I Was Hoping This Utopia Would Be More Utopian

Elon's telling us we don't need to save for retirement because AI is going to take care of everything for us.

"If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant," Musk added.

The world's richest man, whose net worth exceeds $600 billion, described a future where advances in AI, energy, and robotics supercharge productivity, creating an "abundance" of resources that would allow everyone to be granted a "universal high income."

That's awesome, I guess, although I'm wondering how we get from here to there because Elon's roadmap to utopia is rather vague. It looks something like this:

Also, is this going to be the same utopian future featuring the techbros freeballing it in Greenland, untouched by law and living according to their own crypto-inspired code of amorality?

Yet even that story—of American oligarchs pushing an imperial president to new land seizures and new wealth—is only part of the picture. Greenland isn't only a treasure trove for some of these oligarchic forces to mine or to extract. It's also a place for experimentation, not only in how to expand American empire but in how to create a world in which all of these oligarchic figures’ utopian (or dystopian, for the rest of us) fantasies can come true.

The man long at the center of these murkier fantasies is a slender, sandy-haired American named Dryden Brown. He is the head of an organization called Praxis, which has become one of the centers of the so-called "network state" movement. The definition of "network states" is itself a bit jumbled; a "network state," says backer Balaji Srinivasan, is a "highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states."

If you scrape past the techno-babble, the idea for a network state is relatively simple: It is a new nation, both online and on land, that can provide an escape hatch for forces who want to do away with regulatory oversight or financial checks. Who envision a world in which they can expand both their wealth and their influence as wide as they want, and who believe that nation-states—including places like the U.S.—are passé, outmoded ways of organizing societies and that the next iteration of humanity must belong to these self-appointed visionaries, authoring a revolutionary future wherever they can.

Color me skeptical, but that utopia "free of regulatory oversight or financial checks" on ultrawealthy degenerates doesn't sound compatible with a future in which we're all sitting at home getting paid while we play virtual pickleball or whatever the hell it is we're supposed to do when life has been drained of all meaning.

What I would like to know, I guess, is whether anyone has considered that none of these dipshits has any idea what they're doing and that they're holding us all hostage to their pubescent whims, that they appear to view Brave New World as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale? No? Okay, then.

It would probably be instructive at this stage in our late-capitalist collapse to peruse some lists of failed utopias. Here's one. Here's another one. These failed utopias generally share some key characteristics. Creepy dudes with a knack for enthralling people. Weird sexual stuff, often with some eugenics mixed in. No serious plan for long-term viability once the initial polyamorous thrill has subsided.

A problem we've got today–and we have many problems, my friends–is that the dipshits harboring these utopian fantasies have a lot of money, as in, more money than many nations all put together. Whereas the dipshits of the past didn't have the wherewithal to impose their dipshit schemes on society at large, today's dipshits have wherewithal to spare and then some and then some more after that (Henry Ford, who was obviously very rich, and his failed Fordlandia escapade in Brazil seem like the exceptions that prove the rule).

And so, they're going for it. They have big dreams. They're moving fast and breaking things. That's what they do. Only now, they're doing it at the societal level even though they still, rather importantly, have no idea what they're doing.

You think there's a plan? There is no plan.