The billionaires who control your lives, and Elon’s vision for the future

WARNING: THIS BLOG IS POLITICAL

I often talk about the tech billionaires who control our lives. Why blog about this today? Well, a few disturbing developments. One is Elon Musk – you probably already know about his issues – thinking of launching a new American political party; but the other, and more intriguing, is an interview with Peter Thiel in The New York Times. You can watch it here, and it is also transcribed.

It starts with a lengthy discussion of the fact the world is no longer innovating, but stagnating, which surprised me. Interviewer Ross Douthat, an opinion columnist and host of the “Interesting Times” podcast, cited that Thiel wrote an essay for National Review called “The End of the Future”, arguing that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that we had actually entered a period of technological stagnation.

He makes some really interesting comments, such as this one:

It’s probably a Silicon Valley ideology. Maybe in a weird way it’s more of a liberal than a conservative thing, but people are really fixated on I.Q. in Silicon Valley, and that it’s all about smart people. And if you have more smart people, they’ll do great things … and then the economics anti-I.Q. argument is that people actually do worse. The smarter they are, the worse they do. It’s just that they don’t know how to apply it or our society doesn’t know what to do with them, and they don’t fit in. And so that suggests that the gating factor isn’t I.Q., but something that’s deeply wrong with our society.

He goes on to talk about transhumanism.

The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that.

The interview covers lots of other things, from Donald Trump to religion to AI to robots.

I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years.

They then get into Reid being the Antichrist.

The atheist philosophical framing is “One World or None.” That was a short film that was put out by the Federation of American Scientists in the late ’40s. It starts with the nuclear bomb blowing up the world, and obviously, you need a one-world government to stop it — one world or none. And the Christian framing, which in some ways is the same question, is: Antichrist or Armageddon? You have the one-world state of the Antichrist, or we’re sleepwalking toward Armageddon. “One world or none,” “Antichrist or Armageddon,” on one level, are the same question.

And politics:

People [in Europe] believe in the green thing more than Islamic Shariah law or more than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green, Shariah and the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest.

Here’s the issues this interview raises for me: eugenics. The fact that Thiel talks about transhumanism is because he, as does Elon Musk, believes in eugenics. Transhumanism was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley, a leading figure in the British eugenics movement, who saw the idea as a way of ensuring the human population is cleansed of those who do not fit. This means getting rid of the weak. Elon and Peter have been associated with eugenic thinking many times. It is worrying.

Eugenics is a set of largely discredited beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population.
Wikipedia

Ring any bells?

As someone who has just been in Berlin and Oświęcim (Polish for Auschwitz, the German term), it rings bells with me. In fact,, as I recently blogged, the vision of the future is billionaires live in luxury on Mars whilst the rest of humanity lives in drudgery on Earth in a recreation of the film Metropolis. That is Musk's vision of 2100.

The weirdest thing for me, as an oldie, is that I grew up with people being horrible to anyone who was different. Gay, disabled, mixed race, different colour … we had insulting words for all of them. Decades later, I thought we had got over it and had become a better world and more inclusive race. It seems we are going backwards when you see the world’s richest saying we need to go backwards.

Trump has deployed in his administration and in his relationships with billionaires a group of the old and new eugenicists. Some of these leading men believe in a philosophy known as longtermism. For humanity to survive and spread itself across the galaxy in its trillions in the eons to come, men like them must steer the way. For it is they who must make the tough decisions of allowing a significant number of present-day humans to die off to protect this distant future. 

That’s from Al Jazeera

The term “mental retardation” was used to diagnose those who were “feeble-minded”, failed to develop on the average timeline, and were deemed by some doctors as “incurable”. Around the same time, the belief that undesirable traits – specifically intellectual disabilities, and eventually race and sexual orientation – could be “bred out” of existence was growing in popularity in the US. This eugenics movement was endorsed by political powerhouses and substantial research on eugenics was bankrolled by the likes of the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation.

That’s from The Guardian

What is interesting in this space is the chasm between woke and eugenic. Woke includes everyone; eugenics hates the weak and wants to wipe them out of society. Specifically, longtermists (eugenisists) like billionaire Peter Thiel, “believe that Social Security is an ‘intergenerational Ponzi scheme”. Thiel’s is a nod towards Musk’s DOGE work against providing social welfare for elderly humans, a signal that Trump’s regime is developing ageist and ableist policies in the name of cutting wasteful spending, or eugenicist policies.

However, by way of note, not everyone thinks this way.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Bill Gates said of Elon Musk.

It is seriously concerning. So, why blog about this today? Well, if you look at billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in the wider world, go back to where I started. This small group of people have become the most influential in everything we do today. From LinkedIn to ChatGPT to everything else you know about Elon and co, they pretty much control our lives. More importantly, they want to get rid of the feeble-minded, weak, disabled and lesser than thou from society.

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Bill Gates