King Ketamine

Elon Musk’s drugged out techno-optimism

Taija Mars McDougall
 
 

In these times of post-industrialization in the West and Global North, there exists a powerful desire among those of us on the so-called Left to hearken back to a time of self-evident production in our home countries. It would be so helpful, many imply in their thinking and writing about the current state of the capitalist economy, to return to a now-inclusive New Deal economic sensibility, with a revitalization of factory system production, to move away from the forced-servile economy—no more “Hi! Welcome!” before we order our coffee. This is, at its base, a desire to get away from the esoteric world of the frothy financial economy, with its stock prices, derivatives, repo markets, and volatility, apparently so far beyond the world of the commodity fetishism of yore.

This desire appears twinned with a wish to personify capital through figures akin to the twentieth-century robber baron—rather than what we have now, in the post-1973 world. These figures are symptoms of a financialized economy and the advent of the fully-hedged portfolio. Two of them, giants in the world of financial capitalism, are especially relevant because they've left us with an extensive trove of writing about how they envision the world and their outsized role in it. Their writing is emblematic of where finance is headed: stock valuations follow the ideas about our world and the individuals in it penned by these personifications of finance.

I’m talking about Elon Musk, who requires no introduction, and Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist, partial funder of Musk’s Twitter takeover and writer of The Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto. Both are personifications of post-1973 Capitalism. Both appear to desire to be thought-leaders, intellectuals, validated by their capacity to bark up share-prices and endogenously fund their enormous and growing portfolios. And both profess to be invested in optimizing drug use. Andreeseen seems to be interested in engineering drugs that are better, healthier. Musk appears to just like ketamine. And it is the intermixing of post-1973 finance and their selfconceptions as philosopher kings with the attendant power to approximate the realization of such a status, that demands we consider their fantasies carefully. With the added use of a psychic accelerant like ketamine in the case of Musk alongside the real power of both, their fantasies of dominance are a constant threat to those of us who are forced to live in a world that is increasingly theirs.

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Marc Andreessen writes in the “Becoming Technological Supermen” section of his Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto: “We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.” Despite being a self-proclaimed teetotaler, this line from the ideological screed that lays out the beliefs of what we might call the political wing of Silicon Valley venture capital—and those who clamor for its attention and funds—gestures towards something about the psychic fantasies in play in this current mood, culturally, economically, and socially. “We are not primitives,” he writes, suggesting that if you are not a techno-optimist, that’s precisely what you are, so weighed down with its antiblack and racist baggage that you cannot be dragged into the future that Andreessen and those like him are building. This line serves as a starting place to get at the link between the Silicon Valley Weltanschaaung, ketamine, and the subjects constructed through this particular intermixing.

We are offered a binary here, rarely an innocent or self-evident strategy: the primitive and the apex predator, both contending with the lightning. The former is frightened, as though lightning is the work of a cruel god or a witch. The latter has put the lightning to work; what that work is, is left to the imagination, but the suggestion in “predator” is that it is not only in relation to but specifically directed at prey. The binary Andreessen has offered is not innocent and we are left to ask if the prey is the primitive who fears the lightning and if the cruel god of his fears is the predator, hunting the primitive, doing away with him and his cowering culture as he ascends to the heights of their world, able to control and hunt whomever and whatever he chooses. While there are a host of lines from the Manifesto that hint at—if not hold up lights and sirens for— its fascism, this line is the one through which the current Silicon Valley mentality, its fantasies, fixations, obsessions, desires, and aggressions, bares its teeth. These fantasies at work in the techno-optimist’s psychic organization play themselves out particularly in Andreessen’s friend, Elon Musk. One need only momentarily observe the gamut of likes and retweets on Musk’s own Twitter timeline to see that this fantasy about the primitives and the predators is operating already. Andreessen is not calling it into being; he is revealing that it has been in play all along.

