Terminal Space Capitalism
“…a person’s access to power should be in inverse proportion to their desire for it.“
—Iain M Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture, 1994
The Culture is a space-faring, hybrid human-AI civilization described in a series of ten books over 25 years (1987-2012) by socialist science fiction author Iain M Banks. The series has been recommended by a number of prominent people driving the AI industry including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and most prominently Elon Musk.
Since the upper echelons of the AI industry maintain that the Culture should be seen as a positive model for the future of human-AI evolution, it’s worth understanding what they may have in store for us. And it also provides a surprising amount of insight into Musk’s increasingly extreme behavior.
In short, it appears Elon Musk is not modeling his empire on the Culture; he’s modeling it on the bad guy from one of the books, Surface Detail (2010).
Passengers, Pets, and Parasites
In the Culture’s hybrid human-AI society, people live on ships run by superintelligent AIs known as Minds. According to Banks, humans “have a status somewhere between passengers, pets and parasites.”
Many of the humans are connected to the Minds via brain implants known as a “neural lace” and are essentially free to do what they want on the ships. However, humans have only peripheral influence on big decisions.
Despite this power dynamic, neural lace modification is widely accepted practice in the Culture. But in Excession (1996) an AI Mind ship called Grey Area confides to a human with an implant:
A more exquisite and economical method of torturing creatures such as yourself has yet to be invented.
In June 2016, Elon Musk announced “a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines.” He started his brain chip company Neuralink shortly thereafter—and announced it in 2017.
Banks describes the Culture’s form of governance as “socialism within, anarchy without,” meaning there is no central sovereign over the Minds, but within each Mind the society is effectively egalitarian—a scenario only made possible by science fiction post-scarcity economics.
How much Musk truly believes this is unclear, but regardless—it is simply Banksian fan fiction.
The Hells of Joiler Veppers
In Elon Musk’s recommended volume, Surface Detail (2010), the Culture confronts a very different civilization, the Sichultian Enablement, which represents what you could call terminal space capitalism. It is advanced technologically, but it is a cruel society with vast wealth disparity including indentured, hereditary slavery, widespread corruption, and a punitive system wielding a horrific threat.
The Sichultians can be seen as a warning that advanced technology does not guarantee a moral civilization.
For example, Hells are digital prisons where the uploaded minds of people are indefinitely tortured. Civilizations throughout the galaxy own these Hells for different reasons, but the Culture finds this practice abhorrent and sets about trying to end it.
They encounter a sadistic Sichultian media oligarch named Joiler Veppers who lives with effective impunity. Despite having more wealth than he could ever spend, Veppers remains obsessed with obtaining more—while enslaving, abusing, and murdering the people who serve him.
Spoiler alert: It turns out that in addition to his media empire, Veppers also owns most of the infrastructure—the data centers if you will—where the Hells are operated. He has gained some significant part of his wealth by enabling the torture of disembodied minds. Ultimately, Veppers arranges to destroy his own technology to try and scapegoat the Culture, interfere with an interstellar war, and protect himself.
The Veppers of Earth
Now consider the totality of what Elon Musk believes he’s building—and what the stock market is directly funding at a total valuation of $3.5 trillion+:
SpaceX and Starshield: strategic communications and military dependence.
X and xAI: (dis)information distribution and computation.
Tesla and Optimus: attempted automation of labor.
Neuralink: physical neural connections between people and computers.
Starmind: proposed orbital computing and stellar-scale expansion of “superintelligence.“
In September, Musk was given an official role at the “War Department” co-leading “Project Meridian” to define the “future of war.” The other two leads: Newt Gingrich and Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey.
Elon Musk may have at one time identified more with the peace-loving Culture in the books, but he has progressively moved towards becoming more like the Joiler Veppers of Earth. The parallels between the fictional mogul and the real one are well worth pointing out, especially given his deeply disturbing moves just in the last week.
First, just as Veppers interfered in interstellar warfare, Elon Musk is currently interfering in international warfare by throttling Starshield speeds in Ukraine for over a week and counting. This has contributed to dozens of Ukrainian deaths and hundreds of injuries. While this appears to be a cooperative project of Musk and the White House to force a Ukrainian surrender, nevertheless it’s Musk who controls the satellites—a man no one elected to anything.
