Sparrow & Dove

Heavy spoilers for Evangelion, a thirty year old series that surely everyone who cares has already seen by now, follow.

With the heaviest of hearts, I must admit that Elon likes the same anime as me

Elon Musk, the man behind the Cybertruck and one or two other things, once tweeted a list of his favourite anime.

It has no real surprises. Apart from Your Name, everything on the list was at least 15 years old when he tweeted, and some were over 25. It’s just the mainstream classics that everyone who got into anime in the mid 2000s would pick. They’re the series and films I – a normie who likes anime but never got all that deep into it – would pick. But there’s one item in that list that we need to talk about: Evangelion.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is the watershed of 90s anime – it starts as a conventional “teens pilot giant robots to fight aliens” series and ends as a haunting, visceral exploration of depression, grief and the competing philosophies about human connection and finding purpose in a meaningless world. And yet despite how heavy that makes it sound, it was a huge, huge hit. Anime as an artform can be divided into pre-Evangelion and post-Evangelion.

It’s my favourite anime ever – probably one of my favourite works of art full stop – and unfortunately it might be Elon’s favourite too. Certainly, he’s posted about it several times, whether to share memes about its 14 year old child protagonist impregnating an adult woman…

… or to prove his fandom by just posting the name of the shadowy organisation the heroes work for with no context…

NERV.

We need to talk about NERV.

But to do this, I’ll have to lay a little foundation. If you’re already familiar with Evangelion, you can skip the next section. If you’re not then… well, I apologise for the avalanche of sci-fi lore that’s about to tumble over your head.

What is Evangelion about? Attempting to answer the hardest question ever asked

For people who haven’t seen it, I’ll try to summarise the basic plot here – just the details needed to discuss Elon’s Evangelion fandom and his dangerous idolisation of NERV.

Explaining Evangelion is, to some extent, an impossible task. Towards the end of the series, events become increasingly dreamlike and are very loosely explained in an impressionistic manner. In part, this was a deliberate artistic choice but in part, it was a response to the production challenges of running out of money and to creator Hideaki Anno’s depression. The following is my interpretation, based on the original 23-ish episode series and the feature film End of Evangelion, but no spin-off media (and not the Rebuild remakes). I’ll keep it as succinct as I possibly can, but it will still be a few dense paragraphs. Sorry.

An apocalyptic event called Second Impact has killed much of humanity. Now, strange monstrous aliens called Angels have appeared and have declared war on the survivors. Angels are protected by force fields called AT fields and the only weapons that can penetrate those fields and destroy the Angels are giant bio-mechanical robots called Evangelions (Evas). Each of these can only be piloted by a person capable of synchronising with that Eva, mentally and spiritually. The Evas are built and maintained by NERV – officially part of the UN, but run independently with its own agenda.

NERV’s founder and chief, Gendo Ikari, lost his wife in Second Impact. He resents his son, the shy and depressed Shinji, whom he is estranged from. But Shinji is the only one who can pilot Eva Unit 1, so Gendo has Shinji brought to NERV HQ and forces him to become an Eva pilot. Some people interpret Gendo’s actions towards Shinji as tough love, but it’s clearly a simpler, more mechanistic cruelty. Gendo sees value in Shinji only as an extension of himself, or as a tool to be used. Paradoxically, he simultaneously despises Shinji’s “weakness” and indecision but also the fact that Shinji stands up to him and refuses to obey him.

It becomes clear that NERV is not simply trying to defeat the Angels and save humanity. In fact, it is the largest tool of embezzlement in human history – it violates its duties to the UN, sabotages rival departments, and plans to use the Evas to destroy human identity and the material world and usher in a transhumanist future.

It turns out that humanity is itself an Angel – one single Angel broken across many bodies – and our AT field is the barrier of fear that we put between our souls (as in Schopenhauer’s theory of hedgehog’s dilemma) that prevents the pure and deep connection of true love. The shadowy body behind NERV (SEELE) plans to use the Evas to destroy that AT field, melt all our human bodies back into an ocean of primordial soup, and let our souls collapse into one – “Instrumentality”, a pure, blank spiritual existence without conflict or suffering (where “everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”, as Kurt Vonnegut said).

