Blogger Najm Al-Din warns Muslims about the dangers of the transhumanist agenda following the appointment of billionaire Elon Musk as head of Trump’s newly created Department for Government Efficiency (DOGE).
The enigma surrounding Elon Musk continues to fascinate the commentariat.
In addition to being the wealthiest man on the planet, the tech entrepreneur and largest shareholder of social media giant X bears several other titles which has catapulted him to celebrity status, including CEO of SpaceX and Tesla as well being the brainchild behind PayPal and OpenAI.
But it’s not just the quality of being innovative which intrigues observers.
Rather, it’s his reputation for risk-taking and controversy which has polarised audiences and earned him a slew of critics.
Political interference
Ever since his appointment to lead a new “Department of Government Efficiency,” Musk has wasted little time flexing his political muscle at home and abroad.
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In recent weeks, his adventurism took a new turn as he waded into the morass of electoral politics in the UK and Germany.
Following his criticism of British PM Keir Starmer for failing to prosecute grooming gangs and labelling of safeguarding minister Jess Philips as a “rape genocide apologist” having refused to lead a public inquiry into the scandal, the tech billionaire expressed support for convicted fraudster and Islamophobe Tommy Robinson, sparking furore among Britain’s centre-left and liberal political spectrum.
Despite the skewed framing of child sexual exploitation (CSE) as a problem which is specific to Pakistani Muslim men and the absence of any credible evidence supporting the disproportionate representation of a single ethnic group in cases of CSE, Musk has legitimised far-right tropes of Muslim minorities by spouting anti-migrant dog whistles and raising the spectre of Islamic grooming gangs, demanding that the UK holds fresh elections after the government’s lacklustre response to the scandal.
This isn’t the first time he has sowed discord in British politics, having already forecasted civil war in the UK following last summer’s riots.
Last month, Musk was photographed with Brexit Kingpin and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, with rumours of a multi-million pound donation to the populist party with whom he shares a common vision in regards to market deregulation, a shrinking public sector and curtailing the “woke mind virus” in today’s culture wars.
Fears of foreign interference in British elections also heightened after the tech mogul capriciously nodded for Farage’s replacement literally hours after singing his praises, casting doubts on their bromance and confirming suspicions of Musk as an unhinged plutocrat bent on subverting democracy.
German far-right
Musk’s overreach and bid to force European governments to reckon with his influence did not stop at playing kingmaker in British politics.
He recently endorsed Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is currently under investigation after the suspect in a horrific Christmas market attack in Magdeburg was revealed to share sympathies with the movement.
The AfD has adopted an explicitly anti-Islam manifesto, describing minarets, the call to prayer and the Muslim face veil as symbols of radicalisation which need to be banned and have been hailed as the saviour of the nation by the U.S. magnate.
Many have attributed the growing anti-Muslim sentiment and rightward lurch of Germany’s liberal-left coalition to the success of the AfD which has made significant inroads in national and state elections.
With the ruling coalition and AfD normalising the scapegoating of Muslims, fears of “Islamism” have become institutionalised across Germany’s state and federal institutions, sharing parallels with European anti-Semitism in the 1930s. As a result, many Muslim activists and pro-Palestine grassroots organisations are at risk of criminalisation.
As Europe’s main guarantor of security and export market, powerful technocrats like Musk want to leverage America’s financial and military clout to solicit support from the racist underbelly in the continent, which make for perfect ideological bedfellows and allies in the fight against the EU’s Digital Services Act-which requires algorithmic transparency as part of a social media company’s due diligence obligations- and to help advance US corporate interests overseas, unhampered by regulations.
Although many claim that Musk is riding the populist wave sweeping Europe to deflect from the recent H-1B visa fiasco which alienated a large swathe of his nativist MAGA supporters, I believe his recent foray into politics beckons a new age of U.S. interference in European politics and presages a shift in global governance models by undermining national sovereignty and legitimating the governance of unelected bureaucrats serving private corporate interests.
Loyalty to Israel
Musk’s betrayal of the first amendment and antagonism for Muslims was also exposed when the free speech absolutist transformed into a Zionist apologist overnight.
After purchasing Twitter in 2022 and reinstating several high-profile accounts which were previously shadow banned, many anticipated the rebranded X would usher in a new era where a marketplace of ideas could flourish on the social media ecosystem.
However, it wasn’t long before Musk’s actions put paid to the myth of X as an arbiter of truth and haven of free expression.
In the immediate aftermath of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his ill-conceived post which reinforced Jewish stereotypes and platforming of commentators who condemned the indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians led to accusations of antisemitism by the Zionist lobby group “Anti-Defamation League,” which accused the Tesla CEO of harbouring neo-Nazi conspiracy theories on his platform. This led several global brands to cease their ad spending on the platform before boycotting it altogether.
