SpaceX, AI, and the Opium of Capitalism
The big move is not to win at capitalism; it is to be capital itself.
“We’ll have problems politically if there’s not enough growth.”
—Peter Thiel, 2016
“Nastier World”
While Karl Marx’s phrase about religion—“the opium of the people”—is often quoted out of context, the surrounding text is necessary to understand its full meaning. It was not a criticism of religious people, although Marx was an avowed atheist. By “opium,” he meant its 19th-century use as an analgesic to relieve suffering, not just its recreational use.
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”
—Karl Marx, 1844, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
Marx saw religion as the result of suffering, not the other way around. People who have no hope in the practical world need something impractical, or supernatural, to salve their pain. To Marx, religion was a way for the masses to console themselves in the face of destitution.
But now Marx’s theory has come back around to affect the very capitalists he spent a lifetime criticizing. While I’m no expert on Marx, much less a Marxist, I do think he had a diagnosis of capitalism that was perhaps premature but seems to be bearing out in many of the ways he predicted.
There is an essential truth about modern capitalism that gives it a finite life: it is based on growth. Without growth, you can technically still have a system based on capital but it looks nothing like the existing economy. As it currently stands, the true utility of capital is just a tool to seek out more capital.
Capitalism is not a theory exactly. It has no founder, although endless theories have been layered over it. It was a system that emerged from a colonial era, when the chief competitive drive was expansion, and resources were readily available to be extracted through labor, including that of slaves. Capitalism was purpose-fit over several centuries to optimize for growth as a competitive advantage.
But the signs that growth is running out of time as a good approximation of a healthy company, economy, or nation are clear. We are running up against physical limits across the board—in energy, population, and environment. The planet simply can’t handle much more human expansion. The problem is not that no form of improvement remains possible; it is that the existing financial regime has already priced near-infinite growth into the present.
This presents a major dilemma for capitalists: Where is the growth going to come from? This anxiety about the next “frontier for growth” is a driving motivation for billionaires. It is a palpable fear that their time may be nearing an end.
“What I worry about is… we don’t have enough growth… In a world without growth, everything becomes a zero sum game. And that becomes a much nastier world.”
—Peter Thiel
But a “nastier world” for whom? Thiel says “in order to get ahead” the pie needs to keep getting bigger. But what if it wasn’t a given that getting ahead is necessary for happiness? This thought never occurs to elites because it’s like asking a hammer what it would be like if there were no nails.
Opium for Capitalists
Capitalists are like anyone else; they have fears about their own worth, status, and relevance. In my view, SpaceX and AI are different ways for people who rely on growth but are afraid it’s no longer working to console themselves.
SpaceX gives a new life to old colonialist, extractivist ideas by promoting space as an infinite opportunity for expansion. On the other hand, “AI” claims to provide “growth” in the opposite way, by promising to reduce the cost of labor to a number approaching zero over time, thus growing profits at the expense of human needs.
Both of these core premises are false.
While there are legitimate ways to expand into space that make sense to humanity and generate profits, that is not what Musk is selling. He is selling opium for capitalists, not a business.
The way the market has treated SpaceX, by granting it all kinds of exceptions to the rules, and by ignoring Musk’s pathological racism and interference in politics, is not rational. It is the sign that it sees SpaceX as a kind of savior for its problems—such a necessary part of the future that it’s worth forcing what amounts to a $3 trillion NFT for Musk on the market.
When you look at the SpaceX S1 filing with the SEC, which reads much more like a pitch deck for a video game than a $2 trillion financial disclosure, you can see why it was so appealing to growth-hungry capitalists. The filing doesn’t even try to justify itself; it just says whatever is most exciting to a system that needs a way for the numbers to go up. For example, the company concludes it has a total addressable market (TAM) of more than $28 trillion, comparable to the entire GDP of the United States.
It is opium for the capitalists. It is science fiction as an economic pacifier.
Meta-phor
The AI industry presents a different premise to solve the same growth problem—that humans are a disposable and replaceable component of the economy. This idea, and its impact on people, is perfectly illustrated by a recent massive change at Meta. After a huge layoff, many of the best software engineers were sent to a “gulag” where they were forced to train AI all day, rather than do any software engineering.
Everyone else in the company was forced to allow themselves to be monitored all day and used as AI training data.
Zuckerberg’s explicit goal is to extract the “intelligence” of his own employees to train an AI which would ultimately replace them. It is a dystopian, antihuman fantasy born of fear: the fear that he’s running out of ways to grow his mammoth social media company, and of being left behind in the big game of broligarch Survivor.
