Perhaps unsurprisingly, I am compelled this week to consider the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president, and what it signals for the future. Perhaps even less surprisingly, the moment of the inauguration I feel most compelled to consider is the speech made by Elon Musk, his most valued client, and the meaning of a gesture he made in the course of that speech.
The gesture I want to think about, however, is not the energetic one he performed – right arm extended stiffly at an angle of about 45 degrees from his shoulder, hand stretching forward into the glorious future – in such a way as would get him arrested in Germany (at least until the AfD, his preferred party, have their way). I’m going to leave that discussion here, partly because we all know very well what he was doing, and partly because the whole thing was clearly calibrated to provoke scandalised chatter in the press, trollishly signalling his allegiances to the 4chan contingent while simultaneously ensuring sufficient plausible deniability. The only other thing I’ll say on the matter is that even Dr Strangelove struggled manfully to restrain his leather-gloved right hand from performing just this kind of salute.
But the gesture I want to consider here is in fact a linguistic one, and one that, despite being nowhere near as controversial as the salute, is even more revealing and troubling. It came right at the beginning of the brief address to the ecstatic inauguration crowd. “This was no ordinary victory,” he said. “This was a fork in the road of human civilisation.” And then, a few moments later, in a slightly different form: “It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured.”
These rhetorical formulations – human civilisation; the future of civilisation – will be familiar to anyone who has followed Musk’s remarkable career as our present era’s chief imagineer of the future. They are his primary linguistic hallmarks, obsessively signalling and underlining his seriousness as not just a wildly successful entrepreneur, but as a man possessed of a profound and transformative vision of the future. Musk is no mere billionaire philanthropist, scattering concert halls and museums and research institutions like so many shiny pennies at the feet of a grateful public; he is promising, by means of building a human settlement on Mars, no less an endowment than the future of the species itself. That’s real money, and real vision. You get the idea.
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In a way, it’s degrading to have to take this man seriously even for the purpose of ridiculing him, so obvious is his egomaniacal charlatanry. But there is a very important truth to be gleaned from Musk’s invocation of the future, and of the concept of humanity: no one else is talking about the world in this way.
[ Elon Musk makes being a billionaire plutocrat look profoundly uncoolOpens in new window ]
Hardly anyone on the left these days – or for that matter the centre, whatever that’s supposed to mean – is speaking of the future as anything but a realm of fear and darkness. There are excellent reasons for this, of course, not least of which is that the future really does look like a realm of fear and darkness. But the uncomfortable fact remains that Musk and people like him – your Jeff Bezoses, your Sam Altmans, along with various other capital-rich (but imaginatively impoverished) dreamers of space exploration and AI superintelligence – are the ones who are invoking a positive vision of the future.
In his speech, Musk said one thing that seemed to be especially important, and worth dwelling on. It’s something I’ve heard him say before, in various ways, but always in relation to his central vision of building human settlements on Mars, and making humanity, as he puts it, a “multi-planetary species”. (For Musk, this is not just an exploratory impulse but an existential imperative: we need, in his view, at least one “backup planet”, as an insurance policy against some kind of apocalyptic scenario unfolding on Earth.) “There’s always problems in life,” he said in his speech. “There’s this problem, solve that problem. But there need to be things that inspire you. There need to be things that make you glad to wake up in the morning and say, I’m looking forward to the future.”
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It’s ironic, of course, to hear this from a man who so vividly personifies the final and merciless victory of capital over democracy, in what remains for now the most powerful country on the planet. But he’s right. You do need to believe in some kind of future. And it’s billionaires like Musk who appear to own the future. “This is what victory feels like,” as he put it. “Thank you, guys. Thank you.”
When I think of Elon Musk, and his dream of colonising Mars, I think of another successful entrepreneur who gained extraordinary political power – in the very part of the world where Musk himself grew up, and by which he was shaped. Cecil Rhodes – the founder of the British South Africa Company, who went on to become the prime minister of the Cape Colony – believed that the more of the planet fell under the control of the empire, the greater and more glorious the future would be. The English race, he believed, had greatness flowing in its pure and Anglo-Saxon blood, and the future of the human race depended on the dominance of Englishmen.
Rhodes’s friend, the English journalist WT Stead, wrote about a conversation he had with Rhodes once, in which the latter expressed his frustration that there was so little of the globe left for the Anglo-Saxon race to conquer. “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach,” he said. “I would annex the planets if I could.”
Rhodes, too, had a vision for the future of humanity. It did not, famously, go very well for humanity. But it worked out very nicely for Rhodes, and for people like him.
