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.
Some very quick housekeeping,

if you'd like to hit the bell there
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and you'll find our podcast there.

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.

[Mehran] Thank you very much
for that explanation of Musk.
Before I hand the floor over to Yanis,

are there any I mean, in terms of
looking at the aggregation

and the consolidation of power

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,

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?

[Cory] 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
is part of his myth building.

Musk has bought everything
successful he's done,

from SpaceX to Tesla to Donald Trump,
another thing he's recently purchased,

and he nevertheless
characterizes himself

in the tradition 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 convert that to
a durable advantage.

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,

people whose 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
wonderful nature of digital technology

which is that new technologies
can always be plugged into old ones

so 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.

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.

The bot would go to MySpace
several times a day,

scrape all the messages waiting for you,

come back to your Facebook account,
put them in your Facebook inbox.

and then, you could reply to them and it
would send them back to MySpace.

You didn't have to worry about that.

That interoperability was
kind of par for the course

with technology and it gave new market
entrants enormous advantage

over big established incumbents.

In the memorable phrase of Jeff Bezos:
our margin is my opportunity.

If HP is selling $10,000 a gallon ink,

that's an opportunity for someone
who wants to sell $100 a gallon ink

because people wIll jump on that offer.

What we've done in the years since is
we've made IP laws so expansive

that it not only allows
these large incumbents

to ignore regulation
when it comes to privacy,

labor protections, consumer rights,

but also to wield regulation
against new market entrants

and shut them down,
stop them from taking advantage

of that latent power of technology.

So you combine these four changes,

the drawdown of competition,
the capture of regulators,

the deployment of regulation in the
form of IP against new market entrance

and the gutting of labor
power for tech workers.

We've seen it's now over 400 ,000
tech layoffs in the last 24 months

in the United States alone

and you've got a place
where people who

are no better than they
used to be, and no worse

can simply act on their worst nature

without facing any
constraint or consequence

so that you unleash the id
of someone like Elon Musk

someone who has
no principles except for

these kind of weird Muskist kind of
every man for himself and me first

principles without any constraint
and with unlimited access

to a capital market fattened on
quantitative easing and huge bailouts

and you get what we have now,

you get this weird,
manifestly unfit, paranoid

ultimately very stupid man, who's become
extremely important to our politics.

[Mehran] Thank you, Corey.

Yanis, you've heard
Corey's diagnosis.

What's your take?

[Yanis] It's so good to be
hearing and listening to Corey,

because so far, for a while now, we've
been reading each other's books,

we have been endorsing each other,
promoting each other's books.

It's very good to actually be,

even if it's only in two dimensions,
through the medium of cloud capital.

It's great, Corey, to be
on the same timeline

and not just exchanging
text messages.

Look, the only reason why we're
talking about Elon Musk

and not Jeff Bezos or Zuckerberg

presently is because
he has become

the de facto vice president
of the United States.
He purchased a very cushy position in the administration.

It was an amazing, an astonishing investment
for a couple of hundred millions,

a couple of hundred billions,
actually more.

I don't think there is a
better return to one's dollar

than what he has already achieved.
Okay, so this is why
we're talking about him.

I personally don't care at all, if he
writes an op-ed in XXX

about his support of the AFD.

I believe in free speech.

If he wants to support
poor excuses for human nature

in the German elections,
let him do it.

Personally, I don't think
this is what is worrying.

It's not just him, of course.

There is a gentleman that
you all know, Peter Thiel,

that he has also engaged with himself.

These people who have joined the
Trump campaign relatively early on.

Peter Thiel supplied the
actual vice president, right?

It was a former employee
of Peter Thiel.

All these things are perfectly legitimate
reasons to feel sick in the stomach.

when you have men, the
brolicarchy of tremendous wealth

with a very sordid history.

Don't forget the way that they've been
treating the mothers of their children,

trying to impoverish them
through the courts,

the way they've been endorsing
books that are justifying torture

and laugh at the notion of human rights,

the zillions that they are
making from government

and milk XXX that particular procurement,

the manner in which they are targeting
any government program

which doesn't enrich them,

but it does something little
in order to assist the poor.

This is all nauseating stuff.

More recently, we saw Giorgia
Meloni, the Italian Prime Minister,

visiting Miami and having
a little tête-à-tête with Elon Musk.

I can tell you that one of the reasons
why Elon Musk is so enamored of her

and doesn't want her
to be deposed unlike

Nigel Farage that for some reason,
suddenly he's in his bad books.

