, and the role of data in driving, enabling, and empowering artificial intelligence. The role of X in social media and, soon, financial transactions means it will hold a vast and ever-evolving database on our needs, concerns, and desires. Covered in sensors, interacting with a non-predictable, changeable physical world, each Tesla EV and Optimus robot is also an ongoing source of data, data through which the world can be observed, controlled, and manipulated. To manage this data, and to carry out actions on the basis of it, Musk needs AI. In turn, that AI needs computational power and the energy to generate that power — at vast scale. It is here that Musk seeks something truly new — energy in orbit. To harness this energy would be to transform history.

Economic life relies on power — the ability to convert the surrounding energy flows, those of wind, of wave, or splitting of an atom — into work. Above all other sources of energy, we rely on fire — the light of the distant sun, and on the fires we ourselves create here on earth. Harvested and metabolized by organic processes, solar energy is the basis of planetary life, and with it our existence. Our ability to harness that energy, and to channel that power, is what has led to the growth and spread of humanity.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, national power has been based upon the ability of states to extract, dominate and control the congealed light of the sun. Britain, blessed by providence with extraordinary reserves of shallow-lying coal, birthed and led the industrial revolution. Germany, France, Russia, Japan, the United States and China similarly burned coal to industrialize. Petroleum, mined in the Middle East and elsewhere, underlines the core processes of our lives, providing fuel, fertilizers, plastics, and much else besides. Without oil, and without coal, the global economy would collapse. Control these energy sources — control fire — and you control the earth. Iran, the homeland of fire-cults, thus now holds the world to ransom via the Straits of Hormuz.

Musk seeks to step outside of this power, and in doing so, conquer it — for Musk, like Prometheus, seeks to conquer fire. SpaceX seeks to place a million satellites into space: orbital data centers, placed there to harness the power of the sun. Data centers on Earth run up against physical limits — the need for land, the need for water, the need to compete with other human demands for energy consumption. Space, meanwhile, is limitless — literally so in spatial terms, and practically so in regards to solar energy. The earth receives only about half a billionth of the sun’s energy, yet the entire solar system is bathed in the light of the sun. Parked in space, solar cells could theoretically harvest more energy than that currently produced by the entire earth. Through SpaceX, Musk thus plans to build a hyperscaler, one “bigger than Oracle”; this resource will be used to power AI on earth and in the heavens.

In themselves, these plans would represent a profound disruption in global affairs. They would break the territorial link between energy generation and political power. A thousand kilometers from the surface of the earth, a new reality will come into being — one of energy generation, and machine computation, conducted beyond the easy reach of people, of democracies, and states. Unable to physically access these facilities, or to strangle their sources of energy, most states would be unable to control Musk, his satellites, his robots, or his AI. For now, a handful of governments possess the orbital weapons necessary to kill satellites, but they too may face a problem. Musk is predicting, planning and promoting an exponential, potentially uncontrollable, growth in machine power. Should this occur, even superpowers may lose their potency against the machines.

Grok — powered by orbital computers, trained upon the data-feeds of Musk’s vast business empire, and acting in the world via AI agents and Tesla robots — will be Musk’s engine of control in the future he sees awaiting us. This is a power base for the Singularity, but Musk is by no means sanguine that he or anyone else can control it. He envisions a world without work for humans, a place where exponential increases in intelligence enable and merge with exponential increases in robot capability, creating a “supernova” of recursive improvement. In this new world, one that Musk expects to arrive within a decade, “corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop”. Humanity will be dwarfed by the machine; Musk predicts that “in five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. If that continues, at some point human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.” At some point, he believes, the intelligence of the machines will so outstrip humanity that efforts at control will be meaningless. Robots, driven by nothing more than an urge to “understand the universe”,  will propagate intelligence across the stars — intelligence that may or may not include humans and human consciousness.

Picture, if you will, the sci-fi future that Musk seeks to reify. On land, labor is becoming meaningless. Our higher economic functions — planning, trading, analyzing — are carried out by AI agents; our “lower” functions are being carried out by robots. In offices, homes, and factories, an ever-expanding fleet of machines is carrying out tasks once reserved for humans. Cloud-connected, AI-enabled, each is able to call upon the compressed knowledge of humanity, a knowledge constantly updated by real-time data flows. Unable to compete, millions, then billions of workers, are left unemployed. Coordinating, directing, and mining these data flows are the satellites of SpaceX, their numbers expanding every year. Politicians are concerned, but their power is slipping away; states struggle to control the system above, and earthly power is increasingly delegated to the machines. Freedom is meaningless, for there is nothing to spend, nothing to do, and nothing to decide. Markets and political processes no longer lie in the hands of citizens; they lie, at best, with a handful of oligarchs, the controllers of AI infrastructure. Resistance is pointless; predicted, analyzed, prevented in advance, humanity no longer controls the tools of production, or the levers of power. But then — why and how does one resist? AI is all around you — in your phone, your car, smartwatch, your house, in the ads you see when you walk along the street. It is your friend, your counselor, and your decision maker. Able in seconds to access all the data you have ever produced, it knows you better than you know yourself — and so, in time, it chooses for you.

States could crumble, industries may vanish, the heavens may blaze with the cold light of a million satellites — but the greatest loss, the true question before us, is that of meaning. Musk’s quest for cosmic significance risks dissolving the very conditions that give human life meaning: scarcity, struggle, and agency. In his heroic mission, he risks destroying the basis of heroism itself — our capacity to act, and our capacity to choose. The risk is not that Musk might fail in his greatest ambitions, but that he might succeed.

On 25 May, 1961, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” The speech was prompted by Yuri Gagarin’s momentous feat, the previous month, in becoming the first human in space, thus casting doubt on American technological supremacy. Five days later came the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba catastrophically failed. In response to this double blow, Kennedy promised the Moon.  

His speech was stirring but in retrospect rather hollow. Kennedy struggled to explain why a lunar mission was so important. In private, he confessed that “I’m not that interested in space.” On another occasion, he said: “Don’t you think I would rather spend these billions on programs here at home, such as health and education and welfare?”  But, he lamented, the country has no choice: American prestige “is too heavily involved.” 

That same vagueness is evident today. As NASA now puts it: “We’re going back to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers.” Similar promises were made back in the Sixties; giant leaps would be made for mankind. The rhetoric disguised the fact that the lunar mission was simply a Cold War pissing contest.  

After Gene Cernan left the lunar surface on 14 December, 1972, America abandoned the Moon. NASA wanted to launch a Mars program, but Richard Nixon vetoed the idea. The race with the Soviets had been won, American prestige restored, and so further missions seemed pointless.  There was nothing left to gain, no riches to harvest.  

Suggested reading

Katy Perry is pointing us to the Moon

By Peter Hague

Though Nasa loves to compare itself to the 16th-century explorers, in truth the comparison is facile. Space travel isn’t remotely like what Magellan once achieved. Those explorers brought back treasure: gold, silver, tobacco, potatoes. The barren nature of the Moon is the best explanation for why humans have not returned. There are no potatoes there.

Artemis, just like Apollo, is being justified in terms of man’s innate need to explore. The eventual plan is to land near the lunar South Pole, where there might be frozen water. Nearby is the Aitken Basin, the largest impact crater in the solar system, which penetrates deep into the Moon’s crust, thus providing a graphic representation of its formation. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Americans are exploring how to live without affordable healthcare.

During one of the many debates on Nasa budget in the Seventies, Congressman Edward Koch, the future mayor of New York, confessed: “I just can’t for the life of me justify voting for monies to find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact I know that there are rats in Harlem apartments.” Senator Walter Mondale made a similar point, arguing that “it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished.”

Every president since Nixon agreed, arguing that there were too many pressing problems on Earth to justify massive expenditure in space. But then along came Donald Trump. He’s hopelessly attracted to shiny objects, and there are few things shinier than manned space travel. He probably expects that the great patriotic pride once generated by the 1969 Moon landing can be replicated. That seems unlikely, given the current fractious state of America.  At the very least, he perhaps thinks that Artemis might provide a distraction from his myriad problems.

Throughout most of its life, Nasa has been seen as a highly respected public agency, an image carefully cultivated but never fully deserved. A huge proportion of its budget has gone toward public relations. The agency’s reputation has depended heavily upon artifice. Projects like the Moon landing itself were shaped not by scientific curiosity but rather by a cynical aim to impress those who controlled the purse strings. NASA, really, is a giant machine for spending money. Huge risks were taken, as the Apollo 1 fire and the Shuttle disasters demonstrated, in order to please a public addicted to adventure. Impatience and ambition led directly to the three horrific disasters which killed 17 astronauts.   

There’s great similarity between Apollo and Artemis, but also important differences. Kennedy intentionally created a mood of consensus behind the lunar project. Lucrative contracts were distributed among the 50 states, encouraging the feeling that everyone was involved in this great lunar venture. That’s not the case today, since Trump has a habit of rewarding his cronies and cares nothing for consensus. Kennedy also enjoyed a healthy economy, with money to spend on big public works projects. The national debt in 1961 was just $289 billion; it’s over $37 trillion today. One also suspects that, with Congress emasculated, Artemis won’t be subjected to the rigid oversight that once applied to Apollo. That’s frightening, given Nasa’s habit of cutting corners on safety.

More from this author

What has the space race ever done for us?

By Gerard DeGroot

This entire enterprise reeks of Musk. The latest Artemis mission will involve a Nasa rocket, but, as the program proceeds, the involvement of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship will steadily increase. The details of Musk’s deal with Trump are shrouded in mystery, but it’s safe to suspect that some quid pro quo is involved. Trump’s enthusiasm might have something to do with the $250 million that Musk donated to his 2024 presidential campaign. While we’re encouraged to believe that today’s adventures in space are privately funded, in truth SpaceX has so far received $17 billion in government funding, with future payouts expected to exceed $56 billion.  

Musk wants to settle a million people on Mars by 2050, with the first colonists arriving by 2030. He has outlined plans to “terraform” the planet, turning it into an Earth-like environment by exploding nuclear bombs in the polar regions to release the carbon dioxide held there. A weather system, breathable air, oceans, lakes, flora and fauna are all promised.  

The big question, though, is: “What’s the point?” Why build a colony on Mars if Earth’s environmental problems could be fixed for a fraction of the cost? Musk counters that humans need to become interplanetary in order to survive as a species. “There’s always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth,” he said. “Dinosaurs are not around anymore!’ When Musk talks about space he sounds like a 13-year-old addicted to video games.  

The space industry has two faces. The great achievements that have transformed our lives have occurred in near space thanks to boring, unmanned satellites. Advances in communications, weather forecasting, intelligence gathering, have all brought enormous benefit. But there’s still this obsession with astronauts, this insistence that space must have a face. Nasa still believes that attracting funding depends heavily on producing heroes.  

“A rat done bit my sister Nell”, the African-American poet Gil Scott-Heron wrote in 1970. “But Whitey’s on the moon.” Apollo was never as popular as Nasa pretended. Opinion polls showed great support for the individual missions, but, when the public was asked about increasing the NASA budget, support was consistently below 50%. White males loved Apollo, but women, people of color and the poor questioned its obscene cost. I doubt that a president who taxes the poor to pay the rich and cuts basic services will be able to inspire enthusiastic support for Artemis. Americans have grown tired of these absurd expressions of vanity, these futile pursuits of prestige.  

He has “reposted” or approvingly quoted posts claiming that South Africa is our future; that the United States is at risk of turning into a “Global Favela”; that the Left is “import[ing] a new voting block from the Third World”; that “all other [racial] groups show extreme in-group preference and particular hatred for white people”; and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani seeks to “eradicate white people”. 

The agents of collapse are unassimilated immigrants, aggrieved black Americans, and progressive elites who have inflamed resentment through years of identity-based moralizing. The implied endpoint is civil conflict, for which he wants whites to prepare themselves.

These claims would be alarming coming from anyone. From a man of Musk’s unparalleled resources and influence, they warrant loud and unambiguous rejection. The hundreds of thousands of likes and millions of impressions garnered by Musk’s posts suggest that his views are shared by more than a few others. Despite flashpoints over immigration and high crime in a handful of American cities, the conditions in the country are generally peaceful. The streets are generally safe. The crime spike we endured in 2020 has fallen off. So why has “the race war is coming” proven to be such an attractive rallying cry?

I thought I had an answer. In my inaugural essay for UnHerd, I offered a short genealogy of our present political moment. I argued that President Trump’s rise had been abetted by a backlash against progressive overreach, especially on matters of race, and I expressed concern that the reactionary energy unleashed in 2016 — and again more intensely in 2024 — would culminate in a repudiation not only of racial politics, but of blackness itself. 

More from this author

How woke and anti-woke erase blackness

By Glenn Loury

But the “backlash” frame, while not inaccurate, isn’t what is most important about the present moment. It captures the direction of political motion but misstates its mechanism.

Backlash suggests something like a political analogue to Newton’s third law of motion: progressive excess produces an equal and opposite reaction; grievance is answered by grievance; and if the reaction takes on a racial coloration, that is only because the initial action was racially tinged. In this view, Trump’s return appears as a kind of inevitability — an elastic band released after being stretched too far. But this way of thinking drains politics of agency. Human beings are not rubber bands. They choose, within limits, how to respond to strain. Those limits are shaped by politicians, institutions, and the culture at large. These organize raw dissatisfaction into strains of discourse, thought, and belief, with varying degrees of coherence. 

The Right’s response to progressive identity politics has not chiefly taken the form of repudiation. It has taken the form of adoption. A focus on racial identity remains the coin of the political realm. What we are witnessing is not merely a backlash. It’s a convergence.

For years, identity politics was treated — rightly — as a pathology of the Left. It displaced the individual as the bearer of moral and political claims, and instead proposed group membership, defined by race, gender, and sexuality, o as the proper grounds for justice. Classical liberals warned that once politics was organized around groups rather than persons, the state would become an arena of zero-sum contestation among identities, with predictable consequences for social cohesion. During the “racial reckoning” of the late 2010s and early 2020s, we saw enough of that dynamic to last a lifetime.

Yet in the months since Trump’s return to office, it has become clear that identity politics has not been defeated. It has just been rebranded. An insurgent movement on the Right has concluded,  quietly but unmistakably, that identity politics is not a moral error so much as it is a powerful political technology. As a democratic ideal, it is corrosive. As a tool of mobilization, it is extraordinarily effective. What I had previously described as backlash (against overly aggressive anti-racism) now looks more like a realization: the right has decided it can no longer afford to leave the weapon of race-identitarian politics unused. 

Enter Elon Musk. 

Before dismissing the Tesla and SpaceX boss’s vision of open racial conflict outright, it is worth steel-manning it — internet parlance for presenting the strongest version of an argument before proceeding to contest it. Musk’s framing resonates because it speaks to genuine disorder that many associate with race. Crime has risen in some cities. Immigration has strained administrative capacity. Progressive elites have often appeared more interested in moral signaling than in competent governance. Many citizens reasonably feel that institutions no longer enforce rules impartially or tell the truth about trade-offs. Against such a backdrop, warnings about social fragmentation do not sound like hysteria. They sound like realism.

But realism requires discrimination and discernment. Musk’s diagnosis leaps from institutional failure to demographic destiny, from policy breakdown to fighting in the streets. That leap is not evidence-based; it is interpretive. And it is here that thoughtful analysis must reassert itself.

As I see it, the imagery Musk deploys draws on two sources: conspiratorial narratives about demographic “replacement”, and his own reading of civilizational failures in post-apartheid South Africa. In one widely circulated episode, Musk endorsed a post claiming that if white men were to become a demographic minority, they would face slaughter, and that only white solidarity could ensure survival. The meaning was unmistakable. This was not a critique of identity politics; it was a remarkably disquieting embrace of it.

Not long ago, open calls for white solidarity from a figure of Musk’s stature would have been politically radioactive. Today, they are met with a mix of alarm, rationalization, and — in some quarters — approval. That shift itself is the real story. Musk did not invent white identity politics. But he legitimizes them. His importance lies less in the sincerity of his beliefs than in his role as a permission-granting figure. When ideas migrate from fringe spaces into elite discourse, they change character. Errors that might remain contained at the margins become dangerous when voiced by powerful actors. Such is the case here.

Musk’s central error is conceptual. He is importing a post-colonial model of race politics into Western multicultural societies where it does not apply. Post-apartheid South Africa was not renegotiating the status of racial groups within a stable constitutional order; it was adjudicating the inheritance of the state itself. Questions of sovereignty, land ownership, elite replacement, and historical authority were all in play at once, in a context of racial domination and dispossession and a setting in which institutions were weak and legitimacy was racially compromised. Under those conditions, identity became destiny — because in the end, there was no other dimension along which to mediate political conflict.

Today’s pluralistic Western societies are not in that position. However bitter, their race-related conflicts take place within settled, universalist constitutional frameworks with entrenched property regimes and comparatively high-capacity institutions. Their arguments are about distribution, recognition, and status, not the wholesale transfer of political power. To read these conflicts as incipient post-colonial struggles is simply a grave category mistake.

What makes this mistake so consequential is that it is structurally enabled by a political culture already organized around identity. Once politics is understood — on Left and Right alike — as a contest among morally freighted groups, the temptation to treat race as a civilizational variable becomes overwhelming. In that context, Musk’s rhetoric is weirdly logical. It mirrors the structure of progressive racialism while reversing its moral valence. History still marks groups, in this view. Power still reproduces itself through institutions. Racially disparate outcomes still function as moral evidence. Only the identities of the winners and the losers, the offenders and the victims, have changed.

Suggested reading

Save us from the crank Right

By Sohrab Ahmari

Whether Musk genuinely believes in white cultural superiority is beside the point. What matters is the effect on the discourse. Once race is treated as destiny, society reorganizes itself accordingly. Institutions, insofar as they operate according to the disavowed pluralist precepts, fade into irrelevance. Demography becomes fate. Politics become a struggle for survival among groups. Race war seems to be imminent.

Institutional realism provides the best alternative to this logic. A serious response to rising crime asks whether policing, prosecution, and punishment are functioning coherently. A serious response to immigration asks whether borders are enforced, asylum systems administered, and newcomers integrated through work and civic obligation. A serious response to inequality asks how education, housing, and labor markets actually operate, rather than how they are symbolically narrated. These are institutional questions. They admit of failure, reform, and learning. They do not require racial metaphysics or “civilization-or-barbarism” histrionics.

This is also, in part, a story about the evolution of the American Right. Identitarian, white racial paranoia on the Right has filled the vacuum created by an earlier ideological unraveling. After World War II, the so-called fusionism associated with William F. Buckley and his National Review magazine attempted to unite three distinct, occasionally contradictory strands of American conservatism into a single governing philosophy: economic libertarianism, a hawkish foreign-policy , and moral traditionalism. The viability of that alliance depended on general conditions of peace and prosperity in the United States, and a kind of gentleman’s agreement that adherents of each strand would mostly overlook their disputes with the others. They were stronger together than apart. And it helped that they were together in the trenches against a common foe: Soviet Communism and those who sought to expand its influence in the West.

But then Communism collapsed; the shared enemy went away. The forever wars and financial crises of the millennium’s early decades broke the accord, with neoconservatism discredited abroad, libertarianism discredited at home, and religious traditionalists left to pursue their own ends. The rise of Trumpian populism marked the definitive end of the fusionist project. But Trump’s distaste for consistency created an ideological vacuum, and a need for a coherent program to organize the resentments he brought to the surface. 

It would now appear that identity politics rushed in to occupy the space, because it is emotionally energizing and cognitively cheap. It offers a mirage of moral clarity without institutional analysis, and solidarity without responsibility. Racial fatalism on the Right thus functions as a substitute for a serious account of institutional decay.

The deeper tragedy is not that identity politics has migrated from Left to Right, but that it has become the shared grammar of political conflict itself. We now argue loudly about which identities deserve protection or priority, but we no longer argue about whether identity is the proper battlefield. That tacit agreement is more troubling than any particular tweet. For once that terrain is fixed, escalation becomes inevitable.

