During the same week in June, two freakish things happened. A rare but welcome incursion of monsoon moisture entered Arizona from the south, scattering welcome showers across parched forest and grassland, but also throwing down lightning bolts that set off dozens of wildfires. Elon Musk, meanwhile, became the world’s first trillionaire, reaching an unprecedented milestone in the lengthy annals of human accumulation.
You can guess which of these happenings prompted more attention from the media: it was of course Musk’s attainment of an extra 0 on the end of the number tabulating his supposed fortune—an achievement that epitomized, depending on your stance, either new heights of capitalist innovation or new depths of inequality and greed.
What unites the two seemingly dissimilar news items is the centrality of the zero. Musk’s new status is basically meaningless in practical terms—it’s not as if he could cash out all the wealth that resides in assessments of stock values to, I don’t know, go buy a planet or something. Where it counts, literally, is in distinguishing him from all the other tech bros and hedge fund cutthroats who now feel left behind because their worth is measured in mere billions.
Musk, in other words, is a world’s supposedly wealthiest individual only because of a widely held societal agreement that a single additional zero tied on to what is already a long string of them really means something. (True to form, by the way, he laid out the inadequacy of a mere trillion with a post on X: “$10T or bust.”)
It’s no surprise that rich folks who pursue AI, spaceflight, and other dreams of tech utopias would be drawn to the zero. Zero is after all a perfect loop, a recurring return to the origin, the promise that after decline things are going to circle around to greatness again. Zero is the mythical ourobouros, the snake that eats its own tail until it vanishes itself, a pure act of consumption entirely free of waste. Zero is free of all the smelly, composting, emotional, organic baggage of the world most of us live in. It is the perfect abstraction, an ideal symbol of the ethereality of the inhuman dreams we now so often see looming on the tech horizon. How human will the future world be? Well, not at all, if some who exhibit all-too-human degrees of self-centeredness have their way.
But there’s another side to zero, and it’s epitomized by the fires of June. June is when the upland Southwest has historically burned, when lightning without quenching moisture, or human misadventure of various sorts, can readily set fire coursing through browned grasses, fallen logs, and dried-out pine needle litter.
Fire can be a harsh cleaner, scrubbing too hard sometimes, caustically returning more materials than we’d like to see into their simpler components of ash and smoke and charcoal. But it is above all a recycler, and if there’s one thing we have learned about its role in the Southwest it is that periodic low-level fire can, in many places and circumstances, play a vital role in averting the big buildups of flammable materials that cause more catastrophic and dangerous fires. In fire, as in decay, the equation of life on Earth is zeroed out: destruction begets creation.
Call it trickle-all-around ecologics: life can only thrive when the accumulated surpluses of nature, such as a carpet of dead pine needles on a forest floor, is repurposed for new use.
Those who trumpet Musk’s success are likely to be proponents of trickle-down economics, of the idea that because he or his companies are wealthier more spending, and more success, will filter down to the myriad people at lower economic levels. But the readily available statistics on how much of overall wealth is coming to belong to fewer and fewer people gives a lie to this myth.
It is no coincidence, I think, that some past societies developed elaborate means of dealing with surpluses. Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest lived in a rich environment, full of salmon and berries and deer, where the ease of acquiring resources could have led to the same excesses of accumulation that led to the Egyptian pyramids and other stone monuments about as useful as Musk’s new zero. Maybe they saw danger in that. In any event they invented a ritual giveaway ceremony, the potlatch, in which community members who had the most were invited to—or required to—give away their goods. The giveaway itself was a form of status, but more importantly it was a means of avoiding excessive accumulation. Goods that a wealthy person could not use were given new life through distribution to those who had less.
I like to imagine what it would look like if the selfish over-accumulators, the Musks and Bezoses and Trumps, were encouraged to—or perhaps very strongly encouraged to, since empathy and community insight are not really their strong suits—throw their own potlatches, showering startup funds and health clinics and free daycare programs on a grateful world. Just lop a zero off the end of each of those fortunes. What would they lose? Almost literally nothing.
