Huddle Up, Geeks: Some of These Hot Garbage Developments Are Our Fault (Patreon)

Cross-posted by request from Substack with the full knowledge that nothing in here feels cozy because I feel just as guilty as anyone. Sorry, guys. Tried to end on a hopeful note?

Remember how I said I’d be using the paid tier for follow-up pieces to talk about something I wanted to say in the main public essay but felt was just a little too spicy to devote bandwidth to dealing with the blowback of flump-by sea lions from around the internet in the comments?

Yeah, so this one has a Scoville number. I really probably should just leave it in the bin, but I’m far too dumb to do that.

It’s been knocking around my head for a long time, and with the kabuki theater pay-per-view Billionaire’s Brawl of the last few weeks, it wants out real bad. In some ways, it’s a highly-seasoned follow-up to every essay I’ve written here since December last year. It’s an addendum to all of them, all of it, the oncoming AI train and the poor quality of contemporary capitalists, the highly effective stupidity of fascists and the arrogance of the wise left, the wheel of internet becoming and unbecoming and the decay of compassion.

I’ve been a geek for a long time, and in a lot of different ways. I’m even old enough to remember when geek, let alone nerd, wasn’t really a word you wanted to call yourself, or especially to hear yourself called, at all. It was word that made us flinch, because it was usually followed by something directing some flavor or other of assholery our way.

So when I say that geeks and the geek community has long considered itself very special, very welcoming, very enlightened and advanced, well, it makes a kind of sense. We were bullied, so we should understand pain and the horror of feeling defenseless. We had nowhere to belong, so we built our own spaces and logically wouldn’t want to repeat the structures of the spaces that hurt us. We were excluded for our interests and for being booksmart, so the geek proletariat should generally be made of fairly smart people who can see through the lies and hypocrisies and contradictions wielded by the greater mainstream world around us.

And sometimes it is, all those things and more.

And sometimes I look at Elon Musk splashing around wearing his fascist little arm-floaties in the liquefied remains of a community that really did once mean quite a lot to people, particularly geeks of all stripes, repeatedly nailing his tongue to his nose with a rusty, but Verified Blue, hammer, and I think about how eager geeks were to put this man in the cultural position to do what he’s done, trusting based on nothing that this one just…wouldn’t do that to us. Not this time.

This time was different.

Because oh my cats and kittens, the geek community took a look at an awkward, venal, unpleasant, misogynist, grifting, lying South African failson and we made Elon Musk out of that smirking, self-fellating clay.

I’m not saying anyone really knew what was going to happen when they started pretending this sentient jaw implant was Tony Stark and Emperor of Mars and the Risen Savior of Mankind all wrapped up in one super-suave package. I’m not saying it was on purpose, or that it wasn’t manipulated and leveraged and pushed hard by all manner of media and political entities.

But barely five years ago, a whole lot of people, geeks especially, fucking adored Elon Musk. He was gonna fix everything! He was gonna put us on Mars! In an electric car! And make a monorail hyperloop to futurezoom us from NYC to LA in an hour! He’s gonna invent true AI and flame-guns and brain-chips and bring us the promised science fictional future in a pretty little picnic basket and guys, he’s doing it all because he just cares so much. He’s not like those other billionaires. He’s a cool billionaire. A good billionaire. A beautiful billionaire muffin full of sweet selfless technoberries for all the good children of Earth! Why, Elon Musk loves humanity so deeply and powerfully he just has to do all this stuff to save us and it definitely will save us and work and be affordable someday and anyone who says one word against him should be crushed into a thin paste of shame and silence and [account deleted].

The amount of love aimed at this man was, very recently, utterly staggering.

And part of what made that love so ungodly intoxicating for Musk’s dianoga-infested-Death-Star-trash-compactor of an ego-complex was that it didn’t come from the kind of people who love Trump or the Kardashians or whatever football star is anointed in cultural chrism this week or [insert thing you feel good about not caring about here]. It came from geeks. Nerds. Ostensibly smart people who are much less likely to devote that kind of fanatical worship to people not associated with their favorite comic books or movies or novels or games. The high of that love was purer because it came from people who pride themselves on knowing better than that sort of thing.

Which is why I really do wonder if that “Elon Musk is the real life Tony Stark” meme wasn’t a bit of seeded PR right out of his own brain. Because that’s how it started; that’s how he got us. It’s the first think I ever remember hearing about him, at a convention, no less. In awed and hushed tones. With reverence, and real anger at skepticism. With such innocent, naive pleasure in the idea that a man who moved in circles we never could even knew who Nikola Tesla was. That meme forever associated him with a juggernaut franchise that was starting to take over both mainstream culture and the geeksphere. It leveraged the obsession of fandom into political action. It made it possible to transfer that pure, thrilling, childlike, uncritical love of Iron Man onto this very recently unknown industrialist so he could sip on that shit for years.

And the stock market is based mostly on reputation and dreams of crypto SugarPlumCoins. We gave him so much of both he almost couldn’t fail. And at this point we know he really tries very hard to fail most of the time.

