Musk’s personal vehicle, which served as the initial dummy payload for the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, launched in February 2018, making it the first CEO’s car to reach beyond the orbit of Mars, and also marking the debut of that one time when the world’s 54th richest person looped the David Bowie song, “Space Oddity” (David Bowie; Philips, 1969), via a piece of soon-to-be-interstellar debris’s banger sound system.
“This is nowhere, and it’s forever,” said the showrunner for Star Trek, or Quantum Leap, or Black Mirror, or The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, perhaps themselves an artist confronting our macabre fetishization of futurity as a perverse “die-in,” pre-empting our regularly scheduled broadcast of the present.
In short, the polyamorous marriage between media ideology and industrial imagination goes back to Plato’s Cave, at least, and in Lynn, Massachusetts, to shoe-manufacturing profiteers who paid those lousy wages for perimetric and static use of something we call “labour-power at work.”
Edison’s then-slogan for the incandescent electric light bulb was, “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford’s crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie’s Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis’s “Politician Man,” two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods thus triggering an out-of-body experience, and good ol’ monetarist theory.
Certain seventeenth-century hearing aids consisted of putting a rod in one’s mouth and biting down; in 1877, Thomas Edison’s toothmarks could be found on most early prototypes of the phonograph. Thomas Edison was an asshole.
Psychosomatic Netflix binges, off-notification sexting on Signal, ranking Grubhub delivery options by how likely or not will be your engagement with humanity, or clicking “Report” on the trust-fund-enabled sponsored content behind a cyborg-influencer’s Instagram post about detox tummy tone wraps, are all such immaterial allusions as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep (or, as well like to call it, Suspend to RAM mode).