Elon Musk | Philosophy Tube

what do Steve Jobs Tony Stark Bill Gates and Elon Musk all have in common they're all fictional characters [Music] when I first became governor of Judea eight years ago I recognized that we needed a totally new long-term sustainable approach to innovate the Roman Empire our mission as Romans is to invent design and inspire the new way of doing things and set people free from the old ways what I love about working for the Roman Empire is that our team is changing the world it's it's awesome to go to work with some of the finest minds who are committed to building a totally new way of doing almost everything from politics to leisure to taxes to defense the Roman Empire is the network of tomorrow [Applause] so when I saw the headlines about my decision to execute Jesus of Nazareth I had just one overriding thought how can I better demonstrate the incredible value that I know the Roman Empire can deliver because the value of Rome is more than just order and peace much more than that it's job opportunities infrastructure civil engineering security all these features combine to make the Roman Empire the most revolutionary Network ever designed with the power to change ordinary people's lives for the better so I have nothing personal against God but uh well he's a little obsolete [Applause] how thing woohoo do Cecina pendulum misc Elan Reve musk was born in South Africa in 1971 having previously owned the slice of PayPal and now as the CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX as well as having fingers in many other pies musk is the 53rd richest person in the world with a net worth of about 20 billion US dollars Pontius Pilate was a real historical figure who did actually live at the time Jesus is supposed to have been crucified and served as prefect of Judea from AD 26 to ad 36 both he and his wife Claudia have at one time or another been venerated as Saints by various Orthodox churches though his role in the fictionalized Bible story is usually to represent someone who seeks to avoid responsibility for the death of Jesus through the symbolic washing of his hands before giving the death sentence Elon Musk enjoys something of a cult status many people see him as a hero or at least as an inspiration and I could talk about his tweets all day or about his personal life but hey I'm less curious about Elon Musk the man some more news already made that video and it's really good so you can go watch him I'm more curious about Elon Musk the myth the symbol of the type the technological industrial wizard the Tony Stark Nikola Tesla figure of the scientist / industrialist who breaks with the established way of doing things and creates something new and personally although I do love the term tech Daddy there is another term from the 60s for men and it is often men who are mythologized in this way the comprehensive designer someone who is a synthesis of artists inventor mechanic objective economist and evolutionary strategist funnily enough how we today think about computers and technology and comprehensive designers like Elon Musk owes a huge debt to six counterculture in his book from counterculture to cyber culture communications professor Fred Turner explains that there were really two strands to the counterculture of the 1960s on the one hand you have the radical left-wing who are doing things like registering new voters protesting the Vietnam War starting new political parties and organizations bringing challenges to expand civil rights and then there were the new communalist hsihu built communes LSD free love rock-and-roll anti-authoritarianism flower power peace signs the people you probably think of when you hear 60s counterculture and really these two strands weren't all that separate plenty of hippies protested the Vietnam War and plenty of young radicals did LSD but those were two trends the second of which the new communalist came to be seen in time as cool which is why we associate their aesthetic with that particular period of history a lot of those who were on the new communalist hippie scene later got interested in technology and mingled with the new generation who were building early computers and the web and gradually people came to see computers not as symbols of stuffy corporate Authority but as the digital frontier that would set people free funnily enough since we're talking about Elon Musk for a brief window in the mid 70s space colonies became a countercultural fascination the idea of escaping the strictures of what was known to a new space was just like building a commune oh the new communists' took their values and ideas to the teams that built early computers on the way and gradually the idea of the commune the new space that represents rebellion against the old order morphed from rural community calm cyberspace this cool new place that's beyond the reach of any one government or authority and so by the 90s engineers hackers and software developers had come to be seen has been countercultural heroes the comprehensive designers masters of the new frontier we're gonna network the globe and tear down all the old systems man [Music] On January 24 Apple computer will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984 part 3 backlash so that's where the figure of the comprehensive designer tech daddy comes from now a backlash named by author Susan Faludi in her book of the same name is a period of history where instead of progress in