2026: A SpaceX Odyssey
The Empathy Aliens Are Not Coming To Save Us
“All science fiction eventually comes true,” says Steven Spielberg, producer of a seven-movie franchise about cloning dinosaurs, in the midst of a discussion of 2001: A Space Odyssey on The Rewatchables podcast, “It just does.”
The statement is absurd on its face, of course. Many science fiction stories have been based on once-plausible theories which were thereafter disproven, like the capacity of Jupiter to support humanoid life (as dozens of authors from the 1870s to 1920s postulated) or the preservation of animal DNA in amber, as Michael Crichton hypothesized in his 1990 bestseller, Jurassic Park.
Other science fictions are based on competing visions of potential futures which cannot all simultaneously “come true.” Human extinction, for instance, can only be arrived at once, via one causal chain. Armageddon has a hard limit which eschatology does not.
But Spielberg’s assurance in his statement, and the readiness with which his interlocutors (Sean Fennessey and Bill Simmons of The Ringer) accept it, perfectly captures the state of confidence in the weeks leading up to the SpaceX IPO, which happened to fall on the same day that Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, opened in U.S. theaters.
While they represent opposite sides of a narrow mainstream political imaginary in the United States, Spielberg’s statement echoes what SpaceX founder and CEO, Elon Musk, said a few months earlier, during an event at SpaceX’s Texas Starbase: “The purpose of SpaceX is like, we want to make Star Trek real. Okay? We want to make Starfleet Academy real, so that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact.”
Ali Riza Taşkale has dubbed Musk’s aspiration “materialized science fiction,” a process by which existing narratives - usually extremely popular ones - “function simultaneously as both inspiration and blueprint” for speculative enterprises. The entrepreneurs of materialized science fiction - not only Musk, but Marc Andreessen, Peter Theil, and Mark Zuckerberg (all covered in this Taşkale essay) - do not necessarily believe that “all science fiction eventually comes true,” as Spielberg phrases it, but that all science fiction contains the possibility of actualization, a submerged potentiality waiting to be activated by the heroic application of their surplus capital.
As such, to them science fiction is not about imaginative expansion beyond the constraints of present society, as many defenders of the genre have long argued; it is, rather, another means of enforcing limits on what’s possible. The entrepreneurs of materialized science fiction claim a right to choose speculative visions of the future based on which best positions them to retain and calcify their existing power. Whether the visions from which they choose are dystopian is not really pertinent to this process of claiming. Totalitarian dystopias are utopias to the totalitarians.
Jordan S. Carroll has referred to this as “reactionary futurism,” a recent trend of powerful technolords embracing the “metapolitics” of the alt-right, who have long insisted on “reading science fiction as an imperative.” Alt-right appropriators of SciFi narratives treat them as prophecies of real battles to be won or lost, usually along racial lines, rather than as “speculative indeterminacies” onto which readers can mount the “unresolvable tensions” between their lived experience and “multiple forms of futurity.”
Reactionary futurism (closely related to what I have elsewhere called cruel futurism) is central to the fractious alliance between the MAGA polity, the PayPal Mafia which funded (and to some extent runs) the second Trump administration, and a broader technofeudal (or aspirationally technofeudal) class, many of whom are willing to pursue any dystopia in which they retain their oligarchic status, but are equally willing to accept a return to something like the neoliberal order in which they flourished for decades. I think this is the conflict which Spielberg allegorizes in Disclosure Day. There is a culture war unfolding within the ownership class between the fascistic futurist fantasies which ascended from the alt-right and a centrist nostalgia, equally fantastical, premised on reviving the Washington Consensus which many the power elite perceive as having peacefully redistributed wealth upwards for four blissful decades.
i. an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations
Spielberg’s allegory is not deeply veiled. It sits on the surface of the film’s plot in the form of a shadowy corporate villain with an superfluous “X” at the end of its brandname - WARDEX - and its CEO, Noah Scanlon, who dresses in all black and manages to seem bumblingly incompetent even while wielding immense power (played to clammy perfection by Colin Firth). WARDEX, the film makes sure we know, is an abbreviation for “Waived Reporting, Development, and Extraction,” which is an actual term of art used by U.S. federal agencies to describe the reduced public disclosure requirements for private contractors when they are working on highly classified projects.
