transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Greetings, and welcome to the intermittent, unpopular front and Read Max audio product podcast. We're joined today by two guests who have a really excellent new book out called Muskism, A Guide to the Perplexed. Returning guest, Quinn Slobodian, with whom we discussed Elon Musk about a year ago, probably, has actually answered all the questions we had back then and provided them to us in book form with his co-author Ben Tarnoff, who I used to work with at Logic, the thing two times in a row. Hello and welcome to the intermittent and beloved Read Max Unpopular Front Audio Product Podcast. We're joined today by two really excellent guests. One is returning guest, Quinn Slobodian, with whom we discussed Elon Musk about a year ago. Quinn and his co-author Ben Tarnoff are back to talk about Elon Musk and their book Muskism, A Guide to the Perplexed. This is a great book. I really encourage anybody who's subscribing to me or John to read it. It really touches on many of our interests and obsessions as well as being a really fascinating way of thinking about the world right now, the economy. Elon Musk both as an individual human being, but also as a kind of figure symbol of a dawning new era of state power, of capitalism, of regimes of accumulation. But maybe we should start with the obvious question, which is, what is Muskism? How would you characterize it? Why are we talking about Muskism instead of just Elon Musk? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[01:41] I think our inspiration was really the way people talk about Fordism in the past, which yes, has something to do with the man Ford, had a lot to do with the way he organized his factories. But the way social scientists talked about Fordism was about what kind of world outside the factory was required to get people healthily walking through the doors of the factory in the morning and then what allowed them to purchase the goods that were coming out of the factory down the line. What were the social forms and ideologies that were the complement to Ford's way of making money? So, our way of approaching Musk was similar to use Muskism as a kind of analytic, not to suggest that there's some kind of coherent worldview or ideology that he himself has built up in intellectual history kind of a way, but that regardless of his own capacity for self-reflection, there would be some kind of coherence in the ensemble of social forces that would be required for Musk's way of making money to keep making money for him.

Speaker 3:
[02:50] Yeah, that was really the thought experiment that prompted the project, because Quinn and I have known each other for years, been friends for years. But I think when we considered the possibility of doing a book on the subject, we really started asking ourselves like, well, is there a Muskism that you could extrapolate or infer from the life and work of Elon Musk, comparable to how commentators of the last century did the same with Henry Ford? And again, as Quinn has pointed out, it's not an attempt to kind of same wash Musk to make him appear to be a more systematic or premeditated actor than he actually is, but rather to zoom out from the kind of personal and psychological and pathological aspects of Musk and ask some bigger questions about, how does Musk serve as a kind of representative or an avatar of a particular stage of capitalism and therefore, how can he tell us not just about the kind of inner workings of Musk the man, but how we got to this particular moment of crisis in the mid 2020s.

Speaker 1:
[03:47] And what, let's get the nitty gritty a little bit. What do you guys see as the qualities of Muskism or the features of Muskism, the important, the sort of the most important bullet points to think about when we talk about Muskism?

Speaker 2:
[04:00] Well, I think that, you know, the chapters of the book are each kind of modules, you could say, in what we see as essential to Muskism. And it's an attempt to throw another category into the discussion, which so far has, is already a crowded field, right? But some of the categories that circulate, we find less helpful than others. So one of the things we really wanted to separate Musk from is an idea of libertarianism. So the model that he's adopted really since the beginning has been to figure out what we call state symbiosis as a kind of a mode of accumulating profits, making revenues, and he's never been shy about how plugging into government backstops and government contracts. And so that captures something more about the present wave of the big tech accumulation model as well. The other categories we introduce, which we think are essential to understanding him, are the idea of fortress futurism, which we align with his or we see has elective affinities with the political economy of late apartheid South Africa, which kind of splits the difference between ideal typical free trade globalism and then ideal typical completely isolated protectionism. Late apartheid South Africa was both in the world economy and was fortifying itself in ways through importing technologies, whether it was IBM mainframes to carry out the practice of apartheid in the sorting out of populations or nuclear technology to build out its own nuclear energy and nuclear weapons program or licenses to build Fords and Datsuns to have a degree of economic self reliance. So those are a couple of states in biases and fortress futurism. Maybe Ben can add a couple more to the mix.

Speaker 3:
[05:57] Yeah, so I mean, a couple more features or modules of Muskism that we develop over the course of the book. One is what we describe as financial fabulism, which is I think commonly commented upon feature of Musk, which is his ability to promulgate these extraordinary visions of the future that seem quite fantastical. I think critics of Musk would describe them as bullshit and hype, but are nonetheless plausible enough to secure investor confidence. And this is something that probably Musk is best at. I think whenever you think about a successful capitalist, you ask the question, well, what are they good at? With like Steve Jobs, well, he's very good at design, or Tim Cook is very good at setting up global supply chains. What is Musk specifically very good at? And I think it's fair to say that what he's been best at over the course of his long career is persuading investors to put their money into his companies. And the way he does so is through this dynamic of financial fabulism where you're telling a story about the future that seems quite, on the one hand, outrageous, but on the other hand has kind of kernels of credibility such that investor is willing to part with their money. And if you think about the last couple decades of Musk's career, if you were to bet on Musk as an investor, you would have made a ton of money in return. So now when we look at the SpaceX IPO plan for later this year, which is seeking reportedly more than a $2 trillion evaluation, extraordinary multiple relative to their revenue far beyond what Tesla or even Palantir trades at, you might look at that and say, well, this is really wild. I mean, what does this actually rest on? It rests on this vision of so-called orbital data centers that will be able to harvest the power of the sun to kind of break the energy bottleneck on earth. It rests on building factories on the moon and so forth. If you were to read kind of the Musk statements. But what we have to keep in mind is that the types of people who are the audience for this rhetoric are the global investor class. These are the types of people who run the Norwegian oil fund, who run the California pension fund, who are big asset managers. And these are people who are not really Musk fanboys, Musk reply guys of the ideological sort. They're trying to think about a return on their investment. And if they look at the people who have invested Musk in the past, they've been very handsomely rewarded. So this, I think, was the puzzle that we were trying to understand in undertaking this book, which is that how can someone who seems to make such outrageous promises and increasingly behave in such outrageous ways just continue to be rewarded so immoderately that his behavior becomes stranger, he gets richer and more powerful? How is that dynamic possible?

