TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Pump It! ft. Ed Ongweso Jr

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

This Machine Kills’ Ed Ongweso Jr returns to the pod to talk about his series of essays talking about what he calls The Silicon Valley Consensus - an ongoing chapter in our interest in the convergence of reactionary politics and the profusion of data centres all over the world. Also, Trump says “everything’s computer”, and Rachel Reeves claims to eat crumbs from under couch cushions to manufacture consent for the largest act of planned social murder in the U.K. since 2010. Check out This Machine Kills here! Get the full episode on our Patreon! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)  

Elon gave me he gave me his key said for me to smell it and I smelled the key and it just smelled like a normal Key, then I got into the car and I said wow everything's computer I Hate that he's funny. I've said this many times before right if we're all gonna get killed by this fucking guy At least give me the dignity of him not being funny because I don't want my last thought to be the guy who's ultimately responsible for what's happening to me right now is kind of funny. Yeah. And I get it because you know, I was thinking about the first time I went down a K-hole,

I was in the bathroom with my ex and I was looking at the walls and the tiles and I felt like I kept getting obsessively focused on each tile, then hallucinating a different element of my life or a different life path. Everything's ceramic. Everything's ceramic. So when he said that, when he's in, sitting in there, he's staring at it, he's touching it a little. I get it.

He's seeing all his different life paths, you know, like fucking... The thing is, right, because when Trump sits in the front seat of a car, he's transported into, I think, maybe the most elegiac Trump moment I've ever seen, which is, I think about this all the time, it's the video of him driving himself, like, in his own car, it's late at night, Barron's in the front passenger seat, Ivanka's in the back recording them both, and they've got Taylor Swift's blank space playing a little too quietly and they're just driving in silence. He could have had that forever, but instead he's president.

Or when he's in the truck and he's like, I could just leave it all, I could just go. There's something, because Trump is the most American, right, and so as a result he's most in touch with his emotions and his sentiments when he's in a car. So it makes sense. This is the kind of like, it's a real like kind of psychic thing for him. He's also like, I'm confused by this because he's also just like a real New York guy as well. So he's like the only type of person who wouldn't necessarily be like so into his car. That's, I think it seemed really weird. No, no, no. A specific type of New York guy. He's not a subway New York guy.

Out of borough. He is a car New York guy. There are many of them. I just sort of felt like it was a bit awkward to Tesla. It didn't feel like he was really convinced. It felt like he was sort of told what to do. And he sort of said the wrong thing. That was kind of like he sort of interpreted the wrong way. And that's how you get a line like everything's computer. Weirdly, weirdly for Trump, given who he is, he's not a good car salesman. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what I mean.

Well, I'm going to take us back. I'm going to say hello, everybody. Welcome to TF. It is Hussein, Nova, Riley. And we are joined by one of our our favorite recurring guests. It's this machine kills Ed Ongwezo Jr. Ed, how's it going? It's doing great. I love being back again. How's everything?

Is it computer? It is. I won't be getting my livelihood. Traditional American greeting. Is everything computer? Yes, everything is computer. I'm also with you. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, the premise of both of our shows, huh? And he just said it. We're gonna talk with Ed today about a new series of essays that he's written that I think encapsulates something that we've been swirling around for the last few months, which is linking to get like, if you want to listen to our episodes, like with, with Quinn's Slabodian, my talk with Nathan Tankus or Nina Ihacker, even our recent discussion on films with A.S. Hamra, it's been, that's been swirling

around this idea linking this far-right reactionary politics to the hydrocarbon economy, to Wall Street, to all of these other nodes in the chain. And you've been writing this series of essays that's culminated in this thing called the Silicon Valley Consensus that I basically just want to spend 20 to 25 minutes asking you about after we do a little bit of news. The first piece of news, of course, is Tesla continues to be going very well. ALICE That's why they've gotten Trump out there, to try and sell you the true code.

I mean, this is the thing, right? It's bad that Trump is funny, but he's also embarrassing. And I think if you're a liberal, if you care about the kind of dignity of the institutions or whatever, you had a bad time with the whole Zelensky Oval Office thing, but you had a worse time with the White House being turned into a kind of a used car lot. Yeah. I can't believe that the tragedy of the Clemson Tigers football team has been replicated with the farce of Elon Musk

using the White House as a Tesla dealership. No, what struck me most about the, I would say, rapid fusion of the Tesla auto company, which is, by the way, if you're- Oh, criticizing that is now domestic terrorism, by the way. Yeah, but not just domestic terrorism. It's domestic terrorism against, but specifically with named individuals who are like,

I don't know, like Debbie Wasserman Schultz level centrist democratic fundraising insiders, or people like Reid Hoffman who are connected to ActBlue, right, this thing that just like, it's the thing that if you're on the list, then like you'll get the text from Pete Buttigieg or whatever that's like, I'm gay. Like that, like that particular, a real text that was sent.