Musk is obviously not Andreessen, but the two certainly share a host of interests beyond their enormous portfolios. Andreessen, with his blog, podcast, and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is a mover and shaker in a world where technology development and finance meet. While not as in the shadows as his other venture capital counterparts, he is nothing like Elon Musk, the celebrity CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Boring, Neuralink, and so on. Andreessen courts neither the fame nor the controversy: he’s a figure for those who are tuned in to the venture capital–Silicon Valley nexus. Controversy follows Musk, or rather, he courts controversy. In part because of his carnival barking to increase share prices with little emphasis on delivery or safety; in part because of his vocal support for pro-natalism and its eugenic attitude; in part because of his own South African mythology as a hereditary beneficiary of apartheid mineral extraction; and in part because of his forced purchase and fraught management of Twitter. He is a lightning rod for attention.

Earlier this year, however, the controversy concerned Musk’s alleged drug use, which was reported on by the Wall Street Journal. He responded to the alarm sounded by named and unnamed sources who have witnessed his use and his sometimes-erratic behavior in an interview with Don Lemon, which proved to be its own micro-controversy, with the journalist having the offer of a show on the Twitter platform rescinded after a tense, and ultimately ridiculous, interview. In the hour-long sit-down in the Texas Tesla factory, Musk admitted to having a prescription for ketamine, the dissociative psychedelic, currently being touted as a treatment for anxiety and depression. Something about this admission—alongside what we can see of Musk since the beginning of the pandemic, as he became increasingly active online—struck me and suggested that there was a significance to his ketamine use, the increasing visibility of his racism, and his current position as a key figure of our era.

Whatever one may think of drugs and drug use, there can be no denying that ketamine is the drug of our time. What is it that makes a given drug the drug of an era? It need not be the most used drug or the strongest, certainly not the most fun; it is something else. Something about the drug in totality—the mix of its real or perceived users, its procurement, its method of ingestion, its particular high, where one takes it, its mystique, and the infrastructure behind its production and distribution—captures or embodies some sort of pervasive mood that exists in the particular scene of its use. And this mood lives in other places beyond the scenes in which the drug is being used; it is something that is reflected in culture, in systems of control and discipline, in the economy.


“Whatever one may think of drugs and drug use, there can be no denying that ketamine is the drug of our time.”

We’ve been here before: whether it’s LSD in the ’60s, amphetamines in the ’70s, or cocaine in the ’80s, in their mixing with music, the entanglement of intelligence and security services with the culture industry, the disillusionment with post-war prosperity and segregation, the end of the so-called counterculture and stagflation, and the ascendance of Wall Street and the derivative since the discovery of the formula for fullyhedged options in a portfolio. These aren’t the drugs that necessarily release the punishment-hungry hounds of moral panic; they aren’t the ones that are unleashed onto the unsuspecting and impoverished, followed by hand-wringing, police presence, and “we’re just trying to help you” legislation. While the drugs at issue here surely elicit fear, panic, and legislation, they are drugs for and about white people and so they are met with a lighter touch, even if they are scheduled intensely and their trafficking is busted brutally. Panic about their use is less about urban decay, theft, or violence; it is more about the party, the folly of youth, and the risks of the trip. If they elicit panic at all. Whatever the drug is, it seems to capture something about its decade, soothe some collective psychic wound, ameliorate some ailment, or organize for or against some desire. And here in the mid 2020s, the drug of the era is ketamine. Used in the party and rave scenes and by those in Silicon Valley, the desire for and proliferation of ketamine captures something similarly beyond these sites of consumption, a mood that is far more pervasive and insidious than the desire for a good time through dissociation. This mood is related to what Andreessen writes in his Manifesto, which makes sense of Musk’s use of it, while also doing some work to explain the prevalence of both illicit and therapeutic ketamine.

