EDITORIAL | MATIHIKO | TECH
Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief
Edited by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor
Illustration by Stella Roper (they/she) | @dodofrenzy | Arts Editor
We’ve been throwing around the concept of a technology issue of Debate for years. It’s just as much, if not more of a core concept in our lives as food, sex, music, drugs, and anything else we’ve covered since we were founded as Debait in the late 90’s - yet our last tech issue was way back in 2018, when I was in year nine and all I cared about was BROCKHAMPTON shortly before Ameer Vann got booted out.
Peering back through that issues editorial, former editor Julie Cleaver paints a portrait of someone who she considered a modern day Einstein at the time - a man wholly dedicated to humanity whose primary goal at the time was to send humans to Mars and establish a colony, broadening our horizons beyond earth and into the rest of the universe after years of dormancy on our silly little planet. It’s like hearing someone talk positively about Anakin Skywalker without the knowledge he’d become a sith lord.
I don’t blame anyone for previously respecting, admiring, or tolerating Elon Musk. I remember hearing about him for the first time as a kid circa 2015, watching a video where his praises are endlessly sung by a YouTuber who has since left the internet after a barrage of sexual abuse allegations were sent his way - probably an omen in of itself, to be honest. I’d heard him referred to as a saviour for tech bros who, despite being a little overambitious and up himself, genuinely wanted to make the world a better place. In 2015, he was considered a real-life Iron Man. In 2025, I consider him to be the scum of the earth.
If you need an explanation for why Musk is a plague on humanity, and every single atom he interacts with, you’ve likely stopped reading and thrown this magazine into the same bonfire you burned your Nike sneakers in when they had Colin Kaepernick as a spokesperson. The man has spent the last seven years taking on mind-numbingly stupid, and oftentimes harmful roles in society that have made him simultaneously impossible to tolerate or ignore. The man turned Twitter into a fundamentally worse hellscape of right-wing engagement bait and AI bots interacting with other AI bots, destroyed its stock price, implemented the worst rebrand of the 21st century via changing the platform's name to X, and then proceeded to do the same thing with the United States Government.
His bullshit organisation, the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ has the sole purpose of cutting government spending, and - okay, can we talk about this for a moment? The most powerful man in the world, who is openly puppeteering and gutting the most powerful government in the world, named his vessel for destroying America after a fucking decade old internet meme. Some of you first years were born in 2008 - do you even remember Doge? Did we all just collectively forget that the same men licking Musk's feet now are the same ones who cared more about meme relevance than human rights eight years ago, and would roast you on an open flame if you shared a meme that Reddit deemed outdated 24 hours after it began? Am I just chronically online? Is this not just unabashedly, shamelessly, horrifically cringeworthy?
This is the problem with talking about technology in 2025. Tech billionaires, like Musk, are no longer theorised to be controlling the government - they’re actively bragging about it on social media. They’re shielding themselves from any form of criticism by allowing hate speech to run wild and removing any literature or communications criticising them from schools, social networks, and forms of media - quite literally, violating the point of free speech while spreading transphobic misinformation fuelled by nothing but pathetic hatred.
Billionaire technology and hate-fuelled politics are feeding off of each other right now and growing like mould, both across the internet and throughout the world. Social media giants like Meta are revealing any former support they showed for the LGBTQ+ community was for a quick dollar, and have since burned protections for queer people to the ground for an ounce of validation from daddy Donald. Simultaneously, hate fuelled talking points that stemmed from right wing spaces on the internet are sinking their teeth into the politics of Aotearoa - or should I say New Zealand, in order to not offend Deputy PM and snowflake Winston Peters who recently threw a fit in parliament over Green MP Ricardo Menendez March using the indigenous name for the country he has lived in for nearly two decades. Just as Musk and Trump will yell on street corners about free speech whilst actively removing scientific support for trans rights from education facilities, New Zealand First just last year introduced a members bill to “protect freedom of speech” before crashing out over Te Reo Māori being an official language of Aotearoa to the point where Gerry “No, don’t do that” Brownlee had to tell him to shut the fuck up and do his job.
If you can’t tell, I’m angry and jaded about the state of technology and how it’s informing politics. I haven’t even had the chance to touch on Artificial Intelligence, because the US President is already running ads unabashedly promoting the for-profit colonisation of Gaza with AI—skipping the conversation about its ethics entirely. Any semblance of morality or empathy has been reduced to a punchline. Meanwhile, they’re banning books that promote peace and gearing up to join Russia in what feels like the inevitable third world war, which could start at any moment.
Reading the last technology issue shows that while technology is still a force for good, and that there’s still plenty of interesting developments happening every day as we outline throughout this magazine, we need to be careful with how we allow these major technology organisations to be run by people who have used inherited wealth to exploit the system for personal gain. Elon Musk would have never been able to pay his way to top positions at PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter, and the US Government without inheriting cash from his family's profits off of South African Apartheid. By raising taxes on the ultra wealthy and making sure the fuckers actually pay their tax or face a prison cell, we may be able to break the chain of progress being controlled by bigots who use hatred to make money. Even if that means we never get another major technology corporation, like Apple, Meta, Tesla, or anything else that's slowly destroying the planet and everything inside it - we’ll get a hell of a lot more working class people using opportunities that could be paid for through a wealth tax, such as free education, research grants, and a stable living to build a new age of technological advancement where the profit margins are irrelevant compared to genuine improvement to the way we live.
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