Speaker 2:
[08:56] Yeah, it's the problem of what at some point we were referring to as hysterical materialism, which by his own understanding of his own actions, he can do no wrong. Every strange things he does, every half-cocked proposal that comes out of his head is ratified by the wisdom of the market again and again. That's the real puzzle. How the hell did that happen?

Speaker 1:
[09:19] Yeah. One thing that I really appreciate about the book is the way it tries to take these contradictory aspects of Musk, the libertarianism and reliance on the state, and find a way to understand them as a holistic push forward into a different or new way of doing business or accumulating capital. I mean, so much of him as a figure has these contrasting, these binaries that seem to collapse in the figure of Musk. I think one of the reasons he's able to do that is the consistent ambition with which he tells stories about futures. Oftentimes, in fact, as in the case of these orbital data centers, sort of flatly rejecting what we understand to be possible with physics to establish a kind of narrative that allows everything to kind of fall into place for Musk and eventually in turn for those investors.

Speaker 2:
[10:19] Yeah, it has a lot to do with the structure of how companies get funded, especially in the early stages in Silicon Valley, right? I mean, the venture capital model is one that makes it necessary for you not to just promise incremental improvements on some product or something that will sit aside a suite of other products, but a completely transformed market sector. You have to promise something that will change the future and not just make life marginally better because they're going to make very large bets in the first place. Then the payoff for those bets will be premised on them being able to value the further looking value of the company in ways that also kind of defy regular logic. So that there's a structural imperative towards exaggeration that for reasonable people, starts to look a lot like lying, but is nonetheless kind of like a necessary mechanism and condition for the whole sector.

Speaker 4:
[11:25] I think one thing I found really persuasive about the book and useful was its basically characterization of what. So Musk obviously, as you guys point out, does not have a coherent ideology that he could write up in a pamphlet probably. But he does have certain sources for his imagination, right? And you point out those things he was exposed to when he was young. And some of them come from science fiction, some of them come from his early experiences in South Africa. Could you just describe a little bit like the imaginative firmament of Musk, where it comes from and how it kind of structures his desires and the way he views the world?

Speaker 3:
[12:11] Yeah, so this is a feature of Musk that a lot of people are familiar with, which is the passion for science fiction. He often cites Asimov, Heinlein, his figures of the kind of classical golden age of science fiction as inspirations. We discussed that a bit, but an important source for us is actually his relationship to Japanese animation. So in particular, the figure of the Mech or the Mecha, which may be familiar to my readers for sure. I saw Max smiling slightly. They may have all been raised on the same TV shows. So the Mech, I probably don't need to explain it to our listeners, but just in case there are any who missed this, the Mech is a giant robot that a human pilot, typically a young male adolescent human pilot, crawls into and links with in a kind of cybernetic fusion, and thus operates as a single cyborg organism. And it's typically understood to be a weapon that can defend a particular community from the threat of an overwhelming alien force. This is the sort of thing that would have been present on the television programming of the late apartheid South Africa when Musk was a young man. And he repeatedly refers to the mech and the mecha. This is an important touchstone for him. I think the way in which we use the mech is to help account for how he begins to perceive and embrace a deepening entanglement between humans and digital technology, which we date to kind of the mid 2010s, period in which he starts to describe humans as becoming cyborgs, as joining giant cybernetic collectives. This is a process of cyborg integration that he attributes to the proliferation of smartphones and social media in particular. But the kind of imagination, the images that he uses to understand this development are in fact drawn from Japanese animation and the Mecha. I think this says something important about our method, which is that it's very important to us to see Musk and other capitalists as people who get their ideas in the course of practicing capitalism, not in some kind of independent channel that then autonomously influences how they operate as capitalists. I think there's a temptation for those of us who are interested in the humanities, interested in books, to find the source material, whether it's for Musk, science fiction and animation, or in the case of a figure like Peter Thiel, the work of René Girard, to just locate that and say, okay, well, that explains everything downstream. Our case is somewhat different, which is that it is, of course, important to interface with those ideological and imaginative touch points, but that they only really become active insofar as they help account for something that arises in the course of actual of the accumulation process. So for Musk in the mid 2010s, the fascination with the Mecca, the return to that image can really only be understood within this broader acceleration of digital capitalism, of which he is very much a beneficiary and himself an agent.

Speaker 4:
[15:36] And I suppose in the practice, another thing to discuss is in the practice of becoming a capitalist, he also developed, let's say, distinctive ideas of labor relations. What is his idea of class struggle, let's say? And what does he think of the workers? And what does he think they should be done with them?

