Author: tworuru

“Elon Musk is kind of a hero of mine”

I wrote those words, with my own brain, controlling my own fingers. And when I wrote them, they were true.

In my defence: In days of yore, around a decade ago, it was hard to avoid the idea that Elon Musk was a kind of techno-savior. And I was quite taken up by it; perhaps not to the extent of thinking that Musk was the World’s Raddest Man, but I definitely thought that someone devoting their life to fixing climate change was worthy of a bit of hero-worship.

That particular set of words which I must reiterate I typed in communication to another human being were written as part of a pitch to an editor who – wisely – rejected my story idea. I did end up writing something similar for another publication and ended up test-driving a Tesla owned by some people who were quite lovely and ended up being fast friends, but I’m worried to look it up now. In fact, thanks to the dying internet, I can’t find it. Thank God; I wonder what I might have written about Elon in it.

Now, I think we know better. In fact, these days (in my honest opinion) Elon Musk is a narcissistic psychopathic megalomaniac who would make Ian Fleming blush with the sheer cartoonish scope of his villainy.

And yet.

He has amassed more money and power than, probably, any one person in the world. Possibly more than in the history of the world.

Let us look further, and I’m sorry but just bear with me a moment, at the current state of the United States.

There’ll be something new by the time I send this out but at the time of writing, the latest adventures of coterie of lunatics who run the USA include musing about invading Canada and Greenland (either of which would trigger NATO to attack one of NATO’s founding members, but never mind, you’re not here for the geopolitics) deporting people without trial to a slave prison in Central America, and coordinating an enthusiastic extrajudicial assassination of a Houthi leader, feat. civilian collateral damage, via a Signal group chat that included (inadvertently) a journalist.

These are not smart people.

And yet, they kind of indisputably run the United States and any number of tributary nations in a great undeclared empire, and hold the keys to an arsenal that could end the world in about half an hour.

What the hell is going on?

How is it that the richest and most powerful people on earth are also so indisputably stupid?

To find out, let’s turn back the clock a little. With the rise of this new devilry that isn’t quite the fascism of days gone but still walks and quacks like a goose-stepping, zeig-heiling duck, people are looking for parallels, and it’s from 1933 that we get this quote that you’ve probably heard some version of before:

The trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

That quote is popularly attributed to the philosopher, mathematician, logician, and pacifist Bertrand Russell, and – unusually for famous quotes that get bandied around a lot – he actually said it. It comes from this short essay, dated 10 May 1933, and the full piece is a must-read – not just for what it says about then, but how it explains now.

You’ll probably have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, I think everyone on the Internet has, but what you may not know is that science suggests that overconfidence can be a beneficial evolutionary strategy – one that goes a long way to explain the ascent of our new idiot overlords. It’s counter-intuitive; you might expect that nature would select for caution over foolhardiness, but the theory seems sound. Authors Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler lay it all out in a striking letter published in Nature. “The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars,” they understate. There is also plenty of research showing that narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths tend to exhibit overconfidence, and – even without dipping into the way that what’s left of the free political press tends to lionise sociopathic tendencies and select for those politicians who show the least shame – I think that’s got most of the modern world neatly buttoned up.

The madmen who run the world have attained such great heights not because they are smart, but because they are stupid enough to be over-confident.

That’s the bad news. The good news is: You can do it too.

I’m not saying you should become a sociopath; quite the opposite. I’m saying that you’re already more qualified and less evil than the majority of the world’s current crop of most powerful people, so you can afford to be more confident.
And the best part? You can just do it. You don’t have to have any training. There aren’t any prerequisites. You don’t even need to think. Headbutting a concrete wall so you can achieve IQ parity with the Trump administration might help, but it’s optional. You can just go forth and… be confident.

As proof: I just made all that up! Confidently! Is there any evidence that, after a lifetime of not being confident, that you can just suddenly start? I have no idea! But I am saying and doing this quite confidently where normally I’d have all kinds of qualms about evidence and truth. So it must be true. QED.

