#9: Hey Sunshine
F*ck Curtis Yarvin and the Tron Lightcycle He Rode in On.
“Hey Sunshine” is the first song on the March 2024 EP “The Freest Speech Ever Attempted Without Disintegrating.” That half-record is a half-truth about Elon Musk’s blaring loneliness and gradual goose-step toward a complete psychotic break. Very cool.
The Logic file on my external hard drive is telling me that I started writing this one on December 10th, 2023.
This song sounds like Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town” because I purposely ripped off Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys are Back in Town.” The mania and nostalgia that comes from Brian Downey and Phil Lynott’s shuffle is too goddamn fun to not try out at least once in your life.
The song has become some kind of cornerstone of Western media that pops up any time people purposely meet up with other people they might not see that often.
Like in a Buffalo Wild Wings commercial, where actual boys are actually coming back to an actual town. Or an Instagram reel of old Occupy Wall Street occupiers reuniting at a pro-Palestinian watermelon margarita brunch at an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. And through a car stereo to some chill-ass dude splitting a six-pack of Bud heavies between himself and the road on the way to play with his semi-reformed Toadies tribute band at a funeral parlor outside Elko, Nevada.
DOOOOOOOO YOUUU WAW-NAAAAAAAAA DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
I kept imagining that song blaring in Elon Musk’s head every time he blasted a rail of ketamine and spent the remainder of the night tweeting about how Joe Rogan was the Dark Enlightenment’s Robert Oppenheimer. Cut to him grinding his teeth and screaming, “YEAH. YEAH. YEAH. WE’RE SO FUCKING BACK. THE BOYS ARE FUCKING BACK. THE BOYS ARE FREE-SPEECH. FUCK! THAT’S FUCKING BRILLIANT! THE BOYS ARE FREE-SPEECH, AND FREE-SPEECH IS BACK IN TOWN. YEAH FREE-SPEECH IS A BOY BECAUSE THE ONLY GENDERS ARE BOYS AND GIRLS AND BOYS ARE BETTER. FUCK MAN. WHY DID SHE LEAVE ME” at 5am in the Palo Alto Fry’s Electronics parking lot.
Musk had begun his villain arc around that time. I wanted to see if I could beat him to it by threatening myself in the form of a deadline on my birthday in March.
An unhinged New York Times interview had come out on November 30th, 2023, and all the signs were there that this motherfucker was starting to crack, much like a shard of his beloved ketamine. He’s wearing a bomber jacket and pulling some inflated, cocksure Robert Downey Jr.-as-Iron Man effect that you only see in the saddest and loneliest spaces on earth. Within five minutes of coming on stage, he says, “I have no problems being hated; hate away,” in response to a trip he made to Israel earlier that year. Nice. Dude decided to take on the personality of a Monster Energy can.
I don’t need to detail the fifteen months of edgelord hell that followed. One-sided jabs at whatever the fuck “woke” is and gacked-out promises to “make comedy legal again” gave birth to a voting block of Americans that will be studied for centuries, or completely forgotten. Cut to the captains of America’s tech industry playing on their phones behind Donald Trump at his inauguration on January 20th, 2025.
His entire timeline gave me vertigo. It begins with a frail and balding South African immigrant screaming about the importance of colonizing Mars to a Jack in the Box drive-thru speaker thirty miles from where I’m writing this. It ends up with him ripped on TRT and throwing Nazi salutes to a crowd of ghosts in 2025.
I thought back on the mid-2000s tech boom that ran concurrently with Musk’s rise and on my time as the dumbest guy in Silicon Valley during the same period. Which is what I’ll write about because I am writing this, and I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do with whatever these are.
My buddy John got me a job at the lithium-ion battery startup he was working at in Hayward around 2009. I did whatever job that wasn’t fucking around in a science lab or trying to get money from people with more money in Palo Alto. It was like being the mouth-breather who cleaned up pterodactyl shit at the Library of Alexandria. I’m pretty sure those two periods of time overlapped.
The Library of Alexandria, a long time ago.
The lab was a completely new environment filled with exotic dangers like water-reactive sheets of lithium, hydrochloric acid, and giant tanks of liquid nitrogen being rolled around at all hours of the day. I probably could have died a bunch of times in some pretty hilarious ways. Think tripping on a shoelace and knocking over a chemical that makes everybody in the lab’s skin melt off.