the fields of rights and equality the opposite happens things get worse rights get rollback as those whose privilege is challenged by progress fight to defend their unearned privilege so Faludi talks a lot about the Reagan era as a period of backlash for women's rights a lot of stuff got rollback arguably we're living through another backlash right now and the seeds of today's backlash were already lying dormant in 60s counterculture although the new communists' were going for an egalitarian vibe a lot of communes tended to be populated by overwhelmingly white relatively wealthy educated young people well though they were trying to break away from traditional ways of doing things they often reproduced traditional gender roles on the colonies some of them ended up marginalizing women and although they were aiming at independence from the system a lot of them received bankrolling from outside or were set up in places that actually made life more difficult for the poorer folks who live nearby and then what America does one of these people are talking and very very gradually builds of Starbucks around - latte and the well they still definitely have their achievements but just there were some drawbacks as well and those drawbacks continued into 90s Digital counterculture Wired magazine wrote a lot about technology and the comprehensive designers who are mastering it and we're gonna tear down all the old hierarchies but although wired presented itself as openly countercultural its audience were also overwhelmingly white and male and very welcome the very people whose material interests lay in not changing the world too much indeed Wired was an openly libertarian magazine praising right-wing conservative figures like Newt Gingrich and George Gilder both of whom appeared on the cover they were all about deregulating the net man selling information free unfortunately despite their noble intentions they sleep walked right into legitimizing the deregulation of industry more widely the cutting of welfare and the massive inequality we have today like the new communalist to the 60s techno libertarians of the late 80s early 19th like to think of themselves as being independent from the system and creating something new they weren't really they were still entangled within it a lot of the physical labor of actually assembling computers was done by undocumented immigrants women and people of color who didn't really get a slice of the shiny techno utopia that was promised on the Box nowadays a lot of those dangerous difficult jobs are done by workers in state capitalist China where Elon Musk has just been trying to build his own factory incidentally similarly part of the tech Daddy myth today is that he's a visionary he stands apart from the system he doesn't need anyone else he's self-made and this is false for some interesting economic reasons we'll get to you shortly but also on a surface level it's kind of easy to see true because the technologies that comprehensive designers bring to market aren't always the result of divine or even privately funded inspiration like the iPhone is just an aggregate of a bunch of technologies that had already been invented through public funding an impressive invention absolutely no doubt but not exactly from a lot of self-made successful people including Elon Musk had very wealthy parents already so comprehensive designers as we know them today are car like fish little characters the myth doesn't match the men part for che guevara t-shirts they are fictional characters with a purpose though and in order to understand that purpose and where counterculture is today we're going to need to talk about Slava Dziedzic and flirting Slovenian philosopher Slava Dziedzic coined the useful term liberal communists and if you know anything about political philosophy you'll already have spotted straight away this is a contradictory term it's like saying square circle a liberal with a capital L is somebody who maybe has some progressive social ideas but still thinks that capitalism is OK whereas communists are a subgroup of leftists the sexy talented people who realize that capitalism is rubbish and it needs to go so surely you can't be a liberal and a communist you can't both support and seek to destroy capitalism j-jake knows this and he made the term deliberately contradictory in order to highlight a particular contradiction in our society and for my money that contradiction is best expressed through flirting specifically the kind of flirting that consenting people do when they haven't gotten together yet they want and the whole game of flirting is saying something that is suggestive but not putting all your cards on the table and declaring outright that you fancy the person because if you go in there all guns blazing you might end up getting rejected so you've got a maintained deniability not in there creepy I never said that inappropriate thing way but just in an ego protecting way so the other person starts to think fancy me are they flirting with me how do I feel about that oh I kind of want them to fancy me maybe I'll say something a little bit suggestive back and we'll see how it goes down and that's the brinksmanship that's the fun that's the game who's gonna break cover first and make an unambiguous move who wants it more and of course the other person or people probably know that you're doing this you all know the game but it just adds another layer of fun so the whole