WARDEX’s is, to an extent, a mash-up of brands scandalously associated with graft, corruption, and privatized violence. There are overt allusions to private military contractors like Palantir and Blackwater, suggestions of de facto utilities like Amazon and Oracle, and hints of Klepto-Keynesian financial vehicles like BlackRock. WARDEX amalgamates all the bad shit that has happened in the United States as a result of “privatization” schemes since 9/11. The film transports viewers through WARDEX’s web of surveillance centers, bunkers, and black sites, from which we view WARDEX employees practicing “enhanced interrogation,” testing weaponry, and spying on civilians.
In other words, Spielberg has done more than enough to shield Universal Pictures from libel, but it’s still obvious what WARDEX is most directly an avatar for. Not just because of how Firth plays Scanlon, but because Scanlon shares Musk’s understanding of futurism as a blueprint for consolidating power. He can only see the extraterrestrial encounter through the lens of extracting the aliens’ intellectual property, expanding WARDEX’s imperialist agenda, and guarding against any disruption which might jeopardize their power. While the film is premised on Scanlon’s lack of empathy, it is this lack which allows him to temporarily inhabit conflicting ideologies of Catholicism, technolibertarianism, isolationist apocalypticism, and American Exceptionalism. Scanlon’s is the kind of mind which can tolerate the cognitive dissonance of colonizing Mars while demonizing immigration, of calling aid to children wasteful while seeking government subsidies for his social media platform, and of building a company on carbon credits while his private jets burn 10,000 gallons of fuel in a month.
SpaceX and, indeed, all of Musk’s companies, are built to maximize government capture, para-governmental authority, and, short of that, bureaucratic symbiosis, as Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff detail in Muskism (2026). Slobodian and Tarnoff coin the phrase “Sovereignty As A Service” to describe the extent to which fundamental functions like policing, bombing, and intelligence-gathering, which were once thought to be monopolized by the sovereign, are now co-authorized with (if not entirely offloaded to) private corporations like SpaceX. And leaders of these companies have the power to neutralize sovereign functions if and when they wish. Disclosure Day exaggerates only slightly from SpaceX’s actual status as a ward turned warden of the state when it attributes to WARDEX full immunity from disclosure and oversight. WARDEX engineers, not unlike DOGE programmers, are granted higher security clearances than elected heads of state, military commanders, and bureau chiefs, and WARDEX executives make extrajudicial decisions on the state’s behalf continuously and with impunity.
The consequences of this immunity - and Sovereignty As A Service generally - for civil society, for social psychology, for the victims of extrajudicial violence, and even for those who commit such violence, is what Disclosure Day is interested in more than it is interested in aliens (although it is definitely also quite interested in aliens). The film explores (some might say exhaustingly) a concordance between the power being sought by WARDEX and that attributed to monotheistic deities. The effort necessitated to both carry on the hubristic pursuit of supra-sovereignity and keep the pursuit secret from the public pulls the whole world into polycrisis. The effort is so debilitating that even Scanlon, the person who drives the pursuit and stands to benefit most directly from it, seems relieved when “full disclosure to the whole world, all at once” is achieved in the film’s final scene. His storm troopers…storm out of the KCXE studios after he slumps into a chair, not so much defeated as burnt-out by the decades of grinding for ever more destabilizing power.
The version of empathy which Spielberg endorses is perhaps most unsettling at this moment, when we are asked, not for the first time, to feel sorry for Scanlon, despite the fact that the alternative to his defeat is, the film leaves little doubt, violence at unprecedented scale.
ii. internal fears about the unreality of daily life
While Spielberg’s Disclosure Day hit theaters on the same day SpaceX hit the stock market, disclosure day for Elon Musk had actually taken place three weeks earlier, when SpaceX had to file its S-1 registration statement with the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). For the first time since the company was founded 24 years earlier, there was a public accounting of its operations.
