Muskism is the New Fordism w/ Ben Tarnoff & Quinn Slobodian

0:00 And Musk himself has a very strange way of understanding human beings as essentially downstream of the internet, such that if you meme successfully, you should be able to secure social consent. That is, you know, not the kind of material basis on which stable social settlements have been historically developed.

1:05 Obviously, someone like Elon Musk has been very influential for a very long time now, right? He has kind of shaped the direction of travel in many ways in electric cars and with space privatization. He has been key to those sorts of things, but he has also set out a model and a number of ideas for our wider society.

1:24 And in this book, you know, Quinn and Ben are not just trying to figure out who Musk is, though that is part of it. They're also looking at the type of system that Musk has created and how that influences the broader economy in society, similar to the way that we talk about Fordism through much of the 20th century.

1:42 Well, the question then is, what does a system like the one that Musk has created, but which they call Muskism, how does that change the sci society that we live in? Who benefits from it? Um, you know, what are the distinct features of this system? And how does it play into the political moment that we're in right now, and maybe even kind of gets a start even before this moment of seeming deglobalization and these other factors really starts to take hold.

2:11 So there is a lot of interesting aspects of this book and this analysis that Ben and Quinn are doing. And we certainly explore parts of it in this interview, but obviously there are other parts that we couldn't get to, which is why you should definitely check out the book and, you know, see what you think of it, right?

2:27 Uh see if you agree with the analysis that they are putting together and how they think Musk has shaped the system that we live in. But I certainly enjoyed this conversation. I enjoyed digging into it further with them and getting a better understanding of their approach to this, because as you'll hear in the interview, there was one part of the book that I was maybe not so sure about.

2:48 Um, but actually hearing Quinn and Ben explain it actually brought me on side a little bit more and helped me to better understand the argument that they were making in the book and why it makes more sense than maybe I initially thought. So that's all to say. I think that this is really fascinating. I think that thinking about the way that Musk has affected our wider society, you know, how we build businesses, um, and you know, just how everything works is something that we do need to contend with when he is so powerful, and his power does not seem to be unfortunately waning anytime soon.

3:20 Though we'll see what happens with that uh SpaceX IPO that uh is supposed to come later this year. And of course, I'll be doing an episode on that closer to uh when that is going to happen. So, you know, we we can all get filled in on it and learn about what's going on there. But with all that said, I would just finally say before we get into the episode, a big thank you to everyone who supported the show last month during its sixth birthday, sixth anniversary, however you want to put it.

3:44 Uh we didn't totally hit our goal, but I appreciate everyone who did become a paid supporter through the month, and I know that we'll be getting more of those when the next series gets released and the premium episodes that will follow from it as well. Um, and I am working hard on that at the moment and we'll have more news for you soon.

3:59 So stay tuned on that front. But besides that, I would say if you do enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep doing these critical, in-depth conversations on so many different aspects of the tech industry and how it affects our world.

4:20 You can join supporters like Vi from the United States and Karen in Salmon Arm, British Columbia by going to patreon.com slash TechWon't Save Us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ben, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us.

4:35 Hey, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

4:37 Absolutely. Really happy to have you back on the show. And Quinn, happy to have you on the show for the first time. Uh, hopefully, uh, you know, the first of many to come.

4:44 Also very happy to be here. Thank you for having us.

4:47 Awesome. Thanks, guys. Uh, really happy to have you on the show. Uh, you know, you have this fantastic new book, Muskism, which is already prompting a lot of, I think, important conversations, right? About the effect that Elon Musk has had, not just as an individual, but thinking about, you know, the wider impact of his businesses, his career, all these sorts of things, um, which are detailed really well in the book.

5:08 And so I'm really excited to dig into all that with you. And so for people who are hearing this term muskism, I'm wonder if you can give us kind of the short summary of what this actually is. What what does muskism mean and what impact does it have?

5:23 Yeah, so I can offer the one-line capsule summary of muscism that we provide in the introduction to the book, which is that muscatism is the promise of sovereignty through technology. That what Musk is selling is not so much cars, rockets, or satellites, but the notion that both individuals and nation states can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures, but in so doing, of course, increase their dependency on those very infrastructures.

5:55 And just a kind of brief note on methods to help orient listeners, really the thought experiment that prompted this project, as Quinn and I were contemplating it, was to look at the experience of Henry Ford and the life of the term Fordism, where commentators of the previous century looked at the life and work of Ford, the famous industrialist, and extrapolated or inferred a broader social system from that source material.

6:26 Not just a system of mass production, which Ford is associated with, but how to organize society outside of the factory so that it was compatible with the demands of mass production? We thought about approaching Musk in comparable terms. If Musk is similarly an icon of contemporary capitalism in the way that Ford was, let's say, in the 1920s, is there a muskism that we could extrapolate or infer from the life and work of Elon Musk?

7:01 And in so doing, hopefully help clarify the particular historical conjuncture we find ourselves living in.

7:08 Yeah, and the book, in a way, just proceeds by trying to give an answer to that question, right? So we offer a series of new terms that we feel best capture the system that we call muscism. So that ranges from a model of state symbiosis, so working closely with the state rather than trying to exit or escape from the state.

7:30 Financial fabulism, which I'm sure we'll get into, but is the sort of the way that you raise capital in Silicon Valley mode. Sovereignty as a service is another of the things that he's managing to sell back to states effectively through his products and services. And fortress futurism, which is kind of an overarching category, which we see him as both, you know, taking advantage of certain things globally, drawing on global investor interest, for example, but to kind of harden the security of an enclave understood as existing amid a sea of enemies, both outside and inside.

8:08 Yeah, I think that's a great summary for the listeners, and obviously they'll get a lot more from reading the book. But there are several aspects that I want to dig into before we really get into kind of fleshing this out in bigger detail. Obviously, you know, with the term muskism is associated with someone like Elon Musk.

