Imagination is a Battlefield: Elon Musk, Techno-Fascism, and Dungeons and Dragons

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Elon Musk: CEO of Tesla, Inc. and X (née Twitter), founder of SpaceX and xAI, and Senior Political Advisor to Donald Trump, in which he serves as the de facto head of DOGE. A man with unearned economic power and perverse political presence now has the chilling power to “delete” parts of the U.S. government.

Musk also has broader cultural aims. Those goals were encapsulated in an offhand remark that Musk made on X in November 2024 about buying Hasbro, the toy and entertainment giant and, since 1997, parent company of tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. After seeing a post on X that reported that Hasbro’s 40th Anniversary book The Making of D&D would distance the game from the original’s non-inclusive elements, Musk responded: “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash E. Gary Gygax and the geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons. What the fuck is wrong with  Hasbro…?? May they burn in hell.” After being made aware that the original poster did not take Musk’s (and similar) criticism seriously, he bluntly asked: “How much is Hasbro?” Musk saw himself on a mission to “rescue” D&D, to “de-wokify” changes to the game instigated by Hasbro leadership, such as better representing minorities and marginalized  communities within the game’s lore and mechanics. Now, instead of choosing an imaginary character’s “race,” players choose their imaginary character’s “species.” Musk’s remarks were of course “on brand.” He is known for disrupting industries. But his flirtation with obtaining Hasbro touched on how his techno-fascist battle against government “waste” intersects with his culture war against ideas that challenge established political power and social order.  

Musk’s contempt for marginal members of American society is typical of techno-fascists. Now the most prominent billionaire contributor to an international far right movement spanning the United States, Europe, and Latin America, Musk has, in so many tweets, called for a “defense of liberal values” against critical race theory, the “woke campus,” and cancel culture. In March 2022, Putin compared the West’s reaction to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine to the left’s cancellation of J.K. Rowling. Ultimately, Musk’s fantasy to buy Hasbro is part of the global far right’s attempt to seize, remake, and control our imaginations. They act with the understanding that the kind of imagination nurtured by D&D has the potential to undermine foundational hierarchies and binaries. 

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An outline of the game for the uninitiated: traditionally using pen and paper on a kitchen table—hence, tabletop RPG or TRPG—players of D&D invent and personalize characters—or imagined roles—for themselves and generate stories of their adventures, co-creating a fictional fantasy world. There is also a “dungeon master” who arbitrates the game’s rules, narrates the story, and controls all NPCs. D&D’s core mechanics, despite the numerous editions and supplements that have been published since the game’s debut in 1974, have remained remarkably similar: there’s dice rolling, and the accrual of “experience points.” 

Since its inception, D&D has been deemed the province of the misfits and marginalized, the realm of the freaks and geeks. Musk’s disdain for its inclusivity is not the first time the game has been attacked by the right: In the 1980s, amidst the political conservatism of the Reagan years, the game was accused of promoting Satanism and murder. A little over a decade later, D&D was featured in a July 5, 2000 episode of Freaks and Geeks, in which the Freaks’ leader is asked to join a D&D gaming session to form a closer bond between the two groups. By 2016, as The Guardian reported, D&D was “making its influence felt everywhere.” In 2017, D&D had “the greatest number of players in its history—12 million to 15 million in North America alone.”  There’s Netflix’s Stranger Things, as well as the fantasy heist comedy film Honor Among Thieves. In 2022, the New York Times confidently declared, “Everyone’s been playing Dungeons & Dragons without you.” From the designs of innumerable video game titles—first-person shooters like Doom and simulators like The Sims rely on game mechanics (the former for “health,” the latter for “hunger” and “hygiene”) that descend from D&D—to the writings of literary and movie stars like China Miéville, Brent Hartinger, Cory Doctorow, Stephen Colbert, and Matt Groening (all former gamers)—D&D and its imaginary worlds shape American character. 

