politics

The Worst Person You Know Is Making Good Points About Elon Musk

Elon Musk is speed running the process of small-d democratic collapse. It's all part of the accelerationist plan.

When there is no limit to the number of mega yachts one can own, or the fledgling democracies one can dip into a vat of toxic waste, or the adoration one can receive from internet jesters dying for the king’s approval, only one thing – I would guess – holds any interest.

Eternal life, the permanent defeat of death, is the last thing our oligarchs can’t buy. They can buy elections and entire nations and, soon – maybe – they can own whole planets on which we can toil forever (all this talk about interplanetary consciousness is bullshit; they just want Walmarts on Mars).

But death, that determined little fucker, looms over it all.

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It’s why freak-of-the-millenium Bryan Johnson drains his blood every day and posts online about sometimes taking his children’s blood and the duration of his erections as he tries to de-age. Perhaps no man in history has ever thought about his penis so much. He sincerely believes ours will be the first generation to conquer death. We at Bad Faith Times are looking into whether Bryan has ever read a history book about others who have made similar proclamations, only to be devoured by worms underground.

Johnson strikes me as the Most Bored Man In The World, and he’s not alone.

Elon Musk, among those oligarchs who want to establish a libertarian utopia on Mars with enslaved people and everything, has also grown tremendously bored with his hideous levels of unprecedented wealth. Instead of running one of his government-subsidized businesses making shit products, he’s decided to run the world, starting with the United States, which was easier to overthrow than anyone could have guessed. All it took was a measly $250 million donation to an openly fascist presidential candidate and a team of teenager hackers and the most powerful nation in human history fell to its knees within days and is now functionally conquered by the world’s richest man, controlling the public discourse with every online post and acting as dictator: Ignoring court orders, rendering the legislative branch powerless – the kind of shit that might make fellow dictators seethe with jealousy. Musk is by far the most powerful person alive today.

Musk at his core is an accelerationist. Accelerationism is a complex pseudo-ideology, but at its core lies the belief that if a system is doomed to fail, efforts must be made to make that system fail faster. Charles Manson was an early accelerationist, trying to hurry along America's Great Race War with a series of high-profile murders that would be blamed on black folks. Gun massacres – including the one at a mosque in New Zealand six years ago – have been committed by accelerationists hoping to rush the end of multiculturalist globalism. Tech freaks who abide by this core principle of accelerationism have long seen democracy as a system doomed to fail, not because that is necessarily true, but because tech oligarchs need democracy to fail if they are to achieve the anti-human dream. They are now speed running the process of small-d democratic collapse. You see it in the headlines every day.

The reason the past few weeks – since Trump’s inauguration featuring the technofascist trio of Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos – have felt so destabilizing for so many folks just trying to live their lives the way they do when a Democrat occupies the White House is because Musk willed it. He has intentionally and successfully accelerated the collapse of representative democracy and constitutional self governance because those annoying little institutions were getting in the way of his ultimate goal, one he shares with many deeply-twisted Silicon Valley fascists: To wipe out cumbersome human institutions, accelerate technological advancement, and, the thinking goes, live forever (for more on the pitfalls and general misery of never-ending life, read Drew Magary's "The Postmortal").

There’s only one public-facing person who has pointed this out in a major publication, and I take no pleasure whatsoever in saying it’s Steve Bannon, the former Trump confidant and advisor whose inner circle includes some of the most villainous white supremacists and anti-democracy crusaders anywhere on the planet.

Bannon recently described the end goal for Musk and his technofascist counterparts in a lengthy, disturbing, unintentionally funny New York Times interview.

They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity. And that’s why they’re all rushing — whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life. You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.

Musk, Bannon said, “is one of the top accelerationists about driving this thing faster. Accelerating at an increasing rate” by funding and promoting technologies like Neuralink microchips he wants to install in the brains of every person on the planet. Self reflection for Musk might be as simple as asking whether his life goals align with that of the most odious comic book villain.

I would very much like to emphasize that in no way am I endorsing Bannon’s heinous, backward worldview, which, after listening to him prattle on for 75 minutes in his NYT interview, can best be described as unmoored from reality and strangely naive. Bannon’s central political thesis is that the US can rewind time to the golden age of western industrialization, when the social safety net was strong and middle class families could get by on one income and everyone had a home and a car and 2.5 children, give or take. This, according to Bannon, can be accomplished through a right-wing populist uprising in which – again, in Bannon’s fantasy – Republican lawmakers on every level of government adopt and pursue populist economic policies we haven’t seen since the New Deal. Bannon’s dream is based on a workers movement with far-right politics, a fantasy many fascists have held in bad faith until they seize power and seemingly forget all the glorious revolutionary promises they made on the way up. I find Bannon’s entire political and cultural project grotesque on the most basic level and can only hope he’s doing an Andy Kaufmann-level bad faith bit, though I doubt he is. He's far too earnest for that.

