This essay was originally published on the Agora Road forum.
It seems today (Common Era 2026) that the structure of the modern world, and certain illusory mechanics, which up until this point had served as the sort of "glue" which kept the wheels of the 20th Century turning, are melting away, and many people- the illiterate, in particular- are having a difficult time figuring out what to make of the rampant corruption which seems to have infected nearly every branch of government overnight. In reality, of course, this systemic rot is not as sudden as it would appear. It is built into the system on a foundational level- it would not be here if it did not have its forebears and predecessors.
In a Liberal city like Denver the effect has been immediate and jarring. The most obvious instance of this effect- which I will term perverse incentive for the sake of convenience- has been the Bus Rapid Transit project, a project nobody asked for and which does not improve anyone's life, reducing Colfax- the main vessel of the city's commerce- from a 4-lane street to a 2-lane street with 4 straight years of construction which exposes the general public to all sorts of pollutants and makes the street handicap inaccessible, all for the supposed purpose of making the buses run 10% faster- and nobody has ever particularly complained about the Colfax bus being slow as far as I am aware. When I first saw the construction being done, and asked the driver why anyone in a position of influence at a public institution such as RTD would make such a terrible decision, the driver caustically responded, "Well, someone was paid $2 million dollars for this idea!" and he seemed to leave it at that, without considering that nobody should be paid $2 million for an idea that sucks.
There are nationwide and global effects of this perverse incentive, of course, yet the BRT is a wonderful example of Perverse Incentive in action. It purports to make the bus more efficient and in its ambition, its jaw-dropping 4-year spectacle, actually makes the bus less efficient. It was designed for the purposes of the late 2010s, a period of relative materialist excess and naivete during which Denver's population boomed and coastal people flocked here for opportunity and speculation. However, by the time the BRT is complete, living in Denver will be so expensive and the population will have decreased so much that it will be totally redundant. The BRT is, of course, the result of a widespread rot that discourages real productive work that improves the living conditions of people, which should be the ultimate goal of any labor performed. At least, that is, according to a humanist such as myself.
Perverse incentive is a built-in aspect of Capitalism which caused the stock market to crash in 1929 and Reaganomics to be touted in the 1980s and the mortgage bubble to burst in 2008, and every time people are motivated to do things which makes them money but does not actually help anyone in any meaningful way, the results are severe- yet we seem unable to learn from our mistakes. However, we are currently on the verge of a financial crisis so extreme that it may very well reshape our world, our behavior, our incentive, for a long, long time. Rest assured, when this crisis comes- because the more severe the perverse incentive the greater the resultant backlash, much like a pendulum- work will once again be legitimately productive. While perverse incentive reigns, however, money loses any concrete meaning. It never really has meaning- money is a human construct- so accepting that it can suddenly stop having meaning is useful for traversing a perverse landscape.
Many Americans, especially my age, find perverse incentive daunting since they were raised on myths such as the notion that a college degree will ensure a high-paying job or that you can "buy your way" into being intelligent. I have been to concerts where they just sing 5-minute rants about how they want college to be free without considering that reading books is free and the more time they waste screaming about how they need free college, the less time they will spend reading. I have spent time around self-proclaimed "anarchists" who live off college degrees and told me I was stupid for writing manifestos such as this one. Needless to say, such "anarchists" are having a difficult time adjusting to a world where all the lucrative college jobs are drying up.
I have found that the same demographic of assholes who once lambasted me for my artistic endeavors and the fact that I do not have a college degree and am not employed at a major computer firm as a professional dweeb are now slowly beginning to realize that they will not succeed in the way capitalism defines success, no matter how much they lick the boots of their boss. It doesn't matter if you work yourself into the grave- the relentless profit extraction will continue mercilessly until things get as bad as they possibly can, and the only way to survive is to devalue money and value things such as food or sleep.
As I write this, Elon Musk was yesterday declared the world's first trillionaire, an achievement which ultimately means nothing when one considers that money is a human construct rather than a law of science, and this achievement, given inflation, is equivalent to the Carnegies or Rockefellers of their day. However, Carnegie and Rockefeller were both, like Musk, immoral, self-serving, short-sighted men who lacked temporal perspective or moral depth. Musk's achievement, while ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things, is terrible for the economy, and this is bad if you consider the economy important.