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A member of Napoleon’s imperial guard, an elite soldier who was willing to grumble and groan if they believed they were being misused militarily, was called a “grognord.” Tabletop wargamers co-opted this term as a pejorative reference to a player who  exclusively favors older editions. I’m tempted to reduce Musk’s acquisitions dream to grognordian grumblings, but this would skirt past his allegiance to what Adrian Daub has argued is a cancel culture moral panic. Musk remarked in 2021 to Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, that the “woke mind virus” killed his “son,” who came out as transgender. This statement signaled his view that “wokeness” threatens society’s values, interests, and well-being.To think otherwise, beyond one’s assigned gender at birth, for Musk and the far right, is a product of an unnatural imagination. And, by unnatural imagination, for foundationalists like Musk, is meant using imagination to undo the “natural order” of sex.

Musk is hardly alone in his medieval response to people’s limitless capacity to expand received conditions of existence by subverting established hierarchies and binaries. His response, in fact, seems integral to the very vision that propels what Maya Vinokour has labeled “reactionary futurism,” an ideological movement that includes not only Musk, but Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, and Nick Land. For this techno-fascist Silicon Valley oriented group, the state is to be voided because of its artificial rules and regulations, and democracy discarded because as a religious relic of the Enlightenment’s optimism. Such pulverizing is intended to help in the summoning of a techno-capitalist utopia—that is, an invented hierarchical society realized by going where no man has gone before, by colonizing new frontiers through start-up-propelled monarchist models. To be sure, some members of the Trump administration mostly aim to MAGA, to conjure an idealized American past in the present. But allied techno-fascist visionaries, “characters” known for their “superhuman” feats, want this homecoming turned toward a future of their own private dreams. Right-wing blogger Yarvin, for example, yearns for Frederick the Great’s Prussian kingdom, while PayPal billionaire-turned-arms dealer Thiel has echoed Yarvin’s fantasy of withdrawing from the U.S. to establish tech-CEO dictatorships, realms where only the truly superrich can play with their toys, direct the fate of man, and live among the stars. 

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This returns us to D&D, not only an imaginary battleground but a battleground for the  imagination. Gygax’s and Arneson’s early inspirations included myths, games, and fictional worlds that, to sensitive contemporary ears, strike one as traditional at best, reactionary at worst. A key source of D&D’s game mechanics was the wargame Kriegsspiel, created by George Leopold von Reisswitz in 1824 to teach battlefield maneuvers to Prussian officers  They also pulled from J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy: D&D’s original rulebooks offered players the option to play as a hobbit and had NPC ents. That many of D&D’s first published imaginary worlds were rooted in feudal monarchist models of a European bent helps explain the game’s resonance with techno-futurists, as “Feudalism is the New Conservatism”—that is, as Corey Pein writes, “the ideological assumptions of the capitalist elite, the Christian right, and the living remnants of the old European aristocracy have reverted from postwar neoliberalism to the premodern ancien régime.” 

The Eurocentric imagination of D&D’s creators and designers found expression in a number of other ways that are recognizable today as politically and ethically problematic. For a boy like me, who was so eager to play D&D, and who grew up, not in the Midwest, but in New York, where a climate of cultural diversity and, more broadly, a shift in popular culture toward the celebration of differences reigned, that imagination could cause confusion. I remember finding, in 1992, a pristine Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms (1988) in a Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn’s Kings Plaza Shopping Center. On the set’s back, I read, “Establish an exciting Oriental Adventures campaign! Kara-Tur, world of Eastern mystery, is on the far side of the planet from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, but the two cultures only interact if you want them to!” As an adult, those sentences are breathtakingly offensive. It doesn’t take Edward Said to unpack their Orientalism. But after immersing myself in the material as a boy, I was very keen to incorporate into my game “Asian” cultures and “eastern” lands, with ninja and samurai as options for playable characters, as well as new races like Kara-Tur’s dwarf-like korobokuru, the Spirit Folk, and the mountain-dwelling, monkey-like Vanara. Still, I remember Kara-Tur troubling me. Some of my classmates were second generation Southeast Asian immigrants; we never discussed this vis-à-vis D&D, but they avoided playing in the setting. I got the message. Kara-Tur has since been abandoned by D&D’s parent company. 