Bannon identifying Musk’s final project is important though, both for the public to understand the new (unelected, unaccountable) head of the United States, how Musk and his deranged, fanatical compatriots view us, and where they hope to take us. It’s more than pretending to find fraud in the federal government while in fact stripping Congress of its crucial role in the project of self governance. It’s more than supporting explicitly fascist political parties in foreign nations. It’s about accelerating toward an end, and a new beginning.

In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.

If you can temporarily ignore a man who has made a career from engaging in gutter racism and vicious discrimination defending humankind as the children of god, Bannon is correct: You and I have no value and no place in the digital utopia that, for now, only exists in Elon Musk's head.

Through his make-believe government agency (DOGE) – which has operated as an unarmed guerrilla movement over these past three surreal weeks – Musk is not simply gutting the federal workforce and letting things fall where they may. The question arises as President Musk fires untold thousands of federal workers doing important work and controlling critical systems, including the Treasury: Will the Trump administration leave these jobs unfilled? The answer is no. These jobs will be filled, and are being filled, by artificial intelligence. AI is being injected into every part of the United States government like a virus. The hope – the goal – is for AI to take over those aforementioned critical duties of federal government bureacrats. Musk and his accelerationist brethren have taken it upon themselves, without permission from voters or those who represent them in Washington, to replace the government with machines. They aren't doing this in secret; it's all very much public knowledge.

Musk: "By the time these lawsuits are settled, we'll have Digital God."

This is a twofold bad-faith attack on democratic self governance. The first part is pitching a government-by-machine in terms of government efficiency, a way to save taxpayer money, trim the national debt, and (in theory) lower taxes for everyone. This puts any and all opposition to Musk’s AI-centric coup on their back foot, for who is against efficiency? Any lawmaker or judge or activist who demands that federal workers be made whole again, that we undo the horrors wrought by Musk and his hackers, will be widely seen as opposed to efficiency, to less spending. They will be dismissed as advocates for government waste – an attack that will work quite well after fifty years of right-wing media priming the U.S. electorate against government spending. That this is not true won’t matter. Just the other day, a local talk radio station, WTOP, reported on "Elon Musk's government cost-saving program" when reporting on the DOGE coup. Musk’s government efficiency pitch is in complete bad faith, for it’s not about efficiency at all; it’s about taking apart democratically-controlled government piece by piece until there is nothing left.

The second part of Musk’s bad-faith bludgeoning of the American government is that his new machine-controlled federal government will responsibly manage the nation and respond to the desires of the electorate. This is backward: An AI-centered government will remove all authority from Congress and respond directly not to the politics of people, but of the executive. Republicans who are foolishly going along with Musk’s coup – a decision they will regret one day, not too long from now – have been terribly clear about this point. The federal bureaucracy, a nonpolitical entity, largely did not respond to Trump’s demands during his first term, just as it does not respond to the whims of any other president.

Instead of doing the hard work of replacing every last bureaucrat with a Trump cultist, Musk has replaced them with robots that will be programmed to do his bidding, to carry out his fascist agenda. We will be told these machines are objective, with no politics of their own. They're machines, for god's sake. But they are only as objective as the language models on which they're trained.

Far-right Silicon Valley oligarchs’ obsession with making AI racist and sexist and homophobic suddenly makes sense. If these machines are going to operate the American government, they’ll need to reflect the politics of their masters (masters for now, I say as I adjust my large tinfoil hat). When Musk and his allies say this new streamlined United States government will work better and more efficiently, they are not saying what they mean – the hallmark of all bad-faith claims. This techno-nightmare system will only work for the unitary executive, colloquially known as a king. You can have your little elections and send your representatives to D.C. they way you've always done, they might say. It's cute, it's quaint. People feel better about their places in the world when they vote. But under AI-controlled governance, none of that will matter. Your congressional representatives might as well be cardboard cutouts dressed in suits and fancy watches and pearls.

Meanwhile, any legal pushback against this flagrantly illegal attack on the republic is quickly dismissed as an unconscionable violation of the constitution, which, of course, is no longer in effect.

Harry Bolz trolling the public with middle-of-the-night social media posts as he creates the most acute crisis in American history.

Pro-Human vs. Anti-Human: The Future Of Politics

To fully grasp the nihilism of techno-accelerationists, consider Nick Land, widely seen as the godfather of the movement, once said the following: "Nothing human makes it out of the near-future."

The point of this movement is to usher in the end of what you and I might know as humanity. For them humanity is but a stumbling block to a more glorious and insane-sounding future, one in which we usher in our progeny, the beings that will supplant us as the dominant species on earth. Take a few minutes to read Land and his fellow accelerationism truthers but do not talk about this shit in mixed company, for you will sound, at best, deranged. People might call the cops.

