"Elon Musk Is Convinced He's the Future. We Need to Look Beyond Him," is the title of an op-ed by Canadian tech-writer Paris Marx. The article featured in Time, just one year after the seminal magazine named Musk its Person of the Year.
In the article, Marx contends that our society's focus on singular tech billionaires, like Musk, is standing in the way of realizing a better collective future, specifically when it comes to the future of transport.
Marx is the author of "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation," a book in which they endeavor to dismantle once vaunted solutions to the carbon crisis, like ride-sharing, personal scooters and even electric vehicles.
Neither Tesla
"A much more sustainable alternative to mass ownership of electric vehicles is to get people out of cars altogether-that entails making serious investments to create more reliable public transit networks, building out cycling infrastructure so people can safely ride a bike, and revitalizing the rail network after decades of underinvestment," they write.
"But Musk has continually tried to stand in the way of such alternatives."
Specifically, Marx cites Musk's self-confessed effort to derail California's high-speed rail project by floating the notion of the hyperloop, a project in which singular capsules were to be propelled underground at speeds of up to 700 miles per hour.
"He [Musk] has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options. The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now," they write, referring to the Las Vegas Hyperloop, an oft critiqued project of Musk's Boring Company.
Currently, the Las Vegas Hyperloop only manages traffic beneath the city's convention center, shuttling people around in Tesla's at speeds limited to 35 miles per hour. This reality deeply contrasts with Musk's much more ambitious initial vision.
Such differences between Musk's promised vision and reality are central to Marx's case against the figurehead and the growing skepticism surrounding him.
Recently Musk has been subject to a spate of bad press regarding his turnabout during the Twitter
New York Magazine recently published a back-to-back series of articles, all largely critical of Musk.
The introductory piece, written by Lane Brown, referred to Musk as "a master of atoms, bits, and bullshit who begs our awe, skepticism, and irritation in ever-shifting proportions and whose record-breaking fortune may be only the tenth-most-interesting thing about him."
Such disillusionment is inevitable, according to Marx, who writes that Musk's grandiose visions of Mars colonization and brain-controlled computers ultimately stem from the tropes of science fiction, linking this notion to the ideas of late sci-fi master Ursula K Le Guin.
Le Guin dismissed much of modern sci-fi, with its obsession with singular figures pursuing personal visions of the future, as "imperialistic." According to Le Guin, "science fiction is not actually about the future; it's about us and our thoughts and our dreams," Marx writes.
"For years, Elon Musk sold us fantasies to distract from the reality of the future he's trying to build, and to get people to accept his growing belligerence. What we really need right now is not more cars, colonization dreams, and technokings, but a collective project to improve the lives of billions of people around the world while taking on the immediate challenges we face regardless of whether it generates corporate profits. That's something Elon Musk can never deliver."