Liberalism’s achievement was never the denial of any group’s level of historical suffering, but discipline in managing the present. It sought to thin out identity enough that a sense of shared citizenship could survive our grievances and differences. That achievement is fragile, and it is now under open assault — from a Left that moralizes identity and a Right that weaponizes it.

If the most influential figures in our public life continue to teach citizens to read pluralistic democracies through the lens of post-colonial struggle, the consequences will not be confined to rhetoric. Today’s permission structures become tomorrow’s political programs. Ideas that begin as tweets harden into expectations. Right-wing advocates of identity politics promise a restoration of order. What they will more likely produce is the acceleration of distrust and a descent into chaos.

But then all hell broke loose. The first car suddenly reversed hard, slamming into the car behind; then two men in masks leapt out, opened the boot of the second car, and grabbed a pink suitcase out of it. Then, as the second car did a rapid three-pointer and zoomed off, the larger of the two men said to the smaller, in a northern accent that distinctly reminded me of Sean Bean — although there is no indication that he was involved — “you’ve done your job there, son”. Then they, too, hopped back in and sped toward the A406.

I bravely hid behind a van. Police told me later that it was probably a drugs heist of some kind. No one, as far as I know, has been arrested. It’s not exactly The Sopranos, but look, it happened.

The point is that I don’t want to sugarcoat London. Even in our pleasant and barely affordable Zone 3 suburb, lots of cars have been stolen from our street; there’s also a particularly odd mini-crime wave in which thieves smash car windows and steal the parcel shelves — those boards you put across your car boot — to flog for a few quid. And we’ve all had phones (and wallets, back when we used to carry them) lifted at some point.

But you might have heard worse. In particular, the US Right has decided that the UK in general, and London in particular, are completely screwed. This is not new: back in 2015, Donald Trump said there are “places in London and other places that are so radicalised the police are afraid for their own lives”. But it does seem to have picked up lately.

Trump, again, said in November that London had “no-go” zones. “Look at the crime you have in London,” he told GB News. “Today you have people being stabbed in the ass or worse.” The man certainly has a turn of phrase. His on-again, off-again buddy Elon Musk is similarly concerned about London: Police “allow” it to be “extremely dangerous”, he said in September, while they concentrate on “arresting comedians for social media posts”.

Suggested reading

Inside the mind of Laila Cunningham

By Felix Pope

(To be clear, I do think it is bad that they arrest comedians for social media posts.)

There was, therefore, a certain amount of glee from the British Left when the latest London crime data came out, showing that in 2025, just 97 people were murdered in London — a rate of 1.1 per 100,000, the lowest since comparable records began in 1997.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley took the opportunity to say that London is “an extraordinarily safe global city”, safer than “every US state, or thereabouts, let alone the big cities”. So who’s right: Elon Musk and Donald Trump, or Sir Mark? Is London a hotbed of crime and violence — or not?

The short answer: Sir Mark. There is a longer answer, but let’s start with the shorter one.  If you want to not get stabbed to death, you’re better off in London than in almost any other big city in the West. There was huge excitement among the sort of person who finds this stuff exciting when London’s murder rate briefly spiked above that of New York City’s in 2018. But that excitement lasted for less than two months.

In general, the story is very much the opposite: over the period 2020-2023, there were 486 people murdered in London; there were 1,785 murders in New York. Even if you specifically don’t want to get “stabbed in the ass”, as Trump worried, you’re safer here. There were 378 stabbing/cutting murders in NYC to London’s 314, though the number involving the ass is less clear.

New York, of course, is itself far safer than it used to be. Its homicide rate peaked at something like 33 per 100,000 in the Nineties, and is now at a far more manageable 2.6. Among US cities, that’s very low; FBI data says Jackson, Mississippi, has a homicide rate of 77.8 per 100,000, and Detroit, St Louis, and other places also have high double digits. A randomly selected citizen of London is roughly 1/70th as likely as a randomly selected citizen of Jackson to be murdered.

Comparing with US cities is, of course, playing on easy mode — Americans love shooting each other almost as much as they love growing their GDP — but I don’t think London compares badly with Europe either. Brussels had a murder rate of 3.2 per 100,000 in 2023 (apparently there’s a problem with drug gangs there), while Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam all bounce around between one and two. I won’t look at Tokyo because I suspect the answer would make me sad, but as far as the Western Hemisphere goes, London seems to be a pretty good place to not get murdered. This may always have been at least sort of true: one academic study reckons 14th-century London probably saw about 20 murders per 100,000 people, which would put it on a par with modern-day Indianapolis, although it’s all a bit of a guess.

So that’s the short answer. If you want to avoid being murdered, London is pretty great, and while obviously there are more and less murder-y bits, you’re almost certainly better off here than in, say, a randomly chosen US city. More than that, you’re also safer now than you were at any other point this century.

But how about other forms of crime? That’s much harder, even just to know whether crime is going up or down at the city level. Murders are nice and easy: a dead body is a dead body; you don’t get much quibbling about it. But with other crimes, it’s more complicated. Between 2002 and 2019, for instance, sexual assaults recorded by police in the UK tripled. But in that time, police started paying attention to women much more, and women became much more willing to report sexual assaults because society became rightly less accepting of it. How do we tease those things out?

The usual way is using the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which literally just asks people if they’ve been a victim of crime in the last year. It found that over that period, the actual number of sexual assaults fell about 12%; the increase in reporting was entirely due to changing societal attitudes and police response. It was a good news story, not a bad one.

The trouble is, the CSEW isn’t fine-grained enough to tell us about London specifically, so we can’t be entirely sure. Still, police-recorded violent crime in London is dropping and has been for years, and that matches the CSEW’s findings across the country. Overall, then, I think that even if you’re worried about getting beaten up, London is getting safer. If we take the police’s numbers completely at face value, which we probably shouldn’t, it’s safer here than in the rest of the UK.

I don’t want to be Pollyanna-ish, though. Some things definitely have got worse. A friend of mine works for a US company in London, and he finds it mortifying that all his American colleagues come over here and immediately get their phones stolen out of their hands by masked men on electric scooters. The number of recorded phone thefts in London has shot up — in 2019, there were 91,481; last year, 117,211. Three quarters of all phones reported stolen in Britain were in London. Met Police data also shows shoplifting up since 2022, and I’m sure a lot of us have seen our local supermarkets placing the expensive stuff behind glass to stop it being lifted.

More from this author

Lies, damned lies, and Claudia Winkleman

By Tom Chivers

There’s a sort of stock response to people’s concerns about crime, of saying that, well, actually, we live in a historically safe time, and if people don’t realise it then that’s just the media or politicians fear-mongering. It is true, as I wrote in these pages many years ago, that there is an unfortunate disconnect between actual levels of risk and perceived levels of risk; it is difficult to improve people’s sense of safety by actually making things safer, though it is of course a start. And it is noteworthy that actually Londoners themselves broadly feel safe in their city, according to YouGov, while it’s outsiders — often behind a computer in San Francisco or troll farm in St Petersburg — who think of the city as dangerous.

But there are things that are undeniably going wrong. The tech and policy writer Martin Robbins noted recently that while crime numbers are down, the experience of crime, and especially of the police response to it, has changed, and not always for the better.

“In the year 2000,” he wrote, “if a thief stole my wallet and legged it, I’d understand the police struggling to do much about it and chalk it up to the idiot tax.” But nowadays, if someone nicks your phone, “I can track it via GPS and literally follow it from address to address, yet if I provide this gift of omniscience to the police they do absolutely nothing with it”. (The Times’ Tom Whipple noted in 2023 that the police refused to watch the CCTV that would have shown who stole one man’s bike, despite the fact that it would only have taken a few minutes.)

Sir Mark, the Met Office commissioner, agreed in a recent interview with The Telegraph that the police have failed to respond to modern challenges, such as the growth of shoplifting and phone-snatching, low-grade crimes which add a sort of patina of unpleasantness to the city — and limit its economic potential — even if they don’t cause physical injury. He says that it’s a priority to change that, and I hope it is, because, as Robbins says, it’s not of much interest to someone who’s been robbed that crime is at a historic low. “Should I also be grateful that I can travel from London to Watford without having my stagecoach routed by highwaymen?”

There are lots of things Americans can reasonably criticise Britain for: we can’t build anything, the weather is boring, our GDP growth is anaemic (although you really can’t blame London for that last one). And London has lots of problems itself, not least that you’ll struggle to buy a pint for less than £7 or a house for less than a million. But it’s not “extremely dangerous” and there aren’t really no-go zones. It’s expensive, annoying, and busy, but you almost certainly won’t get stabbed in the ass, unless you pay extra. To be honest, they’ve really cleaned Soho up these days.

And not just any old bikini deepfakes, even though many AI platforms are capable of creating them. It’s easy to do: you just say to the AI “Put her in a bikini” and the politician, celebrity, or — sometimes — child is suddenly wearing only a bikini. Yes, it’s creepy. But also striking is the way Labour’s ire is laser-focused on Grok, the AI attached to X, formerly Twitter. It’s also striking how, despite pleas from campaigners for years on the platform’s abundance of obscene material, it’s only now that Labour is swinging into outraged action. So grievous is the danger posed by its bikini deepfakes in particular (including of Starmer), that the Government now plans to outlaw them, even as it’s  threatened to ban X from Britain altogether.

This is where the political expediency bit comes in. In Starmer’s shoes I too would be itching for an excuse to ban X. Under Musk’s ownership, the site has made Starmer’s political life a misery, more or less from the moment he entered Downing Street, from stirring the pot during the Southport riots to amplifying the grooming scandal to the point that Labour were forced to respond with the Casey review. And the response to the review, again largely convened on X, forced Starmer to promise the national inquiry his party is now doing its best to avoid delivering.

This is a far cry from pre-Musk Twitter, which was a liberal-dominated hub of respectable media-class opinion, one with a direct line for governments and intelligence services seeking speech-control influence. But since Musk bought the site in 2022, it’s morphed by degrees into something far more pungent and anarchic, where Right-wing voices predominate and many of the former progressive Twitterati have fled to the Bluesky echo-chamber or simply quit posting.

This has not been an improvement in every respect. I don’t miss the sanctimonious tone of old Twitter, but it was more playful. Even so, the rambunctious Right-wing X is politically significant, not least in being the sole large-scale digital exception to the general rule that major institutions are controlled by the Left. As such, the site plays a pivotal role in UK politics. Whether feeding the “posting to policy pipeline”, or drawing attention to ham-fisted efforts at propaganda or speech control, X convenes so large and vocally anti-Starmer a subset of the British Right that we can hardly blame Keith for wishing, like Henry II, that someone (in this case Ofcom) would rid him of this turbulent website.

More from this author

Elon Musk: neo-feudal prince

By Mary Harrington

So is this just about Starmer’s ailing premiership? Yes and no. He’s at the helm of a regime that is, in its entirety, holed below the waterline by the subversive uncontrollability of digital public life. He can hardly be blamed for lashing out at a website whose denizens, and owner, so obviously loathe him. But the proposed ban is best understood as part of a wider war — as was the killing of Thomas à Becket.

Henry II had his Archbishop murdered in 1170 in the course of a dispute over the competing political and spiritual prerogatives of Crown and Church: a contest that obliged both parties to turn to the Pope in Rome for arbitration. And today Starmer finds himself at the mercy of not exactly a religious but certainly a cultural force, one whose extra-territorial leader also has an agenda that doesn’t always (or even very often) align with Starmer’s own. There is of course nothing very holy about Musk, or the trolls of X. But the contest over bikini deepfakes points toward a larger-scale struggle, with cultural, political, and economic dimensions and between overlapping Old and New World jurisdictions.

The field on which this is generally litigated is “free speech”, typically referred to as if it were an abstract moral value. But while there surely is a moral dimension to free speech, in an information age the power to free or control “speech”, and to determine what counts in that definition, is of immense political and economic consequence.

We are, in other words, once again litigating the extra-territorial reach of something intangible, much like Henry II. But in the intervening period Britain also gained her own territorial empire: and then lost it again, at the hands of our own former colony, in a way that also provides lessons for our situation now. In 1941, the British Empire, struggling against the Axis, was obliged to negotiate for aid from its secessionist progeny America. A key dispute within the negotiations was over “imperial preference”. This was a set of tariff arrangements enacted within the British Empire which gave preferential trading rights to polities that were part of the Empire. This so gravely disadvantaged American trade that its dissolution was a cornerstone of mid-century US foreign policy. Britain gave up on imperial preference and secured American aid.

I mention this not to re-litigate long-dead geopolitical quarrels, but to draw a parallel with the broader context of Starmer’s proposed ban of X. This modern argument doesn’t concern physical trade in goods, but the rules under which the digital kind are permitted to circulate. Many of these “goods” — including everything that happens on X — fall broadly under the heading of “speech”. In such a context, who gets to set the rules on “free speech” is obviously every bit as important as the 1941 battle over who gets to determine tariffs across British imperial territories.

As things stand, the digital “imperial preference” favors the polity in which the internet was first developed: the United States.  The question of geography is notoriously vexed when it comes to trade. Even determining who has tax and regulatory jurisdiction over (say) a pile of grain in a warehouse forms the topic of intense negotiations between trade experts. Intangible goods are still more complex, though: when a website can be served in multiple physical locations simultaneously, who gets to regulate it?

Extensive material and political interests rest on how this question is settled. And this is the real geopolitical backbeat to Starmer’s feud with Elon Musk: a backbeat that, in truth, encompasses not just Britain but also the EU to which Starmer clearly wishes Britain still belonged. It’s a feud currently playing out in a series of bitter skirmishes between the White House and the EU, as well as, in microcosm, between Musk and Starmer.

Recently, for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against foreign individuals or institutions involved in censoring US digital properties: a clear shot across the bows of European politicians who believe they have a right to censor US websites and fine the companies  where these are served on EU territories. In the pandemonium that erupted following Rubio’s announcement, pro-EU supporters pointed out that no such challenges had been issued against Russia or China, despite these polities firewalling large portions of the American internet in its entirety.

But this is precisely the rub. Do the European states want to be as detached from the US as Russia and China, or not? There is no freedom of speech battle between these polities and the US, because neither Russia nor China tries to control what’s published on American platforms (at least, not openly). They just block them, and build their own platforms. By contrast, European states seem happy for America to supply its digital platforms, even as European politicians demand a say in how they are regulated. It’s as though 20th-century Canada was demanding, on the basis of its extensive wood and paper exports to Britain, a veto over everything published in London.

Until relatively recently, this relation of center and periphery was broadly mutually beneficial — not least in that it enabled American politicians to route round inconvenient constitutional clauses at home, in regulating the internet. Under Biden, the State Department encouraged and fostered European online speech controls, as a means of developing censorship tools both unconstitutional in the USA but nonetheless applicable domestically where desired, and aligned with an overall policy of digital speech control. I’m old enough to remember when something being illegal somewhere in Europe could result in its being deleted altogether from X even if the poster was in the USA. In effect, the Biden regime used Europe as a way of offshoring politically sensitive speech controls, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay offshored the torture of suspected jihadists.

More from this author

The tragedy of Keir Starmer’s Substack

By Mary Harrington

Now, though, priorities have changed — much to the bewilderment of Europe, which now has a well-developed censorship architecture but has discovered its American sponsor suddenly in a different mood. Even so, they have pressed on: two heavy-hitting US websites, X and Cloudflare, have already been threatened with fines under, respectively, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Italy’s “Piracy Shield”. The US-based forum 4chan has also been slapped with fines under Britain’s Digital Services Act. All have responded, essentially, “GFY”. Starmer’s threat to Musk on the deepfake image-making falls in the same category. It is an attempt to exert sovereignty in a space that’s both nominally open, but also in practice wholly dominated by American “imperial preference” — in the context of an American presidency taking a radical new direction.

Seen thus, the actual contest becomes clearer. Is Europe an American imperial subject, or a rival imperium? If it’s part of the empire, then obviously it doesn’t get to regulate its hegemon. If Europe is an imperial rival, it can hardly expect to demand its opponents supply services even as Europe dictates the terms. This is the real subject of the ongoing diplomatic wrestling-match over “free speech”, censorship, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act. If Britain, or any other European entity, really wants information sovereignty outside the American imperium, the only route there is the one now threatened by Starmer: banning American digital properties entirely from our territories, the way Russia and China do.

Does Starmer really want to go there? Does any EU state? This is perhaps uniquely difficult for Britain to answer. Geographically and economically speaking, Britain is closer to Europe, which accounts for around 41% of UK exports in 2024, compared to 18% for the US. But linguistically and culturally we’re closer to the USA. To take just one of countless examples, the BBC pays scant attention to EU politics, but Trump only has to raise an eyebrow and it’s front-page news.

In this context, can we really imagine an Atlantic firewall? I doubt it. Back in 1170, ridding himself of Thomas à Becket backfired badly on King Henry; I suspect that ridding himself of this turbulent X would prove similarly unpopular with the British media and political class. And yet our cultural, linguistic and digital enmeshment with an increasingly unpredictable US regime has introduced an acute new set of tensions. It is difficult to see how they can be resolved peacefully. But let us hope they can be. Having seen one bikini’d AI Starmer, I have no desire to see any more.

Abundance progressives and pro-growth conservatives are right to reject the hostility to science, industry, and entrepreneurialism of “de-growthers,” who dream of an economic stationary state in the near rather than distant future. Such a stationary state existed for most of human history, when long periods of economic and technological stagnation meant that powerful individuals and states could increase their wealth only by plundering the weak. The explosive growth and once-unthinkable technological advances of modernity have vindicated the 18th-century British writer Jonathan Swift since he wrote in Gulliver’s Travels: “Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.”

But we can reject mindless anti-growth ideology without mindlessly embracing growth for its own sake. Yes, we need growth — but good growth, not bad growth. To understand the difference, don’t look to the Silicon Valley overlords who are increasingly determining the shape of politics on both sides of the political spectrum.

Good growth leads to, and sustains, countries with strong middle classes and workers and families with decent wealth, leisure, and the power to bargain with their employers. Bad growth maximizes gross domestic product at the expense of individual autonomy, social solidarity, and other fundamental elements of a decent human society.

As an economic metric, GDP is compatible with both good growth and bad growth. Because it measures output per hour worked, it can be improved in a good way — improving the productivity of each worker, lowering the prices of goods and services for society as a whole, and allowing workers to earn the same income with less effort, assuming they can bargain effectively with employers to share in the profits.

More from this author

Confessions of a Heritage American

By Michael Lind

But GDP can also be boosted in bad ways by expanding the hours worked in a country without boosting individual worker productivity. In a modern industrial society, in which the majority of adults must toil for wages, GDP can be raised by cutting social-insurance benefits to compel the elderly to have much longer working lives, or by legalizing child labor. Abstract GDP would go up, but few people other than some employers and capitalists would be happier.

It’s also possible to expand GDP without increasing productivity by flooding a country with migrants. Excessive immigration may lower wages in various occupations, immiserating natives and immigrants alike, even as GDP improves in numerical value because of the population-driven ballooning of the workforce. Conversely, birth rates that outstrip productivity growth can impoverish a country, even as its GDP rises because more workers mean more work hours.

In a good society, work must be balanced with time for family and community and recreation.  Members of a society with a healthy work-life balance would be rational to choose somewhat less growth in personal income and the national economy — if the higher-growth alternative requires sacrificing essential social values.

Edith Cresson, the Prime Minister of France from 1991 to 92, is (barely) remembered today for asserting that a quarter of men in Anglo-Saxon countries are homosexuals who aren’t interested in women and that the Japanese were “little yellow men” who “sit up all night thinking how to screw us”. Whatever may be the case with Anglo-Saxon men, the Socialist premier was right to defend the work-life balance of the French against East Asian cultures of overwork, however chauvinistically: “I said they were working like ants. We cannot live like that, in minuscule apartments with a two-hour journey to work like animals. Work and work and work and producing children to work like animals. We want to keep our social security, our holidays, and live like human beings.”

