I saw that clip of the Tesla Tunnel in Las Vegas randomly pop up on twitter and it has made me utterly despondent. Not just because of the obvious reasons — it's a stupid idea that happened because we reward people for having stupid ideas if they’re rich enough, but because it means they’ve won. There will never be anything new built. Future generations will have no great work, no defining creation. The future itself is being dismantled.
The libertarian philosophy that has so completely won has one possible result: What we have but worse. We have put people so devoid of imagination in charge that we cannot even consider anything else. A tunnel! A tunnel but worse! A tunnel whose primary function is as an advertisement for an aging billionaire. An aging billion among aging billionaires who want to reshape society with things and ideas that were out of date almost two centuries ago. If you asked Jeff Bezos how society should be ordered, he would describe something you could attach any 18th century robber baron’s name to. If you asked Elon Musk how people should live in his farcical Mars colony, he would describe something that anyone who ran a company town would recognize. They can only give you what you have but worse. If you asked Bill Gates anything, you should really follow it up with why there are so many photos with him and Epstein.
So yeah, maybe this is a little extreme, and definitely a little nihilistic. But that tunnel represents the looming feeling of dread. The feeling that something has gone terribly wrong somewhere, maybe irrevocably so. There will never be a new city built. There will never be a vision of the future that isn’t branded. There will be nothing and you’ll like it. What saddens me the most about all this is just how boring it is. When knowledgeable people said about the hyperloop “this is an obvious scam that could never work” they were met with the indifference of the damned or the howls of people desperate to believe that anything good could be accomplished under the fickle gaze of someone like Musk. When the obvious was revealed, that it was just a straightforward scam to stop public transit from being built because he personally did not like it, how could people respond? How should they respond?
When someone like a Peter Thiel imagines their own immortality, which is something they all grasp at like desperate vampires, they imagine a static future. If they imagine any change at all, it's their own gravity distorting society to slowly revolve around them in all things. It is a future without taste or color, it will be what we have now but worse. This slow grinding is intentional. Everyone with power wants you to believe that their power continuing is natural. Something that simply happens like the weather, and not because of deliberate choices made or not made by all of us together. They seek to dismantle the future entirely because they cannot conceive of one where they are not the center of it. It is their one collective failure, one of imagination, that will hopefully be their undoing.
