My first great literary (if you can call it that) enthusiasm was Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. He was the comic-strip space hero of the Eagle’s front page in the early 1950s; in retrospect rather less science-fictiony than we thought at the time – the science all wrong, with for example the planet Venus more verdant than we now know it is in reality; and everything about it more redolent of the Second World War than of any imaginable future: Dan with his fat Lancastrian batman Digby, spaceships looking like Lancaster bombers minus their wings, and so on, and lots of chivalry – but in spite of all this sparking in me a life-long interest in science fiction, and in the questions about ‘life, the universe and everything’ that later more cerebral versions of this genre explored. The art work (by Frank Hampson) was superb too.
I’ve referenced Dan Dare before: https://bernardjporter.com/2021/05/28/dominic-mekon/. That post compared Dominic Cummings – remember him? – to the arch-villain of the strip, the Mekon. He (or it) was the tyrannical leader of the ‘Treens’ of Venus, with a huge green head and a tiny body. The head was the clue. It contained the pure science which was the Mekon’s means of controlling his subjects, but without room to take in what Dan regarded as more human (or ‘British’) characteristics; such as empathy, charity, and simple decency. He (it) was obviously part of the ‘evil genius’ tradition in stories and novels that went back for decades; probably as far as the hyper-fictional ‘Satan’.
Elon Musk’s head is not as big as the Mekon’s; but his ambition appears to be comparable. In common with most people, I first associated him with electric cars and spaceships, which did not seem to be bad things in themselves – indeed, the opposite if you were brought up on Dan Dare. But then I learned of his takeover of Twitter, which as a modern technology dum-dum I knew little about then, and still do. (My only contact with this field is the present one: Facebook.) But now that I know what Musk can do with his immense riches and power, and arguably has done already through his liberation of Twitter from almost any sort of ethical moderation, with results we saw in the riots that took place in England a week ago: fake ‘tweets’ empowering far-Rightists and provoking them to attack immigrants and Muslims; and with what I’ve since learned about his background (South Africa), his own far-Right leanings, and from the testimony of his transgender daughter: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665; I’m now fully aware of the danger he poses. In this regard he can be seen as the digital-age successor to that other media Satan, Rupert Murdoch. Isn’t it interesting – and maybe significant – that both these men originally came from ex-British colonies: ‘The Empire Strikes Back’? (That of course was bound to occur to me, as an Imperial historian.)
Obviously we shouldn’t allow billionaires to dominate our national discourse in this way. But that’s what happens when you give a privileged ‘freedom’ to capitalist speech.
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Incidentally, I still return to Dan Dare occasionally, in the bound facsimiles published by Titan Comics over the last ten years. I recently acquired The Earth Stealers, reproducing issues from June 1961 to March 1962, which was a few years after I had stopped subscribing to the original. The quality had declined by then – no Frank Hampson, for a start – but I was intrigued to find a story-line based on Dan’s returning to a future earth via a time-warp, and witnessing the near-destruction of the Earth by global warming, graphically illustrated with images of the Houses of Parliament burning, and so on. That looks quite prophetic for its time (16 December 1961). – If I can find a way to, I may post a few frames of it later. (I haven’t yet got to the end of the story, so I can’t tell you whether Dan saves the earth yet again; or whether the Mekon is involved.)
Porter’s Pensées 
I should have said History Reclaimed, not History Today, in the previous post I made on this topic. Apologies.
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Perhaps Musk should be seen not as an evil genius but as the Messiah of the religion of tech.
Faith in technology, according to David Noble, has a lot in common with religious faith. It has a redemptive narrative. It moves from darkness to light, from error to truth. It promises to improve and perfect us as individuals (cyborg technology, posthumanism). It promises to save us or our descendants from an apocalyptic fate (geoengineering, interplanetary colonisation).
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23779413/silicon-valleys-ai-religion-transhumanism-longtermism-ea
There has always been a certain kudos attached to having a successful career outside of politics: think of Hoover, Eisenhower, Trump. Perhaps the aura of hi-tech brings the greatest glow of all. Musk seems to inspire a kind of devotion in his online followers. This is not confined to the USA, or even to Britain and the EU. Musk has a following in Russia, too.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/in-russia-musk-mania-is-tribute-to-star-power-b1967050.html
This following is not due to his peace proposals for Russia and Ukraine; it precedes them. It has, I believe, much to do with the political vacuum which appeared in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism. Liberal seeds fell on stony ground in Russia in the cruelly tough 90s. Soviet society always valued skills in science and engineering (despite Stalin’s caprices) to the detriment of the humanities. It has a tradition of interest in science fiction (Asimov, Tarkovsky). And as Adam Curtis, a keen observer of the post-Communist collapse argues, part of Russian society has long been fascinated by hyper-rational solutions. Tech optimism filled a void and seemed to offer a career path to many savvy young Russians.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/adam-curtis-russia-oligarchs-communism-ukraine-corruption-democracy
The convergence of colonisation, technological progress and utopian visions has been written about by Duncan Bell in “Dreamworlds of Race”. One person he highlights is HG Wells, who apparently admired Rhodes’ ability to think in terms of continents. Wells saw technocracy as benign. The tech experts of different countries, through a sort of well-connected international freemasonry, would eventually bring about a world government. In the anti-democratic “Anticipations”, Wells foresaw a world divided into shareholders, tech experts, a service class and an “abyss” of people with no obvious stake in society. The solution would be eugenic. All this seems less far-fetched as people today wonder about the impact of AI; and a frankly disturbing modern riff on Wells’ ideas is provided by Curtis Yarvin, friend of JD Vance and Peter Thiel.
Perhaps such fears are just nightmares. Anyone who has ever struggled to project a slideshow must feel a little better that Elon Musk’s Trump interview was beset by technical glitches. “He’s not the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy.” But even if we discount such visions as remote, there are more immediate threats to liberty.
In the Telegraph and History Today, Robert Tombs has partly ascribed the Southport-triggered riots to none other than Roy Jenkins. Apparently, though permissiveness has its benefits, its arrival coincided with the breakdown of an “orderly and patriarchal society”, the collapse of family stability and the emergence of an underclass. I expect JD Vance would agree. Tombs laments the inability of civil society to police its own errant members. He quotes C19 Russian dissident Alexander Herzen: ‘your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman.’ Although the extent and aim is much disputed by academics, this sort of idea has been adumbrated in Chinese social credit systems with the aid of hi-tech. What Tombs omits to say is that Herzen deplored rather than admired these mechanisms of social control. The immediately preceding words to Tombs’ quotation are “Public opinion becomes a torture-chamber”. Herzen went on to ask “Can only a people that is incapable of inner freedom develop liberal institutions?” Perhaps he was hinting that even though Russia was a police state, its people had an “inner freedom”. If so, I hope it’s still true.
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