Speaker 2:
[16:00] Yeah, I mean, the Mech image kind of helps there too in a way, because this classic image of, for example, from Neon Genesis Evangelion, where part of the reason why you're effective when you plug in is you let loose the kind of animalistic powers of the Mech itself, and then you kind of give yourself over to the berserker mode that is required for victory. And the important thing there is the lack of mediation, right? Or plug directly in. Musk famously starts Open AI with Sam Altman in 2015-16 to slow down ostensibly in AI development and make sure that there won't be a runaway malevolent digital superintelligence. But at the same time, he develops Neuralink, which is by his own reckoning an ability and an effort to greatly expand the interface we have with our network devices and to turn humanity into what they are already becoming, in his mind, which is a human machine symbiote. So if you think about that as this point of orientation, then there really is no place for a mediating institution like a trade union, right? I mean, there is no place for really civil society actually. But those institutions that Galbraith famously called countervailing institutions are exactly what Musk sees as like the breaks and obstacles on civilizational progress. And he extrapolates from that kind of mech idea to the, gets it from arguably from the programmable PC, gets a Commodore when he's just a teenager becomes very, very important to him, sells his first video game as a teenager. And the factory in a way is just the programmable PC expanded out over which he needs total visual oversight and the ability to work out bugs in, in real time. You know, he famously would sleep in the office at times and have this light that went off when there was some kind of a slowdown on the assembly line and would run out and immediately see what it was. So his dream originally and still is to fully automate the factory and to make it an alien dreadnought in one of his nice coinages, a totally dark factory that is run by robots. But his early efforts at doing that ended up being kind of a failure and he ended up, as he describes it, pulling out a bunch of the robots and putting humans back. So he isn't quite able to be free of humans yet, but he'll be damned if he's going to introduce something like, you know, a collective bargaining agreement between him and that bug on the shop floor to be worked out, which is why the Gigafactory outside Berlin is the only shadow factory in Germany without a collective bargaining agreement. And why Tesla workers in Sweden have been embroiled in the longest labor action in Swedish history against Musk. Because I think in that short-circuited, disintermediated understanding of the production model he's trying to roll out, there just can be no union.

Speaker 4:
[19:20] Right, I think that this idea of, I think that's a key notion in your book and kind of an explanatory device to kind of unlock Musk entirely is his kind of lack of belief in mediation of any kind, right? So he just sort of wants, I mean, for the lack of better, to put it kind of crudely, total control, he wants, and this also explains his idea of state business relations, which there is not a clear line between the two of them. He's basically saying, well, the state should be an adjunct or a piece of the creation of this machinery, right? So it's not like, oh, well, you know, the states does certain things, my businesses do certain things, we keep them separate because otherwise they get contaminated. He doesn't conceive of anything in the world as having any autonomy from this process he wants to set in place of technological acceleration, machinization. Is that fair to say?

Speaker 2:
[20:23] Yeah, I mean, just to add a couple of things to that, I think for one thing, it helps distinguish him from crony capitalism. So I was actually doing a podcast with this University of Chicago Business School professor, and he was like, this Muskism just sounds a bit like crony capitalism. Right. And I think the distinction that we would draw is that, as opposed to crony capitalism, which is almost always about sort of frontierism on backward sectors that are like resisting competition, resisting modernization, and because they just deliver for the incumbent, you know, clients of the regime, Muskism actually is expanding state capacity in many ways. Right. I mean, this is why it's actually effective and worth thinking about. It isn't just, you know, locking in dependencies in like a patrimonial way, people have been talking about it like, you know, Dylan Riley and and and Levitsky and Ziblatt. It's not just about that. It is about that. But it's also about managing to push out the innovation frontier in ways that make, you know, the cost of putting mass into orbit 90 percent less now than when he started SpaceX that allow him to create reusable rocketry, that create low-earth orbit as a viable space for satellite internet and satellite cellular delivery. So there is a state capacity expansion there, not just a kind of parasitic relationship to the state. One other thing I just wanted to mention is this also is important to think about in relationship to the public firm versus the privately held family firm. Because Musk has always resented actually the fact that he took Tesla public and was accountable to shareholders, shareholder initiatives, shareholder activism, these squeaky wheels at the annual general meeting and so on, the shareholders meeting. The reason he's taking SpaceX public, even though he would rather not to, is he needs to raise that capital for XAI, which is burning through money at the rate of a billion dollars a month and still not catching up, actually, maybe even falling farther behind. But when he does so, and this is, I think, important, you guys know this, but not everyone maybe does, that the way that Silicon Valley goes public these days is with these extraordinary novel instruments which are called dual class share structures pioneered by Zuckerberg, which means that founders have an overwhelming number of votes attached to their shares, and those publicly traded shares that you can buy on day one, often come with very, very small amount of vote or one vote, or even in the case of snap, zero votes when they did their IPO. So he basically manages to avoid even the intermediation of the shareholder, which in the traditional understanding of the firm was something that was supposed to also act as a counterbalance or a countervailing force against the delusional actions of management.

Speaker 1:
[23:27] I'm not going to turn this into an anime discussion podcast because John will kill me if I do. But I just have to harp on Evangelion for a second. It's probably too late for Musk to have watched it. But nobody... I mean, I just immediately I was like, oh...

Speaker 4:
[23:41] Wait, it's something you couldn't even have watched?

Speaker 1:
[23:43] Well this is... It's like one of the... I mean, he would have watched it in the 90s, but he wouldn't have been like a kid.

Speaker 4:
[23:47] All right, go on.

Speaker 1:
[23:48] But it's a story about this shrimpy little boy who gets forced into the mech by his domineering father. And it's both a story about a family firm that is deeply embedded in the state in trying to ward off these evil alien creatures. And also like a really sort of Freudian story about your relationship to your parents and wanting to fuck them and wanting to fuck the machine and them wanting to fuck each other. And I mean, I'm not saying I'm just saying this is low-hanging fruit out there. If anybody wants to do a Muskean reading of Evangelion or a Shinji reading of Musk, that'd be great. But I do.

Speaker 2:
[24:26] He's literally crawling back into the womb, right? I mean, that's what he does when he goes. The Mech is also his mother. It's important to point out. And Musk is a very close relationship to his mother.

