If I hadn’t sworn off internettisms, I’d say “there’s a lot going on here” — which would be the “tell me you studied semiotics without telling me you studied semiotics” equivalent of those tiktok-type videos that say “I had to watch this twenty times to see it…” There’s a slew of those pseudo-savvyisms: “if you know you know” (or its gnosticky version “IYKYK”), “I’ll just leave this right here,” etc. We‘ve grown so inured to this kind of telegraphic nonsense that we no longer see what it is: brazen manipulation, a kind of personal clickbait. If you translate from emic to etic forms, as an anthropologist might say, the result would be nakedly aggressive: “I know everything about this but won’t tell you, so you need to guess.” Now that Silly Valley is making its long-promised move to actually destroy nation-states, it’s time to stop flashing their gang signs and pay much closer attention to those aspects of “online culture” we actually have the power to change. The inane phrases that serve as the building blocks of so much online kulcha, for example.
So…what’s going on here in this exchange between the world’s richest guy and someone who seems to identify pretty strongly with the brand of car they own? Well, the world’s richest guy’s bespoke global megaphone was triggered by the word “Nazi” to ask questions about his gesture. One of those questions tends toward what we could think of in terms of a growing problem, something like globo-narcissism (“How does gesture affect Musk’s image?”); the other question has the same kind of non-content as what so much AI sounds like — an SAT test question. No matter, because Musk pulls a third rabbit out of a hat by actively instructing this fan to reject what he himself sees and hears. I doubt the fan will ever recover from this level of artisanal redpilling.
But the lot-going-on-here that catches my attention is more abstract: the slow conversion of brands into banners. This isn’t new — brand loyalty has taken on all kinds of perverse and destructive forms for close to as long as there have been brands. When Jagger sang “well he can’t be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke the same cigarettes as me” in 1965, the gender violence baked into these distinctions was already plain enough fit into a few lines in a pop song. Fast-forward sixty years (because history is just a VHS, innit?) and we can see not just that pickup trucks have basically become gigantic handguns you can drive, but that the “Cybertruck” marks a new level of masculine desperation, delusion, and aggression. We’re spitting distance from a situation where achieve the cultural status of something like a white windowless van — but for vehicular assault rather than abducting people. The missing ingredient is Luigi-like figure who crystalizes that shift in meaning. Musk isn’t just “trolling” (another pseudo-savvy formalism that doesn’t say anything specific), he’s recruiting for his army.