We got fucking snowed.

We probably should have known. Because Tony Stark isn’t actually a great guy, or very ethical, or very interested in the collateral damage his fun times cause for the little non-billionaire people on the ground. He has his moments, and did all right in the end, but Tony Stark is kind of a piece of shit and that’s part of his story. Musk joined Twitter in 2009, when Iron Man had just hit the screens. Geeks were still on the rise as a cultural class with cache and power whose attention it behooved the powerful to grab at. And that first Iron Man movie starts with our Anthony as a war profiteer and explicit monster, and ends with him swaggering off having learned virtually nothing except how to improve his own PR.

<figure>Why are you booing me? I’m right.</figure>

And that’s right when I started hearing about how amazing Elon was and what he was going to do for us. How awesome a FutureSanta he was going to be, with his sack full of everything we ever dreamed of as science fiction-obsessed kids.

And I get it. Musk said nerd dreams out loud and a lot of us felt like someone powerful actually saw us, acknowledged us—before we got sick of the powerful seeing us and realized all this was happening not because the world suddenly realized how cool we’d always been, but because it just hadn’t yet occurred to capitalism to pander to us specifically yet. And, you know, we saw someone like us making it. That shit is so powerful. You know, REPRESENTATION. Maybe he wasn’t the same gender or sexuality or color as a lot of us, but he was clearly a nerd like us, right? We saw someone awkward and kind of weird but super talented and clever and tech-oriented, a STEM nerd like us. We believed the self-made origin story floating around because no one really cared enough to fact-check it back then. We looked at him and got infected with hope. Hope that smart geeks who knew our lingo could be on top and make things better. Hope that any one of us with two lines of code to rub together could escape the wheel of suffering that was economic existence in 2008-2009. Hope that maybe one billionaire, finally, could have one speck of group-consciousness and give-a-shit about the future and put all that CEO energy into elevating everyone instead of crushing us.

BUT THE FOOTBALL WAS ON STAR TREK THIS TIME IT JUST HAD TO BE REAL

Ugh. Hope is gross. Yeah, yeah, it’s beautiful and necessary and we all need it and it fuels change and feels nice. It’s also gross and it’s real dumb. Hope bypasses all sorts of mental blocks and very sensible filters that we usually use quite effectively to NOT PLAY WITH LUCY EVER.

A couple of years later I distinctly recall being on a panel and suggesting that maybe Musk was doing what he does mainly for profit, not very well, and that he wasn’t actually on our side. And I did get booed, quite loudly and energetically. I’m not saying that to smoke my little ego-pipe in my superior dressing-gown and trill: not me though, I was never fooled.

I mean, I wasn’t, but only because at first I didn’t care, and then I’m so goddamned contrarian that as soon as everyone likes something or someone my brain chooses to suddenly believe there must be something wrong with it. It’s not exactly a trait I’m proud of. Contrarianism has its own wake of consequences foaming behind it gurgling but the memes were fire. Trust and believe I’ve been fooled by a lot of other trash so I’ll eat my crow en flambe thank you very much. But back then I started doing some reading and a lot of stuff we all know now turned out to be pretty easy to find. His ex-wife told us all what he was. He didn’t even actually start Tesla and certainly not PayPal. He was one of the thousand foul and gibbering nether-children of fetid underbeing Peter Thiel. He came from money and didn’t actually invent anything much. A lot of it was there long before the generally-accepted starting point of his faceplant-from-grace, the Thai sub rescue in 2018.

But if you ever tried to say anything about it online, you’d be inundated and harassed within an inch of your sanity. Still would, but it’s more of a weak dribble these days. And sure, a lot of that screaming was astroturfed, but a lot was very, very real. In the wake of GamerGate, you just couldn’t think people acting unhinged online wasn’t largely sincere.

Geeks just wanted to live in the future we dreamed of so bad. And no one else was selling tickets.

AND NEITHER WAS HE. He just loved being loved by the people who say they don’t care about celebrity culture and an unbelievable mountain of what he’s doing now is just to get that gorgeous golden feeling back, what we gave him when we pronounced him the savior of humanity. He and all his fascist friends put on Majora’s Progressive Mask and used our belief in our own judgment and far-seeing perspective to step on our heads to get tall enough to reach the world they wanted to tear down.

NOBODY IS GOOD ENOUGH TO NOT GET ADDICTED TO THAT PARTICULAR BRAND OF SMACK AND BILLIONAIRES LEAST OF ALL.

You’ll do a lot of really irrational, awful, hideous things in the throes of addiction. And that’s where he is now. I don’t feel sorry for him, but I recognize it. I feel sorry for us. Because we loved an idiot too hard and he went and burned down our house and laughed about it.

And now we’re all so desperate to get our comfy couch back we’re telling Zuckerberg he’s our new daddy. That’s how spun we’ve gotten.