Speaker 1:
[24:35] Very close relationship, who famously was photographed, like, photoshopped as being pregnant at age 60 or something on the cover of... I'm just saying, this stuff is all there. You could write this. Claude could write this. You don't even need to do it yourself. It's all right there. This is a good opportunity, maybe, to mention. I was just telling you guys. So you guys just wrote a piece for the Law and Political Economy blog that's sort of a recapitulation of some of the arguments in Muskism but also placing it in historical context against Fordism and one of the really interesting arguments in this piece, which I recommend people read in addition to the book, is about the idea of a kind of countervailing power and the lack of one. One of the things that strikes me reading is when we talk about Musk and the vertical integration that he favors, is there are these very Fordist, Fordian aspects of how Musk wants to run his business. But with, as we've been saying, the absolute exclusion of unions or anything that might be a counterbalance to that power that might, as you guys said earlier, keep people in line for lack of a better way to put it. One thing I wonder as we think about Muskism and look to the future is, what is the aspect, how does Muskism as a system keep social peace, so to speak, how does it keep people in line?

Speaker 3:
[25:57] Yeah, this is a real question for us. It was really fun to be able to do that LPE blog piece because this is something that we were thinking about at the edges of this book, but didn't get a chance to completely flesh out. The starting point for our understanding of Fordism and the one that I think is probably most generally adopted within the academy is the one developed by the so-called Regulation School of primarily French economists starting in the 1970s. And they understood Fordism to be a system not just of mass production, not just about being able to manufacture consumer goods at new scale through the introduction of new technologies and techniques, but also a system of mass consumption where you were able to secure social peace, as you put it, Max, through things like collective bargaining agreements, through unions, through what Regulation School described as a social consumption norm. And this was a way to stabilize the accumulation process, because if you think about the first half of the 20th century, it's a period of extraordinary class struggle, of industrial strife with the United States, approaching that of a war, having pitched battles in the streets. So if you're a capitalist, this is just very bad for business, not to mention the threat of communist revolution, which was credible at the time. So the notion of putting aside a portion of the social surplus in order to secure a kind of predictable and orderly business environment was eminently rational. Now fast forward to the 2020s in which the level of class struggle is comparatively low. The working class does not really exist as an organized political force in any recognizable way. And you have a somewhat paradoxical situation, which is that on the one hand, that makes things easier for capitalists in all sorts of obvious ways. They're able to intensify exploitation without much resistance. They're able to purchase political influence in a kind of unprecedented way, as evidenced by the current Trump administration. But, and this is where I think things become a bit paradoxical, the absence of a strong counterparty can also undermine their own interests as capitalists, because there's no real reason for them to take a longer view of their actions, to mitigate their short-termist and most socially destabilizing impulses. So arguably, the thinness of the social compact under Muskism, its disinterest in the question of social consent or legitimacy, is probably symptomatic of a broader phenomenon, which is, if you think about this Trump administration, just how uninterested it is in the question of consent. I mean, how with the case of the Iranian conflict, there was really no effort made whatsoever to try to secure a degree of consent, kind of astonishingly so when you think about, you know, George W. Bush and the global war on terror days. And I think this is one of the ways in which actually not having a kind of strong class antagonist in the form of an organized working class means that capitalism itself becomes less stable in ways that could, in time, undermine the very conditions of accumulation.

Speaker 2:
[29:10] It gets sloppy and reckless, yeah. But it's also, I think, worth pointing out that the reason that let's say Ford was also happy enough to redistribute the wealth in that way is that he needed, in the end, healthy workers to enter the factory every morning, right? If you think about, and his target was a mass audience and a mass consumer base, if you think about Musk's products and how he sees the role of labor, he doesn't have that same vision of, well, at least we need to do the biopolitical norm to like get, you know, upright people walking through the doors. He imagines an ever smaller number of working people inside of his factories. And he imagines a client base that actually isn't, you know, universal and spread out to everyone, but one that actually still remains like at some level, a fraction of all of the people available. So that's one of the weird things about his set of products is it's not, you know, building on the kind of Fordist vision of the city and then the suburb as this large interconnected interdependent unit where everyone is, you know, having a car in their garage that is bought from the central buyer and so on, or the central firm. But it's a world of kind of encapsulated enclaves, right? So the Tesla ecosystem that he sells is quite openly understood to function as a kind of a domed household level unit that can unplug effectively from publicly available infrastructures and grids, right? He standing in front of the shareholders a couple of years ago, Tesla shareholder meeting, he said, you know, we had a big snowstorm in Texas a couple of years ago, that year that nobody expected. And he lost power for a while, lost Internet. But if he had had the Starlink uplink, the solar panels, the Tesla power wall, the cyber truck, then he would have been safe inside of the Tesla dome. And he makes an offhand comment like, this is pretty good for preppers. You've got everything you need. And that vision of like a consumer market that isn't a mass one, but is one of like a series of fortified enclaves, is a bit strange to the American middle class mentality. But very, very familiar to the post-apartheid South African mentality, right? I mean, that is a description of what the middle class has done, both black and white in many cases, to solve the problems of underfunded grid, political problems and so on. So having that as the horizon that you're operating to also changes the social contract because you're like, well, I don't need to actually keep everyone healthy. I don't actually need to keep everyone happy. I just need to target the people who I need to persuade and then hive out select customer base.

Speaker 1:
[32:06] There's a very, I mean, this was the marketing for the Cybertruck was sort of effectively like it was to me, at least it was Bill that's basically the truck you drive through the riot of the underclass. As you get to your SpaceX launch or whatever. And he was like hitting with the, it didn't even seem like it was really good for that because you know, you could, he broke the window or whatever the first time you rolled it out.

Speaker 4:
[32:27] I think it's a good time to ask a question about apartheid. I mean, your book outlines a pretty complicated set of attitudes and experiences with apartheid South Africa. Musk, of course, is not a Boer. He is not from the Afrikaner ethnic group that dominated apartheid South Africa. He is a Victorian, an English speaking white South African who formed a kind of sometimes formed a kind of financial and business elite within South Africa. Can you talk a little bit about his experience in apartheid South Africa, both the things that he rebelled against perhaps and the things that may be stuck with him?

