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Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
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About This Book
Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called a playbook for our new postliberal age. It's not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he's certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own post-liberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world. Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.
Reviews
"Pithy and informative from beginning to end."
"Fascinating and chilling."
"Well-sourced and appropriately fleet-footed ..."
"Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff have a go at trying to define 'Muskism' in a new book of that name."
"Given all that, I found Muskism more suggestive than revelatory and was left feeling the definitive left-wing critique has yet to be written ..."
"The great value of Muskism is that it is brief, easy to read and yet packed with insights about why we find ourselves in such a perilous situation in which a handful of unelected individuals exert unprecedented domestic and global power."
"Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything."
"While their dive isn't as deep as Michael Steinberger's in The Philosopher in the Valley, the two books are of a piece in warning that such a technocracy can turn fascist on a dime, and backed by a robot army at that ..."
"Muskism is a brisk read, just 167 pages, with a lively and well-edited narrative."
"But sometimes the book is too clever by half ..."
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