Going Off the Deep End

For once, the US presidential elections have given us a spectacle actually worth noting. An extreme thing for us to say, as we have been abstentionists for over seven decades, not by principle but by strategy. Yet the facts speak for themselves.

The victory of a billionaire poised to return to the White House ushers a considerable number of extremely wealthy individuals into the president’s “inner circle.” A phenomenon that is not entirely surprising: oligopolists are increasingly set on governing states directly, as if they were at the helm of their own companies. This demonstrates well how the political class, which the bourgeoisie had maintained throughout the centuries as a buffer between itself and so-called “civil society,” has now become completely redundant. Lenin, more than a hundred years ago, was already speaking of state-monopoly capitalism. At a certain stage of development, an industrial company must plan its production in ways that interfere with the functions of the state. Today more than ever, a handful of flesh-and-blood capitalists are stepping onto the stage of political spectacle as the collective capitalist “in person”—or rather, “in persons,” even if they are few in number.

And what about Elon Musk? After investing around $130 million in Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, he saw the value of his companies’ shares increase by $70 billion in just two weeks. He’s no longer just the richest man in the world. He’s now the person who managed to turn an investment in a worn out democratic ritual into a return rivalling the jackpot.

Now, Mr. Musk has a net worth of approximately $330 billion. If, without accounting for new earnings, he decided to live on just one million dollars a day (and who doesn’t do that nowadays…) he could go on for over 900 years before ceasing to be a billionaire. When you think about his companies, it’s hard not to be fascinated (so to speak!) by such magnificence.

Tesla produces almost two million electric cars a year, half a million of which are manufactured in China at the Gigafactory in Shanghai. Starlink is a satellite constellation capable of providing worldwide internet access, even without relying on terrestrial or undersea fiber optic cables. It reminds us that the center of gravity for high-tech human activities is shifting to the skies. Meanwhile, Neuralink connects the human brain to machines, reminding us that in a society centered on a deranged economy like capitalism, the machine can increasingly do without the human.

And yet, despite all that Musk possesses, he is always missing something. He’s only a man, not superman. He retreats into his mind and ventures into the hyperbolic implications of the labyrinthine ideology of transhumanism. Here, humanity will be surpassed by the post-human: a being whose DNA is engineered at will and connected to the global cybernetic mind. Thus, capital, incarnated in the person of Elon Musk, pioneer of the post-human, finally reveals its dream—and nightmare—of a hyper-technological world stripped of humanity, because it has been stripped of human beings altogether.