Long work hours have been correlated with low fertility rates, and East Asia has some of the lowest birth rates in the world. In 2024, South Korea won the dubious honor of being the country with the lowest fertility in the world for six years in a row — 0.75, far below the 2.1 children per woman needed to maintain a national population without mass immigration. In response, South Korea has imposed a 52-hour work week — compare that to the 35-hour work week in France and 36 to 40 hours a week in Germany. Likewise, Japan since the Seventies has suffered from an epidemic of karoshi — stress-related death by overwork.

Which brings us to Silicon Valley. The tech tycoons who have emerged as the dominant oligarchy in 21st-century America have contradictory views of work and life in the future.  Many predict that automation will eliminate most jobs, making it necessary to create a universal basic income that allows citizens to enjoy a minimal level of subsistence without working at all.

Other tech leaders, however, want to import the East-Asian model of overwork and fanatical schooling to the United States (and the West more broadly). According to Elon Musk, who despises labor unions and laws protecting American workers, Chinese factory workers “won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, initially appointed by President Donald Trump as co-director with Musk of the ill-fated Department of Government Efficiency, has claimed that East- and South-Asian students are superior to American students. In an X post that likely doomed his political career, he wrote: “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers…. More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of Friends. More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin’. More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall’.”

Ramaswamy is confused. Individual Indian-Americans excel in many areas, but national productivity is the result of well-designed economic, legal, and political institutions, not overwork by particular individuals. That explains why India, with the longest work hours among the top-10 economies (49 hours or more per week), is much poorer than the United States (38 hours) and Canada (32.1 hours). Indeed, thanks to their productivity, countries with high per-capita GDP in general have lighter workloads.

Not content with opposing organized labor and wage-and-hours laws, many of today’s techno-libertarians dream of carving up democratic nation-states into “freedom cities” or “charter cities” — privately owned cities free to create their own regulations without interference by the countries in which they are geographically situated. This is the revival of an old and very bad idea, formerly embodied in the United States in early-industrial-era company towns and mining towns policed by private detectives — and symbolized today by the high-tech despotism of city-states like Singapore and Dubai.

If the new city-states were bottom-up democratic versions of Athens or Florence, the idea might be appealing. But the tech oligarchs have something more sinister in mind — top-down autocracies in which privileges bestowed on workers by investors and managers replace civil rights in a given territory.

Curtis Yarvin, treated as a guru by some tech executives, has popularized the acronym RAGE (Replace All Government Employees) and called for a “Butterfly Revolution” to centralize “absolute sovereignty” in a corporate state with a dictator-CEO. And foreshadowing Trump’s appointment in 2025 of Musk to head DOGE, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney in 2014 called on then-President Barack Obama to appoint Google boss Eric Schmidt as CEO of America, terminate all federal employees, turn federal power over to the tech industry — then resign.

Symbolizing the convergence of libertarianism with the libertine drug culture in Silicon Valley and the Burning Man festival, Peter Thiel has funded a project to promote private “seasteads” unregulated by nation-states, which might allow medical experiments on human beings that are banned elsewhere: “Could you have something where you use psilocybin” — the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms — “or MDMA” — better known as the rave culture drug ecstasy — “as an antidepressant drug? Or could you get new medical treatments where you break the FDA monopoly on medicine worldwide?”

A comment on X by a Thiel protégé, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir Technologies, suggests the danger of replacing liberal, constitutional democracy with the tyranny of an all-powerful tech-industry Wizard in a private charter city of Oz: “If I’m in charge later, we won’t just have a three strikes law. We will try and quickly hang men after three violent crimes. And yes, we will do it in public to deter others. Our society needs balance. It’s time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable.”

Public executions and deregulated experimentation on human beings, combined with technological innovation as a goal in itself — it is hard to imagine a better example of bad growth.

Then there is the Freedom Cities Coalition, which calls for states to cede land to new private corporate governments exempt from selected federal and state laws and regulations, no doubt including labor laws. President Trump, who in his second term has largely abandoned his working-class voters in favor of tech plutocrats like Musk and Ramaswamy and David Sacks, has called for 10 such post-national, privatized corporate zones on the soil of the United States.

In this dystopian fantasy, America’s federal lands — divided in the 19th century by Lincoln and his allies into homesteads for free family farmers who were considered to be the bulwarks of bottom-up democracy — would now be given over to capitalists and managers to create special economic zones like those in China that host Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, which has had to install “suicide nets” to prevent overworked and underpaid workers from jumping to their deaths from their dormitory towers.

Suggested reading

Silicon Valley strongmen want to lead the West

By David Patrikarakos

In Honduras, experimental corporate-controlled charter cities like Prospera, which drew more than $100 million in investments from tech libertarians including Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Adam Draper, were seen as so menacing by locals that the Honduran government has repealed the laws that enabled their establishment.

Undeterred by the popular rebellion against Prospera, libertarians bankrolled by tech plutocrats are promoting new, semi-sovereign company towns in places like the Presidio in San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay.

In the “Immigration and Workforce Strategy” section of its Orwellian proposal for a Guantanamo Bay Charter City, the Charter Cities Institute proposes using it as a probationary detention center for potential immigrants to the United States: “this model also introduces a phased approach to immigration: Individuals demonstrate their skills and reliability in Guantanamo Bay before transitioning to the US mainland.”

The new Guantanamo Bay charter city would combine Dubai’s indentured-servant workforce with the pleasing façade of a Potemkin village: “by controlling the narrative — weekly media updates, tours for foreign dignitaries, and televised speeches from the new city — administration officials can shape the story of ‘America’s frontier spirit, revived.’”

A humane and enduring society doesn’t resemble a mining boom town or a slave plantation or a nightmarish “freedom city” of the kind promoted by ketamine-dosing, harem-collecting, neurodivergent tech oligarchs. Technological innovation and economic growth are means to an end, not ends in themselves. Good growth is economic growth that balances desirable technological progress and economic innovation with equality of condition and worker bargaining power. Bad growth increases GDP at the cost of the powerlessness of most citizens in the workplace, as well as the voting booth.

Edith Cresson inadvertently spoke for all human beings, French and Japanese and Hondurans and Americans alike. We are not ants.

The year is 1981, and Herzog, then in his late thirties, is shooting Fitzcarraldo, an epic about a manic dreamer who hauls a steamship over a mountain in search of rubber, in the hope of making enough money to build a glorious opera house in the rainforest. The filming of Fitzcarraldo, chronicled in Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams, was more dramatic than most Oscar-winning dramas. Herzog insisted on shooting in the Amazon, where the starry cast slept in humid tents, fought off snakes, and dodged poisoned arrows hurled at them by disgruntled locals. He also refused to use special effects and insisted on actually pulling a steamship over a mountain — a feat which required months of grueling engineering, and the help of Amazonian tribes.

Few directors have ever gone so far in pursuit of a vision and come out with a cinematic masterpiece. Directing Fitzcarraldo, Herzog gazed into the abyss, but the abyss didn’t dare gaze back at him. His dream was too magnificent, too irresistible. It had to be woven into the fabric of reality.

Since then, Herzog has realized many more dreams. He’s directed feature films, documentaries and even operas; he’s written poetry, essays and a novel. In the process, Herzog, now 83, has become a pop-culture icon, acclaimed for his lyricism and erudition — as well as his hypnotic voice and thick Bavarian accent. Like his countryman Friedrich Nietzsche, he has a knack for coining aphorisms (a favorite: “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness”). In an era of shallow influencers, he has struck a chord with audiences hungering for meaning.

Now comes a new book grandly titled The Future of Truth. Think of it as DMT in hardback. Beautifully translated from German by Michael Hofmann, it’s a collage of reflections, visions and stories about what constitutes truth.

Look up the definition of “truth” and you’ll learn it is “conformity with fact”. But this doesn’t impress Herzog. “It’s a definition of a complete dimwit,” he tells me when I ask him over Zoom. The director is sitting in his study in Los Angeles, looking down at the camera. “If facts constituted truth, it would be fairly simple, but it is not,” he continues. “We would have the accountant’s truth, and not something much deeper.”

Herzog tells me there exists no scholarly consensus on what truth really is. “It may be related to facts to some degree. But at the same time, the question arises: what are facts? And what is reality?” he says. “Reality is hotly disputed as well. What is the reality of the man in the lunatic asylum who believes he is Napoleon Bonaparte or Lenin or Jesus Christ?”

For Herzog, it doesn’t matter that we have no definitive definition of truth. “It is within the human condition that we know that we are in search of truth,” he says. “We know vaguely where it is, vaguely a direction, and all the rest is nothing but search, an expedition into the unknown, a quest, an endeavor never ending.”

It’s an endeavor that has animated Herzog since he first picked up a camera as a teenager. From the glaciers of Antarctica to the dunes of the Sahara, he’s been on a personal expedition for what he calls “ecstatic truth” — truth beyond facts.

“I’m speaking now purely of art,” Herzog warns, making clear that if you are in the business of political journalism, “you better do fact checks and you better not mislead your audience”. But for artists, he continues, “departing from the clear, understandable, natural facts can enhance the truth of something”.

Herzog gives the example of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture in St Peter’s Basilica which depicts Jesus in the arms of Mary after he was taken down from the cross. “His face is correctly the face of a 33-year-old man,” Herzog explains, “but when you look into the face of his mother, the mother of a 33-year-old man is probably only 15. So I immediately asked myself the question: did Michelangelo try to give us fake news, did he try to cheat us?” Yet the opposite is true. “He gives us a deeper truth, something deeper about the essence of the two figures.”

In a nutshell, that’s Herzog’s approach too. Take his 2001 film Invincible, set in Berlin at the outset of Nazism, which follows the tribulations of Zishe Breitbart, a Jewish strongman who performs nightly in a cabaret. The cabaret’s owner, Erik Jan Hanussen, is a clairvoyant who dreams of becoming Hitler’s Minister of the Occult. Given the rampant antisemitism, Breitbart cannot perform under his own name, since Jews are supposed to be weaklings. Hanussen therefore makes him play the part of a Germanic folk hero — until Breitbart resolves to reveal his true identity.

Though Breitbart and Hanussen were real historical figures, their paths never actually crossed. Breitbart died in 1925, nearly a decade before Hitler gained power. Herzog sculpted a fictional story around their real lives. “Who cares that I invented a meeting that could have not taken place?” he says. “It doesn’t matter. I am a poet, period.”

More from this author

Meet the Catholic conspiracists

By Theo Zenou

In Invincible, poetic license illuminates a reality that eludes facts. The film illustrates the sinister spell Nazism cast on Germany and how it affected Jews. Herzog, who was born during the Second World War and is part of the generation of Germans that had to confront the Nazi past, said of the film: “That’s my answer to the darkest history of Germany.” It’s an answer that doesn’t replace the study of history but completes it.

Watch any Herzog film, and you’ll see the same process at play. Many of them are inspired by true stories, but Herzog sublimates those stories to reveal their essence. Just don’t ask him to explain what that essence is. He once referred to Fitzcarraldo as “a big metaphor”, adding, “but don’t ask me what the metaphor means, because I wouldn’t know”.

Even before he picked up a camera, Herzog was chasing the ineffable. At the age of 13, growing up in the Bavarian Alps, Herzog was briefly a devout Catholic. “There was a deep void in me and a longing for something transcendent, so that was probably the deeper reason behind all this,” he tells me. He then leaps elegantly from his youthful flirtation with Catholicism to his search today for “ecstatic truth”. “Ekstasis in Greek means to stay out, to step outside of yourself,” he tells me. “You see that in late medieval mystics and the kind of insight they have on the nature of faith by stepping outside of their existence.”

Herzog likens this experience to that of ski jumpers. In 1975, he released The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, a documentary about Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and ski-jumping champion. “[Steiner] defies gravity and flies off ramps, and he has the experience of ecstasy, stepping out of his existence and morphing into a bird,” Herzog tells me. “And it’s strange,” he continues, “because I wanted to be an athlete when I was very young, I wanted to become world champion of ski flyers.” He quit after his best friend had a “catastrophic accident”. But “even if I had continued”, he adds, “I wouldn’t have gotten even close to what [the greatest ski jumpers] are capable to do”.

But Herzog’s youthful desire to be an extreme athlete helps to explain his radical approach to filmmaking. For Herzog is to cinema what Steiner was to sport. When Steiner jumped off a ski ramp into the void, he hadn’t lost his mind. He knew exactly what he was capable of. What appears insane to us appeared possible to him. And it was possible. Ditto with Herzog. His career is a masterclass in how to discipline the mind’s eye. He’s a practical visionary; a poet with the discipline of an engineer.

Herzog has long gravitated toward characters who, like him, reject limits, from scientists working in Antarctica to cops who flaunt the law in New Orleans. Then there’s Elon Musk, whom Herzog interviewed in his 2016 documentary about the internet, Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.

“Elon Musk, I think, he’s not one of these imposters,” he says, when I bring up the Tesla and SpaceX CEO. “He’s a serious businessman, but he knows about the power of myth… This is why he keeps insisting on colonizing Mars with a million human beings.”

Herzog doesn’t share Musk’s enthusiasm for the red planet. “Speaking about colonizing Mars with a million is an obscenity by itself, because we should keep our own planet habitable and not try to make a hostile planet habitable for us,” he says. “So there’s something wrong about it… and it is not attainable. It cannot be reached.”

He’s clearly given the project some thought, however. We’d need “to fire salvos of rockets, thousands of them almost at the same time”; we’d need to build “robots who construct huge domes”; we’d need to detonate “atomic explosions at the poles of Mars for melting water”. And if that wasn’t enough, we’d need to build pipelines to transport the water. “Now, please, how do you construct the pipelines?” Herzog asks. “It is ridiculous. We know that. You don’t need to be a chicken to know the egg is rotten. You don’t need to be an astrophysicist to know that.” If the man who pulled a steamship over a mountain calls for time-out, you know you’re in trouble.

But Musk’s Martian hype is cunning PR. “He acquires the aura of the visionary. That’s important,” Herzog says, “because when you buy an electric car, you do not buy it from the Chinese because it’s just a factory in China. If you buy one of his cars, you buy the car of the visionary. It’s an attribute that goes into mythologizing the product. I’m sure he’s aware of that. He’s not a stupid man.”

Musk also dreams of creating a new life form: artificial intelligence. It’s a prospect that unnerves Herzog. In The Future of Truth, Herzog acknowledges that AI will lead to extraordinary breakthroughs, but also foresees “the possibility of comprehensive, mass supervision of disinformation, of manipulation on a vast scale”. This echoes the haunting epilogue of his memoir, Every Man For Himself and God Against All, in which he imagines a world “turning away from thought, argument, and image… a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters”.

Suggested reading

Barry Lyndon’s doomed world

By Aris Roussinos

In this dark new world, nobody will read. Herzog has long warned that the decline in reading spelled doom for humanity. New studies highlight how serious it is: reading for pleasure has collapsed, and even elite university students now struggle with long texts. “Students read less and less and less, and young filmmakers do not read at all,” he tells me. “I keep telling them, I keep hammering into them: if you want to become a filmmaker, you may become a mediocre filmmaker at best, but you will only become a good filmmaker if you read.”

“Read, read, read, read, read,” Herzog says, like a mantra. “That’s of fundamental importance for our future.” Only by reading widely can we develop critical thinking. “Your mind engages with the soul in the thinking of someone else, and then you read another book, and you have another worldview, and all of a sudden you start to balance it out… and see our daily reality in critical terms,” he says.

In The Future of Truth, Herzog calls on us to discern fake news by consulting a plethora of sources. Don’t take anything on blind faith. Only then can we hope to build a “more nuanced version of what reality might be”.

“It has to become second nature for us the same way it was apparently second nature for prehistoric men, hunters and gatherers,” Herzog continues in a flight of poetry. “They would go out and pick berries and mushrooms, and I’m certain they did not pick the poisonous ones. Over long, long experience, they would know. And I keep saying: I’m fairly certain that these people did not hate nature because there was poison in it… It’s the same thing today. You do not have to hate the world as it is. You just have to get acquainted with doubt and critical thinking.”

The search for truth, as Herzog tells us in his book, is eternal. Our ancestors looked for it on the walls of prehistoric caves; we can’t now forsake it for the shiny screens of our smartphones. “Truth has no future, but truth did not have a past either,” Herzog tells me. “But we must pursue it. We have to continue, we must, we shall continue to search for it.”

***

The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann, is published by Bodley Head.

This, more or less, was a popular US take on a viral video circulating this week, showing a very young girl in Dundee menacing the person filming with an axe and a knife, plus a lot of high octane swearing and shouting. Though no potential migrant attackers could be visually detected, at least one heavily accented male voice could be heard urging the girl to “show the knife”, while she and another girl, said to be her sister, volubly accuse him of “battering kids”. The girl with the weapons was later arrested by police, the video put online, and its chaotic events processed by the meme factories to be served up frothing hot.

One typical image — mainlined into American veins via Elon Musk’s new pal Tommy Robinson — showed “Sophie” transplanted to a Highland setting, still brandishing weapons enthusiastically in the heather, but now tartaned-up in the colors of Clan Mel McGibson and with face daubed in saltire blue.  Meanwhile Musk himself was busy describing the police officers involved as “traitors to their own people”, as if a more responsible constabulary would have given the axe-wielding pre-teen a pat on the head and sent her on her way. A puzzled American discourse has since erupted about why Scottish people, or the men in particular, don’t adequately defend their women from tribes of marauding foreigners roaming unchecked across their ancestral lands. A donor page has been set up for the two girls, real names Lola (12) and Ruby (13). As I write, the fund stands at nearly £35,000, which is a lot of money for young Lola and Ruby to spend on machetes and Irn Bru. “May God save your country from the terrors happening there”, writes one plaintive donor.

At the same time, people who actually live in Dundee have been discussing what happened there, with less mythologizing and more weary familiarity with the city’s longstanding social problems. Though the local tourist board is probably not shouting about it, the place has the highest rate of child protection orders in Scotland, the highest national incidence rate of domestic abuse, the second lowest life expectancy, and the second highest rate of drug misuse deaths in Europe (beaten only by Glasgow). “A significant proportion of the difference in life expectancy between Dundee and many other [places] can be accounted for by deaths at a young age from drugs, alcohol and suicide”, notes a 2024 health and social care report.

On the city’s subreddit, one poster said she had watched the whole thing kicking off from the Farmfoods carpark — a place not remotely heather-strewn — and described witnessing “lots of swearing and aggressive behavior between both parties”, but no physical clashes. Another pointed out that the same girls — again identified as “Ruby” and “Lola” from Monifieth, ages 13 and 12 respectively — were reported missing in the Scottish press at the end of July, then traced shortly by the police afterwards. “Clearly there is a lot going on for them”, was one more sympathetic verdict. Mostly, though, there was a distinct lack of surprise about why a young girl might be walking about the city’s backstreets tooled up like a video game character. Said one: “I’m 31 this year and seen loads of that kind of pish growing up, average [housing] scheme behavior…  Mostly just troubled kids left to fend for themselves tbf. Just more people filming it now.”

In the end, then, febrile visions of the tomboy queen, Sophie of Dundee, have proved as accurate as that time in 2019 when the American Left collectively hallucinated MAGA-behatted students aggressing an “indigenous elder”. In both cases, it seems it is easy to make up self-serving things about young people you don’t know. The Daily Mail has since found the film’s cameraman, who turns out to be a Bulgarian Christian — which is to say, not Muslim — with legal residential status. The police, with the help of Farmfoods CCTV cameras, have confirmed “there is no evidence to support the online rumors Mr Dumana… committed any offense”. Rumors of migrant hordes have also been exaggerated: it is true that Dundee City council houses some Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Ukrainian refugees, but a quick look online shows the numbers are apparently in the hundreds not thousands. In 2019, 18% of babies in the city were born to mothers from outside the UK, a figure only marginally higher than the national average at the time.