8:26 But when you are putting this together, obviously you're thinking a lot about Musk, but is it just describing what Elon Musk himself is doing, or is this talking about something wider that we're seeing other companies and individuals doing as well?

8:38 Well, Musk is useful insofar as he lets you tell a story about the last 40 to 50 years of global capitalism and how particular threads were knitted together into an ensemble that's quite distinctive. I think in that sense, that's what we mean when we try to place Musk as an avatar of something called Muskism rather than looking at him in highly personalized or psychologized terms.

9:12 Now, there is, I think, a you know, an irony or a paradox at the heart of our approach, I think a constructive one, but you know, just as the theorists of Fordism were looking at the life and work of Ford in order to do a kind of theorization of a broader period of political economy, that too is our method with Musk.

9:31 So as Quinn pointed out, when you just open the table of contents of the book, we are actually moving through the periods of Musk's life in a chronological way. But we're at pains in each chapter to place Musk within broader political economic currents. You know, for instance, trying to understand the origin of SpaceX within the context of the early years of the global war on terror, trying to understand Tesla within the context of the brief experiment with green capitalism that the United States conducted during the first Obama term.

10:09 Here and elsewhere, Musk is surfing the tide of history, if you like, contributing to it in important ways. We don't want to see him purely as a kind of epiphenomenon of historical structures. He's also clearly an agent of history, but he offers us a vantage point from which to see these broader occurrence, because Musk tends to present them in a more exaggerated, radicalized form.

10:38 And I think for that reason, can be quite a useful pedagogical tool for understanding the shifting currents of political economy.

10:46 There are especially some kind of features of the global political economy more recently that we're trying to offer, I think, a slightly longer prehistory of through the figure of Musk. So a lot of the time you'll hear about the period since the end of the Cold War is being narrated as sort of like you had an era of high globalization, and then 2016 happened, and boom, there was like a 180-degree turn, and suddenly everyone was reshoring and turning to economic nationalism and protectionism.

11:16 And sometimes there can be a bit of a kind of data sex matching a vibe to that narrative. Like, how did we get from point A to point B? One of the interesting things about Musk is he was doing that stuff before it was cool, so to speak. He had made the turn to hard tech and military tech in 2002, long before Alexander Carp was thinking about selling products to the government or Andoral was deciding to pivot towards munitions.

11:45 He was bringing as many of the production processes inside the walls of his factory as he could at a time when people like Tim Cook were trying to spread out supply chains for Apple products, you know, wherever the cheapest labor and the cheapest products could be found. So he also offers this kind of interesting earlier moment genealogy of many of the things which have now become kind of second nature.

12:10 And you can see how Musk was able to kind of game the moments as they were opening up and then also kind of help set the direction of travel. So a favorite example, I think the both of us had is the Giga Factory, right? So he builds one out, of course, in the United States for the first time. But when China expresses interest and Germany expresses interest, you know, he's able to serve their own nationalist designs by offering his technology kind of in a modular way that can then land in Shanghai and be filled with Chinese-built components and help seduce the Chinese EV industry and lithium-ion battery sector, serving their own domestic needs, the same way in Germany can serve needs of an all-European

12:59 electric vehicle or more supply chain resilience and move towards an energy transition. So that way that mosk mosquism is something between outright nationalism and full free trade globalism, rather, it kind of splits the difference and it figures out how to serve states as states need their services to be provided, is one of the things that I think we find helpful kind of instructively as well.

13:27 Yeah, there are so many fascinating kind of areas in the book where you dig into different examples that really illustrate what is going on here, how Musk has acted in a way that maybe isn't always even the way that he was being perceived at the time, right? You know, somewhat in hindsight, we can look back and say, oh, look at what he was doing here.

13:44 This is really interesting. Um, but just to pick up a bit on what you're saying about Muskism before we expand this further, obviously you're also making the comparison to Henry Ford and to Fordism, right? And comparisons between Musk and Ford are not something new. Uh, you know, going back to the early days of Tesla, he was compared to Ford because of, you know, the automotive side of things.

14:04 More recently, he's been compared to Ford because of his right-wing politics and anti-Semitism. I wonder what you see in the comparison between, you know, kind of a system that Musk is creating and a system that Ford created back in the day, and what comparisons there are between those that you find uh valuable.

14:19 So Fordism is defined variously by different theorists over the course of the 20th century. I think the definition that is probably most uh widely known within the academy, and the one that we've been most oriented toward, was the one developed by the so-called regulation school of primarily French economists beginning in the 1970s.

14:39 And their view of Fordism, to put it reductively, was that Fordism equals mass production plus mass consumption. That it was, on the one hand, a way of making money, an accumulation model that had to do with producing consumer goods at a new scale, made possible through the introduction of innovations like the moving assembly line, for which Ford was particularly famous.

15:03 But those innovations in turn make it possible to produce a new kind of social contract that, in their view, really stabilizes in the post-war period, in which an industrial working class is paid a relatively high wage, is provided with the institutions of collective bargaining and a welfare state. And this, if you like, stabilizes the social system, secures social peace so that accumulation can continue.

15:36 If you think about Muskism by contrast and kind of the period of capitalism that we find ourselves living through in the 2020s, you know, there are some obvious points of contact. I mean, you already alluded to the parallels between Musk and Ford, a very obvious one being Musk's strong preference for vertical integration, which is a style of production that's usually described as Fordist.

15:59 But when you think about what Muscism has to offer, what its social contract might be, it's quite thin in comparison to the Fordist social contract. And there's different ways to think about it. One of the ways that we've been inclined to think about it more recently is that this thinness of the Muskist social contract is symptomatic, actually, of again, a broader phenomenon.