However, you may not yet have full confidence in my newfound confidence, and that’s fine. For you, and for my former unconfident self, I will spit some straight facts. In fact, this will make me even more confident. Imagine, not just being confident but confidently correct!

I just Googled “can you just decide to be confidetn”, so confidently that I hit “enter” without even correcting the typo. The evidence I find is patchy, seemingly because confidence is a somewhat subjective state. Efforts to quantify the effect of acting confidently on things like hormone levels have run headlong into the reproducibility crisis, but there does still seem to be an observable effect arising from simply acting – i.e. pretending to be – more confident, and this can lead to a greater perception of confidence among audiences, which makes you more confident, and so on. In short: if you make it, it might just be because you faked it. The current state of the science aside, I feel confident that this is one of those areas in which received wisdom will turn out to be correct, like when your nana’s nonsense about getting your nose out of a book and playing outside lest you become short-sighted turned out to be entirely true.

Besides, you can’t argue with results. Musk, Trump, Zuckerberg et al must be some of the most insecure, brittle, unmanned people ever to walk the Earth, and yet they are quite unquestionably confident. Given this, I am convinced that I will never write anything more true than the following sentence: you, reader, are brighter and better than these boors and billionaire. Your only curse is being smart enough to think you know your limits. Well, fuck that. Go on, make that call. Upload that video. Start that business. Speak at a public meeting. Run for the local council. Hell, become a member of Parliament or Congress. Don’t let confidence, or the positions of power afforded by confidence, become a trait associated only with the worst of us.

Take it back.

Go on.

I have full confidence in you.

I was in bed, scrolling through Bluesky, when I saw it. An activist and journalist I follow broke the story, moments after it happened. I told my wife.

“Are you sure? It’d be on the news sites.”

“Yeah, probably not. Then again – I’ve followed her for ages, she reported on Charlotteville, and I’ve never seen her joke about this sort of thing.”

A few minutes later it was on the news sites, too. All of them.

My immediate reaction was revulsion. Not so much at the news as the Takes which I knew were coming, as sure as night follows day. After Christchurch, everyone became a gun violence and counter-terrorism expert; after Whakaari, a surprisingly high percentage of the population turned out to be volcanologists; and during Covid, everyone online suddenly displayed hitherto unsuspected depths of epidemiological knowledge. The same segments of the population, I knew, would turn out to hold unrivalled expertise in the field of this latest Event. The media would play their part, reporting on events as they unfolded without the benefit of accuracy or context: the news version of a race to the comments in order to post “first.”

It gave me the ick enough that I put my phone in another room and spent some time installing a new stereo head deck in the car. The original, which displayed most features in 漢字 and placed the car in the middle of the ocean as revenge for having the temerity to drive outside of the geographical confines of Japan, had been some time dying. First it lost the ability to play or eject CDs, then the reversing camera stopped working. Eventually, its last remaining function – to play, without warning, from the previous owner’s vast library of Japanese country music – disappeared as mysteriously as the music sometimes arrived. We drove around with a portable speaker filling in for the sound system for, oh, about three years. It did the job but it sounded muddy and was annoyingly unwieldy to deal with.

The new head deck enabled me at last to listen to the radio – should I want to. I found I didn’t. When I did, little shots of adrenaline would make their way around my system and give me the jitters. It wasn’t good to drive to. Audiobooks and music were better.

I realised that putting my phone elsewhere and just getting stuck into a project for a while had given me a lot more mental clarity than I was used to having.

And then, as is customary, I forgot about that helpful epiphany and slowly began re-absorbing everything I saw on social media and news feeds, like a sponge soaking in the jet from a fire-hose. I wrote most the above as a draft newsletter and forgot about that too.

That Event was back on July 13, 2024. Now, a related Event is rearing its hideous head and I’m here to tell you: you don’t have to tune in.