The company was part of a larger Bay Area intellectual gold rush that was based on the “triple helix model” of symbiosis between academia, government, and private industry. That model pops up in the United States anywhere people have weird family members who don’t talk much and travel to the Caucasus a bunch “for work.”
Ideas are formed in academic institutions like Stanford or UC Berkeley, the government comes in to fund it by way of the Department of Energy or the Department of Defense, and a private company is formed with shareholders. Great. Let’s order some pizzas and spend all night trying to figure out how to mine Venus.
Making employees comfortable was paramount to the startup world at this time. A company’s greatest assets were the intellectual stable they had hacking away at their IP.
Andrew Carnegie’s wealth was in steel mills and company towns. Tech had non-verbal Neon Genesis Evangelion experts who got Alice Waters to cook wagyu beef sliders for them every Friday. That is, only AFTER they did two keg stands and spent at least fifteen minutes in the meditation bounce house.
The lack of stratification between the classes and factions at that point was pretty remarkable because of it. Silicon Valley thought of itself as very liberal then and always tried to stay in stark contrast to the prickish captains of industry from previous generations of businessmen.
Four martini porterhouse lunches were replaced with boiled chicken breasts and weird slow-paced walks where they held their hands behind their backs except to point at some bird or tree for fuck-all reasons. Blurring a hierarchy was supposed to be a part of that, I guess.
“That cloud kind of looks like the high school triathlete I get my blood replacements from.”
It felt like those who would now be known as the “tech oligarchs” were amongst you. These were actually important people with actual power who were shockingly pedestrian. They weren’t celebrities. The idea of having security guards or paparazzi would seem insane and counterproductive to the humility they were pushing. They wanted to give the air of being approachable and empathetic. Some would even say that they were trying to be “human.”
The lack of clear class distinctions and a never-ending chaotic rush of funding and failure lead to situations that now seem like a dream. Yes. That’s it. Just a big… ol’… dream. Why, look below. Here is one of those dreams now.
Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s billion-dollar boondoggle, Solyndra, was in a massive 500,000-square-foot plant off the 880 in neighboring Fremont. They very publicly failed in 2011 at the high water mark of the clean energy boom. My boss sent me over to grab some equipment he had purchased at an earlier auction and check out what was still available. It didn’t matter what. Office chairs, nuclear reactors, or leftover condiments in the refrigerator. Just go grab some shit before it gets incinerated.
I showed up to an abandoned airport hangar. The dregs of the government money they had squandered were scattered around with the names of its new owner written on Post-it notes.
All the previously mentioned stratifications of the tech explosion wandered around the abandoned hangar like biological variations in an aquarium. Or the stuff in a pot of chili. Yeah. The chili thing is better.
A delegation of sharp-looking Chinese businessmen sauntered around pointing at equipment and remarking to themselves. Mexican construction workers were doing demo wherever demo needed to be done. Former Solyndra salesmen were getting headhunted by rival companies like widows getting hit on at their husband’s funeral. And a bunch of sun-beat hillbilly scavengers were pulling anything that contained copper out of the dumpsters and throwing it in the flatbed of their Syrian militia-looking 1990s Toyota pickups. Beautiful.
Leaving Solyndra with a broken Mr. Coffee pot, a 3D printer, and a bunch of family photos from the desk of some guy named “David Zhou,” I passed the security gates of a grey monolithic factory with “T-E-S-L-A” on the front.
This was the former Honda plant that Elon Musk took over in 2006 to make his first round of luxury go-karts for incels. He would become admired by fans for pulling a cot out on the factory floor so he wouldn’t have to leave. Sounds pretty reasonable for a guy with 10 kids.
This is the confusing nearness I keep bringing up. There was some dude in that building 500 feet away from me trying to end mankind’s dependence on fossil fuel while trying to go to Mars. He and I could both stand in line at the 7-11 on Fremont Blvd, and no one would think anything of it. Patrician and peasant. Egghead and blockhead. Billionaire inventor and arguably one of the greatest songwriters of all time, whom KQED once described as having “cinematic storytelling that’s also light on its feet, deeply felt without taking itself too seriously,” and with lyrics that Glide Magazine once said “archive such emotional depth with so few words.”
All of the hackneyed altruism and pinko bullshit that Silicon Valley prided itself in gave way to whatever you would call our present timeline. That constant and chaotic American seesaw between the collective and the individual swayed back to the latter, with decency completely falling off this go-round. Or maybe it was never there. Maybe this is what was always under the hood. That is a car reference because Elon Musk makes cars.
Tech people are weird motherfuckers.