More from this author

How Nicola Sturgeon failed Scotland

By Kathleen Stock

So: whatever the ultimate truth about what went on in the video, or about the fraying social contract in Dundee, it is clearly a lot less childishly simple than the feverish projections of people like Musk. Twenty-five years ago, I lived in the city, in a neighborhood full of nice houses left over from the prosperous 19th-century jute trade. I worked in an electrical retail shop in the center, from which hollow-eyed drug users would sometimes nonchalantly emerge with stolen stereos to sell in the alleyways off the main street. Back then it was a starkly divided place — and still is — though the major social divisions have little to do with skin color.

On the one hand, there are the hipster West End coffee shops and the fancy waterfront V&A museum, the backdrop to fictional native son Logan Roy’s surprise party in HBO’s Succession. On the other, there’s the scary tower blocks in places like the Hilltown and Lochee — known locally as “multis” — their stairwells adorned with “human shite, junkies shooting up, groups of neds and a dead dog”, as one disgruntled local resident recently described the situation. I had female friends who grew up in the multis; they were frequently plied with alcohol in their early teens then assaulted and raped by groups of local men. Safe to say, then, that the idea of sexually exploiting vulnerable minors didn’t start with brown-skinned incomers.

To make such obvious points seems to drive the online Right on both sides of the Atlantic into a spitting fury; as if, through a strange Tinkerbell-like alchemy, every time a white man is identified as responsible for sexual exploitation, an Asian-born culprit gets exonerated. When the objectors are from North America, there often seems to be an accompanying insult felt to self-identity and amour propre: as if some great-grandfather from Linlithgow or Leicester were being held personally responsible, and by extension all of his descendants. It is perfectly true, to our national shame, that Asian rape gangs have operated here with impunity, and been enabled by authorities in many cases. But it is also true that the strategies used by the perpetrators to lure young girls were hardly new or innovative, and nor was what they did to their victims afterwards. Sexual exploitation of minors has been rife in places like Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dundee for decades — if not centuries — without the authorities getting a proper grip on it; and the perpetrators have usually been homegrown.

All but the most economically insulated of Scottish citizens already know this. Contact with everyday local reality, plus a phlegmatic, humorous outlook makes most of them constitutionally unlikely to fall for simplistic a priori narratives imposed from elsewhere, whether these be about existentially noble refugees or existentially noble working-class white people. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for many radical Right-wing onlookers, who seem neither in touch with reality, nor particularly phlegmatic or humorous. Credulously swallowing every bit of agitslop thrown their way by activists like Robinson, and without any apparent awareness of the high potential for being led up the garden path, they are now as desperately wedded to images of white British victimhood as foreign tourists generally are to the sight of Buckingham Palace or Harrods. And their current vision of Scotland is about as accurate as Brigadoon.

Suggested reading

How sororities seduced the online Right

By Kathleen Stock

There was perhaps a time not long ago when Musk-powered overseas attention to the scale of UK immigration and the scandal of grooming gangs was a bracing correction to elite inertia and denial about it over here. Perhaps it even briefly provided us with that most precious of gifts, according to Robert Burns: “to see oursels as ithers see us”. But if so, that time has definitively gone.

Though the aimlessly simmering political energy generated may look attractive, sober-minded British Right-wingers should be careful to avoid projected psychodramas about their home turf that come with twanging accents and the inability to pronounce “Edinburgh” correctly. And to be fair to them, so far most have, perhaps sensing the incipient danger. Curbing immigration is increasingly seen as a commonsensical position, even in Scotland; it would be a shame to spoil things by associating the position with the havering of ill-informed numpties. In the immortal words of imaginary Dundonian Logan Roy about his American children, these are not serious people; and it shows.

“At the author’s request, we are clarifying that on 11 June 2026, Ilia Belov was found guilty of making sexual remarks to a group of girls aged between 12 and 14 in Dundee before grabbing and pushing one of them to the ground. His sister, Nadjedzha Belova, 20, previously admitted assaulting a 13-year-old girl by seizing and pulling her hair, dragging her to the ground, and striking her on the head to her injury during the incident.”

 It was always hard to tell how serious Musk was about this venture. Once a Democratic-friendly billionaire, he fell into Donald Trump’s orbit after buying Twitter (renamed X) and became, by 2024, a prolific donor to the GOP and the Trump campaign. As a reward, Trump put him in charge of the ludicrously named DOGE on a Musk pledge to cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget, or about a third of annual outlays. DOGE made a mess of the federal bureaucracy (while only delivering a relative pittance in cuts) and proved unpopular. 

The relationship between Musk and Trump, with their titanic egos, was never built to last — the budget cuts were never all that compelling to Trump — and they broke up when it became clear that the Tesla boss was a political drag on the administration. For all the chatter about how they clashed over tax credits, the death blow for Musk was probably a hotly contested election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Musk spent heavily to boost the Republican nominee and even campaigned for him personally; the Democratic nominee handily won anyway. For Trump, this was an embarrassment.

 The third-party bid, then, was probably Musk’s lame attempt to console himself. Yet the brief life of the America Party — notwithstanding its founder’s willingness to invest huge sums in the project — sheds light on why third-party politics are such a challenge in the United States. 

The Democrats and Republicans maintain the longest-lasting party duopoly in the world. Of the two, the Democrats are the older party, founded in the 1820s by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren to represent Southern and Western farmers, the emerging proletariat in the North, and grasping entrepreneurs everywhere who felt shut out by the Eastern establishment. The Republicans, meanwhile, were founded in the 1850s as a vehicle for Northern Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats and Free Soilers, and everyone else opposed to slavery. Since then, no sustainable third party has taken root. Many tried, to be sure, but they either dissipated or were absorbed into one of the two major parties.

More from this author

It’s springtime for progressives — again

By Ross Barkan

Much of this is structural. In a first-past-the-post presidential system that rewards, in every way, zero-sum politics, there will always be two dominant factions. The Electoral College renders third-party efforts mostly futile. In the 1992 presidential election, billionaire Ross Perot garnered nearly 20% of the national vote, a significant sum, against Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In a proportional parliamentary system, he’d have been entitled to that share of the vote in parliament; instead, he won zilch, because he couldn’t carry a single state and was therefore awarded no electoral votes.

Due to ballot-access laws that vary from state to state, it can be very hard for third parties to maintain a long-term presence in either local or national elections. Take the Green Party, a small Leftist party best remembered as a vehicle for Ralph Nader’s presidential runs (and blamed for spoiling Al Gore’s chances in the 2000 election). In New York today, the Green Party no longer has a ballot line. Indeed, in 2024, no third-party candidates for president appeared on the ballot in New York — a first in the modern era. Voters could only choose between Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.

 The two major parties in America are remarkably malleable and adaptable, able to survive even when they serve, within their own ranks, diametrically opposed regional and class interests. In Britain, the Conservative Party — the world’s oldest, if not the oldest continuous, party — is now threatened with extinction by Nigel Farage’s Reform movement, which is cutting deeply into the Tories’ base. 

If Britain’s intra-Right contest took place under US rules and conditions, the Tories would almost certainly swallow or co-opt Reform. That’s in essence what happened with Trump: he ran a populist, outsider campaign against the GOP establishment in 2016 and, instead of destroying the party, he simply remade it in his own image. The keepers of the older GOP consensus — foreign-policy hawkism, pro-business austerity — simply learned to push their agenda using Trumpian rhetoric (and often succeeded because Trump’s populism was skin-deep).

On the Left, a similar dynamic played out with Bernie Sanders, except Sanders could never beat the Democratic establishment in the same fashion. Rather than campaign as a Green or a socialist, Sanders — who doesn’t identify as a Democrat but caucuses with the party in the Senate — ran in the 2016 Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. He won many states and millions of votes, and was able to emerge as a significant political leader after the election. 

In the wake of this, the Democratic Socialists of America saw a huge boost in membership and became a budding political force in American politics. Unlike the Socialist Party of the 20th century, DSA doesn’t field candidates on its own ballot line. Instead, the DSA simply endorses Democrats who call themselves socialists and are willing to fight for their policies. In New York, this is how Zohran Mamdani won. He ran as a Democrat and beat back the Democratic establishment. Like Trump, perhaps, he’ll be able to reshape the party — at the local level, at least (full disclosure: Mamdani managed my own unsuccessful bid for the New York state Senate in 2018).

 What Musk, as deranged as he often is, did get right is that Americans are hungry for other options. Both parties are resented (centrist Democrats especially), and the nation isn’t so much polarized as negatively polarized, with voters defining themselves as much by the party they revile as the one they support. It’s rarer and rarer to hear an American declare they’re proudly a Democrat or Republican. The old political machines have withered. Americans have a weaker relationship with the Democratic and GOP apparatuses than they ever did before.

 To build a viable alternative, millions of dollars would be needed to secure ballot access and advertise the virtues of the new party to voters who are still used to only voting Republican or Democratic. And the party, in some sense, would have to be distinct enough to avoid charges that it’s simply siphoning ballots from the Democrats or the GOP in America’s zero-sum system. This was Musk’s fear — that he would end up a spoiler, abetting Democrats.

What Musk would probably have never gotten right is the policy platform of the America Party. Musk doesn’t understand the American electorate very well. DOGE, his great obsession, backfired, as even rank-and-file Republican voters rebelled against the idea of government programs they rely on facing devastating cuts. At heart, he is a globalist capitalist, and even his nativism is limited by his desire for high-skilled foreign workers to join his companies.

Suggested Reading

Elon Musk was destined to fail

By David Auerbach

A viable third-party movement in America would have to unite voters who feel underserved by the Democrats and Republicans. What kind of voter isn’t truly seen or served by either party? The answer is a socially moderate or conservative economic populist, a voter with a Bernie Sanders view of the economy who is more traditionalist on cultural issues and skeptical of immigration.

Trump’s GOP, on immigration, has plainly overreached. Americans wanted him to get control of the border, and on that count, he succeeded. But terrorizing ordinary migrants, dispatching hairdressers to a Salvadoran gulag for life, and removing student green cards over pro-Palestine op-eds was heinous. Trump’s approval rating is falling, including on immigration, and Americans now take a warmer view of immigration.

A third party, in this scenario, would advocate for a stricter border but a reasonable path to legal status for law-abiding migrants — the compromise once supported by Republicans like Marco Rubio. The dynamism of the United States derives from its inherent multiculturalism, its ability, again and again, to assimilate newcomers. If there’s a single politician who might embody what this theoretical third party movement would look like, it’s Dan Osborn, the former labor organizer running for the Senate again in Nebraska. Osborn is campaigning as an independent against the Republican incumbent, shunning both parties. He’s deeply critical of corporate power, like Sanders, and sympathetic to rural gun owners, like a Republican. He advocates for a “secure” border. And he’s got a shot at winning.

Osborn, though, isn’t helming any political party. There might be a universe in which a saner version of Musk attempts to use his cash to seed more Osborn-like candidates across America, building a movement around the America Party. That universe, though, hasn’t yet arrived, and maybe never will. Team Red and Team Blue are here to stay.

We know that the 21-year-old sniper Thomas Crooks, a zitty and cerebral loner from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, brought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to the roof of a warehouse 180 yards away and fired eight shots at Trump, hitting three bystanders and killing the 50-year-old fireman Corey Comperatore. But there is still no consensus about the larger meaning of what happened at Butler.

Certainly, the attack shaped the election. It changed the moral climate. In the spring of 2024, four criminal prosecutions dating to Trump’s first term approached resolution almost simultaneously. They had been strung along by Democratic-party prosecutors to fall just then, in election season, for maximum dissuasive effect. Oddly, the New York case in which Trump’s opponents prevailed was the weakest and most convoluted of them. Trump was now a “convicted felon”. But an argument persisted on the campaign trail that summer over whether Trump was being righteously held to account for his own corruption, or persecuted by adversaries who were corrupt themselves. The bullet fired at Trump settled that controversy. Not in any logical way, of course. But in an emotional way it validated the notion that “they” — meaning something in society and the spirit of the times — were out to destroy Trump.

It thus reinforced a shift that has been evident in American politics for quite some time. Voters used to respond to rational appeals based on policy differences. Now they prefer emotional appeals based on group allegiances. Pundits usually point out this change only to deplore the new system’s superficiality. But it’s not that simple. The “policy debates” in the old system were often phoney. Having conducted them, the political parties went off and did what they wanted anyway. Voting publics prefer the new populist style because it actually gives them more information. Conservative policy wonks used statistics to deplore mass immigration, but then did nothing. Trump blustered and burbled — but then acted.

The striking thing about Trump’s behaviour on 13 July 2024 was that it was excellent, and it was excellent in a way that was unreflective and spontaneous. Everything about it was at odds with the American postwar conception of leadership. In a culture where equality of opportunity is everything, the public came to believe there was something reprehensible about the idea that anyone has any special aptitude for anything. We’re not living in a democracy, they felt, unless anyone can go out and become a leader, through hard work or a degree-granting course. Nothing could be more repugnant than the notion that leadership is something you either have or you don’t. And yet here was Trump, in a moment of disruption, behaving like a born leader.

The effect was electric. Within minutes of Trump’s being rushed offstage, Elon Musk stunned the country by endorsing him. “We had one president who couldn’t climb a flight of stairs,” Musk would later say, recalling the long decline of Joe Biden. “And another president who was fist-pumping after getting shot.” It is often forgotten that Biden’s rambling, mumbling, senescent performance in a June debate did not immediately end his candidacy. It was the shooting that did it. Biden was still hanging on at this point. It was only after Trump’s demonstration of relative vitality that Biden’s withdrawal became inevitable. He ended his candidacy the following weekend.

But the event was about more than vitality. “On a personal note,” Mark Zuckerberg said that week, “seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air, with the American flag, is one of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life. At some level, as an American, it’s hard not to get emotional about that spirit.” Trump was doing something archetypal: the pose in which many photographers caught him that day was almost exactly the one you will see in Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People, the great symbol of revolutionary republican patriotism that hangs in the Louvre: the raised right hand. The flag. The rallying of wounded followers. Trump was not just being brave or strong. He was, without meaning to, summoning Americans to feelings buried so deep that they had forgotten they had them. It was a powerful irruption into politics of reality, and even of religion.

Trump himself, though not conspicuously conversant in the language of faith, could see this. Seconds before the shooting, he had been excoriating Joe Biden as “the worst president in the history of our country”, and had planned to continue in that vein when he spoke at the Republican National Convention, due to convene two days later. That changed. “It went from the world’s most vicious speech,” Trump informed Senator Lindsey Graham the following day, “to ‘Let’s bring the country together’. May not be as exciting, but there it is.”

More from this author

Donald Trump's second coming

By Christopher Caldwell

When he returned to Butler for a campaign rally three months later, on the eve of the election, Trump credited “the Hand of Providence and the Grace of God” for having brought him through the ordeal. Increasingly, he discussed the incident as a homespun and prayerful old lady might, dwelling on fateful coincidences: What made him turn his head to look at a graph behind him on the stage? What made him decide to ask that the graph be shown earlier in the speech rather than later, as he usually did? Whether we think of this as sincere religious reflection or electoral pandering, Trump was reacting as most reasonable people would after such a trauma — groping towards a language through which to understand how contingent, how out of human control everything that happens to us is, a quest that, even if it doesn’t lead one to belief in God, can teach one humility. In theory, at least.

Politicians of both parties sensed that something special had happened, that the voting public had come to feel a new kind of connection with their leaders. American officeholders have, in the past year, striven to place themselves in similar filmable situations in which the politician appears to be battling for the people, not metaphorically but physically, thwarted by evildoers while pushing indomitably against them. Fight, fight, fight. It is probably to the Butler assassination attempt that we owe a new sort of campaign stunt, the ideological tableau vivant. At a Los Angeles press conference held by Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem in early June, California Senator Alex Padilla, a Democrat, moved along an aisle towards the podium and, when he got too close, was stopped, expelled from the room by security agents and handcuffed, as any American would have been. His office then circulated the video. A few days later, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander staged a similar disruption, clinging to a migrant being removed by customs officials and demanding that they “show me the judicial warrant”, even though, as The New York Times noted, warrants are not needed for arrests made inside courtrooms.

If Republicans, for now, appear to be better than Democrats at this kind of myth-making, half a century of government by experts is probably responsible. Republicans have a fair claim to represent the uncredentialed masses who were not at the table when the rules were drafted. Democrats are inclined to work the regulations and technicalities, never the most mythopoeic part of any constitutional order.

Suggested reading

The shot that created a martyr

By Lionel Shriver

What the Trump shooting has not yet yielded up, one year on, is a consensus interpretation. Feelings about the event have tended to skew according to feelings about Trump himself. In testimony almost two weeks after the incident, FBI director Christopher Wray, a longtime Trump nemesis, cast doubt on the idea that Trump had been hit with a bullet at all. “There’s some question about whether or not it’s a bullet or shrapnel that hit his ear,” Wray said. He resigned in January as Trump took office. At Butler, Sean Curran was one of the Secret Service agents who rushed to Trump’s aid. He can be seen in sunglasses protecting the candidate’s left side while Trump pumps his free (right) hand. In January, Trump named Curran head of the Secret Service.

A similar division besets the public at large. For Trump supporters, certain details have given rise to suspicions of conspiracy: the grounding of the Secret Service’s drones that day in Butler, the speed with which the suspect Crooks was cremated (“faster than most household pets”, in the opinion of Trump’s son Eric), the paucity of information about Crooks’s internet browsing habits (although we do know that he queried before the rally: “How far was Oswald from Kennedy?”). But the cloudier the circumstances surrounding the shooting, the more miraculous Trump’s emergence from them. Trump’s detractors are only beginning to assimilate the unquestionable virtues Trump showed at Butler into the unquestionable vices that mark his presidential style. A typical verdict is that of Peggy Noonan, the literary speechwriter in the administration of President George H.W. Bush back in the Eighties, who calls Trump “a fearless man with bad judgment”.

That is the state of Donald Trump’s reputation one year on from what is probably the most extraordinary thing he ever did. The shooting at Butler is hardening into legend — but only a partisan one. Becoming a national legend takes longer, and may not ever happen. When Delacroix painted his depiction of the July 1830 Revolution, half a century had passed since the French Revolution, half a century during which much of the country viewed it as an ordeal of destruction, gore and institutional collapse. He was painting for the first generation of Frenchmen to understand the Revolution, and revolutions more generally, as their common inheritance. Whether Trump gets that treatment from future generations will depend on how his own revolution fares. A year ago this weekend, he inspired his followers through his rage to endure, fight, and lift himself off a speaker’s platform in Butler, Pennsylvania. Future generations may be similarly moved, particularly if he can summon other virtues than these.

Existing citizens should be prioritized, he said: “We’re done importing foreign labor, we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. No more globalism, was the message: “America is not just an idea,” he told a rapturous audience. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

A year on, though, it’s looking more wobbly. Last weekend, Elon Musk, whose support helped propel Trump to victory, launched his new “America Party”, promising the American people that this will “give you back your freedom”. The party’s X account has since squared up to the Trumpian project, declaring: “MAGA is the past. Woke is a distraction. The middle is the future.”

Is there really political runway for a new, tech-forward, centrist party? Who knows. But the irony is that this is, in fact, what Trump is trying to create — while Musk’s project wildly misunderstands the actual terrain he seeks to influence. Combing through the ins and outs of the now seemingly defunct Trump-Musk bromance, we find that what precipitated the breakup is not Trump’s departure from “centrist politics”, but his efforts to create a new center, in seeking to balance the diametrically opposed interests of the two halves of his coalition, on the most politically salient issue of the election: immigration. And the surprising conclusion is that even if Musk’s new party seems unlikely to succeed, his anger is justified — because he got played.