For the entirety of my adolescence I was drip-fed a continuous stream of pro-Musk and pro-Tesla propaganda. This marketing was subtle, but it made its presence known in our public schools where the arts and humanities were defunded and the pursuit of science was fetishized and commodified as the ultimate goal that all people should strive towards. My teachers, being weak, illiterate men and women, unknowingly spread this fetishization of science to us. Nobody was motivated or incentivized to be the next Kurt Vonnegut or the next Pablo Picasso, we were told to become the next Elon Musk. This was the sowing of today's perverse incentive. I read books far more than my peers and was convinced that school was useless for me, and that I would not have a job upon graduating because all I liked to do was write, draw, record music, and so on- and such skills were not valued or monetized during the late 2010s.
Elon Musk and his obscene boatloads of money were able, in effect, to convince hordes of gullible, illiterate, socially inept young men my age that computers and science were the future- and as a result, jobs were tapered down until nobody could earn a living as a painter or novelist, and one could only earn a living programming, typing, clattering away at some spreadsheet. And then, because Elon Musk employed so many people, he and the rest of his sociopathic fascist ilk who do not value human life and do not take the consequences of their behavior seriously- Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, etc.- were simply able to fire all their employees and produce a supposed "infinite money glitch" from automation. The idiot employees built the robots, and then the robots were able to take all the jobs, and then nobody is employed and nobody can afford anything, and everyone dies because the rich do not possess effective leadership qualities and are bad at running the affairs of the world.
This was not at all inevitable and we may tell ourselves that simply because we cannot bear the collective guilt of our own failure. A simplified narrative where Elon Musk is purely evil and is an irrational actor plagued by insanity is reductive and dangerous. Elon Musk's behavior, as he sees it, is wholly rational because nobody has ever told him no.
One cannot hold Elon Musk entirely to blame. My generation is comprised of overwhelmingly stupid people who do not read or consider the nature of their existence and so they signed up in droves for Elon Musk's methamphetamine-fueled hallucination. They enabled his behavior through irresponsible submission to a lifestyle that was never designed to benefit them and, ultimately, will not even benefit Elon Musk once he is dead and buried because nobody will remember him fondly. The reality in which he lives and the reality in which you or I live are separate places. We can hold Elon Musk to blame as much as we can hold to blame the millions of science-worshipping cretins who believed in the absurd lie of infinite growth enabled by computers. This science-fiction concept, employed by writers such as William Gibson in his "Neuromancer" trilogy as a direct metaphor and warning against people such as Musk, was appropriated by pseudo-intellectual fascists such as Nick Land, whose amphetamine-fueled gibberish rants were the direct byproduct of a listless existence in Neoliberal 90s academia- and subsequently fetishized by influential people like Elon Musk who knew that there was an audience for science-fiction, and also that the weaponization of nostalgia was a powerful drug to use against insecure, weak men who disliked organized religion and lacked a coherent identity.
The future proposed by men like Elon Musk, therefore, is an incoherent, ephemeral collage of various concepts and themes endemic to 20th-century science fiction with no direction or point. Elon Musk cannot imagine a car which would be functionally suitable for the specific conditions of the actual 21st Century people find themselves in- that is, the "real" world- so he imagines a hypothetical car which would look good in Blade Runner but which drives like a toaster and is made of aluminum foil. Elon Musk believes that, if enough money is thrown at such a vehicle, the general public will stand in awe at its sheer brilliance. The general public does not, of course, stand in awe at its sheer brilliance, because it is not even something as impressive as a replicant as described in Blade Runner or its source novel. There is a fundamental disconnect between what Elon Musk insists the world is, and what the world actually is. Elon Musk reads a book such as Do Androids Dream- or, more likely, reads a plot synopsis online- and arrives at the conclusion that the replicants described in its pages are literal robot people who literally work for the megacorporation described in the book. Of course, if one is capable of recognizing metaphor, one knows that Philip K. Dick is capable of tremendous subtlety- that the replicants as described in the novel are meant to represent a subjugated underclass of people, a motif which harkens back to Fritz Lang's "Metropolis". The concept of the robot is not anything new and is really just a way of internalizing the alienation of the worker under modern conditions.