Speaker 3:
[33:12] Yeah, I'm glad you brought up this question of the social composition of the apartheid because I think folks who may not be all that familiar with the history will remember that it was of course a white supremacist state but there were different types of white people within South Africa. So there was the majority of the minority which were the Boers, Afrikaners, who are descendants of the Dutch settlers. But they themselves understood themselves to be an oppressed so-called native population that had been oppressed by the British. And the British, the descendants of British settlers, the Anglophone slice of the population, were in turn a minority of the white minority and one that had historically had the wealth and the power until the construction of the apartheid regime starting in the 1940s with the National Party wins power and begins to implement apartheid. So Musk belongs to this Anglophone layer. His father is descended from British settlers. His mother actually, so somewhat more complicated story where her family came from Canada and actually her father came specifically to apartheid South Africa because he was a fan of the white supremacist regime being constructed there. So he was, you know, not himself a descendant of Dutch settlers, but very supportive of the type of racial regime they were developing. But these type of distinctions matter because, you know, for figures of Musk's social milieu, you know, he comes from a kind of affluent Anglophone family. They were on the one hand beneficiaries of a white supremacist regime. They were classified as white, entitled to many of the privileges of whiteness. But on the other hand, were not in the driver's seat politically, that they were largely excluded from the question of political leadership. And their relationship to Apartheid itself could be somewhat complex, that they often resented Afrikaner domination of the political process, but were not necessarily anti-racist in their outlook. And that's, I think, an important distinction because particularly after the fall of Apartheid, many Anglophone South Africans kind of retrospectively claim themselves as anti-racist when in fact, the truth was a bit more complex. I mean, Musk himself, I think as you're alluding to, John, does make anti-Apartheid statements at various points in his life. He describes leaving South Africa in 1989 because he didn't want to serve in a so-called fascist army. And I think that can feel particularly odd given his more recent statements, for instance, promoting the conspiracy theory of white genocide and parroting a bunch of far-right talking points from South African Afrikaners. But I think the piece of it that we probably feel is most resonant with Musk, is this parallel or point of contact between the South African Apartheid industrial model of pursuing a degree of economic and technological self-sufficiency and Musk's own approach as an industrialist, which has always emphasized vertical integration and a reduction of reliance on external suppliers. He did that at SpaceX and at Tesla in the 2000s, which retrospectively are really the high point of free market globalization. He didn't want to distribute production across global supply chains. He wanted to do as much as he could within his production sites in California. We can't get inside his head and specifically say what prompted what. But if you think about what may have been available to him as a precedent that would have led him to so defy the conventional wisdom of the time, I think the South African Apartheid Industrial Model certainly is one possibility.

Speaker 2:
[37:12] Another thing that we speculate about, but I think we're on pretty firm ground, is that this thing that becomes really a core part of Muskism up to the present, which is a really strict hierarchy of humanity and a feeling that not only are some humans more important than others, but that some people who appear to be humans may not be human at all. So the way that fear and concern about bots at Twitter and ghost employees at Twitter, vampires and 300-year-old people in the Social Security Administration, his belief that anything that seems to be running counter to his beliefs must be the object of either a kind of impersonation or an infaction at the programming layer. It seems to be pretty consonant with the experience of growing up as a white minority ruling class member in South Africa in the sense that the black majority population was treated as NPCs, right? They were treated as people with limited agency and autonomy whose labor could be deployed by the oversight of an enlightened scientifically enabled planner. They could be sent to that factory when it served them and then push back to the townships when it no longer served them. And that god mode that the apartheid state did enjoy over its own population is allows for a kind of hubris, I think, that if you've been engaged with the struggles of small R Republican democracy for 200 years, as most parts of the industrialized north had been, then you wouldn't have the naivety to think that you can just treat people like bits of programming. I mean, you would know that this whole legitimacy problem and the consent problem is not a minor issue. Arguably, you can't get anything done if you can't at some level make people feel that they are also being represented in the process. But South Africa's anomalous position is like the last decolonizing settler outpost, and the last place openly based big asterisk for Israel based on racial hierarchy, is one where you could grow up and be only in your 50s now and still have had very much a full childhood's dose of that world, which is otherwise, thankfully, gone.

Speaker 4:
[39:53] Yeah, I think it's important to point out, too, is that apartheid was a product of modernization and saw an acceleration of capital accumulation and development. I think I read that apartheid South Africa only in the postwar period, Japan had a higher rate of growth. I think that this is interesting to keep in mind because I think in the industrialized north and the post industrial north, we assume that liberal social relations are somehow connected to an advanced economy and to development. And his experience is very much the opposite, which is that development, speedy development is built on the back of extreme inequality and hyper exploitation.

