00:01:14.480Yeah, it's a good question to begin with, Adrian.
00:01:16.880As you alluded to in your opening remarks, there's been quite a lot written on Musk.
00:01:23.960So I think the first thing that my co-author, Quinn Sulbodian, and I had to figure out as we contemplated this project is, what else is there to say?
00:01:33.260And how do you distinguish yourself from the mountain of existing material on the man?
00:01:37.000and where we landed was adding the ism to his name which which for us you know indicated an
00:01:45.160effort to take a more structural depersonalized approach to Elon Musk to try to think of him
00:01:51.980less as a collection of particular neuroses or drug addictions or you know whatever your
00:01:59.480preferred biographical mode I think all of which have some merit or his genius right like for his
00:02:04.760boosters. Genius, sure, sure. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. Both critics and fans tend to focus
00:02:11.640on his personal qualities, which is understandable. And I think there is some explanatory power in
00:02:17.000understanding those qualities. But our interests really lay elsewhere, which is trying to excavate
00:02:22.940the political economy of what we describe as Muskism, which is a broader set of themes that
00:02:31.100one can extrapolate from Musk's own biography, from his business ventures and then his entrance
00:02:39.080into a kind of strange ideological world of the cyborg far-right, let's say. So that's our effort
00:02:46.640to kind of map the territory. And just as a final remark, the implicit comparison here, which we
00:02:51.700discuss very briefly in the book but elaborate elsewhere, is to Fordism, where commentators of
00:02:57.080the last century looked at the life and work of the industrialist Henry Ford and in different ways
00:03:02.780extrapolated the social system from those ideas and practices. And our gambit, our experiment,
00:03:09.560let's say, was could we do something comparable with the life and work of Elon Musk?
00:03:15.260Yeah, I mean, the idea that a Model T held out a certain kind of promise and a certain kind of
00:03:20.340vision of what an American future was going to look like and that the Cybertruck, in its own
00:03:25.680bizarre way, embodies something quite similar. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me. This is
00:03:30.800a projection of a vision into political economy. There's something about what people want,
00:03:36.100how people consume, how space is organized that's inherent in the way this guy sells his products,
00:03:43.120right? I'm glad you bring up the sort of elephant in the room of Musk's personal characteristics,
00:03:50.080right? Because when I first heard about the concept for this book and I started reading it,
00:03:53.800I was like, well, this is kind of intention because this guy is very clearly sort of driven by Id, right?
00:04:01.400He doesn't seem to be exactly a progenitor of a coherent worldview.
00:04:10.620And does that seem like a fair assessment to say that what you guys are trying to do is really describe the historical conditions that created this figure
00:04:19.840more than trying to sort of posit him as the author of this grand scheme.
00:04:25.200Yeah, I think it's a very fair way to understand him as a historical actor.
00:04:29.580I mean, this is one of many things that make him comparable to Trump,
00:04:33.400which is that he's really a creature of impulse and instinct,
00:04:36.800doesn't appear to follow a premeditated course,
00:04:40.400is not a kind of self-consciously author of a system,
00:04:43.380but clearly has a talent for sensing opportunity at different historical junctures and pursuing it
00:04:52.180quite constructively and quite creatively even. It's interesting you made reference to the idea
00:04:57.980of the id because, you know, psychoanalysis is not the discourse in which this book is written,
00:05:03.400but one of the insights of psychoanalysis, of course, is that the meaning of one's actions
00:05:08.600are not always, in fact, rarely evident to the actor. And I think that was one of the principles
00:05:17.840that we use to write this book, which is that Musk's self-accounting of his own behavior,
00:05:24.540which we've seen documented extensively, for instance, in the Walter Isaacson authorized
00:05:29.480biography, which is mostly kind of Musk on Musk, has a value for that reason. But
00:05:34.820so much of the reporting on Musk in both book length and newspaper and magazine form has
00:05:43.540presented Musk in his own words. He's generally allowed to speak for himself and too often taken
00:05:49.600at face value. So for us, the choice to scan his long career for certain themes and through lines
00:05:59.380didn't represent an effort to impute a kind of coherence to him necessarily,
00:06:06.340and certainly not the notion that he himself is actively pursuing in a conscious way
00:06:12.700an intellectual, political, economic, social project that could be defined in traditionally intellectual terms,
00:06:21.300but rather that when you kind of zoom out and think about his life and work as a whole,
00:06:29.380There is a certain approximate picture that emerges that crucially, and this is, I think, the part that really matters to us, helps us understand how we got here.
