Elon Musk, the man who wants to be our demiurge
He's a god of the internet — a minor god but a powerful god nonetheless.
Elon Musk ducked out of the public eye ever since his Tesla business started tanking. But he’s not gone and you can see him pop up at random places…like he just did in Saudi Arabia, sitting behind the crown prince while Donald Trump talked on stage.
To me Elon Musk is a character out of Philip K. Dick’s universe — one of his self-obsessed, hyperactive boss types plotting to take over the universe. Specifically Elon is a lot like Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, the mysterious tycoon space explorer who comes back from a remote star system with a new hallucinogenic drug that’s supposed to make life more tolerable for Martian colonists but which turns out to be something much more sinister. It’s a drug that shunts you into a parallel psychic-spiritual world where Eldritch has control and is in fact he turns out to be some kind of malevolent alien god, a bored and listless god but who still wants to live and to control. In the PKD’s Gnostic Christian world, Eldritch becomes a kind of minor demiurge — malicious and powerful and yet still not entirely in control of himself or even that aware.
To PKD, Palmer Eldritch was the personification of evil manifesting in the world. And he was so freaked out by this character — scared so much by his own creation — that he couldn’t reread his own novel. “I’m afraid of that book; it deals with absolute evil, and I wrote it during a great crisis in my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel dealing with absolute evil as personified in the form of a ‘human.’ When the galleys came from Doubleday I couldn’t correct them because I couldn’t bear to read the text, and this is still true,” he wrote 1968.1
I keep thinking back to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich whenever I see Elon Musk in action. There are a lot of similarities — even on a physcial level. Palmer Eldritch has all sorts of robotic replacement parts: slitted cat-like metallic his eyes and a metallic arm. Elon has mods, too. He’s got fake hair, facelifts, steroids and growth hormones and weight loss drugs, and rumors about a penile implant that went wrong. The tabloids talk of Elon’s recent “glow up” — aka various body mods — that got him ready for the limelight of being Donald Trump’s righthand man. (See our recent episode on our era of body modifications.)
Elon Musk seems to be all over the place. He’s drugged up, obsessed with having babies, embroiled in constant custody fights, and at the same time he’s emerged as Trump’s right-hand man, deploying DOGE to gut jobs in line with longstanding neoliberal plans. Musk operates in a very chaotic way. But there is purpose underneath it all, just like with Eldritch Palmer.
See, all this stuff is just a sideshow to the main act that’s happening off stage: Elon Musk’s capture of America’s communication systems. He wants to be the guy living in the wires. Like Palmer Eldritch, he wants to mediate our reality. He wants to be the body — yes, that pale pumped-full-of-hormones body — through which all information flows. He wants to filter all content through himself. He wants to be our digital demiurge.
In my book Surveillance Valley I wrote about the dreams of post-WWII military planners in America and their desire to create technologies that could allow them to see the entire world in real time — to do to human societies what radar-based systems did for the sky: to track enemy objects, to predict where they are headed, and to intercept them before they cause damage. Out of these dreams of technocratic social control, the internet was born. And the dream is now mostly a reality. Google, Facebook, Apple, ISPs, data brokers, credit card companies, and the spy agencies that sit above them all — they have a god’s eye view of the world. They see where we go, who we talk to, what we’re interested in. They watch us and manage us from afar. We’re more or less transparent to them.
And now this world has a new player in town: Elon Musk. And he’s bringing some PKD weirdness to the party.
Yes, Musk has become a god of the internet — a minor god but a powerful god nonetheless. He is one of the elevated few who determine what goes into our heads, what we think about, and how we think about it, while making money off of us in the process. We’re working for him.
Let’s look at what he’s done.
He bought Twitter and created his own world — a world where he controls the content and the flow of information and the news cycles. His posts get the most views. He can banish people with the snap of his fingers. He can elevate the faithful or cast down those who dare to cross him. He can pop into any conversation. He can make anything go viral or turn down the heat and bury whatever he doesn’t like. He’s god on the platform.
AI bots (powered by Musk’s Grok AI service) have been released into the wild (under Musk’s direction?) to pop up in every relevant conversation in order to argue with people and push Musk’s line of thinking, taking up our precious time and energy. Yes, people are actually arguing with Elon Musk’s bots.2
So you can say Musk has already uploaded part of his consciousness into the web like some kind of demented oligarch Lawnmower Man.3
He runs Starlink, now the biggest satellite internet service provider in the world that serves both governments, companies, and people. More and more info will flow through him. Yes! LET IT FLOW! YES!!!
He spent at least a quarter billion to get Trump reelected and now he’s seeing contracts for his information empire drop his way.4 His support for Trump was an investment, you see.
He also runs SpaceX’s Starshield, the military version of Starlink, and has billions in contracts with various branches of American’s vast security apparatus — from spy agencies to the military. So Musk is mediating warfare. He’s the god of the war machine.5
Starshield is also developing highly secretive spy satellites. Musk will operate these robotic eyes in the skies, looking down on us, judging us, targeting us for extermination.6
While launching all these spy and comms satellites, Musk is cluttering our night skies — making it harder to see the stars. He is blocking heaven, which is what a demonic character would do.7
Elon Musk is creating what PKD described as the Black Iron Prison
When I talked to Chris Hedges about my book Surveillance Valley, one of his producers said he thought that Musk’s goal with DOGE and other efforts was to put his AI into the federal bureaucracy so he could mediate the government. The producer was right. But I think Elon’s goals are much bigger. Like the rest of his peers in Surveillance Valley, Elon Musk suffers from a god complex. Elon is Eldritch. He wants to ensnare us in his psychotic web. He wants us to live his reality.
—Yasha
PS: I have written other things about this hairplugged man-god. Take a look…
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