Turn off, tune out

One of my more inconvenient scruples with this newsletter is that I try to only tell you about self-improvement things if I’ve tried them and found them to work (or, as is more usually the case, the opposite.)

This is one that works. I know because I’ve done it before and have resumed it for a while now: I don’t look at social media or news until my knock-off time, at 5:30 pm. At earliest.

I’m not worried about missing anything. I learned when I did my “dopamine detox” that if I really need to know something, someone will tell me. And a quick check-in tells me pretty much everything I need to know. I don’t have to scroll for hours.

It took me a while to get here, but it’s stuck pretty well for around a week. I plan to keep it up because it gives me something precious: time, and sanity. Every time I have managed to take serious time off the socials I’ve just kind of started getting stuff done by default. Useful things, not artifacts of toxic productivity. Long-broken car stereos get fixed. Shelves get built. Things get tidier. More work – often much more work – gets done. Newsletters get writ. My self gets improved.

It’s all very well for you to say “walk away,” Mr Privilege, but we owe it to those less fortunate to bear witness to their suffering.

Yes! It is important to face the truth that our sociopathic rulers create endless horrors, and to listen to those affected. Not being subjected to horrors is indeed privilege, not to mention the myriad other advantages I get by default, thanks to being a white man in a society created for white men. My aim is to use what I have, to help where I can. Being welded to my phone, gawping at the horrors, isn’t helping anyone.

Caveats

This isn’t being written to make anyone feel guilty. There’s enough of that out there without me adding to it. As often, this is (selfishly) written as the results of an experiment with a sample size of one: me. As always, your mileage can and will vary. Consider the following:

“I’m a creator. My income depends on me posting my work on social media, and engaging so people will see it.”

Then carry on, comrade, and post up a storm. We could all use more art in our feeds. Posting isn’t my gripe; neither is engaging. My problem is with scrolling. Maybe I’ll make it up into a design, riffing on something highly culturally current like Game of Thrones. A Kraken like the sigil of House Greyjoy, tentacles wrapped around a human brain, imposing text declaring: We Do Not Scroll.

“I’m a journalist. My job is to take samples from the firehose, so I can tell others what’s important.”

You’re doing God’s work and we thank you for it. Of course, the best journalism is usually engaging sources and trawling through documents and asking questions no-one else is, not duelling brainworms on Twitter, but you knew that anyway. We need people who make sense of madness, and I’ll still be reading your stuff. You couldn’t stop me if you tried.

“I’m a member of the X #resistance. My job is to find the worst things said by the worst people on earth and make sure as many people see them as possible.”

Please stop. If all you’re doing is trawling for Bad Shit and signal-boosting it then you’re not aiding; you’re abetting. The below post sums it up well, and suggests an alternative.

reminder: this is the point of the barrage of batshit appointmentsif you are a tiny bit freaked out by each of them it will add up to “too freaked out to do anything about anything”pick ONE thing at a time to be upset about, decide what action to take on it, then follow through, repeat

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— Yell In a War (@jelenawoehr.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 4:20 PM

(I found that while taking a quick Bluesky break while writing this article. I am aware of the irony.)

Authoritarians and social media oligarchs have something in common: they want you scrolling. They want you anxious. They want you despairing. They want you paralysed. They want you inactive, while thinking you’re doing activism, endlessly thumbing your distraction rectangle in between ads, and it’s this behaviour that I believe is a problem, if not The Problem. I am sure there are people for whom lengthy doom-scrolling sparks action, or who genuinely enjoy swimming in the sea of insanity. If you are one of them, good for you. Really. Sadly, I am not. I do better – almost absurdly better – and I do much more when I am not jacked to my eyeballs on digital jenkem. You might too.

So if there is something happening today – and whenever you read this, it will be today, and there will be something horrible happening – and you felt like you needed permission to log off or do something else for a while: this is it.