00:06:41.300I mean, ultimately, our interest in Musk is much less in the man himself than in using him as an optic through which to understand the last 50 years of global capitalism, and in particular, the kind of convergence of multiple crises that we find ourselves in in this very present moment.
00:06:59.820Yeah. So what are the through lines? You've mentioned that they're among the most documented people on the planet. Thanks to Twitter, we get to find out what they think at 3 a.m. while on the shitter, right? Like they're overexposed, if anything. And in some way, there's real value not in transcribing whatever they say, but to zoom out as much as you can. Sort of think like, what's the gestalt of what I'm looking at here? What are the impulses, Maura is saying, that seem to drive this person? What are these through lines of muskism? What are its defining features?
00:07:28.240But we enumerate a number of them throughout the book, and we read them from different passages of Musk's own biography.
00:07:36.620So despite all of my protestation that this isn't a biography, we take a depersonalized approach, inevitably the material of Muskism, where we find it, is in the life of Musk himself.
00:07:47.960So we trace Musk through formative periods of his entrepreneurial career.
00:07:54.340And an early one that emerges, and the one that has probably surfaced most frequently in our discussions about the book, is what we call state symbiosis.
00:08:03.700Which is a particular relation of Musk to the state, which we think does have broader purchase for much of Silicon Valley as a whole, but also says something specifically about the configuration of state industry power we find ourselves in in 2026.
00:08:19.160And briefly, state symbiosis is simply the idea that in contrast to the libertarian imagination, often associated with a figure like Peter Thiel, in which the state is something to exit, to secede from, Musk and Muskism more broadly sees the state as something that can be instrumentalized as a source of power and profit.
00:08:42.220And therefore, and Musk has been very consistent in doing this across his ventures from the 1990s onwards, therefore the goal is not to exit the state, but to merge with the state, to achieve a kind of state symbiosis whereby the corporation can become deeply embedded into the machinery of state power and in fact become indispensable for the exercise of state sovereignty.
00:09:09.280Before we move on, I might want to drill down a little more on this concept of state symbiosis. For those of us who might not be as familiar with the extent of Elon Musk's regime of federal contracts, let's talk a little bit about the kind of services that he is providing for the state and the ways that the U.S. government in particular have become really dependent on Musk ventures.
00:09:34.780Well, I'd say the venture where this is most evident would be SpaceX. So SpaceX, it's founded in 2002, and really its early years becomes a government contractor during the first stage of the global war on terror,
00:09:52.060Where there is a new need for satellites in the sky to help with Donald Rumsfeld's vision of a more agile, more networked military that relies on globally distributed special operations teams that would be fighting terrorists all over the world.
00:10:13.500in order to fulfill this mandate, a new kind of technological breakthrough is required, which is
00:10:20.240that the Defense Department wants to find cheaper ways to put satellites into the sky. And SpaceX
00:10:26.980is one of a number of different companies, but is, of course, by far, that emerges as the most
00:10:32.600successful, who promise to bring the cost of putting mass into orbit down through a series of
00:10:41.240innovations. And over the course of 20 years, SpaceX does indeed reduce the cost of putting
00:10:48.160things into space by more than 90%. It's kind of extraordinary transformation that really has
00:10:53.500opened up low Earth orbit in particular as a new economic zone and is responsible for things like
00:11:00.440Starlink, but also the more rapid militarization of space. That is, I think, a classic case of
00:11:06.680state symbiosis where SpaceX is not, and I think this is an important corrective to those of us
00:11:12.900who are rightly critics of Musk, but this is not simply a case of parasitism or what is often
00:11:19.840described as crony capitalism. This is not just a matter of SpaceX leeching resources off the state.
00:11:25.860There's actually something that is being gained by government officials here, which is to say
00:11:32.680the Pentagon and the intelligence communities are able to put satellites into space much faster
00:11:39.280and more affordably than they were before, and that that expanded technological ability
00:11:46.180enhances state sovereignty, understood in a particular way. So this takes us some distance
00:11:52.100from a kind of neoliberal thinking about the state being hollowed out or state sovereignty
00:11:57.960being diminished. Rather, we think of Muskism often as the increase of state capacity through
00:12:05.580private means. And SpaceX, I think, is quite a vivid illustration of that.
