A Point About the Cybertruck (Seriously)

[00:00] Yeah, I know it's random but, I wrote  you something about the Tesla Cybertruck.   There's a bunch of unsold ones at this  dealership over there. Anyway, bear with me.

[00:13] There is a story told in Walter  Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk   from a couple years ago that goes like  this. Elon says he was hanging out with   his son Saxon (look to camera). He  was hanging out with his son Saxon,  

[00:29] and thus spoke Saxon: “Why doesn’t  the future look like the future?” No idea of this story is true, by the way,  but, "Why doesn’t the future look like the  

[00:43] future?” is a thing that lots of people do ask, in  different ways, and it's easy to understand why. Broadly speaking, the science fiction  of the 20th century predicted that our  

[00:56] time would look very different than  it actually does now. By our time,   they predicted we'd have houses that look  like flying saucers, or hovering cars,  

[01:09] or post-apocolyptic wastelands — (fingers  crossed) not yet ... I don't think?

[01:21] So the question is why doesn't their future  — our present — look more like what they   predicted? Why does the early-mid 21st century  look the way it actually turned out to look?

[01:38] Elon says that this question, as asked  by his son, inspired the design of the   cybertruck. Something that looks like what  someone in the 1980s would have predicted.  

[01:53] Something that beloved distopian sci-fi  hero John Bladerunner would have driven. The idea behind this design has always made  me laugh, because I think Elon Musk means for  

[02:06] this "truck" to look futuristic, but to me —  and perhaps to you — it actually looks kinda   old-fashioned. It looks like something from the  80s, because it kinda is. It's an imititation of  

[02:25] designs from 40 years ago. It looks like  the armored vehicle from "Aliens," 1986. The fact that that design was intended  by James Cameron to look futuristic is  

[02:39] irrelevant — it's still a design from the  80s, so it naturally looks old-fashioned   to people like you and me, and so does  its present-day imitator, the Cybertruck.

[02:53] The reason I'm talking about this now, by the way,  is that MY son — who does not have an implicitly   racist name — my son and I were talking through  our feelings on the cybertruck the other day.   He thinks they look kinda cool but he's troubled  by Elon's whole "If you crash into another car,  

[03:10] you'll win" schtick. My son sincerely does  not wish to hurt other people. Imagine that. Anyway, Elon Musk — due to his Peter Pan syndrome,  or perhaps just due to his relatively advanced age  

[03:27] at this point — Musk doesn't seem to realize  that an 80s design in our time looks the way   a 50s design would have looked to someone in the  80s. Something like, "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet."  

[03:44] That looks like something from the 1950s because  it is, even though it believes itself to be   futuristic — believing it doesn't make it so. It's  still clearly from the 50s just as the Cybertruck  

[04:01] is clearly a 21st century retro throwback  to a product of 20th century imagination. Or at least, that's what the Cybertruck  obviously looks like to me. Let me know  

[04:15] if you agree — I suspect at least some of you do. But I don't think Elon Musk see the Cybertruck  as a retro throwback. I think this 80s-inspired  

[04:28] design actually does look furustic to him, and  here is a darker potential explanation for that. I suspect that Elon, and people like him,  see the 20th century scifi vision of our  

[04:46] time to be a kind of unfulfilled potential.  They see it as where we rightly should be by   now if not for all the ways we've failed, or  if not for "those people" holding us back.

[05:06] When Elon Musk hears his son ask,  "Why doesn't the future look like   the future," his answer is predicated on  the assumption that the present, our time,  

[05:18] would not look futuristic to someone from the 80s  or the 50s, and I think that it actually would. Yeah, a lot of our world would still look  pretty familiar to a person time traveling  

[05:34] from the 80s. Our cars don't hover yet,  but they do look pretty different from   80s cars. 80s cars were mostly still  all straight lines and steel. Now,  

[05:47] even a basic-ass car is plastic-composit and  aerodynamically curvey. I think a 2026 Toyota   Corolla really would look futurstic to a frozen  and unthawed 80s man, or certainly a 50s man.

[06:06] And holy crap, tricorders from Star Trek are  real now. A smartphone can literally do almost   everything that Star Trek envisioned  for the personal communicaiton devices  

[06:19] of the 23rd century. We're actually 200  years aheard of schedule on this one. Have you ever been to Tokoyo at night? Tokoyo  at night straight up looks like the vision of  

[06:33] future Los Angeles we see in Blade Runner.  I think a person who walked out of that   movie in 1982 and stepped into today's Tokyo at  night would think they were still in the movie.