Kara-Tur heralded coming battles over D&D’s fantasy worlds. Without it, the extent to which the exploring and adventuring that are so central to the “D&D experience” is a colonialist fantasy would have never occurred to me. Consider the Spelljammer setting (1989). Spelljammer was designed by Jeff Grub and in part inspired by popular historian and cultural conservative Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself (1983), which argues that discovery has a transformative power that drives human progress. Boorstin used as examples explorers’, scientists’, archaeologists’, and psychologists’ discoveries of ideas, concepts, places, and facts from the dawn of time until around the turn of the twentieth century, and in particular the greatness and foibles of Christopher Columbus, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton. 

In Spelljammer, players assume imagined characters similar to Boornstin’s terrestrially-bound protagonists, envisioning their fantasy heroes flying spell-powered ships travelling through interstellar galaxies to discover undreamt of planets, realms, magic, and technology. Introduced races had a clear link to in-fiction slavery; the Hadozee were a race of sapient apes granted intelligence by an outsider who enslaved them, experimented on them, and intended to sell them. Knowing that such violent imagery shaped my young self’s D&D adventures is at once sad and disturbing; thankfully, the setting was heavily revised two decades later. 

Around three years ago, there was more uproar surrounding the Hadozee—multiple paragraphs of game lore were, correctly I believe, deemed as still insensitive. Gaming communities have, for more than a decade, experienced online generated controversy that revolves around challenges to established hierarchies and binaries. Most notably, there was gamergate, a harassment campaign waged on social media platforms by white male right-wing gamers in 2014–15 against the emergence of women and feminism in the industry. The attacks exponentially increased when “#Gamergate” spread on Twitter and, according to Adrienne L. Massanari, gamergate helped the growing Alt-Right recruit followers that with the far right and the techno-fascist visionaries cast a spell over American and global society. “Gamergate,” as David Emery reflects, “is regarded as emblematic of the deeply rooted sexist and reactionary attitudes observed not only in the male-dominated gaming industry of that time, but across the internet at large.” Seen in this light, Musk’s comment about buying Hasbro extended how play and gaming culture have for years normalized established hierarchies. 

Musk’s emotional investment in “Gygax and the geniuses”—that is, superhuman men creators—who invented Dungeons & Dragons is hardly surprising, as it dovetails with his close alignment with the eugenetic imagination and its fraudulent race science devoted to eliminating the “waste” of humanity. Musk is, indeed, a man who did not simply use a Nazi salute at a political rally. In interviews and meetings, he has also routinely promoted higher birth rates, arguing that global fertility rates are a civilizational crisis—an emergency resolvable only by fellow genius creators who make babies with a high-IQ, white lineage (he has sired 14 kids) that possess an able body. As reported by Garrison Hayes, Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents on his platform X… spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.” “He,” Hayes continues, “is amplifying users who will incorporate cherry-picked data and misleading graphs into their argument as to why people of European descent are biologically superior.” Musk’s obsession with an imagined fertility crisis—one he believes can only be solved by “genius” white male producers who will reverse civilization’s decline and restore a proper social hierarchy—contributes to the mainstreaming of the eugenetic imagination championed by fellow Silicon Valley techno-fascists.  

Peter Thiel, for instance, has given huge donations for research into how to achieve “immortality,” an ancient fantasy updated by transhumanism, a movement that advocates the development of the human condition through advanced technology. He has also made unsettling investments in “women’s health,” notably a period-tracking app that purportedly removes the need for birth control. These donations and investments have a clear political purpose: In 2009, Thiel wrote that women’s suffrage and the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries since the early twentieth century “have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” This imagined roll back of a century of progress, designed to cull the herd for the benefit of supposedly brilliant male creators, not only betrays a desire to restrict our collective political imagination to foundational hierarchies, but also exposes how these self-described geniuses can only imagine “humanity” as reflections of themselves. 

Trump has used language integral to the eugenetic mind to describe undocumented immigrants, and implied that this past February’s deadly plane and helicopter crash was connected to the FAA’s hiring of people with “severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions.” Such eugenetic visions remind me of D&D’s Nazi analogue: the Scarlet Brotherhood, a secret caste society led by the “Father of Obedience” whose full members are “bred” and have pale skin and blonde hair and believe themselves a master race. The Scarlet Brotherhood was driven from their homeland by a genocidal war, and they aim to restore their ancient evil empire on the backs of their so-called racial and cultural inferiors. Based on how The Scarlet Brotherhood is portrayed in game sources, a portrayal perhaps due to Gygax’s and Arneson’s Midwest Baby Boomer background, it’s unmistakable who the real villains are: those with eugenetic imaginations.