00:12:11.160Yeah, in the book, you write that, quote, Musk does not sell cars, rocket or satellites.
00:12:16.360He sells the fantasy that in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals
00:12:20.500can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. And I think in that
00:12:25.940sentence, that's doing the heavy lifting, right? Both individuals and states can do this. Like,
00:12:30.780it's individual sovereignty in the sense of Bataille, and it's state sovereignty in the sense
00:12:34.960of Schmidt. Precisely. And that's an important point, Adrian, which is that sovereignty,
00:12:40.340which is a really important concept for muskism that we spend a lot of time expanding upon in
00:12:45.780the book, can be scaled up or down. It can be understood at the scale of the nation-state,
00:12:50.080which is a very important domain for muskism. But it can also be understood at the level of the
00:12:55.640individual household and that the technologies that must provisions can be used to fortify
00:13:02.260the household, to harden the walls of the home, analogous to how his technologies can be used to
00:13:08.740harden the borders of the nation. And in particular, this is usually framed in a kind of apocalyptic
00:13:16.500prepper idiom. So the notion that you have your cyber truck, which is a vehicle that's evidently
00:13:22.980designed, at least in some kind of science fiction fantasy way, to enable you to drive through
00:13:29.680masses of hungry rioters or whatever reactionary imagination being activated here in a kind of
00:13:36.020disaster zone. And further, you will be, and this is a vision that I'm not just spinning out,
00:13:42.000is actually something that Musk has spoken about in public, but that your home can be entirely
00:13:48.180independent of the grid through the use of Tesla batteries, Tesla solar panels, and of course,
00:13:56.580a Starlink receiver. So that even if all the critical infrastructure goes down, even if there's
00:14:01.340a climate disaster, even if there's a hurricane or there's a revolution, you'll still have
00:14:10.620Yeah. Ben, I wanted to talk to you about this concept of fortress capitalism because something
00:14:14.680I found really useful for me in your book was the way you did sort of make a hinge a little bit
00:14:21.560with Musk's biography and talking about the origins of this understanding of production and
00:14:27.200consumption in apartheid South Africa, late apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up and
00:14:32.540where there was a sense of a besieged consumer who was maybe both integrated with, but to some
00:14:41.280degree dependent of the state, right? This kind of like networked collection of fortresses of the
00:14:47.840white population out in the suburbs where he grew up. Could you tell me a little bit more about how
00:14:52.660you and Slobodian understood South Africa as sort of a model? Yeah, so South Africa is an interesting
00:14:57.960case because folks know, of course, that apartheid South Africa was quite officially a white
00:15:04.240supremacist state. But what's less remembered today was the extent to which the leaders of
00:15:09.900the apartheid regime saw themselves as futurists who wanted to pursue a degree of
00:15:17.160both economic and technological self-sufficiency. So there's a real effort to embrace advanced
00:15:24.620technology and to build up the independent industrial capacities of the state so as to
00:15:31.160fortify the regime from the enemies that it correctly perceived to be surrounding it,
00:15:36.960both in the decolonizing countries that surrounded the Republic of South Africa,
00:15:41.680but of course also from the majority Black population whose labor was being exploited
00:15:45.820and was being segregated into townships.
00:15:49.220So this manifests in a variety of ways.1.00
00:15:51.560I mean, the South Africans actually build a nuclear program
00:15:55.200and construct a working atomic bomb with help from both American and Israeli scientists by the early 1980s.
00:16:01.960But they also obtain licenses from Ford and Datsun to build up their own auto sector.
00:16:10.280South Africa today is still the biggest auto sector in sub-Saharan Africa.
00:16:15.720Another case where this is visible is in the use of IBM mainframes, an advanced technology of the time, to implement the racial classification system of apartheid.
00:16:29.020Well, the reason that we found this interesting and resonant with Musk's later career is not just the Musk turned to the far right in the early 2020s, and many observers have drawn the comparison there to the legacy of apartheid South Africa.
00:16:45.020But even before you get there, Musk's hallmark, I would say, the kind of core characteristic that distinguishes Musk as an industrialist from SpaceX onwards onto Tesla and his other ventures is his preference for vertical integration, his interest in shortening supply chains, his interest in a model of, you know, we talk about South Africa in terms of fortress futurism.
