Elon Musk's video game ideology

Elon Musk's attack on Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes points to a horrifying world. We have the obvious, a billionaire intervening in the Judiciary of another country. But this, although disgusting, is not new. For as long as capitalism has existed, people like Elon Musk have had enormous power over governments, parliaments and judiciaries. This time, Musk has accused a judge of being a “dictator” and has called for his “removal” for “censoring” profiles on Twitter. The action has mobilized the international extreme right around the cause of former president Jair Bolsonaro, increasingly closer to prison. The magistrate, for his part, has responded publicly to the provocation. So much so that the press refers to the episode as “the confrontation between Musk and Moraes”, as if it were a duel between the two. But democracy shouldn't be about individuals, which is exactly what social media demands. By personally attacking a Brazilian magistrate, Musk reduces his attack on democracy to a dispute between avatars. It is terrifying that our present and our future are in the hands of a video game plot and that those who represent us are not prepared to face them.

Elon Musk's strategy of buying Twitter to have his own reality — where (almost) everyone plays — is what best shows his vision of the world. If we look at what we could call classic billionaires, the generation before Silicon Valley, they were cynical. They knew who they were and why they did what they did. The novelty of a figure like Elon Musk is that he represents this particular era. Musk believes that he is a visionary, that he is smarter than everyone, that he does more than anyone and, above all, that he is a hero. In the fight of good against evil, he undoubtedly believes that he is good. Many claim that he is only motivated by profit. It's worse: he is motivated by believing himself to be a human god in the midst of an endangered species that only he and his superior vision can save.

You can only understand Elon Musk's career, his bravado and his wanderings with the logic of video games. There are shocking aspects in the biography written by Walter Isaacson. People are disposable players and, except for their family, any human being is nothing more than an insect that, if it buzzes out of tune, is crushed. But the most emblematic episode is that, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he refused to close his Tesla factory in Fremont, California, and reached an agreement with the local government to keep it open. This in a country that prides itself on being the strongest democracy in the world (or was proud, until the episode of the assault on the Capitol).

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It is possible that Elon Musk thinks that Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro are trash, but trash that temporarily serves their purposes: the “freedom” to do whatever they want, without caring about the limits imposed by governments or institutions. The difference with his predecessors is that there is no give and take, only overcoming and elimination. The video game is different from classic power games.

Elon Musk is not far right, Elon Musk is only from Elon Musk's party. Whether he is worse than a Rothschild or a Rockefeller, it is difficult to know. But the destructive power of the man who plans to save humanity by taking it—a very small part—to Mars in his rockets is much greater. The only way to stand up to him is to do the opposite of what the Brazilian Supreme Court justice did. Personifying democracy, setting yourself up as a vigilante to confront the evil billionaire, is playing into Musk's hands. And in this game he is unbeatable. In a world of avatars, the only way to resist is by doing something avatars don't understand: community.

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