Speaker 2:
[40:52] Yeah, yeah, and it's the late apartheid of South Africa is fascinating too, because it's one of these cases where actually the neoliberals and the Marxists agreed and they were both wrong. Both the neoliberals and the Marxists thought that capitalism could not live with racism in the long run in that formalized form, that it would create excessively high wages for the protected white working class, that it would strangle opportunities for the creation of new consumer bases among the black majority population. So both Marxists and neoliberals, and I've read many of them in the 1980s, were saying like, it's only a matter of time through its own internal dynamics, marketization will undo apartheid. So it's really just a kind of a question of waiting and seeing. But other people that we've read for the research in this book were arguing otherwise. And interestingly, one of them was a sociologist named Stephen Gelb, a white South African who said, no, actually, we have in South Africa something that I call racial Fordism. So it operates very similar to Fordism. It just has a very targeted layer and a minority layer that perceive them that virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption. So in the same way that roughly at the same time, Cedric Robinson was hashing out ideas of racial capitalism, you know, arguing kind of similarly that in fact, racial hierarchies can work very well alongside capitalist modes of accumulation. People were figuring that out there too. So it's kind of no secret that Musk would have taken on that lesson. But I think it's worth, maybe it's a good opportunity to air something that's been kind of a meta question for us now, especially as the reception of the book begins. And it maybe says something about our method too. So many times now, since we've started talking about the book or there have been reviews, we've gotten a kind of exasperated response from people saying like, duh, it's obvious. He's, you know, hello, son of an emerald miner, like apartheid South Africa. Like, what's the surprise here? And, you know, there is a feeling now that the distaste and the repulsion that people rightly feel about Musk, is like short-circuited towards feeling that he does not need to be explained at all, right? That he's become the sort of Voldemort figure who is simply, you know, a satanic presence. And that I, then I think the question is then, so what does one do about his structural influence? Like, is just some gesture of refusal enough to say, like, put up his face with an X through it and then we're done? You know, so it's, but it's been interesting to try to slow walk an argument, for example, about the relationship between Musk and South Africa with sources and verifiable statements. Because even the very, very cautious approach we take in the book has still been, in some of our more like, mainstream, almost financial press type reviews, been like a point of issue for the reviewer. Like, well, they didn't quite prove that he thinks that people are NPCs because of South Africa, but we'll give it to them. So it's been interesting to try to not steal man Musk, but to take seriously, as we would argue, leftist critics working in the 1920s wouldn't just be like, Henry Ford, what a freak, ha ha, Henry Ford's stupid, we're done. You have to understand what accounts for the power and mystique of this man, not just for a bunch of right-wing monetized fanboys on Axe, but also, as Ben mentioned, the Norwegian Oil Fund. Why are these the most sober Nordic prudent money managers in the world, looking at Musk in his sunglasses, wobbling around on stage and being like, yes, I will put my whole nation's future on the back of this man.

Speaker 1:
[44:56] On this ketamine addict, he's going to send everybody to University of Oslo.

Speaker 3:
[45:02] I think it should be pointed out here just for context that Quinn has been radicalized by his blue sky mentions, that there are various hysterical liberals in his replies who are just driving him crazy.

Speaker 4:
[45:12] There's a certain kind of blue sky anti-intellectualism that-

Speaker 2:
[45:15] I've been radicalized onto LinkedIn, which is a horrible outcome for all of us.

Speaker 3:
[45:20] But I thought, Quinn, what you were going to say is that one response we get from that audience in particular is that we are too cowardly to use the f-word, the fascism word, that why don't you call him a fascist. It was interesting, John, because when you're talking about the late apartheid regime, the thing that occurred to me is this concept of reactionary modernism, which is associated with Jeffrey Hurk, the historian, as a way to account for how the Nazis on the one hand, obviously rejected liberalism and enlightenment values, but nonetheless had a fascination with high technology. And that, I think, was clearly a feature of the apartheid regime, whose founders were openly sympathetic to Hitler, but is also a through line in Musk's own career, the notion that technology can be used, in fact, to harden social hierarchy and social inequality.

Speaker 4:
[46:16] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that category is more valuable in a way, and it explains how he's attracted and views authoritarian models of government as consonant or necessary to accomplish his project, but he's compatible with a number of different approaches to things. I don't think that he thinks of his program as the program. I think fascism would probably strike him as a, not something that he wanted to be subservient to, but as a potentially convenient ally in the carrying out of his particular reactionary modernist program, which he views as absolute. I think that what I want to ask you guys about is that there was also a feeling from his taking up of the foundation novels of two things. Ability to kind of be omniscient or omnipotent about controlling societies, and also a fear of decline and collapse, social collapse. Can you expound a little on that?

Speaker 2:
[47:26] Well, this is one way to answer it, I think, is through a bit through what you were just talking about with and Ben was talking about the reactionary modernism, because I know John, you rely on that category quite a bit in your writing as well. And I was actually just at a conference in New York last week, devoted to techno-fascism at Columbia. And I presented about Musk and his demographic questions. And for me, I paused on the fascist category for two reasons, the one to do with economics and the other to do with biopolitics. And in economics, what we know about the way... Fascism was always interested in somehow subordinating finance to state ends and in actual existing cases, producing these enclosed protectionist blocks of one kind or another that prevented the flow of capital in and out, and then used draconian means to keep wages down through the crushing of unions and socialist parties. And one of the things I found interesting about Musk is the way he finesses the difference between kind of globalism and nationalism, right? He totally, he is not like Ford, a devout hater of Wall Street or finance, right? To Ford, finance was Judaism, was Wall Street, was the coast and everything that he hated. Musk doesn't exist without finance, right? He doesn't exist without deep pools of investment capital from Abu Dhabi to Masayoshi Sun back to Silicon Valley and Sand Hill Road. Like he needs a kind of endlessly deep circulating pool of finance. So right there, there's already a kind of a mismatch to me. But then on the biopolitics, you know, he talks about, he talks like a fascist, right? That there's no question of that. He makes it sound like he wants the white birth rate to stay up. But there's none of what, you know, Gertz Ali called Hitler's social state. Yeah. I mean, there's none of that, quote unquote, positive eugenics that would allow for reproduction by the chosen few and then expulsion and extermination for those beyond sterilization. He might be, he's happy with expulsion. He wants remigration. But there's nothing like a birth rate raising policy, somewhere hidden in Musk's proposals. They're not there. There is his own genetic line and that's it. The fear of decline is one that is phrased in these old-fashioned early 20th century terms of the decline of the West. But when you ask about his expressions concretely of like care or stewardship for the West, you find yourself grasping around fruitlessly because as we've been, I think, insisting, politics for him is online first, and politics is in the network, and everything else is downstream of that. So his version of protecting the conservative values that he cherishes is also online and somewhere in the network. And the curious thing about that is that his main touch point is a couple of metaphors coined openly as trans allegories, right? The matrix and the red pill. He sees these, you know, he just brutally tears them out of the hands of like their actual authors, and makes it sound as if to take the red pill is to somehow revert back to the least modern values that you can imagine. Which seems like a strange port of enlightenment, right? I mean, this is, I guess, what the dark enlightenment is supposed to suggest. But for Musk, that means working against a lot of the politics that have happened online, right? I mean, when Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto as we talk about in the book, she knew that the cyborg was the child of the military industrial complex, but she also suspected that it was going to produce other kinds of more subversive identities and politics. Musk's Gambit and arguably Andresen and Teal and all the rest of them is that they can kind of push the genie back in the bottle and practice a kind of cyborg conservatism by rewiring the LLMs, by buying the social media platforms, by creating alternative vertically integrated ideological stacks within which there will no longer be contestations to their power.

