Some Thoughts on Douglas Coupland's Piece on Elon Musk

Some time ago I (rather belatedly) happened upon Douglas Coupland's much talked-about piece about Elon Musk.

I would not have wasted my time clicking on the link had I known who Coupland was, but not knowing better I had a vague idea that he would at least attempt to offer an appraisal of Musk's record as an entrepreneur and in the course of it say something that I had not heard a million times before--perhaps actually succeeding in telling me something I did not know, or making me rethink what I already knew, if only a little.

Instead this piece, which had few facts and less analysis but many, many assertions, was just Coupland trolling--in exceedingly colloquial and vulgar fashion and at very great length--everyone who is not a devoted member of the Cult of Elon Musk, vehement about how the man is superior to you, you personally, repeating it again and again. The item's title is actually "'The Smartest Person in Any Room Anywhere,'" while phrases and words such as "huge IQ" and "Ubermensch" and "measurably, scientifically, clinically and demonstrably the smartest person in any room anywhere" (the title is a quote by Coupland of his own words) are peppered throughout, and not content with celebrating Musk he sneers in his opening paragraphs that anyone who thinks Musk is a [expletive deleted] is "stupid." Interestingly this appears in the course of the following passage: "what's in it for you to dis someone you don’t know, anyway? Being negative is a stupid person's way of trying to appear smart without actually being smart," Coupland apparently oblivious to the fact that "dissing someone you don't know" is exactly what he is doing on a colossal scale.

Or is he oblivious? At this point you might think from the muddle-headed, hyperbolic material ("smartest person in any room anywhere," etc.) that I have quoted that "Coupland's being ironic and we are not supposed to take him seriously"; or even that "Coupland is satirizing billionaire worship generally and worship of this billionaire in particular." But the tone of the rather long piece is less than consistent (it runs over two thousand words, and significant stretches of it betray no sign of self-awareness), while postmodernists like Coupland as a matter of course provide themselves such escape hatches whenever they mouth off (one may think of it as "cowardice masquerading as 'playfulness'"--it is, as I have said again and again over the years, part of what makes reading their material such a waste of time). At any rate, even if Coupland really is playing the satirist that hardly makes his joke a good one, for at least three reasons worth mentioning:

1. A joke your audience doesn't get--a joke your audience doesn't even realize a joke--is by definition an unsuccessful joke. And in looking about the Internet I have yet to see evidence of anyone taking this item as a joke.

2. The audience which, predictably, reacted negatively to the piece is sick and tired of the kind of thing Coupland had to offer. Few these days would sit through a racist or sexist harangue and then let the writer off on the excuse that they "were being ironic." This was the class equivalent, sneering and snarling at the "losers" for over two thousand words that if they had been made to feel small, well, that was because they deserved to be so, because they were inferior to the great Ubermensch; and those irritated or offended at something they took as more than just a waste of their time--as a statement intended to taunt and demean and humiliate those who are not billionaires and dubious about the elevation of this billionaire in particular to something akin to godhood; who in 2022 can only be sick and tired of the sneering and snarling, which in its original version is so extreme and so silly than the satirist, the parodist, has nowhere to go with it--have no obligation to allow the lame dodge. (Indeed, they could fairly take his remarks as a provocation, with the social media reaction testifying to their being far more successful that way than as a piece of socially incisive humor.)

3. The item in question ran in The Guardian, a far from likely place for an extended joke of this nature (again, over two thousand words!) while given the shifting of that newspaper's editorial line in the wake of its Jeremy Corbyn-bashing recent years one would be less sure than before that the publication would not run a piece of economic royalist snarling at "the common man." (Certainly in my glances at the publication I have noticed how it has gone from being a forum for critics of neoliberalism--with such criticism extending to the specific record of New Labour and Tony Blair--to increasing allotment of space to players of the tedious "neoliberalism isn't a thing" and "Tony Blair was more left-wing than he was given credit for" games. Indeed, even now the author of a recent article criticizing "warmed up Thatcherism" couldn't resist taking a cheap shot at Corbyn in which he inaccurately, even incomprehensibly, compared him to Tony Benn--whether one views him positively or negatively, a very different figure with very different stances in a very different time.)

The result is that the plausible explanation is that either

1. Coupland and the Guardian were coming at the audience from the elitist territory of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises (but with even poorer argument and prose colloquial to the point of sub-literacy); or

2. Coupland and the Guardian tried and failed to make a very questionable, Onion-style joke because the joke looks so much like their actually coming at the audience from the elitist territory of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises (but with even poorer argument and prose colloquial to the point of sub-literacy).

Whichever one you go with, it reflects very poorly on both the author and the publication which accorded him the space on its platform.