Second, just as Veppers was a media mogul, with the purchase of Twitter Musk became one as well. However, Musk is not done with his media ambitions. He appears to be bailing out the Ellisons’ attempt to corner the media. The merged Paramount and Warner Bros. company, Skydance, is under strain due to Larry Ellison’s over-exposure to AI, but Musk has already reportedly invested $1 billion—with another $7-9 billion potentially lined up.
Larry Ellison also invested $1 billion in Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
This unites the broligarchy’s control over the media in a way that should be chilling to anyone who values free speech.
Third, Musk has started to be worryingly clear about his anti-democratic, dictatorial ambitions. His messianic personality is emerging in ways that should be alarming to anyone who values their own liberty.
Musk has spent over $450 million to try to elect Republicans, including $158 million to the Senatorial Leadership Fund which handed it to Ken Paxton’s SuperPAC in Texas—where Musk moved SpaceX.
Musk has also been on a rampage for the last several days, furious over the idea that Democrats might investigate him if they regain Congress.
“Live by the sword, die by the sword” says the richest man to the Democratic Party.
Not content to stop there, however, Musk threatens an imagined group of puppetmasters “pulling the strings.” Like Trump, his paranoia and conspiratorial worldview is deepening the closer we get to the midterms. A potential loss of impunity if a Democratic Congress is seated is existentially dangerous to both of them.
Endgame
Perhaps most worrisome is Musk no longer hides his desire to end liberal democracy in America and around the world. Like Peter Thiel—and Joiler Veppers—Elon Musk clearly feels that democracy is incompatible with his freedom.
For example, Musk has been increasingly interacting with one of the most virulent opponents of democracy over the last two decades, eugenicist “hyper-racist” Nick Land, whose handle on Twitter is “Xenocosmography.”
Along with Curtis Yarvin, Land is a co-founder of the Dark Enlightenment, an explicitly anti-democratic project which seeks to turn America into a feudalist corporate surveillance state with a CEO-king.
Below, Land says “Make Letters of Marque great again,” to which Musk says “Yes.”
Letters of Marque was the practice of using “privateers” aka pirates to attack ships of a foreign country America was at war with. It was abandoned in the 19th century because it created more problems than it solved. But Musk and Land are not suggesting it be used on warring foreign countries; they are suggesting bounties be used against private companies in America.
The day before, Land had suggested the solution to the problem of Musk being investigated by Democrats is to “criminalize the organization”—just the way Hitler made Germany a one-party state.
Remarkably, despite everything he’s doing to take apart America and the world order, Musk is still platformed by some mainstream journalists as if his ideas should be taken at face value. This week, Musk pushed for a future relationship with AI just like the Culture.
Walter Isaacson: “And does that mean humans should always be in control?”
Musk: “…I mean if the AI was awesome, you’d say like, ‘Maybe the AI should be in control, you know?’”
It reflects a rare kind of psychology which can feel simultaneously justified in making life and death decisions over human beings in a foreign country, but also feels that a machine will one day make him feel like a “house cat.”
“We would be so far below them in intelligence that we would be like a pet. Like a house cat.” —Elon Musk, 6/1/16
The common theme in either of Musk’s scenarios, whether he’s the human sultan of an American Sichultian Enablement, or the hybrid merged Mind of an imaginary starship, the majority of humankind is out of the loop—disempowered and dependent.
And in the end, isn’t that what it’s always about—people who need other people to voluntarily give up their own value? Every abusive relationship and every cult leader says a version of the same thing:
You are not worthy.
I am worthy.
If you give yourself up, I will make you worthy like me.
This is perhaps the biggest lie ever told, because it gets told over and over.
Musk knows that some people believe that since the “market” thinks he’s a genius, he must be. But, like Trump, he knows if he just tells a lie often enough—like he’s the “founder” of Tesla, or that he will be going to Mars—people will believe it. He relies on the aura of being a “visionary” and a genius just because he’s worth a lot of money.
But the man who created the world from which Elon Musk plagiarized many of his “visions” had this to say about the “market.”
“The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is … intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter … and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.”
—Iain M Banks, A Few Notes on the Culture
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Musk is slightly more out to lunch than Hitler. Cyborg manchild Hilter.
I hope Americans wake up to how quite seriously dangerous and megalomaniacal, driven, this guy is. Your article presents him as he actually is, thank you very much for it Jim. These tech guys are not fooling around. They need to be stopped.