The SpaceX prospectus is, at least as much as Disclosure Day, a work of science fiction. It acknowledge as much. “For decades, a reality where humanity travels between the planets and the stars has felt tantalizingly close but still locked in the pages and screens of science fiction,” the Prospectus promises, “We are capable of better understanding the universe, exploring the universe, and ultimately making life multiplanetary across the universe.”
Its most-discussed section - “Other Matters” - promises a “grant of 1 billion performance-based restricted shares of Class B common stock to Mr. Musk,” but only if SpaceX’s market capitalization reaches $7.5 Trillion and they establish “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.” It is, as Taşkale puts it, a series of “science-fiction scenarios deliberately encoded into compensation milestones.” The prospectus takes for granted that SpaceX will be able to engineer its way past problems like the inhospitability of Mars, the existence of Earth’s gravity, and Elon Musk’s own mortality.
Right up to the IPO, even people who should’ve know better, people who did know better, kept their gaze, at least publicly, stubbornly fixed on these speculative fictions. And by sheer willpower many continue to avert their eyes from the cybertruck behind the curtain. But Musk is now chasing supra-sovereign, multiplanetary power with an imperative to publicity that even he is having trouble keeping up with. SpaceX valuations and the ventures those valuations make possible are presently sustained mainly by making what even the prospectus characterizes as the achievements of a distant future seem increasingly imminent. A speculative bubble is what exists in the space between futurist euphoria and presentist sobriety. What happens when the distance between the two collapses?
Disclosure Day had a huge opening weekend, the biggest of Spielberg’s career, buoyed no doubt by an inventive and expensive marketing campaign. SpaceX’s opening days went equally well, for much the same reason. The company increased its liquidity by $86 Billion. For the founders, employees, and pre-IPO investors who held more than 95% of the stock on June 12, it was no doubt tempting to sell as the price rallied to $60 above the IPO offer by the third day of trading. Some obviously did. Some are barred from selling until later this year, at which point they likely will.
But as with Spielberg’s film, which trailed off fast and may not make back the cost of its production and distribution from box office receipts, SpaceX’s share price has sloped downward since mid-June, now sitting well below the IPO offer, let along the post-IPO peak. One reason for this slump, utterly predictable, is that investors have the opportunity to buy SpaceX’s downside for the first time. Even if all science fiction did come true, it would do so only on the longest time horizon, and you can buy options on SpaceX today. Via the IPO, Musk created a mechanism for negative sentiment towards him and his company to find its way onto what was, until then, a quaintly utopian balance sheet. Many people are willing to short Star Trek it turns out.
The curse of public corporations is that, no matter how promising and/or stable their actual business is, past a certain point shareholders, whether activist investors, employees, board members, or memestock fanboys, get panicked. And public efforts to stem that panic are just as likely to create more of it. “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know,” is the message Spielberg’s alien race chooses to introduce itself to 21st-century humanity. They clearly never observed a day trader on the wrong end of a margin call, or a tech whistleblower stumbling upon their employer’s darkest secrets.
iii. gratuitous reminiscences
Disclosure Day has two didactic theses. The first is that “the right to know outweighs the consequences of knowing.” However bad the effects of unsettling, but accurate disclosures are on public confidence, they are preferable to the long-term effects of non-disclosure. This has long been the conventional wisdom of those who study financial and economic crises as well. Economic booms and bull markets can be prolonged by disinformation, but only temporarily. And the longer people are allowed to continue behaving on the basis of falsified market signals, the worse will be their anger and distrust when the revelation comes. The resulting parsimony and prolonged aversion to risk is what turns recessions into depressions.