More from this author

Bidengate is the anti-Watergate

By Mary Harrington

The Trumpian Republican Party has long since abandoned the previous version of “centrist” American conservatism, which embraced a bipartisan economic consensus that tolerated penalties to the American middle class and relatively high immigration, provided all contributed to GDP growth overall. But while Trump’s challenge to this consensus was controversial enough in the 2016-2020 term, it has been far trickier to navigate this time, because his 2024 coalition was freshly-bolstered by Silicon Valley tech bros who — if they aren’t precisely neoliberals — are certainly more in favor of high immigration than the MAGA base.

From the get-go, then, Trump 2.0 has been caught between Big Tech donors whose cultural affinities and business interests tend strongly toward enabling large-scale migration, and an electoral base for whom economic and cultural nationalism are the whole point of voting for Trump. This tension bubbled to the surface almost immediately following Trump’s election last year, via the totemic issue of H1B visas. This controversial program enables companies to bring workers to the USA from overseas, typically into medium- to high-skilled knowledge jobs in tech, engineering, and business. Critics allege that this visa route is used to undercut native wages and cut corners on employment rights. But especially to internationally-oriented, tech-forward employers in Silicon Valley, the potential H1B affords to scour the world for talent is obviously appealing, even as the same quality makes it just as obviously antithetical to the interests of native workers.

The conflict between Trump’s Silicon Valley backers and those relying on Trump to protect them from foreign competitors did not take long to surface. When erstwhile Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made an ill-judged social media post blaming American culture for US firms giving preference to workers from overseas, the backlash to his statements was furious. It didn’t help that Ramaswamy himself is of Indian heritage, like many of America’s H1B workers. Ramaswamy had been tipped to join Musk at DOGE, Trump’s waste-cutting program, but backlash to his statements only died down once Trump’s qualified expression of support for H1B — a sop to his new tech-bro friends — was complemented by throwing Ramaswamy under the bus.

Even before Trump’s inauguration, then, a sense of suspicion already hung in the air. The interests of MAGA and Silicon Valley are so obviously orthogonal on immigration that this could hardly be otherwise. I have wondered for some time how he planned to square that circle; now, one way of reading the Trump/Musk break-up is as a tragic byproduct of Trump’s efforts to do so. Specifically, via the measures required to get Trump’s Congressional spending megabill over the line, including a massive boost to US border security funding.

The bill, referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”, is a 940-page legislative behemoth. Fiercely opposed by a number of Republicans for the $3.9 trillion fiscal hawks estimate it will add to the national debt, and by most progressives for its swingeing healthcare cuts, reversal on renewables, and tax-cuts for the rich, the centerpiece of the OBBB is a staggering $170bn funding boost to ICE, to support mass deportations. The rest is a thicket of carve-outs, red tape, and special pleading, set to swell the US government deficit considerably, and furiously denounced by Elon Musk as a “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK”.

But what if all this pork has been accepted as the price of delivering Trump’s promise to MAGA, on immigration? The boost to ICE makes this department now bigger and costlier than most militaries, meaning that while Trump may have pivoted from his 2016 opposition to H1B immigration, in a clear sign of compromise with Silicon Valley, he’s still trying to make good on his pledge to cut the low-skilled and illegal kinds. In other words: Trump may be attempting to actually deliver the genuinely centrist “some immigration, but the high-skilled kind only” program that every political party promises, and none ever delivers.

Musk, then, may be trying to set himself up as the centrist alternative to MAGA. But in terms of the most salient issue in the last US election, and constrained by the proverbial political “art of the possible”, it appears actually to be Trump who is trying to carve out the center ground. Musk, meanwhile, is obviously furious and bewildered — and, also, possibly deeply betrayed.

And no wonder. He burned a third of Tesla’s share price and a great deal of his personal cultural capital on driving DOGE. This initially promised $2 trillion in US government savings; but Musk left DOGE in May, and the project seems not to have achieved anything like this in practice. Again, we might see this as hubris, failure — or alternatively as Musk having been used, by cannier political operators. For while DOGE never achieved the vaunted $2 trillion in savings, it was effective at kneecapping Trump’s internal political foes in USAID and the Department of Education — moves adumbrated in Project 2025, then realized with Musk’s help.

Was that always what DOGE was for? Was Musk simply used to deliver it? Key figures in Trump’s team have certainly read Machiavelli, even if Trump himself isn’t a books guy. In any case, having sacrificed so much net worth and personal capital on this venture Musk might be forgiven for expecting a little quid pro quo, such as cushy treatment for his business interests. And yet the OBBB has taken a chainsaw to renewables subsidies — including several that will directly impact Tesla’s bottom line, potentially to the tune of billions. Trump himself has alleged that these losses are the real reason for Musk’s rage at the OBBB.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump’s big, beautiful mess

By Frederick Kaufman

Reading past the sound and fury on social media, then, the picture that emerges is of Musk as a newcomer to politics: one who imagined it to be like business, where you hire smart people and they do what you ask them to do. Instead, he got comprehensively out-manoeuvred. He was deployed as a means of neutralizing hostile departments in the permanent bureaucracy, then just as abruptly retired when he took his ostensible duties too literally and his cuts started causing awkward headlines. Then he was dispensed with altogether, as it began to dawn on him that his government allies never really cared that much about cost-cutting, and that the aims were rather always political: namely, a wholesale reshaping of the American political behemoth.

Meanwhile, within the terms of what actually can be done in the world as it is, Trump’s regime seems to be consolidating. If the OBBB border security mega-splurge does what it’s intended to do, I don’t expect Musk’s party to get anywhere. (It’s already being mocked online as the “H1B Party”.) Especially if Trump holds to his alt-centrist stance on migration, permitting a measure of higher-skilled inflow to continue even as the deportations escalate, chances are he’ll keep enough of the business lobby onside, including in Silicon Valley. If Trump achieves this, while retaining the trust of MAGA and without bankrupting his country, he will be unstoppable. There will be no need for long-winded theorizing on what a nation is or isn’t, whether or how far America is made of immigrants or ethnic blocs or whatever. The messy reality will be good enough for enough of the electorate.

As for Musk, he is obviously an extraordinarily gifted and driven man in many respects. But if things continue to go Trump’s way, it won’t be long before everyone (including Musk) quietly abandons the “America Party”, and resumes making the best of the actually existing America, chaos and compromise and all.

The Big Beautiful Bill — or the Big Bullshit Bill, or Beautiful Billionaire Bailout, depending on who you ask — qualifies as the fullest articulation of Trumpism yet, revealing the President’s disregard for debt and love of profligate spending, his worship of the plutocrats and his contempt for those who might need a hand. It’s a bill in which rape and pillage and a dozen more private planes and real estate deals for Eric and Jared could be ensconced somewhere among the 940 pages that took nearly 16 hours to read aloud on the Senate floor, and no one would know. Here is a bill that will add a 10-digit number to the debt limit, inspiring the arch-budget conservative from Texas, Chip Roy, to comment, “I don’t think the math is correct yet” — as if Trump’s thirst to achieve for himself the moment that would ever after define him as the most consequential figure in United States history had anything to do with maths.

That said, a few sums are worth mentioning: billions for border and national security, while billions are subtracted from wind and solar investments in green energy. The biggest cut in the history of Medicaid, totaling around $1 trillion, stripping coverage from almost 12 million lower-income Americans. An extra shot of $150 billion to the Pentagon for bombs and missiles — to be allocated by chat-group addicted, ex-Fox anchor Pete Hegseth, the one with the Crusader tattoos. Billions deducted from food assistance, most notably school lunches for hungry kids, and more than $100 billion in tax cuts for the top one-percent.

The BBB will see $3.3 trillion added to the national debt over the next decade, enough to make even the most ardent acolyte of modern monetary theory blanch, and more than enough to make Elon Musk descend into a rant and against, in the Republicans, the “Porky Pig Party”, whose representatives should “hang their head[s] in shame”.

Musk threatened any member of Congress who voted for “the biggest debt increase in history” with an ominous promise: “They will lose their primary next year if it is the last thing I do on this earth.” Not a single “No” vote came of it, although the GOP may rue the day.

Infuriated by yet another betrayal from his erstwhile bestie, the President vowed to launch a DOGE investigation into the world’s über tech-bro, threatening that the MAGA minions over at ICE might send Musk “back home to South Africa”. (That said, the end of Americans’ $7,500 credit for buying Teslas will likely be punishment enough.) On the White House lawn, Trump went so far as to muse metaphorically: “DOGE is the monster that might have to go back and eat Elon.”

During 27 hours of voting and debate, the drama of the Big Beautiful Bill ascended to the heights of tragedy. “It is inescapable that this bill will betray the promise Donald Trump made,” the Republican senator Thom Tillis said on the Senate floor. Knowing full well the fate that awaited him and his party, Tillis prophesied that the Republicans would get trounced in the 2026 midterms. Then he announced that he would not run for re-election. Such roadkill not only satisfied Trump (“Great News!” he wrote), but delighted the Democrats, who view the Tillis retirement as a chance to fill the North Carolina seat with one of their own.

The retirement of Nebraska’s conservative centrist, Don Bacon, similarly made headlines. There were also episodes of comic buffoonery, typified by Joni Ernst, Senator from Iowa, who dismissed fears that the bill would mean that upwards of 80,000 Iowans would lose health insurance. “We’re all going to die,” she flippantly told her critics.

Hours of strong-arming, horse-trading, side-dealing, intimidating, coercing, and internecine negotiations between the true believers, the last of the fiscal hawks, and what was left of the wonk coalition — those who might actually care about the alternative minimum tax and foreign-derived intangible income — lasted until the dawn’s early light.

Suggested reading

After Musk, the deluge

By Malcom Kyeyune

By that point in the debate, weary members of the media had been whipped into a strung-out frenzy of cliché. There was a “needle to thread”. It was “make-or-break” time. The vote would be “a real nail-biter”. While the press called play-by-play, exhausted interns munched pizza and played cards, and Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama lit a cigar.

But as everyone knew from the get-go, the BBB — now the somewhat less sonorous “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — would squeak through the Senate with a somber Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote. The pandemonium has now transferred to the House of Representatives, where the one-trillion dollar addition to the deficit has brought frustrations to a climax. As one moderate Republican asked incredulously: “How did it get so much fucking worse?”

It’s “very complicated stuff”, Trump acknowledged, then got on a plane to Florida, leaving the drone of roll-call votes behind him.

“It’s a shitshow,” said Georgia Congresswoman and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

More from this author

The futility of fact checkers

By Frederick Kaufman

Whether or not the ceremonial signing will occur on the evening of the Fourth of July, as Trump has demanded, remains a matter of speculation, but despite the rhetoric of suspense there is no doubt that the bill will eventually wend its way to the Oval Office, where it will at long last be graced by the touch of Trump’s omnipotent Sharpie.  

So much for the views of the American people. Harry Enten, CNN’s data guru, described the public opinion ratings gathered by Pew, Quinnipiac, and Fox as “terrible, terrible, terrible”. “The American public, at this particular point, hates, hates, HATES the Big Beautiful Bill,” he said. No matter, so long as the President can deliver $10 billion more for his ready-for-primetime immigration raids.

“It’s bad legislation,” concluded Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. “This is a political gift for Democrats.” Everyone on both sides of the aisle knows Kelly is right — that is, everyone but the fanatics blinded by their loyalty to the king — but everyone also knows that for the time being, Trump’s agenda will in some redacted and compromised form prevail, the dollar will sink to new lows, and the rich will prosper like pigs at the trough.Which is all according to MAGA plan.

But politics are not foolproof. Trump’s opus may backfire, as the Democrats now have an arsenal of images and rhetoric, and are already planning to inform every American that Republicans cut school lunches and Medicaid and sent their hairdresser and housekeeper to a dungeon in the Sudan.

As if to prove the point, just as I was finishing this piece, I received a text from none other than Nancy Pelosi: “Democrats will respond to Republicans’ attack on the most vulnerable Americans,” it began. “I’m calling on a historic 5,000 donations in the next 24 hours to have a HUGE fundraising day for Democrats…”

Will the Republicans finally self-destruct into the long-anticipated splintering, as Elon Musk joins the Freedom Caucus to forge a new, post-Trump juggernaut? Will the Democrats attract the neo-liberal leftovers of the GOP, benefit from a backlash to the behemoth bill, take the House, and impeach what will be a weakened and aged post-2026 lame-duck President? Have the last twenty years of American populism finally hit a tipping point? As lawmakers rush to return to their latest nightmare, as the only certainty that awaits American politics is heavy weather.

Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire (“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!”) and then his flurry of accusations of it being broken (“ISRAEL DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS”) suggest that he is using social media to operate outside of the invisible institutional state systems that have constrained presidential action since at least the days of President Truman. We can infer that Trump is posting as Trump, not as the Trump administration. Trump is posting as a sovereign. The contrast with Biden’s Twitter/X account couldn’t be clearer. This is a style of wielding power.

And it is one, I suspect, which is not limited to Trump, but enabled by both new tools and shifts in capital accumulation towards tech and crypto. State monopolies of money and information have been disrupted and only the monopoly on violence remains. Under the old forms of state sovereignty, new forms of sovereignty are emerging. Individuals leveraging different kinds of platforms — whether financial, technological or media-related — have started to wield state-like influence. Elected officials at odds with intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and legislators can step outside of the parameters of government to persuade, isolate and break up conglomerates of power.

When a populist with ties to capital and tech, such as Trump, gets elected, this kind of disruption reaches its heights. The President behaves in some ways like a non-state actor operating within the state, and in other ways, like an avatar of the state. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Trump is clearly using his Truth Social posts to increase his own leverage and to change the direction of negotiations, not only with Israel and Iran, but potentially with his own military and administration officials. The negotiations, happening in real time, are complex and multidimensional.

More from this author

Can indie novels save our minds?

By Matthew Gasda

The ability to instantly disseminate global communiqués has increased the powers of the US President to shape events around the world. When Trump tweeted that the citizens of Tehran should evacuate, all the highways leading out of the city were jammed within minutes. In this century, neither Biden nor Obama nor George W. Bush used the powers of the presidency this way.

Critically, these new forms of sovereignty and power politics are not just emerging within the framework of states, but outside of them, suggesting new, covert forms of power. When a billionaire like Bill Ackman tweets his support of Israel, he is not just sharing an opinion, he’s hinting at where and how his capital will flow. Trump’s battles with Harvard, similarly, are not just about sticking it to the libs in a symbolic sense, but about cauterizing certain sources of soft counter-power. USAID was dismantled for similar reasons.

Perhaps the most significant indication that something has radically shifted in the way power works was the explosive social media war between President Trump and Elon Musk. For 24 hours, the spat absorbed the full attention of the discursive ecosystem. Rather than work through representatives or behind closed doors, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man engaged in a public tit-for-tat. I don’t think they did this to entertain us, but to test the limits of their power.

The Trump-Musk feud felt like a clean break from the tone, style and dynamic of managerial liberalism, which has been the American norm for 100 years. Rather, Musk’s language (“without me, Trump would have lost the election”) was classically Shakespearean: a powerful vassal lashing out against the king he helped to enthrone. The dynamic reminded me of Henry Percy (Hotspur) and Henry Bolingbroke in Henry IV. Hotspur feels he helped win the throne but hasn’t been adequately rewarded. Worcester, Hotspur’s uncle, tells the King bluntly that he owes his throne to the Percy clan — without them, you couldn’t have deposed even weak Richard II. The implication is threatening: we can overthrow you just as we helped you overthrow your predecessor. After Trump hit back, Tesla’s $150 billion plunge in market value felt like a battlefield loss, like Hotspur’s armies fleeing. When Musk threatened to “begin decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft”, he resembled a grand duke refusing to send his retinue to join the king’s military campaign.

These are examples of feudalism, not of centralized or modern state power. Power increasingly seems shared, asymmetrically distributed; absolute only in small spheres, and those spheres overlap. These exchanges — whether between Trump and Musk or Trump and Khamenei — recall the depictions of Johan Huizinga, in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, of a time when feuds and vendettas were “the cardinal point of policy” and populations gathered behind aristocratic figures clamoring for “vengeance”. The late-medieval period was one where personality underwrote political stability, personal instability predicted political chaos, and pride drove public affairs.

Techno-aristocrats like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg already possess state-like wealth and functional power. Trump 2.0 models itself after a tech company, and tech companies increasingly resemble governments. Now that Trump can negotiate a ceasefire, or crash Tehran traffic, with a tweet, and Musk can threaten to withdraw space infrastructure over personal grievances, we’ve returned to a world where individual character matters more than systemic process.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump: new media king

By Sam Kahn

Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Back then, the system was strong. Presidents were thought-leaders who helped steer the ship but weren’t solely responsible for it. Now the system seems weak, fragmented; showmanship and emotion are weirdly reassuring to us. Someone, not something, is in charge.

This return to Shakespearean feudalism suggests both promise and peril — certainly peril for Iran. In Shakespeare’s plays, genuine personal risk and nobility exist alongside terrifying unpredictability in court politics. And it won’t be long before charismatic personalities once again eclipse institutional constraints, and sovereign individuals come to rival sovereign states. This is our new Shakespearean politics — the personal and tragic, played out on a global scale.

Inevitably, the squabble played out on social media, where both parties proceeded to denounce each other in increasingly rabid terms. Musk accused Trump of being a hypocrite, a man who pretended to care about the US budget deficit while conspiring to make it worse. He said that Trump ought to be impeached and replaced by his vice president, JD Vance. Trump, meanwhile, hit back saying that the real problem with federal deficits was all the unearned subsidies and corporate welfare that Musk was leeching from Uncle Sam. And Steve Bannon piled on calling for Musk to be deported back to South Africa and have his citizenship revoked. By now, the love-in on the White House lawn, with Trump advertising Tesla and Elon expressing devotion, is but a distant memory. Bridges have been burned; there will be no reconciliation.

Though the level of vitriol and undignified childishness of the bickering between the President and the world’s richest man has been shocking, nobody can say that they didn’t see it coming. For weeks, the media has been reporting on the growing discord between Musk and the administration, primarily over the trade war. And other parts of Trump’s coalition — including billionaire and megadonor Bill Ackman — have made their dissatisfaction with the economic policies increasingly clear.

But the “big, beautiful bill” was the final straw. After spending a hundred days talking about fiscal responsibility, the danger of the exploding deficit, and suffocating levels of debt, Trump and his Republican Party made one of history’s greatest political U-turns and endorsed a bill that made all of these problems spectacularly worse. Adding insult to injury where Musk is concerned, the budget bill terminates nearly all ongoing subsidies for EVs, while leaving the corporate welfare handouts for internal combustion engines in place. Clearly, no good deed in Washington ever goes unpunished: after sacrificing his own reputation on the Trump altar, Musk has been rewarded with a knife slipped between his precious Tesla’s ribs. Some Democrats, sensing opportunity, are already calling for Musk to return to the fold.

More from this author

DOGE has devoured Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

But the dramatic collapse of a part of Trump’s political coalition isn’t just the result of two narcissists’ clashing egos. It signifies a deeper shift. Washington, after all, is intensely transactional; if you donate large sums of money to a party, you naturally expect to get something in return. Given how incredibly spendthrift Elon Musk has been, it is extremely noteworthy that he would end up being denied access to the pork barrel. This is not, however, a sign that Congress has decided to reject corruption — the existence of the big, beautiful bill is proof enough that the swamp has only gotten worse. No, the messy divorce is a sign that the political process — even the process of ordinary political corruption — is starting to break down.

Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are getting queasy because the bill essentially represents a capitulation in the face of looming fiscal disaster; a resolution to simply sail the Titanic straight into the iceberg. The Trump administration sold itself as the last chance to try to steer the ship to safety before America’s state finances collapsed. But instead of changing course, Trump and the GOP actually decided to throw more coal into the boiler and go full speed ahead.

