Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solopsism (18 Aug 2025)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Zuckermuskian solopsism (18 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar, perched on a legless nude Ken doll body; its eyes are psychedelic pinwheels. Behind the figure is a group shot of child laborer miners from the 1910s, glitched out, blue tinted, and covered with scan lines. The background is a psychedelic swirl of moody colors. They stand atop a filthy checkerboard floor that stretches off to infinity.

Zuckermuskian solopsism (permalink)

When Elon Musk disagrees with someone, he calls them an "NPC" (non-player character). In video-games, an NPC is a machine-puppeted sprite that engages in predictable movements (think of the ghosts in Pac-Man) and perhaps utters some scripted (or AI-generated) dialog:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-interviewer-npc

Seeing people as automata is probably a side-effect of sitting in the command-center of a big online service, in which you primarily interact with users as statistical aggregates in an analytics dashboard. When you nudge the "buy" button a few pixels over and see how sales rise or fall, you're interacting with people as a mass. The dashboard tells you how "sales" respond to a change in the UI, but not how people are affected by that change.

The dashboard can't tell you whether the change meant that some people couldn't locate a buy-button and thus didn't get something they needed, nor can it tell you whether some people bought something they later regretted.

Analytics allow you to relate to people the way a Simcity player does, by making a zoning change and observing the population-scale outcomes: put a road through a residential block and watch the traffic numbers improve while the happiness of the sims in that block declines.

But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad. If you think of those people as truly real – as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety – you couldn't possible set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.

William Gibson described this mindset beautifully in Idoru, in a scene where a TV executive describes his audience:

Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

(Not for nothing, Musk frequently pumps millions of dollars into elections in the hopes of influencing all those NPCs into voting for his favored candidates, irrespective of whether those candidates will make those voters better off:)

https://pbswisconsin.org/news-item/musks-plan-to-pull-back-from-politics-follows-flop-in-wisconsin-court-election/

On Twitter, Musk banned an account that reported on the movements of his private jet (that is, an account that republished public information), because he said that it made him feel unsafe. Musk also changed how Twitter's block button worked to make it easier for gang-stalkers, griefers, harassers, and trolls to attack their victims, who are disproportionately marginalized: women, queers, people of color:

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-block-x-blue-sky-rcna176130

Musk's fears are vivid and real to him, but the fears of millions of Twitter users are just scripted NPC behaviors. In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk.In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk. Or, as Musk put it on Rogan:

The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-5321299/how-empathy-came-to-be-seen-as-a-weakness-in-conservative-circles

Not for nothing: this is also how being in a K-hole feels. Under ketamine sedation, it's easy to feel like the whole world, your whole life to that moment, was a dream or a hallucination. The whole universe is just a figment of your imagination, and you are its god and creator. In a K-hole, other people aren't real.

Now, as it happens, there's a long moral tradition that condemns people who treat others as unreal, as means to an end, rather than as ends unto themselves. For Kant, this is so odious that he said it violated the "categorical imperative":

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/persons-means/

Or, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax put it:

Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

But when you are seeing like a billionaire, that's how people appear to you: as things. It's the mindset that leads to you offering your subordinate a thoroughbred horse in exchange for fucking you:

https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-paid-250000-to-a-flight-attendant-who-accused-elon-musk-of-sexual-misconduct-2022-5

Seeing like a billionaire is when you view people as aggregated masses without any real interiority or will. Hence "high agency," the term that people who aspire to extreme wealth and power use to describe themselves. If the elite are high agency, then it follows that the masses are low agency. They have few desires or real feelings:

https://www.highagency.com/

It's not just Musk who views people this way. Mark Zuckerberg has been treating people as things for his entire life, ever since he started Facebook in his dorm-room so that he could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads. In Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams' whistleblower memoir of her time as a top FB exec, we get a picture of Zuck as someone who just doesn't think that other people are real enough to matter:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

It's no wonder that Zuck thinks that chatbots can replace our friends:

https://fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zuckerberg-ai-friends-hinge-ceo/

At some foundational level, he thinks we are all chatbots, automata driven by manipulable inputs that drive deterministic outcomes. This is a guy who claims to have invented a mind-control ray using warmed-over Skinnerian behavior mod techniques:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Sam Altman, another person who sees like a billionaire, and wants to replace our friends with chatbots, claims that humanity is nothing more than a "stochastic parrot" – a statistical autocompleting program that does not truly understand or think:

https://x.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728?lang=en

Billionaires have to be solopsists, or at least, selective solopsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they weild their power over. This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

Billionaires just don't think we're real.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrago PC disguised as a set of encyclopedia volumes https://www.mini-itx.com/projects/encyclomedia/

#20yrago Nobel economist on harm lurking in copyright monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20060217023906/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_16-8-2005_pg5_12

#15yrsago Heinlein biography: LEARNING CURVE – the secret history of science fiction https://memex.craphound.com/2010/08/16/heinlein-memoir-learning-curve-the-secret-history-of-science-fiction/

#10yrago LAPD & Chicago bought “Stingrays on steroids” with asset-forfeiture & DHS money https://revealnews.org/article/chicago-and-los-angeles-have-used-dirt-box-surveillance-for-a-decade/

#10yrsago NSA kremlinology: spooks outsourced lawbreaking to AT&T https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/08/was-nsa-trying-outsource-responsibilty-its-fourth-amendment-violations

#10yrsago German chefs can claim copyright over the arrangement of food on plates https://www.techdirt.com/2015/08/17/germany-says-taking-photos-food-infringes-chefs-copyright/