The film’s second thesis is that empathy is the measure of individual intelligence and civilizational advance. Spielberg has been forwarding this thesis, especially in his alien movies, since the 1970s. In Disclosure Day extraterrestrial empathy manifests in the aliens’ non-consensual human ambassador (another Spielberg trope) as a kind of superpower for persuasion. Margaret Fairchild becomes not only a skeleton key for every language barrier, but becomes “unstoppable,” as one WARDEX henchman puts it, because she intuits exactly what people need to hear in order to do what she wants them to do.
The empathy superpower is, the film hypothesizes, the antidote to what ails us: paranoia, isolation, tribalism, anti-intellectualism, fear-mongering, etc. Which, fine, I guess. Feel your neighbors’ feels, or whatever. Where this turns retrogressive is in how Spielberg imagines the empathy superpower would achieve full disclosure at scale.
The circular hero’s journey which Fairchild goes on in Disclosure Day is back to her workplace, the local Kansas City television station, KCXE, where, earlier in the film, she expresses her modest aspiration to rise from on-camera meteorologist to weekend anchor. When she returns during the finale, she is no longer a subordinate, but the station has been chosen as her instrument to access mass media and therefore deploy her empathy superpower to the multitudes, simultaneously waiving WARDEX’s disclosure immunity and revealing the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Criticisms of this scene have focused on the procedural verisimilitudes of how a regional broadcast affiliate preempts a national network. But such quibbles are easily explained away by the empathy superpower. A substantive critique must address the scene at the level of the allegorical. If empathy is the antidote to totalitarian creep, what is the means by which such an antidote gets administered? Spielberg’s answer could not be more solipsistic.
Disclosure Day climaxes with the fantasy of humanity united by experience of a longform motion picture narrative. The inverse of WARDEX’s mass surveillance and supervision is mass projection and persuasion, some might say counterpropaganda, mediated by the same tech monopolies upon which WARDEX’s totalitarian creep depends. The leader of the insurgency which commandeers this communications infrastructure is Hugo Wakefield (played by Colman Domingo), who behaves like a film director or showrunner. He oversees the construction of sets and the acquisition of props. He masterfully massages the egos of anxious performers. He dictates the schedules and the logistics. And in the final scene, he watches from offset as all that he has orchestrated comes together in front the KCXE cameras.
Spielberg asserts that somehow the escape from being monitored lies in collectively receiving what someone like himself narrativizes. The imperative Fairchild expresses in the film’s final line is to just “Listen.” In mass culture - monoculture even - we will find freedom! If we all just go back to blockbuster movies and primetime TV, we’ll be able to practice compassion again.
iv. successful manipulation and containment
But Disclosure Day is not just nostalgia for the Reaganalog. The extension of extraterrestrial empathy is due, the film insists, foremost to the totalitarian. Nobody punches Scanlon or handcuffs him. To the contrary, Wakefield stands with him, caresses his shoulder, and looks tenderly into Scanlon’s eyes as the disclosure day programming begins; as though to signal that his though NGO immunity no longer empowers him, he still won’t have to answer for anything he’s done. Let bygones be bygones, possessor of nuns, torturer of aliens.
Disclosure Day thus dramatizes the fantasy of retro-neoliberalism which has stultified contemporary American liberalism, most egregiously establishment figures in the Democratic Party, many of them one-time architects of the Washington Consensus. If we all abandoned the platforms politics of microtargeting and rage, couldn’t we go back to how it was in the ‘90s? Can’t we just take a mulligan? Can’t we all just get along?
Does Spielberg think that this science fiction will eventually come true?
In Fredric Jameson’s famous reading of Spielberg’s Jaws he argues that the film “touches on present-day contradictions and anxieties only to use them for its new task of ideological resolution.” I think the same is true of Disclosure Day. It is reactionary futurism for Gavin Newsom voters. It desires the revival of a presumption of decency which reinforces class solidarity to neutralize rising class animus.
The empathy aliens are not coming to save us. The weapons of mass disclosure do not exist. The saboteurs of civil society will not mend their ways if we bail them out.