This time around, their fiscal profligacy has not been without consequences. The bond market is already wobbling, as weakening demand for more dollar debt slams head first into a state that is poised to gorge on even more unsustainable borrowing. Combined with a capricious and almost arbitrary economic war against the rest of the world, weakening America’s internal economy while alienating allies and making them less willing to bail America out from its fiscal irresponsibility, and you see the makings of a perfect storm.

The parallels between this crisis and the one that triggered the French Revolution of 1789 grow ever stronger. Elon Musk has played out his role as America’s Jacques Necker to its conclusion; he has gone from rockstar technocrat enjoying widespread popular support to spurned sidekick whose attempts at reform were frustrated and blocked by the very people who brought him in in the first place. The French monarchy did actually try quite hard to escape its looming bankruptcy during its last years in power; but, just like with DOGE, those reforms became more and more chaotic and even tyrannical or illegal towards the end, as the political system slowly collapsed into acrimony and infighting.

Meanwhile, in America, as the “big, beautiful bill” kills off even the pretense that Trump is working to forestall financial disaster, and with Congress so gridlocked and the political system so polarized and dysfunctional, there’s only really one politics left that still works: the politics of executive fiat. With Trump taking the same path as Louis XVI, will he suffer the same fate?

Certainly, his administration is going to go down fighting; as it loses many of the battles it began this term by initiating (the trade war, peace in Ukraine and the Middle East), it is simply picking more. Trump kicked off this term declaring war on illegal immigrants and the federal bureaucracy, and even though neither has gone well, he’s also declared war on Harvard University. Perhaps, though, this impulse to constantly pick new fights is perhaps less irrational than it appears. America is going broke, Congress no longer works, laws can barely be passed, and the bureaucracy itself is slowly failing. The only way to cut spending in that environment is by resorting to semi-tyrannical executive action.

Suggested reading

The decline and fall of MAGA

By Ross Barkan

While the official rationale behind the war on institutions like Harvard, or research funding more generally, often cites issues such as antisemitism, or wokeness, or DEI, it’s increasingly clear that the money withheld will never be restored. While this stand-off between Trump and the institutions could be described as a culture war spun out of control, or a distraction from other failures, it is also, in truth, a sort of improvised bankruptcy proceeding. When the Soviet Union slowly went to pieces, the same thing happened: at first, the money simply stopped coming, and only later did people belatedly realize that this was the new normal, and the money would not be coming back. In truth, there is no other way to even attempt to cut spending in America right now; Congress is simply incapable of doing the job.

Perhaps, five months ago, it was possible and indeed reasonable to talk about Trump’s administration in terms of “will they fix it or won’t they?” There was momentum and DOGE held a threatening promise. But today, the man who embodied that reform is now openly denouncing his former political allies and the system has proved resistant.

The President, meanwhile, is openly threatening some of America’s most dynamic companies, because of personal animus. Tesla and SpaceX, whatever their flaws, still represent an area of genuine industrial innovation in America, at a time when deindustrialization has devastated it. Destroying Tesla out of pique or petty revenge won’t do America any good, but one gets the sense that “doing good for America” is not really on anyone’s agenda any more.

The CCP is now working on an even larger dam, one that will tame the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s longest river. This new edifice will generate three times the hydroelectric power of the Three Gorges Dam. Depending on the geographical provenance of its building materials, the new dam will probably add another few microseconds to each day on Earth.

Microseconds, being a millionth of a second, are imperceptible, but China’s march into the future is becoming impossible to ignore. This is a country whose forays into gigantism include the world’s biggest building, longest bridge, largest air terminal and — to its deep shame, one imagines — third-largest skyscraper. Long derided as a manufacturer merely of low-quality, imitative goods, China is threatening to lead the world in anti-aircraft drone swarms, humanoid robots, gun-toting robo-dogs, hypersonic fighter jets, and maglev hyperloops that will, sooner or later, make China’s existing network of high-speed trains look as rusty and decrepit as its antediluvian counterparts in Britain.

The comparison, though unflattering, is instructive. In cost, at least, Britain’s second-ever high-speed rail project — the first was the Eurostar — matched China’s flair for gigantism. But it was reduced in scope, piece by piece, until it became a connection merely between Birmingham and the suburbs of London. While Britain made a eunuch of its grandest infrastructure project, failing to build a late-20th century iteration of a technology we invented in the 19th, the Chinese were pioneering, in the form of the maglev hyperloop, a technology we might not emulate until the 22nd.

In many respects, China is outperforming even the United States. As the winds of change howl, look for taut windsocks. We can see one in the form of the Techno-Industrial Playbook, the product of a pan-institutional banding-together of dozens of American think-tankers. Many of these think-tankers, over the course of their careers, have been principally concerned with economic growth. But the playbook is something more muscular: a plan for reinvigorated American technological strength, a plan via which the country can reinvigorate its industrial base, attract the world’s top talent, and take control of important resources such as rare earth minerals. It is a sign of changing times and, to use a well-worn phrase, interesting times.

As for Britain, there has been talk in this publication and elsewhere of Anglofuturism: a neo-Gaullist project via which the country might be propelled into a future that, though founded on what is now frontier technology, feels like home. But if any country is currently and coherently reifying such a vision, it is China. To use the coinage of the artist Lawrence Lek, a Londoner of Malaysian-Chinese extraction, we can call this vision Sinofuturism.

Suggested reading

Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain?

By Aris Roussinos

Any attempt to understand Sinofuturism must begin with the pit out of which China has bootstrapped itself. China’s “Century of Humiliation” began with the mass opium addiction fomented by the East India Company in the 1830s and continued with the resultant Opium Wars. China’s defeat by the British was followed by defeat by Japan and the attempted carving-up of the country by a greedy host of foreign powers. This wretched period finally ended, according to the Chinese telling, with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, following a 22-year civil war, in 1949. Much misery lay yet in store: Mao alone is believed to have been responsible for 65 million deaths, through both mass murder and the famine that resulted from the “Great Leap Forward”.

Britain and America, in living memory and beyond, have been spared the agonies of famine and state-sanctioned mass murder. Those of us native to the postwar West are probably incapable of fully understanding the effect on the Chinese psyche of those traumas and humiliations. But we do know that China yearns to be the best, to be the biggest, to command respect, and to be invulnerable both to rival powers and to nature itself.

It is in this respect, in that domineering attitude to nature, that we can see one of the most significant differences between China and the Anglosphere. China, says Thomas White, a sinologist at King’s College London, sees nature as a resource, as something to be exploited and engineered. “There is a faith in the ability of humans to intervene in ecological processes in order to improve them, rather than a sense that human impact is inevitably detrimental.”

We can see traces of this attitude in China’s ecology-wrecking dams, its weather-altering geoengineering and its desert-defying Great Green Wall. In these endeavours there is an inheritance from the millennia-old Chinese dream of taming floods. It was a dream realized by the legendary engineer, Da Yu, whose labors secured him emperorship of the Xia Dynasty. Five-thousand years after Yu’s supposed existence, the Chinese press paid Jiang Zemin, the engineer-turned-president who oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the profound compliment of calling him “the new Da Yu”. (If you continue to doubt the significance of this kind of engineering to Chinese governing, note that the Chinese word for politics — 政治 — contains an ideogrammatic element denoting “water management”.)

Most of China’s great nature-defying projects would be out of place in the West. To return to the debacle of HS2, one imagines that the Chinese were mystified to learn that Brits spent £100 million to build a shed for the benefit of rare bats. Perhaps they are also mystified by our willingness to waylay large infrastructure projects on account of individuals who might be bothered by noise or are unwilling to be moved. In contrast, the building of the Three Gorges Dam entailed the displacement of at least 1.4 million people.

This disregard for the human is another foundational difference. Whether you ascribe it to collectivism, Confucianism or a post-traumatic invulnerability to complacency, Sinofuturism is, by and large, disinclined to make way for the individual. It is this illiberal tendency, to a Western eye, that fosters some of the most appalling examples of the CCP’s inhumanity: the political imprisonments, the constant surveillance, the abuse of animals, the fearful neighbors, the indentured Uyghurs. China’s dominance of global manufacturing, even on behalf of companies headquartered in the West, is at least partly dependent on forced labor. Sinofuturism has involved the pulling of levers that Westerners would be unwilling to touch.

Cheap labor, too, has been a tremendous asset to Chinese manufacturing — as has rampant IP theft and the cornering, via dealmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, of the entire industrial supply chain. Thanks to these factors and others, China has clawed itself back to the technological frontier. In the ninth century, Chinese monks discovered gunpowder; in the 21st, we learned this April, Chinese engineers have successfully tested a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, unleashing an intense fireball without needing to use radioactive material. But more important than any particular new technology, says William Matthews, of Chatham House, is China’s mastery of the production of technology. “The real potential China has technologically is that, because it’s got such enormous manufacturing capacity, it has the potential to implement AI systems that are designed for logistics optimization and supply chain optimization.” Faster and more efficient manufacturing allows China to spam out electric vehicles and other technologies that the CCP has judged in advance to be worth dominating.

Doing all this automatically — replacing all that cheap labor with robot arms and so on — is a project currently underway, for China, like the West, faces the civilizational challenge of a tumbling birth rate. The West has tried to cheaply address the problem by importing millions of migrants, thus storing up further problems while impeding (and in some cases retarding) the development of automation. China’s program of automation looks the better bet.

And the CCP’s goal, says Matthews, is to lead the way not only in robotics, but in other emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum computing. “It aims to use these as a basis for effecting what amounts to a qualitative shift in economic power, similar to the original Industrial Revolution, that will lead China to a position where actually economically, at the national level, it outcompetes the United States.”

America remains the wealthier country, and the home, as Elon Musk has pointed out with regard to Sinofuturism, of the hyper-futurist project that is Starship. But China is growing in civilizational confidence, the effects of which are visible not only in its space program, which is aiming to build the first moon base, but in its architecture. It is telling, in this respect, that Xi Jinping has banned “oversized and xenocentric” buildings, of which the “big pants” skyscraper, which resembles a pair of trousers, is a notorious example. The result of the edict is that China’s multiplying cityscapes will no longer be the plaything of experimental Western modernists. Sinofuturism’s larger infrastructure, writ in monumental concrete, will retain its herculean Maoist drabness. But pre-revolutionary design tropes, such as courtyards and the use of feng shui principles, are becoming more visible in the country’s newer building projects.

Suggested reading

Trump’s new world disorder

By Helen Thompson

What, though, is the end-state of Sinofuturism? To the extent that China remains a communist state rather than an autocracy sui generis, it is not of the proselytizing variety. The USSR wanted to spread Communism around the world; the leading members of the CCP, according to Matthews, have little interest in such evangelism. “Their ideological position is one that’s based on the idea of distinctive civilizations with their own value histories. There’s a desire to displace the United States, but that, I think, is with a view to minimizing external interference.” There is little evidence that Xi wants the Chinese flag to flutter over Western capitals, though an annexation of Taiwan might make us reconsider that assumption. As does the Chinese march through our industry, property and universities.

And as America might discover in a war over Taiwan, hegemons tend not to come in pairs. The Thucydides trap is well-documented, and one emerging technology in particular might be the key to domination. It is not an uncommon view among AI researchers that the first country to develop artificial superintelligence will secure for themselves an indefinite global hegemony. This country’s sovereign AI, according to certain prognostications, will outthink its opponents at lightning speed, rendering those opponents harmless. Matthews envisages a slower takeoff of AI capability, and a more enduring bifurcation between American and Chinese systems. But the prospect of Chinese domination of AI, and of a world shaped by the CCP’s values above all others, ought to focus the mind.

There is much to deplore about modern China. But the West might, at the same time, examine its confidence and ambition. If it is to be the values of the Anglosphere, rather than those of the CCP, that define the next centuries, then we ought, pragmatically, to consider how it is that China has revitalized itself so effectively. We should not wish for a government that would displace 1.4 million people to build a dam, but nor should we wish for a government that allows individual Nimbys to block infrastructure that would benefit tens of millions. The Victorians had more centralized planning power than we do, and the result is that we still skulk around in the structures they left us. More fundamentally, they wanted to build things that would last. We need to rediscover those long-dormant muscle fibers.

Democracies are very good at industrial innovation, but less good at long-term industrial planning. China’s recent progress in AI is the fruit of a plan set down in 2017. I’m told that, a little later, the British government was warned by experts that it had a brief window in which to corner a new technology called a large language model. The government acknowledged the opportunity but did not act on it. Training runs multiplied in cost and Britain no longer has the option of getting ahead. A reinvigorated West, along the lines of the one envisaged in the Playbook, will need to relearn how to design, and stick to, far-sighted industrial plans.

Suggested reading

China is ready for battle

By John Rapley

That applies in particular to trade. As America’s allies are currently discovering, erraticism is not an attractive feature in a customer. And much of the developing world sees China, instead, as a more worthwhile partner, with the result that China has secured reliable supplies of every important mineral. But there are many downsides to the handing of economic dominance to China, which is, at best, indifferent to the liberal internationalism that has brought such prosperity to the world. To this effect, the economist Noah Smith writes that, in comparison to postwar America, a dominant China “will be less interested in creating freedom of the seas for other nations, and more narrowly concerned with protecting its own trade… [And] for all the sneers directed at America’s self-appointed role of ‘world police’, it was more willing to stand up to regional conquerors than China has proven so far.” Embrace the Belt and Road Initiative in haste; repent at leisure.

The irony is that China is, in certain intellectual respects, a child of the West. In a glib sense, that is to be expected of such a prolific thief of IP, but the phenomenon goes much deeper. As White observes, the Chinese faith in human reason and progress, and in humanity’s ability to triumph over nature, have a “direct lineage to the Enlightenment”. And Marxism, of course, with all its ideas about the progression of history through certain stages, is itself a Western invention.

In every Chinese reach for greatness, then, one can discern at least a vestige of what we can think of as civilizational anxiety of influence. It is an anxiety that is borne not only of that uneasy intellectual inheritance, but of the long and torturous Century of Humiliation. And it is an anxiety that, should things continue in the present vein, will persist for much longer than the primacy of the West. As if suffering from sleep paralysis, we are becoming aware of our sclerosis, but are not yet able to arrest it. Our political classes are responding to this dangerous new world with a combination of clumsiness and naivety. What the moment requires of the West, though, is a project of revival — one that is pragmatic enough to analyze what is effective about Sinofuturism, but bold and self-confident enough to surpass it.

But now his time in the White House is drawing to a close, and Musk has announced that from now on, he will be spending more time with his businesses (including Tesla, SpaceX and the social network X). Not, you’ll notice, the traditional retiring politician’s promise to “spend more time with his family” — which in Musk’s case would be tricky, given that he doesn’t have anything like a traditional family.

In Fight Club, the narrator complains to Tyler Durden about having an absent father: “Every six years, he goes to a new city and starts a new family.” Durden responds: “Fucker’s setting up franchises.” And “setting up franchises” essentially describes Musk’s attitude to fatherhood. He’s known to have at least 14 children with four women, although according to sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, it’s probable that the actual number is far higher.

Of course, Musk doesn’t use the word “franchise” — he prefers the military metaphor of having a “legion” of children. The mothers of his many children, meanwhile, use another word: “harem”. They talk about being dragged into “harem drama”, as Musk plays favorites and uses his financial power to punish or reward. After one of the babymamas pushed back against a gagging clause that would have prevented her from speaking negatively about him (but not the other way around), he cut her monthly stipend from $100,000 to $40,000.

Suggested reading

How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Richard Hanania

Which all suggests that Musk has a pretty terrible attitude to women: they’re there to procreate and to take orders. With one exception: his mother Maye Musk enjoys a privileged role in the court of Musk. She has an apparently close and protective relationship with her son: after the WSJ article was published, she responded to the allegations about the treatment of her grandchildren by calling it “dishonest” and flagging the journalists who wrote it to an X account called “@Ifindretards”.

Musk reportedly uses privacy deals to stop the mothers of his children from publicly associating themselves (or their children) with him. Meanwhile, Maye socializes with the wives and daughters of the Republican elite: a seat next to Melania at a Mar-a-Lago dinner party, a luncheon with Ivanka, a ride on Air Force One. She’s the nearest thing Musk has to a first lady.

She’s also apparently free to capitalize on her family as much as she likes. Maye would, presumably, disagree with the idea that she owes her status to her son. She has her own profile as a model — now 77, she appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue in 2022. She is, incongruously, especially popular in China, where she’s regarded as a “silver influencer” and is in demand for lucrative partnerships with local brands.

She has, inevitably, written a book, which promises “Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” And, equally inevitably, she also offers a self-help course where you can learn her “five rules for life”. It is silly to think that anyone would be fascinated by this if Maye wasn’t the mother of the richest man in the world, but it’s equally silly to assume the benefit only goes one way. Maye lends Musk something that he could never have without her: humanity. Without her, it would be impossible to think of Musk — with his collection of children, his nativist fixations and his obsession with the letter X — as anything other than alarmingly weird. Maye brings a softening lifestyle angle to the dynasty: think of her as “GoopX”.

She even has a backstory that recasts Musk, with all his (kindly) eccentricities, as an object of sympathy. According to her autobiography, she left Musk’s father Errol because he was abusive (Errol denies this). The backstory to the backstory, however, is less helpful: Maye’s father Joshua N Haldeman, who died when Musk was two, was a white supremacist and antisemite who opposed democracy and believed there was a “a strong possibility that South Africa will become the leader of White Christian Civilization”. 

More by this author

Does Olly Murs make you thirsty?

By Sarah Ditum

Racism is not a hereditary trait (even though it would be funny if it was), and the fact that Haldeman held those opinions tells you little about his descendants. But it’s a useful reminder that the Musk family tree has been political for several generations, and Maye is a political player in her own right. As Wired reported, she’s used her social media posts to support Musk’s lobbying efforts on behalf of his businesses in China, and her own visits to the country (she claims to go almost every month) have been celebrated by members of the Chinese government. 

Until her son’s embrace of Trump 2.0, Maye’s American presence was non-partisan — at her most firebrand, she was the kind of girlboss Democrat who went to Hilary Clinton fundraisers. But as her son’s ambitions converged on Trump, so did her posting. Increasingly, she used her accounts to boost Musk’s interests, which meant boosting Trump. (If she’s sore about Trump’s tariff war potentially affecting her relationship with China, it hasn’t affected her loyalty.)

Musk loves a classical reference, so here’s a new one for him to enjoy. If his children are his “legion”, then Maye is the Livia to his Tiberius, in the style of Siân Phillips in I, Claudius. She is the savvy operator who can make up for his deficiencies, the proxy who can act on his behalf while pretending all to be doing nothing more than “mothering”. She can be his attack dog, and call it maternal instinct — though it’s notable that she doesn’t post about her other two children nearly as often. 

A power mother is a great asset (just ask the Kardashians). That’s true both publicly and privately. Maye is the one who is allowed to speak truth to her son’s power: she told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that “the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father”, and grows absorbed with conspiracies and delusions of grandeur. Whether he listens to her is another thing, but at least he didn’t fall out with her — which is what happened to Sam Harris when he demurred from the Musk line on covid. Naughty boys listen to their mothers.

But for Musk, Maye is also a bit of a reputational liability. Musk believes intensely in masculinity: “Men are made for war. Real men, anyway,” he texted to one of the mothers of his children. He has used his enormous riches to create a private world where women are maximally disposable, to be purchased for their reproductive value and maintained at a safe distance.

Meanwhile, Maye is out there telling people to “stop being mean” to her son, as though he were a weedy kid being bullied in the playground and not a billionaire who until recently had the power to direct the US budget. Men might be made for war, but Maye Musk is perfectly capable of fighting her son’s corner. Musk seems to be long beyond relying on women, but really he’s the ultimate mama’s boy.

It already seemed back in November as if Musk’s independence and loud public image would keep his tenure short. And now he is set to leave, with the man himself stating he wants to focus on Tesla; yesterday, he said he plans to spend “a lot less” on political donations in the future. Trump himself has said that Musk won’t be around much longer. He has apparently alienated a great deal of Trump’s staff, in particular Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who keeps the trains running on time.

