Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity’s saviour from a quickly crumbling planet or rabid social media troll – the verdicts on the world’s richest particular person range in flavour, however most share one thing in frequent: they focus on Musk as a person. Of their examine, Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston College, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech author, want to reframe the dialog. Crucial query, they argue, is not “who is Musk?” however “what is Musk a symptom of?”
As the title suggests, their reply is “Muskism”, the coinage a deliberate nod to Fordism, the shorthand for Twentieth-century capitalism constructed on the pairing of mass manufacturing with mass consumption. If Fordism was the final century’s working system, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend that Muskism is this century’s.
Like Fordism, it is a modernising mission. Not like Fordism, it does not intention to distribute its rewards broadly. Its central promise is “sovereignty by way of know-how”: the fantasy that, in an more and more unstable world, states and people can change into extra self-reliant by plugging into Musk’s infrastructure. This is Muskism’s model of a social contract. However, as the authors level out, the actuality is fairly completely different: somewhat than self-reliance, we are provided merely better reliance on the Techno-king of Tesla himself.
This may look like an apparent level to make, but it surely develops into one in all the e-book’s strongest insights, as Slobodian and Tarnoff observe the thread of dependence throughout Musk’s empire, from SpaceX (a near-monopoly supplier to the Pentagon and Nasa, accounting for 95% of all US orbital launches) to Tesla, which sells electrical autonomy in the form of autos and batteries whereas drawing consumers deeper into Musk’s walled backyard; and, extra lately, to X and Grok, which promised a brand new city corridor for the train of “free speech” before consolidating Musk’s personal voice and his more and more far-right agenda.
The chapter on the so known as division of presidency effectivity (Doge), which describes Musk’s 130-day stint as a “particular authorities worker”, is significantly eye-opening. It exhibits how his try to deal with the federal authorities as a codebase to be debugged collided with the messy, irreducible realities of a state that helps thousands and thousands of lives. A few of the e-book’s sharpest passages examine the computational metaphors that Musk jokingly and not-so-jokingly makes use of in interviews and on X. In his view, empathy is an “exploit”, society is “corrupted code”, and tolerance is a bug to be patched. Most disturbingly, concepts, authorities businesses and folks are all figured as variables that may be “deleted”.
The biographical chapters are well-sourced and appropriately fleet-footed (the authors are eager to remind us that this is not a biography), tracing Muskism’s roots to his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a Canadian devotee of the Technocracy motion who emigrated to apartheid South Africa in 1950. Slobodian and Tarnoff tease out the continuities between Musk’s youth in Pretoria and the convictions he later developed: the religion in engineering as a mode of governance, the fortress mentality, the conflation of racial purity with civilisational survival. Apartheid South Africa, they argue convincingly, was the nursery of Muskism.
Fordism described a system that outlived Ford and operated independently of him. Can the identical be mentioned of Muskism? The writers recommend that its logic of state-tech symbiosis, algorithmic governance and racialised exclusion may persist with out him, however the e-book has a tough time pivoting fully from the biographical. For all the structural scaffolding, this does typically really feel extra like the story of 1 man’s empire, constructed beneath particular historic circumstances. Maybe it doesn’t matter: others might but observe the blueprint.
In any case, even those that are bored by Musk and his dominance of the 24-hour information cycle will discover Muskism compelling. It’s a well-researched account of how now we have arrived at a degree the place so many sources are concentrated in the fingers of only one man, and the way this truth alone will inevitably form the future, lengthy after he’s gone.
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