saturn devours his trans daughter
the greek tragedy of a trillionaire
When it dropped that the world had voided its bowels of the first trillionaire; the sycophants cheered like their flattery would be rewarded with permission to sleep at the foot of his bed and everyone else went to work. In Britain, the furnace of winter-insulated terrace houses trapped the ungodly heat, then it rained, then it was inescapably muggy once more and the strawberries tasted paler than they looked. America was at war. It was a typical day. There were no harmonious feelings that humanity had surpassed some remarkable milestone as a species. Civilisation shrugged. Everyone at the parade stayed hunched over their phones.
The enigma of Elon Musk is that, beyond any guilt or gratification one might feel by stubbing their toe on an insult from simply thinking about him, even the most dispassionate observation of his life reflects the slow-but-increasingly-noticeable societal decay. His supporters, of course, are quick to call any contempt one might derive from the recognition of this rot as simple jealousy, but you can pluck any one of his “achievements” out of a Stahlhelm and you’ll discover, with the briefest of Googles, a string of once-promising endeavours worsened by his involvement that are extremely hard to envy. Tesla Cybertrucks going up in flames. SpaceX rockets won’t stop exploding. A Department of Government Efficiency so inefficient it has lead to the death of hundreds of thousands.
It has been half a century since Thatcher and Reagan convinced the citizens of the Anglosphere to stop expecting competent governments and start worshipping at the altar of privatisation and, if you listen closely on an inclement day, you might hear their cackles echoing along the contours of the wind while the economics they championed remains untrickled-down. Instead, hordes of wealth have pooled in the cupped hands of a bizarro Phrygian King from South Africa—so socially off-putting that even billionaire paedophiles struggle to be around him—with a touch not of gold but of shit and you cannot help but consider all of this and look at him to wonder: if this guy is the victor—what does that say about the game?
It has been pointed out many times before that capitalism—the greatest economic system to ever careen humanity towards its own extinction—is sustained by a dedication to infinite growth that is indistinguishable from a malignant tumour. And yet, its demise is supposedly unfathomable, its inevitability undeniable, its efficacy unchallengeable. Billions of man-hours spent on overthrowing and/or sanctioning communist nations, billions of dollars spent on perception management to convince the world that what it is experiencing is not cancer.
Meanwhile, the threat of going broke hangs over your head like a sword tied to a horsehair. Your limbs sore from Herculean grunt work. Your joints seized-up from Sisyphean e-mail jobs. Your everlasting tiredness. Your winter-bound ennui. The influenza of loneliness. Your capital-W Worry. These things couldn’t possibly be symptoms of a sick society. They are your personal failings alone. Skill issue.
Upstream of this viral load, you find Musk, and Epstein’s Illuminati, and techno-fascists, and warmongering elites who—in years prior—would’ve riled up young men to crave war with rousing speeches from the snipers-view of a grand balcony, or from inside lavish parliaments, or from the comfort of a war room. Now they instruct soldiers who instruct lesser soldiers to press a button that’ll ensure an algorithm eviscerates an enemy and his sleeping family from an unmanned drone in the sky. We all notice they have masculinity in common, and whiteness in common, and wealth in common. And age in common.
Of all the matters regarding Musk’s ascension to capitalism’s weird new champion—it is his charge as a parent that feels the most tragically Greco-Roman. His years of experience not humbling into empathic wisdom but calcifying into a bitterness so trivial it echoes fables written millennia ago as he weaponises the gender transition of his daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, into a billion dollar spectacle.
In an interview with NBC, Wilson—one of twelve of Musk’s children—describes her father as “barely present”, that he “would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine” and “constantly yell viciously” because he thought her voice too high. He was “cold”, “quick to anger” and “narcissistic”.
In his own interview with Jordan Peterson, Musk claims Wilson was, “born gay and slightly autistic”. Wilson says Musk “doesn’t know” what she was like as a child because he “simply wasn’t there.” When Wilson began her process of transitioning, Musk claimed to Peterson that he was “tricked” into signing documents regarding Wilson transitioning, which Wilson denies, saying he “knew the full side effects” of the medicine she sought.
Lamenting the “loss of his son”, Musk has vowed to “destroy the Woke Mind Virus” through acquiring Twitter—a platform beloved among young people and instrumental in social uprisings like the Arab Spring and Ferguson protests. Under his tenure, regressive marketing decisions have changed its site’s name to the objectively worse and far more forgettable “X.com”, petulant guideline alterations have banned the term “cisgender” while granting safe usage of racial and ableist slurs and the site is overrun with bots to skew engagement numbers towards unhinged far-right content.
Twitter has been enshittified to avenge the abstract death of a child Musk has always neglected and, in some cruel way, it is the greatest affirmation he could give Wilson as a daughter: a paternalistic act of pettiness, masquerading as heroism, ultimately constructed to teach her a lesson for her own good. Is that not the cornerstone of misogynistic fatherhood?
