Does Elon’s Vision Lead to a Dystopia?

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I’m going to interrogate four objectives I have seen either mentioned more than once from Elon Musk or indicated by his action as desirable outcomes for America’s future and ponder what sort of future do they together create. Now, this is not either a praising of Musk and his action nor is it a condemnation of this. That is a large and volatile subject in a landscape filled with landmines of unquestioned admiration and devotion and an equal number of outright hatred that is ill-suited for this exploration. This is not about Elon the man but simply these four concepts and what they might produce if fully implemented. So, I am not interested at this time in either how great the man is for his advances in space exploration nor how terrible he is for his personal beliefs and political powers.

  1. Natalism: Musk has and continues to expound on the idea that the falling birthrate in the USA is an existential crisis, one that should not be ‘corrected’ by immigration but by more people having larger families.
  2. No Welfare State: His action as the head of ‘DOGE’ as well as his continuing comments and support for those restricting the size and scope of government make it clear that he envisions a government that acts very little in the way of spending money on social support for people either domestically or abroad.
  3. A Market and Economy with very little government action or oversight: He also clearly believes that companies and the people that run them know best for economic growth, with little to no regulation from the government both in terms of what companies can do and the accumulation of wealth by individuals.
  4. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence: Musk is firm in his belief that artificial intelligence, A.I., will soon create machine minds that exceed human capabilities in logic and creative problem solving leading to exponential growth in knowledge and capability. He is equally convinced that humanoid and non-humanoid robots will soon be cheap and plentiful freeing humanity from menial labors.

Looking at these 4 ideas and advancements, what sort of science-fiction world-building can we engage in. The world I see is not a very pleasant one save for the very rich.

There is a large and growing population as families expand in an economy where labor has been displaced by robots. Without something like a Universal Basic Income, which by many is seen as merely stealing from the rich to give to the poor, these families are left with little to no economic chances for growth, trapped in poverty. They will live in poverty and in a likely ecological ruin, a weak and emasculated government will not have the power to prevent corporations, ever seeking to expand, from polluting and spoiling the environment.

There will be little chance for peaceful change to the system as unlimited accumulation of wealth by the few creates unlimited political power by the few. Those with wealth and power will be the ones with the ability to steer the course of public discourse and the direction of governmental powers, a feedback loop of self-reinforcing wealth and political power creation that excludes the growing, starving, and sick masses. This looks pretty dystopic to me. I am sure that there are those out there who will feel that this is nothing more than doomsaying and a thinly disguised hatred for Musk. They may point out that in 1890, 90 percent of Americans were engaged in agriculture and by the late 20th century it was a mere 2 percent, so the fears of robotic displaced labor is overblown. However, in 1890 one could, and many did, see that the factories of the day would be the engines that drove the economy of tomorrow. What is the equivalent of the ‘factories’ in that economy where AI and robots can do nearly any job that humans can? What is that sliver of capability that humanity possesses which robots do not that can be employed by masses of people for economic gain? An ‘I don’t know’ but it will be there is magical thinking and not world-building.

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ESL or Bad Acting?

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My sweetie-wife introduced me to the joys of Nordic Noir, films and programs from the Scandinavian nations dealing with murder and investigations. One of our favorite shows is Arctic Circle, following the career of a police officer, Nina Kautsalo (Lina Kuustonen) in the far north of Finland as over the season she climbs from a patrol officer, through detective, to Chief of Police for the small town of Ivalo.

The current season we are watching, season 3, deals with a billionaire’s self-driving automobile being tested in the harsh Lapland winter, corporate espionage and murder, along with Nina’s continuing familial dramas. A key character in the corporate evildoers’ plot is Walter Blakeney, an American ex-special forces man who has done security work across Europe and has a quiet, heated temper.

There is not a lot of dimension to Walter’s character for any actor to play. We learn nothing about his life outside of his security work and the fact that he’s perfectly willing to do anything to achieve success. He does curse quite a lot when angry, and that has been the most jarring moment of his performance. Cursing, particularly when it’s a string of curses, is a lot like singing. There is a beat and a rhythm to it. It is pure emotion spilling out of a character unguarded and unconstrained.

