We have wasted a lot of very tiring evening and late-night hours absorbing punishment from dudebros on Twitter, trying to learn as much as we could about the Elon Musk Phenomenon from the heart of his online cult headquarters. All those folks are basically also on Team Trump. The cults have almost wholly merged. While there's some residue of disillusioned ex-Tesla fans who are upset that Musk turned towards fascist politics, they've been ostracized and subject to incessant harassment. The bulk of the Musk loyalists are wholly devoted to the GOP counterrevolution.

All of these persons are exceptionally, superlatively intelligent. Really! Just ask them and they will tell you. Elon Musk of course has the highest IQ of all—although paradoxically there's a subset of these folks who suspect that a middling IQ is best. (If you're TOO smart you might go 'woke'.) But while Musk may be the superhuman genius, possibly a space alien or something or an avatar of the Machine God or something like that, even the lowliest of his fans know themselves to be geniuses as well. Obviously they're geniuses! They're smart to follow Musk, the father of all invention and science, the self-made engineering superstar who will take humanity to Mars and make everybody^* fabulously wealthy^† in the process.

* "Everybody" may be subject to social and racial constraints.
† The "wealth" may come in the form of cryptocurrency. $DOGE, perhaps.

Acquiring the preternatural 'intelligence' of the Elon Musk cultist may seem a formidable, indeed an impossible task. The dudebros themselves attribute it to their genetic purity, perhaps with some idea that they're all straight-line blood descendants of Charles the Great or Marcus Aurelius or someone else suitably regal and impressive. My readers might be thinking to themselves: "I'm not descended from any kings or emperors! Why is that even important?" Put such concerns from your mind! The trick to Musk's sort of 'intelligence' is very simple: just lie! Lie your arse off. Claim that you're the genetically gifted heir of Ramesses the Second or Ashoka the Great or anyone famously royal! Even if you're challenged, you can simply brush off the challenge. It helps here to learn a fusillade of intelligent-sounding insults, although thanks to Elon Musk's brilliance this task is now much simpler. A slur will do, in a pinch.

For the trick to work, however, you do have to believe it to some extent. This is an ancient conundrum with all professional liars, especially merchants and salespersons and others "in business": if you aren't at least partly convinced of the lies you tell, they will sound wobbly and unconvincing. The human ear is good at picking up uncertainty in speech. Hence to be good at asserting you're the spiritual incarnation of Suleiman the Magnificent, you must persuade yourself that it might be true. This isn't so difficult a task, but it's a treacherous one: you may let the imposture go to your head, and make yourself look foolish. Only geniuses of Elon Musk's exalted superintelligence get the necessary social latitude to get away with arrant foolishness.

IQ is also valuable in establishing one's 'intelligence' but I don't know whether it's actually necessary to do much more than assert a value. I assume there's places you can shop around for an IQ score and I'd guess there's some IQ-testing houses that are very generous with their allotments of IQ points. (They know whom they're dealing with!) Having some sort of source for the IQ number is undoubtedly a boon, but such things can always be asserted rather than carried out. You can always claim that your score is "official" in some murky way and hurl around a lot of brand names or IQ-testing jargon in order to make your point stick. It may also be wise to start by asserting a modest value and then inching it upwards over time. Most of the people you're attempting to impress with your 'intelligence' wish to pretend they're always getting more intelligent, so they won't be shocked by an ever-increasing IQ number, within limits.

But the really central thing to Elon Musk-method 'intelligence' is simply speed. The techbro crowd think of their own brains as like supercomputers always whizzing away faster than the sluggish thoughts of the sheeple, so they think of 'intelligence' chiefly as being ultra-quick and impulsive with decisions. They don't think of it this way exactly but really they're making their decisions first and then working out the rationale later, like someone talking themselves into a committed lie. Bark out answers quick enough and you'll keep everyone else reeling, struggling to keep up with you (especially if you take care to surround yourselves exclusively with people whose 'intelligence', though sound and worthy, isn't quite up to your own.) Memorizing a lot of factoids and maxims to snap out during conversations helps with the perception of always being a bubbling ferment of Ideas™ even though you're merely repeating memes.

Myself? I think I'd prefer to stay a [slur]. I guess I'm lazy and a [different slur] and should Have Fun Staying Poor, etc.

~Chara of Pnictogen

we would all like to get back into being better friends with computers. learning programming seems like a necessity if we're to survive the next several years because I have a feeling the landscape of personal computing is about to shatter.

we've been trying to help in the shattering process, I admit. Mono the Unicorn has been kicking away at the credibility of the "large language model", which seems like a cosmic joke of a technology, the world's most expensive Burroughs Machine. but people really do believe in it, and that's kind of terrifying actually. I'm quite prepared to believe that a lot of computer jockeys who feel like the Machine God is about to burst forth from their gibberish generator are shocked and amazed for the simple reason that they're seeing scraps of text they would never otherwise read. they're such limited people with limited intellects and a practically subliterate degree of language use because they're speaking a kind of street poetry or patois so liberally festooned with memes that you practically don't NEED to talk. it's actually sort of cool, but it's also rather obvious these people don't know how their machines work. so many layers of abstraction have been heaped atop the personal computer that these techie people plainly regard "the computer" more like a force of nature than a physical object. memory? electricity? data? surely these things merely flow like water or nitrogen.

in a way, that's delightful! fiction has met fact, in a way. where do you find such highly abstracted and stylized depictions of how computers work? in movies and games and comic books and fiction! this is how people talk about computers in stuff like Tron or Hellblazer, as if data and memory were substances, stuff. they certainly can be (in broad approximation) treated that way. but the real world is a place of infinite subtleties and these have all escaped the notice of the high-tech crowd. if they're bad at programming it's because at some level they don't even really know what a computer program is any more.

that's charming. they might even be as bad with computers as I am, despite all their bluster.

they're certainly not good with math. it's quite obvious in a hundred little ways that these programmer dudes have a mystical, innumerate sort of approach to numbers. they're numerologists though not honest ones. large numbers quite escape their grasp, but they're dazzled and impressed by them; small numbers tend to fall completely out of their sight. they love percentages so they have a habit of pretending that any fractions smaller than 0.05 or even 0.1 must not mean anything. Pfft, 5%, that's NOTHING!

anyway it would be pleasant to get that old feeling of facility back. I may have come to feel like my faith in the personal computer (it's sad to think that I did in fact HAVE one but I did) was betrayed, and thus conceive the sort of festering vengeful sense of offended justice that Emiya Kiritsugu once held for heroism. It's curious that our paths should have crossed as they did, and that we should have had so much in common, including a child's faith in a just Universe.

Apple Computer, most of all, has been like some Evil Empire in my mind, which is a bit silly I grant you, and yet...I can't let go of the feeling that they did in fact poison their tempting apple. they held out the promise of something that eventually they grew tired of trying to offer, so they settled for being COOL. but it's more than that.

think of what they did to George Orwell's 1984...they pretended it had a happy ending.

~Chara of Pnictogen