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Ketamine in its totality captures and thus reveals something about our contemporary moment. So much so that it should be no surprise that Musk uses ketamine—according to him, by prescription—and possibly overuses it, according to some concerned sources in the Wall Street Journal article that set off his admission earlier this year. With this confirmation, I want to think about just what it is that ketamine offers, and what it might be offering to Musk, with this line from Andreessen’s Manifesto in mind. This should be read neither as an anti-drug use screed nor as apologia for ketamine, but rather as a consideration of what ketamine possibly offers such that it could become the drug of the here and now, and what Musk’s highly publicized use suggests about the fantasies of the white and powerful. Another way of putting it is that it is ketamine’s particular action, alongside its current mystique and the location of its proliferation, that has something to tell us about its psychic, cultural, and, through Musk and those like him, economic significance. When those who are at the levers of the powerful nexus of technology and finance are using ketamine therapeutically, recreationally, and beyond, it feels indicative of the economic significance of Musk’s own willingness to over-leverage— taking on increasingly pernicious amounts of debt for the sake of, say, buying Twitter—and the techno-optimist’s willingness to over-leverage to become the apex predator. Through ketamine, we might glean an understanding of how the perniciousness of an unbounded white psyche, its fantasies of technodominance, and what the disciples of such a movement are willing to pledge to achieve it come together in a figure like Musk.

My own experience with ketamine is varied, having been both an active user and spectator to its extreme overuse. In other circumstances, I would say that, like dreams, no one wants to hear about another person’s trip, good or bad, never mind read about it.

I stopped using ketamine entirely after two experiences, separated by about four months. In the first, I had arrived in a city, filled with shimmering symbols of light and people lining the streets. Wandering through this city, everyone turned to watch me as I walked towards a pedestal in front of a massive building, the top of which was so high it jutted into the clouds, invisible from the streets where I stood. When I got close enough to the pedestal, I saw there was a god sitting upon it with two faces, each at a 45-degree angle from the other. As I reached the pedestal, I was torn away, back to my Los Angeles apartment. This was a beautiful trip, but I left it feeling that I had seen something I wasn’t ready to see, some secret that wasn’t for me quite yet. A few months later, I took ketamine for the last time, when I saw a man. It wasn’t the Hat Man of sleep paralysis nightmares, creepypasta lore, or diphenhydramine overdoses; he was something else. He was far from me, but I could see him clearly. All I knew in this case was that I didn’t want him to see me. It was imperative that I not be seen by this man, so I threw myself on the ground and hid. Something horrible would happen if he saw me. That was the last thing I remember. When I came back to myself, I swore off ketamine; I would never take it again. I never wanted that man to see me, and I knew that he would return to me if I continued.

Similar themes run through both ketamine experiences: secrets, entities, gazes, some uncertain information contained in the gaze. The two-faced god and the man were two entities that contained some secret that was living in my unconscious, one I was not ready for and another I never wanted to be ready for. In either case, ketamine revealed two sides of the same coin: there is at the very least an anxiety about being seen within me, perhaps a concealed desire to be seen. The space that ketamine opened and afforded me revealed at least this, an excavated or uncovered unconscious that cried out: “Please see me, but not yet, not like this. Please don’t see me ever, if I can help it.” Whatever secret I was not ready for and whatever secret I was refusing lives in the space of dissociation. While not prone to chemically unassisted dissociation—my own men tal illness offers me something very different—the space where I could be distant from myself held a piece of my unconscious, a reality that could be concealed from myself and an accompanying fantasy that the desire could remain concealed. This unconcealing of what lies hidden in the psyche is key to the effect of ketamine; it is not simply dissociation that it offers but instead access to both what is hidden and confirmation of what is to be done. To be sure, there was, in this revelation, something to pursue. The gazes trained upon me and my resistance to them were unearthed, exposed to air forcibly, without analyst, shaman, or any assistance: they were out of the crypt, staring at me. What else might live in this space of dissociation, and what does the drug’s capacity to unearth these secrets reveal, particularly when it pertains to a figure like Musk? If the fantasy that is at the heart of the techno-optimist, like Musk, is of the apex predator quashing the primitive, likened to Nietzsche’s Last Man from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, then the drive to access this space that offers the feeling of certainty, and the power it brings to the pursuit of the fantasy, is critical.

