Trump + Musk = Accelerated Extinction

The Grotesque Summit and Failure of Human / Transhuman / Trash-human Supremacism

Jaym*/Jaime del Val – Nov. 2024

“Humanity” and all of life on Earth face the greatest crisis and crossroads in history, the climatic and ecological one, which poses a possible eco-social collapse and a threat of extinction in this century according to numerous institutional reports, in a scenario of galloping acceleration of processes beyond all expectations, where in 2024 we have already exceeded the 1.5º average increase in temperatures feared for the end of the century, a scenario in which all the governments of the world, including those on the left, look away, with measures that are at best cosmetic and at worst fanatically opposed to everything that could lessen the already inevitable climatic catastrophe that is coming: increase in food products of animal origin, fossil fuels, extractivism and delirious overconsumption, that is, everything that leads us to the imminent abyss.

In the words of Antonio Guterres, Secretary of the United Nations, we have “our foot on the accelerator on the highway to climate hell” and extinction. The various human policies differ in having their foot on the accelerator more or less fanatically, but all of them step on the accelerator, none of them speaks of what would be necessary, according to the science with the greatest consensus, to slow down the imminent collapse: transition to plant-based diets and a deep degrowth in all consumption, extractivism, production, transport, urbanization and land occupation, and voluntary stabilization of the population, especially in rich countries.

In such a scenario we have a triumphant return of Donald Trump to the leadership of the greatest power in the world: the most grotesque fanatic and liar known, and recognized criminal, who bases his strategy on radical disinformation, a super-rich man who has made a fortune with urban speculation, a reality show character.

His “all-round advisor” is going to be another grotesque media figure, if possible even more dangerous: Elon Musk, the richest person in the world, with a fortune of 350 billion dollars (in November 2024) equivalent to a forth of Spanish GDP and 1,5% of US GDP, who dominates an unprecedented business empire that ranges from the space race (SpaceX) and electric cars (Tesla) to the largest satellite network in history (Starlink, crucial for example for Ukraine in the current war, where we see a glimpse of its geopolitical significance) and the social network X, formerly Twitter, as well as delirious projects such as Neuralink (for implants for direct neurostimulation of the brain in communication with machines) as well as being cofounder of Paypal, Hyperloop and OpenAI amongst others. Father of 12 children, Musk is a transphobe who has repudiated his trans daughter. A “new star” who seems to be aiming to be the next president of the United States and who is going to put the “American empire” at the service of his own.

Grotesque Epitomes of Human Supremacism

Trump & Musk are two epitomes of the transphobic, sexist, racist, colonial, supremacist, super-rich, heterosexual white man, two grotesque figures, epitomes of radical disinformation and of the mobilization of guts emotions in the masses. But they are also a paradigmatic symptom that marks an epochal inflection where the power of the large technological corporations, whose epicentre has been Silicon Valley and had been until now supposedly linked to a democratic discourse for diversity and emancipation, show their true neo-fascist and anarcho-capitalist face, interested only in the unlimited profit of a few elites and in the delirium of total control and fanatical supremacism.

Trump & Musk represent the failure of the human enterprise, the triumph of toxic disinformation in the service of climate denialism and of cuts in rights for the enrichment of white minorities, precisely in the middle of the last decade that was seen as a window of action to avoid catastrophic climate change. Elon Musk’s space rockets, like interplanetary phalluses seeking to leave the devastated Earth, colonizing and destroying worlds, are perhaps the ultimate expression of this grotesque end of a humanity turned into a radical parody of itself, fleeing forward in the face of the abyss created by its suicidal proliferation.

Trump & Musk represent the double formula and double face of global neo-fascism by which states become puppets of megacorporations that encompass everything, from the space race, AI or communications, to transport or health. Musk, in the last two years, has woven a dense network of alliances with the world’s far-right governments, from Milei (who has put Argentina at the service of whatever resources Musk needs for the batteries of his cars at the cost of environmentally devastating the country) and Bolsonaro to Orban, Meloni, and Putin: with the latter he reaches out to traditional enemies of the US, showing where the new geopolitical order is going: neo-fascist and hyper-capitalist transnational conglomerates that exceed the nation state as we know it.

There is a tendency towards a dismantling of the State, as Milei is proposing in Argentina, a total deregulation in which all environmental protection or social rights disappear. This deregulation follows the imperative of “disruption“, which in the jargon of technological corporations implies introducing high-impact technologies into society (such as smartphones, Big Data or AI) that exceed regulatory frameworks, advance and get established in legal vacuums that will perhaps be partially filled decades later when it is already too late. But at the same time, the remains of the States and public spending are being instrumentalised, for example, in the interests of militarisation. Stale patriotism, populism, conservatism, and religion are used in equal parts to mobilize the masses.