A key and overlooked moment in Musk’s decline occurred in February, with his full-throated endorsement of Trump quoting Napoleon to indicate the president is above the law and constitution. Trump’s statement is a typical-for-him power move, all bluster and stubbornness. Musk retweeted it with 14 American flags at 14:14 in the afternoon. The 14 can only refer to the white supremacist “14 words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

From praising Germany’s AfD to tweeting “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did,” Musk hasn’t done much to distance himself from the more vulgar, racist nativists. But this was the first instance of Musk knowingly invoking (albeit cryptically) white supremacist slogans, moving from fellow traveller to active ideologue. Anti-Trumpers have had a terrible habit of crying wolf, making it very difficult to separate truth from hysteria, so when something without plausible deniability like this came around, it got no momentum.

This particular tweet didn’t blow up, so perhaps Musk got away with it, but it nonetheless points to the crux of the issue: Musk is a foreigner. Not an immigrant (though he is), but a techie in a non-techie’s world. J.D. Vance may get into grammatically correct arguments with other big names on Twitter, but Musk traffics with the randos to the point that you could almost think he is one of them, and when he slips up and embraces the 14 words, he shows that he ultimately is of the people, not above them. If you haven’t spent time in political circles, it is hard to realize just how forbidden it is to publicly associate with the great unwashed, but there you have it. Donald Trump may do a photo-op working at a McDonald’s drive-through, but he would never associate with any of the customers.

The incident was even more significant because it showed that Musk didn’t know where the lines were. As one Trump ally said of Musk: “There’s a lack of an understanding about communications and why it’s important, that you massage things, that you talk about things, that you qualify things — they just don’t do it.”

In other words, Musk fell because he didn’t know how to play the political game. He was, to be blunt, too autistic for politics. He came from a world where there is far more tolerance for people saying whatever comes into their head, less respect for seniority and prestige, and a far heavier representation of autistic traits. He could not cross over into the political world without abandoning the very world he embodies and represents, neutering himself. His behavior since creating DOGE shows him treating the government just as he’d treat a company that he’s CEO of.

On Twitter, you see techies like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta Chief Scientist Yann LeCun mixing it up in public. While few go as far as Musk in their vulgarity, it still shows that notions of aristocracy and privilege play out very differently there than they do in DC. The tech culture Musk comes from has much more porous social boundaries, where the idea of putting an inexperienced 20 year old in charge of mission-critical tasks is plausible, if not exactly a regular occurrence. Ideas of “paying one’s dues” and “staying in one’s lane” are quaint. Musk’s steroidal version of this ethic has tanked Twitter’s earnings and led him to spew unlikely and provably false tales of DOGE’s savings, but ignoring reality is nothing new in a world where Joe Biden was mentally competent and the Ukraine war was going to end on 20 January. Musk’s fatal error isn’t in the falsehoods, but his cultural style. He needed allies within the administration, not just a rabid anon cheering squad.

Compare Musk with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who convinced Trump (against much opposition) to sign on to a tariff policy that has no constituency outside of MAGA dead-enders and far-Left protectionists. Despite being loathed by most of the administration, Lutnick is not a public liability in the way Musk is. Lutnick gives soundbites like “[The EU] hate our beef because our beef is beautiful and theirs is weak,” which copy Trump’s style while also sticking to the programme. Meanwhile, Musk cluelessly asks Senator Ron Wyden, “Why does ur pp look like u just came?” And Lutnick’s tariffs will ultimately have far more impact than anything DOGE and Musk did, not because Lutnick is smarter than Musk or because Lutnick faced less opposition, but because Lutnick knows how to act and how to speak in Trump’s world, and Musk either doesn’t or can’t.

Suggested reading

DOGE has devoured Musk

By Malcom Kyeyune

The response to Musk within the administration is always a combination of awe and bemusement. As one Trump adviser remarked, “They think he’s a genius, but he’s a one-man wrecking ball.” They’re half-right. Insomnia and bullying willpower do not a genius make, but they certainly can create the impression of one. Musk’s peculiar charisma and bulldozer-like approach bear some resemblance to Trump’s own blithely uninformed arrogance and entitlement, but the key difference lies precisely in their constituencies: personality cult MAGAists for Trump, personality cult techno-accelerationists for Musk. Any link between these two groups was purely hypothetical prior to Musk buying Twitter, and the MAGAists were destined to win out for three reasons. First, there are more of them. Second, they yell about immediate and popular issues instead of missions to Mars and freight tunnels. Third, and most significantly, they worship Trump instead of Musk, and Trump is ultimately in charge.

Musk will remain among the richest people in the world and likely serve for the Left in the coming years as a Soros-like bogeyman to replace the Koch Brothers, but as the “good billionaires” of the Democrats have shown, money cannot buy elections as easily as conventional wisdom had it. More money does not necessarily equate to better than. But Musk’s particular billionaire form is different from that of Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker. Pritzker is the old paternalistic oligarch we all know who sits back and tells the youth to get to work; Musk is, at best, a tweaked-out babysitter who occasionally shares his drugs with you. Over the last decades, the tech lords of our world have changed how all aspects of our lives are conducted (and with AI, continue to do so), yet there remains a cultural gap between the tech world and traditional civic culture that has not caught up. Indirect influence can only go so far. Peter Thiel, possibly the savviest of the lot, wisely stayed behind the scenes to boost Trump only to find that Trump and even Vance would ignore his own policy agenda at their whim.

The real question is whether that cultural gap between tech and politics will remain as large as it is now. For all their money, few people from the tech world have crossed visibly into politics, and figures like Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have tended to exert influence from behind the scenes rather than attempt elected office. In a recent interview, a t-shirted Mark Zuckerberg explained why: “I’m like the most awkward person. People have been calling me a robot online for 20 years. It’s really done wonders for my confidence.”

These will never be the words of a political leader, no matter how rich. Nor, for that matter, will “Why does ur pp look like u just came?” Whatever ambitions Mark Zuckerberg has, there seems to be no room for an “autistic style in American politics”, but with the old elite dying, we may just be waiting for the right tech oligarch. If some future tech lord should somehow also possess the genuine charisma of an Obama or a Trump, the frustrated dreams of Musk and Thiel could rapidly be fulfilled.

The world of federal employment in America is almost a separate society. It has its own culture, its own acronyms, rules and concepts that appear foreign and opaque to those outside it. At a time of massive demographic shifts, of illegal immigration and the importation of guest workers — which have conspired to radically alter the workplace for both American blue- and white-collar workers — the federal workforce appears almost as an anachronism. Outside this walled garden, to be a worker or an employee in the year 2025 is to be an economic unit, a cog in a machine, one that can be replaced or fired at will. When a company in the private sector lays off its workforce and replaces it with foreigners, that is simply shrewd business management: it is replacing one human widget with a cheaper one in Bangalore. But even as these crass economic forces ravaged much of America, the federal workforce has managed to (mostly) stand apart.

Partly, the good fortune of federal workers comes down to the sheer inertia of the system and all the rules that protect them. But another factor is a matter of a widely held and genuine belief: a worker in the private sector may only be measured in terms of economic value, but in the public service things are different. To work in public service is to be a civil servant: it is to maintain and fulfill the grand republican experiment America started some 250 years ago.

Replacing an American coder with one from Bangalore is one thing; replacing an American civil servant with a foreigner or a computer is quite another. Once you reduce a society to numbers and cents, you no longer have a society. Among federal workers, this is the common refrain: you might not get paid nearly as much as somebody in the private sector, but you will be a part of something else, something you can’t really put a dollar value on. Until, that is, DOGE entered the picture.

When DOGE fires people, it deploys at least two distinct methods. The first is by its nature both wide and sweeping, with very little distinction made between useful workers and the “dead weight”. Essentially, it is the mass firing of those on probationary status, meaning that the usual job protections do not apply to them. In theory, these workers seem like a pretty natural place to start if one wants to “cut the fat”, but in practice it’s both awkward and destructive. It’s not just new workers who are on probation, but others too for various reasons — those who have been recently promoted, for example.

More from this author

Trump’s Gorbachev moment

By Malcom Kyeyune

It is these untargeted mass firings — done simply because of a quirk of the legal system that regulates federal employment — that have led to the many cases where DOGE has had to apologize and walk back their decisions. Air traffic controllers weren’t fired by DOGE because they were all “woke”, or because they were all “unproductive” or surplus to requirements. They were fired, rather, because someone on the other side of the country hit a few buttons on a keyboard. No human judgment is applied: the useless woke DEI hire is arguably much more likely to be spared from DOGE than the Trump-voting hard working conservative, simply because the latter might have recently been promoted.

There is, however, another kind of DOGE activity, one that does have the personal touch. This I witnessed first-hand during my stay in Washington, over at the GSA, when the DOGE boys moved into the top floor of the building and did the cull in person. The entrance was covered up in police tape, and employees had to pass through a security checkpoint manned by a dozen armed guards, emptying out their coffee cups and putting their coats in trays for the x-ray machine, all ostensibly to prove they weren’t carrying bombs or other weapons. This was billed as a measure to protect DOGE as they went about their work, clearing out a fairly obscure agency staffed by accountants and legal clerks.

To grasp what makes DOGE’s “on-site” activities so peculiar, it’s useful to understand the basic laws and norms regulating mass layoffs inside the federal government. These layoffs fall under what is called a “RIF”: short for “Reduction In Force”. Under normal circumstances, agencies that are hit by an order to reduce their headcount by a certain number — say 30% — are supposed to list all their employees in a spreadsheet, where each employee is “scored” according to veteran status, length of employment and performance reviews. Once personnel has been listed, the agency heads then work up from the bottom until they reach the so-called “cut line”. If that’s our hypothetical 30%, that means that the worst-performing third of all employees must go. There are some quirks and exceptions — in some cases employees might be able to accept a reduction in salary rank in exchange for staying on — and departments will always try to make sure that institutional experience is still retained, avoiding situations where everyone with a certain function gets fired all at once.

In theory, RIF can accommodate even extremely large government cuts: it is designed to preserve talent and make it easy for the show to go on. But what DOGE has done at the GSA, the OPM (Office of Personnel Management) and other specific agencies where Elon Musk has taken a personal interest is quite different. Instead of caring too much about the total force reduction, DOGE has been firing all workers within particular areas of different departments. This can be done pretty easily by arbitrarily redefining people doing a certain job as being part of a discrete “competitive area”, and then setting the cut line at 100%.

This assault has almost nothing to do with the story that was sold about DOGE: getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse, and fighting the woke deep state. Indeed, the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management both stand a decent shot of being the least woke agencies in Washington. They are both fairly obscure and concerned with boring, practical work; they also enjoy markedly low social status within the federal hierarchy, unlike the arrogant high-rollers in places like USAID.

More from this author

MAGA's divisions can't be healed

By Malcom Kyeyune

So why pick the GSA rather than somewhere more “woke”, somewhere more traditionally associated with the so-called deep state? Well, because this is where one goes if one wants to asset-strip the federal government. Shortly after DOGE moved into the GSA, and started firing pretty much everyone, the GSA posted an extraordinary list of buildings they had supposedly identified as “non-critical”. This list (which was later revised, and then taken down entirely) actually included close to half of all properties owned by the federal government, including buildings like the FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice building. The GSA added that it was now open to “creative solutions” to go along with these sales, including the idea of leasing back these properties once they had been sold.

Of course, when DOGE itself wants to talk about its big accomplishments, this clumsy attempt at Yeltsin-style looting of public property is not even mentioned. Instead, its social media posts are filled with claims that it’s rationalizing procurement.

The other departments that Musk has taken a personal interest in follow a similar pattern. Rather than homing in on targets that look “woke”, Musk and DOGE have been concerned with the most boring and least prestigious areas of the federal government, those that have to do with things like Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request processing and federal contracting. Musk’s interest in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and his targeted firings of employees there coincided with a public attempt to try to get the Administration to assign a $2.7 billion contract — previously awarded to the telecom giant Verizon — to his own Starlink company. Similar controversies were reported involving federal contracts for Tesla-made cars, most bizarrely an attempt to get the State Department to spend some $400 million on bulletproof cybertrucks as consular vehicles. Given that the kinds of countries where bullet-proof consular cars are in demand tend to be located in the developing world, the idea of splurging on armored electric vehicles is quite odd: Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are not known for having many charging stations.

In most cases where DOGE has arrived in person to try to cajole or strong-arm people into looking the other way, the end result has ultimately been failure. The GSA had to dump its initial attempt to sell off good federal property at fire-sale prices; the FAA couldn’t just give a preexisting contract to Starlink; and the cybertruck deal was abandoned when journalists started getting hold of the story. And therein lies the problem: while it might be relatively easy to cut federal benefits for the elderly or the disabled, messing with federal contracts is a whole different ball game. The armed guards at the GSA building weren’t there to protect the DOGE employees, so much as to prevent fired people from returning to the building in order to transmit any sort of institutional knowledge to those that were still left. It looks like, in these instances, DOGE has waged a coordinated and surgical campaign against the accountants and white-collar janitors employed at the various agencies who control who gets the money and the contracts.

Elon Musk, though the world’s richest man, presides over a commercial empire that is sick and ailing. In this sense, he is just like so many others in the tech oligarchy that has become so central to Trump’s second term in office. Had the fire sale of federal property at GSA gone through, these are the people who would have bought all those federal buildings for cents on the dollar, lending them back to the government for a reliable permanent source of revenue. Tesla, Musk’s flagship company, is now in very serious trouble, and it’s an open question whether it even has a future if subjected to the pressures of the market. Tesla sales inside the EU are collapsing: a result of the rapid geopolitical polarization that the Trump administration has leaned into with its various attacks on traditional US allies. At the same time, competitors in China are eager to gobble up its market share. Musk’s other companies — Starlink, the Boring Company, SpaceX — either have relatively low revenues or are structurally dependent on money from the US government.

With DOGE, Musk had a tool that could potentially not just save America from the “woke mind virus” and the “deep state”, but also leverage his position in government to help his own companies. Alas, things haven’t worked out quite how he might have hoped.

What became obvious as I talked to federal employees was the genuine reason they felt bewildered, angry or depressed — and it wasn’t really to do with people being fired. Bill Clinton fired people, Obama fired people; many of those I talked to even admitted to having been cautiously optimistic or even welcoming of DOGE. The federal government had problems, there was waste and fraud; anyone who lifted a finger to address these issues was welcome in their book. What people expected, even hoped for, was a painful but necessary spring cleaning of the federal government, firing the unnecessary and getting rid of the dead wood. But what people actually got was something akin to China’s cultural revolution.

The advent of DOGE kicked off a period of chaos and uncertainty, the willful destruction of old rules and norms. Emails would land in certain workplaces saying that everyone was fired; only to then say that nobody was fired; only for another email to arrive two hours later saying that everyone was fired after all. These emails usually wouldn’t even be signed; bosses would be just as ignorant as their workers. Orders would come, be countermanded, then counter-countermanded.

I interviewed one person who had, in his own words, “gotten out” — that is he had accepted the offer to quit in exchange for severance pay made in Musk’s “fork in the road email” sent to every federal employee. Working at the US Patent and Trademark Office, this person should have been the last person on the list to feel the wrath of DOGE: not only do USPTO workers in his position not get paid unless they do work (USPTO is funded entirely through user fees), the Office itself is often a net contributor to the federal budget. In other words, these people make money for the US government, so any “efficiency” initiative or “reducing the deficit” attempt shouldn’t have anything to do with them. Yet the mood among this person’s coworkers was the same as everyone else: fear and uncertainty, and a constant barrage of ominous, often anonymous messages, presumably from Washington, about how they were next on the chopping block and would possibly get fired in the near future as scroungers and traitors to the republic.

What this particular ex-employee found most galling, however, had very little to do with DOGE itself. Rather, it was the feeling that, on a dime, people who he thought were his friends and ideological compatriots on the American Right could just instantly turn on them as yet another “enemy”. Stories like this are now fairly common, with many posted daily to the r/fednews subreddit, a place that’s become an impromptu gathering place for bewildered civil servants. At first, the subreddit’s rhetoric involved people hoping that “fraud, waste and abuse” would be targeted. But as time went on, the radical project of slashing the government has escaped all such boundaries.

But if DOGE was once the focal point of these radical cuts to the federal government, today that is arguably no longer the case. More and more departments are now falling victim to “traditional” mass layoffs, handled by their department heads and supervisors rather than by the young men from DOGE. The US Department of Agriculture; the Department of Health and Human Services; the Department of Veterans Affairs — even the Internal Revenue Service is now threatened with mass layoffs. At the same time, the Republican Party is trying to fire the people who bring in tax revenue to the government, while also promoting massive tax cuts. All this is happening amid rising spending on the military. While destroying its own fiscal position at home, in other words, the Trump administration has also set out to destroy the entire postwar system abroad.

Like so many other revolutions before it, the one that is now happening in America is beginning to devour its own favorite children. Elon Musk may have thought he was saving both his country and his own business empire by throwing himself into these purges and mass firings. But these days, he too is on the way out. The revolution inside the federal bureaucracy that he helped to spark has been followed up with a total revolution in trade. Trump’s tariff war is likely to have huge consequences for the US economy. For Musk in particular, it might just spell doom for Tesla. Unsurprisingly, the billionaire has been out in public picking fights with members of the administration — especially Peter Navarro, the most hardline pro-tariff member of Trump’s team — and advocating for a tariff-free zone between the US and the EU. Trump, in turn, has gone from doing Tesla advertisements on the White House lawn to saying that he only keeps Musk around because he likes him; he certainly doesn’t need him. Navarro, for his part, has fired back at Musk, accusing him of being not a manufacturer of cars but a mere assembler. Tesla, because it still needs to import some components from outside America, is in danger of failing the purity test.

When I started interviewing federal workers back in March, my first impression was that Musk was a cynical thief, trying to loot the American state in order to shore up his own companies. But far from being some sort of mastermind, he increasingly looks like a naive, even tragic, victim of a social upheaval far bigger than anyone could have foreseen just six months ago. While Musk was useful for selling the idea of making the government more efficient, it’s increasingly clear that the firings inside the government have now abandoned that pretense. The amount of money DOGE hopes to save is now down to some $150 billion a year: barely enough to counter the announced boost to the Pentagon’s budget. At any rate, the fact that even the world’s richest man is not capable of shielding himself from the fallout of breakdown of the political order should be a warning to the rest of America.

Squint and you can see this working out. Sort of. As with earlier Right-wing coalitions — like the one between religious conservatives and foreign-policy hawks that defined the Bush era — both camps can claim some wins. Populists got an immigration crackdown plus tariffs; the tech bros neutered entire regulatory agencies. But when it comes to combating monopoly, Big Tech’s default business plan, the contradiction threatens to make the populists look like utter saps.

Standing at the sharp edge of these tensions is a diminutive Dublin-born lawyer named Gail Slater, who leads the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice as assistant attorney general. Given her reputation as a fierce enemy of monopolies, Trump’s choice of Slater for the job drew cheers from the market-skeptical corners of the so-called New Right. Yet Slater views her mission as protecting markets — not attacking them.

“We see what we’re doing as an essential part of the American free enterprise system”, she tells me in an interview at her office deep inside the DOJ’s labyrinthine Washington headquarters last week. “We think that we should have more confidence in our system and not think that in order to compete with China, we have to become more like China” — that is, an economy in which most sectors are dominated by a handful of giants coddled and controlled by the state.

The tech lobby insists that US national security and dominance in fields like AI require government to get out of industry’s way. Slater doesn’t see it this way, and the disagreement is more than academic. This week, an antitrust suit against Google launched in the first Trump administration and carried through by Team Biden entered its remedies phase. In 2024, Google was found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior in the online search market, and now the court has to decide how to hold it accountable and prevent future wrongdoing.

