Mastodawn

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

If you happened to drop by Twitter any given moment and get into a conversation with a fan of Elon Musk, as carefully as possible, you might learn that Elon Musk is a man who does not care about #money.

You'd probably find that's true about any big-name #CEO or top business executive or prominent "founder" or dedicated "wealth builder". All of them, from top to bottom, will tell you over and over that they're not greedy. They don't suffer from avarice, oh no! Always these people claim that they aren't in business for the money. They have values. They have missions. They have noble intentions and utopian goals, and squeezing the world for all the money it can give them is only the humble means to the grander end.

It's like "Wayne Industries", right? It's accepted as a matter of course that #Batman should go on doing what he's doing—he's assumed to be a hero, a moral benchmark for everyone else—so he's got to make money, and thus Wayne Industries exists almost completely offscreen, the means by which Batman is able to afford bespoke crimefighting equipment and a batcave / garage / hangar / laboratory / archive / etc.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

Now I'm sure there's many better-read Batman fans out there who could tell me about some storyline or miniseries in which Wayne Industries and its corporate life are actually central to the plot and not merely ornamentation to the Batman's heroic aspirations.

I will risk overgeneralization, and state that in Batman media meant for the widest possible consumption—e.g. hit TV series and films and video games—there's not usually meant to be much attention given to exactly how Bruce Wayne and his business empire make their money. We're generally supposed to assume that he's that outrageously unrealistic creation of U.S. popular entertainment, the Good Capitalist™. We are invited to accept the premise that Bruce Wayne is the ideal boss who pays well and treats his workers with compassion and mostly stays out of their way, because his real job is Batmanning.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

That's a comic book businessman. That's also exactly how Sam Altman and Elon Musk and Jensen Huang and all the other corporate executives are routinely written about. For centuries now, U.S. media and journalism have been idolizing the Man of Business.

Ayn Rand didn't invent John Galt—she was not an inventive writer, not in the slightest—but instead grabbed for an archetype that already existed, that was already being created and puffed out en masse. Citizen Kane exists as a commentary on this self-aggrandizing culture of business titans who strive to present themselves as the great innovators and architects of society.

You'd think journalists would notice, at some point, that it's all smoke and mirrors.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

Oh I need to be fair here: of course there are honest journalists who notice these things and attempt to write about them, but they are not allowed to make too much noise—not compared to the boosters and the "optimists", for it seems to be considered unseemly to suggest that maybe a #business or #investment opportunity SHOULD fail. In my opinion it should never be the job of journalists to protect business speculators, who after all are making big promises and demanding an unhealthy amount of social latitude (not to mention gazillions of dollars) in exchange for a chance to make those promises come true.

It is still gambling, when it comes down to it. The entrepreneur is promising, without certainty, a return on investment. Anyone willing to throw in, is gambling. Is it actually a good idea to entrust the creation and direction of businesses (and entire industries) to gamblers?

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

And now you can gamble on gambling, with a "prediction market". Swell.

Where am I going with this? Oh, nowhere very impressive. I am merely pointing out something that seems like it ought to be far more obvious than it actually is: all the people who get into the headlines of stories about #business and #technology, all the executives and big-name investors and founders, are gamblers—and gambling is not actually a productive activity. Others must produce, in order for gambling to happen. Quantities of money increase rapidly thanks to gambling, but nothing is being produced thereby; there's no "creation of wealth", if by #wealth you mean something substantial and solid.

A large number of stockholders are willing to gamble that a share in Elon Musk's shitshow is still gonna be worth a LOT of money in the future, and for that reason U.S. society and journalism says that Elon Musk is among the world's richest persons, and his fans say even more hyperbolic things about him. The general tenor of the U.S. press about Musk is that he—Musk personally, Musk himself—has created something astounding and unprecedented, and the proof is that a lot of people gamble a lot of money on him still.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

Wealth has been created somehow—Elon Musk is sure of that, and Maye Musk and the other Musk kids are sure of it, and Walter Isaacson and David Sacks and Shaun Maguire are sure of it, and all the Republican politicians and all the Heritage Foundation pundits...well, you get the idea.

A tremendous number of human beings, including some of the most powerful people on Earth, are absolutely certain of one thing, if they're certain of nothing else: Elon Musk is valuable. He has given the world so much value, according to those whose opinions actually matter in the world of the contemporary United States of America.

And if the gamble fails?

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

Elon Musk and his inner circle, by this time, have probably felt like they've somehow stumbled their way through so many crises and near-misses—one is irresistibly reminded of Musk's wrecking a costly MacLaren racer while showing it off to Peter Thiel, an accident that Musk walked away from—that there's no chance any of their gambles will fail. They must, at any rate, exclude the possibility of failure from their minds. If they lose faith in themselves and the inevitability of their success, they're immediately in trouble, for they rely upon inevitability for support.

