Racing Toward Dystopia

In a piece on Common Edge, Josh Stephens writes, “It goes without saying that speculative fiction, no matter how outlandish, is meant to reflect the present at the same time that it anticipates the future, or at least a future. Director George Miller has imagined and reimagined ecological devastation and a resource-constrained hellscape ever since the original Mad Max, starring Mel Gibson, premiered in 1979. Forty-five years later, he returns to the same desert, dry and brutal as ever, with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.”

“No one is pushing us toward it more gleefully than our greatest industrialist-adolescent and would-be warlord: Elon Musk.”

“Musk’s juvenilia could be disregarded were it not accompanied by his inconceivable wealth and an almost orgasmic fatalism. Musk talks big game about his electric cars, battery packs, and renewable rockets. But he shows his true self in chilling ways: his assault on the marketplace of ideas; his sociopathic hatred of cities and, particularly, public transit; and, most of all, his fantasies of Martian colonization.”

“Oil, guns, megalomania, and trucks already have ruined much of our world. But, they haven’t ruined everything yet. The more furious the rest of us become, the better chance we have of winning the war.”