Speaker 4:
[52:11] I have a quick rejoinder to the fascism question. I think that's putting a little too much ideological, assuming that every member of the fascist coalition, so to speak, shared in every other part. I mean, it was an amalgamation of different social ideas that somehow held intention to each other. So you had obviously the more red side of fascism that comes out of that as populist and even socialist and has critiques of capitalism. And then you have obviously the industrialists who are attracted to fascism for what it could do for their regimes of accumulation. And those existed in tension with each other and were able to work together for a time. But I think that, I would just say that you know, Musk has a particular type of fascism perhaps, which is geared towards industrialists. But he doesn't, I don't think he needs to be like a brown shirt for us to say he somehow fits in that project. You know, like, I don't think, I think that, you know, national socialism, fascism contain multitudes. And he's definitely in keeping with one of its strains. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 1:
[53:29] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[53:30] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[53:32] I wanted to ask about, you know, one of the things we've been sort of skirting around is, is the question of populations in Musk. And he has, this is another place where he has these kind of contradictory notions of, you know, on the one hand, as we've been saying, he's not making products for the masses, so to speak. There's not a lot of people in his vision of the future. It's very, and by the way, this is also true of the first few chapters of abundance, not to pick on it. It has a very similar kind of like, there's no people in the, there's no happening of that book where they project a world out into the future. You just get a ping that your friend has made it to the airport. But I was going to say that, you know, on the one hand, he has this sort of people-less future, but on the other hand, he has this, you know, strongly hierarchical understanding of the world where there is a great mass of something, of surplus populations, I suppose. And then this is all sort of, you know, roiling underneath his professed natalism and his project to populate the world with his own sperm, but also to his own progeny, really, but also to sort of encourage the white birth rate. And I'm wondering how you guys see that, all those sort of different things interlinking or locking up with one another.

Speaker 3:
[54:41] Well, it's actually quite contradictory if you think about it, because on the one hand, Musk and many of his peers in Silicon Valley are really committed to the notion that AGI is around the corner and is about to throw vast numbers of people out of work, so that people will be designated as social and economic surplus permanently, that those jobs will never come back, that robotics will be how you displace blue collar work, and LLMs will be how you displace white collar work. This is a vision that Musk very much buys into. He's a major investor in both of those technologies. Arguably his accumulation model for the future really depends on this scenario coming true, as it does for Silicon Valley as a whole. To the extent that the US economy has made a one-way big bet on AI, for that to succeed means mass automation, which would be enormously socially destabilizing. On the one hand, you have that scenario. On the other, you have this stated commitment to increasing white birth rates specifically, and this language of apocalyptic terror around immigration, and the rising birth rates of non-white population, which in turn for Musk following the lead of far-right European parties and so-called identitarian movement in Europe, has to be handled with these very vigorous interventions such as remigration, which describes the forced expulsion of both immigrants and people of immigrant descent, which is a popular rallying cry of the European far-right and one that Musk has amplified significantly on his platform. But that is, of course, the kind of coercive piece of it, where there doesn't appear to be very much of substance, as Quinn is alluding to, is the sort of things like paid parental leave, the kind of really basic, banal policies that often without much success, because of course demographic decline is a reality across much of the world, but nonetheless efforts to make it easier for people to have kids, even if you were to target those in, I think as Musk would be inclined to do, to white populations in particular, that's not really a kind of piece of the positive program that he seems particularly interested in. And I think there's a lot of different ways to navigate the many contradictions of Muskism. This is kind of what we spend most of the book doing. But I think what I would emphasize is the extent to which Musk, and I think here he's really an indicator species or a broader phenomenon within the American ruling class is centered on Silicon Valley, really envisions a post-human future in which humans are augmented with machines such that the category of the human kind of disintegrates in the old Kurtzweilian fashion, but that also humans really kind of disappear, both figuratively and literally from the scene as we're supplanted by AI. And the best hope we can have is for that AI to be imbued with enough of us as humans that it becomes, you know, it's kind of recognizably, distantly human, but far exceeds it. And that is really the path that he sees, not just for his own business model, but for the future of civilization, that the colonization of Mars, the colonization of the galaxy as a whole, will be done increasingly by kind of post-human, digitized, cyborgified organisms. And here again, I think we can kind of like chuckle and say, oh, that sounds really ridiculous. But again, I think trying to understand Musk as a kind of funhouse mirror that in somewhat exaggerated form shows us some very concrete political economic developments. Because it sounds kind of ridiculous, but if you think about the depth of the bet on deep digitization of daily life that generative AI represents, it's actually not that far removed from, you know, the types of so-called rational decisions that the global investor class are making right now.

