Surely we are dumber than this?

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to read that ‘thousands of people are reportedly lining up to have a portion of their skull removed and one of Elon Musk's brain chips implanted’.

Only thousands?

Surely we are dumber than that?

If Donald Trump can convince 74 million people to vote for him as America’s Most Wanted Caligula Impersonator, then surely Elon can do better than a minor league baseball stadium's worth of volunteers. These are first-class idiots we’re talking about here, not your common or garden-variety gullible rubes. They are sitting up and begging like jittery dope fiends for one of Elon’s robot doctors crack open their skulls and stick Twitter Hitler’s Fitbit in there.

The distressing number of extremely online Musketeers who never stop calling him Elon as if to suggest their intimate personal connection to his mononymous cultural significance—Banksy! Beyonce! Elvis! Elon!—suggests he should have no trouble rounding up millions of minions, Igor-beavers if you will, to volunteer for an even more intimate personal connection to Neuralink’s rusty, monkey-murdering brain implants.

After all, it’s not brain surgery, except for the bit where the circular saw chews through your skull and a robot surgeon stuffs a bunch of cheap Chinese wires and silicon into your cortex.

Surprising nobody but those few frightened souls who might have a problem letting this guy…

… into their brainpan with a pocket knife and a raging case of Dunning Kruger Syndrome, the US FDA initially refused Musk’s Neuralink researchers permission to start operating on human subjects. But there seems to have been a scuffle in the FDA car lot and some quick work with a pocket knife because somebody with an acquired brain injury reversed that decision, and now the robot surgeons with the cranial saws are fairly chomping at the bit (and soon enough through the parietal bone plates) to get after it.

So naturally, thousands of Elon fans put their hands up for a free lobotomy.

But why not millions? Hmm, why not!

They can’t have been put off by the gruesome, sanguinary details of the experimental monkeys that died in the original trials, can they? As Elon himself explained, those brave monkeys were all very old and almost dead anyway. There was no way they could have survived the routine complications of Neuralink surgery, including “bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema”.

While thin-lipped buzzkills might quibble with Space Karen’s plan to choose as his first human subjects severely incapacitated quadriplegics, pointing out that he’s already killed a bunch of sickly primates, this is weak tea. True Elon Stans would retort that all the aged and crippled monkey butchering was terrific practice and he knows what he’s doing now. It’s not like you can just send rockets into space without first blowing up a bunch of them on the ground.

That is a good point as far as it goes, which is somewhat less further than a Space X Starship experiencing a ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ on the launchpad. And it’s assuredly a matter of little to no consequence for the thousands who’ve already signed on for upgrades. Because, really, what’s a little unscheduled disassembly on the operating table, rapid or otherwise, when measured against the chance to assure Mister Musk that Twitter is so much better now and, “Your memes are the very best, sir.”

These would-be human Teslas should inspire us all, no matter how many of them post-operatively accelerate into small groups of children at school crossings and/or spontaneously catch fire. Indeed, with so much of the world now permanently on fire, it could be argued, as Elon almost certainly will in some future trial or inquiry, that spontaneous human combustion isn’t a fault of the Neuralink system; it is a vital evolutionary feature in a rapidly changing world.