16:28 We're always kind of inclined to try to read Musk as an indicator species for broader phenomena. And in this case, it has to do with the fact that unlike in the Fordas period of the mid-20th century, really the first quarter of the of the 20th century, the level of class struggle is fairly low. You know, in order to forge a social compact, in order to actually be incentivized to secure social peace, capitalists need to feel under pressure, as they certainly were, given the extraordinary degree of industrial strife.

17:05 I mean, to the point of basically pitched battles in the street when you look at American labor history. That is not the case, you know, in our in our current era, and we could talk about the various reasons for that. But I think that in turn, somewhat paradoxically contributes to a weakness within Muskism, which is that it's it's part of what makes it, I think, a quite volatile, and it may prove to be an unsuccessful way of organizing society, is that it's not terribly incentivized to think about these questions of social consent.

17:38 And Musk himself has a very strange way of understanding human beings as essentially downstream of the internet, such that if you meme successfully, you should be able to secure social consent. That is, you know, not the kind of material basis on which stable social settlements have been historically developed.

18:02 So, you know, it's it's it's an absence within Musk, but as always within Musk, that absence tells us something about the kind of world that we're living in.

18:11 Yeah, I mean, it's a real interesting analytic for us because if you use the way that uh previous social scientists have talked about Fordism, it makes you ask these kind of questions, right? Like, not just what's happening in the factory, but who is the counterparty for the capitalist, right? Who are they forced to kind of come to the bargaining bargaining table with, literally speaking, in the case of Ford?

18:34 And what would be the kind of mechanisms of producing like a social peace rather than an ongoing low-level social conflict. So that raises the question, as Ben is saying, of you know, what is the social contract, social contract of tech? I'm sure this is, you know, this is certainly the kind of question you've been writing about and thinking about for a long time.

18:56 And what's so fascinating is by following Musk through these different moments of what is now not a totally short era of digital capitalism being the dominant form of political economy in the United States, right? We're talking about now about 30 years, you can see how that contract looks different at different moments.

19:17 So in the Web 2.0 moment, for example, you know, we can understand now why people decided to stop worrying and learn to love surveillance capitalism, right? There was something about the degree of convenience, the endorphin hits of interaction, the connectivity that they got, the kind of um replacement for other forms of sociability and sociality.

19:40 People learned to live with it. They were okay with it. That was a kind of contract, right? It was a kind of a settlement. And Musk now, you know, is posting into the new era of generative AI being the big investment and really the only investment and growth story. And he, like many of his brethren, here's where he's helpful to think about alongside of his members of the Silicon Valley leadership class, has decided perhaps recklessly that it's not necessary to pay attention to the way that ordinary people feel about the tech that they're building their whole growth model on.

20:19 Like again, like getting into territory that I'm that I know is the bread and butter of your work and this podcast, but um you know, people just don't see the other side of the bargain when it comes to AI. They see actually mostly harms either to the generalized standards of truth or their future job prospects or just another inconvenience or something cluttering up their desktop or something that their boss is bugging them about.

20:48 So Musk is it's kind of an interesting like test case for Muskism, right? To what extent can you just pull those through existing institutions and implant your own version of how things should be organized? Will there really be no resistance whatsoever? Uh, how far can you push? And this is actually the Doge experience kind of in miniature, right?

21:13 Because Doge, as we saw it, was him, as Ben said, treating the government like just a bunch of dumb computers, as he called them to Ted Cruz, and feeling that the problems of government were actually problems of software engineering. And so if you solved the code problems, then there would be a kind of cascade effect where social optimization would follow.

21:35 But of course, coming anywhere close to the two trillion dollar cut that he promised, you know, on the floor of Madison Square Garden, I think, um, would by necessity require getting into the flesh of the entitlements programs that Americans rely on. So it would just mean getting into Social Security, getting into Medicare.

21:56 This was going to be the thing that he naively thought. He is master tech support would be able to just debug his way to a solution form. But as we know, the moment he started touching those things, like boom, resistance arrived, actually. Like the social contract had some life medicine. After all, people are flooding temples, they're shutting them down, and that's about when he gets shown the excess.

22:22 So the story we tell in the book, especially in the last chapter, is about his kind of hubris. And it's sort of like steel manning his understanding of how he can live without the counterparty, Contra Ford. But also arguably, it shows in the case of Doge that he can't quite just impose a form of accumulation that some kind of legitimacy creation, however it still works, inside the American political system anyway, is still a kind of a necessary complement to his economic model.

22:55 He can't quite just supplant one with the other, right? Symbiosis can't become parasitism, or you kind of consume the host. And the host for him is always the state.

23:05 Yeah, I think very well said. And something that's all uh very important to understand about Musk's project, right? I feel something that came up that stood out to me as I was reading the book and also in both of your answers that time is really like Musk's, I don't know, relationship to the world, to the people around him.

23:22 And it seems that whenever he interacts with an individual or a system, he tends to see it through the lens of computation, right? You know, the government is seen as a computer, how individuals work, they're they're computers, a company is a computer, everything seems to be a computer. I wonder, you know, is this something that is just part of Musk, or does this also kind of feature into how you are kind of looking at the kind of worldview, the ism that that you know you're kind of creating around him?

23:51 Well, I think if you if you turn back to Musk's origins as an entrepreneur, they lie in the 1990s dot-com boom in Silicon Valley. This is really where he makes his first fortunes that he goes on to create SpaceX and to become the majority investor and then CEO of Tesla. And if you think about that period, this is a period in which, often describe it as techno-utopian, but in which, you know, fairly um, you know, rational actors are saying pretty extraordinary things about how the internet is going to transform people's lives.

