Elon Musk is a Sophon

On Friday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed look at what Elon Musk and his DOGE bags have sliced from federal spending. As might be expected from a Rubert Murdoch propaganda outlet, the results were couched under the title "DOGE Claims It Has Saved Billions. See Where." However, no massaging of the headlines could make the truth of these cuts look good.

As the article admits, the numbers are nowhere near as large as Musk and Donald Trump have claimed and only a tiny fraction of what has been cut is related to the DEI programs that the right has been railing against.

In fact, the biggest target for Musk's cuts can be summed up in a single word: Research.

Musk and the enhanced scrotum crew have cut funding for research on early childhood development, chronic lung disease, and a drug to treat Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury. In some cases, they've cut studies that were in their final stages and were only waiting for results to be evaluated.

While the $6 billion in cuts claimed by Musk is not at all real, what's very real is the assault on basic science:

• $109.7 million reduction in spending on biotech research
• $102.5 million reduction in life sciences
• $86.8 million cut from social sciences
• $171.7 million on lab services, consulting, and support.

On top of all that, the edicts from Musk's team halted studies that have already been paid for, resulting in no savings. Zero savings—incalculable damage.

If you haven’t watched the Netflix series Three-Body Problem, or read the excellent and challenging book series by Chinese author Liu Cixin, I’m about to spoil a large portion of the plot for the first book. Consider this your warning.

In the book, a race of aliens from a nearby star covets Earth for its stable position in the Solar System and launches an invasion fleet. With technology far in advance of anything understood by humans, it seems like a huge mismatch. The aliens will arrive and squash us like the bugs they believe we are.

Only the aliens have a problem. Their ships will take 400 years to arrive, and human science is advancing much more quickly than their own. By the time their fleet arrives, humans are likely to be so advanced that they will brush aside the attempted invasion—and maybe wipe out the aliens to teach them a lesson about being pests.

To prevent this, the aliens use their technology to send two tiny particles to Earth. These "sophons" are smaller than atoms, but they contain enormous computing power and surveillance technology. With them, the aliens can watch everything that humans do for a single purpose: Stop us from making the kind of technological breakthroughs that would allow us to defeat their invasion when it arrives.

A tiny brain, embued with unreasonable amounts of power, aimed at keeping humans mired without progress—that certainly sounds like Elon Musk.

Why has Musk set his team loose on destroying science? First, just as with Trump, he loves the uneducated and the ignorant. It's so much easier to sell people on propaganda if they don't have facts in the way. It's how fascism has always worked.

Second, Musk wants to be seen as the only possible source of miracles. As fellow would-be overlord Sam Altman put it two years ago in The New Yorker:

“Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

Finally, Musk is an accelerationist. He believes that society is going to collapse and that the best thing he can do for himself and others in the ruling class is hasten that fall. It's a concept that they bolster by cherry-picking from the thick layers of bullshit in Strauss–Howe generational theory as expressed in nonsense tomes like The Fourth Turning.

When Musk warns that Americans should expect "temporary hardships" on the way to conservative paradise, he doesn't mean that he, Trump, or the billionaire class will be feeling any pinch. He means that everyone else will probably experience something from mild discomfort to death by firing squad as the new feudalism settles in.

But don't you worry, folks. Your grandkids will get the exciting opportunity to lead the peasant uprising about fifty years from now.

In the meantime, if anyone is doing science, it has to be approved by Musk. Which means owned by Musk. And if millions die as a result ... well, that's their fault for not being billionaires.