There are many such themes a worthless drain on society like Elon Musk likely does not recognize- the subjugation of the so-called "chickenheads" such as John Isidore (a metaphor for autism), the internal struggle Rick Deckard faces as a policeman, forced to do things he recognizes as immoral and which defy his inner nature(as typified by his encounter with the archetypal shadow doppelganger Phil Resch), the vacuous commercial entertainment of Buster Friendly, and of course the narrative's overarching theme of the intrinsically human trait of empathy. All this is lost and wasted on a vegetable like Elon Musk, who sees the dirigible with the Coca-Cola sign and arrives at the conclusion that it's pretty fucking dope. Philip K. Dick had the luxury of being able to write a fictional extrapolated satire of current trends he witnessed emerging in his day, and Elon Musk, the hapless idiot, takes it upon himself to realize those trends because he views them not as pertinent commentary on the zeitgeist of the 1960s, when the book was written (and this is not to say that the book is dated, it holds up remarkably well if one does not take every single detail literally) but as an unavoidable reality that cannot be stopped. Weak, insecure men such as him, who do not possess the foresight or maturity of someone like Philip K. Dick, who could not write forty-odd novels if called upon to do so, cannot separate fiction from reality and so wish to suck us all into a hallucinogenic fever-dream where reality and fiction are hybridized. This project is entirely futile and can never be completed, as the real world is inherently subject to limitations which fiction is not, such as the laws of physics. Unfortunately for Elon Musk, infinite growth is not possible because infinity is a hypothetical concept with no basis in reality. Men like Musk will spend the entirety of their lives in the sad pursuit of the unattainable, and die unhappy and unloved.
Elon Musk makes many excuses- chief among them, his supposed status as an autistic person. Being autistic myself, I find this highly unlikely. I was diagnosed with autism from a very young age- well before it became fashionable to have autism- and so have learned to live with it. I can recognize autism at a glance, its essential characteristics and affects. There are two reasons I do not believe Elon Musk is autistic. The first is that he lies constantly. Not small lies, but whopping fibs that are never substantiated in any way. Autistic people do not generally find it in their best interests to lie, and as such we miss out on the hallucinogenic world of fantasy speculation that modern consumerism has devolved into. I CAN lie- it happens on occasion- but I am not good at it. Certainly not good enough to attract investors.
The second reason I doubt Musk's claims of autism is because I do not believe he could be as successful and charismatic in the world as it exists if he were autistic. The hierarchy of power as it is set up is designed to keep people with autism and other neurological conditions subjugated, this is by design, and even if Elon Musk does have autism, he is a terrible representative for all autistic people and his dangerous autistic-supremacist rhetoric does not help autistic people or non-autistic people. I do not want, as an autistic person, to be any sort of ubermensch who rules the world, I don't have delusional power fantasies like that because I am a realist and I accept the finality and inevitability of death, and in the face of death power is ultimately fleeting. I readily admit that I, as an autistic person, do have access to certain capabilities that a non-autistic person does not have, such as the ability to write a long paragraph such as this in one sitting with no stimulants. However, the world Elon Musk envisions is one where my particular abilities and strengths are devalued to nothing, so I do not want to live in such a world. I would prefer to live in a world where I am allowed to make a decent income off my writing and art, Elon Musk and all the rest of his fascist friends are summarily executed like the depraved animals they are, and all the insecure, illiterate men who once swooned at the batshit promises of Elon Musk will settle into nice routine 9-to-5s, blissfully unaware of the next instance of perverse incentive on the horizon.
