The Octagon of Bad Ideas: Musk v Zuck

This piece first appeared on my newsletter, <a href="http://futureproofnews.substack.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Future Proof.</a> You can <a href="http://futureproofnews.substack.com/subscribe" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">subscribe for free</a> — and if you enjoy it, maybe you can take out a paid sub. Paid subscribers are, famously, more successful and attractive. IfMark Zuckerberg wants to beat the shit out of me, he’s welcome to. I will happily take being forever known as the bespectacled Brit who got pulped by the nerdy Facebook dude, in exchange for what I assume would be a spike in subscribers to <a href="http://futureproofnews.substack.com/subscribe" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">my newsletter</a>. Elon Musk — the X supremo whose grand vision for renovating Twitter is still, at time of writing, yet to fully, or partially, materialise — seems less keen to become known as the guy who got beaten up by Zuck. After much toing and froing over the logistics of a possible MMA fight, Musk is in retreat. An injury, he claims, requires surgery, so the mooted fight (for which Rome’s Coliseum was proposed as a venue) seems less likely to happen. After months of baffling decision making, this is finally a good stance for Musk to take: he’s a 52-year-old Diet Coke addict who was likely to be made to look quite foolish by his younger, fitter counterpart. How have we got to a stage where not only are two of the richest, most powerful men in the world genuinely haggling over a fight, but where that does even feel especially bizarre? There are two currents here, as far as I can see. The first is a highly cyclical backlash to the aphysicality of the internet era. The fact that my lame, dweebish Microsoft word processing software doesn’t even recognise the word “aphysicality” is a symptom of this. As the 90s turned into the 00s and culture and society migrated online, the slogan “the geeks will inherit the earth” went mainstream. It became the title of a book by Mark Roeder and a song by I Fight Dragons, but, more importantly, it became true. The geeks made a lot of money and became status symbols. Not since Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe have we seen such a radical reshaping of, predominantly male, attractiveness. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel is married to Victoria’s Secret model Miranda Kerr, Elon Musk was married (twice) to actress Talulah Riley, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian is married to tennis GOAT Serena Williams. The geeks inherited the world; and for a while the fact that they couldn’t win an arm wrestle with Shirley Temple didn’t matter. But these things are cyclical and all the disempowered men who are NOT billionaires and NOT married to supermodels and NOT actually good at anything really, could aspire to something physically that was unattainable mentally. Not to mention the confluence, in recent years, with a male backlash to the progress of feminism and the equality agenda, which has left many doughy (mentally, as well as physically) men to reckon with decreased entitlement to job prospects, salaries or soapboxes. It was sort of inevitable that, when the dust settled, masculinity would reassert itself. Mixed Martial Arts was always the apotheosis of this trend, and UFC its flag-bearer. Boxing, which had always mixed that raw, athletic pugilism with an almost balletic dancelike, tactical quality, was replaced by something harsher, rougher and, crucially, more violent. (It also makes the homoeroticism of boxing look positively chaste, but that’s for another article…). On the level of the individual, MMA is about reclaiming some autonomy — some sense of power — and at the broadcast level, the spectacle is all about disinhibition, the ruin of societal strictures. <a href="https://nickfthilton.medium.com/the-octagon-of-bad-ideas-musk-v-zuck-5aef85f043c3">Visit Now</a>