He said it out loud.

If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army?” Musk said on the call. “I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

And what does he say his army is for?

…you can actually create a world where there is no poverty…

Musk is deploying the classic utopian framing that’s preceded every authoritarian project: “eliminate poverty” through technological dominance and centralized control.

I’ve written extensively about how these narratives work – from Hitler’s Lebensraum promise of “living space” to apartheid theology’s “separate development” to the ACTS 17 preacher Peter Thiel’s “optimal governance.”

The promise is always paradise; the mechanism is always control.

The “no poverty” promise always comes with an implicit answer to “for whom?”

Historically, these projects define poverty as a problem of the wrong people existing in the wrong places – solved through displacement, containment, or elimination rather than redistribution of resources or power.

Tesla can’t even make steering systems that reliably keep vehicles in their lanes. Their “solution” to societal problems likely will be even more dangerous than their “vision” failing to respect double yellow lines.

With an “army” of millions of autonomous machines under Elon Musk’s individual control, failure modes will become systematized violence.

Musk is not talking about oversight, regulation, or democratic accountability. He wants personal control of an army as a precondition. This maps directly onto the history of territorial sovereignty projects such as apartheid — his demand is for extreme governance exemption with concentrated control (e.g. Nazism).

Hitler promised to solve poverty too, but he just redefined who counted as people, then built an enforcement apparatus to murder those redefined as “the poor“.

No one shall be hungry, no one shall freeze. […] Within 4 years the German farmer must be freed from his misery. Within 4 years unemployment must be finally overcome.

That’s what Musk’s “robot army” + “no poverty” means in practice. It’s another Stanford killing machine, like the 1800s in America that Hitler studied.

The 1800s American West wasn’t just the homework for Nazi Lebensraum architects – it was their template. “Manifest Destiny” was utopian framing for Indigenous elimination. “Civilizing the frontier” meant systematic displacement and extermination. The “problem” of poverty was solved by redefining who counted as human, then deploying enforcement mechanisms (cavalry, settler militias, reservation systems) against those excluded from the category.

Stanford University sits on stolen Ohlone land, built with fraud and railroad money extracted through Chinese labor that was then excluded from the prosperity it created. The “Stanford” in “Stanford killing machine” isn’t metaphorical, it’s the institutional genealogy of genocide that Musk is invoking today.

We must remember Churchill was dismissed as alarmist, warmongering, and unreasonable for warning about men like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel throughout the 1930s. The British establishment – including his own party – marginalized him precisely because he was willing to say what the threat actually was while others counseled moderation, diplomacy, and “not inflaming tensions.”

Churchill would say this is a centrally planned and controlled distributed weapons system with humanitarian marketing.

And Musk has admitted out loud:

• Operating under single-person command authority
• Demanding exemption from democratic oversight
• Failure modes causing death
• Intending scale in civilian population centers
• Integrating with surveillance and targeting networks

That is by definition another Stanford-born genocidal killing machine, regardless of its nominal purpose.

Kudos to writer Cory Doctorow for his high-profile entry-level economics literacy campaign. I have to assume there’s an audience for his ideas, because people don’t know basic economics?

It’s a fancy new spin on old ideas: the monopoly rent-seeking, regulatory capture, and market power dynamics he describes are retreads from decades of prior writers.

Interesting that he invokes one prior theory, while not admitting to all the others he is borrowing from:

In the same way that Tim Berners-Lee rolled out of bed one morning and said, “The web is too important for me to take out a patent on it. Everyone’s gonna be able to use it.” And the way Jonas Salk said, “The polio vaccine is too important.” He said that owning this vaccine would be like owning the sun, so he didn’t patent it. I’m not a “Great Man of History” guy by any stretch, but I think those people show us the downstream effect of being a real mensch when you start something, just a really solid person, and how it can create a durable culture where there’s an ethos of kindness and care.

Right. Cory is definitely not a man of history, as that interview is basically just repeating textbook stuff well understood since… Stigler “Theory of Economic Regulation” in 1971? Mancur Olson in 1965 “The Logic of Collective Action”? Earlier if you count the trust-busters. Brandeis and the Clayton Act, 1914? Tarbell and Standard Oil, 1904? Veblen in 1899? Sherman Act of 1890?