But not for Walter.

His always came out with a closed, stilted cadence lacking a naturalistic flow or meter. I wondered if the actor was perhaps not a native English speaker and as such found the fast flow of angry cursing difficult to perform. It’s more common in British television to find Brits putting on an accent and trying, to varying degrees, to pass as American, and certainly this could have been the case here. It wasn’t. The actor was born and raised in America, moving to Finland in 2000. He just can’t pull off naturalistic cursing.

What a shame.

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Remaking Amadeus? — Heaven Help Us

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Until the trailer popped up in my social media feed yesterday, I had no idea that someone was remaking the amazing and award-winning film Amadeus.

Orion Pictures

For those not in the know, 1984’s Amadeus, screenplay by Peter Shaffer and adapted from his stage play, recounts a wholly ahistoric feud between the Italian composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and the brilliant but abrasive Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce.) It is ahistoric in that Shaffer himself referred to the play as a historical fantasy and used the two well-known and famous composers to explore themes of envy, genius, and madness. The 1984 film is a masterpiece, winning Oscars and many other awards. It is a beautiful work capturing the glory and despair of creativity in a manner that few cinematic projects have even attempted, and now the play is once again being adapted, this time in a mini-series for Sky Television.

 

While the cast looks quite talented, I shudder at the prospect of someone tackling a project that has already been done with such artistry and brilliance. There is little that does not work in the 1984 film, and what there is is of such small consequence as to be not worth mentioning.

A few online trolls have voiced terribly serious artistic concerns because the actor playing Mozart is not white. Opinions from closed and little minds such as these are unworthy of inclusion in discussions of art.

I hold to my two core principles when it comes to remakes. A remake should either tackle a film that was made poorly, that produced a bad film, or if it is a remake of adapted material, it should seek to hew closer to the source material, and this production is neither.

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Movie Review: Tron: Ares

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The third film in the Tron franchise, Tron: Ares, flips the script and instead of spending its time with humans trapped in an alternate universe of cyberspace dealing with self-aware computer programs, computer programs come into the ‘real’ world and deal with us.

Walt Disney Studios

The principal technological advancement in this feature is the creation of digital objects and people in reality, much like Star Trek’s replicators from the later series. The creations, however, can only last 29 minutes before evaporating painfully back into nothing. The McGuffin of the film is the ‘permanence code,’ a bit of software that would allow created material to exist sans any time limit.

Fighting to possess this software is the evil Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), grandson of the original film’s villain, seeking the power for military purposes and his own aggrandizement. Julian is countered by the movie’s protagonist, Eve Kim, CEO of ENCOM, the firm that was formerly headed by Kevin Flynn, Tron’s original protagonist. She, of course, is tortured by emotional trauma of the past but seeks the code for the betterment of humanity.

Pursuing Eve in the real world to seize the code from her is the military program Ares (Jared Leto), self-aware and slowly becoming more than his code defines.

Tron: Ares holds no real surprises. Every plot point is one that can be expected to take place, every character revelation is something well-trod in the annals of scriptwriting. The callbacks to the original film are delivered as expected, and this is a film that presented nothing in deeply shaded complexity.

All that said, sometimes all you need is a ‘popcorn movie.’ Something that makes little to no demands on the intellect and instead simply invites you to sit back, enjoy your popcorn, and lose yourself in a grand and well-executed spectacle. That is Tron: Ares. I watched the movie in 3-D, and this paid off handsomely—the visual effects were dazzling in 3-D, and the director, Joachim Rønning, resisted the urge to thrust too many things directly at the camera.

If you are looking for a bit of fun and can switch off any nagging issues of physics, then you could do worse on a Saturday afternoon than Tron: Ares.

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Movie Review: Terrified

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Please note that this review is for the Argentinian horror film Terrified and not 2016 American slasher Terrifier.

