E105: Musk’s Move Into Politics: Yanis Varoufakis and Cory Doctorow on Fighting Billionaire Control

[Mehran] Hello.
hello, hello and welcome.

I'm Mehran Khalili.

We are DiEM25, a radical political
movement for Europe.

And this is another live discussion
featuring subversive ideas

you won't hear anywhere else.
And tonight, we're talking Elon Musk,
the world's richest human.

Yes, Musk is now reshaping
politics in troubling ways,

using his vast wealth and control over
technology to influence elections

and public discourse.

Two years ago, he bought
X, formerly Twitter,

placing himself at the centre
of the news via his own account,

the largest on the platform,

but it wasn't until last year that
Musk got deeply involved in politics,

jumping around on stage
with Donald Trump
and injecting more than
a quarter of a billion dollars

into the man's campaign
to help to get him elected.

Musk has now, in recent weeks,

been throwing grenades into
Europe's political mainstream,

supporting an anti-migrant,
hardline nationalist party

in Germany ahead of
elections there,

and calling for the resignation
of the British Prime Minister.

So all of this highlights the alarming
intersection of tech and political power.

So how did we get here?

I mean, wealthy elites have always

shaped public discourse and policy,

but why does it feel now,

like we've broken through
to a fresh level of hell?

And of course, the question
we always ask here on DMTV,

how can we push back against it?

To answer these questions, we've got
two people that have coined the terms

that we often use to describe
the mess that we're in,

technofeudalism, cloud capital,
and then shitification.

And that's, of course, our own
Yanis Varoufakis.

And I'm delighted to welcome to
DiEMTV for the first time,

Cory Doctorow,
the science fiction author,

activist, and journalist,
and DiEM25 member.
And of course, we have you,
you out there.
If you've got thoughts, comments, rants,

something that you really think
should be said in this debate

then put it in the YouTube chat
and we'll put it to our panel.
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Let's kick it off with Cory.

Cory, how did we get here?

[Cory] Well, I'll tell you how I got here,

my first encounter with Elon Musk.

So I had a friend and colleague who's a
science fiction writer named Ian Banks,

who is a legendary
socialist science fiction writer.

And one day on Twitter,
I saw a tweet from Elon Musk

saying he considered
himself a Utopian socialist

in the mold of Iain Banks.
And Iain had died not that long before,

and I said, I knew Iain, and he was
an ardent trade unionist

and he would not
have been happy about

being identified with
a man who's in trouble

with the National Labor Relations Board
for virulent union busting.

And Musk came back and he said:

Well the thing is that in Iain Banks's
famous culture novels

there are no trade unions

and that's why I think I can
consider myself in his mold.

And I said: You know,
with all due respect

Iain Banks culture novels
are set in a future

where faster than light ships

that hold a trillion people

and are piloted by galactic scale super
intelligences roam the galaxy,

the fact that there's no
trade unions in that world

tells us nothing about whether
they need to be here.

And he said: Well, if Banks
could have seen

the degree of automation in a Tesla factory,

he would have not expected me
to unionize my factories either.

And I said: You know, again,

there is a world of difference
between faster than light travel

and eking out marginal gains
in the production of cars.

And then, he blocked me and
called me an enemy of humanity.

He is one of these guys that,
as a science fiction writer,

you run into as immortalized in
that great tweet,

you know, as a science fiction writer,

I've written a novel about
the torment nexus

so that you don't
create the torment nexus.

Tech bro, I have created
the torment nexus.

As William Gibson always says:

Cyberpunk was a warning,
not a suggestion.

Whenever I think about Musk,

I feel some personal responsibility

because there is a kind
of cadre of tech billionaires

who've read our dystopias and
mistaken them for business plans.

I always come back to this great
quote from A Fish Called Wanda:

Aristotle was not Belgian,

the principle of Buddhism is
not every man for himself,

the London Underground
is not a political movement,

these are all mistakes,
I looked them up.

When I hear Elon Musk
talk about his views

and how they connect to
world historical phenomena,

to the literature he's metabolized,

to the ideologies he claims to espouse,

most notably free speech absolutism,

something I have some connection to

given my long association with
speech fights on the internet
through the Electronic Frontier Foundation,

I think of him as being one of these people

who has absorbed just enough of
things that are kind of in his orbit,

that he can deploy them tactically

to justify what is the
ultimate view of Musk,

which is Wilhoit;s view
of conservatives,

that conservatism has one tenet,

that there are in-groups whom
the law protects but does not bind,

and out-groups whom the law binds
but does not protect.

And I think that is Muskism in a nutshell there.

Thank you very much for that explanation of Musk.
Are there any kind of, before I hand the floor over to Yanis, any any sort of, I mean, in terms of
looking at the aggregation and the consolidation of power between big tech and that big tech
has got to this point where we're in this situation today with Musk,

can you take us, like, give us a lightning speed?

Like, how is it, because it's shifted a lot in the last eight years as well.

So if you can give us that background just to bring us up to speed to 2025?

I mean I think like Trump, Musk is best understood as a result and not a cause.
That there's a kind of sociopathic billionaire shaped hole in the world, someone who can inveigle
sweetheart government contracts, someone who is better at PR than he is at engineering, someone
who is capable of abusing the law to force people who actually invented things that he subsequently
bought to describe
him as the inventor as part of his myth building.
Musk has bought everything successful he's done, you know, from SpaceX to Tesla to Donald Trump,
another thing he's recently purchased, and he nevertheless characterizes himself in the
tradition of of all these tech billionaires is a self-made man.
When we decided that we would no longer enforce policies that prohibit predatory acquisitions,
that prohibit lock-in, that give a special advantage to incumbents over new entrants, we created
a kind of winner-take-all lottery where whatever mediocrity scrambled to the top of the heap,
you know, stabbing people in the back
on their way most quickly, could then, you know, convert that to a durable advantage.
You know, the difference now between now and then is not that in the old days when tech was better,
that we had better people leading it.
It was that they faced more constraint.
They had to worry about competitors because our policies promoting competition were not yet
completely destroyed.

They had to worry about regulators because they hadn't fully captured the regulatory apparatus.
they had to worry about their workers leaving because tech workers were then the princes of
labor you know people whose uh labor was in such short demand and whose skills were were so hard
to find in the market that they could just tell their bosses to f off whenever
their bosses asked them to do things and they had to contend with uh you know wonderful nature
of digital technology which is that new technologies can um always be plugged into old ones
so you know when when Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, he had this billionaire problem.

His billionaire problem was called Rupert Murdoch, who owned another service called MySpace.

Everyone who wanted social media was already on MySpace.

And it was a big lift to ask people to leave all their friends behind and go to Facebook.

And rather than make them ask that, he just gave them a bot.

And you logged into Facebook, you gave it your MySpace login and password.