There’s this thing that I have started calling the Elon Effect.
The Elon Effect is what happens when something is super cool in a vacuum (like Tesla!) but then is commodified/co-opted/really annoyingly obnoxiously never-endingly stanned by people you hate. In my head, it’s kind of a subset/corollary theory to first-order basic, which I’ve written about before; a lot of things that have the Elon Effect are first-order basic, but not necessarily everything that’s first order basic has the Elon Effect.
Great examples include:
In-N-Out. Great burgers. The fries are bullshit. If you’re from California I don’t want to hear another word.
Hamilton. Incredible, landmark piece of music. The stans, especially a few years ago: the worst. Were they right? Absolutely. But still the worst.
Cryptocurrency. Harrison and I hate how cool cryptography and the blockchain is and how “crypto” has been adopted by the griftiest of the tech grifters. A GSB student told me they were going into crypto because “no one really knows what it is so it’s easy money.” Great sign.
Harry Potter. a;fldkajsl;kdfja;iehfkjashdlfkjaf
David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest is actually a reference to how people who’ve read the book will never stop talking about it.
The Bible.
Tesla. The granddaddy of them all. Imagine if literally anyone but Elon Musk was running Tesla, a company that has set market standards for battery efficiency and driven the whole electric car market further along! (I emphasize Elon runs it and did not found the the company. Because he didn’t, and that whole story is CRAZY) The core product is incredible and miraculous, but that doesn’t change the fact that Musk stans and Musk himself completely insufferable.
The crux of the issue with the Elon Effect is the greenbeard effect, some kind of inverted virtue signaling, the idea that telling other people you like Tesla might mean that they’ll think you’re a “Science is Fucking Awesome” hypercapitalist technocrat worshipping hack, the same way that if someone tells you you should read this great book: atlas shrugged! you assume they’re a bootstrap-adoring libertarian. But you probably never wanted to read Atlas Shrugged; what makes the Elon Effect so infuriating is that it taps into a particular kind of self-hatred, because if it weren’t for those weird nerds you have a feeling you would like the thing, and that if you start the fall down the slippery slope you might be one of those people you loathe by the time you hit the bottom. Or, it’s that something precious has been soiled and commodified and repackaged by capitalism; Jia Tolentino (who has probably already written this essay better than I ever could) had this killer quote Capitalism appropriates what resists it instantly which I think about all the time. The Elon Effect makes you seethe with rage, either at yourself or at the powers that be.
I hate the Elon Effect, but I hate how much I hate the Elon Effect even more.
I fixate on this kind of thing so much and it’s such an easy way to be miserable. I can hear my mother already: if that’s all it takes to make you dislike something, you probably never really liked it in the first place. It sucks that something that would otherwise be really enjoyable is so easily ruined just because I find some of the other people who like it annoying; it’s petty and stupid. I think subconsciously I am especially wary of Elon Effect candidates because I tend to nerd out super hard over things (have you watched this show HAIKYUU??!!!), which is kind of dumb because why not lean into the fact that I am so easily amused instead of just being sAD all the time?
One of the key pitfalls of the Elon Effect I think is that the depth of fanaticism is conflated with breadth of fanaticism. Like with anime: it’s perfectly normal to like anime, but if you’re super into an anime, I think a lot of people also assume you really like all anime, including the weird tentacle stuff. And if you want to clarify that you’re only really into this small part, and not the worrisome aspects of the thing, then it’s SUS because you sound super defensive and you’re using soooo many words. (This kind of relates to why I find “subtly weeby” UNIQLO shirts super cool: to most people, it’s a cool abstract design, but to my fellow weebs, it’s the knot thing from kimi no na wa: it’s like public key cryptography, but for clothes.)
I think the saddest thing about the Elon Effect is that it means I am so much closer to tolerating a different subgroup of people and at the end I abandon it for the tribe I already know. I think tolerance between people who have diametrically opposing views is a tough ask, but I think an undue amount of vitriol is reserved for people with only slightly different beliefs than you, which seems ridiculous when that’s the group that seems like you have the best chance at tolerance with. There is already a much better essay about tolerance and how hard real tolerance is on the Slate Star Codex, and it lays out what I just said but much more beautifully and convincingly.
(the SSC is frequently really well-written and thought-out and so are criticisms of the blog and its proponents. I think this essay is one of the best of the bunch, but also I don’t agree with the linked essay completely, and I’d love to talk about it!! also it’s not nearly as long as the scroll bar makes it look like 85% of the page is the unrolled comments section.I have sooooo many thoughts about the problems with categories and goldilocksing and the phrase “you’re not wrong” but those are for another essay that’s much longer, much farther away, and in need of much more thought.)
I think a large part of my character development in college was caring a lot less about what people thought about me (be yourself! a flaming hot take. i know). I really leaned a lot more into accepting myself as a ginormous weeb and being way more into the things that I love than I was in high school. And yet! The things tainted by the Elon Effect still elude my full enthusiasm, for better or for worse. There is still a lot of truth in the Elon Effect: people flock to things for a reason, and an easy proxy for judging a movement is to look at the kind of people pushing it. It is so so hard to both not miss the forest for the trees and also really understand the trees, but that’s what we should strive for!
So come hither, weird nerds. Tell me about your fancy cars. Just leave Grimes out of it.
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