The Cybertruck And Our Muskian Infection
Cybertruck owners are desperately seeking the inescapable hellscape Elon Musk has promised
Elon Musk designed the official vehicle of dystopia and has since worked tirelessly to bring about the societal collapse that justifies the existence of such a viscerally ugly vehicle.
Around 50,000 ghastly, misshapen Cybertrucks prowl the streets of what their wild-eyed owners want to believe is an apocalyptic – or perhaps a post-apocalyptic – United States in which the invading, unbathed hordes have accomplished their inexplicably-coordinated mission of transforming the world’s greatest superpower into a poor, lawless land where one must have a bulletproof car if one is to safely go the grocery store and purchase whatever is left from its barren shelves.
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That the land is lawless because Musk’s administration has made it so, that the shelves are barren only since he overthrew the government, does not seem to matter at all. If the central goal of bad faith politics is crafting reality – often turning it on its head – then the Tesla Cybertruck is the first bad faith vehicle. If a (failing) car company makes a bulletproof, bomb-proof truck, it must be for a reason. The existence of the Cybertruck proves what Musk and his sycophants want to believe about American society: That it was a Mad Max wasteland before they took charge.
Five years ago the Muskian right – the techno-fascists – saw folks of color protesting the state’s refusal to treat them equally under the law and decided that the world was in fact over. The worst had come to pass in 2020: The underclass had demanded some rights. You don’t design a war vehicle for use on civilian roads unless you believe in your marrow that it is The End, that we are engaged in a civilizational war. Out of Musk’s inner-ugliness, his bowel-shaking insecurity, the fear and depression that practically vibrate around his weird frame, has emerged the product of a man who pines for the ecstasy of terminal destruction.
Those who oppose Musk's double-barrel assault on international democracy can take some comfort in knowing the weirdos driving his dumbass truck are being roundly mocked and ridiculed by people who have no black-pilled themselves on X, the everything app. The Defector's Drew Magary, a man so smart he had me on his podcast recently, wrote last summer about being on the receiving end of endless ridicule when he rented a Cybertruck.
The Cybertruck doesn’t look like anything else out there, which is why your average new-money bro wants to plunk down $60,000 (at the minimum) for one. They’re paying to be noticed, and they don’t care what flavor of attention they might receive. I got attention. So much attention — and in a wide variety of flavors! Children stopped and pointed. Strangers gave me the finger. Tourists at the Dana Bower Rest Area just across the Golden Gate Bridge swarmed the truck and asked to take pictures with it. Another motorist pulled up alongside me and said, “I just had to stop to laugh at you.” This car is a celebrity, which makes you a celebrity merely by driving it. That’s for better and for worse, with little in between the two poles.
More than 46,000 of those 50,000 Cybertrucks invading American communities have been recalled because they keep falling apart because, you see, they are pieces of shit birthed from the mind of a man who knows a little about a lot – enough to trick people into buying his stupid shit and either tacitly or explicitly supporting his coup of the United States government, which now – according to court documents – involves DOGE hackers hiring guys with guns to break into federal agency offices and threaten anyone who dares stand up for the country in this tech-heavy takeover.
Denny Carter
I don’t think it matters a whole lot that Cybertrucks are being recalled or that they’re not selling well. The Cybertruck, in all its repulsiveness, is part of a miserable 21st century trend: Internet brain poisoning bleeding into the real world. DOGE itself is a prime example. Three years after Musk was on Saturday Night Live yelping in all his nihilist lunacy about the DOGE cryptocurrency, a thing called DOGE has slithered out of the hellishness of a fascist social media platform and is eating away at the load-bearing pillars of American government and society. Musk himself is an online meme come to life, and follows the path laid out by Trump, a man who played a successful businessman on television and emerged from the TV world into the real world as a dominant political force and the most consequential person in American history. Trump first became real on TV. Musk became real on Twitter.
The shadows on the cave wall keep coming to life in an age where we are amused to death. So it is with the Tesla Cybertruck, a dystopian science fiction creation that has become all too real.
As Musk’s Cybertruck abomination reinforces the fascist belief that society has fallen to pieces and must be reassembled by the Great Men, protected in their horde-proof trucks, the quasi-religious techno-fascist belief that humanity will one day succumb to artificial intelligence is a self-fulfilling fantasy.
The singularity – the idea that humans and technology will one day soon be merged into one being – doesn’t have to happen if we don’t want it to happen. We can simply remain human. Consider this my humble request that we do just that. But Musk and his followers are making every effort hand control of the world to machines, carefully programmed to protect favored groups and erase the unworthy ones. We finally have clarity around Musk’s obsession with making a racist AI bot: He needed the machines to reflect his worldview because he was always going to push for an AI-run society. Musk has carefully grafted his fucked-up politics and hatreds onto the technology that is replacing the U.S. government. In this way, he is invading every part of society. He slithers and slithers. Nothing is safe from his reach.
Musk is an infection running rampant through the world’s bloodstream, making us sicker by degrees, so slowly we can hardly tell until, one day, we look up and see his fascist algorithm controlling the world’s discourse and his dystopian trucks polluting our neighborhoods and his machines seizing control of basic government functions. My hope – our hope – is that other countries inoculate themselves against the Musk virus, and that leaders of a post-Musk United States can do what it takes to flush him from every crevice of our nation.
Denny Carter
We’re seeing these efforts take hold in a few developed nations, including in the UK, where officials are scrambling to draw up restrictions on foreign donors flooding the country’s elections with their limitless cash supply. The UK government’s urgency is real not just because Musk has conquered the United States, but because he had pledged to funnel upwards of $100 million to the fascist British party known as Reform UK. They’re hustling to close key loopholes to stop the Musk infection from sickening their democracy after Musk tried – and mostly failed – to spread his black-pilled disease into German politics last month.
The measure of Europe's opposition to Musk will eventually be its willingness to ban the X platform and crush Tesla within its borders.
Musk is not the first man to have the means to end the world. But after sealing himself in an online warehouse of depression and alienation and loneliness and all the fascist thought that stems from those maladies, he’s making every effort to will dystopia into existence at no one's request. Nothing reflects this determination more accurately than the Cybertruck, which rolls on, past your home, past your car on the highway, past people going about their day, in and around perfectly fine cities and towns, desperately seeking the inescapable hellscape Musk has promised.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
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