24:29 And in fact, many of those promises are fulfilled. Not quite as early as as they had hoped, not early enough to save the dot-commerce. But you know, if you look at the stuff that felt quite outlandish at the time in the 1990s, if you go to the 2000s and 2010s, a lot of these things become reality. We actually have a quote from David Sachs, who is now, of course, running AI and crypto policy at the White House, who is a member of the so-called PayPal mafia, and he gives an interview in the 1990s where he describes a future scenario in which one could walk down the street and order a coffee ahead of time at your favorite coffee shop and then go in and pick it up, you know, just by pressing a few

25:14 buttons on your on your phone. At the time that was pure science fiction, and now that's actually pretty banal. So if you think about someone like Musk, who, along with many of his peers, was someone making those promises, but then being rewarded very handsomely for those promises, and then subsequently seeing much of that vision come to fruition, then it's actually quite reasonable to infer that digital technologies are the most transformative in human history, that the digitization of every aspect of our reality is a beneficial development, one that we should welcome and accelerate.

25:59 And further, that human beings themselves are probably best understood in computational terms. Of course, that's not a particularly new idea. I mean, arguably, the birth of artificial intelligence as a field in the 1950s and the birth of computer science as a field was deeply invested in these computational theories of mind.

26:21 That's not something that the dot-comers invented in the 1990s, but starting the 1990s, people are getting really, really, really rich. And that does something as a kind of verification mechanism for people's worldviews. So I think, yes, absolutely, Musk takes things a bit further, the extent to which he sees the world in cyborg terms, the extent to which he sees government and society as a whole, as a set of computers, the extent to which he sees individuals as essentially programmable pieces of software.

26:55 But if you took a wider view, not just within the Silicon Valley leadership class, but the last 40 years of digital capitalism, is it so crazy, or is it a just one or two degrees intensification of something that was quite widespread and indeed was being rewarded quite exorbitantly?

27:15 Yeah, there's a slightly less well-known part of the theory of the famous Chicago school neoliberal Milton Friedman. Uh, it's a very famous essay for economists called The Methodology of Positive Economics. And the argument in that essay is that we shouldn't actually try to come up with theories based on things that we can verify and find to be true in abstract terms, but we should adopt those theories that tend to be most predictive of the future over time.

27:47 So, in other words, you know, is the primary base layer of reality the internet? Probably not. If you take that as a starting point and design all of your investment models around it, do you make money across the last 25 years? Almost definitely yes. Right. So that I think that for a lot of the people who have been on the winning side of these bets, when we, the kind of critics and eggheads, you know, sit back and like stroke our goatees and ask like whether or not this is really according with some abstract idea of reality, they would just say we're missing the point.

28:24 That if your point is like organizing society's productive forces in a way that like transforms and metabolizes the Earth's resources into new forms, which is how they see things in their Promethean way of thinking, then our strategy would be a losing one and theirs is a winning one. But I think that there's even more overlap between their common sense and kind of centrist common sense in recent years when it comes to this notion that politics is just online first, in fact.

28:58 If you think about the way that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 for the first time, or the yes vote on Brexit in 2016 were discussed by mainstream pundits, it was also giving us the impression that politics happens online and then we offline just act as kind of automata based on what the troll armies have infected our minds with, based on Cambridge Analytica's like secret sauce juking of our Facebook algorithm or whatever, right?

29:28 That idea that we had all become kind of drones of digital forces was almost like the mainstream common sense around 2016, and that was sort of what the tech lash has been driven by until the recent anti-data center moment. So for Musk to go along with that and say, like, yeah, I believe that too. Like, yes, the internet is everything.

29:53 And me, and furthermore, I'm going to buy big chunks of it and organize it in such a way to reinforce my belief, is actually, as Ben is saying, I think like quite rational, right? It might be socially destructive. It might be, you know, objectionable, but it can't really be faulted for its like consistency.

30:15 Yeah, no, that's that's really fair, right? Especially when you look at the position that he holds today. If he if he hadn't made these bets, you wouldn't be writing uh a book about him and talking about the system that is kind of oriented.

30:29 The puzzle for us is not how is he deranged or or when did he lose his mind, even though those are fair questions to ask. But you know, the puzzle is really how has this particular form of derangements been so lucrative? Like, how does that get launched? What are the mechanisms that launder that kind of way of thinking about the world into such extraordinary rewards?

30:55 Yeah. And, you know, speaking of those mechanisms, you were both talking earlier about the kind of symbiosis with the state that is very important to Musk's project and the way that he has sold sovereignty as a service to these governments, essentially. Uh, you know, and Ben, you were mentioning the earlier days of the internet.

31:14 And I feel like, you know, the narrative early on was that tech was this kind of libertarian place, right? Where uh these tech billionaires wanted the state to get out of the way so they could do what they want. But I feel like in the book you're laying out that Musk had a different perspective than this early narrative suggests.

31:30 And I wonder if you could talk a bit about Musk's relationship to the state and how that has really benefited him and created uh the power and wealth that he now enjoys.

31:42 Yeah, I think it's a it's a major argument of our book, which is to emphasize that Musk is not a libertarian, that if you look over the course of his career, he's consistently instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit in various ways. I mean, as a as a backstop, as a funder of basic research, as a provider of loans and subsidies, and really above all as a customer and a client.

32:06 You mentioned SpaceX, and you know, SpaceX gets its start as a key government contractor in the early years of the war on terror, and now has you know become a very important partner for the US military and U.S. intelligence agencies in getting its satellites into low Earth orbit? I think you know, one way to read that is through Musk personally.

32:29 And another would be to say, well, what are the kind of shifting paradigms, both technological and financial, that drive the evolution of the valley from the 90s onwards? And if you think about the kind of high point of so-called cyber libertarianism, kind of emerges as a better-known formation in the 1990s, into the 2000s is associated with figures like Peter Thiel.

32:57 And if you think about how people are making money on the internet in this era, both the Web 1.0 and the Web 2.0 era, it's websites and apps, it's consumer-facing. Obviously, they develop a kind of surveillance capitalism model with just all about harvesting user data. But the relationship to the state in this period is a bit attenuated.