Gendo however has an ulterior motive – as well as betraying humanity, he’s also attempting to betray SEELE. His wife’s soul lives on inside Eva Unit 1, and Gendo hopes to restore her soul into a clone of her body and bring her back to life.

OK, phew.

So. NERV.

DOGE is NERV, if Gendo spent too much time on Reddit

Remember, when asked to mention something from Evangelion, the first thing that came into his head was not the Evas, not the Angels, it was not any of the characters, it was NERV.

A shadowy four-letter-backronymed semi-independent government agency that claims to be saving the world, but secretly exists to destroy rivals and funnel government resources to build a post-human future? Hmm. HMM.

NERV takes the tools given to it to defend humanity, and use them to instead destroy it and create a new post-human world in its place. DOGE takes the tools given to it to cut government spending and – political and tech commentators widely allege – uses them to exfiltrate sensitive government and personal data to train AI that Elon claims will be “smarter than humans and an extinction risk“. As I write this, the Librarian of Congress and leader of the Register of Copyrights have just been fired, allegedly over a dispute over copyright and AI training.

When confronted by a rival giant robot project that is competing for government funding, NERV sabotages it. And similarly, Musk has a long history of attempting to sabotage rail projects that compete with his vision of electric vehicles, whether by distracting politicians with pipe dreams of Hyperloop and underground car tunnels to dissuade them from investing in trains and subways, or by threatening California High Speed Rail directly via DOGE. Regulators overseeing Tesla autonomous vehicles have been canned and SpaceX operatives seem to be being placed in the FAA.

NERV is officially subordinate to SEELE which is officially subordinate to the UN, but in reality power flows in the opposite direction. Similarly, DOGE is officially subordinate to the US government, but Musk uses DOGE to exert massive control over the government, whether by slashing regulators or subverting payment systems, and even Musk’s “SEELE” (the analogy here would be JD Vance and the circle of conservatives and tech leaders who often seem to be working behind the back of Trump) appears to have lost control of him.

NERV believes the only way to end human suffering is to break down the barrier between mind and machine through the Evas, and between mind and mind through Instrumentality. Elon believes that to survive and thrive, humanity needs to develop a direct mental link to AI, as well as human-to-human communication.

Gendo attempts to speed his plans by manipulating his son, and by massively cloning his wife – he has huge tanks full of identical soulless (and nude) teen girls who can be used as expendable tools to fight for him or (he vainly hopes) to love him. It’s impossible not see some reflection of that in Musk’s massive spamming of children (officially he has 14 that we know of, and has talked about using surrogates to birth far more), allegedly using IVF to select only XY male embryos and demanding C-sections under the weird backwards belief that caesareans cause larger brains. His belief that his children are his property – his tools, an extension of his own ego – are most obvious in his sickening cruelty towards his estranged trans daughter, about whom Musk publicly said “I lost my son… My son is dead… killed by the woke-mind virus“. (She is very much alive.)

Gendo wears mirrored sunglasses and a chinbeard, Elon wears mirrored sunglasses and a chinbeard.

The only substantial difference between NERV and DOGE is that NERV takes its name from the German word for “nerve” (SEELE similarly means “soul”) because it is rooted in German philosophy about body, mind and spirit – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud. DOGE takes its name from an illiterate Shiba Inu turned cryptocurrency icon because it is rooted in a Reddit meme.

The Torment Nexus is epic, poggers and extremely based 😂😂😂

The problem of viewers identifying with the villains is an old one. Plenty of Star Wars fans love the Stormtroopers and the Sith. Even Richard III owes much of his current support to Shakespeare’s depiction of him as a witty machiavellian – surely, there would be no revisionist Richard III Society without the Bard. I believe that Elon Musk has undergone a similar process.