In fairness, I'm also texting this to my friends, so that's relatable. That's the No Gods No Mayors episode planning group chat. This is who has been suggested are financing domestic terrorism, which actions against Tesla dealerships are now considered. It's really funny that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now on the same kind of scope as the Bada financing domestic terrorism, which actions against Tesla dealerships are now considered. It is really funny that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is now on the same kind of scope as the Bada Minow group, right? Not her literally, but that type of person.

You do all of this kind of consensus building and you're very nice and you respect all the norms and stuff and it's like, you may as well have spent that time sort of like firebombing your kind of your enemies car dealerships. We are the sons of the white guys for Kamala Harris that you did not detain. What reminds me of this, right, is if you looked at Musk's takeover of Twitter, right, he did kind of the same thing, which is in response to the company being worth $10 before now it's worth $44 billion again, because it's how you buy influence with the U.S. state. Yeah.

Right. That what he did was he also suggested that advertisers who were fleeing the site were doing so illegally. And a lot of the same language is being used. A lot of the same language is being used to say that like people boycotting or protesting Tesla, whether it's are also doing so illegally It's just the stakes have been considerably raised. It's just cool. It's just what it is is its corporatism again, right? It's like if you jump back, it's like Hitler looking at a big Mercedes and being like wow, it's all radio

Look leftists need to understand that Tesla's have an innate right to exist and boycotting them Citizenship is a very, very fragile thing. So if you're looking at a Tesla and like, you know, licking your lips and rubbing your hands, what I'm going to say is you should think again. They belong in your home and on your streets. That is true. Yeah. You should give the Tesla your house. It's not settling. It's parking. A parking space for a car for a car without a parking space. A park guide, you know? We got it.

You know what they say, if you finance it at 29.99%, it is no dream. I mean, like we laugh about it, but also like, you know, it is very, like there are lots of documentation of like, Miserati is like taking Israelis like taking parts of settlements and literally turning them into parking lots. So like, not, you know, cutting quite close to the bone there, at least in that respect. So basically, what we're talking about of course as well is Tesla like, its stock price finally doing what I think it should have done for a very long time. This is not financial advice.

In fairness, it's just joining the rest of the economy, right? There's some tariffs happening, the trade war is happening, obviously, we're staking out a firm position here that we're both partisan Canadians and Canadian partisans here, both of those are equally important. But like... ZACH For nation forever! ALICE Yeah, I think it's really funny that in what, like, two months in office, Trump's gotten it to, uh, actually maybe no treats anymore.

Maybe the economy isn't gonna be good anymore. And then to have the statement be like, Americans do not need treats. The most treated nation in human history. Right, yeah, yeah. It's like this is the only thing like people enjoy about going to America. Like they're so like, yeah, like without the treats, like what is America? Big parking lot. It's worth going into one.

We're talking about like the Tesla crash is emblematic of the broader crash and lots of equity, not all lots of equities. European banks are doing amazing. By the time this comes out, we'll see, but yeah. Yeah. But the promise, and this isn't just the promise of the politics, of the literal party political insiders, this was the promise of the reactionary tech sector.

When it decided to be conservative reactionary instead of liberal to conservative reactionary, is that was the problem. Like Shamath, David Sacks, like all these guys, they were like, look, we're going to get in, we're going to be efficient, we're going to become an autarky, you know, and then there's going to be a golden age of like 5% GDP growth basically forever. And it took them two weeks. Those same guys, the All In podcast has pivoted from like, we're all going to make it essentially

to oh yeah, by the way, we're doing like, turbo austerity, 10-year, like, treasuries are fucking, are through our up, stocks are down. And, you know, the promise was always like, the bait and switch was so obvious that it was going to be a bait and switch. And I mean, some of the only people who were being honest about it were people like Peter Thiel, who were like, no, like, America and like, the empire, which, of which it is the core, right, needs to get way less fucking prosperous so that we can implement a like a theocracy of which I am the Pope King, essentially, right. And he was one of the only people who's being honest about it. I mean, even like you can see it in the way that Howard Lutnick talks about the,

the American economy alongside, and again, this is going to be extendable to more, because we're going to talk about Keir Starmer in a moment who says a lot of the same things. In that voice. Yeah, he says it out of the side of his mouth. Why is guy Keir Starmer? Hey, step over here Keir.