However, perhaps it would be useful to discard the notion of objectivity, the notion that any legal punishment is capable of satisfactorily addressing the hideous crimes committed by men such as Musk. Perhaps true objectivity is a theoretical impossibility, like infinity, and can be dismissed as such. Scientists are biased, fallible human beings like anyone else, they are not remotely special. In fact, they are overrated as hell. Objectivity was useful to me during my adolescence, I applied it to art and writing and things like that, I made top 10 lists of media and still do on occasion, they are useful in ranking quality. But if the quality of art is subjective (as so many people claim) and Philip K. Dick's book is of the same quality as a cheap 5-sentence online summary of Philip K. Dick's book (and I'm sure that sentiment, like the rest of so many sentiments of the late 2010s, was cultivated specifically by Musk) then we must accept that Musk's value to the world is subjective. To him, and to a few other men, Musk is immensely valuable and successful. To the rest of us- even to his various ex-wives who he had sexual intercourse with and then divorced because he is incapable of love- Musk is a catastrophic, totalizing failure. If we accept that, then the matter of disposing of him becomes relatively easy. if we cease viewing him as an innovator or a visionary, and instead recognize him as a drain on society and on progress, and on the collective happiness of the human species- then his execution becomes ever more salient and feasible. We stop thinking, "Well, we can't kill this man, he's powerful and has a lot of sex-" and we start thinking, "Well, he's only a sack of meat like the rest of us, and it's him or us, so it can just be us." Like his various illusory fictions, his factory of nothing, his business of complete simulacra- we can adopt a superseding fiction which posits that his death would be wonderful for us all- this fiction will in time eclipse the previous fiction, and will thereafter become reality.
I do not write this as any kind of threat, it is an inevitability, just as it is inevitable that a charlatan like Musk will re-emerge 3 generations down the line and make similar impossible promises and spread similar repulsive fascist rhetoric. This is the repetitive, neverending cycle of the human ego, it is a very dark yet very human thing and will never end. Nor will men like Musk stop being executed and assassinated, molotov cocktailed and one-shotted into oblivion. This is history, and history is built on blood. As a pacifist myself, I find this process, like the process of sexual intercourse, wholly redundant and unnecessary, I do not personally commit violence, and I am of the firm belief that well-directed literature such as this is effective in the demoralization and humiliation of ideas I do not like, which is ultimately all I can hope for.
The fetishization and commodification of science under Capitalism is as much a problem as the blind acceptance of religion under Feudalism. Science is good when it can solve practical, legitimate problems and benefit humanity in the process. The lever is good, the wheel is good. But so is the paintbrush, the typewriter and the camera, because they can make us feel things. We discard the intuitive power of art and human creation in the idiotic pursuit of either a deity who will bestow absolute truths upon us or an absolute unifying theory of physics which can never be improved upon. We can never fully comprehend all of reality, either through belief in a fictional god that objectively does not exist or in the reckless, neverending, neurotic, boring waste of time that is science and mathematics. Upon each discovery made through science, there is another discovery, and another, and another- and math reduces all the complexity of the world into sterile ephemera- and when you get right down to it, men like Musk who posit that there is some kind of omniscient machine God are no better than the idiot priests who claim that the life of some bumbling carpenter with a destructive Messiah complex who died 2,000 years ago is applicable to your life. Human life must be lived in good faith- one must accept that one can attain happiness if one simply ignores the endless pursuit of absolute truths or power, and accepts one's inherent state as a conscious and meaningful human being.
But human beings cannot do this, at least the vast majority of us can't- as mentioned previously, there is some sort of inherently destructive human impulse to fabricate lies, to invent Gods, to submit to authority and to avoid responsibility for atrocities. Perhaps it is that, if one were to accept the atrocities one is indirectly responsible for and complicit in- especially today, on a global scale- one might go insane. So there is an inbuilt "pressure release valve" which offloads the responsibility and attributes human evil to the devil and human goodness to God and robs human beings of the ability to admire their own wonderful state and achievements while simultaneously excusing and even justifying unspeakable atrocities.
I spoke to someone a while back who claimed that killing figures such as Charlie Kirk was inherently bad because it only served to intensify political instability. I responded that the death of Charlie Kirk probably actually kept us more politically stable than we would otherwise have been. After all, the definitive, conclusive end of someone like Charlie Kirk- whose entire job in life was to sow seeds of division, uncertainty, hatred, and insanity- objectively means there is less division, uncertainty, hatred, and insanity in the world. If someone like Charlie Kirk, whose ideas were not only worthless but harmful, were permitted to spread like a festering virus without any sort of meaningful repercussion, the political climate would probably be much more unstable by now. Charlie Kirk, like Elon Musk and like all fascists who are incapable of critical thought, was a symptom of a society that enabled and promoted his pointless regurgitations of the Holy Bible, a book with virtually no literary merit which is generally useless to the 21st-century person. He did not promote the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or the writing of Marshall McLuhan because society did not incentivize him to.