33:19 I mean, of course, there's always a relationship, DARPA is always important. Um, you have the NSA doing collaborations with the big tech firms around mass surveillance, but certainly when put alongside earlier eras of the Valley's history, you know, if you think about its origin as a semiconductor manufacturing zone for the Pentagon, the relationship with the state by the 90s and 2000s has become a bit more distant.

33:47 Everything changes with the generative AI boom after 2022. Now you really need the state as a close partner, not just as a client. You know, think about the Pentagon's endless appetite for AI killchain tools, as evidenced by their partnerships with Anthropic and Palantir, but also crucially, probably even more importantly, as a partner who is going to help accelerate the data center construction boom.

34:16 And you've seen this quite dramatically in the case of the current Trump administration, which has rolled out all sorts of policy moves designed to speed up construction, whether it's about providing federal public land for data centers, rolling back environmental review, trying to secure energy infrastructure, and so on.

34:34 And that's, you know, if you are, you know, Sundar or Satya are these guys who, you know, at the end of the day, don't strike one as particularly reactionary ideologues, but are quite rational capitalists, you actually now have a very strong material incentive to partner with the state. It's not just about trying to avoid uh, you know, Trump's bad temper and the possibility of retaliation, which every capitalist now has to worry about, but you really need a partner for this big, big investment push.

35:03 Here, as elsewhere, Musk gets there first. You know, for Musk to be developing this type of relationship with the state as a client with SpaceX as early as 2002 shows us, I think, once again, that Musk is not only a kind of indicator species for broader developments, but he's often someone who arrives at a kind of new political economic inflection point a bit earlier than his peers.

35:30 So by the time everyone else is partnering with the state, turning to hard tech, turning to infrastructure, he's been doing that for decades.

35:40 Just to, you know, demythologize him a little bit. Also the case that he's also often coming late to sectors, right? I mean, and and is still lags, for example, and as you know, Paris, from the book you wrote about this, but his attempts at doing fully self-driving automobiles have been, you know, promised serially again and again and have never actually panned out, even compared to his competitors.

36:05 And XAI remains a serious laggard in comparison to open AI and Anthropics. So part of what I think is important to home in on is what Ben is pointing out, that it's really this willingness to find a partner in the state that made him special. And he's always managed to eventually get there in most cases.

36:28 And now arguably we're at the doorstep of his biggest yeah, with SpaceX, which 100% relies on state as client, really primary client, but then also with the hope of creating whole new market sectors around you know, satellite to internet, satellite to cellular, satellite to device, and supposedly orbital AI.

36:52 So it's always this combination of overpromising, but then backstop by Uncle Sam, as he once famously put it.

37:00 Yeah, you even see that with the AI push, right? You know, the contracts with Grok and you know, how that, I don't know, even if you really want to bring a generative AI tool into government, is Grok really the one that you would be contracting with?

37:13 Probably not. Not unless he makes it a condition of the deal, which is what he's been doing, like forcing banks that want to be part of the SpaceX IPO to download grok just to be able to be part of it. So that's like one thing that we thought about, especially in the early part of the book, is this interesting tension in Silicon Valley operating practice, which is both sure that there's always a disruptor part on your heels, ready to overthrow you, but then for good reason, completely fixated on how to lock in your own incumbency and make sure that you are not the one who is displaced.

37:48 And you can see the whole, I mean, this is really what Nick Cernisek's work has been about recently is these strategies of entrenching market dominance and market share, which often mean, you know, turning yourself into a conglomerate, acquiring competitors, getting, squeezing out competitors, but ironically, kind of working against the supposed core ethos of Silicon Valley itself by like stopping disruptive innovation and making sure it doesn't happen thus, like arguably making the quality of the things you're delivering worse over time as well.

38:22 Yeah. There's another piece of that, and you know, it it relates to SpaceX to some degree as well, right? But that is the question of attention, right? And the way that Musk has wielded attention in order to, you know, drive his influence, uh, but also to benefit his businesses and this infrastructure that he was creating.

38:40 You know, we saw that uh obviously with the acquisition of Twitter, but he has long used social media in this way to drive attention to his products, not to mention um exaggeration and and and the like. I wonder how you see that as playing into this kind of system that you're talking about with Muskism in particular, you know, how the use of this form of communication also then benefits what Musk is doing and how you see that playing out with the way that he approaches the world, you know, commerce, government, what what have you.

39:13 Well Musk has been a media personality for a long time. I mean, if you go back to the 1990s, he's giving interviews to major outlets. He's positioning himself as a charismatic founder CEO, which is kind of a species that's that's being born in the 1990s in Silicon Valley for the first time, that in order to unlock these crazy valuations, you have to tell kind of persuasive story about the future.

39:38 You have to really kind of sell it. And we describe this dynamic in the book as financial fabulism, that there's a you know, a way to turn stories into money by offering a vision of the future that is at once fantastical but plausible enough that it can secure capital from investors. And that's something that Musk has always been very good at.

40:02 You know, I'm tempted to say that that's the thing he's been best at as a businessman, is his his ability to secure the confidence of investors. But of course, with social media, when that comes along and when he becomes a prolific tweeter starting in the mid-2010s, it gives him a completely new stage from which to make those promises.

40:25 But I think it also introduces a kind of qualitative change. We're not just making the argument that, oh, now that he has Twitter, he can do the same thing that he was doing since the 90s at a bigger stage. The specific form of social media really matters to Musk. Something we observe in the book that others have observed of Musk as well, is that most of his posts and social media are replies, that he is a kind of classic reply guy who in turn famously has cultivated a large audience of reply guys.

40:54 But his power in the platform is actually not to treat it as a broadcast medium, but to descend into the fray and to have, you know, long conversations with low follower accounts. If you know anything about Musk and if you've spent as much time as we have clicking through his tweets, you know that this is actually a lot of what he does and how he endears himself, in fact, to his fans.