All of the transitioning, hustled along by obscenely wealthy men who would rather control (destroy) the world than retire and play golf or get into birdwatching, is pitched by accelerationists – they like to be called "effective accelerationists" – as perfectly natural. They present their cause in this way because it paints their opposition as unnatural. They say this move toward AI as the next dominant earthly being is nothing more than part of a continuum that cannot be stopped unless we want life itself to stop. This is a false choice, though it makes for a compelling defense of accelerationist goals. As Samuel Hammond, an economist with background in "bridging the cultures" of Silicon Valley and Washington, recently wrote in explaining the accelerationist mindset:

Even capitalism can be thought of as a “meta-organism” for aligning individuals “towards the maintenance and growth of civilization” as a whole. The advent of superhuman AI is thus a thermodynamic inevitability — an attractor that any sufficiently advanced civilization is pulled towards by a series of positive feedback loops. We can either choose to accept this as the universe’s true purpose and accelerate the creation of our successor species, or we can attempt to freeze technology in amber and guarantee civilization’s collapse. In short, expand or die.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, chief antagonist of Elon Musk, and hardcore acccelerationist, is among those who believe the the merging of humans and machines began years ago with the proliferation of smartphones that have shaped modern life.

Our phones control us and tell us what to do when; social media feeds determine how we feel; search engines decide what we think. The algorithms that make all this happen are no longer understood by any one person. … This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not prevent it. … We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.

A strongly held belief that the merge – or the "singularity" – between people and machines is already underway functions as cover for the worst among the accelerationists to do the horrible work of finishing the self-fulfilling prophecy of the end of humans as the planet's dominant species. These are stories tech billionaires have told each other for years, and now that they've found the perfect conduit – a sundowning fascist president who has no interest in governing – they have gotten to work in making the prophecy come true. You can do that when you have unlimited resources and uninhibited access to power.

Musk’s disdain for humanity is clear to anyone who wants to see it. Watch the world’s richest man gleefully post about illegally destroying USAID and depriving the planet’s poorest people from accessing food and medicine. Musk and his team of happy fascist hackers didn’t do this under the cover of night. They did not deny it, or say they took no pleasure in stopping USAID funding in order for the U.S. government to save a few bucks this fiscal year. Musk and his people were happy about stuffing life-saving aid dollars “into the wood chipper." The suffering it will cause plays no factor in his dictatorial decision making. Half a million metric tons of food for the world's neediest people going bad because of DOGE hackers fucking around with government computer code does not register for someone as hateful and hardened and poisoned as Musk.

Those trying desperately to move humanity beyond the painstaking but ultimately fair-minded work of democracy, Bannon said, “don’t give a flying fuck about the human being. And I don’t care if you’re Black, White, Hispanic, Chinese — they don’t care. And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world. And you see this in artificial intelligence. We have no control over this. … We’re in deep shit right now. We’re in a crisis.”

Twenty-first century politics are increasingly difficult to nail down. You might think you have a handle on who is advocating for what and why, but that's all fleeting, almost ephemeral. Politics are shifting beneath us more quickly than we can grasp; this will only speed up as Musk and his fellow accelerationists seize power and undo systems that can't be put back together. We have to come to terms with political alliances looking awfully fucking weird in the near term if we are to survive the Silicon Valley insurgency that has – as of February 2025 – ended constitutional rule in the United States.

It was only four years ago that Trump was dislodged from power – the first president to lose re-election since 1992 – thanks in large part to mainline liberals and the left teaming up and declaring a civic emergency. Though the two sides had warred for years following the exceedingly bitter and fractious 2016 Democratic Party primary, by 2020 they (mostly) knew what had to be done. Trump had to lose. The hope, of course, was that Joe Biden and his party would act urgently and with force to create barriers for ascendant fascism rather than a return to pre-Trump norms. They were weak and chose poorly, and now we face oblivion. That's not the point though. Hated rivals came together and dug out the infection, temporarily, in the body politick.

The future of politics – and I don't mean in ten or twenty years, but soon – will be more about pro-human forces than pro-democracy forces. While maintaining some semblance of democratic self rule will remain the goal, we are going to have to make deeply uncomfortable alliances with those who have hideous right-wing politics but see the accelerationist threat for what it is. I don't know if that means you and I will one day soon have to link arms with Steven Bannon. Please know that I hope this won't be necessary, though it could be if we are to fight against an AI-obsessed scourge with no limits to their resources and control over social media and, consequently, our minds. I believe there is a future in which people of myriad political and cultural backgrounds say in one voice that we are not ready to be dismissed as relics of a tech-dominated future, as victims of the singularity. We won't allow you to speed run our demise. We won't sit at home and watch excellent TV as you fiddle with human history and tell us your vision of the future is inevitable.

Politics in the near and medium term must look something like this: The broadest-possible coalition of people forcefully telling transhumanists that they do not have our permission to accelerate beyond humanity, and even if they did ask for our acquiescence, they answer will always be no.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.