Super-villains, Elon Musk -- same difference?

[jducoeur]

One of the shows I've been watching recently is Stargirl (on HBOMax). I finished season one yesterday, and wound up thinking about similarities between the resolution of that story, and the past week.

High concept of the show: this is a superhero story, loosely inspired by Infinity, Inc and the like. Ten years after the death of most of the Justice Society of America, their teenage heirs (literal and figurative) group together to fight the Injustice Society. It's mid-grade Berlanti-verse: decent and fun, but kind of lightweight. (Rather like the Flash, but more by and for teens.)

The rest of this is, necessarily, spoilers.

The central plot of the season is that the Injustice Society want to take over the world, of course. (Okay, not the entire world -- just the American midwest -- but close enough.) They are going to do this via a device that will brainwash everyone across about half of the US to think the way they want. So far, so typical.

Late in the season, our heroes manage to hack into the bad guys' computer, and find the manifesto for their dastardly plan, which features sub-sections like:

• Fight Climate Change
• Eliminate Racism
• Provide Universal Healthcare

There's a bit of a mental record-scratch for our heroes, as they realize that they agree with every single one of the villains' goals. Our lead villain, Icicle, has been saying all season that he wants to create a new, better America: the subversive part is that he actually means it. His first wife died because the system failed him, so he wants to build a world where that doesn't happen to people any more.

Of course, the story doesn't wrestle too much with the moral ambiguities there. If it wasn't bad enough that they are planning to brainwash a hundred million people, it becomes clear seconds later that the process will kill a quarter of them. The villains regard that as acceptable losses, clarifying that yes, they're still the bad guys.

And the thing is, reality is doing a nice job of echoing fiction this week.

Yes, Elon Musk is pretty clearly an arrogant asshole with a bad case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome and too much money. But I think he's also sincerely trying to save the world. Tesla was pretty explicitly about global warming, and he's always been explicit that the purpose of SpaceX is to colonize space (on the theory that humanity on Earth is going to trash itself); he's probably telling the truth that he thinks he can save the public square by improving communication.

But even if his ideals are good (which they probably are, although he's deep in denial about the downsides of his techbro fantasies), and even if he actually has a realistic plan to achieve them (which he probably doesn't), his means this week have been bordering on super-villainy.

I mean, yes -- of course he was going to fire the CEO who he has been fighting with. But in the same breath he fired the lawyers who were already doing the free-speech work he claimed to favor. And when people turned against him, he turned around and insta-fired many of the people who built and have been running the company. (And from the sound of things, maybe many of the wrong ones, for the wrong reasons -- rumors that he judged engineers based on their LoC productivity are horribly plausible.)

I've never loved Twitter, and I'm not actually sad to see it immolating itself in a dumpster, but I didn't want it to go like this. A lot of people, many of who have been sincerely trying to make Twitter into a useful and not-too-toxic tool, have been hurt because an arrogant villain was too focused on his ideals, and appears to consider the human cost to be acceptable losses. That is sad.

And for the record -- if in six months you see the roof of Twitter's HQ split apart and a giant antenna come out of it, either find the nearest superhero or run.

Comments

[alexxkay]

Two thoughts:

1) "The ends justify the means" was always false. Means *are* ends.

2) So Stargirl is one of the nigh-infinite batch of modern media in which the people who have a liberal agenda are actually Eeeeevil. This trope is, IMAO, Eeeeeevil.

[metahacker]

Amen.

[jducoeur]

2) So Stargirl is one of the nigh-infinite batch of modern media in which the people who have a liberal agenda are actually Eeeeevil. This trope is, IMAO, Eeeeeevil.

To be fair, the villain's liberal agenda is on-screen for a whopping fifteen seconds -- up until then, the safe assumption had been that they were very ordinary fascists. (And really, most of them clearly are pure power-tripping fascists: there's no reason to believe any of them except Icicle actually have any ideals. The rest follow him mostly because he's proven himself the deadliest of the bunch, quite willing to kill anyone who steps out of line.)

I disagree pretty strongly about your "nigh-infinite" point there: modern mainstream TV fiction (ignoring Fox and its ilk, and specifically ignoring the "news") do tend to be fairly progressive on average. Even shows with traditionally reactionary topics (eg, The Rookie, which I'm rather fond of) are generally presenting a mildly progressive fantasy of how things could be if the world didn't suck quite so much. That's a good thing, and should be acknowledged. The "liberals are secretly evil" tropes exists, but it's fairly unusual on average, and far less common than the "conservatives are just as evil as they look" one.

But Berlanti is essentially making your first point: that it doesn't matter what your ideals are, evil means are evil. That's worth stating, and I disagree with your framing. Current fiction most often has easy right-wing villains; IMO it's important to recognize that you can have progressive ideals and still pursue them in bad ways. That certainly happens plenty around the world in reality, and I'm always dismayed to see folks on the left claiming that those dictators can't possibly be evil, since they're "socialist".

[danabren]

Musk may have delusional claims of wanting to make the world a better place, but he blew it when he used technicalities to evading helping with world hunger. Eff that guy.