The drive to dissociate is certainly a crucial aspect of the draw of ketamine. Hyper-mediation, the desire to arrive in a place of comfort that mimics the digitally mediated lives we lead, fits well with the effects of the drug itself. The space of dissociation seems like a means to live, at least for a moment, in the encounter with the self-as-other, a making manifest of what feels unreachable on a regular Tuesday afternoon. It can feel something like a terminable analysis and mystic enlightenment rolled into one as this space opens up between self and self, wherein one can gaze back upon oneself in the way one might scroll through one’s own Instagram, seeing selfie after selfie, the best versions of oneself as the other less appealing parts are shorn off. A new look upon an old face, but this time for the mental apparatus, as one’s line of vision refracts and reflects, an analog–digital mirror for the user-subject. There is certainly a dark significance to the general popularity of a drug that for a brief few moments produces this separation that we have learned to internalize as natural. This dissociative action can feel like a psychic defragging [1] as the user-subject can reorder some of their psychic software, attaining the space to observe their own psychic processes and rearrange them into a newly contoured psychic cartography.

The therapeutic aspect of ketamine derived from this space can also afford those suffering from depression the possibility to rearrange that suffering. But there is something else that lives in this space. Ketamine, because it can open this non-space, or non-place, in the self, can also have spiritual uses, as what the usersubject can also experience is the feeling of one’s symbolic structuring as being part of the external world, that the user-subject is a piece of a oneness. The space itself, while a placeless simulated site between psyche and soma, mind and body, symbolic and material, is not empty. What one finds in this simulated space is why dissociation itself is not enough to explain the significance of ketamine for the era, particularly among those like Musk who are at the forefront of accumulation through the vehicle of technological development.

There is something about the action of ketamine that unleashes and exacerbates certain drives already present in a personality like Musk and already present in the operations of the finance economy. I sat down with a friend who has used ketamine, not only for insight into its shamanic uses but also about its use among those she knows in the tech industry. I spoke with M at length about both of our own experiences with ketamine, why we both stopped, our experiences with friends who have overused it into paranoid delusions, and why it might be that technology and ketamine are in some ways twinned. In the first instance, she says, our current interactions with technology function similarly to ketamine: a space of viewing and being viewed is opened in which the user can look back at themselves in a way that mimics not only social media but also something not dissimilar to the analytic situation, yet without an analyst. With ketamine use, she noted: “I am myself observing myself [and] the world is my creation looking back at me. What ketamine allows is for you to become—I don’t want to say at one—but to become a part of this subconscious communication. So in a sense, you are becoming that thing looking back yourself, that’s the dissociative action and that’s a lot.” The space that ketamine opens for the user can be one of unleashed repressed material, irrupting to the surface for viewing without transference and without symptom.

For M, the k-hole, the fully detached and dissociative space that one can, but does not always, access through ketamine, is the home of symbols, and so it is not surprising that those whose work is on creating small-“s” symbolic worlds like websites, apps, chatbots, and so on—or at the very least accumulation via the marketing, investment, and eventual sale of these technologies, regardless of whether they actually work or not—can get interested in a substance that can bring one into collision with some form of the symbolic. It feels like a quick and easy lifting of the veil, a shortcut to the world of mystics, without the need for rituals of preparation or purification. With prolonged sustained use of ketamine, accessing this space over and over or refusing to leave it, “you’re often sort of shown these machinations of your own subconscious, but they feel greater than you because they extend out into the world because you’re an actor in the world. So you start to make these associations [. . .] and it feels very divine.” Not only is there a space of dissociation, but one runs the risk of association: divine association. If one lives within this space, it can feel as if some repression is stripped away and one is left with an imperative or mission to enact, no matter the cost, no matter the collateral damage, no matter the sacrifice. And this imperative can persist beyond the use of ketamine, blossoming out into the world as one acts in the world. It can mean an unleashing and enacting of what would have remained a fantasy, which would have found different expression, different enaction had the divine touch of ketamine not intervened. And when those who are already powerful, who are moving markets and prices with tweets and announcements of yet-to-materialize technologies, their fantasies of dominance not only find their way out into the world through the usual means, but through expressions of fantasy via their ventures, their world-altering acquisitions, their tweets, their interviews, their hostilities. These are the fantasies that emerge, and the use of ketamine exacerbates while transforming the fantasy into an imperative.

