Elon Musk's Mob (and Effective Altruism) Ties and Globalization's Failures

Can we tame the excesses of mobbed up globalization before it is too late?

You can learn a lot by deconstructing an era’s buzzwords. In our age, those phrases are “effective altruism” and “globalization.” Both “effective altruism” and “globalization” are words you’re supposed to feel good about but which require careful attention to how they are practiced and by whom.

To study both we need only look at the globe’s richest man — Canadian-South African-American Elon Musk — and himself a purported effective altruist and beneficiary of globalization especially its Chinese tendrils.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, the largest gift to an effective altruist was the massive $5.7 billion gift that Elon Musk tried to give mobbed up poker player Igor Kurganov before the FBI got wind of it.

Much like Sam Bankman-Friedman, Igor Kurganov is a committed effective altruist with strange ties to the criminal underworld that are only now coming into focus.

We know that a big part of Musk’s story is unraveling, especially as more and more people seem prepared to tell the truth about things he did or said. Even his first wife Justice is breaking her characteristic silence and exposing that Elon was lying about what happened to their departed son, Nevada.

Justine Musk @justinemusk

@ElongatedMush A SIDS-related incident that put him on life support. He was declared brain-dead. And not that it matters to anyone except me, because it is one of the most sacred and defining moments of my life, but I was the one who was holding him.

Yes, Elon’s shrinking as the interest rates rise and the Silicon Valley ego bubble pops.

roon (impersonator) @tszzl

low interest rate elon: we will conquer mars and dethrone god high interest rate elon: i am going to individually pick which guys get to tweet

One gets the sense that this is all something of a game to both SBF and Musk and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kurganov and Sam Bankman-Fried compatriots, Dan Friedberg and Sam Trabucco, all have connections to the seedier parts of the poker world. Friedberg, who was the top regulatory officer at FTX, was linked to a cheating scandal in online poker. Trabucco, the former co-CEO of Alameda Research, the hedge fund tied to FTX, even applied a Vegas-style approach to crypto.

Incredibly Kurganov seems to have been backed by Chinese triad criminals as this video makes clear.

Ask yourself honestly: Is it a normal thing for the world’s richest man to give $5.7 billion to a poker player?

Globalization is the movement of goods, information, and people. When these things flow freely and in a legal, well-ordered framework, they enrich the world (or at least the American Empire and its allies). Alas, all of these things can be terribly mobbed up and we’re now at the stage where we have to acknowledge that the mobbed up criminal world has largely won.

We’ve reached peak globalization with the election of President Donald J. Trump and Brexit and that we’re now entering a period where nations secretly try to strengthen the state to tame the excesses of globalization while maintaining an outward commitment to multilateral institutions.

At first blush this geopolitical development looked an awful lot like a turn to nationalism but when you look closer, you see that many of the nationalist movements around the world have Chinese fingerprints and backers. That simply won’t do. China, as the pandemic and attendant supply chain problems have taught us, is bad for business and for our health.

We’re now entering a period where we demand more of globalization than platitudes. We want to “trust but verify” its promised claims.

Globalization then is Sinification and Sinification is ultimately cultural genocide. I don’t know about you but I don’t want to live as a Uighur — or buy products made by Uighur slaves that profit the Chinese regime. Wouldn’t it be nice if Amazon disclosed which products came from China?

Let’s take each component of globalization — goods, people, and information — and propose solutions to the problems they propose.

Goods and the Wish Economy

When it comes to goods, you can get inferior goods that explode on you, poison your dogs, etc. I call this the Wish economy — fake, cheap, flimsy.

The solution, it seems to me, is the carbon monitoring and tracking of these “goods” and of course reporting the scams to the better business bureau and the FTC. In the not too distant future I suspect you’ll be able to track all of your purchases through satellites.

Rather than have an anti-Chinese tariff, we will simply require our supply chains be less carbon intensive and of course less slave labor intensive. We might swap out slaves who enrich our enemies with friendly slaves who enrich us.

You can see this in the pressure campaigns against all goods coming out of Xijiang or in the efforts to ban all conflict cobalt in Tesla batteries. It’s not for nothing that the price of Teslas in China is way cheaper.

People and the World’s Halfway House

When it comes to people, you can get the world’s refuse. That’s our current policy, whether or not we care to admit it. You don’t get the best of the best and there’s even some question as to whether or not its wise to brain drain the rest of the world anyway. If you take the best and brightest from the shithole countries, I suspect you ultimately have a responsibility to colonize those countries from whence they hail if only because you’ve stolen the very minds who might have been able to do something about the country they ran from. Immigration is never a free lunch and there are always winners and losers from it.

“If liberals won’t enforce borders fascists will,” writes neocon David Frum. Quite right but who shall set the borders? Internal enforcement is the way to go here but I suspect that might well offend a lot of folks until some sort of crisis forces it upon us. Facial recognition, in this formulation, went from being terribly naughty to absolutely essentially. If every state is a border state, then the technology needs to get good fast. We also need to use the latest in genetics to identify who is who they say they are and who has the talents we need for our modern economy.

Information and the “Prerogative of the Harlot”

When it comes to information, you get no clearer teacher of this than famous admonition from Stanley Baldwin who sought to make a distinction between the responsible press and the “insolent plutocracy” which published the tabloids.

Stanley Baldwin began his speech to his supporters on March 17, 1931:

Let me begin by saying that the Press of Great Britain is the admiration of the world for its fairness, the ability with which it is conducted, and the high principles of journalism to which it adheres.

The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. (Cheers.) They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes of two men. (Loud cheers.)

Baldwin continued, using a line gifted to him by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling:

What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

In our own day the harlot is the social media companies who, at every turn, dunk and dodge their considerable responsibilities for the unraveling of our social fabric, and the Murdoch Empire, which, having cut a faustian bargain with the Chinese, now finds itself being Gawkerized at last.

When it comes to social media, reform is slow to come — either due absurd interpretations of the Communications Decency Act which carved out immunity for Internet companies way back in the ‘90s or by bought off politicians who are only too happy to cash Big Tech’s donations whilst their children or spouses are formally or informally added to the payroll. Looking at you Connor McCarthy, son of Kevin McCarthy!

Relief may be upon us. The high interest rates are killing the advertising markets upon which many of the most compromised and vampiric of the tech companies feed. Stock prices are halving. Lawsuits are being settled. It’s all to the good, as far as I can tell. We’re not quite there at nationalization all the data and pressing it into the service of the state but that doesn’t seem as crazy as it once did.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump once promised to “open up the libel laws” but President Joe Biden may preside over just that.

Consider that the Peter Thiel strategy of wiping out naughty companies through litigation.

• Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is on the hook for a billion.

• The Murdoch empire, backed as it is by the Bank of China, stands to be wiped out by the Dominion lawsuit and/or humiliated by the Crikey one.

• Johnny Depp holding Amber Heard accountable.

There is a solution to globalization’s excesses — more information, more accountability, more transparency.

Watch closely who runs from such efforts or tries to thwart them.

Could it be that “effective altruism” is anything but? Could it really just be a nerd snipe whereby the smartest people spend all their time debating rather than building?

I leave it to you to judge for yourself.