[06:48] I think a person from the 80s would be pretty  amazed to hear that almost nobody has to die   of HIV anymore. HIV is virtually curable in some  people, it can be managed as a chronic condition  

[07:03] in most others. There are prophilatics now that  can keep you from getting infected in the first   place. In the 80s and 90s, HIV was a death  sentence. They drilled that into our heads  

[07:16] when we were young and sexually active in that  era. HIV was the scariest thing in the world. My   best friend who was more into sports than I was  cried the night Magic Johnson announced he was  

[07:31] positive in a speech that everyone thought  was his Lou Gehrig moment, his goodbye. Magic Johnson is, of course, still  healthy today, and a billionare.

[07:48] Because now, scientically speaking,  almost nobody has to die of HIV,   which makes it all the more ironic that literally  millions of people who could have been saved by  

[08:01] these medicines are now dying because Elon Musk  bought his way into the U.S. government and   chose to use his awesome power there to, of all  things, eliminate funding for U.S. foreign aid.

[08:17] The world's richest man decided that the  world's poorest people are not worth the   equivalent of spare change, probably because  he views them as genetic trash to be discarded,  

[08:33] which is something he says out loud, all the  time now, and we let him get away with it. Even if you believe that some people  really are genetically inferior, and it  

[08:49] you further believe that you somehow possess  the divind rod to reliably tell them apart,   I dare you to say into the eyes of a  child: "You must die — scared, alone,  

[09:06] and in pain — so that I might realize  the future I was promised in a movie."

[09:18] But hey, at least the deficit's under control. What I'm arguing is that the future does  look like the future. It just doesn't look  

[09:31] quite like the future we expected, because how  could we know? Nobody can predict the future.   Turns out this is it.

[09:43] And maybe we didn't notice because it  kinda crept up on us, the way the future   usually does. I'm a couple months away from  walking my older boy home from his elementary   school for the last time. I could swear  I just dropped him off for first grade.

[10:02] The more adult answer to little Saxon's ostensible  question is that real, grown-up progress is hard,   it requires lots of people to work together  for a long time toward common goals,  

[10:19] it requires not only great ideas but great  labor to make those ideas come alive,   and this kind of real, tangible, durable  progress usually unfolds incrementally  

[10:35] enough that you might not even notice it's  happening — unless you make an effort to.

[10:47] Clinging to futuristic visions from  the past is like a kind of revanchism,   a "lost cause' mythology. I think some people  feel deprived of yesteday's future even though  

[11:03] they never actually had it in the first place.  All they ever really had was the fantasy of it. Some people feel deprived of a  U.S. economy where the uneducated,  

[11:18] unprialedved working man could own a beautiful  three-bedroom home or maybe some farmland   and support his homemaker wife and two point  five kids on a single salary for low-skilled  

[11:30] labor — that was always mostly a fantasy. You  never lost it because you never really had it.

[11:43] I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and I also thought  Blade Runner and Star Trek looked really cool.   Part of me is a little disappointed  that the future doesn't look like that,   at least not yet. But rather than  spending my time chasing a fantasy,  

[12:03] I choose instead to put that effort toward  noticing and appreciating the progress we   actually ended up making, which is different  than what I expected, but still really good,  

[12:18] in so many ways, and it could be even  better if we keep looking foward, not back.

[12:30] Just because something lacks the comfort of  nostalgia does not mean it is bad. Just beacuse   something, or someone, turns out different than  what you expected does not mean they are bad.  

[12:50] The future will look like the future no  matter what, because we could not go back   even if we wanted to. The only way available is  foward. So get in loser, we're going that-a-way.

[13:12] You know something else from our present that  is really quite futuristic? Squarespace. You   know when I built my first website in the late  90s I literally had to learn to code. I mean,  

[13:26] it was basic html, but that was still a heavy lift  for me to do something really simple, like put my   creative portfolio online for other people  to see. Now you just start with a beautiful,  

[13:38] human-designed template or you tell the computer  what you want and it spits out a draft in seconds.   You go in and tweak it to your heart's content.  Drag and drop stuff. A payment block here to  

[13:50] take people's money, a calander block there  to let people schedule appointments with you,   really anything most people could ever possibly  need in a website is a few clicks away.   Bring you own pictures and  stuff or use their stock art,  

[14:05] which is all integrated into Squarespace, along  with the payment processiing, newsletter tools,   social integration — EVERYTHING. And they host  your site for you too. When you're ready to pay  

[14:17] to make your site live, or to register a  custom domain, do something good for our   collective future and save yourself 10 percent  with my code Ragusea. Thank you, Squarespace.

[14:30] And thank you to everybody working  hard to build a real, grown-up future.