|
|---|
|
Tail Lights: Where is Elon Taking Tesla? Author: Bill Crittenden Publisher: The Crittenden Automotive Library Date: 6 November 2022 |
 Tesla Model 3 in Mt. Hood morning fog, photo by Sasan Hezarkhani.
|
Elon Musk has been compared to Henry Ford numerous times. I never thought I'd see a resemblance, but if you think of Henry Ford less as the assembly line & vertical integration innovator and more as the owner of The Dearborn Independent, it's starting to fit.
Once a liberal icon for building the first successful mass market electric car and keeping his politics to himself, as best as I can tell Elon went public with his once hidden conservatism public in May 2020 with a tweet saying "take the red pill." Red pill references come from a scene in The Matrix, where Neo takes one to escape the computer-generated simulation world and see the real world. It's been co-opted into a right wing meme, and to be "redpilled" is to reject the mainstream news media to see the world as it is shown by Fox News and other right wing propaganda.
How far down the rabbit hole has the red pill taken him? Rock bottom can't be much further than tweeting in response to Hillary Clinton a link to a story from the website Santa Monica Observer that Paul Pelosi's attacker was a drunken gay prostitute that Pelosi took home with him willingly. That story is an unsourced fanfic from a conspiracy theory site which had published in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had died and been replaced with a body double.
When your worldview is warped by propaganda that you see conspiracy theories as plausible, it tends to start a downward spiral where eventually nothing seems impossible and everything crazy seems real. Oh, and you tend to see legitimate news, fact checks, and any verbal pushback against your wild-eyed bullshit another conspiracy. Through this lens, Twitter's Terms of Service was just a part of a wider conspiracy to suppress The Truth.
What happens when you start following those threads of yarn from pushpin to pushpin, from Big Tech Censorship to "someone has to be funding this" to globalist bankers to "George Soros types" and the Rothschilds? You inevitably find yourself at what Wikipedia calls the International Jewish conspiracy, or the idea that “a malevolent, usually global Jewish circle conspired for world domination.”
That's where Kanye West ended up, resulting in him getting suspended from Twitter for promising “when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” on October 9. Shortly after Elon carried a sink across the threshold of his new acquisition, Kanye's account was visible again and the n-word was posted by hundreds of trolls testing Elon's claim that “the bird is freed.”
It's not as if Elon is a walking, talking embodiment of that overused Voltaire quote. He's fired an employee who shared a video of his "self driving" Tesla in operation, he's offered money to take ElonJet off Twitter, reporters have been asked to show drafts of articles before publishing them, among quite a number of other incidents that establish a pattern of behavior: free speech is for me those who agree with me, and not for those who disagree.
So given the unsuspending of Kanye's account and allowing random assholes to harass black Twitter users with n-word replies, it's entirely plausible to conclude that these are things that, if Elon doesn't truly agree with them, he at least sees them as his kind of people and doesn't disagree with them enough to do anything about it.
So what does any of this have to do with cars? Brianna Wu sent this out to their 121K+ followers on October 25: “If you think Adidas took reputational damage, just wait until Elon takes over Twitter. Every Kanye-like incident is going to be at his feet. He will consistently want to do nothing. It’s inevitable Tesla will be synonymous with antisemitism, mass shootings and queerphobia.”
Sentiment may already be moving in that direction. A Tesla owner was quoted in a recent interview as saying “I don't want Tesla cars to become the new MAGA hat.” Another said on Twitter: “Pro tip: if you own a Tesla, you're now basically driving around in a giant red hat.”
Of course polarizing politics hasn't closed Hobby Lobby or Chick-Fil-A, but installing level 2 charging at home and committing to a half decade of payments on a car isn't the same as buying some new Christmas potholders or a chicken sandwich.
But then the Ford Motor Company still exists long after The Dearborn Independent published articles titled "Jewish Power and America's Money Famine" and "The International Jew: The World's Problem."
Will people drawn to the brand by Elon's politics outnumber the ones pushed away? Will this stay in the bubble of political social media circles, as Toyota's donations to insurrectionists have barely caused a ripple outside of Twitter as people just care more about a reliable crossover that gets them to work on time?
As is always the case with history, we can try to extrapolate from past examples but we can only wait to see what really happens.
629.2
The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about Library Owner Bill Crittenden's personal collection of books, magazines, and miscellaneous papers, much of which is available for reference if it's not directly available on CarsAndRacingStuff.com.
I recently bought a copy of the 1960 book The Indomitable Tin Goose: The True Story of Preston Tucker and His Car by Charles Pearson. With the copyright expired, it went to the top of the pile of things I'd like to scan and add to The Crittenden Automotive Library's Online Collection.
Except this time, it's actually happening!
Thanks to Apple's new image-to-text feature for its native Photos app, along with the nice clean letters of a book page shot with an iPhone 12 (instead of the grainy newsprint scanned in black-and-white that confounds OCR programs), I've been able to transcribe the table of contents and the first chapter and they're already online!
Then I took the book to my local library to use their book scanner for the photographs. Sadly the scanner doesn't quite work right at the edge and I'll have to re-scan it later when I get my own book edge scanner. What I was able to get is online now anyway.
The rest of the text should be online before the end of November, though!
History Beyond the Bumpers
The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.
Wondering where everyone's going to go when Twitter collapses has me thinking about social media and cars. With the glaring exception of the "Kia Challenge" on TikTok, social media has mostly changed car culture for the better. I recently picked up a copy of the Early Ford V-8 Club of America's 1989 membership roster, and I remember how slow things moved when you were waiting on the mail. Or the awkwardness of calling a stranger. Or the loneliness of not knowing anyone in your town who shared your weird taste in cars.
I first experienced online car culture in the late 1990's when I bought my first car and at the time Yahoo! Clubs gave emailing lists into a simple-to-use interface. The service turned into Yahoo! Groups, and then was shut down just a few years ago, but I still have archives of some of the chats.
That's one of the neat features of the computer age: what were once conversations in parking lots and basements are now message boards and podcasts. Aside from being able to talk to folks all around the world, some of it is archived for posterity instead of it all being lost in the wind.
I've created an archive of President Donald Trump's Twitter messages on cars and other topics within the Library's scope, and I'm going to add those someday to the Automotive News Briefs pages. But I really don't have any idea how to create a system that archives a mass of messages across muliple platforms in multiple formats with different ways of threading conversations, nor do I have the time to really start another project. But it's one of those ideas in the back of my mind, that it would be interesting for historians to someday go back and read through conversations that happened in real time instead of only having the finished products of news articles & editorials.
About The Crittenden Automotive Library
The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is an online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.
The Library currently consists of over 868,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 54,000 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images, and offline reference materials including 818 book volumes, over 1,000 magazines, and thousands of advertising brochures & documents.