practice of flirting only works in so far as you can plausibly disavow that what you're saying reflects what you're thinking and what jiseok says is that so much stuff relies on exactly the same kind of disavowal like wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt for instance wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt that's been mass-produced is on some level kind of perverse some poor exploited person probably had to make that t-shirt in a faraway country in terrible conditions for pennies an hour and that whole system goes against everything the man whose face is on the shirt fought and died for but if I wear it ironically then I can do it because I know that it's bad i disavow it I am innocent a minute I'm innocent I am innocent I am innocent of this man's blood I am innocent of this man's blood crucify him I washed my hands of this and the key point is that like flirting my wearing the Che Guevara t-shirt actually depends on me disavowing it Pontius Pilate can't sentence Jesus to death until he's washed his hands first the disavowal is central to the whole operation but I still wear the shirt particularly under capitalism we focus a lot on people's intentions I wear the shake of our a t-shirt but I'm not a bad person because I didn't intend anything bad by it I know that it's bad unlike some imaginary person who wears it because they like the pattern I guess Elon Musk might not get things right all the time but at least his intentions are good and jejak says it ain't about what you intend to do it's not about what you believe in your heart or whether you're a good person it's about the material effect your actions have on the world so forget the flirting or we can leave it are we gonna get it so liberal communists are big-time capitalists millionaires billionaires business owners who simultaneously wash their hands of capitalism through their actions like Bill Gates former hacker huge counter cultural icon in his day huge business owner now but gives millions away to charity a fundamentally anti-capitalist move because you're giving money away rather than investing it expecting returns my boy Ilan cave daddy maximum MC Tesla gives free batteries to Puerto Rico Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon gives millions to medical research at Princeton and of course George Soros how could we forget George I could even name some millionaire liberal communists on the YouTube scene if it weren't for the off chance that they'll be watching now don't get me wrong charity grants batteries those things can be amazing change lives save lives but in order to give wealth you first have to take wealth or as some would put it create wealth and here we're getting into the deep economic reasons that explode the tech daddy new profit is generated by the workers if you're a capitalist you can throw as much money as you want at a block of wood it will not turn into a chair investment investment investment you can throw as much money as you like in a sheet of metal it will not turn into a Tesla it only turns into something that you can sell for profit because somebody puts in the time and works on it and in order to make that profit you mathematically have to pay that person less than the value they added to the starting materials that's true people who work in factories is true of people who build the robots that replace people that work in factories it's true of youtubers it's true of people who pull pints in the pub and people who work in the HR departments of massive corporations you're always being paid less than the true monetary value of your work and the only way to get the full amount is if instead of the boss owning the factory and everything that gets made in it the workers between them cut out the middleman and own it together which is what we call socialism but on the capitalism every penny of a billionaires fortune is a penny of unpaid work that someone else did in addition and this is a big deal whether you're a Marxist or you're not cool liberal communists have every incentive to protect their wealth and the means by which they acquire it and that means getting involved in politics and that they do it's common knowledge now that all Elon gives millions to both of America's political parties another they aren't both exactly the same they do both support capitalism he also discourages his but maybe that's slightly unfair or at least potentially legally dodgy Elon Elon named is it alright is it fair to say that you discourage your employees from unionizing well you don't encourage it okay that's fair there are some sneakier tactics to most every billionaire will have a charitable foundation named after them like the Gates Foundation and some of the money from those goes to political think tanks who advise government and they ain't the political think tanks recommending we abolish billionaires that is a little bit more like an investment only the product is your engineered political consent and here's the real kicker from Mark Fisher far from constituting any kind of progressive alternative to official capitalist ideology liberal communism constitutes the dominant ideology of capitalism now the legacy of 60s counterculture into 90s Digital counterculture is that an opportunity for genuine transformation wasn't quite follow through all the way but the aesthetics of counterculture of the comprehensive designer and the tech rebel became very fashionable