41:21 The other thing that social media does, of course, in contrast to traditional media, is provide a degree of just immediacy and instantaneity that is unparalleled. And Musk in particular becomes very attuned to this when he learns that his posts can actually move markets. Dogecoin is an interesting case of this.

41:41 Dogecoin, for those who don't know, is basically a joke. Cryptocurrency was made initially as a parody of cryptocurrency, and Musk gloms onto it as his favorite cryptocurrency. And as he tweets about it and as he posts memes about it, the price of Dogecoin increases. Arguably, this is also the case with Tesla stock more broadly.

42:03 So in social media, he finds a machine for what we describe as attention alchemy. It's essentially asset price inflation through memetic means. And it's a, it continues to be a very important source of Musk's power. If you think about this SpaceX IPO that's coming up this year that Coin alluded to, they are reportedly seeking a valuation of more than $2 trillion, which would make it the sixth biggest publicly traded corporation in the world, bigger than Meta.

42:33 And this is an extraordinary sum. And you know, we could talk about, well, how does the global investor class possibly rationalize this? One of the considerations is the outsize influence of Musk himself, not just as an entrepreneur, as a capitalist, as an industrialist, but as someone who is able to sustain these extraordinarily inflated valuations on the basis of his social media performances, as evidenced by Tesla.

42:59 It's really interesting, though, watching the traditional forms of business analysis try to catch up to what I think Musk is doing, especially to the communication ecosystem. So, for example, just today there was a piece in the Harvard Business Review, and the question was you know, what relationship is there between people's understanding of the politics of the CEO and the products that they're producing?

43:23 And the case that they're using was Musk and Tesla. And the way that they were doing it was large surveys of people who they were asking, you know, if you know that the CEO is um leaning right, would that make you more or less willing to buy the car? And then other pieces of information if it had a longer range, if it had a quicker charging time, and so on.

43:44 And then they put together the numbers and they said, Oh, it turns out that, you know, people on the right will be more likely to kind of commonsensical outcome would be more likely to buy the car if they aligned with his politics, and people on the left would be less so. But To me, reading that and like having followed Musk's whole trajectory, especially through the acquisition of acts and then the creation of his own large language model and the layering of a chatbot and eventually Gracopedia on top of that, it was missing another way out of this, as I think Musk conceives of it, which is people, these consumers, wouldn't be getting information out there in some neutral way upon which they would

44:28 build their opinions. But his goal is really creating a closed ecosystem of information circulation and creation in which there would only be his political principles and views. So if you imagine the realization of his goal, which is getting rid of the legacy media, which is always something he's been very annoyed about, and making sure that it was only his own monetized reply guys that like are setting the agenda and delivering the always sunny messages from the Tesla earnings calls and the ex-usage statistics in Japan or whatever.

45:03 I mean, it really is like the Politburo in North Korea just telling the news to Kim Jong-un and then getting the applause of the arena. Then this idea of, well, would the average consumer think X, Y, or Z is totally irrelevant? And that really is the only way to understand his push for like, I want one million satellites in low Earth orbit, right?

45:27 I want to create basically a global teleco monopoly. Will he achieve that? I hope not. Probably not. But that's what he's aiming for. Is that's those are where the goalposts are for him? Is like how to create a kind of hermetically sealed space in which there's a vertically integrated ideological stack that stretches from your phone to the satellite to all the products that you buy out of his suite of objects.

45:56 And that is not one where you could use traditional understandings of like business analysis. Like it's actually breaking the frame because it's going so much further than people had gone ever before.

46:06 Well, on that point too, I wonder then, you know, when you're looking at the system Musk has created, how you explain his political shift, you know, in in recent years as well, right? There have been many attempts to theorize for why Musk has made this real shift to the right, you know, that it's in his business interests, that he was personally radicalized for a number of reasons in his life, that the political climate had changed and he was kind of going with it.

46:30 Uh I wonder for both of you, in looking at this broader project, how does how does it work? How does it make sense for Musk to make this shift? Is it, you know, is it part of this kind of larger thing that he's trying to create, or is it just a personal thing that we've all been kind of watching happen uh over the past number of years?

46:48 Well, the thing with Musk is, of course, there's already been a ton of writing him on him already, and in particular on this question of why does he turn to the right? And you know, I think a lot of the answers that have been provided have been good ones. We review them in the book, and you know, just to give a very very abbreviated summary, um, in two uh uh sorry, 2020, um, his Fremont factory is shut down by public health order um by Alameda County officials.

47:18 This is a moment where Musk goes ballistic on Twitter. If you recall this episode, uh Trump, who is still in his first term, sends a message of support. Musk denounces the lockdown measures as fascist, manages to close, keep the factory closed only for seven weeks because he actually restarts it against the wishes of the local public health officials.

47:42 But but that is a is an important moment for Musk. Of course, in the spring and summer of 2020, you also see the emergence of the largest social movement in U.S. history, the George Floyd Uprising. And that in turn is the culmination of really years of uh a new kind of egalitarian politics that's bubbling up from a kind of reinvigorated American left, arguably beginning with Occupy Wall Street.

48:08 Biden comes into office and then pursues a number of policies that both Musk and many of his colleagues in the Silicon Valley leadership class find distasteful, from a pro-union NLRB to Lena Khan at the FTC pursuing a renewed regulatory and antitrust push. So you can kind of go down the line. This is where Musk, again, is not really that distinctive.

48:32 You know, he, I think, like other members of the Silicon Valley elite, are feeling that in this period their wealth and power is under threat, that the traditional social hierarchies that have been the basis of that wealth and power are under threat, both from below in the form of social movements and from above, in the case of the new Biden administration, and that there are quite evident rational and strategic reasons, regardless of their ideological viewpoints, to seek out a new accommodation and partnership with the right.

