Big Tech Can’t Handle Being Heroic. Part One.
Choose Your Hero: Elon Musk or Eloise in the Plaza
It’s very puzzling. Big Tech along with billionaire allies, the World Economic Forum, and the Chinese Communist Party sees itself as being in the process of taking over the whole world, which they’ve converted into a Global Village. So why would they crawl out on a limb making themselves look like deranged fools in the eyes of most of the Village’s villagers?
But that’s what they are doing. Yes, specifically their attempt to defy that very fundamental aspect of reality that there are two human sexes, and when combined with social traditions, there are two genders, give or take a little weirdness around the edges.
So, instead of ignoring the gender thing, in the same way that they ignore so much else, Big Tech has chosen to make denial of gender reality a centerpiece of their ideological foundation, now called by most observers, Wokeness.
Along with much else, I’ve written many Substack posts on Wokeness. I have a whole sub-series in the More Than a Village series, which I called Why Big Tech will Abandon Wokeness. Part One is here, and Part Ten, the latest so far, is here.
I’ve also written about how Wokeness is nothing more than attempt at totalitarianism, and, recently, how I’m getting burnt out on the very topic of Wokeness.
And yet, here I am again, because the absolute weirdness of the Woke ideology makes no sense at all.
Unless…
And the rest of this post is intended to be about the unless, or the beginning of the beginning.
Throughout history, all ruling classes of all nations, or tribes, or other militant social entities have seen themselves as heroes. Let’s take the Iliad and the Odyssey as examples. The Achaean Greeks take over Troy after a woman (Helen) is allegedly snatched by a Trojan prince (Paris). Superb casus belli. Makes Remember the Maine, and the Gleiwitz Incident look pretty serious in comparison.
But does Homer question whether the Greeks had any business anywhere near Troy? Does he call the Trojan Horse “disinformation” or a “dirty trick?” He does not. Because he was a Greek poet and at the time he was around the Greeks, like all other ruling elites, celebrated their own heroism.
But the Greeks also had a sense that there were limits to heroism. Their mythic hero Icarus flew too close to the sun. In Greek theater, tragedy and comedy took precedence over heroism. Oedipus Rex brought home the idea that murdering one’s father and having sex with one’s mother were not too cool.
More recent history clarified what was going on: Freud’s theory of the id and the superego is a good example. Both are impulses in the human consciousness. The id is essentially if it feels good, do it; whereas the superego is the mind’s way of setting limits on the id. My own spin on Freud is that the id is the heroic impulse, and the superego is limit-setting by morality, as passed down by parents and the community.
Nietzsche had much to say about this in his essay On the Genealogy of Morality, in which he compares heroic and priestly ideals. This was followed up in the Twentieth Century by the University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss, where he writes about the tension between the ideals of Athens and Jerusalem, in which he wrote:
“Man has to live with knowledge of good and evil and with the sufferings inflicted on him because of that knowledge or its acquisition. Human goodness or badness presupposes that knowledge and its concomitants.”
And this brings us to the heart of the problem that Big Tech has now. Big Tech is, or pretends to be, the ruling class of Planet Earth.
So what is their obsession? Do they consider themselves to be heroes?
Where is the Big Tech Iliad and Odyssey?
They don’t exist. There is only the alphabet soup mumbo-jumbo of DEI, and ESG, and the WEF. And why is that?
Because Big Tech is having a massive guilt trip.
And like they do with so much else, they are outsourcing decisions they have the responsibility to make for themselves—outsourcing to media pundits and to Woke ideologues.
Let’s take a look at Big Tech’s heroic side first. Is there anything heroic about what Big Tech is doing and has done? Yes! Though being human, and therefore imperfect, Elon Musk recognizes the heroic in Homo sapiens. Earlier in his career he took mid-20th-century science fiction themes of space travel and supercars as examples of heroism, but when he began to recognize that Cancel Culture was evil, he shifted his attention to Twitter. One might say he moved from Athens to Jerusalem.
I’m writing this on an iPad, which would not exist without Big Tech. Given that there is so much garbage online, I have to remind myself constantly that Big Tech is indeed heroic, because Big Tech reminds me constantly that it’s stinking sewage.
Recent popular culture has solved the Athens-Jerusalem dilemma by creating superheroes who are crime fighters, but never fight real crime. Does Batman have to deal with pickpockets or gropers in the subway? With carjackers? With organized, roaming gangs of catalytic converter thieves? With shoplifting gangs in San Francisco?
Of course not. He confronts the Joker, the Penguin, and Catwoman.
Having outsourced their morality to the sages of Critical Theory, Big Tech wants to be Batman. Their villains have a variety of names: transphobes, TERFS, misgenderers.
And most of all, Big Tech despots don’t want to look like Batman, Superman, or even Wonder Woman.
They want to look like little girls.
The plot of the Iliad revolves entirely around Achilles asking the question of whether he belongs at Troy. Having been dishonored by Agamemnon, he no longer sees any reason to fight for Menelaus's wife when his own woman has been stolen from him. Also, Icarus was not a hero.
There's way too much wrong with this post in my opinion. Big Tech does want to look like heroes: Why else do you think Elon Musk is naming everything with the letter X and making his X bat signal?
https://michaelamckuen.substack.com/p/x-corp-and-the-x-parrot/comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbH-Lukq9gU
I'm willing to give Elon Musk time though even if I feel like I've been picking on him a little. If you can buy a company, change its policies so you get accused of being a Nazi, and then you have to ask Netanyahu to let you go to Israel to prove you're not a Nazi, you can stand people saying that you're Elongated Muskrat which is a weird knockoff Wolverine. If I got famous I'm sure people would make fun of me and I'd just try to laugh at it.
However, isn't Big Tech one of, you know, the few holdouts against "critical theory?" Most of them don't believe it. Good for them! I'm going to feel like teasing them as long as they keep messing things up or just not doing enough, but I'd take them over the people who support Hamas any day.