Introduction
The Oxford English Dictionary has myriad definitions for the word ‘cool,’ from the conceptual physical sciences where cool means lower temperature, to its cultural connotation where cool means “restrained and relaxed,” such as jazz, and “fashionably attractive or impressive,” which could be a person, trend, habit, or behaviour. If one means pop culture, then it's harder to define what is cool, because the pop culture is broken up into subcultures, each with their own definition of cool. One cannot look at the current age with the same perspective as you look at previous ones. There are reasons for this.
The major reason for this is that the information flow happens at such a tremendous rate, that by the time you make sense of what’s happening, the phenomenon has already run its course and any hindsight that can be gained would have become obsolete.
Secondly, previous decades such as 1960s, 70s, and other were dominated by highly specific movements and individuals. We're living in an age where new potentially global moments arise all the time. So defining a ‘lightning rod’ moment that can be said to have ushered in ‘cool’ in this era is very difficult. The dissemination and exchange of ideas, information and concepts is very fast now, so fast that it has become almost difficult to sustain a movement, political or otherwise.
So in the 21st century information society, social, cultural and political moments come and go all the time. Stuff that would've been obsessed over for months a few decades ago is forgotten in weeks now. It is in such a context that the essay tries to define what is considered cool and why. Connor defines cool as “everything and nothing at all.” One cannot say with surety whether it is a “philosophy, a sensibility, a religion, an ideology, a personality type, a behaviour pattern, an attitude, a zeitgeist or a worldview” . This can be interpreted to mean that all of these or any one of these can be considered cool.
This essay will attempt to define what is considered cool in the current era by focusing on the ‘cool’ cult that is created around Elon Musk, the CTO and CEO of SpaceX, and CEO at Tesla Motors. He is the inspiration behind the character Tony Stark in the Iron Man movie franchise. His might not be a rags-to-riches tale in entirety, but he is very much a self-made billionaire entrepreneur whose ambition and success add to the coterie of Silicon Valley aspirants and achievers. His confidence in his designs does not shroud his thinking; he is aware that even the best of designs can fail, and is prepared with a Plan B, C or D to combat any situation.
Elon Musk, as stated earlier, belongs to a generation of inventor-innovator-entrepreneurs that have either contributed to the information revolution on the internet or made it big through the internet. Joining ranks of the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Musk is celebrated as much for his engineering innovations as for his leadership skills and vision. Unlike other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (not necessarily referring to the list above), Musk did not court retirement in early 2002 when he had sold PayPal to eBay for $180mn. He instead set up SpaceX, considered the most ambitious project for space travel that would help the humanity reach and set up habitats on Mars.
At a time when engineering grads take up jobs as stock brokers and finance analysts, Musk’s passion for technology and engineering inspired him to envision civil space travel which could help the current and coming generations set up colonies on Mars. At the same time, his ambition to make the planet more sustainable inspired him to work on designing and manufacturing electric cars. These eliminate the burning of fossil fuels that escalate the problem of global warming.
Similarly, when the leading automobile manufactures keep their techniques a secret or rush to acquire intellectual property rights over any new technology they develop in-house in order to to maintain their competitive advantages, Elon Musk allowed the use of Tesla Motor patents by other companies so that they can develop electric cars, and increase the pace at which the cars are developed. Now that’s the vision for not only the industry as a whole, but also a progressive step in the direction of reduce carbon emission levels on the planet.
“Should we take Elon Musk seriously? As a boy, he often withdrew into his own world so completely that he was feared deaf and had his adenoids removed. Now, interview over, I get a taste of what can be the result of such intense focus.”
Researchers who have defined cool in cultural context also opine that anything that is considered cool is more often than not juxtaposed to the mainstream practises and opinions. That is to say anything that has shades of rebellion against the popular practise becomes cool, and instantly popular. By these standards or definitions, talking about taboo topics is also considered cool. And equally by these standards, an entrepreneur who would contribute $1mn to building a Nikola Tesla Museum, after being called out publicly by a digital comic curator, The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman, can definitely be considered as being unconventional.
You have entrepreneurs who are popularly affable or unconventionally ruthless and reserved, or too intent on achieving their monopolistic ambitions. Elon Musk is focused, outspoken, yet cordial and humane, and utterly successful with strong leadership qualities.
There are posts on Question and Answer social network Quora where young, aspiring technology and business enthusiasts have asked questions about Elon Musk and secrets of his success. The answers are penned by technology curators and former employees at SpaceX or Tesla where they recount moments where they witnessed his strong leadership skills along with technological brilliance.
Dolly Singh, in one such post writes that after the launch failure of falcon rockets for the third time around, there was much dismay among the employees because everybody had worked really hard. They were not even sure if the company had finances for further rounds of testing. However, at that moment Musk addressed the gloomy and confused employees, reassuring them that he had been able to get funding for two more rounds of testing just in case things didn’t go as expected, and that he would need all their hard work and support until they have achieved what they have set out to achieve.
In another post, an Elon Musk fan recounts the famous anecdote from the former’s life after he had sold PayPal to eBay for $180mn. Story goes that Musk had famously invested $100mn to set up SpaceX,, $80mn in Tesla Motors and had borrowed money from someone to pay his rent. Now, isn’t that cool? Not the man, but the style, attitude or dedication towards achieving his ambitions.
The above analysis with a focus on a cool personality, namely Elon Musk, tries to define what cool stands for in the current era. Making big in life against the social, political, and economic currents is still considered cool. Musk achieved the much celebrated Silicon Valley dream on his own terms, standing up to the corporate competitors and federal regulators. This might not be as dramatic as compared to the ‘Jazz’ revolution that inspired an entire genre and had tales of emancipation of an entire subculture woven around it.
The superheroes and fantastical setups are considered cool in this age of hi-tech revolutions where superhero fantasies are coming on life on 3D and 4D set-ups. Musk’s work pattern, popularised in the media is nothing short of a superhuman effort – working 15-16 hours a day, and motivating 3000+ employees to put in that amount of hard work too – sounds fantastical to a budding-entrepreneurs. Even if the popularity of Musk is nothing but a cult-hype created around him, his personality fits the frame of ‘cool’ for the current Generation Y. Space mining, colonies in mars, open source AI, modes of travel that seem like they're from the Jetsons, battery tech, making electric cars mainstream and better.
As “structurally flexible and semantically allusive” the word cool remains, cool still means standing out from among the masses, and at the same time following a trend because everyone else is following it. Its basic connotations might not have changed, and that is why marketers then and now vouch on creating a ‘cool’ aura around their products to sell it to the Generation Y. The Generation Y has a pattern in letting know what they consider cool – they increase the consumption of the discourses and products around the artefacts that they consider cool, even if it is Elon Musk.
Works Cited
Ferguson, Shelagh. "A global culture of cool? Generation Y and their perception of coolness." Young Consumers, Vol. 12 (3) (2011): 265-275. Web.
Kohlenberger, Judith. The New Formula for Cool. transcript Verlag, 2015. Web.
Smith, Andrew. "Meet tech billionaire and real life Iron Man Elon Musk." 04 Jan 2014. The Telegraph. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10544247/Meet-tech-billionaire-and-real-life-Iron-Man-Elon-Musk.html>. Web.
