Flying cars have been a dream for 100 years, but culture war cynicism is preventing us from getting excited about Elon Musk’s Roadster, writes Anna Moloney
In Illustrated World, 1917, beneath a gleaming image of a red car with eagle-like wings, an article in the American monthly science magazine predicted: “The aeroautocraft of the future will roll on the road, cleave through the water, fly through the air. Its owner will start from his garage or hangar, travel streets or roads at will, cross streams or lakes that lie in his path, rise in the air and fly over a hill, a valley, or woods, to another road, all at his pleasure. This is not the prediction of a dreamer, but the logical development of present day tendencies.”
A beaming illustration of technological optimism, published more than a hundred years ago.
Flying cars have long been the symbol of the future – representing not just technical progress, but the ultimate dream of American freedom. To not just go west, but to fly upwards.
We may then have reasonably expected that Elon Musk’s unveiling last week of the Roadster, Tesla’s flying car prototype – which uses SpaceX thrusters to propel itself into the air, and even perform a couple of flips – to have been cause for genuine excitement. A flying car! What science fiction fantasists have been dreaming up for more than a century! Instead, beyond Musk’s own faithful base of tech bros and fanboys, the reception, it is fair to say, was largely muted and, where it has been covered, made up overwhelmingly of straight-faced reports urging painfully serious questions: Is the Roadster road safe? Does anyone actually want a flying car? Et cetera. Et cetera.
Excuse my yawning, but can we all stop being such bores. (No, of course it’s not road safe! Yes, people do want flying cars!) For me, the far more pressing concern is where has all the wonder gone, and can we get it back please?
How tech became a culture war issue
We know where it’s gone. Thanks to divisive figures like Musk, technological progress has become part of the culture war. No longer can new technology be lauded in and of itself, but the politics of its maker must be assumed to be baked in. To cheer at a SpaceX rocket successfully launching is not to laud scientific triumph, but to endorse a man who colludes with Donald Trump, sires (allegedly) a “legion” of children and wishes to colonise Mars. This may not put off investors (though shares did initially drop immediately after the reveal, before recovering ahead of Tesla’s results last night), and indeed Musk presided over the biggest IPO in history this year with SpaceX. But Wall Street is a poor arbiter of cultural taste. For the rest of us, Musk is so lame he’s made flying cars uncool.
A similar example could be seen in the UFO Files too, which have seen tranches of previously classified documents purporting to show potential alien sightings barely make a stir in public consciousness, arguably due to their release by the tainted hand of Donald Trump.
There is nothing new about technology being political (c.f. the space race, industrialisation etc) but there is something new, or heightened, about the propulsive cult of personality currently driving it, and now embedding into popular culture too. It is notable, for instance, that three major film releases this year (The Social Reckoning, Artificial and Musk) are all character studies of the personalities of Big Tech (Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Musk, respectively). Given their cultural infiltration, it may be that we now must start asking the questions we have long posed about artists: if the art can be separated from them, can the technology too be separated from its engineer?
In the past, my instinct too has been to will on figures like Musk to failure. It felt like it would prove a point for X to fail and his spaceships to crash. Yet when I was a little girl, I wanted to be an astronaut.
The cult of personality can go both ways. Musk’s supporters may use his achievements to excuse his worst faults, but his detractors risk doing the inverse: treating his worst conduct as grounds to dismiss shooting for the stars. Cynicism has its functions but it is also limiting, and I fear it has now made us incurious and unimaginative.
You don’t need to like Elon Musk (I don’t) to allow yourself to be excited about flying cars. And I would urge you not to allow it. Don’t let Musk ruin the childish glee of rocketships, and don’t let Trump ruin the wonder of aliens.
Imagination is one of our most powerful faculties. Proof? Within that same 1917 issue of Illustrated World that swooned at the possibility of flying cars lay another dream of a fantastical feat: “Tubing the English Channel”. Look to the Eurotunnel then for evidence that wonder is the starting point for the possible.
Anna Moloney is deputy comment and features editor at City AM