49:06 Where I think that is not a complete picture for Musk is the particular form in which Musk metabolizes these threats. If you recall the phrase the woke mind virus, this is the phrase that, more than any other, is associated with Musk's Turn to the Right. He tweets it for the first time at the end of 2021.

49:27 And 2022 is really usually considered to be the year in which he's consistently promoting and expressing right-wing viewpoints on Twitter. And of course, that's also the year that he purchases Twitter and transforms it into a right-wing content ecosystem of X. The woke mind virus for us actually needs to be understood literally.

49:47 It's not a joke. You know, typically when we talk about the book in public settings, when we say that phrase, people chuckle. It's not a metaphor. He's not kind of trying to speak symbolically. He's actually speaking very literally. And what he means, and I think this is kind of where we get to the root of what we're trying to offer, that's maybe a bit distinctive from the explanations that have already been provided.

50:10 What he's saying is that human beings, because of our entanglement with our devices and with digital technologies more broadly, above all, but not limited to social media, have become networked with one another in what as early as the mid-2010s, he describes as giant cybernetic collectives, that human beings are becoming cyborgs, again, his term.

50:35 And what this means is it introduces a vulnerability. If you know anything about information security, you know that any network system can be compromised, can be infected. And he sees these diverse threats to his power, as evidenced by a lockdown order or a Black Lives Matter march or what have you, and assimilates them under this common category of the woke mine virus, because the problem as he sees it is that malicious actors have taken power of key nodes of the network to promote certain mental viruses that can infect people's brains with bad ideas and cause them to act in ways that are contrary to his interests.

51:17 So, therefore, what he has to do is to seize those choke points, to seize those interfaces where the cyborg fusion is taking place in order to produce a different kind of cyborg, in order to promulgate an anti-woke mind virus that can cleanse the network. Now, again, you're smiling, Paris. Like this sounds quite outrageous, and of course it is.

51:41 But, you know, as Quinn alluded to earlier, is it that onrageous? I mean, this kind of theory of the programmability of human minds was the centerpiece of the mainstream liberal reaction to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The notion that there are Russian trolls out there who put a bunch of memes on Facebook, and that's why Trump has been elected.

52:01 Now, that's not totally fair. I'm being a bit reductive, but that's the broad stroke of it. So there's a kind of right-wing inversion of that that Musk develops, but is also derived from what we were discussing earlier, which is the just the fact that digital capitalism had been very good to him, that digitization as a direction of travel seemed not just inevitable, but beneficial because he rode that wave to great success.

52:28 And in terms of the kind of new dangers in the form of a new egalitarian politics, you know, why not apprehend those dangers from within this computational frame of mind that dominates the way you see everything else? It's actually, I think, quite reasonable from within the vantage point of the person who's experiencing it.

52:47 There's also, I mean, I think I agree with all of that. I think there's also a timeline of this. I think what Ben has been suggesting is that we don't so much disagree with the arguments that have been made already about why he turned to the right, but we want to add what might be the very specific coloration that that turn to the right took in Musk's case, and that one can't understand it and the nature of his response without seeing it through this kind of cyborg or cybernetic lens.

53:16 As a timeline that I think probably your listeners would appreciate or be able to identify with, I think it's also helpful to note a kind of a two-phase switch in Musk's attitude towards politics. One stretches from around the founding of OpenAI with Altman in 2015, when he and Altman, under the influence of Nick Bostrom ideas of existential risk, become convinced that the AI may develop into a malevolent digital superintelligence.

53:47 Therefore, it's very important to be attentive to AI safety alignment, to be very cautious in the conduct of this research. Rather than slowing it down, however, Musk's proposal is that we actually should accelerate it. So he starts Neuralink around the same time he starts open AI. And the argument being we actually need to jack in to become even more cyborg, as Ben is describing it, to make sure that the human machine AI is able to outpace the purely digital superintelligence.

54:21 Wild proposal, but there it is. That lasts until 2022. 2022, because as Ben already said, the launch of Chat GPT, the advent of the large language model is the new growth story. And for Musk, the conviction that the LLMs that are leading the pack, specifically OpenAI, but also soon thereafter bianthropic, are shot through and infected with destructive progressive beliefs that include, you know, super exaggerated anti-racism, super exaggerated feminism, trans rights, meaning that the new danger is not a runaway digital superintelligence.

54:59 The new danger is a woke AI that will, in time, do things like cull the white male population as an extreme affirmative action measure, will in his terms, quote, turn him into a woman of color. Musk said that on Rogan's podcast. And so now what you need to do is bulk up the anti-woke AI, X AI and Grok, to fight with the woke AI.

55:23 So that, you know, that's from inside, that's Musk's turn to the right, right? It's like, I need to now build Mecha Hitler, basically, to defeat, you know, the woke super nanny AI, as he calls it, that his opponents have constructed recklessly by training it on the data of years and years of social movements that include like Me Too, Black Lives Matter.

55:49 All of these things have now become the kind of raw material out of which the dangerous mech of the woke companies has been formed and he needs to build his to do this kind of big kaiju big battle with it, like in God knows what blasted landscape.

56:07 No, I I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'll admit, when I was reading the book, it it's probably one of the pieces that I was like a bit skeptical of, but hearing you both explain it, it makes a lot more sense, especially when we think about how Musk sees so much through the lens of the computer, right?

56:23 Um, sees people as programmable, as you as you were saying, Ben. Like, yeah, I think it makes a lot more sense to hear you uh kind of spell it out for me. But, you know, there's so many other things that I could ask you about the book. It's it's really fantastic with everything that it that it gets into.

56:37 But to close off our conversation, I'm wondering, you know, if we're thinking about the public, what is the greatest threat to people from this worldview and from this system that Musk is creating? And is there a way out of it? Is there a way for us to challenge it?

56:53 Well, I think there are so many dangers that I'm kind of like struggling to pick the one that I'd like to discuss. Yeah, the hierarchy.

