The dashboard can't tell you whether the change meant some people couldn't locate a buy-button and thus didn't get a thing they needed, nor can it tell you whether some people bought something they regretted.

Analytics allow you to relate to people the like a Simcity player, by making a zoning change and observing the population-scale outcomes: put a road through a residential block and watch the traffic numbers improve while the happiness of the sims in that block declines.

3/

But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit *lots* of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about "full-self driving," you have to be willing to maim your workers, you have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad.

4/

If you think of those people as truly real - as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety - you couldn't possible set these crimes in motion. You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in.

5/

William Gibson described this mindset beautifully in *Idoru*, in a scene where a TV executive describes his audience:

> Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting.

6/

> It has no mouth, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.

(Not for nothing, Musk frequently pumps millions of dollars into elections in the hopes of influencing all those NPCs into voting for his favored candidates, irrespective of whether those candidates will make those voters better off:)

pbswisconsin.org/news-item/mus…

7/

Musk's plan to pull back from politics follows flop in Wisconsin court election

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin could go down as billionaire Elon Musk's last big spend on a political campaign. And it was a flop. Musk, the richest person in the ...

^{PBS Wisconsin (Here & Now)}

On Twitter, Musk banned an account that reported on the movements of his private jet (that is, an account that republished public information), because he said that it made him feel unsafe. Musk *also* changed how Twitter's block button worked to make it easier for gang-stalkers, griefers, harassers, and trolls to attack their victims, who are disproportionately marginalized: women, queers, people of color:

msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinio…

8/

Elon Musk's softening of the block feature on X is bewildering

Elon Musk's weakening of the block feature on X betrays a bewildering indifference to user experience and safety.

^{Zeeshan Aleem (MSNBC)}

Musk's fears are vivid and real to him, but the fears of millions of Twitter users are just scripted NPC behaviors. In some important sense, those people don't actually exist for Musk. Or, as Musk put it on Rogan:

> The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.

npr.org/2025/03/22/nx-s1-53212…

9/

Not for nothing: this is also how being in a K-hole feels. Under ketamine sedation, it's easy to feel like the whole world, your whole life to that moment, was a dream or a hallucination. The whole universe is just a figment of your imagination, and you are its god and creator. In a K-hole, other people aren't real.

Now, as it happens, there's a long moral tradition that condemns people who treat others as unreal, as means to an end, rather than as ends unto themselves.

10/

For Kant, this is so odious that it violates the "categorical imperative":

plato.stanford.edu/entries/per…

Or, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax put it:

> Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.

brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com…

But when you see like a billionaire, that's how people appear to you: as things. It's the mindset that leads to you offering your subordinate a thoroughbred horse in exchange for fucking you:

businessinsider.com/spacex-pai…

11/

SpaceX paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who accused Elon Musk of sexual misconduct

SpaceX paid a flight attendant $250,000 in severance after she accused Elon Musk of exposing himself and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for a sexual massage.

^{Rich McHugh (Business Insider)}

Seeing like a billionaire is when you view people as aggregated masses without any real interiority or will. Hence "high agency," the term that people who aspire to extreme wealth and power use to describe themselves. If the elite are high agency, then it follows that the masses are *low* agency. They have few desires or real feelings:

highagency.com/

12/

High Agency in 30 Minutes - George Mack

High agency might be the most important idea of the 21st century. This essay is what I wish I read at 18, rather than writing at 30. Join me in the high agency rabbit hole.

^{www.highagency.com}

It's not just Musk who views people this way. Mark Zuckerberg has been treating people as things for his entire life, ever since he started Facebook in his dorm-room so that he could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of his fellow Harvard undergrads. In *Careless People,* Sarah Wynn-Williams' whistleblower memoir of her time as a top FB exec, we get a picture of Zuck as someone who just doesn't think that other people are real enough to matter:

pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuc…

13/

It's no wonder that Zuck thinks that chatbots can replace our friends:

fortune.com/2025/06/26/mark-zu…

At some foundational level, he thinks *we are all chatbots*, automata driven by manipulable inputs that drive deterministic outcomes. This is a guy who claims to have invented a mind-control ray using warmed-over Skinnerian behavior mod techniques:

pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah…

14/

Mark Zuckerberg’s dream for AI chatbots to become your friend is as unhealthful as ‘junk food,’ Hinge CEO says

Justin McLeod warns against certain AI use cases for dating apps.

^{Sydney Lake (Fortune)}

Sam Altman, another person who sees like a billionaire, and wants to replace our friends with chatbots, claims that humanity is nothing more than a "stochastic parrot" - a statistical autocompleting program that does not truly understand or think:

x.com/sama/status/159947183025…

Billionaires *have* to be solopsists, or at least, *selective* solopsists, who don't really believe in the humanity of the people who create their wealth and whom they weild their power over.

15/

This has always been clear, but the idea that we can replace our social connections with chatbots erases any doubt.

*Billionaires just don't think we're real*.

eof/