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Techno-fascists’ yearnings for a return to imagined foundational binaries and hierarchies,  whether, gender, racial, or class, explains why Musk would get so upset with improved  representation to D&D. Notable instances of rule changes aimed at better inclusivity can be found in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (2020). In this touted supplement that expands D&D’s fifth edition core rules, the concept of race was replaced with the idea of “variable origins,” subverting the view of race as having a timeless essence and core attributes linked to patterns of behavior. But Musk is almost a quarter of a century too late: The third edition, published in 2000, already removed limits placed on character class and race, and offered players the choice to combine any race and class. Two examples: while the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook (1978) introduced the half-orc race and portrayed them as evil, the third edition allowed half-orcs as player characters and  did not restrict their moral stance. Similarly, in previous D&D editions, the paladin, a holy warrior who upholds justice and righteousness, could only be human. This constraint was also removed in the third edition. For a group ostensibly wielding the weapon of freedom and personal choice against totalitarian social justice warriors, they sure get riled up about D&D’s imaginary expansions. 

But as troubling as D&D’s past remains, the most fantastic power of D&D is precisely the one that, I believe, threatens Musk and the techno-fascist imaginary: D&D is a co-conjured stage upon which players co-imagine boundless possibilities. With an open game licensing concept implemented in 2000, which allowed independent developers to modify D&D as they saw fit, playable races and character classes have long proliferated: over 200 races and 54 base classes, in contrast to the four races and three character classes of first edition D&D. “Dark MAGA” Musk’s attachment to a foundational iteration of D&D is at one with MAGA fixations on past glories of America, such as the auto, steel, and oil industries, which, not coincidentally, were, like D&D, made in the Midwest; but D&D’s player base has, for many decades, extended far, far beyond that space to galaxies far, far away. More than all that, though, D&D “workers” not only create an imaginary world but guide its development and growth. D&D “rulebooks” are in fact guidebooks, and Gygax himself was fond of reminding players to ignore whatever rules they disliked. “Workers”  could therefore change the system if they so wished. While geekdom has been appropriated by mainstream America, D&D and the imaginative play it nurtures can function like a pluralist democracy in miniature. Musk’s attempt to de-wokify the game is rooted in a dream of restricting the game’s diversified play and democratic imagination.

Here, in (self-)exile in Germany, my experiences teaching a university course on the cultural history of D&D speak to the democratic ethos that, I think, has always fundamentally directed the game. Except for the occasional exchange student, my students are all German and almost all grew up in the Ruhrgebiet. But their demographic diversity would have shocked my young self—at least half self-identify as women. My students also tell me that they have completely abandoned the use of moral alignments, a categorization of the perspectives of characters. Their characters’ elaborately imagined backgrounds instead serve as the guidelines for the decisions they make, offering a freedom that I never considered when playing as a teenager. Still, my students also understand that imagination provides the possibility that myth, narrative, and metaphor might rescue humanity from the nightmare of destruction regularly justified by rationalistic claims; they unanimously expressed outrage to me about Musk’s Hasbro tweet. 

Listening to my students, I thought of William Blake, who battled Newton for his mechanical depiction of the universe and championed imagination as a route to spiritual liberation. Blake wrote about Newton through his character of the bearded old man Urizen, a prominent figure in Blake’s mythology who tried to create and constrain the universe with a compass. One can here substitute Urizen for Musk, DOGE, and the whole lot of techno-fascists. In contrast to that group’s “rightist” philosophy, Blake, in his allegorical poem “The Mental Traveler,” is committed to the idea that the mind’s imaginative capacity has the power to traverse and shape the landscape of experience:

(For the eye altering, alters all);
The senses roll themselves in fear,
And the flat earth becomes a ball,

The stars, sun, moon, all shrink away
A desert vast without a bound,
And nothing left to eat or drink
And a dark desert all around.

Perception, then, transforms reality itself. Collaborative communities that successfully envision a more progressive world will always be in conflict with Musk’s techno-fascist aims for this real world’s future.