In light of nothing whatsoever, today seems like a good day for a long, rambling thread about what brought me out of the ElonCult over the past couple years!

Late in high school i started watching spacex streams. I was awed by the power and precision of the falcon 9 landings, and there was something about the way spacex talked about their design process that sucked me into a rabbithole of learning about aerospace and hard scifi topics

For the first time, i felt like engineering was something i could learn to do and be a part of. This, combined with the Wait But Why series about Musk's life and ideas, had me a pretty big Elon fan by the time i started undergrad.

The Boring Company is what really started to change things for me. At some point in my first year of college, the engineering department went on a tour of the BoCo's Hawthorne construction site. This was months before the unveil party,

and their concept of operations still involved mass transit pods that could carry a dozen or so people at a time. They also showed us some of the bricks they had made with excavated soil. I was impressed - it was like the Morgantown PRT, but underground instead of elevated,

and you can build houses with the construction byproduct! It had potential, and having grown up in a suburb with lackluster bus service i was glad to see talented, passionate engineers taking the initiative to make better transit.

The unveil party shattered that vision. What BoCo actually planned to build wasn't PRT, it was just teslas in tunnels. And by far the biggest cost-cutting measure of the tunnels themselves was making the cross-sectional area of the tunnel too small for a train or bus

(because their boring machine was bought secondhand from a sewer main project).

The final straw was when Musk tweeted he didn't believe in induced demand - the effect in city planning where adding lanes to a road makes traffic increase to fill all the new capacity.

Having grown up in the LA suburbs, a land of 12-lane freeways that get completely clogged every rush hour, i could tell Musk was either ignorant, or lying. It became clear to me that BoCo wasn't really innovating transit, it was contriving a new market for Teslas.

But that unveil party generated a staggering amount of good press for a project that hadn't really acheived very much. Because novelty tech is fun and cool, and we all love a story about a mad genius changing the world. That became the narrative, even though it was largely false.

Hype over gadgetbahns like Loop and Hyperloop draws attention away from more conventional transit projects that have actually worked, and have actually improved people's lives.

As i learned more about the history of transit and the issues transit planners deal with (shoutout to @citybeautifulyt and @99piorg for providing great starting points!) i learned that technology is one piece of the transit puzzle, a piece that's been firmly in place for a while.

The main hurdles to cheap, equitable transit are organizational and political, not technological.

And similar dynamics lie at the heart of other Muskian futurist visions. Slapping a battery on every car in the world won't make a significant dent in carbon emissions -

- it's just a tenuous band-aid on the deeper problems of consumerist excess. Even with a dirt-cheap heavy-lift rocket, its highly unlikely that humans will go to Mars unless NASA decides to send them, and NASA policy, it turns out, is quite the can of worms.

Musk fandom relies on ignoring human factors, instead putting faith in technology to solve vast societal problems. This isn't a new dynamic in STEM, but it's a bad one. [end of rant]

a couple addenda - i think Elon's behavior, especially on Twitter, has gotten more toxic over the past couple years, especially after the SEC lawsuit turned media opinion against him. This, in turn, has produced a conspiracy theory mindset among those who still try to be fans[1/]

- writing off critics as "mainstream media bias" or "bought out by big oil" or "they must be shorting tesla lol". Occasionally this might be true, but by and large, it's a concerningly conspiracy-theory and cult mindset for such a predominantly white and male fanbase [2/2]