Aura Films

As part of their year-long film festival of Neo-noir and foreign horror movies, yesterday Film Geeks San Diego presented Terrified by Argentinian writer/director Demian Rugna. Expanded from a short film inspired by the director’s nightmare of something under the bed, Terrified follows a sequence of seemingly unconnected supernatural occurrences in a quiet neighborhood of an Argentinian city. Told from different points of view and from different points within the story’s timeline, though without chapter markers as in the recent Weapons, Terrified skillfully weaves the separate threads together with the use of a team of paranormal investigators, experienced and mature persons who turn out to be wholly unprepared for the nature and scope of the neighborhood’s troubles. The film ends with only vague answers to the hauntings and deaths, making the supernatural threats more intense by not giving the audience a pat reason and set of rules that would return balance to the universe.

I quite enjoyed Terrified, finding it a film that, while it presented truly horrifying images and sequences, at its heart it has a connection with humanity and community. The festival actually presented a double feature of Argentinian horror movies yesterday. The second feature was a zombie comedy. However, because it was shot on consumer-grade video with handheld cameras, it threatened to ignite a migraine, and I left shortly after it started.

Terrified is currently available on streaming and video on demand.

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Star Wars and the Protean Honor of Old, Scared Men

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Now, Star Wars is not the finest example of world building in even cinematic fiction, much less fiction in general, the retconning that took place between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menaceamounts to vandalism of the lore but there are still elements that are intriguing to look at even with the massive alteration to the original trilogy’s history.

When the first film, Star Wars, takes place the Imperial system and the emperor himself have had their grubby little paws in power for less than 20 years. Luke Skywalker is in effect the age of the Empire itself. We could map this to real-world fascists with Italy, where the OG Fascists came to power in 1922 and were still there in 1942, albeit quite diminished in their geopolitical positioning. The German would not match that run their terrible regime, lasting only about a dozen years before imploding and taking millions of lives with it.

Lucasfilm/20th Century Fox

Let’s look at the Imperial Officers presented to us as characters in Star Wars. Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin is the old man of the group we see on the Death Star with the actor about 64 years of age, the rest of his command staff, is much younger but not young men. The other officers are in their 40s, 50s, with some matching Tarkin in their 60s, career men who dedicated themselves to military service — the military service of the Old Republic now enthusiastic and dedicated officers of the Galactic Empire willing to slaughter millions with the throw of a switch.

Undoubtedly it was the easier path when the emperor came to power to not buck the system, to not stand out from the crowd, to just ‘go along for now’ with the new government, the new administration, after all this won’t last forever. The oaths to the Old Republic conveniently forgotten in the harsh light of self-preservation.

Certainly, this observation has no relevance today.

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Change My Mind Isn’t a Debate

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Charlie Kirk, who was murdered a short time ago, became one of the internet’s most posted altered memes. The only other one that comes to my mind that I have seen with such repeated frequency is the replaced subtitling of Hitler losing his temper from the fantastic piece of cinema that is Downfall, but nearly as common is the image of Charlie Kirk, mug in hand, sitting behind a portable table with a sign that reads “Change My Mind.” I really have no idea what he was challenging people to change his mind about in the original, but the endless alterations can be quite humorous.

Setting aside the funny memes of a Gorn challenging people to change its mind about Cetus III being an invasion, there’s something more important in the phrase “change my mind.” It is a challenge, not a debate. It is a statement from a person who already holds a committed position, not one from an open mind seeking honest inquiry. It is an Objectivist challenging you to prove that selfishness is not a virtue, a Scientologist challenging you to question the authority of L. Ron Hubbard’s vision, or a born-again Christian challenging you to change his mind on the existence of God.

None of this was actually about whether Charlie Kirk’s brand of conservatism yielded better governance than a more liberal philosophy—it was performance art. Kirk, it seemed to me, was like a stand-up comedian, but with all the stand-up stripped away so that all that remained was the comedian and the hecklers, and he was very good at dealing with the “hecklers.”

Dealing with hecklers is performance, not philosophy. Nothing justifies the man’s murder, and his surviving spouse’s call for forgiveness is an astounding act in the true Christian faith, but the man, like any talented liberal Hollywood actor, was a performer and not a political thinker.

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The House is Too Small

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There are a number of adjustments, all within the bounds of the Constitution, that I feel are required to pull us back from the political disaster we currently experience. The most important reforms I think are ones required for the United States House of Representatives.

