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Comment by scarecrowbob | Hacker News Reader

I get that it makes folks uncomfortable to think that at the base of a lot of techno-utopianism lies a lot authoritarian and anti-human thought.

Maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

Maybe there is no necessity to believe that all of us mere humans are a weakness which must be transcended on the progressive path to some as-yet unknowable future.

But it feels like that undercurrent has always been in much techno-futurist thoughts which we can read in Musk's specific interests and grievances. Maybe that is just a problem with a view of history as the product of historical necessity- maybe it's just easier to see when the changes are specific technological changes instead of more abstract political or economic changes.

Anyhow, that's how Musk (and basically anyone who promotes implementing mass, top-down changes to the world) has always felt to me.

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> at the base of a lot of techno-utopianism lies a lot authoritarian and anti-human thought.

This is certainly true. At the very least it's obvious in terms of the attitudes that circle has been expressing over the last decade or so.

I used to be a techno-libertarian until I outgrew Ayn Rand as an undergrad. I can understand that as an immature mindset. But it now seems to be worse. The people who were merely techno-libertarians seem to have morphed into techno-fashy authoritarians, with a side order of eugenics. Eww.

>Maybe it doesn't have to be that way.

It does. All utopian ideals are at their core anti-human and authoritarian. The only way a utopia can realistically exist is by fundamentally re-engineering human nature, or killing everyone who doesn't get with the program. Eugenics or genocide. Probably both.

Is Musk specifically an authoritarian transhumanist? His recent ramblings seem to me more like someone who's on the spectrum or perhaps just really stoned all the time. They don't seem to congeal into any sort of cohesive philosophy, but maybe I'm just not paying enough attention?

Less "Borg Queen" and more "stoner college roommate with too much money and powerful friends, who never learned to censor himself"...

"... who's wearing a MAGA hat and has a vacation home in Russia"

No one owes anyone else ideological consistency, so it's certainly possible Musk is just some dude musing on the world.

However, it's also possible that there are finite families of ideas in the world which all have similar flavors and consitencies, and when we have seen many of them we can start to draw conclusions both about their obvious and more nuanced features.

We might consider that no one really has a "cohesive philosophy" into which our thoughts congeal:

we might not need someone to write a manifesto in order to draw some reasonable conclusions about their thoughts.

And, further, when the conclusions we draw about those thoughts (less so about being-of-people, if you will, but about thoughts) are validated, we might take that as data for how well we are listening to what folks are saying.

In the case of Musk, since I had been exposed to a lot of ideas about technology in the 90s and 00s, what he has been saying over the last 15 years or so has seemed both very clear and, to my ears, very consistent. And very authoritarian and very anti-humanist.

That's fair, and well said!

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