Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk and the Cult of the Celebrity Savior

villagevoice.com

35 pointsbenryon10 comments

Putting aside the issue of Elon Musk, this is the most interesting line to me: The distribution of public goodwill is an economy not of labor but of attention.

I think a lot of us have experienced this in the context of tech support from Google or some other algorithmically driven giant; something goes wrong and the only recourse is Twitter. I really don’t want to live in a world of arbitrary and unappealable actions by monopolists, with my only recourse being a social media appeal.

Yet that’s the obvious trend.

Even HN is part of this phenomenon. Sometimes having a highly voted blog article complaining about poor customer experience or corporate malfeasance is the only way to get companies to respond.

Unsure why you got down-voted here, I've seen evidence of this (although not personally experienced it).

I'd guess any public area where people who are the companies customer visits, where you end up complaining in public, ends up being a possible place where this might happen. The only gripe I have with this trend is where people choose to go direct to social media vs the appropriate channels for support. The fear i have is that if enough people do this, normal support channels might get under resourced.

Having said this, i'm often impressed with the support i get when i ask for it. I rarely ask, but i probably should more often. A classic case of "you only get what you ask for", but a good reminder that you should probably be asking more often.

Good example of something that got traction on HN:

https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/thai-cave-resc...

this elon guy seems to have some psychological issues so better let him be a savior for just a minute, before he hurts anybody

And this comes just days after he said:

“I have made the mistaken assumption—and I will attempt to be better at this—of thinking that because somebody is on Twitter and is attacking me that it is open season,” he said in an hour-long interview with Bloomberg Businessweek for this week's cover story. “That is my mistake. I will correct it.” [1]

My completely non-tech relatives in the UK asked if I'd heard of "that Tesla man", so I think he has damaged his and Tesla's reputation there. Hopefully the cave diver sues and donates the money somewhere worthy.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-13/-the-last...

It amazes me how many people seem to have bought into his cult of personality. Hopefully his recent pedophile outburst will give them some pause, and lead them to consider the long-term societal effects of worshipping corporate oligarchs.

It's really interesting. The more remarkable successes Musk has, the more a certain large group of people and media organizations attack him. It almost makes you think they have some sort of hidden motivation.

It works like this. Two teams and the media (owned by the teams) work together. Team A argues their side in the media, and so does Team B. It's important to give the illusion that they are enemies. That way people get interested, they continue to read the media, and Team A or Team B gets attention. Everybody gets what they want.

This is used in elections, staged wars, anything.

You can be a hundred times a bigger a dick than Elon Musk and won't get a hundredth the publicity. Its all about clicks!

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