Sci-fi has been full of visions of awesome scientific world-crushing supervillains over the years – powerful men (almost always men) surrounded by cool aesthetic technology, able to manipulate other human beings and shape the world through raw intellect and Will to Power. Elon Musk thinks that if he builds the Death Star and controls the Force, he can become as cool as Darth Vader. Failing that, if he build robots and AI and neural interfaces and evil government agencies, he can be as cool as Gendo Ikari.

Right now, there is a lawsuit between the creators of Blade Runner 2049 and Tesla over Tesla’s apparent use of Blade Runner imagery of the dust swept ruins of a city to promote Robotaxi. Elon Musk has called Cybertruck “the vehicle Bladerunner [sic] would drive“. He jokes about creating a zombie apocalypse so he can sell flamethrowers. He styles his fake “Hyperloop” after the vaults from post-nuclear wasteland RPG Fallout. Elon wants to make sci-fi dystopias real, because they look epic.

There’s a classic Twitter joke about this tendency, by user Alex Blechman:

It’s here that I should (try to) explain what happens at the end of Evangelion. The UN realises belatedly that NERV has betrayed them and stages a bloody invasion of NERV HQ. NERV fights back in one of the greatest pieces of animation ever put to film (sorry only the French dub is on Youtube) and crushes the Japanese Self Defense Forces and the UN, but is then brutally eviscerated by SEELE, who trigger Instrumentality. Gendo’s last attempt to resurrect his wife fails as her clone rejects him, and she instead becomes a huge Angel that causes every human body on the planet to explode into a tidal wave of orange fluid.

Inside Instrumentality, our protagonist Shinji comes to terms with his depression, his failings as a person, and his inability to accept love through a long sequence of abstract imagery, monologues and dialogues. Finally, his soul arrives in a heavenly plane to be congratulated by all his friends and family. But Shinji realises that life cannot exist without individuality and change, even if individuality means conflict and change means pain.

His body rematerialises and he awakes to find himself alone on a blood-soaked beach, waves of orange liquid beneath a burning sky and the mountain-sized broken corpse of his mother’s clone. He finds his co-pilot Asuka, the last other human alive – a girl who used to belittle him and tease him sexually (culminating in Shinji violating or at least masturbating over her comatose body – End of Evangelion is really bleak). Shinji strangles her out of sadistic rage and masochistic self-loathing, only to let her go when she touches his cheek. He sobs while she mutters that he disgusts her. The End.

The message of Evangelion is… well, I’d hesitate to call it “clear”, but I think there is only one real plausible reading. Instrumentality is the Torment Nexus. We cannot create a perfect existence through grand projects – social or technological – and we certainly cannot force it on others against their will. The perfect mediated life, free from pain and conflict, is dry and inhuman and could only be built on oppression and the denial of who we truly are. We can only work on ourselves, on the difficult and often painful labour of loving others, letting others love us, loving ourselves, and making ourselves lovable.

It is a message that I don’t think Elon even noticed when he watched it, never mind whether he took it onboard. It’s certainly not a message that Gendo understands. He loves only himself, and believes the love of others is a tool he can instrumentalise. He loves the memory of his wife, but he does not love her clone, or her son, and that is why he fails.

I do not believe Elon wants to literally cause Instrumentality. I do not believe that it is physically possible, or that Musk’s plans would even metaphorically bring it about. I do believe that if you gave him a magic button labelled “Destroy the material world to create a virtual world free from pain”, he would push it before he even got to the end of the sentence. If you gave him a button that would force the people who have rejected him to accept him, even at the cost of their own individuality, he would keep slamming it over and over until the springs broke.

DOGE, X, xAI, Neuralink – these are all facets of a cargo cult NERV. A cosplay project for acting out the role of post-humanist sci-fi villain. It doesn’t matter that these plans seem to be impossible technologically, socially and philosophically, any more than it matters that physics, economics and politics all stand against his dreams of a Mars base – he will LARP the fantasy anyway and make the world a worse place in order to do so.

Grok, make my wife and child love me. Grok, melt all of humanity into primordial soup. Grok, remove Asuka’s clothes.