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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
"Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything."
"But sometimes the book is too clever by half ..."
"A searching look into Elon Musk's quest to rule the universe ..."
"The authors don't pretend that Musk himself has a coherent philosophy, but instead point to a set of behaviours via which tech utopians like him try to subvert the state for their higher purpose."
"Capably and cleverly attempts to recognize the world that produced Elon Musk as well as how he became an icon and later, a political firebrand."
"Fascinating and chilling."
"It's a well-written, sharp book ..."
"In their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, historian Quinn Slobodian and tech writer Ben Tarnoff dig into the mindset of Silicon Valley's most gauche tycoon and touch on science fiction more tangentially, but their firmer grasp of just what flavor of capitalism Musk and his cohort represent sheds a brighter light on the topic."
"The account of those events is surreal, until you remember that they actually happened ..."
"It's a well-researched account of how we have arrived at a point where so many resources are concentrated in the hands of just one man, and how this fact alone will inevitably shape the future, long after he's gone."
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