The HUGE elephant in the room is… are we at a point where basic entry-level economics is served as a “big new idea” to gain traction? Apparently we can’t have normal policy debates using actual technical language anymore, it has to be injected through a viral hook. Part of that blame goes to the toxic ideology that leaked out of the Chicago School labs, which for 40 years misled people that monopoly concerns were outdated/debunked. So now this generation has to rediscover what the previous ones warned about over and over.

Thanks Shit-cago.

Consider this timeline. Tim Wu coined “attention merchants” in 2016 to describe what? Advertising. Leave it to marketing to decide a new term for advertising will sell more books. And then Lina Khan’s 2017 “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” paper was treated as groundbreaking when it basically rebranded pre-1980s antitrust theory by using the word “platform”. Ooh. Wait until you hear what happened next. Zuboff’s book “Surveillance capitalism” in 2019 was heavily promoted as a concept where companies were collecting data to sell ads. Shocking if true!

Original Concept (1970s)	1990s Rebrand	2010s Rebrand
Monopoly	Platform power	Enshittification
Externalities	Spillover effects	Systemic risk
Information asymmetry	Knowledge gaps	Dark patterns
Rent-seeking	Value extraction	Wealth transfer

We’ve built a system where expert consensus doesn’t matter, historical knowledge doesn’t accumulate, and basic economic principles have to be rediscovered and remarketed every generation to gain traction.

That’s… wait for it… the shitification.

It’s not how knowledge is supposed to work in a functioning civilization.

To be fair, Doctorow himself becomes a fascinating foil about someone who can’t decide if he’s more into determinism or contingency in economic history:

• Determinism: Once the internet became commercially important, monopolization was inevitable under capitalist logic. The specific policies were just accelerants.
• Contingency: Different regulatory choices in the 1990s/2000s could have produced genuinely different market structures (more like the pre-consolidation internet).

Doctorow is in the middle, but leaning contingent—we could have had mandatory interoperability, stronger privacy law, preserved rights to modify purchased tech, etc. And those structural guardrails would have prevented monopolization regardless of who the entrepreneurs were.

The specific mechanisms (DMCA preventing competitive modification, stock-as-currency fueling consolidation, KPI-driven enshittification) are really just some lower-level institutional details within basic economic theory.

Of course, this amnesia about economic predation isn’t new—it’s embedded in how the country commemorates its predators. It’s bad that economic theory keeps getting forgotten and rebranded (intellectual amnesia), but underneath is something even worse! American predators exploiting the cycles are elevated and celebrated (moral amnesia).

Am I right? Epstein files, cough, cough.

America still brazenly celebrates the worst of the worst men like Stanford, Polk, Jackson… does anyone really believe a Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg isn’t going to exploit the same loopholes if they haven’t been closed.

Stanford?

Yes, that supposed great man of history was “a primary facilitator of genocide”, who oversaw Native American policy in the California legislature. His “killing machine” legacy is feted as if the true engine of Silicon Valley, a man implicated in fraud and genocide.

• “Killing machine” is Benjamin Madley’s term of art from “An American Genocide” (Yale University Press, 2016), referring to the system of US soldiers, California militia, volunteers, and mercenaries that California officials created.
• Stanford served on the Committee on Indian Affairs in the California state legislature in the 1850s, then as Governor (1862-1863) signed appropriations bills specifically funding extermination campaigns against California ethnic groups.
• The population rapidly dropped from 150,000 or more, to less than 12,000 survivors. Multiple sources (UCLA’s Madley, California State Library, SF Chronicle) have all confirmed Stanford “helped facilitate genocide.”

Yeah, giant loopholes. Like the one Stanford still proves.

They not only haven’t been closed but people walk around boasting that they went to Stanford. They literally put his name on their hats and clothing. It’s very strange for anyone who understands history, let alone economic theories of monopoly based on annihilation. Can you imagine a Stalin hat, or a Pol Pot sweatshirt?

I mean seriously, the White House didn’t give a clue here about loopholes in economic history of America when they said they’d bring Jackson’s ideas back, another American known for fraud and genocide?

Is Doctorow useful? Entertaining, maybe. But if “enshittification” doesn’t bring actual antitrust enforcement back again, we’re just waiting for a 2045 reboot.