MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Whatever you think of Elon Musk - technology innovator, meme creator, proponent of right-wing and white nationalist movements, prolific procreator - there can be no doubt that Musk has had an outsized influence on everything from what we drive to how the world communicates. A new book argues that Musk, through his wealth and tech ventures, has an influence in the 21st century similar to what Henry Ford had in the 20th. He's not just a businessman. He's the architect and proponent of a worldview. Historian Quinn Slobodian and tech writer Ben Tarnoff make this argument in a provocative new book titled "Muskism: A Guide For The Perplexed." Half of the duo, Quinn Slobodian, is going to tell us more about it now. Good morning, Quinn. Thanks for joining us.
QUINN SLOBODIAN: Happy to be here.
MARTIN: So you make a parallel to Fordism, which I confess is a term I had never heard before. I think everybody knows about the assembly line, which was not just about mass production, but also about fueling mass consumption. You know, the idea was higher living standards for everybody. So what is the goal or central idea of Muskism?
SLOBODIAN: Well, Muskism, like Fordism, has a kind of mode of redesigning the factory at its core, but then it expands out to what we think of as a whole set of dependencies that are created. So Muskism offers us a new kind of sovereignty through technology, but it ends up cashing out as a kind of dependence on his products and services.
MARTIN: And who has sovereignty in this scenario? Is it the individual, or is it him (laughter)?
SLOBODIAN: Well, that - I mean, that is really the heart of the question. And one of the things we were trying to do with the book is get away from this idea that Silicon Valley is libertarian. We suggest, rather, that Musk and his brethren in the Silicon Valley leadership class operate by something that we could call state symbiosis. So it is - the same way there's a symbiotic relationship between organisms and the natural world, there is a give-and-take. But in the end, as we discovered, for example, when Musk turned off satellite connectivity in the battlefield, Musk seems to have his finger on the on-and-off switch. And that should be, I think, an object of some concern.
MARTIN: You - one of the other interesting things that you do with this book is you map his business practices and his political tendencies onto his biography, right?
SLOBODIAN: Mm-hmm.
MARTIN: You make the argument that, well, being a white person growing up in South Africa under apartheid plays a huge role in the way that he operates. I mean, there are all, like, little examples of this throughout the book. For example, like that his Cybertrucks actually look like the vans that the apartheid police used to terrorize the Black townships, which is something I didn't even think about until I saw pictures. I mean, I went and tested - I thought, oh, what do they look like? And I went back and looked. They do...
SLOBODIAN: Yeah, it's striking. Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Look like those - it is striking. But he left South Africa when he was 17. So what convinces you that that is such a driving force in the way he sees the world, that that life experience was the way - is such - is so dominant in his thinking?
SLOBODIAN: Well, yeah, he sold his first computer game when he was just a teenager. And so he was certainly imbued with a sense of what we call fortress futurism. So South Africa we think of as a backward place, and it was certainly politically very reactionary, still built on the principle of white supremacy when that had been outdated pretty much everywhere else in the world formally. But it was also importing high tech. So they had IBM computers they were using to carry out apartheid. They built out their own nuclear weapons and their nuclear energy program. They built out their own auto sector. And what's on TV? Things like "Robotech," things like "Transformers," things that Musk ended up calling out later in his career. So he's sort of left breadcrumbs himself, and that has become sort of ever more part of his business plan in recent years - this conjuring up of the threats of especially racialized others swamping the internal population, and then the high tech needed to defend yourself and your family.
MARTIN: The kind of white nationalist views have become so much more prominent during the second Trump term. Is this something that was always there, or was this a development of something else? You know, I mean his obsession with the woke mind virus, etc.
SLOBODIAN: Yeah. Well, I think it's helpful to see him as a kind of indicator species, as someone who is able to kind of find the cutting edge of investment possibilities, often of technology, then tap into them. He's happy to kind of modulate his politics accordingly. So his metamorphosis is often led by his kind of business opportunities rather than the other way around.
MARTIN: Does Musk have a concept of what he wants for humanity?
SLOBODIAN: When SpaceX - and this is really the big story right now for Musk - goes public later this year at a projected value of $2 trillion, which would be the biggest public offering in history and make SpaceX immediately one of the most valuable companies in the United States, then it will get fast-tracked into index funds and people's pensions. So overnight, without you even knowing it, your own life chances, the life chances of your children, will be dependent on people continuing to prop up Musk's visions of how the world should look.
It's not a question, I think, of figuring out what's in his mind or what his plan is. It's a question of pulling back and saying, OK, what is this kind of devil's bargain that we've all entered into where fabulous visions that are really speculative in science fiction end up being kind of the load-bearing infrastructure for financial capitalism as we understand it? So that's the sort of strange riddle that we really set out to try to understand with this book.
MARTIN: OK. But let me ask you this question. If the prospects of this are as real, potentially...
SLOBODIAN: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Imminent...
SLOBODIAN: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...And dire as you describe here...
SLOBODIAN: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...Why don't you have a call to action in this book?
SLOBODIAN: I would say that the book grants people the respect that they would be able to come to that conclusion themselves, right? I mean, it ends with a vision of actual existing Muskism in the year 2035, right? So, like, what if everything we described in the book as Musk's direction of travel were allowed to continue to play out? What would that look like? And we want to bring people on that journey themselves and walk them right up to the moment where it seems obvious, I would say, that some kind of counteraction would be necessary.
MARTIN: Quinn Slobodian is the co-author of "Muskism: A Guide For The Perplexed." Quinn, thanks so much for talking to us.
SLOBODIAN: Thank you.
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