There is another component to the recent mania that I believe has skyrocketed SpaceX, a rocket company worth perhaps $75 billion by normal valuation metrics, to forty times that much on the market. The same opiate that works on elites also works on retail investors.
Reactionary Theology
“The computer turns out to be the Eye of the reinstated Sun God.”
—Lewis Mumford, 1970, Myth of the Machine
Over the weekend, Donald Trump humiliated America by hosting a gladiatorial circus on the White House lawn, and by surrendering to Iran, a nation which had been seen as an extremist pariah state before Trump’s war. While Trump has not officially released the terms of the deal with Iran, the details are out and they are shocking.
After spending upwards of $200 billion on the war, Trump agreed to some $500 billion in total compensation to Iran. He agreed to lift sanctions on its oil, and to effectively pull out U.S. military presence in the region. And he received almost nothing in return.
This was the apotheosis of Trump’s failure—a crass spectacle desecrating numerous symbols of American democracy combined with the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.
Nevertheless, the stock market soared, and SpaceX continues to rise. On Monday alone, Elon Musk’s SpaceX stock went up more than the net worth of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.
Just as SpaceX and AI are opiates for billionaires and banks, they are also an opiate for people conditioned to being a follower of a group with waning energy, like QAnon, MAGA, or crypto. There is a major crossover, especially on Elon Musk’s X—which is owned by SpaceX—from the increasingly disillusioned Trump-MAGA universe to the techno-utopian fascism of Musk.
This is a kind of reactionary theology to a world that feels increasingly limited to a wide swath of people, many of whom have held on to Trump as the avatar of their grievances for a decade. Those people feel betrayed and hopeless. In Musk, they see a kind of Tony Stark who promises to make up for their disappointments with rockets and endless money.
All of it, of course, is just opium for retail investors.
The Big Move
The mania around SpaceX and AI is a reaction to fear—by capitalists of the end of elite, white male dominance, and by the people of a world increasingly antagonistic to their existence.
The theology of accelerationism, be it in the form of neo-Nazis like Atomwaffen and O9A, the “Dark Enlightenment,” or the SpaceX IPO documents, is about converting growth into a malignancy that will break the system that contains it. Accelerationism is not just about speed. It’s about going so fast you permanently escape the cops.
SpaceX is not about winning the game of capitalism, it is about being capital. It is about replacing the complex order of a free market and liberal democracy with the simple order of an authoritarian, techno-fascist, white ethnostate controlled by an elite class through AI.
The big move that appears to be well underway is to create a vertically integrated alternate reality that parasitizes the real world until it becomes so large that it swallows and replaces the existing system. With Donald Trump in increasingly obvious mental and physical decline, the rush by the PayPal Mafia to capture his splintering MAGA base before it dissipates is clear. The final transfer is not from Trump to Musk; it is from public government to private infrastructure.
Peter Thiel tells a story about Elon Musk’s attitude towards America. About 15 years ago, Musk described the aerospace industry as “fat cows in a grassy field” and if Musk “ever got in there, there was just going to be a bloodbath.”
Musk’s ambitions have now extended far past a slaughter of American companies in aerospace. The “fat cow” is the entire financial system. He’s jumped the fence and the “bloodbath” has started.
The quest for never-ending growth at the expense of the Earth and the people who live on it marks a phase transition in humanity. The current capitalist system has been warped to such an extreme that it can no longer even pretend to be compatible with liberal democracy.
We Earthlings have a choice. We can take a hard look at our lust for eternal growth and build a new system that prioritizes a sustainable planet and a healthy population, or we can submit to the will of entrenched capitalists who want to extract all the resources from Earth, including human intelligence, for themselves.
“Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion.”
Hannah Arendt, 1951, Origins of Totalitarianism
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It isn't capitalism per se ,but the insatiable need of men for status. Money to gainpower, power to gain status.
If it weren't for the ability to pool assets (capital) there would not be any U.S. of A. It all started when a group of wealth London merchants and lesser nobility pooled their assets and prevailed upon King James to grant them a charter to adventure forth and exploit the territory that stretched from the lost colony of Roanoke to Maine, which they called Virginia, and thus a private enterpise was established, the base of which they called Jamestown. And it remained a capitalist adventure until 1624 when James revoked the charter and made it a royal colony.
All the technological advances that we enjoy would not have happened were it not for capitalism, and (sadly) war.
The problem is man, his need for status, for domination. Which is the real motivation behind religion, "family values", "pro life", and which came to fruition as MAGA,and their avatar Trump.
I upgraded to a paid subscription after reading this post from you. One of the best posts ever!