I don’t understand how people associate Elon Musk with sustainability or invention. He didn’t start Tesla. Sustainability would come with fewer roads and cars. Musk is building more roads, including underground with the Boring Company, and as many cars as he can.

For comparison and context, Eli Whitney invented a new type of cotton gin. As I understand, his goal was to decrease the need for labor in picking cotton. It’s tempting to see technology as good or bad, but it’s a tool. Like sharp knives and fire, tools augment the values and goals of the people and culture using them.

Whitney may have, in his heart, wanted to help slaves. The result of the cotton gin was to transform an institution declining from exhausting the soil into the largest slave culture in history. Intentionally or not, he contributed to the South’s economy growing to include four million slaves.

Whatever his personal goals, the people who owned and used the gins didn’t want less labor. They wanted more profit, likewise the plantation culture. They and their culture used the gins to get what they want. The gins accelerated their culture.

Likewise, whatever Musk’s goals, he is contributing to more pollution, depletion, cruelty, and suffering. His technologies are accelerating our culture and its results.

That anyone sees him or any of his work as contributing to sustainability is tragic. He is accelerating our current cultural trends and profiting from it: increasing pollution, depletion, imperialism, slavery, and so on.

I hope people snap out of their misperception. A car not emitting pollution from its tailpipe doesn’t mean it helps or is even innocuous to our environment.

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