Really and truly. They have become besotted by inevitability.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 15h ago

For that's their lesson for everyone else, for the scum class, for the people whose faces they hope to tread on, forever: "there's no way you can win, and there's no way you can lose." They are obsessed with simulations and projections and models, as a result; they're hagridden by the future, but they have persuaded themselves that they have developed an infallible toolkit for predicting and shaping the future.

They love #statistics and base most of their really important logical fallacies around misunderstanding of statistics. They want to think that the lesson of statistics is that even "random" things are predictable and easily accounted for.

They don't really get chance.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 14h ago

And that all comes back to their need to believe in the inevitability of victory, which boils down to a belief in a metaphysical protector. At some point, they're certain of it, they ARE going to be rewarded with victory and happiness ever after. Somehow that will happen for them; for whatever reason, they must believe they've been promised just such a thing.

I don't actually know what it's like to be the sort of evangelical-type #Christian who is convinced, utterly dead-certain, that they've been saved. I don't feel that way so...what's it like? 😬 I can only conjecture that it must involve a definite spiritual experience, a moment of gnosis in which the person is directly informed, "You will live happily ever after."

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 14h ago

At some point, I internalized a need to believe in a different sort of inevitability, and that was the inevitability of Ragnarok and the twilight of the gods. How I came to place faith in Norse cosmology is a complex story, but the point is: I've learned how to live with the idea that everything's just gonna...go to shit, slowly or quickly, and there may never be a happily ever after.

Maybe Baldr never does see the Sun again, even though the Prose Edda leaves us with that possibility. There's to be a next era after Ragnarok, a more just era overseen by Baldr and the children of the old gods. But this is where scholars mutter and shake their heads and ask if Snorri Sturluson wasn't cooking this up because he was #Christian. People tend to forget that about the Prose Edda: it was written by a Christian.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 14h ago

Anyway, I've never been able to turn myself into the sort of person who sees inevitable bliss in their future (by hook or crook) and that's a pity, a real actual weakness in today's society in which everyone must always be selling themselves and vying for capital, even if it's mere meager "social capital". For the person who believes they've been shown the Promised Land has something they can sell. I mean really sell.

Isn't that the entire official history of the United States of America? Insofar as the "American Dream" can be given any definition at all, it's the idea that once you're in America, you have Made It™ and now there's a seat in the Happy Place for you somewhere...if you just hustle and scratch and claw and if necessary [—] in order to find it.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 14h ago

Anyone who can make themselves believe that, or some version of that, can always look people in the eye and say things like "I have faith" and "I'm on a mission" and "I'm going places" and other such things which speak to the certitude of their place among the winners of the Cosmos.

It would be pleasant, I have sometimes thought, to have that kind of emotional security in my life. But having this sort of drive seems to do bad things to people, at least certain people. One only sees the worst examples, generally speaking, those who are apt to boast and preen about being faithful persons on a mission from...whoever.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 14h ago

But it's never about just the money. Oh, no! The sense of personal mission, the feeling of having been chosen for success...it must seem as if these noble purposes wash away the sin of the money-grubbing and wealth-hoarding:

"I'm not demanding ungodly sums of money for myself, oh no! Why I hardly even think about money. Money doesn't interest me, but I need it to pursue my philanthropic interests! etc."

It helps that the executives and founders and other such persons are undoubtedly rich enough to afford to delegate the bulk of their money matters to underlings, in some way or another. They can push money to the edges of their lifestyle and claim to be spending their time on the loftiest of aspirations.

Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen 14h ago

Strange how they're all still so very stingy. They quarrel over sums of money and fret about small expenditures and grumble about waste and inefficiency if they think something they don't like is costing them money. You'd think that being among the world's richest persons, they'd develop some sense of generosity...guess not.

But they don't care about money at all! Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the rest of them are just asking for fair wages in exchange for all the hard work they do. They're not greedy. Heavens! Imagine the idea of accusing Larry Ellison or Bill Gates of being too enthralled with mere money.

Ángela Stella Matutina 15h ago

Why would they notice? They're professional liars, propaganda operators, who sell themselves as watchdogs and saviors since forever too.

Ángela Stella Matutina 15h ago

Exquisite analogy.

Now where is Musk's Joker?

Dataline 15h ago

@mxchara Thinking about that time when I was C suite adjacent in my career and the mask was totally off in a room full of bigwigs all howling with laughter about "getting extremely fuckin' wealthy".