If, as I have claimed, ketamine and its unconcealing effect is a part of this picture, and Elon Musk’s fantasies are exposed and affirmed again and again through his use, driving what appears like an imperative in cases like his, this combination with the economic capacity to run after those desires, then Musk’s use and behavior takes on a new tenor. If this fantasy of the primitive and the predator is the secret gazed upon by Musk in his k-hole—and evidence for this lives on his Twitter timeline—then what one in his position is willing to do to achieve this imperative fantasy can be seen in the drive to leverage and over-leverage, to forget the future. Yet with Musk, driven by the fantasy of techno-optimism and the imperative shaped by ketamine conjoined with this logic of debt with capacity, the future is not just forgotten and the future is not alone in this sacrifice. It is the so-called primitive that is pledged, made into what must be sacrificed to the creditor-god and the wheel of debt that drives accumulation as the proof positive that the fantasy is being achieved. At the same time, the accumulation is what can be repurposed into investment and into technological innovation that further hunts the so-called primitive. The so-called primitive, carrying all his racial baggage for the white techno-optimist, living at the edges of the k-hole, becomes the prey of the predator and his bottled lightning.


“The so-called primitive, carrying all his racial baggage for the white techno-optimist, living at the edges of the k-hole, becomes the prey of the predator and his bottled lightning.”



While indebtedness and the creditor–debtor relation has been a fixation, particularly since the financial crisis, precious little has been said about what it means for one to have the capacity to mobilize debt to maximize accumulation, to leverage what is a negative into a positive, at least for now. Amin Samman and Stefano Sgambati write, “For an ultra-rich minority, leverage has been proven to be the key to winning the game of money-making—and forget about the future.” And so the drive to over-leverage, the increasingly onerous debts of a certain kind that we who do not own because we can neither pledge at the scale nor for the reasons of entities like Musk or Andreessen, can come together with the divinity in dissociation in and through Musk’s professed ketamine use. The subject that is formed through this capacity to limitlessly leverage while perceiving themselves to be on a fantasmatic divine mission to become the predator deserves renewed analytic engagement, informed not necessarily by a clinging to Marxian categories, but instead by an engagement with concepts as they exist and operate within finance. With ketamine’s ability to drag us into our own psyche and open our psychic world to communing with angels and devils—to compel us to doggedly make our innermost fantasies into a reality because of our capacity to over-leverage and tolerate riskier and riskier financial positions—a psychoanalysis that takes this figure and its attendant fantasies, powers, and capacities into account is indispensable. A psychoanalysis that takes seriously what those who place the operations of debt and credit at the core of their models, informed by the entanglements of whiteness, power, finance, and fantasy—including the ways that these subjects encounter their fantasies and the ways that these figures become part of the psychic worlds of those without their capacities—is where we have to go. Not to cure them but to work through our own fixations with them, the affects they elicit, but most of all how we escape the trap of burning an effigy in order to remember something like a future.

