How Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg Distort Reality to Sell Fantasy – Rolling Stone

Gerard Julien/AFP/Getty Images; Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Jonathan Taplin has had more careers than most folks — Bob Dylan and The Band’s tour manager, film producer (the Last Waltz and Mean Streets) Wall Street entrepreneur, teacher at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. In an exclusive excerpt from his latest book, “The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto,” Taplin lays out the dangers of becoming complacent in the face of the fantasy worlds offered by the leading technocrats.

Four very powerful billionaires— Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen— have created a world where “nothing is true and all is spectacle.” These technocrats are the new American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp. 

History has proven that fantasy is both a brilliant marketing tool and a powerful political tool. In the world of politics, it allows two-thirds of the Republican Party to believe the 2020 election was stolen. In the commercial realm Musk floats the notion that we will escape our planet’s inevitable extinction by building a new civilization on Mars. Zuckerberg promises you can escape the dreary reality of your life by putting on the Meta Quest 2 VR helmet. Thiel thinks we can live to be 160 and Andreesen believes with his software powering drones and killer robots, we can fight wars without human casualties. But as a society, should we invest $20 trillion in fantasy worlds (missions to Mars, crypto currency, and the Metaverse) when real-world solutions to the critical problems of our planet are currently available? The plans for these fantasy projects have already drained billions of dollars of government and private capital.

When I was working for Bob Dylan & The Band in the 1960s, the role of much of the pop culture was oppositional to the politics of the time. Musicians sang in support of the civil rights movement, and filmmakers made antiwar movies. Movie studios have always made fantasy films. But starting in the late 1970s with Star Wars and Superman, the fantasy blockbuster began to dominate the movie business. And that success bled over into video games, music, and other forms of pop culture so that the ground was laid for the Metaverse, in which you could become a fantasy film character in your daily life. And as the fantasy/superhero genre came to dominate the movies and video games, pop culture’s countercultural role faded away.

For forty-five years (since Star Wars) the fantasy genre has dominated the entertainment industry. We have lived our lives in these fantasy worlds in increments — two hours in a dark theater watching Black Panther, three hours at a computer playing World of Warcraft, two hours at the roulette wheel in Vegas. But now we are entering an era when fantasy is 24/7. Fifty million Republicans are living the fantasy of Trump’s lies.  All the tools for creating alternate realities are here (even if they are crude), and even Musk’s computer visualizations of life on Mars or Thiel’s imagining of eternal life seem a bit more plausible, thanks to the years of collective magical thinking. I am well aware that for many citizens the reality of 2023 America is painful, and so escape (either through entertainment or drugs) has real power. But to truly be free, we must embrace reality and try and change our collective course — not run from the truth.

The rise of fantasy culture in America began with science fiction novels. All of our Technocrats immersed themselves in science fiction reading during their somewhat awkward childhoods. Musk and Thiel were bullied incessantly. Andreessen and Zuckerberg both had fits of anger that they had a hard time controlling. Both Musk and Zuckerberg cite Iain Banks’s nine-book “Culture” series as a seminal influence on their thinking. Marc Andreessen loves the hard science fiction (post-Singularity) of Charles Stross and Richard Morgan. And Peter Thiel cites The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson as one of his favorite books. All four of them also claim The Lord of The Rings series had a profound influence on them. J. R. R. Tolkien’s books are an attempt to construct new myths to help modern man deal with the moral chaos of our contemporary society. They are essentially very conservative pleas to “return “the king” to his rightful throne. There is a sense that everyone has a place in this semifeudal society and should be content with that. The four men who sit on top of our neofeudal technological order, of course, share a desire to maintain their status quo.

But the foundational science fiction texts in opposition to their vision are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The notable media critic Neil Postman wrote about the difference between the two books: 

In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. 

The rise of social networks has proven that Huxley was right and Orwell was wrong. Brave New World depicted a future in which humans don’t have much to do and end up blissed out on drugs and immersive entertainment. For Huxley’s idealized government, controlled by the plutocrats, this is an ideal situation because it prevents what Huxley called “the proles” from invading the mansions of the oligarchs. And today we are no longer dealing in fiction. 

In creating his Brave New World, Huxley drew upon the ideas of the Roman poet Juvenal, who wrote about the decline of Roman politics in the first century AD as “Bread and Circuses.” Juvenal believed that the Roman populous could be kept from revolting as long as the ruling class provided them sufficient food and lurid entertainments (lions eating Christians) to keep their minds off the sorry state of their lives. This is the role of contemporary fantasy culture, whether in movies, TV, music, video games, or gambling.

And of course, with the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the victory of fantasy over realism is complete.  Hollywood has always been considered a bastion of progressive ideology, but the reality is that libertarians, who have dominated the written science fiction genre for decades, are now dominating the big-budget film business as well.  Now the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, complete with true believer libertarian heroes like Iron Man Tony Stark, has completed the takeover. Stan Lee, the creator of Iron Man, once said that he invented Stark to piss off leftists in the 1960s. He told an interviewer: 

“It was the height of the Cold War, The readers—the young readers— if there was one thing they hated it was war, it was the military, or, as Eisenhower called it, the military-industrial complex. So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer. He was providing weapons for the army. He was rich. He was an industrialist. But he was a good-looking guy and he was courageous . . . I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like—that none of our readers would like—and shove him down their throats and make them like him.”

In an ironic tribute to our Technocrats, Iron Man writer Jon Favreau identified Elon Musk as the inspiration for the screen version of Tony Stark; Musk even had a cameo in Iron Man 2. Imagining Elon Musk on a combat mission in Afghanistan stretches all credibility, but for Musk it was a way to enhance his brand. No longer was he the PayPal nerd; he was Iron Man incarnate. Musk tweets that his politics haven’t really changed; rather, the “woke progressives” have moved further to the left. In a string of tweets announcing his support for Republican candidates, Musk said he was abandoning the Democrats who had been “(mostly) the kindness party” but were now “the party of division & hate.” He continued in a paranoid vein, claiming, “Political attacks on me will escalate dramatically in coming months.”

This has been the magic trick of the Technocrats from the start. Their vocal embrace of cultural liberalism (gay rights, cannabis legalization, diversity in the workforce) has never interfered with their transgressive ability to use every tool in the capitalist arsenal to advance their businesses. In doing so, they continually bump up against the line of illegality. As Google’s Eric Schmidt once admitted, “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” 

I produced two of Martin Scorsese’s early movies (Mean Streets and The Last Waltz), and I have to agree with his comments about the Marvel Cinematic Universe: “That’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them…is theme parks.” Marty has hit upon the crux of the matter. People who can fly through the air, see through walls, and throw ten-ton trucks down the street are not human. Novelist Saul Bellow bemoans the dilemma of those of us interested in the humanities instead of computer science in The Adventures of Augie March: “The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.” Bellow’s ironic assertion that poets, novelists, musicians, and painters will be relegated to picking out the velvet…