#10yrsago Massive Star Wars lands coming to Disneyland and Walt Disney World https://web.archive.org/web/20150815230427/http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2015/08/star-wars-themed-lands-coming-to-walt-disney-world-and-disneyland-resorts/

#10yrsago America’s “worst voting machines” dropped in Virgina (at last) https://www.wired.com/2015/08/virginia-finally-drops-americas-worst-voting-machines/

#5yrsago No one wants an H1B visa https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#crickets

#5yrsago Amazon bans podcasts that criticize Amazon #https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#nondisparagement

#5yrsago Combat Wheelchairs https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#combat-wheelchairs

#5yrsago How to Argue With a Racist https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

#5yrsago Self-driving cars are bullshit https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck

#1yrago MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

#1yrago "Disenshittify or Die" https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025

  • "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
    https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. (1000 words yesterday, 35029 words total).

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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(made an account just to comment here, when I realized I honestly just needed to comment on this but not really subject myself to the Horrifying Ordeal of Being Known™, i.e. interacting with anyone else in social media)

I don’t know if I’d make the argument that Zuck or Musk are naturally solipsists — it’s more likely that, like everyone else, Zuck and Musk have a certain number of people they have empathy with (i.e. Dunbar’s number) and they’ve long ago exceeded that amount.

It’s funny because after I read this I decided to look for, and find, Cracked’s article on Dunbar’s number and how we’re able to countenance horrors happening to others yet still care and empathize with others within our sphere.

I say this not because I want to defend both of these guys — heaven knows they’ve done so much harm and I maintain to this day that Zuck deserves to be put on the dock on the Hague for crimes against humanity — but because it’s a trap that any of us could fall into, where we amass so much power, money and influence that it literally damages us in some fundamental way?

The argument isn’t that these people are uniquely bad, it’s that no one should have this kind of power, especially power over others. It literally deranges you.

(Of course they could just be particularly joyless motherfuckers, and maybe for bullying’s case they should be considered that way and mocked in that manner)

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[NB: nooooo I have too many links! I have to choose the most two important ones! nooooo!]

AIIEEE! Interaction! Being known! Aaaaaugh!

I’m okay. I’m fine. Give me a minute.

I don’t know if I’d argue that there’s a singular human nature, necessarily? But it does appear to exist, in aggregate, across a particular range.

Like I recall listening to a podcast — it was Behind the Bastards, I think it was one of the episodes related to the Wansee Conference… hang on, I got it, it was the Adolf Eichmann episodes… where one of the things that they did have to deal with was that, it turns out that getting the soldiers to actually do the murders turned out to have consequences, and it manifested in substance abuse, depression, PTSD and a rise in suicides. Which was why they decided to automate the damn things with gas chambers and fake showers and having the other prisoners do the cleanup.

Now, I’m not saying those murderous Nazi soldiers were free from accountability for what they did. I’m not even saying that there weren’t outliers who thrived or flourished in that kind of environment. I’m sure there were, but… on average? Like, on a population-level scale? Pretty sure having to murder civilians, especially women and children, even if you dehumanized them and hated them, has a mental and emotional cost that manifests in a number of ways, which, to the Nazi leadership, manifested in drastically reduced combat readiness (because they’re Nazis, that’s what they care about).

Like, I recognize that a lot of the crap that people like Underwood pull tends to be a caricatured version of what people tell themselves to justify the terrible things they do, that if you don’t do it others will do it, that the only way to survive in a world is to dominate over others, forever and ever. I… kind of recognize it as a rhetorical trick, and a profoundly wrong way of seeing the world?

You know how the way some people who say they’re Darwinists and then use the whole guff about how “the fittest must survive” and then treat the whole world like it’s a massive competition between mutually hostile equals that is purely zero-sum, the way some (social) Darwinists do? Or you could do a Kropotkin and realize, based on his observation of how nature behaved in Siberia, that for the most part most organisms just want to survive long enough to reproduce, and there are benefits to mutual aid and existing as if the other organisms around you weren’t out to get you, because thinking like that costs a lot of resources that would otherwise be used to, oh, I don’t know, survive in an environment that is more hostile to you. It’s not the other guys that are the biggest dangers, the universe is already dangerous.

Like how some right-leaning folk realize that domesticated organisms, including humans, have less brain matter in their skulls than their wild counterparts and then come to the erroneous conclusion that oh, civilization and domestication makes organisms stupider, cooperation is for dum-dums, rather than the alternative explanation that, actually, what’s happened is that domestication frees up resources, and instead of dedicating resources to internal genetic systems, you just… change the environment to be more favorable.

It’s why mammals have less genes (∴ less complex genomes) than reptiles and birds — they just code for less proteins, because it turns out that having an internal environment that you can control dynamically (i.e. wombs) means you don’t have to have so many genes regulating what an embryo needs to do if the temperature changes. And that happened! It wasn’t nature more dakka-ing a thing, there was apparently an innovation hidden somewhere in the phenomic phase space that… made things cheaper, like a cheat code!

All this is a kind of complicated way of saying that, you know, maybe there is a kind of human nature that we can divine some kind of rules from, and that assholes making statements about Nature Red in Tooth In Claw™ and Actually Everyone Desires Dominance Over Others™ are just… assholes making rhetorical justifications that simplify things in ways convenient to them. Maybe What People Actually Want might be too complicated to divine, but we do know some things, like… if you do this thing you get hurt this way. If you do the equivalent of drinking bleach you get damaged in this certain way, but for society, you know?

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