Elon Musk interviewed by Chris Anderson at TED2017 – The Future You, April 24-28, 2017, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Photo: Bret Hartman / TED
To protect the shareholder value of X from plummeting further, Musk insisted he was “philo-semitic” and affirmed support for the IDF at the height of arguably the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our lifetime, visiting Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog in Israel to dispel any doubts of his support for Zionism.
Ever since his rebuke by Israeli officialdom, Musk weaponised the algorithms on X to suppress Pro-Palestinian hashtags, block livestreams of IDF war crimes and suspend many anti-Israel accounts for violating community guidelines. By conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism and doubling down on calls to repress non-violent Pro-Palestinian activism, his kowtowing to Israel left no questions about where his allegiances lay.
Having built his entire platform railing against cancel culture and the radical left’s censorship of freedoms, the tech entrepreneur’s about-face on free speech and endorsement for Israel confirmed suspicions that the platform can only operate when subordinated to U.S. foreign policy interests.
The trip also exposed the transactional relationship between Israeli politicians and the far right, given Netanyahu’s track record of courting pro-Zionist populist leaders in Europe with a history of antisemitic behaviour and raised concerns about the tech collaboration between X and Israeli intelligence, with the latter responsible for managing the platform’s verification process.
Both Musk and Netanyahu pledged to further Israel’s ambitions as a “start-up nation” and leading global tech hub, for which the Silicon Valley mogul’s expertise will be instrumental. Furthermore, the meeting highlighted the strategic role which Musk will play in enhancing Israel’s military capabilities with AI powered systems.
Transhumanism
For the majority of Muslims, the criticism towards Musk has fixated on his pro-Israel and far-right leanings. However, I believe this overlooks another disturbing reality about the richest man on earth which poses a grave danger to the future of the human species.
Musk is not content with merely developing technologies to enhance the human condition.
Rather, he represents a particular strand of transhumanism according to which the most fundamental human problems can be addressed through emerging technologies, including synthetic biology, quantum computing and genomics, which will be harnessed to shift the calculus on what it means to be human.
He’s made no secret of the desire to innovate technologies which lead to a symbiosis between the biological and technological realms, eventually merging humans with Artificial Intelligence to create a superintelligence.
Brain-machine interfaces such as Musk’s Neuralink are not only being developed to treat neurological illnesses like Parkinson’s disease and restore communication and movement in patients with spinal paralysis.
Rather, neural implants have a more promethean aspiration, such as expediting the march towards a future hybrid species where human consciousness can be uploaded onto cloud systems by mapping the functionality of a brain onto digital platforms to spawn substrate-independent minds, which Musk claims will allow humans to live a cybernetic existence after their physical deaths.
While the intersection of neuroscience and technology undoubtedly has medical benefits, we tread uncharted waters when extrapolating that to augmenting humans through privately controlled technologies, which opens the door to every dystopian nightmare we thought was confined to the realm of science fiction.
Control of humanity’s collective consciousness
Musk’s ambition to establish a new synergy between humans and AI may also explain the reason behind his acquisition of X, formerly known as Twitter.
Not too long ago, he cryptically labelled X as “‘humanity’s collective consciousness.”
This has been interpreted by tech futurists as a desire to harvest the vast repository of data on the platform generated by the entire sum of interactions between X’s users and the global computer-based communication network to form an emergent superorganism which can generate a suprahuman level of consciousness.
According to Musk, X can spearhead the endeavour towards a cyber consciousness which at some future stage will shape mankind’s collective thoughts, emotions, experiences, beliefs and values, combining to form a ‘Global Brain’ that possesses God-like powers of cognition.
Muslims – proceed with caution
As Muslims, we must acknowledge that Allah is the ultimate source of consciousness and that cyber-physical systems envisioned by Musk can never possess the qualitative and subjective aspect of human consciousness. Nonetheless, there is a danger that such technologies can invert our perception of reality and tempt us towards a man-made synthetic alternative to God-given natural life forms.
Ultimately, our status as vicegerents on this earth must be rooted in the concept of embodiment and physical presence and not the disembodied cyborg life envisaged by the technocracy.
Like much of the technological tools at our disposal today, platforms like X and innovations such as Neuralink are not neutral. They shape our values, form habits and have a specific orientation in which its creators often steer users.
Therefore, it is vital to proceed with caution when engaging in platforms and consuming technologies pioneered by Musk and his transhumanist ilk, as the raison d’etre for fuelling their radical changes and innovations is premised on the belief that human beings cannot progress by becoming more human. Rather, they must trade their humanity for an understanding of man, life and the universe which is filtered through the prism of technology.