Musk is the crudest populist face of a so-called “transhumanist”, “longtermist“, and “TESCREAL” culture, which is actually trash-human, hyperhuman and extinctionist, and that, in its commitment to the “technological improvement” of humanity and to deliriums of cosmic colonization, remains muddled in the worst myths of the most rancid and totalitarian humanism while creating a trash-planet in process of collapse, accelerating the very extinction they fear. Now we see how dangerous his strategy of buying Twitter was in order to manipulate global public opinion. We are entering the final throes of cultures of domination that have turned the planet into a feast at the service of egocentric and grotesque egomaniacs who succeed precisely because they are such, surely with a carefully crafted media strategy, and doubly dangerous for this.

Trump is the crudest and most stark image of a more classic conservatism dressed in sexist and racist outbursts and that is capable of turning world politics into a permanent reality show (which perhaps it always was). A policy of pure homogeneous affections disseminated in mass media and now with the help of bots and toxic algorithms in mass disinformation networks.

They are two sides of a same coin that their alliance finally shows. An alliance with more ramifications, such as that of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, who has also taken a Trumpist turn and vetoed in the campaign that the Washington Post, of which he is a majority shareholder, supported Kamala Harris.

Effects, Context and Replies to the Grotesque Collapse

What effect will the Musk + Trump formula have, then? Even without taking into account possible cascading effects reinforcing neo-fascist tsunamis across the planet, we can expect an even greater acceleration on the highway to ecosocial collapse and extinction.

But when considering responses, it is urgent to understand the systemic context for this triumph of disinformation and fanatical and denialist supremacism. This is a possibly final phase of a millennia-long process by which sedentary civilizations, based on the exploitation of life, are cemented in a profound alienation, a culture of atrophied and atomized bodies now in fixed points of vision, that sensory paradigm invented in the Renaissance and which underlies every interface, camera or screen today (as explained in Ontohackers). In this society of spectacle, bodily connection and movement have been lost. Instead of relating in motion between us and with ecosystems, we have imposed on the planet the same aligned atrophy that governs our homogeneous relationships. We have replaced biodiversity with ubiquitous monocultures, also of humans.

As Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” The problem is not only the content but the homogeneous and aligned sensory structure of media and of ways of relating that separate and immobilize us, whose current epitome is “social networks,” which are systems of sensorial homogenization inherited from linear perspective. Algorithmic society follows in the wake of a representationalism which aims at replacing the complexity of the world with a controllable double of quantifiable data and manipulable representations. Accumulated centuries of these economies of representation and sensorial alienation allow the triumph of disinformation as a corollary of human failure that feeds the forwards flight of fanatic and suicidal supremacism.

Virtually all current human policies present different degrees of the same underlying problem. The US Democratic Party, like any global center-left, also reproduces deeply anthropocentric, supremacist and technocentric policies, which lead us to the abyss. It is above all a question of the degree of fanatism. The Trump+Musk duo is a more fanatical and accelerated bet on climate chaos and collapse. A ruthless and unmitigated bet that, on the other hand, may allow for a firmer resistance and opposition.

How to channel anger? There is already talk of a rise in the 4B movement (originating in South Korea, in which women renounce relationships with men as a response to heteropatriarchy) in response to Trump’s victory. While a global resistance movement against human supremacism as a whole is blatantly absent: this enemy that we all carry within us and that seems to drag us into an unstoppable abyss, as struggles are fragmented and anti-speciesism is relegated to marginality instead of the epicentral role that it should occupy. But in order to do so, the “critical” activists and intellectuals of the global north must step down frm their own supremacist pedestals and question their own privileges: that is the insurmountable problem.

Faced with a problem of such magnitude, the question is not how to avoid collapse but how to share practices so that at least a few of us can mobilize a profound transformation of ways of life while we adapt to the coming collapse, as proposed by Metahumanism, VeganAnarQueer and Indignant Rebels, amongst other, for a Theory of Deep Change, Deep Intersectionality and Deep Degrowth.

It is not a question of clinging to the agricultural-industrial-digital civilization, of sedentary and homogeneous exploitation, of ubiquitous farms (of humans and non-humans), but of mobilizing radical alternatives to all these toxic ways of living, moving and relating, to recover a co-evolution with degraded ecosystems, but which may regenerate slowly over millennia, provided that the supremacist logic that Trump and Musk represent does not survive the collapse.