That’s how bad we want to believe there somehow is an Iron Man who’s going to fix things for us. That’s how bad we want to believe there can be virtue in power. How little we can even get our heads around anymore, how much we just want someone to tell us they’ll figure it out one way or the other and it’ll be okay. In our confusion, we hurt ourselves. Over and over.

But Tony Stark created Ultron, too, my loves. He’s not a good daddy.

But it’s not just Musk. I just intoned the dreaded GG word. That was a dark time, my wide-eyed youngs. I don’t even know how to make a joke about how off-the-charts reality-optional, seething, spitting, acidly hateful crazy it got, and over how little. GamerGate, followed by the Puppies, consumed the geek world, put a rather squabble-prone community’s latest fight on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, revealed some deep worms chewing at the roots of our heroes and ourselves, bucketed so much fury and loathing and violence and sheer meanness into a world that was, at least on the tin-label, supposed to be about liking stuff and finding a place to belong. Not a lot of non-geeks participated in those things, it was mostly us, and mostly we didn’t get what was really happening.

And it made Twitter a place so clearly toxic that many people weren’t that interested in defending the place or the culture it created when Musk decided to stab himself in the eye with it.

We know now that geeks of many stripes, but largely gamers, were targeted specifically by Steve Bannon doing his very best and extremely long-term impression of Baron Harkonnen and his pustuled horde of misfit joy-eaters. Targeted for loneliness, for isolation, for naivete, for easily-leveraged prejudices and blindspots born of isolation and loneliness, for receiving the world mostly through text on the internet, which could be so easily manipulated. GamerGate and the Puppies were a soft launch of the open fucking trashfires and sizzling waste-dumps that comprise daily life online and off now and probably in the future. All those little worlds geeks tried to create were just…unprotected marks for Musks and Trumps and Tates and Petersons and Stones and Bannons and Thiels and the worse ones whose names we don’t know yet. Because no one had tried to activate us in the power struggles of the big kids’ table yet, a lot of people both had no real defense against that pulsating tragic feeling of being seen for the first time, and also unfortunately had some rotted opinions about women and POC and the queer community that, let’s be honest, probably weren’t helped by a steady, loyal adoration of (or even participation in) genres that haven’t always done a spectacular job of not making illustrations of those opinions bestsellers and classics.

And y’all know I love those genres. They’re my genres. They’re my life’s work. Science fiction and fantasy still have a lot of essays to write after class before they can graduate, you know?

Turns out fans aren’t slans, just human beings, and recreated a lot of bad exclusionary structures from their trauma in their own spaces, and loved things with their huge uncritical way of loving despite some of those things being monsters, and got addicted to finally being the center of something rather than on the outside, and, well.

You’ll do a lot of really irrational, awful, hideous things in the throes of addiction.

It’s not just the social media rageswamp, either, though. God, I remember so many conversations about the advent of AI, long before Chat GPT, and meeting argument after argument from friend after friend that people would just have to adapt, AI is the future and it’s gonna be great because we won’t have to work, 3D printers will make manufacturing obsolete, self-driving cars will be SUPER SWEET MAN I CAN NAP DURING MY COMMUTE BRO WHAT TRUCK DRIVERS THEY JUST NEED TO LEARN TO CODE AM I RIGHT? There was a serious libertarian slant to geek discourse at the close of the 00s and advent of the 10s. A lot of things we’re finally admitting should be paid for were being loftily proclaimed to be necessarily free, and the theft of them not theft. There was, and still is, a sneering, nasty attitude about any knowledge or expertise or interest that wasn’t STEM. We were the ones who understood this tsunami of new technology and possibility and way too many of us used the fact that we were suddenly being asked what we thought by people who couldn’t have seen us even when they were looking right into our eyes thirty seconds before to wave away every ethical human consideration and tell anyone who might drown in the slow-moving great molasses flood of automation to git gud.

What the fuck were we thinking?

Are thinking? Because I don’t know that this has gotten much better. I don’t know that we won’t fall for the next grifter who figures out how to say what geeks want to hear as opposed to what the Average American Consumer wants to hear and meme their way into real power, which will inevitably be used to do much more harm than launching a stupid car into stupid space.

We fell for one of the classic blunders: if a guy shows up saying everything you’ve always wanted to hear in your deepest heart of hearts, don’t believe that asshole he’s gonna rob your house.

It just makes me so sad. It’s not all our fault, not even close. There’s GOBS of blame to go around. The country is the size of the map. But it’s cost us so much to listen to these wheedling slime-gargoyles and their Morden-promises. We have to do better. It’s cost so much, and so many are still listening, just because the new Mephistopheli look and talk like them and say they like their games, like their shows, like their sweet little intimate obsessions.

But you know what the Admiral says. He knows.

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Just because evil turned up in robot cosplay this time doesn’t mean it’s got anything new to say. Same shit as always. Anyone not like you is bad, give me your money and your love and I’ll punish everyone who ever hurt you. And also you, but you last. Maybe.

That is the whisper of the dark trying to come in. It has never changed.

I hope we can.

I don’t give a fuck about flying cars. That’s the future I dream of.