Tunnel Wars
ARGs and the Eternal Recursion of Tunnel Wars
“Ah, Solon, Solon, you Greeks are ever children. There isn’t an old man among you … You are young … young in soul, every one of you. Your souls are devoid of beliefs about antiquity handed down by ancient tradition. Your souls lack any learning made hoary by time. The reason for that is this: There have been, and there will continue to be, numerous disasters that have destroyed human life in many kinds of ways. The most serious of these involve fire and water, while the lesser ones have numerous other causes.”
—Plato, Timaeus
Among men, the secret brotherhood, the confederacy of dirty tricksters, the conspiracies of play, are counted as the dearest forms of friendship. In captivity, humans curl like armadillids into cabals, and modernity is, for the greater part, a captivity situation. But from what abyss of uncreation come those coyote-gods Paranoia and Conspiracy that rule our underworld, and oft threaten to invade the surface?
Through the lens of Catastrophism, we can surmise that multiple near-extinction bottlenecks saw humans survive through trickery, psychological warfare, and, among the fallen races, feeding on the flesh of their fellow man. We yet live among the descendants of such wretched skinwalkers that wear masks of peace and weakness, waiting for any rationalization that would let them slip past their conscience, to butcher their neighbors.
For the survivor of such events, long period of refuge in caves and tunnels, drawing on finite food and water, jealously guarded. Every gesture is laden with significance, paranoia and darkness amplifies every whisper. Survival would demand a strigine vigilance, alliances, ad hoc secret societies. The giga-catastrophe represents an inflection point of rapid adaptation and peak experience, now lost to conscious memory, but leaving deep impressions upon our nature, most certainly our stress responses. Many of our interactions with risk and uncertainty can be traced to the choking atmosphere of the “Tunnel Wars.”
We find there are Neolithic tunnels and Erdstalls all over Europe. Subterranean passages are regularly “discovered” under almost every major European city, under houses, in forests. They are called by the locals “dwarf tunnels” or the abodes of helpful goblins. Though said to have been constructed during the Medieval period, there is not a single written record of the construction of an Erdstall. “The tunnels were completely hushed up,” says Dieter Ahlborn, leader of the Working Group for Erdstall Research.
Imagine being witness to a cometary or planetary near miss, the sky exploding with plasma and thunder, volcanoes emerging from the ground and spewing pyroclast, the heavens gone berserk, black and purpled, your neighbors twisted in feral-shape from heavy electromagnetic effects, their minds instantly translated into some liminal plane by hallucinations of bizarre, visionary cosmata. The ones that manage to make it to the underground, traumatized, form factions, and begin to wage resource wars on a micro scale.
Under this paradigm, a certain human tendency, a near existential thirst for insider information, would be born out of the domestic terror of post-catastrophe tunnel life. Indeed, the protean grotto, the treacherous cave, has found expression in every age, in the katabasis of dream and myth, and most explicitly in cinema.
This collective haunting now allows the modern schizo-engineer, pilot of ARGs, to take both leftist and rightist groups on a Willy Wonka’s Wondrous Boat Ride. At an ever-accelerating rate, we hurtle past haunted cartoons and animatronic ghouls like Jeffrey Epstein, an indigestible glut of light and noise, without even a glimpse of the machinery which empowers it all.
Elon of Mars and the Cursed Amulet
In 2022, by appearing to take action on Twitter - to “drive off extremists” and cater to “the middle 80% of people” - the great “Techno-King” Elon Musk purchased license to continue shadowbanning and deboosting criticism of the status quo. Even if a few goblins were slain, it amounted to no meaningful change: the exact same categories of people remain in control behind the scenes, and the incentives for censorship remain unchanged. It’s nothing more than the new theater of cyber governance, a gamified, highly online adventure through a labyrinth of “deep state” shenanigans.
Before we decide whether to trust or condemn the motives of Musk, or accuse him of running an Alternate Reality Game (ARG), we must first establish if he is simply a pot smoking Tony Stark, a modern Delos David "D. D." Harriman from Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon, or something more complex. Based on his history and past statements, I believe the truth will be made clear. Whatever is revealed is not meant as an indictment, merely an act of context repair.
Elon Reeve Musk is a purported “billionaire” African-American businessman known for his two biggest companies, Tesla and SpaceX. However, his wealth has been largely attributed to Pentagon and state government subsidies, all the wealth acquired from his involvement in the early stages of the “PayPal Mafia” was gone by 2008. The consensus among Musk biographers is that his greatest influences are science fiction and his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, who in the 1930s led the Canadian branch of the Technocracy movement.
Joshua Haldeman was an American-born figure who moved to southwest Saskatchewan in 1906. Haldeman helped establish the province's first chiropractic association and campaigned publicly against Coca-Cola. He was also involved in the Canadian branch of the Technocracy Party, serving either as the "research director" or "party leader," depending on the source.
Technocracy was a movement and ideology that aimed to establish a system of scientific control over society, dividing the world into regional units called "technates" run by technocrats—experts in various technical fields. The movement gained popularity in the 1930s but faced criticism for its impracticality due to the lack of necessary technology for such comprehensive control.
Ultimately, the Canadian government found the Technocracy movement dangerous due to its anti-Semitism and opposition to World War II, leading to its ban. The ideology faded post-war as prosperity grew. Disillusioned by these events, Haldeman left Canada and moved to South Africa, where his grandson, Elon Musk, was born.
Elon grew up idolizing his grandfather’s adventurous feats, including flying across the Indian Ocean and circumnavigating Australia in a single-engine plane without electronic instruments. This ingenuity and Faustian spirit clearly inspired Musk. Haldeman's family motto, "Live dangerously—carefully," and his teaching that "there's nothing a Haldeman can't do," were instilled in all his children.