57:00 I mean, I think one that I would Yeah, I don't know.

57:03 We there might be more than two, but I think one that I would draw our attention to because I think it's maybe one that is under-emphasized in what I've been seeing. And and Quinn hinted at it, but I want to draw it out more. So if you think about people's worries about AI, they they fall into like a few major buckets.

57:22 There's the kind of existential risk school, which is associated with figures like Nick Bostrom and Yudkowski, and you know, these guys have been around for a long time, very, very influential within the AI sector. Basically, the notion that AI could develop to the point where it becomes hostile to humanity and has both the desire and capacity to exterminate the human race.

57:43 I think another category of concern is that AI will reproduce old biases, particularly those associated with categories like race and gender. Again, this is a very important discourse, one that I'm personally more sympathetic to, but has also kind of been around for a while, certainly predates the generative AI boom associated with the pioneering work of figures like Tim Nid Gebru.

58:09 There's another category of concern around what it will do to employment. This is something that Bernie Sanders in particular has been really emphasizing what does it mean to have these types of tools advance and proliferate? If you look at what AI coding tools are doing to the profession of software engineering, just how radically the work of writing code is changing, what does that mean for employment in the tech sector?

58:37 Is the proficiency in coding by AI tools going to be generalizable to automating other kinds of white-collar tasks? So kind of fears around mass automation. I think, you know, all of these, I might be somewhat less sympathetic to the first, although not entirely. But I think all of these, you know, have have some validity that should be engaged with.

58:59 I think one that is generally not as salient for people is the possibility of AI as an ideological tool, as a tool for promoting particular political viewpoints. And this is really Musk's emphasis. So Grok, as Quinn described, was designed from the beginning to be an anti-woke model and chatbot integrated with Grokopedia, the right-wing clone of Wikipedia's that it can draw on as a source of truth.

59:33 And if you think about what Musk is attempting to do here, people access the wealth of information on the internet through a particular interface. You know, the initial interface was really the search engine. Then arguably it transitioned to social media. And now, arguably, it's transitioning to the AI chatbot.

59:56 That the AI chatbot, you know, even when you search something on Google now, the Gemini response is up top, and most people just read the Gemini response. So how people learn about the world, we know it doesn't happen through traditional media anymore. It doesn't really happen through the kind of old Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 forums as much as it used to.

1:00:16 It's increasingly happening through the interface of the AI chatbot. And that means that whoever owns that choke point has the capacity to influence people ideologically. And Musk recognizes that, and arguably that's why he's so keen to win the AI race. I think that's a really underappreciated source of risk.

1:00:35 I'm not sure he'll necessarily pull it off, but it's a very powerful tool for ideology that I think we need to be very careful and constructive about in trying to meet that challenge. Now, the question of how to meet the challenge and what is to be done, this is Quinn's specialty, so I'll let him answer this.

1:00:55 Far from it. No, I'm usually the doomer in the group. Um, but yeah, interestingly enough, I I didn't actually know you were going to end up where you ended up in that in that riff there, but it was where I wanted to suggest my deepest concerns as well, perhaps just because of the world I inhabit. But for me, higher education and journalism or the public sphere are the places where I feel this danger most intimately.

1:01:19 Um, in the case of higher education, the infiltration of the classroom by the chat bot is now complete. And the former modes of pedagogy that had once been possible for quite literally centuries are now no longer possible because of the um availability of uh abilities to plagiarize and cheat at scale.

1:01:45 So that's a big concern for me professionally, but to the public square, the public sphere that Ben is alluding to, I was thinking about an example from the course of the research that we were doing, which was, and you might remember this. I I can't remember what movie it was because I definitely didn't watch it, but Jared Leto was in it, and he shows up at like Grauman's Chinese theater or whatever, and there's an optimist there.

1:02:11 And he did a little like scene where he sort of kung fu fought the optimist and then went into the theater. And it was, you know, we know that that wasn't an autonomous robot. We know that that was being remote controlled, remote operated, but I wanted just the link to the Reuters story or whatever I could use to back that up.

1:02:35 But it was a small enough incident that if you went to try to find the real journalistic take on it, you couldn't find it. I mean, you could find like Yahoo News, TMC kind of things, which just reported the existence of this having taken place. And then if you went on X, you would say like crowds wowed by Lido Kung Kung Fu fighting with Optimus.

1:02:57 And the question of how it was actually operating was like not in anyone's direct interest to find out. And so instead, just the surface impression was endlessly circulated in an automated way. And that was then the narrative with which we were left, right? So it was a way that I could really, in a way, see the genius of Musk.

1:03:18 And I had a kind of heart-dropping, vertigonous moment of imagining that being true for every event in society, right? That there would be no external check. There would be no one invested on asking the second question, no one whose job it was to actually puncture the bubble of impressions and find something else about the way that things were actually working.

1:03:42 And that was a real sense of terror, I think. Like imagining the independent form of the verification of any reality being evacuated and emisserated to the point of disappearance is unfortunately something that I don't think I could have imagined 10 years ago, but now I feel myself a lot closer to being able to imagine.

1:04:03 And that is that is truly a sense of dread.

1:04:05 Yeah, and you know, I think it's a serious concern, and it's just one of many concerns, as Ben was saying, that is presented by this system, right? Um, you know, I I think we're going to be talking about a system like Muskism and using that term for many years to come now, and we're going to be referencing that to your book.

1:04:23 Yeah, I guess so. But Ben, Quinn, I really appreciate you both taking the time for the conversation. You know, the book is fantastic. I highly recommend people go pick it up. Uh, but thanks so much for taking the time.

1:04:33 Thank you so much. Thanks for having us, Paris.

1:04:37 Ben Tarnoff and Quint Slobodian are the authors of Muscism, a guide for the perplexed. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Houston. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

1:04:51 You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.