00:17:11.940For Musk, factory is understood as a fortified enclave. The goal is resilience, the goal is control. And if listeners know anything about supply chain capitalism of the sort that emerges after the 1970s and really reaches its climax in the 1990s and 2000s,
00:17:35.960the sort of thing that Musk is doing at the time really cuts against the grain of conventional
00:17:41.620wisdom. This is a moment when capitalists like Tim Cook at Apple are constructing these very
00:17:46.600elaborate global supply chains to distribute production widely across the globe. That's not
00:17:51.960what Musk does. Musk wants to concentrate production. So we can't look inside his mind
00:17:57.420and ascertain specifically and with total certainty why. But if you put that somewhat
00:18:05.700counterintuitive industrial philosophy, counterintuitive at the time, not anymore,
00:18:11.180alongside the experience of South Africa, there are certain parallels that emerge that are quite
00:18:16.440interesting. Yeah, he seems really kind of like allergic to dependence on outside suppliers,
00:18:23.860Right. Like when I was growing up, the word was offshoring.
00:18:27.060Right. We were told all the time that manufacturing was being diversified so that, you know, one consumer object would have been produced by a dozen or two dozen firms.
00:18:37.680And Musk is really sort of doing the opposite, sort of consolidating all of the production in-house as much as he can.
00:18:46.360I think he is comparing himself to Henry Ford, where he was like, well, that guy mined the ore and we're not that crazy, you know.
00:18:51.600But he is doing kind of everything but trying to sort of integrate and own all of the different factors of production that go into the making of his rockets, of his cars.
00:19:03.000It occurs to me that, like, on the one hand, this seems like he's also taking on all the risk.
00:19:09.060But it's a sort of like masculine form of this illusion of independence.
00:19:15.500And we are a gender podcast, so I might try to steer it a little bit here towards our preferred, most comfortable ground.
00:19:22.600But I hope I'm not like crazy and making the analogy of Musk's on-shoring and sort of vertical integration with things like Tesla to what he's doing with his, you know, pro-natalist harem in Austin.0.76
00:19:35.460I was like, oh, this is vertical integration for the production of white babies, right?0.99
00:19:38.580He's sort of buying up a lot of producers, by which I mean women, and putting them all in one location where he can oversee them and just pumping out as many of these white children as possible.0.99
00:19:50.480And it sounds vulgar, but this is a pretty vulgar mind.0.97
00:19:54.200Yeah, and you could trace that also back to apartheid South Africa.0.99
00:19:57.460I mean, there are, in fact, also resonances there between the, let's say, racialized gender politics of apartheid South Africa, the importance of white women as the cradle of white civilization, and protecting white fertility against the specter of uncontrolled Black reproduction.0.86
00:20:15.960I mean, these are, at this point, quite regular themes of Musk's own X timeline.0.88
00:20:21.560And they've kind of resurfaced quite directly and dramatically. But certainly, I think there are also resonances with the form of masculinity that was being taught in the schools that Musk attended in Pretoria.
00:20:37.420that kind of emphasis on domination and mastery is certainly something that stuck with him and
00:20:46.600this is a place where isaacson is quite useful i mean there have been a lot of criticisms of that
00:20:51.960book but i think it's it's quite illuminating on the gender question in particular when i did a
00:20:58.060review of that book a few years ago at this point that was really what i centered my piece on because
00:21:04.880it just comes across so strongly. I think if you took a biographical approach to Musk,
00:21:10.900gender would probably be the category that you'd spend the most time with, that had the most
00:21:16.100explanatory power. It strikes me that the emphasis on the home as sort of being reinvested with
00:21:23.860sovereignty, this is something where Musk actually activates an older line of thinking in Silicon
00:21:28.740Valley, right? We had Becca Lewis on talking about George Gilder, who made the same kind of promise
00:21:33.660in the late 80s, early 90s saying like,
00:21:36.320well, digital technologies will sort of allow a reinvestment
00:23:43.260And it's also, I think, to be fair, not one that there's any evidence that he had any real investment in as a young man.
00:23:51.500Despite his later turn to the far right, his earlier statements on apartheid were actually quite critical. At one point, he says, I left South Africa because I didn't want to join a fascist army. So at that point, he doesn't appear to have any sympathies with apartheid as a system.
