Elon Musk’s Deadly Future | Mark O’Connell | The New York Review of Books
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Reviewed:
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff
Harper, 242 pp., $30.00
Anyone attempting to think seriously about Elon Musk is confronted with a forbidding cognitive dissonance. Musk is the richest person on the planet, and among the most powerful capitalists in history; before a recent slump in SpaceX’s stock price, the company’s IPO briefly made him the world’s first trillionaire. His companies have redrawn the boundaries of multiple economic fields—the automotive industry, the aerospace sector, satellite communications—and his direct influence has helped transform the world’s most powerful government. He is among the most famous people alive, and surely the most prominent entrepreneur. To exist in this time is to be forced to think, whether you like it or not, about Elon Musk.<br>And yet for God’s sake, just look at the man—at his dispiriting attempts at humor, his weirdly off-putting outfits, his incessant posting of banalities and faux profundities and extreme-right disinformation on social media. Just look at the uniquely awkward way he inhabits his own body, as though exercising doubtful control over a dysfunctional robotic exoskeleton. For all the immensity of his wealth and power, all his world-bestriding influence, it’s remarkably easy to dismiss Musk as a malignant clown who is not worth the energy and aggravation of thinking about. It’s tempting, even, to view him as living proof that exceptional entrepreneurial success has no relationship to exceptional brilliance.<br>Here we must recall Joyce Carol Oates’s devastating assessment of Musk, which went viral last year on the very social media platform he owns and devotes so much of his attention to:
So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates—scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports, acclaim for a favorite team; references to history. In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the “most wealthy person in the world.”
But the sad and somewhat degrading fact is that this man is unquestionably important. If we want to think in any kind of consequential way about the present and the future, we have no choice but to take Musk seriously—if not as a man, then as a manifestation of a cultural-political malaise. This is the premise, more or less, of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, a short and potent new book by the historian Quinn Slobodian and the tech writer Ben Tarnoff. It is not a biography; its authors are much less interested in Musk as a person than in what his centrality to our culture says about us and where we’re heading. The question they want to ask, as they put it in the book’s introduction, is “not who is Musk? but what is Musk a symptom of?”<br>Their attempt to answer this question leads them to posit the existence of a loose set of beliefs and ideas they call Muskism: a quasi ideology of which Musk himself is less an originator—in the sense that Marx was the originator of Marxism, or Freud of Freudianism—than an avatar. They’re not aiming, in other words, to portray Musk as a coherent or systematic thinker, as someone whose political convictions and business decisions are shaped by a stern and immovable ideology. They see Muskism as a contemporary analogue of Fordism, a word that neither Henry Ford nor his colleagues used but that economists and political theorists have used to think about how early-twentieth-century mass production and consumption were shaped by the industrial practices he originated. “If Fordism was the operating system of the twentieth century,” Slobodian and Tarnoff write, “we contend that Muskism offers a possible operating system for the twenty-first.”<br>While Fordism relied on highly rationalized production and disciplined workers to create durable structures for mass consumption, Muskism, as Slobodian and Tarnoff see it, is much less oriented toward the broad distribution of societal goods. It aims to provide great benefits to a relatively select few, and to disregard everyone else; it is a worldview of hard borders and hardened hearts. (Two of Slobodian’s previous books, Crack-Up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards, have traced the intellectual and...