SpaceX Space Cadets Set Their Sights On Libertopian Mars

The good folks at io9 ask: Could SpaceX Land the First Humans On Mars? I would like the short answer to be: "Don't Bet On It." But chances are that all of us taxpayers will indeed be strong-armed into precisely that bet by the same neoliberal incumbent elites who have ruinously looted via private contracting so many of our armed services to generally terrible results in every way (except counting the profits raked in by a small number of already filthy rich greedy gazillionaires).

Because SpaceX is described as a "commercial venture" all the usual Libertopian and Ayn Raelian types who throng futurological precincts have decided to pretend that becoming a government contractor engaging in a taxpayer funded exploitation of already existing mostly decades-old technology which itself already existed only because of the splendid efforts once upon a time of a For Real government space program which still made possible the launch to a state-consortium funded and maintained International Space Station represents "Going Galt" in space. After all, look how libertechian Elon Musk hates gu'ment handouts -- except, of course, the ones he lards himself with, natch.

Because they have decided to pretend SpaceX is market-fantastic many are now also pretending that this means that libertechian capitalism will sprinkle "market pixie dust" on the stalled space program, introducing forever vaunted "efficiencies" and big-brained hitherto quiescent "innovators" and "risk-takers" into the dynamic to revive all the Old Dreams, orbital hotels, L5 toruses, moon bases, space elevators, Mars colonies, asteroid mining, the whole OMNI Magazine sweet patootie (to which pre-pubescent me was a wide-eyed subscriber, both to the magazine and to the dream, believe you me). The thing is, of course, the "efficiencies" they are talking about are really mostly just the usual plutocrats externalizing all the real costs and risks onto the vulnerable, the "innovators" are really mostly just the usual self-promoting sociopathic flim-flam artists, and the risk-takers are really mostly just going to fail upward while everybody else is expected to clean up their messes for them as usual.

When the Soviet Union fell, think-tank capitalists swarmed the landscape breathlessly awaiting the arrival of Libertopia from the blood and ashes of Communism but they scrammed real quick when the "spontaneous order" perfectly predictably (and as predicted) looked instead like human trafficking on a bleak corrupt kleptocratic scorched earth. By then, the market ideologues had moved to Cyberspace, "the new home of Mind," where they expected first cryptography and then later the "social web" to smash the nation-state and crystallize into Libertopia again, with e-cash and reputation servers and netizen-bloggers of loving grace presiding over rugged individualist avatars kicking into high gear an acceleration of accelerating acceleration unto holodeck heaven but they mostly scrammed when the net of nets became instead a strip mall surveilled by paranoid states targeting Terror suspects and greedhead corporations targeting niche markets in which the only liberty left was the liberty to lie about yourself on an online dating profile or swapping funny cat videos with your Mom. (Lawrence Lessig told this story better than anybody way back in Code.) By then, the kick-ass capitalists all took a ticket to watch Bombs Over Baghdad clear the way for a privatized flat-tax Libertopia with Paul Bremer on Iraq Year Zero but soon enough scrammed again taking whatever wasn't nailed down with them when, well, we all know how that turned out. By then, our eager market fundamentalists were being called upon by the Killer Clown Administration to remake post-Katrina New Orleans into an amusement park Libertopia, dress rehearsing the new Disaster Capitalism as the planet convulsed under the strain of extractive-industrial-petrochemical criminality and the criminals themselves prepared the next stage of the scam in which they would declare that they alone can clean up the lethal mess they made through highly profitable unaccountable "geo-engineering" mega-engineering wet-dreams. That terrible story is still in the works, but it is no longer hard to figure how the story ends. (Naomi Klein told the first part of it awfully well in The Shock Doctrine and I strongly suspect her next book will tell still more of it.) Still, now it appears that some of the usual subjects have scrammed again, and have moved on to better things, SpaceX Space Cadets ready to paint the next scam Libertopia over Kennedy's New Frontier.

I seriously doubt that Space will be the Final Libertopian Frontier, although it might be if we wake up to the scam and send the libertopians and libertechians scramming, screaming, permanently. I for one still hold on to my dreams of space science and exploration, but I know it will only be accomplished for the common good through the planetary commonwealth of democratic agency and civic order. Space is the Place for Civilization, but the neo-feudal anti-democratic pre-civilization of Libertopia is a path to nowhere, and certainly not into Space.

Fellow Space Dreamers, You Wanna Go Galt? Then the Dream Dies, and It's All Your Fault.

Re-posted from Amor Mundi.