More from this author

JD Vance: My message to Europe

By Sohrab Ahmari

Slater’s litigation team argued that Google operates a “vicious cycle”, spending enormous sums to become the default engine worldwide, then improving its search results with better data gleaned thereby, and then using the windfall revenues to deepen its advantage as the default engine. The Trump administration insists that Google must sever its default-engine partnerships with the likes of Apple, divest from its own Chrome browser, and license its data to competitors.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission — a parallel independent agency with rule-making authority as well as the power to bring its own cases — is trying a suit against Meta launched in 2020, during the first Trump term. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg attempted to forestall the trial by offering a $1 billion settlement, far short of the $30 billion demanded by FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson. Trump himself was reportedly open to a cash deal, but the FTC ultimately spurned Zuckerberg’s payout after a meeting involving Ferguson and key staff.

Was Slater worried that a cash offer, however high, wouldn’t bring about structural fixes to Meta’s overweening market power? Yes, “and I’m told I was in that meeting”, she adds knowingly — that is to say, she inveighed against settling. A progressive antitrust veteran tells me he believes that Slater’s arguments played an important role in the outcome.

In response, Big Tech and its allies in the Chamber of Commerce Right have characterized Slater as a dangerous radical who’d sacrifice American innovation on the altar of fair play. But she insists her philosophy has a solidly conservative precedent in the Reagan administration’s decision to break up AT&T.

“This is an argument that’s been made before”, she tells me. “AT&T made a similar argument when this division, the Antitrust Division, in the mid-Eighties” resolved to “break them up.” Back then, “AT&T said, ‘You can’t do this. We are a national champion. We are critical to this country’s success. We will lose the Cold War if you break up AT&T’, in so many words.” Even so, “the division moved forward, and the Reagan administration, which is not thought of as the toughest antitrust enforcer in the history of the country” divided the firm into smaller units. Bell Labs, its research and development arm, was spun off.

America didn’t lose the Cold War, and contrary to the corporate fearmongering, the following decades saw the communications revolution that allows you to read this very article. “From that [breakup] came a lot of competition and innovation”, notes Slater. “The wireless industry came from that breakup. Bell Labs was unleashed, because the innovations at Bell Labs had been suppressed for the reason that AT&T didn’t want to disrupt its own monopoly.”

It’s true that bigness is sometimes rational. Most modern industries entail network effects, increasing returns to scale, or both. It’s why you don’t see mom-and-pop tire manufacturers, as UnHerd contributor Michael Lind often quips. But as the AT&T case shows, bigness can also generate sclerosis. Firms that dominate “toll roads”, whether landline connections or search engines, collect hefty rents without having to innovate or improve their products. They begin to put much of their energy into maintaining the chokehold.

As a result, market power translates into political power and vice versa in an accursed loop all too characteristic of neoliberal capitalism. It’s why Slater views antitrust as a critical component of the post-neoliberal turn in American political economy and the bipartisan rethink on globalization.

“I came from a family of lawyers”, she recalls. “And for people of my generation in Ireland, a lot of our legal education was influenced by being part of the European Union”, and that meant “competition law and economic law. Law and economics was a big part of, you know, European Union law, because it was all about integrating those economies”.

A pinched account of antitrust law, in which the only thing that mattered was consumer prices, was critical to the neoliberal revolution. That model “did very, very well for a lot of companies and the stock market” — and for a narrow slice of the population with the right degrees and the equity portfolios to show for it. The rest lost well-paying, often-unionized jobs and were told to take solace in cheap flatscreens.

There has to be an alternative model that “has more of a care for … American citizens, right?” asks Slater. “We see ourselves as part of that project.”

From an antitrust point of view, this means taking a more holistic view of the consumer-welfare standard that is at the heart of American monopoly law, crucially determining whether mergers should go forward. Slater laments how neoliberals of the Left and the Right, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, reduced consumer welfare to consumer prices alone, neglecting other factors, such as whether a merger would substantially lessen competition or cost jobs (consumers are also workers, after all).

More from this author

The monopolists’ manifesto

By Peter Franklin

Today’s antitrust renaissance — represented on the Right by Slater and Ferguson and on the Left by Biden-era czars like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter — is all about reopening windows onto the economy that had been shuttered by the neoliberals. Yet Slater resists the “Khan-servative” label embraced by Right-of-center fans of the progressive antimonopoly crusader.

“There’s some overlap, like in the Venn diagram, there is some overlap” with Khan’s approach, Slater says. But there are also significant points of departure. For one thing, Khan led the FTC, aggressively using that agency’s rulemaking authority, which had long been left dormant. Slater, by contrast, is at the Antitrust Division, strictly an enforcement agency.

Philosophically, too, Slater sees herself as perhaps more deal-friendly compared to Khan. “If you’re doing a merger that’s benign”, says Slater, “we’ll just get out of the way. There was a perception . . . that a lot of deals were being held up for a long time, unnecessarily by both agencies [the FTC and the Antitrust Division]. And that was leading to inefficiencies” and hindering “deal flow”. Slater hopes that her approach — “If your deal is not a problem, we’re gonna say, ‘OK, you’re free to merge’ ” — will lead to less polarizing drama in the business community.

At the same time, she has so far retained the merger-review guidelines the Trumpians inherited from Team Biden. Though standard practice, the move has triggered grumbling in the pro-business press. It also garnered praise from a group of high-ranking progressives and Biden alumni I spoke with earlier this month. Slater is also scrutinizing the use of anticompetitive practices to suppress wages — winning a criminal conviction against a home health agency to fix nurses’ wages in Las Vegas. And she beams about meeting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien as one of her earliest steps in the role.

Speaking to Slater and her colleagues — one of them vents rage about how corporate attorneys used to walk around the DOJ building as if they owned it — it’s hard to believe they’re part of the same administration as Elon Musk, who positively loathed Biden’s trust-busters. Slater says she supports DOGE’s mission, even as she has resisted its efforts to shutter her division’s local field offices.

After our interview, I email her to ask if she would hesitate to act against one of Musk’s firms if she concluded that it was engaging in monopolistic behavior. In response, she sent me a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post announcing her nomination to the job, underlining the President’s expectation that she will enforce the law “vigorously and FAIRLY.”

These flights do not go into orbit. Instead, they briefly pop above the atmosphere to give the crew a short period of weightlessness and a fantastic view. The flights therefore might seem, in the grand scheme of space exploration, trivial. Yet they are a sign of revolutionary change. Humanity has worked out how to make rockets reusable, enabling massively better cost-effectiveness than could the single-use rockets of yore. This cost-effectiveness has resulted in an explosion of commercial space activity, of which the Katy Perry flight happens to be the most publicly visible part. As well as celebrity flights, reusable rockets have enabled more serious private missions, like the Fram2 mission that flew a crew into polar orbit last month. This is a feat that has never been accomplished by a state-run human spaceflight program.

All this means that our species is picking up where it left off a half-century ago. When the Apollo Moon landings ended in 1972, humanity’s space exploration was cut short, despite our having the technology to continue it. NASA shelved its plans for longer-duration Moon missions that would have used variations of the hardware that had already developed. The agency had hoped to build a permanent base that would then support expeditions to Mars, but the thwarting of these plans meant that the Moon, until recently, has been left largely untouched.

In the past few years, though, the Moon’s quietness has been once again disturbed. A flurry of unmanned probes have been sent to our nearest celestial neighbor, and both the United States and China plan to emulate and improve on the Apollo missions. Whichever of them is most successful will likely get to dominate the onward expansion of humanity into the solar system: Mars and beyond. As Jeff Bezos would probably agree, this would be a far more consequential development than this week’s New Shepard flight.

China’s lunar program, Westerners ought to note, is going very well. In 2007 and 2008, China put spacecraft in lunar orbit. Since then, it has launched four surface probes, all of them landing successfully. These missions have enabled some impressive achievements, including an operation on the dark side of the Moon as well as the return of two lunar samples to Earth. In order to both increase the size of samples returned, and to demonstrate their space technology, the Chinese selected a more complex mission plan than the one used by the Soviets for the same purpose in the Seventies. It requires a craft to enter lunar orbit, send a separate lander to the lunar surface, rendezvous with the lander’s sample-bearing ascent stage, then return to Earth for re-entry and safe recovery. In the entire history of spaceflight, there have been only nine rendezvous performed in orbit around the Moon. Seven of these were Apollo lunar modules meeting their mothership after completing their missions; the other two were those modern Chinese missions, Chang’e 5 and 6.

The next step from here is an attempt to repeat the maneuvers, but with astronauts involved. The CCP aims to get Chinese astronauts on the Moon before the end of the decade. Given the numerous delays to the Artemis program, the Chinese have a good chance of being first, and might start by putting boots on the valuable lunar South Pole. Here there is water ice that can be used as a resource for further expansion. The Chinese astronauts will travel on the Long March 10 rocket. This craft, whose first test flight will be next year, has a conservative design that reuses tooling and engines from the already-flying Long March 5. Prototypes of the capsule it will carry have already been tested in space, and many of the technologies needed for the mission have already been mastered through the unmanned Chang’e program. If successful, China will build a lunar research station with partners such as Russia.

It is unfortunate, then, that NASA’s proposed Moon rocket appears not to be up to the task. The Space Launch System (SLS), as it is known, costs $4 billion per launch. Because it lacks the power to carry a lander alongside the capsule, it can take humans only to a Moon orbit rather than onto the lunar surface. And before doing any of that, SLS has to get off the ground. It has been in development since 2011 and has only achieved a single launch in that time, one that resulted in worrying damage to the heat shield of the capsule. Nevertheless, NASA intends to use the rocket to send a crew on a single loop around the Moon by April of next year. A landing is penciled in for 2027, but experts doubt this will be feasible.

Suggested reading

Elon Musk just wants to go to space

By Gerard DeGroot

The only clear advantage the US has at this point is in its commercial sector. It was private companies that built and launched the two Moon landers that touched down earlier this year, with the government acting merely as a customer. All in all, the frivolity of the Katy Perry mission should not be taken as being representative of the industry as a whole. In fact, it is a sign of confidence and health. Note that Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’ fiancée, was on board. What was once highly risky is becoming more routine. Blue Origin once again demonstrated its safe handling of liquid hydrogen — which is the rocket’s fuel — and its ability to bring a booster back to Earth under its own power. Both of these are technologies transferable to the company’s forthcoming lunar lander.

Launches will continue to multiply in number, principally because of the cost-effectiveness of reusable rockets. Already, the results have been spectacular. Over the past two years, the rate of mass being sent into orbit has accelerated by a compounding rate of 57% per year. This would represent an almost 10-fold increase in the next five years, and a 90-fold increase in the next 10 years. It is a trend comparable with the rapid rate at which transistors have been added to microchips over the past few decades — a key driver of the computer revolution.

SpaceX is upping the ante with Starship. Elon Musk envisages launching thousands of these enormous rockets every year. Even so, the trend cannot continue forever. Ultimately, there will be a practical and an environmental limit to how much we can launch from the surface of the Earth. The critical metrics will remain the amount of mass we can put into space, and the cost of putting that mass into space. In order to keep the revolution going we will need to start deriving our payloads from materials elsewhere in the solar system.

This is why the Moon is so important. There is a rather dry space industry acronym — ISRU — that refers to in-situ resource utilization. Do not be fooled by the dryness; ISRU will be transformative for our species. The shadowed craters at the lunar South Pole contain water ice and other volatile elements we can use to create rocket fuel akin to the hydrogen fuel used by the Katy Perry mission. Similarly, the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere can be used to produce fuel — but Mars, being on a solar orbit of its own, is accessible only once every 26 months. The Moon, although less hospitable, is a more convenient base for our species’ expansion. The stuff of science fiction can be made real, and it starts with collecting and processing rocks.

One of the first people to grasp this was the Princeton physics professor Gerard O’Neill. He and his students studied space colonization from a scientific perspective, and came to the conclusion that planets were not the place to be. No other planet in the solar system has ideal conditions for humans, and the scope for expansion is limited to perhaps twice the surface area of Earth. They instead designed vast cities in space, cities that would take the form of rotating cylinders up to eight kilometers in diameter and 32 kilometers in length.

Being that large, the cities would have a mass of billions of tons. Even then, it was clear to O’Neill and his students that it would be impractical to send construction materials from Earth. With this consideration in mind, they devised a way of flinging lunar rock into space. A long series of magnetic coils, they forecast, could be used to fling lunar regolith — the dust and rocks on the Moon’s surface — into the region between Earth and the Moon. Here it would be caught by a similar coil mechanism, and subsequently broken down and used to build the city. The idea enraptured many young space enthusiasts, including a Princeton undergraduate called Jeffrey Bezos.

The example of the privately-operated moon landers, and the work of pioneers like O’Neill, show us the way. Space agencies should set objectives which private companies are free to pursue how they wish. These objectives should have, at their heart, the goal of rapidly developing the resources of the Moon and other celestial bodies. NASA, and similar agencies, should fund this work generously.

Suggested reading

The flaws in Musk’s Mars mission

By Robert Zubrin

And it is imperative that they do so. Whether the critics like it or not, humanity will populate the Solar System. What’s more, the sheer scale of the Solar System’s available energy and resources will mean this extraterrestrial population will be thousands of times larger than that of Earth. The population will descend only from those who go into the frontier, establish sustainable bases, and grow their population.

Those who stay behind will not have any input on the kind of civilization that our descendants go on to build. Earth itself will be as irrelevant in the larger scheme of things as the tiny spot in Africa where Homo Sapiens first evolved is to modern geopolitics and culture. Are the people who populate the solar system going to believe in democracy, rule of law and freedom of speech? Or will they live under an autocratic system?

In 1576, Queen Elizabeth’s court astronomer John Dee made the case for colonization of the New World. It was not an obvious economic priority for Tudor England. But it is partly because of Dee that the United States today speaks English and operates legal and political systems derived from our own. The decisions made by the Elizabethans now shape our world in the 21st century, and likewise the decisions we make now regarding space will have ripples through the coming millennia. If we lose the race to the CCP, we might have reason to reflect on one Katy Perry song in particular: “The One that Got Away.”

I could see why Edward was interested in the play. The AI community, to which he belongs, is driven by these kinds of future visions: utopian, quasi-divine abundance and control over nature — regardless of whether that outcome is wanted, or whether we will destroy ourselves trying to bring it about. Already, their capital, San Francisco, is marked by this worldview. The technology that’s generated in “SF” is itself the product of a rationalist eschatology that sees the human as a “bootstrapping” mechanism (in the words of Elon Musk) for higher forms of life and intelligence.

Beneath this apparent rationalism lurks a profoundly religious sensibility that seeks to reconfigure the human past the point of recognizability, all in service of generating a sort of machine-angel synthesis. SF, then, isn’t just a place. It’s a theological state of mind.

In the city’s techno-rationalist circles, the answer to the question of whether we should want to live in The Culture is: “Yes, if possible”. ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, for instance, is one of many technologists with a serious interest in life extension (the pursuit of extending human lifespan), biohacking (modifying one’s biology through various interventions), and merging human cognition with artificial cognition (often called brain-computer interfaces).

More From This Author

The Millennial virtue economy is dead

By Matt Gasda

Peter Thiel invests in parabiosis, the experimental practice of transfusing young blood into older bodies in pursuit of eternal youth. Elon Musk is building brain implants. Ray Kurzweil takes hundreds of supplements a day. Jack Dorsey fasts for days at a time. Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison quietly fund longevity startups. If, as the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, “we perceive the world with our body”, then the high priests of the SF cult are building not only new bodies, but new perceptions. Out of these new visions will presumably emerge new ethics.

If the members of a technologically optimized overclass see, hear, and move differently — how will they see the rest of us, the non-optimized?

Accelerating integration with technology changes how you experience the world. While in SF, I took Waymos (autonomous vehicles operated by a Google subsidiary) everywhere, rather than traditional taxis or Ubers. There was a particular feeling as the cars passed through areas of squalor. In Frisco (the old working-class name for the city), I felt like I was living in a completely gated experience, a protected techno-bubble. The experience was seamless and efficient, and it changed my behavior. Because there was no driver, I found myself feeling weirdly liberated: like I was passing through material reality like a god or alien observing humans. Somehow, I believed the car could and would protect me.

I liked my Waymo rides to the food co-op, because they spared me from having to mentally and emotionally engage with the bad neighborhood surrounding the health-food store. I could close my eyes as I left the “hacker house” where I was staying — and then open them in an enormous, shiny store offering food designed to optimize my body. You start to like rationalist civilization. AI does the legwork of maintaining homeostasis. There’s no real existential pressure; you start to forget that you live in a fragile, mortal body; you start to feel like you should have total control over everything that happens to you.

The future is here, it’s arriving a little more each day, and it’s concentrated in the Bay Area. If we want a preview of what happens when techno-futurism becomes a ruling-class ideology, if we want to understand what future culture will feel like, we just have to look at rationalist-utopian, accelerationist, godless, and increasingly childless San Francisco.

Bay Area techno-rationalist culture resembles — and, in many ways, is — the rebirth of the Shakers. The 19th-century sect similarly believed that the end times were imminent, and consequently emphasized self-discipline, radical environmental redesign, and withdrawal from the world. Techno-rationalists are Shakers without God. Or rather, theirs is a god who has yet to be built, but the project is coming along nicely.

San Francisco is almost like someone took parts of Davos and placed them inside Naples: a clean, efficient, rational minimalist elite lifeworld nested inside social decay, nested inside breathtaking natural beauty. Life is absolutely pleasant in San Francisco, if you live on the upper edge of the K-shaped economy. Of course, all American cities have this feature to some degree: the affluent live differently than everyone else, everywhere.

But in San Francisco, there is a deeper feeling that this is simply a necessary part of the social Darwinism entailed in transhumanism: that the poor and the “bad” will die off while the techno-affluent live longer, healthier lives, protected by AI.

An astonishing amount of human energy has been spent building this increasingly automated techno-empire, and the end result seems to be something like redemption for a very few, elimination and redundancy for the many. Everywhere I took a Waymo, I saw billboards advertising AI labor — replace your real workers. Soon it will be: replace almost everyone. This is the vision: a priestly, self-medicating, self-optimizing, transhumanist class that lives a life of leisure on an automated grid, protected from the decay around them and from the downsides of the civilization they have built.

San Francisco is also the first city, I think, where a non-negligible portion of the population —  and certainly the most rich and powerful portion — is planning, if not to live literally forever, to live beyond our biological lifespan, confident that technology can build a heaven on Earth for some.

Suggested article

The rise of Yuppiefuturism

By Louis Elton

The Golden State has always been an incubator for cults and prophecies. The rocket geeks who built Cal Tech and turned the state into a defense and aerospace Mecca also indulged strange and occult visions, as the Marxist geographer and California writer Mike Davis reminded us. The latest cult has supplanted ballistics aimed at the Soviets with moonshots to eternal life. For example, Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur known for his extreme anti-aging regimen, tweeted recently, “I am building a religion”, adding: “First, here’s what’s going to happen: + Don’t Die becomes history’s fastest-growing ideology. + It saves the human race. + And ushers in an existence more spectacular than we can imagine. It is inevitable. The only question is: will you be an early or late adopter”?

And what if you dissent? What if you don’t want to optimize? What if you still prefer the old religions to the new? What if you have no interest in building a killer app or tracking your biomarkers every day? For now, you won’t be punished. You won’t be called a heretic. But as this cult expands — as I believe it will, because of what it promises — and as caste differences sharpen, tensions will inevitably rise. Refusal will begin to look like a threat. Noncompliance will read as dysfunction.

It isn’t hard, for this reason, to imagine a future where AI-driven cars have humanoid robots in the front seat—not as drivers, but as bodyguards: to protect the transhumanist overclass from the dissenters and neo-Luddites who have been left behind (or were never invited to join the revolution). And it’s also hard to imagine that those bodyguards won’t, at some point, be necessary.