On Thursday, I had the good fortune to spend almost the entire day with my 20-year-old daughter, who was in town for a few days. We went out to coffee in the afternoon, and that spilled over into a dinner date.
It was a lovely time. We had a very tasty dinner at a local burger place I’d been wanting to try out, and then she came back to my apartment, where we discussed and debated the ethics of AI, and how it might be usurping human agency and creativity. She argued from Platonic philosophy, I argued from long experience as a creator and several years as an AI user — and also as someone who thinks about and discusses this regularly on my podcast. Knowing that she’s considering the path ahead for her life, I stopped at one point and suggested that she consider a career in the philosophy and ethics of AI, since it’s a field that sorely needs the thinking of bright minds like hers. It got late, we said our goodbyes, and she headed back to her friend’s house, where she was staying for a few days.
Around the time she was heading out, I suddenly remembered having seen something about a special event that Tesla was supposed to have been holding that evening for a new car model called the “Roadster,” which I knew nothing about. But the hype had made me curious, so I hopped on X after she left and looked to see what I’d missed.
I have to be honest: nothing I’d heard had prepared me for what I was about to see.
About an hour before my daughter left, Elon Musk had staged a tech demo of the latest innovation to come out of the efforts of the electric car company he leads and his combined rocket ship & AI company, SpaceXAI.
The demo showed the much-anticipated Roadster doing things that no car has ever done before — all while driving itself without a human being in control.
In case you missed it, there’s a full 31-minute video (the action starts about 5 minutes in) of the entire presentation for those willing to take the time. For the rest of you, I’ll offer a few brief videos: essentially the CliffNotes version of the event.
If you’re wondering, this isn’t just me being a spergy guy talking about a cool new toy. There’s something deeper at work in society that this points to, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
First, the upside down ramp:
Then, the kick-flip:
Finally, 0-60 in 1 second (and then at 0.81 seconds):
I have to admit, I was pretty floored by what I saw. Not since Doc Brown’s DeLorean in Back to the Future II had I seen a car do anything this cool, and that one was pure fiction.
There was a meme going around a few years ago of a SpaceX launch tower with the popular Silicon Valley phrase, “You can just do things.” I found myself thinking of that, grabbed a photo of the Roadster doing its thing, fed it through Grok Imagine, and came up with a new twist:
This philosophy speaks to something about the spirit of boldness in the relentless pursuit of innovation, and it’s a reminder I like to consider in my own life when I’m feeling trapped and needing to find a path forward.
I sent a link to the event to my partner in thoughtcrime, Kale Zelden, knowing that he’s an early riser and was probably in bed before the videos went live. I said, “Flying cars are finally real!” and headed off to sleep happy to be alive in a time where a guy like Elon is out there making amazing things like this happen.
When I got up, I had a reply from Kale, but it wasn’t what I’d expected:
I’m walking and talking, so understand that this might be a little bit inchoate.
What Elon showed last night is something that is radically masculine. This has got me thinking about the world we all live in, and just how female-coded the internet is versus the male-coded world of things. The UAP story is remarkably male. The tech of things versus the tech of ideas.
I’m not exactly sure what to make of all of this, but the ever-increasing disconnect between men and women, between the masculine and the feminine, has become almost completely disconnected now.
I don’t really know what I mean by all of this, but the flying roadster is a condensed symbol of the bullshit world you and I are trying to navigate as middle-aged men.
I was groggy. It was one of those moments where you look at your phone as soon as you open your eyes to see if any emergencies you need to attend to had transpired overnight. I sat with his observations. I love metaphor and poetic language, but I have a tendency to be overly literal in my interpretation of things, and often miss the symbols that are sitting right in front of me.
I wasn’t sure that I agreed with Kale’s nascent observations, but I decided to sit with them and let them develop — something akin (in my mind) to waiting for a Polaroid photo to make the image visible.
I got up. I made coffee. I sat at my desk and opened X to see the morning’s discussion of current events. And as I started scrolling I saw that my intrepid co-host was already advancing his thesis:
Important to note that last parenthetical. As the discussion continued, some people missed this point. For reactions to a thing to fall along masculine and feminine lines does not mean that the sexes will all line up to play kickball, as it were, for their own team. This is more of a general observation of the different social priorities that tend to align with each sex.
As my own timeline filled up with responses from various people that seemed to indirectly verify Kale’s observations, I chimed in. Most of the guys I was seeing talk about the event could barely contain their excitement. I saw discussion from women (or from men talking about their wives or girlfriends) that questioned the point of the exercise. The leftist point of view seemed to align more with the “female-coded” reactions, though whether this was because of their politically-motivated hatred of Musk or some other reason was not entirely clear. I posted my own thoughts:
And further:
As the day wore on, this pattern repeated again and again. As I said, it didn’t fall cleanly across the divide.
Sex-specific behaviors are observable even in small children, and even in a world where traditional gender roles have been flattened. Women have a tendency, generally, to prioritize the function and protection of the domestic realm — which often spills into pragmatic disputes over domestic labor, childcare, finances, and so on. Men have a tendency, generally, to focus on outside pursuits like exploration, discovery, war, politics, sports, technology, meaning-seeking, and so on. The family unit, when it’s healthy, is where those respective spheres unify to create a cohesive whole.