nowadays capitalism sells us symbols of anti-capitalist resistance because as long as we're consuming those symbols wearing the Che Guevara t-shirt watching the movie with a bad guy is an evil corporation praising wealth hoarders for their generosity or people who got where they are because of their workers as visionary she did it alone as long as evolution is sold as a revolution the actual revolution the substantive break with everything that has come before is delayed that doesn't mean that all of those movies and artworks and even Tesla's aren't great fun you're like jeers but it does mean that the tech daddy isn't the figure of counterculture it's an advertising mascot for backlash why are you cheering fry you're not rich true which someday I might be rich and then people like me better watch their step part 5 the real Elon Musk was inside you all along as a final thoughts the character of the tech Daddy is mainly used to sell backlash to men but similar tactics are being employed to sell it to people of other genders to today's counterculture includes trans-inclusive tendencies feminist tendencies the widespread acceptance of lesbian gay and bisexual people and we're already seeing those features of it being used to wallpaper media aimed at women that's really just about getting advertising clicks there are corporations who have floats in the London Pride Parade who sell weapons to countries that use those weapons on LGBT people counterculture will have the anti-capitalist strains removed on what's left will be used to sell you [ __ ] just a couple days ago I was at summer in the city it's a big YouTube convention here in the UK and I was on panel and I brought up the fact that their cameras and laptops that we youtubers used to do our jobs contain within them coltan coltan is a conflict mineral the extraction of coltan in the Democratic Republic of Congo is doing massive social economic and environmental damage and that's not even getting into the poor buggers out in China we're going to be assembling all this electronics in three dormitories and absolutely terrible conditions being horribly exploited building the same machine that I will actually use to edit this video and when I brought this up I was quite shocked there was another youtuber on the panel who by all accounts is very progressive and very lovely who completely verily dismissed these concerns who said I'm here to speak for my audience and I said okay cool I wonder who's gonna speak up for all the people who do the actual material work that puts us on this stage though and he just went not me which is less i wash my hands of this and more down blood never hurt anybody and here's my big question i she only when he asked myself quite a lot is this same process of counterculture into backlash happening to us to YouTube to leftist YouTube in particular as our channels get bigger as we start employing people like research assistants and musicians as we start selling t-shirts getting invited to industry parties and movie premieres are we gonna just end up emptily disavowing washing our hands of it all are we gonna wake up one day and look in the mirror and not recognize who's looking back at us because instead of our face it's just the palette shrimp eyed face of a long friends musk did you hear there's a natural order those most deserve it will land up with the most that the cream cannot help but always rise up to the top well I say [ __ ] floats if you thought things or changed friend you better think again bluntly put in the fewest of words Musk's are still running the world Musk's are still running the world [Music] now the working-classes obsolete they are surplus to society's needs so let them all kill each other and get it made overseas that's the word don't you know from the guys that's running the show let's be perfectly clear boys and girls o Musk's are still running the world Musk's are still running though oh yeah oh yeah well feed your children on crayfish and lobster tails find a school near the top of the league in theory I respect your right to exist I will kill you if you move in next to me oh it stinks it sucks it's anthropologically unjust oh but the takings are up by a third Oh some mosques are still Musk's are still running must still must still [Music] the free market is perfectly natural do you think that I'm some kind of dummy it's the ideal way to order the world [ __ ] the morals does it make any money and if you don't like it then leave Oh use your rights to protest on the street yeah use your rights but don't imagine that it's heard oh no no God must still run in the world masks are still running though food must still run in the world oh yeah must are still running Oh musta still run in the world old yeah mosques are still run in the world old master still running [Music] I'm getting absolutely eat alive hate shooting outdoors

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 1,270,934

Rating: 4.8392892 out of 5

Keywords: elon musk, tesla, slavoj zizek, philosophy, Marx, Marxism, economics, counterculture, irony, Space X, NASA

Id: 5gnlhmaM-dM

Length: 27min 19sec (1639 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/kvothekilledmyking]

This is the video that made me stop being a Musk fanboy.

[u/corpsecabin]

The fucking capitalist shills in the comments shudders

[u/[deleted]]

How to fucking shoot myself

[u/WellDressedLoser]

I love the framing of Pontius Pilate as a tech daddy