Elon Musk gestures while speaking during an inauguration event at Capital One Arena on Jan. 20, 2025. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky
January 21, 2025
It was the salute seen around the world — at least if the world and the internet, as it increasingly seems, have merged and become one. I am referring, of course, to the hand gesture made by Elon Musk at yesterday’s presidential inauguration. Thanking the crowd—and, no doubt, the 47th president standing to one side — for saving the future of civilization, the world’s richest man then launched the first of the res gestae of the Trump Ascendancy. He shot his right arm straight out with the hand flattened and tilted upwards, then spun around and, to those behind him, repeated the gesture.
But what, exactly, did the gesture signify? Had Musk confused the rotunda in the Capitol for the stadium at Nuremberg? Was his gesture, as the Israeli paper Haaretz headlined, a “fascist salute?” Or was Musk’s ramrod stiff arm, as the Anti-Defamation League suggested with great delicacy, no more than “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm”? The same sort of awkwardness, no doubt, embodied by Peter Sellers in his role as Dr. Strangelove in the Stanley Kubrick classic.
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Yet I wonder if the actual import of Musk’s gesture — spastic or fascist, herky-jerky or just plain jerky — really matters. Instead, what does matter is what I am doing at this very moment — and what countless others have done since Musk made that meaning-pregnant movement. Namely, like those others, I am responding to the gesture, one that has been endlessly reproduced on social platforms, including Musk’s own X. The tech overlord’s intentions are, ultimately, less important than what it has revealed: We have become the willing participants — extras, really‚ in what one thinker called “illusion-promoting spectacles and dubious speculations.”
The thinker is Walter Benjamin and the phrase is taken from his classic essay “The Work of Art and in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” A German-Jewish intellectual, Benjamin saw the writing on the wall in his native country in 1933 — brightly lit by the flames of the Reichstag fire — and, condemning himself to exile, settled in Paris. Two years later, when he began to draft the essay, the shadow of Nazi Germany had lengthened, no doubt influencing Benjamin’s exploration of how modern technology and capitalism shape our experience of the world.
The essay has fueled a cottage industry of scholarship. There is one aspect, though, that clearly and urgently speaks to the moment we are now living — the moment captured by Musk’s oddly hieratic gesture. In the epilogue, Benjamin pivots from his philosophical and psychological reflections to the political, even existential consequences of these new media. As if anticipating those who downplay the context — one of the first casualties of endless reproducibility — of Musk’s embrace of neo-Nazi parties and Holocaust deniers, Benjamin writes:
Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.
The property is no longer railways and steel factories; instead, it is social platforms and AI. Of course, the Marxist language sounds rather quaint, but if we substitute “all of us — me included — for “proletarian masses,” we have a pretty good description of what happened during the inaugural festivities on Jan. 20, as Musk spoke for the gaggle of tech overlords gathered behind him. When he invoked the future of civilization, he sealed the invocation with a gesture that launched a thousand memes and a cacophony of chatter.
Ironically, this suits both those who support and those who oppose the new administration, not to mention the administration itself. It gives all of us the impression we are participants in the process, while the reality behind the spectacle grows grimmer and darker as the levers of power — an outdated metaphor if ever there was one — are placed in the hands of this new elite.
The triumph of fascism, Benjamin concluded, is that it risks making our “own destruction an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” A bit melodramatic, perhaps, but a claim I could not help but text to friends while I ran on a treadmill at my gym, where the vast flat screens framed either the spectacle of the inauguration or the spectacle of the college football. When I hit the third mile, I’m not sure if it was the sweat in my eye, or the very nature of the medium, that made the spectacles nearly indistinguishable.
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