He wants, instead of giving
him 100 million pounds,

he wants to depose him from the
leadership of the reform UK party.

The reason is that Meloni has effectively

offered him the opportunity of having
the Italian state move away from IRIS-II,

the satellite network that the
European Union was planning to

create in competition with Starlink.

That is a reason to
be extremely worried

when you have such deals
being concocted in Mar-a-Lago

between the Italian neo-fascist
Prime Minister and Elon Musk.

I don't need to add
any adjectives to him.

But, having said all that, and let me
just add one more thing,

He's not a free speech absolutist,

he's an absolutist, he's a totalitarian,

but that doesn't mean he
cares about free speech

unless it is his own free speech.

Supposedly, he's supporting
Tommy Robinson's free speech,

and the fact that Tommy Robinson
is in prison for contempt of court,

for actually lying about
a refugee, a Syrian refugee,

in court and outside of court.

But, when Julian Assange was rotting,

rotting in the Belmarsh
High Security Prison,

Elon Musk said not one word,
because for him,

a man who is convicted of nothing

should rot in prison if he goes against
the interests of the CIA, of the NSIA,

of the Pentagon, and of Elon Musk.

So give it a rest, Elon.
You don't give a damn about freedom of
speech and freedom of expression,

especially for the free press.

But the point of...

Now I'm going to play, to
some extent, devil's advocate

in actually arguing that we need to ask
ourselves what is really new about this?

Because many people are pretending
that what is happening with Musk,

with Thiel, and with the other members
of the Brotherhood of the Old Brolicarchy,

that this is something really new.

Well, is it?

Is it really new?

I mean, yes, but not for the
reasons that most journalists

of the liberal establishment
press tell us.

John D. Rockefeller, he headed a dynasty
that makes Musk look an amateur.

Henry Ford, he bought newspapers

and canvassed and effectively forced
municipalities to rip out tramways

and to replace them with

Ford automobiles and buses.

Thomas Edison electrocuted famously,
an elephant at Coney Island

just to demonstrate that Westinghouse's

direct current electricity was dangerous,

sorry, alternating current was dangerous,
whereas Edison's direct current wasn't.

Big business has always enjoyed a revolving
door kind of relationship with government.

Remember that Bill Clinton appointed
Rubin, the CEO of Goldman Sachs,

to the to the treasury, as
his treasury finance minister,

in order effectively
to remove all and every

shackle that was, since the 1930s,
holding back Goldman Sachs

from effectively committing the crimes
that they committed immediately after
the Clinton administration
allowed them to do this.
And then, Obama brings the same person back in,

in order to bail out the same banks

after 2008 collapse
that these bankers had created.

So we have to keep all this in mind.

But here's how we can
complete this long thought.

There is one thing which is new

and that is the new form of capital
that these people actually possess.

Everybody knows that
I call it cloud capital.

It's not a produced means of production.

It's a produced means of
behavioral modification.

It's effectively a new hyper weapon,

which these broligarchs, these
cloudalists, as I call them,

or techno feudal barons or lords,
they possess, which, a Henry Ford,

a Thomas Edison, a Westinghouse,
a Rockefeller didn't.

Unless we understand
the manner in which

this new form of capital,
which I call cloud capital,

operates, and the way
that it usurps markets,

it replaces them,
it replaces profit with rent,

it effectively turns capital,
cloud capital, into a gigantic parasite,

which is a hundred times,
a million times bigger than

the organism on which
it is parasitic.

The organism is traditional capitalism

and of course, the labor force

and, of course, the surplus value
that these workers produce.

We need to understand that,
because this new hyper weapon

of the lords of big tech, of the Musks
of the world, not just Musk, Gates, Google,

don't forget them, right?
Even though they are Democrats,
they've always been in this game

and they're already in the inner circle
of Trump or they will be very soon.

It is important to hone in
on the political economy

of the phenomenon of which Musk
is simply an epi-phenomenon.

[Mehran] Thank you, Yanis.

Before I hand the floor
back to you, Corey,

a couple of questions and
comments from the chat.

Subradeep says: 'Musk is the
face of right-wing extremism.

His extension of support for British
anti-immigrant parties is a clear sign.'

Kirk Doherty says: 'An open market system
should be open to everybody

without regulations to stop these rich
boys from monopolising markets.

When I was a kid, monopolies were
broken up, now they're not.

Sandoz says: 'Musk bought Twitter
specifically to be able to

use his power to control the narrative,
he's a real life bond villain.