The fact that there are so few competitive seats in the House and that it often has a lower turnover of members than the British House of Lords for god’s sake is a prime reason that we are in this current mental death grip between the two parties. For far too many of the Congressional Districts the only election that matters is the primary election because the voting population of the area is so skewed by the way it has been drawn that only one party ever wins the general election. That said, national legislation addressing the practice of gerrymandering is unlikely to pass constitutional review, so another approach needs to be employed: expand the House.

In 1963, about the time the nation began shifting to a primary-based system for party nominations, each member of the House represented 410,000 constituents, a ratio already more than doubled from the start of the century when it was 193,000 persons.

Because the number of members, which used to be adjusted quite often for population growth, is unchanged, today the ratio stands at about 760,000 persons represented by each member of the House.

Such large population districts make the practice of gerrymandering, particularly ‘cracking and packing’ where populations are either split up or combined into districts with overwhelming populations of a single party or voting bloc, more effective. Expanding the House would not only force a new round of redistricting but with many more districts make some of the tools for gerrymandering far less effective.

Doubling the House I think is impractical, but perhaps an increase of a quarter might suffice to help us back onto a road for more sane governance.

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The Light at the End of the Tunnel Isn’t a Train

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It took not an inconsiderate application of willpower to not dance around my desk at the office yesterday. For the last two days, actual forward progression on my Work-In-Progress, a novel of ghostly cinematic horror, has been halted while I reverse engineer backstory. I had reached the point where mysteries laid out in the text and bedeviling the characters would begin to be understood and their origins revealed, but because I was ‘pantsing’ this story when I wrote those mysteries I did not actually have the answers and explanations in my head.

Now, I do.

The last two days have been working out from what is known and what has been hinted at, the full shape of the story, why it all exists in the manner that it does, and just what the scope of the dangers truly are. This isn’t entirely ‘pulled out of my ass.’ Some of this I suspected as I wrote the novel but other bits I knew I was leaving for future me to solve, and now present me is future me, and I am so happy with my solutions that dancing was nearly irresistible.

As is so often the case, once that clarity is obtained, a full understanding of not only character and plot but theme and subtext as well, a new and better first line came to me. I don’t need a whole new first scene but now I have the sentence that opens the novel: After the summer of 1984 Dave Ludendorff never again lived a charmed life.

Paramount+

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Streaming Review The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll

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In preparation for this week’s episode of The Evolution of Horror podcast, last night I watched The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, released in the United States as House of Fright.

Hammer Studios

Yet another adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this Hammer Studios production is not very memorable. It has the same core elements of nearly every other adaptation: Dr. Henry Jekyll develops a ‘scientific’ method, in this case an injection, for separating out elements of the human mind often labeled good and evil. Experimenting on himself, he releases Hyde, and a battle ensues between the two personalities for control of the corporal body that they share, ending tragically for the good doctor.

The production reflects that distinctive Hammer look with vibrant colors that pop off the screen and a collection, particularly in the opening scene’s supporting characters, of idiosyncratic personalities.

Paul Massie plays Jekyll/Hyde, and in a twist, it is the good doctor that is presented as more hirsute and Hyde as clean shaven. Dawn Addams is Kitty, Jekyll’s wife, who is carrying on an affair with Paul Allen (I seriously could not hear that name without thinking of Microsoft), played by Christopher Lee, who was the film’s only real saving grace. Most cinematic productions of this story make a meal of the transformation in the same way most directors lavish money, time, and creativity on the creation sequence in any Frankenstein movie, but not here. I suspect this was due to a lack of funds; Hammer productions were often resource and time strapped. Here, Jekyll would find some reason to hide his face from the camera, slumping on the desk, turning away, and so on; the camera would move away and then back again to reveal Massie now presenting as Hyde or vice versa.

I can’t say this movie was very engaging. Certainly, my mind wandered, and I found myself just longing for scenes with either Christopher Lee because he always brought his best game, or Dawn Addams because she was a very attractive redhead with a most charming smile.

Overall, I am glad to have seen another Hammer film, but it is not one I shall be revisiting.

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