Musk is a huge proponent of transhumanism, a movement to integrate humans and artificial intelligence. His support for Neuralink and other projects are extensions of his belief in a technocratic “world brain”, a collective world electronic mind. “On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we coexist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” Musk has stated, “such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
The so-called "PayPal Mafia" is an alleged “deep state” faction of former PayPal employees and founders who have since gone on to start and greatly influence the success of new tech companies with close ties to the security state. The central hub of members all met at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, some dropping out and starting companies together during the Internet bubble of the 1990s. This group has become increasingly powerful and influential, reshaping key aspects of the economic and political topography.
This “influence network” has used various methods to achieve success, such as the Hidden Revenue Model and the Multi-Sided Platform Model. This business model, implemented by Reid Hoffman and other PayPal Mafia investors such as Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, serves as “invisible middlemen” in interactions among buyers and sellers, allowing more data of the users on these sites to be sold to companies and intelligence agencies. The general idea is that Pay Pal Mafia ventures, such as Palantir for instance, formed as data mining operations, similar to Facebook, provide an open back door to the NSA and CIA.
A pillar of this frame is the observation that nearly every data-driven startup without deep ties to the security state seems to fail. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all have Pentagon contracts, DARPA affiliations, or In-Q-Tel funding, and, of course, a host of former CIA/NSA employees. The Big Data wave of the past fifteen years has been revealed as feverish Silicon Valley tech evangelism. Outside of selling data to advertisers, no real business value was evidenced. To see a physical representation of this, Boeing’s safety approach, Boeing Safety Intelligence Solution, was an entirely data-driven scheme that used “advanced modeling techniques and machine learning algorithms to identify hazards and risks through data”. Connections to the tech-intelligence complex do not keep airplanes falling from the sky.
The “don of the mafia”, Peter Thiel, has attended all Bilderberg meetings since 2012 and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007. In 2017, Elon Musk joined the World Economic Forum for a panel discussion on the future of energy, where he shared his thoughts on the potential of technology and artificial intelligence to revolutionize industries and drive economic growth. While it is dubious that the “Pay Pal Mafia” represents a coherent cabal, all signs indicate that, like most Silicon Valley factions, each of its former members are favorably positioned toward the so-called ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution,’ which can be reduced to various brands of transhumanist neo-feudalism.
Related terms of note are "cyber-favela,” “techno-ghetto,” “chip-pigs” and “pod life.” For all its futurist lacquer, the world-image envisioned here is a recursion of the paranoia and cargo-cultism associated with living in a cave, alongside a motley crew of atomized, paranoid survivors, brandishing scraps of technology from a destroyed civilization, all while the leader falls under the spell of a ‘cursed amulet’.
Musk, like all tech CEOs, has every mark of a snake oil salesman, an inveterate serial offender, making a number of futurist prophecies that were later walked back or transformed into something farcical. The Hyperloop, for example, was a futuristic tunnel-based maglev rail system that eventually became a small tunnel for cars with some flashy neon lighting, and then recently abandoned altogether.
Elon’s Boring Company, a tunnel construction startup (another venture designed to rely on state subsidies) is characterized by employees as a workplace where ‘We have consistently flirted with death.’ Boringly, this is due to OSHA violations and not battles with subterranean races.
Elon of Mars has repeatedly invoked the blood memory of Tunnel Wars, and then routed that frisson back into the all-swallowing hypostasis of modern Bug-Tunnel World. Scrawling on the walls his crude 2D representations of a lost timeline, shiny and chrome, we find comfort in the delicious fumes and child-like glossolalia of his next prediction.
Tesla's Level 5 self-driving cars have been promised to be here “by the end of the year” for ten straight years—yet, they still haven't arrived and are still classified as Level 2. After hundreds of crashes and dozens of deaths involving Tesla vehicles using “Full Self Driving,” the company is under investigation by multiple governments, and the promised miracle is replaced by the mystery that Tesla somehow remains in operation.
Then there's the much-publicized Neuralink claims, with Musk predicting that Neuralink would have a viable product for treating brain injuries by 2021. As of now, Neuralink has not released any such product, and its development remains in experimental stages. The only proof of its effectiveness is mouse cursor movement, which was demonstrated in the 1990s.
The Neuralink device, which has been called “neuroscience theater”, has been the subject of much controversy since its first announcement. The US Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General reportedly conducted a federal investigation into animal welfare at Elon Musk's brain-computer interface startup, Neuralink, following allegations from current and former employees that the company killed around 1,500 animals, including 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, since 2018. It is unclear how many of these animals died due to the company's prototype brain chip, but it has previously been reported that 21% of the monkeys used in testing died due to gruesome “infections” and “malfunctions”. Yet the Neuralink was fast tracked to human trials.
We also have the infamous SolarCity solar roof presentation, which was pivotal in securing Tesla shareholder approval of the purchase of SolarCity, something that personally profited Elon and his brother Kimbal greatly. The product in question was not functional and is still not functional to this day. Recently, Musk's pattern of presenting non-existent technology and getting away with it has accelerated. We've had a dancing AI robot (which was a person in a fake robot suit), a robovan, Tesla home, robotaxis again and sporadic reports of the reviving of the hyperloop after nine years of nothing.
From its origins in 2002, SpaceX has been extremely close to the national security state, particularly the CIA. Mike Griffin, at the time the president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm, was with Musk virtually from day one, accompanying him to Russia in February 2002 in an attempt to purchase cut-price intercontinental ballistic missiles. Griffin believed Musk could substantially undercut competitors by using second-hand material and off-the-shelf components for launches. Later, while at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract, and by 2008, SpaceX was again in dire straits, saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services.