The Open Window

Any time two people build something together, there is a certain kind of person who cannot help but fantasize about using that as a wedge in any disagreement they might have with one of the builders. To the builders themselves, I can tell you from experience, such attempts are universally very funny.

Ben Hunt and I founded the undertaking we call Second Foundation Partners - the publisher of Epsilon Theory - around six years ago. He's been my best friend for much longer than that. We talk about everything. We argue about everything. We know every dumb habit and peccadillo, every bad opinion the other one has about everything under the sun. So when someone sends me links to Ben's no good, very bad opinion about voter ID or reminds him about the 2016 podcast where I described my optimism based on a handful of personal interactions I'd had with Donald Trump and his children in the past, we mostly laugh. Not so much at each other (although that, too), but at those whose human relationships are so shallow as to think 'ratting on' us to someone who is the first to laugh with us about one of many dumb things we will say and do in our lifetimes will be any kind of wedge at all. We know each other's hearts and minds as much as anyone can, and we are comfortable disagreeing about and talking about practically anything.

In other words, the Overton Window in our relationship is about as open as it can be without ripping out the whole wall - framing, insulation, and all. For the uninitiated, this is a term which credits the work of the late Joe Overton, a life-long Dow Chemical kid like me. Joe made the simple observation that common knowledge constrained the range of what society considered it acceptable to discuss and consider. More importantly, he observed that the role of politically engaged individuals and institutions was and ought to be to open that window even further.

Nothing keeps an Overton Window shut tighter than polarization. Perhaps ironically, the source of this widening gyre is one of those things that Ben and I argue and disagree and drink and laugh about. Ben has argued well, if incorrectly in my judgment, that we should see the initial candidacy of Donald Trump as the event which transformed every game we play in America from a Coordination Game to a Competition Game. I have argued that the change in game is predicated on the in-group common knowledge of the opposing player's unwavering commitment to your destruction. I believe that the domination of media, entertainment, and academia by political progressives and the expelling of conservatives from those spheres over a period of 20-30 years was the opening salvo in a series of events which led inexorably toward this widening gyre. I think the theater of the absurd we know as MAGA and performative wokeism are better thought of as effects rather than causes.

As it happens, however, that isn't the topic on which we disagree most vocally. Neither are abortion, guns, campaign finance, health insurance, capital gains taxation, for that matter, or a dozen other topics we disagree on.

No, nothing makes us argue more than Elon Musk.

Sort of. I mean, we both think he's an insufferable knob, but so are we sometimes. Still, I am willing to ignore just about any amount of shitcoin shilling, selective commitment to free speech, fast-and-loose adherence to Reg-FD, and the occasional overpromising of certain technologies if it means getting off this rock. It is my unshakeable view that once a civilization determines that rocketry and the escape from the atmosphere and gravity well of their planet are technically possible, and once they have a grasp of the source and near-guarantee of mass extinction events, it is a moral imperative that they expend uncomfortable sums diversifying their species' exposure to any planetary body. Under the current structure of western political institutions, it is impossible to consider any policy or problem with a long-term payoff or which addresses a real but improbable tail risk to our species. There will always be a more electable present need. Thankfully, for every sociologist tearing their hair out about the very real costs of income and wealth inequality, there are three or four dogecoin-stanning fanbois ready to call any dumb thing Elon says a masterful gambit who are glad that he is willing to light his own billions on fire to get us off this rock. And, you know, me. Just without the Dogecoin.

Ben thinks I'm delusional. He thinks it's adorable that I think Elon has any plans of doing anything with space other than making it a new personal fiefdom. He's not wrong! About me, or about what Elon probably intends. I know that the name of the first settlement on Mars will probably be some reference to McDonald's Szechuan Sauce from Rick and Morty or something. I'm literally picturing that episode of the Simpsons where Mr. Burns won't let Smithers into the escape pod because he "likes to put his feet up" and I just don't care. In the absence of a feasible state-based solution or a markets-based solution in the hands of a less nutty guy who has to deliver earnings and guidance that might justify even a fraction of his stock's valuation, I'll take a lying narcissist who can gin up enough babe-in-the-Cathie-Wood-style patsies to keep his cost of capital at half of what it should be so that something can be directed toward humanity not dying in a one-in-a-million collision with an asteroid. At this point, I'm not sure we have much alternative but to trust our descendants to figure out how to overthrow their edgelord overlords after they've escaped the risk of death in a mass extinction event we seem utterly indifferent to preventing, however far off it might be.

But even I will admit sometimes the guy makes it hard. Especially for me. I don't like being wrong, but I really don't like being wrong when it makes Ben right.

In case it is not immediately clear to you, let's walk through exactly what it is that Elon is suggesting here. Someone has presented a graph charting the polarization of US tech executives based on their political donations over time. In 2000, the range of "leanings" as surmised from such donations was somewhat narrower (based on how far the graphics extend left and right on this scale) but also rather more continuous in nature. It skewed slightly right. By 2020 that continuous distribution had remained continuous but in a way that skewed more significantly left. In 2024, the continuous nature of the distribution evaporates in favor of the classic, high-peaked bi-modal distribution so evident of political polarization across almost any metric in the United States. Elon's response is to call this "the refreshing cool breeze of a wide open Overton Window."

Gah! No! Absolutely not. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

Two closed windows do not an open window make. And that is precisely what the 2024 chart and every other chart and network graph mapping political polarization shows: two closed windows. It's like the old SNL bit about the Change Bank that makes no money but makes it up on volume. You don't create viewpoint diversity by simply funneling a previously diverse audience into two more extreme but less diverse windows. Within each glassy boundary is a narrow range of acceptable positions, words, opinions, and connections. The data that would produce "wider" left and right extremes on a chart like this has precisely nothing to do with the breadth of opinions it is acceptable to hold and express. A sharply bi-modal distribution with significantly less connectivity between modalities and significantly lower in-group variance is NOT more diverse. It is a low information transmission system in which each successive year presents fewer opportunities to transmit useful information. It is a high-conformity monoculture. It is a matched pair of equally religious, equally dogmatic, equally incurious panopticons watching themselves watch one another across the great ravine.

In every way that matters, this chart describes literally the opposite of everything that Elon Musk believes it does.

And still, I get it. The chief Greater Truth of the political right is that political conservatives have been maligned, excluded, ostracized, and made to look like extremists by a media environment dominated by the political left for decades. Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, and related properties were a response to this within traditional media, an opportunity not to "do it right" or be "fair and balanced" in isolation but to balance the scales in the aggregate. To be a counterweight to the existing left-leaning bias at the scale of American society, they had to present a similarly tilted version of Fiat News in the other direction. I get it.

It is no secret that Elon is trying to do the same with the modern media apparatus that he now owns. And again, I don't really have a problem with it. First, his monkey, his circus. Second, conservatives are not wrong about the historical makeup of social media being driven by those same unbalanced voices. There's nothing inherently wrong with or unreasonable about conservatives or liberals wanting a room of their own, too. It is entirely normal to want a place where there's enough peer support to avoid the other political tribe's obnoxious version of de-platforming and cancelation. Yes, it will lead to more cringe-inducing January 6th Prison Choir videos, but until America receives an apology for that Gal Gadot Imagine video during COVID, I don't want to hear it.

But if you are a small-l liberal and small-c conservative who thinks actual free expression and good faith exploration of unfamiliar and uncomfortable ideas matter to humanity, celebrating the deepening of polarization as evidence of viewpoint diversity ain't it. And frankly, it should concern you that the person with perhaps the single greatest influence over the public conversation thinks it is.