And Anonymous Friend notes that:

'It's a menace to U.S.
national security state,

to allow someone
to get this wealthy.'

Cory, hand it back to you,
and you'll turn it to Yanis.

Sure yeah, I think that it's important to
understand what Musk is actually doing.

So Yanis used the phrase,
behavior modification

and there's different ways of people
deploying that phrase when they

describe how tech works.

I think some of them
are quite useful.

Like, if you're a tech guy
and you understand that

people have certain activities
that are non-discretionary,

like being enmeshed in a community
or dealing with government services

or your employer, or if your
kid is going to school

and they have to use certain services,
then how you use the technology

does indeed modify
people's behavior, right?

You do in fact, force people to conduct
their affairs in certain ways

and I think that is what we talk about
when we talk about the risks of monopoly.

Historically, the case against monopoly

which, has been around
for a very long time.

People have argued about
this for a very long time.

Historically, the case for that
has been that

if the state does not regulate firms
to prevent them from getting too big,

then the firms themselves
become regulators.

They get to decide who
enters the market,

they get to decide how people
conduct their lives, and so on.

If the only way you're going to get
broadband out in the countryside

is with Elon Musk because Musk
has convinced governments

not to pull fiber out to
low-density communities,

which is a thing that he's
currently embarked upon.

It's an echo of something
he did previously,

which was to have this
kind of fake high-speed train

between San Francisco and LA

that he promised but never built

after building this
ridiculous demonstration,

which is a tiny tunnel in Las Vegas that
goes from a hotel to a convention center.

He said, soon we'll build a version
of this that's much larger

and it'll be evacuated
so it'll be frictionless

and we'll send Tesla's through it so fast
that no one will ever need the train.

And so then you starve the state
of investment in public transit

and you get to sell cars
in the same way

where we're seeing a drawdown
of investment in fiber

in places where Starlink
is very successful,

notably in Ontario where I'm from
in Canada, there's been a lot of this,

and this is coming as a result of Musk
wanting to control our behavior, right?

If he's the only game in town, when
you want to get on the internet,

and we all have to get on the internet,

that's where our bank is,
and our family is,

and our job is, and our kid's school is,

and how we interact with politics
and civics and so on,

then you have to do it through Musk.

And so if Musk makes choices
about which services are available

or which ones are prioritized
and which ones are downranked

or how the services build and
whether upload is billed at a higher rate

than download so you can
consume but not participate.

That's structuring private behavior.

It's a very powerful form
of behavior modification.

But there's another form
of behavior modification

that tech bros like to claim,

and it goes back to this
science fictional conceit,

which is that tech bros take
this warmed over, Skinnerian

behavior modification psychology,

and they declare that they can combine
it with big data and automated processes;

these days they just say with AI

and that they can use that to
bypass your critical faculties

to make you do
whatever they want.

And this is a very self-serving claim,
especially if you're selling ads, right?

If your pitch to the advertisers
is the reason you should to pay

a 40% premium to
advertise on my service

is that I built a functional mind
control ray using big data,

then that's a very great pitch.
But, everyone who's ever claimed
to have built a mind control ray

was lying to themselves
or everyone else.

It was true of Rasputin,
it was true of Mesmer,

it was true of the CIA with MKUltra,
it's true of pickup artists

and people who believe in
neuro-linguistic programming.

It's all junk.

Whatever behavior mod you get
out of a new kind of trick,

quickly regresses to the mean,

the era in which 99 cents does not
automatically equal a dollar

is long behind us, but there was
a time when you could sell someone

something for 99 cents
and they didn't realize that

you were selling them
something for a dollar.

And so these tricks regress
to the mean very quickly

and yet, you have these claims
that are quite extraordinary

being made by tech bros and sometimes
being echoed by their own critics.

This is a thing the scholar at Virginia
Tech, Lee Vinsel, calls Crit-a-Hype,

where you repeat the hype claims.

So we saw a lot of this with Musk
and his claims about automation.

Musk knows that his audience
of business leaders is insatiably

horny for firing workers

and replacing them with
machines who don't talk back.

And that's why Musk has
put so much energy

into pretending to
have built a robot.

Three years ago, he put a guy
in a robot costume on stage

and had that robot dance around on stage
and declared it to be a robot.

Last year, he put a
remote-controlled robot on stage

that was being controlled by workers
in an off-site location

and lied and said that it was
an autonomous robot bartender

that would soon make
every bartender obsolete.