Christopher Nolan has received much flack in the anticipation of his cinematic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey. His casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy/Clytemnestra riled up “anti-woke” controversy about preserving the ethnic purity of the original Greek tale. By not casting a fictional character who was sired by a rapey god in Swan form as a European woman, Christopher Nolan shamefully showed the world that he has “lost his integrity.” More white-hot outrage fomented when it was speculated trans actor Elliot Page was cast as the invulnerable Achilles—a claim circulated with no evidence and seemed biologically engineered to bring the rabid, right-wing contempt to a fever pitch.
Two men. Musk and Nolan. One unable to escape from inside the harrowing fables of a Greek tragedy. One seeking to expand the conceptual core of the mythology outwards to reimagine it for contemporary times. They have come to represent a fascinating binary.
It is clear in all this that Musk sees himself as a crowned defender of western culture—a Snyderian Spartan leading the latest battle against the Woke Mind Virus to preserve the integrity of a history that is inherently besmirched by his white-supremacist projections. To anyone else, he looks smug and misshapen in his thinking cap, gesturing his thumb at a movie trailer and claiming it “fucking sucks” while the hot-dog-on-a-skateboard that is Nolan’s cinematic spectacle is anticipated to be the literal coolest thing ever.
Where Musk seeks to impose a traditionalism upon a tale that he, as a Dutch-descended South African has no claim to outside of his whiteness—Nolan follows his own curiosity along the narrative parallels between a past, multicultural society and the present one. “The feeling of most academics is that oral formulaic poetry is the basis in which these things were handed down.” Nolan opines when asked about casting Travis Scott. “So it felt very apt to have a rapper play a bard in that way.”
Where Musk’s Grok is among the wave of Generative AI that he and other tech-sycophants keep trying to convince everyone is inevitable by screaming, this is the future! in eerie chorus—Nolan, a director known for his elaborate dedication to practical filmmaking and limited reliance on digital effects, is acutely aware of how The Youth see through it:
“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime. So much energy has been expended on bringing in AI, but if you look at that generation’s reaction, they’re utterly rejecting it.” He cites his own four children – in their late teens and early 20s – as a further example. “Their judgment of AI slop has been immediate and harsh. They see it for what it is very quickly – and it’s much easier for them to identify it, because it grew out of an online world they know really well. And while that doesn’t mean that every aspect of the technology is useless or meaningless, in film-making it’s hitting at exactly the wrong time. After years of driving towards heavily virtual environments, we’re seeing a renewed interest in more tactile, more real forms of storytelling.”1
After prolonged belly-aching about kids-these-days and their phones, it is difficult not to notice how the older generation has turned up late to social media addiction, descending upon Facebook like Florida. They are tantalised by Generative AI, immune to its uncanniness, emotionally activated by ghoulish clips of ululating Muslims in a Sikh turbans swinging scimitars while mopedding through the cobbled streets of central London, the screen perched inches away from their face while GB News blares in the background. Musk and the other slop-factory owners have convinced them that this is good and normal because the progress of technology is always good and normal. But the only reason the technofascistic elite see Generative AI as an inevitable future is because it is deception machine that will allow them to weave new realities and control the electorally-relevant herd.
Respected, veteran artists—having seen more leaps forward in technology than they can count—capitulate to the mythology of AI out of fear that resisting its narrative of inevitability will make them seem cantankerous and unwilling to adapt or worse, mean they get left behind. Meanwhile the younger generation despises it, which Musk might know or care about if his own child didn’t emancipate herself from him. It is the presence of Nolan’s children in his life help him form a more open, deeper understanding of the world around him. The disparity between the two men lays bare how the anti-woke power-fantasy is nothing more than an insular exhibition of how a gerontocracy weaponises its moral obligation towards the young. A child is more convenient to defend in the abstract than to take care of in reality. It is far easier to perform outrage, scoff with indignation, and salivate over imaginary violence at the concept of paedophilia than it is to deal with the consequences of paedophiles in real-life—to hold accountable the cabal at the top of society, to dedicate meaningful care for the life-long recovery of victims, to foster safe environments that protects children in the first place. They are not treated as participants in their own lives but appendages of the lives of those older.
There is a common misconception in Britain, chauffeured by the wealth-protecting corporate media, that the United Kingdom’s welfare state is bloated by benefit scroungers, disability cheats and, of course, immigrant handouts. The truth is: state pensions are the biggest social cost by far, surpassing child benefits tenfold. The society so boringly scapegoating refugees that pays endless lip service to the welfare of children while the resources chug upwards to coddle the eldest is a doomsday cult, too hell-bent on heisting from the future, perpetually delaying solutions with plasters and bandages because it has hedged its bets that tomorrow is probably dead anyway.
Every millennial has had the displeasure of experiencing a sanctimonious lecture about participation trophies and safe-spaces by a generation of ladder-yankers suffering from apocalyptic resignation, so painfully aware of their own mortality, so desperate to not get left behind, so blissfully unaware of how it has manifested in a world they tacitly believe should die along with them. Their children will inherit their squirrelled-away wealth and the ruins of a political landscape engineered to bleed it dry. And at the summit, Musk will be there—with a long tube dangling out the corner of his mouth—alone, triumphant and suckling.
elon is now tweeting “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer”
love the ideas and the prose is fucking awesome as well