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In proceeding years, Elon was certainly in the political air, but not in the way he would become when he threw his support behind Donald Trump. And what an entrance he made, jumping into the air, attempting to make an “X” with his body, promises of a million dollars for Pennsylvanians who signed his political petition, the advent of the America PAC and, of course, awkward chants of “US—A?” With pre-election photos of Trump’s open disdain for Elon while at the same time calling him “a new star” and praising SpaceX’s “beautiful shiny white” rocket “going 10,000 miles an hour and [. . .] burning like hell” (Trump Victory Speech), we learned the significance of the Twitter purchase. And no gesture towards the hypocrisy of Musk’s own illegal immigrant status in the 1990s could stop us from arriving where we are. The King Ketamine, Krowned, I would say if I was still fluent in Maoist Standard English. Musk has been once again validated in the market, but this time it isn’t localized to the financial markets. Now he is validated as a key node in the libidinal markets for aggression and cruelty, opening new flows of power and violence. He has seized the lightning, as it were.

When the dust of the election settles, it remains an open question whether we will see—or will refuse to see—that the election and Musk’s involvement are about the meaning of inflation, the feeling of being squeezed, and who can maintain legitimacy in the face of this divergence. What does it mean to tell the truth about that disparity of official criteria and experience in economy in a full sense of a unity of the libidinal and material (material itself being a fusion of the stuff of production and the money, the contracts, the ledgers, and the worker-consumers and so on)? And this question of inflation needn’t be caught in the register of the increasing price of a basket of goods; inflation here includes the increasing price, in blood, for the maintenance of the Zionist entity or for those who can become pregnant to have access to abortion. It is about inflation as the increase in price in terms of money, blood, and sex, and what really counts as intolerable inflation.

In the world of money, consumer price inflation can bring down a government, but asset price inflation is tolerable, encouraged even, as a compromise that can put the lid on political instability. In the world of blood, the inflated blood-price denominated in Palestinian lives is a tolerable price to pay for Israel but perhaps continued US-American funding of their genocide could prove to be too inflated a price. In the world of sex, “your body, my choice” in the words of fascist talking head Nick Fuentes and the deadly pregnancy is a tolerable price, but ratified legal protection for safe reproductive medicine and care is not. This all comes down to questions of distinction and difference, of money, blood, and sex, and to when and where markets and territories are coterminous, the salience and significance of coterminality, its negotiation, or its lack. Thence arises the question of immigration and the current boogeyman of China and the CPC. Some prices can go up, protecting and protected by the state and the attendant institutions; other prices increase where the rulers are suddenly in question, to be unceremoniously tossed out in favor of those who benefit from an increase that is taken to be fictitious or extra-economic so as to be tolerable.


“Musk is in the middle of all of this: a fortune that is all based on asset price inflation and stock market valuation, a pro-natalist, one hand clutching government-military contracts as the other tweets about the replacement of the white race with AI slop images that could only look real through a ketamine haze, if then.”

Musk is in the middle of all of this: a fortune that is all based on asset price inflation and stock market valuation, a pro-natalist, one hand clutching government-military contracts as the other tweets about the replacement of the white race with AI slop images that could only look real through a ketamine haze, if then. With every idea a divine insight that can only bark up his own asset prices, the raw material for levering up again and again, shapes a future with downside protection and unlimited upsides for Musk and the other predators is taking shape. The rest of us are doomed to learn the power of rich men’s debts, the seduction of a predator, and the violence of a sadistic insistence of institutions to which those who elect them are able to delegate their own enjoyment of cruelty. Even if there is stupidity, incompetence, and/or in-fighting, the damage will be real. Now is the time of predators.

Confronted as we are with a world in which there are no good choices because the price of assets— whether those are investment portfolios, firms, Israel, a strong border, or the life of a fetus—are not taken to be the Economy, a new ensemble of demands will have to interrupt the usual blaming, marching, or despondency.


[1] This term comes from M, an LA-based hypno-therapist and former psychonaut.

 
Taija Mars McDougall

Taija Mars McDougall is a reluctant academic, semi-retired radical, and reformed problem, working at the University of California, Santa Cruz, thinking about blackness, finance, and psychoanalysis.

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