A couple days after I announce that I don't want to help Jeff Bezos make any more money, it might come as a surprise that I am linking to this article about a guy who seems to LIKE Bezos (and also Musk!). But I do like Stuart Brand. I have a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, and it had a lot of good ham radio content in it:
https://soldersmoke.blogspot.com/search?q=Whole+Earth+Catalog
Anyway, here is the article. I found it very interesting.
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ReplyDeleteBrand has always been an interesting figure. His comments on Musk and Bezos don't surprise me considering his life-long optimism. Giving the "Devil his due" is only fair, but the danger is that it can give way to cults of personality. Americans in particular love to place certain figures on pedestals and to ascribe to them a lot more than their "due." Musk *owns* the controlling shares of "his" companies (which he bought as going concerns), but how much does mere ownership give him the moral and intellectual credit for the accomplishments of SpaceX and Tesla?
ReplyDeleteI think very little, but we'll never really know because media coverage follows the script of his own carefully-crafted public image. With very-minor exceptions, the *real* sources of SpaceX and Tesla accomplishment are the thousands of unnamed engineers, managers, and workers of those companies. Media pays virtually no attention to them. They're just "staff," just servants of the Great One.
When you peel off the legal structures and media coverage layered over Tesla, SpaceX, and even "Bezos's" Amazon, you find *collective* institutions and *cooperative* (voluntary or not) effort. The fact is that the "great man" at the top is in a position to do as much damage as good to the institution over which he has legal control. Think Jack Welch and General Electric, for instance. Think Musk himself with Twitter and DOGE.
In the best of all possible worlds, we'd look at companies like SpaceX and say, "Wow! How'd those guys do that? A self-landing reusable rocket booster!" or "Those Starlink satellites are a real boon to the isolated and underdeveloped parts of the world!" We might or might not think, "Hey, isn't SpaceX owned by that grandiose, licentious, child-rejecting, publically-pot-smoking, self-indulgent and self-regarding white-supremacist South African? What's his name again? Trusk? Husk? Dusk? Oh, I think it's Musk."
Expressed mathematically, one could write:
SpaceX ≠ Musk --and-- Amazon ≠ Bezos --and-- USA ≠ 45/47.
As quadratic equations, one could write:
SpaceX = Engineers^2 + (Workers x Managers) + Musk
--and--
USA = Americans^2 + (250 x Annual_Immigration) − (45/47).
Elon musk is a fascist if one associates, supports or does business with a fascist you have to question the persons moral compass and distance yourself and call them out for what they are.
ReplyDeleteIn the end, all these people, regardless of the "side" they are playing, have a goal to push us into a technocracy. They don't think like us. Take for instance people like Klauss Shuabb of the world economic forum, and Yuaval Harari. Not to mention Bill Gates. Just a trivial study on where these people stand and you see they think of us as just cattle.
ReplyDeleteHappily the 1968 edition is in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/1stWEC-complete
ReplyDelete