Speaker 2:
[58:48] Can I also add that I think I agree with Ben that if that's the deep future, then you have to, I think, understand Musk's population talk as more of part of a transitional tools or transitional rhetoric. And I think it's better understood in terms of form rather than content. So he sees not inaccurately that there is a global far right which has the capacity to displace incumbent parties by basically doing an end run around what had in the past been the pretty controllable space of public opinion creation. So for example, in Germany, if you go to Germany during election season, there's the exact same number of signs on telephone poles and large size billboards for each party. It's decreed by law. There's a strict cap on how much advertising could take place, and it's not very much. This is their way, I think rightfully, of regulating an open public sphere in which people focus on the actual platform and are not diluted by being swarmed by messages. This has been totally short-circuited by social media. You can't regulate TikTok influencers in that way. You can't regulate Twitter or Facebook in that way. So you have the AFD very effectively using social media to basically massively tip the balance of visibility and the prominence of their talking points towards their side. Musk is not stupid. He sees that and he's like, oh, if I can find a partner with the AFD now who know how to game social media, they know how to game the network, then I'm going to have a partner when they come to power. What kind of memes are they using? How are they being so effective? Here's some of their memes. Remigration, white birth rate, Muslim crime, Pakistani rapists. Does he know about any of these things? Absolutely not. Does it matter to his form of influence creation? No, it doesn't. He actually doesn't need to know. All he needs to do is hit retweet. All he needs to do is reply, interesting or concerning, or Starmers should go to the Hague. He doesn't know anything about Starmers or the Hague, but he'll write that while he's brushing his teeth. Because he thinks what he's doing is juicing the spread and the reach of certain kinds of memetic vectors that in the end will cash out with a better political position of leverage for himself. He sees quite openly the political system now online as hackable and with the right degree of wealth. He sees himself as being in the position that he admires George Soros at having perfected, incidentally. He sees that as something that he's trying to mirror now for his position. So I think that in the end, if you sat him down and asked him like, well, so walk us through it, how are we going to get the birth rates up? He'd be like, I don't know, like well power, I don't know, just bootstrapping.

Speaker 4:
[61:52] Yeah, that's very interesting.

Speaker 1:
[61:53] He likes that. He has that very Trumpian quality of enjoying sowing chaos so that he can switch his advantage or change how he is able to try to reap some advantage out of the particular chaos that he's sowing, which I think is useful for thinking about at least some of the projects that he decides to take on as you're saying that sometimes it's just a matter of I'm backed into a corner in some particular way or I'm not getting the results I want out of this particular thing. So let's throw a bomb and see what happens next and how I, through the power of my storytelling, my sort of promissory future oriented storytelling can create a new path through which I can accumulate more power. This is like very, like all this stuff with sort of fusing SpaceX and XAI and this partnership with Cursor, the fact that it doesn't make sense is in fact a sort of a bonus. It's a feature, not a bug because the nonsense of it is part of what makes it a place that he can then form a sort of a new future oriented idea around like orbital data centers.

Speaker 2:
[63:03] Yeah, and it's always both and, right? I mean, we just published this piece with The Atlantic and one of the questions the editor was having was like, so what is it really? What does he want with the satellites? Is it orbital AI or is it direct to device, you know, cellular internet service? And we're like, that's not a very Muskist question, right? I mean, the Musk, the Musk argument is always both and. In fact, in the, in the tradition of improv, it's actually yes and, because that's how he's always doing the logic of escalation. It's not for nothing he loves Rick and Morty so much, right? I mean, because that following out a premise to its absurd and is actually how he does business. And that's actually how he keeps like people following him along.

Speaker 4:
[63:47] You conclude the book with a kind of imaginative construction of what the Muskest future would look like, obviously, if there were no fric, there's no friction in the world, no inertia. Could you, could you just paint that picture for us?

Speaker 2:
[64:04] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[64:04] So this is how the book ends. And it's, it's, you know, I could describe it as a science fiction portrait of actually existing Muskism in 10 years. But it's not all that fictionalized because we do provide in the back of the book, in the end notes, the sourcing statements for this picture we're drawing. So everything that we describe in this speculation about actually existing Muskism in the near future is actually rooted in his own posts, tweets, interviews, et cetera. This is a future in which, you know, to speak about kind of AI. I mean, really the economy and society has been subordinated to the needs of AI and AGI, where energy infrastructure, just questions of social organization, that that has, has all become secondary to the demands of artificial intelligence. It's also one in which technology has been successfully applied to harden social hierarchies, to promote a profoundly in egalitarian social structure, and in turn to rewire our education system to affirm the positive value of anti-egalitarianism and even anti-humanitarianism. Really, it's a kind of reversion to something, let's say, before the 20th century with a technologized twist. Of course, it's also one in which space launch has become very important. So this is a future in which Musk achieves his dream of completing Starship, which is the major, kind of what they call super heavy launch vehicle that SpaceX is developing and continuing to test. And the vision of Starship is that it will be able to continue to dramatically reduce the cost of putting mass into orbit. This is something that SpaceX has already managed to do by more than 90% over 20 years. But Starship is at such a scale that it would be possible to completely flood low earth orbit with his satellites and in turn to make it cost economical to move cargo and people to the moon and even to Mars. And this again is a priority for a Musk society into which all of the functions of the society have been supported.

Speaker 2:
[66:39] Yeah, the image that we leave the reader with is not very reassuring, but it's not really that likely. What do you think about the change in the world of the thought experiment of playing it out, like showing a girl walking past murals dedicated to white women who have been killed by black men, and learning that slavery actually existed first in Africa, and that whites are no worse than anyone else, and that all of the faults of civilization are not attributable to anything about Europe or imperialism? Those are all things that he very clearly wants to do, and that are, let's be honest, already becoming part of curriculum in places like Florida, where it becomes legally impossible to criticize the history of European imperialism, for example. But then also, as Ben says, because if you funnel all of energy resources and all the investment towards this scaling idea, then you will get reduced water supplies, you will get brownouts for civilians, and you will be held for this unrealizable future of finally settling Mars, which is what we have at the end of the images. Companion AIs kind of singing in unison that the girl is watching on her device, saying, you know, like, one day, one day, we will get there, we will get to Mars.

Speaker 1:
[68:10] That may be the moment to end on, I think. Yeah. Thank you guys for coming on. The book is Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed, available bookstores everywhere as of this week. Yeah. Ben, Quinn, thank you so much for coming on. John, any parting words?

Speaker 4:
[68:31] No. Fascinating book and very persuasive one, I have to say.

Speaker 2:
[68:34] Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Speaker 1:
[68:36] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[68:36] Thanks so much.