Last week, Tesla unveiled their newest vehicle, an electric-powered truck called, well, the Cybertruck. Presenting the world’s first irony truck. Get it? It’s supposed to be dumb!
We all had a good chuckle at its ridiculous design, which looks like a DeLorean rendered on a PS1. The memes were endless. The whole reveal, even down to its corny name, was designed to attract a certain type of turbonerd: the Elon Musk fanboy. In the dark dungeons of Reddit, sweaty, clammy hands furious crank it to Musk’s absolute weirdness, pretending to like Grimes’ music. “The man is literally Tony Stark”, the tweets read, because their internet brains have been liquefied and funnel all cultural context through the strainer of Marvel movies. His fandom revolves around the image of cutting edge technology, when in fact, Tesla has only invented a technocratic marketing polish aimed at pop culture fanatics.
The claims about Cybertruck where subsequently quite nutbar: that its exoskeleton can withstand a 9mm bullet, its drag coefficient could be as good as a sports car, and that its windows were unbreakable. The last 2 points were disproved right out, with the windows being hilariously broken live on stage. (Just a headsup, if you’re going to do a live demonstration, make it impossible to fail.) He also claimed it could outpull a Ford F-150, a very likely scenario since electric motors are high torque, but such a showdown is unlikely. The whole thing reeks of “my dad could beat up your dad”.
Tesla is the company that most perfectly reflects our postmodern age. They are performing a necessary function: the electrification of road vehicles, but are the most ill equipped and ridiculous version of that process. The Cybertruck is trying to be a necessary part of that; fleet vehicles and trucks are natural first milestones to electrifying civilian transportation. If we’re going to have industry of any size, freight and delivery infrastructure are core.
The problem is that they’re the wrong company to solve this crisis: more concerned with its celebrity CEO making headlines with vanity projects and crass behavior than actually producing a worthwhile product. Elon Musk’s juvenile antics, especially his extremely online behavior, are threatening to turn a necessary requirement of a new economy into a sideshow. The company’s anti-union suppression, poor safety records, crunch culture, environmental violations all cast a long shadow over their superstar CEO; all surface glitz rotting underneath. They even tried to SWAT a whistleblower, which is practically the same as attempted murder. It’s not even the first time they’ve done something like this.
But hey, they rolled a sick-ass looking future truck out onto the stage! Flamethrowers! Memes!
The Cybertruck is a “futuristic” design only because it looks like something out of a scifi movie of the past: angular, an aggressive profile, and lacking most of the language of modern truck design. Just like how the SUV was the minivan for lawn dads, the Cybertruck is the F-150 for Rick & Morty fans. Over 200,000 have been pre-ordered, God help us all, and considering Tesla’s own production delays, delivery is not anticipated to be smooth or on time. (A reservation only requires a $100 down payment, however.)
Perhaps this is what it will take to get the public interested in a Green New Deal or a break from traditional fossil fuels: inept billionaire dolts smoking weed on Joe Rogan and showcasing absurdly designed vehicles. The Dubai Police recently added a Cybertruck to its fleet, eager to parade a showpiece vehicle to their Bugattis and Lambos.
Tesla follows the corporate pattern of the inability to imagine a future, rather than the cartoon of the future. Their cars are sold more as gadgets than anything else, their “cool value” based on the persona of their CEO. They can only look backward to retrofuturism of the 1980’s, because that was the last time an actual vision of the future was presented. It was a neon-drenched utopia, a nowhere geography built of light and flash. That was the time of the personal computer coming into its own, the internet just on the horizon. Perhaps that was all bullshit considering what technology turned into: delivery systems for ads.
Now in this late capitalist netherworld, all we get is regurgitations of the past. It’s more comforting, less risky, more culturally coddling. It’s not even a past anyone lived, it’s our foggy memory of the past. The 1980’s weren’t a technicolor futurescape, they were a grim period of austerity, the decaying twilight of the USSR, and South American coups with stacks of bodies. Reagan euthanized the last gasps of American organized labor, kickstarted the runaway military budget, and unleashed finance capital on our lives. We can’t build a new America, we have to make it “great again” and relive an ambiguous past. We don’t get a future, we get Cybertrucks.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.