Figures like Philip K. Dick, who was more intelligent than Jesus Christ, cannot and should not be held responsible for the behavior of figures like Elon Musk or Charlie Kirk. Science-fiction writers of the 20th century fulfilled their roles as the producers of cheap, disposable entertainment- or, in the case of someone like Dick or Vonnegut, legitimately thought-provoking and beautiful literature. This was the economically incentivized behavior in their more relatively democratic time, just as Elon Musk's garbage factory is the economically incentivized behavior in our time. The writers of the 20th century assumed that anyone intelligent enough to read their material would be responsible enough to understand things like metaphors.
Then again, Elon Musk generally has no discerning taste in literature, he will pull references from absolutely anything- his child pornography-generator, "Grok," is named after a term in Robert A. Heinlein's superficial schlock-fest, "Stranger In A Strange Land," a book which, among other things, features a Libertarian Hugh-Hefner type figure named Jubal Harshaw who is an elderly polymath living in an isolated mansion surrounded by bikini-clad women who satisfy his sexual needs at all hours of the day. No doubt, Elon Musk loves books such as Stranger In A Strange Land. It is the sort of reproduction-focused, materialist, nutritionally empty, vapid testament to American ideals that a young Apartheid-enabler like Elon Musk, coming of age without the capacity for critical thought under the tutelage of his filthy diamond baron father, would read and love.
At any rate, while Elon Musk may hate reading and may attempt to destroy the national literacy rate with his infernal machines, I cannot simply start being stupid. Knowledge is a curse and a gift, and one cannot lose it once one has it. I was lucky enough to avoid the Elon Musk-sponsored propaganda mill that caught so many of my pathetic contemporaries and reduced them to sniveling dickwads who do not believe women should have the right to vote. It is lonely to be intelligent in a nation of overwhelming and contagious stupidity, but at the same time my mind is a greater commodity than Elon Musk could ever dream of, and as long as I do not allow myself to become the subservient employee weakling of someone like Elon Musk, and I spread my ideas entirely of my own volition and die happily when the time comes, I will be satisfied in life. Unlike Nick Land, whose mind was thoroughly decimated by the modern world, I am a product of the modern world I find myself in. I can adapt, I am up to the challenge, the world cannot break me no matter how many dark insanity boogeymen those in power might throw my way.
I find peace, solace, strength and comfort in the negation and ritual humiliation of the concept of God, particularly the Judeochristian God, Yahweh, in the same way Christians claim to find the same things from a steadfast belief in God. A Godless universe is the only universe in which I would want to live and thankfully it is objectively the universe in which I find myself, with no semblance of intent or conscience. We human beings have absolute free will, and pessimistic dipshit philosophies such as determinism are really only intellectual replacements for God for people who do not want to make anything of themselves or enjoy themselves while they are here. True, we are bound by certain limitations, such as the laws of physics and our own mortality, but aside from that we can do anything we want. Elon Musk's insane ketamine behavior is proof of this, no conscious God with a functional morality would allow such a man to exist. The good news is that both people who worship math and people who worship god are weak, dogma-poisoned neurotics and do not generally value their lives in the way an enlightened humanist who values freedom and dignity can. This is why many gullible soldiers who fight in pointless wars believe in God- the uneducated are far more likely to become beefed-up killing machines.
I find immense comfort, too, being asexual, in the mockery of sexual behavior and the reproductive process. Men such as Elon Musk value reproduction because he believes that his seed is more potent than any other man's and that by breeding with multiple women his unparalleled genius can live on- whereas I stand enough by my words to assume that my work will be valued for a generation or two past my death- long after Elon Musk's children are relevant- and after that it will be natural and good for subsequent generations to produce figures such as me who are applicable to the specific pressing conditions of their time. Unlike Jesus, whose legacy should be one of the instigation of civilizational collapse and domestic terrorism against the wonderful nation of Rome, I do not need to be remembered for entire millennia after I die. That is far too long for one person to be relevant, and at a certain point it just becomes a babbling game of "telephone" across the centuries.
