Back in my day, back in nineteen-diggity-two, when pea-cocking teenagers felt the need to defend their precious porcelain honour, they set a time and place behind the gymnasium, for a windmill duke-out. Drawing gossiping crowds to see which of the two snotlings had the biggest swagger.
Most of the time, the fight came to naught. Someone didn’t show. An adult stepped in and stopped it. Or someone’s glasses broke and went to whine to their mums.
A few days ago, the rival, maladjusted, tech-giants Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg called each other out behind the gymnasium (The Octagon in their case, but it’s all the same). Musk postured, Zuckerberg called his bluff. And as with all children, Musk’s mother shortly intervened to put an end to bloody noses and ripped sweaters.
It is with mixed feelings I witnessed the newsreels. On the one hand, a slice of nostalgia can be a soothing thing. A glimpse of childhood memories and hijinks go well together with late afternoons beneath the linden tree with a glass of elderflower lemonade, listening to the buzz of frantic bumblebees.
On the other hand, the exchange made it perfectly clear that the paved path of technological development of the human race is being dominated by absolute fucking children. Naught but infantile degenerates with the confidence and maturity of high-schoolers. One should think that decent billionaire supervillains would have hired a legion of black-clad goons to plan elaborate strikes against one another, but oh no. That’s not the timeline in which we live.
Musk and Zuckerberg are two of the absolutely richest men on the planet. Exactly how rich is impossible to gauge accurately, see-sawing from day to day depending on the twitteconomics of the hour. But at any given time, these two individuals can field more financial assets than the vast majority of world countries. And with assets comes power. With power comes responsibility.
The reins of human development are held by people who hold themselves to pubescent moral values and behavioural standards, coddled in the safety of intervening mothers. One should weep, for despair and frustration, if it were but for mad laughter at the grotesquerie of it…
/Sebastian Lindberg 27/6-2023
WastedWords 