However, it is no wonder that a Patriarchal, Monotheistic system such as Christianity has been so readily adopted and endorsed by machine-God worshippers like Musk who twist science to their own ends under the perverse incentives of Capitalism. Christianity appeals to the universal lowest common denominator of person through its vague promises, wishy-washy bullshit, prolongation of the status quo, and hatred of humanity. It promises everlasting life through belief in Jesus rather than accepting that death is a natural and necessary part of life and that everyone dies no matter what you believe, which is of course the objective truth of reality. Christianity, like Musk's Tesla factory, is an elaborate, desperate fiction that wants to prevent you from thinking and living on your own terms. When the Pope denounces the behavior of someone like Musk or Altman in their relentless pursuit of power and wealth, it is not because the Pope is a humanist- the Catholic Church has never been Humanist and has in fact always been a distinctly parasitic anti-Humanist force. Rather, it is because the Catholic Church sees a viable competitor approaching and it is insecure. Make no mistake, however- the machine empire is much more fragile and temporary than the Catholic Church, and a life spent in pathetic servitude to either the machine God or the usual God will only make you sad and empty.
The same goes for reproduction. Reproduction cannot save you from death, its prioritization is a symptom of capitalist materialism and somebody who values all the sex they have and all the condoms they run through and all the hookers they bang is every bit as annoying as someone who brags about all the stocks they wheel and deal all day on the S&P 500 and how they just made out like Bernie Madoff. Death, the good ol' skeleton, is the only true God, you will die and all that will be left is what you said and who you were, and you will not even be punished or rewarded for that after dying, so you have to think purely about the good or evil you can commit while you're here, and how you affect people. Having children will not keep you alive because your children are not you and cannot transmit your lived experience precisely in the way the written word can.
Anyone like Elon Musk the little breeder bitch boi, who claims that reproducing is the only way to leave a meaningful impact on the world after death, is delusional and narcissistic, because they assume that their genetic material specifically will be the stuff that lasts tens of thousands of years, and given that there are 8 billion people on this planet, the odds that YOUR seed specifically lasts for over a millennia are incredibly low. Plenty of lineages die off all the time because some people just don't like fucking, myself included. As long as I am not employed and do not have sex, I will be happy and can maintain my composure regardless of the extent to which the world decays around me. One can only be sad about the dissolution of the system if one buys into the empty promises of the system to begin with.
When one mocks sex, money, God, or power, one "perverts" the structure of perverse incentive.
For an example of an easy argument against the assumption that having sex or reproducing is important, you need only consider that Abraham Lincoln currently has no living descendants. His lineage died out in the 1980s. This does not at all mean that Abraham Lincoln was not important and still is not tremendously important to the state of the world today. In fact, he was a greater and more courageous man than a flabby landwhale like Elon Musk could ever aspire towards, and many historians have speculated that he was a closeted bisexual. Thankfully, he left a wealth of important documents and records so that we can learn about his life and the period of history during which he lived, and doing so can teach us valuable lessons in trying times such as the ones today. And so the written word is ultimately more potent than any big-time Jubal Harshaw fucker, we have cuneiform records that predate the birth of the fraud Jesus Christ by many centuries, and our wonderful books such as "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" will last for centuries and centuries to come, even if all our lineages end.
Anyway, hopefully this was a comprehensive rundown of the nature of perverse incentive. It is not only perverse in the theoretical or economic sense, but in the literal sense. The same men who destroy your jobs and livelihoods and destroy your will to live are the same ones who all gave each other fellatio in a big 50-man "daisy chain" on Epstein Island, and if we had the collective willpower to line all of them up and shoot them all at point-blank range in the head- a relatively minor body count, all things considered- many of the world's ills could be resolved. However, that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, as we human beings are given to things like the adoption of various fictive narratives and the blind worship of power. The inevitable deaths of men such as Elon Musk will be more satisfying the longer we have to wait. In the meantime, it is better simply to avoid perverse incentive if and when you see it.