00:24:10.640His interests lay elsewhere. He wants to join the world of high technology. He wants to become an entrepreneur. And he does so in the 1990s, and in fact, the perfect time in 1995, which is when the dot-com boom is blasting off.
00:24:25.580that summer. There is the Netscape IPO, which is commonly seen as the starting gun of the boom.
00:24:32.300And all sorts of young men in particular are flooding into Silicon Valley with ideas for
00:24:38.380internet companies. Musk starts one with his brother Kimball and a friend of theirs,
00:24:43.980which is devoted to developing sort of online city guides, something maybe sort of comparable
00:24:51.700to Google Maps today. And in order to achieve this, kind of pulls in GPS data, merges it with
00:25:00.500a local directory of businesses, and puts together a successful company, which they managed to sell
00:25:07.800to Compaq, the computer manufacturer that I'm old enough to remember, but maybe many listeners do
00:25:13.920not, at the end of the 1990s. Am I correct in remembering that that GPS data was created and
00:25:20.160basically made publicly available by the military, right? So there's this kind of like almost
00:25:23.640cyclical avenue of money, like the value of this taxpayer funded military technology going into
00:25:31.080these Silicon Valley private firms who then in turn contract backed with the government in this
00:25:37.000kind of expanding cycle. Yeah, that's correct. I mean, if we want to return to the theme of
00:25:41.660state symbiosis, that's another frame through which to see Zip2, which is the name of the
00:25:48.000first company that Musk founds in Silicon Valley, which is that it is reliant on two publicly funded
00:25:54.340infrastructures. The first, of course, is the internet, which emerges as a technology created
00:26:00.200by Defense Department financed researchers initially in the late 1970s, but in the spring
00:26:06.240of 1995 is finally turned over to full private control, which lays the groundwork for the dot-com
00:26:13.680boom that arises later that year. But also, as you point out more, the GPS constellation,
00:26:20.420which had also been a project of the U.S. military, actually remains under military control,
00:26:25.980unlike the internet, but becomes fully operational that same year in 1995. And
00:26:31.360Musk is able to obtain GPS data from a private provider who in turn obtains it from the U.S.
00:26:39.260military, but he does so free of cost because he puts together an agreement that says, so long as
00:26:45.000we're not making a profit, we won't pay any royalties to you. And in classic Silicon Valley
00:26:50.680fashion, they never make a profit, but they managed to sell to Compaq for a fair bit of
00:26:57.100money. And that's his first success as an entrepreneur. He rolls it into another firm,
00:27:02.720thefirstx.com. Thefirstx.com, which is financial services of various sort through the web,
00:27:12.460sort of ahead of its time, but becomes better known through its merger with a company that
00:27:17.480at that point is called Confinity, later to become PayPal. And this is his first encounter
00:27:24.820with Teal and the other members of what will later be described as the PayPal mafia. But this
00:27:30.860is also a moment where Musk becomes truly rich for the first time, because in the early 2000s,
00:27:36.760eBay purchases PayPal, and that gives Musk the money that he needs to go on and start SpaceX in
00:27:45.3802002. I did want to ask about the path to the PayPal mafia, which you've just laid out, which
00:27:51.560is partly about a bunch of mergers. It's partly about basically eBay buying up everyone and just
00:27:56.920kind of mashing them together into one company.
00:27:59.140But I did want to ask about sort of Musk
00:28:02.100and these other Silicon Valley creeps,
00:32:49.860you can see that whether or not this is consciously pursued
00:32:54.600Musk's online persona and his increasing absorption into Twitter in particular from the mid-2010s onward is clearly a major driver of the growth of his financial fortune.
00:33:10.580that as he becomes the richest man in the world in the early 2020s, as Tesla becomes
00:33:18.360the most valuable automaker in the world, that this coincides with Musk's obsession
00:33:26.340with tweeting. And in our view, this has to be understood together. It's not necessarily a
00:33:34.620question of Musk losing his mind, even necessarily Musk becoming addicted to social media. But
00:33:41.580thinking about how Musk is able to master the attention economy such that he can use memes to
00:33:51.180move markets. And that occurs, I think, in these interactions with dweebs, like in these interactions
00:33:58.440with reply guys, but that the main audience for that, in our view, is less those low follower
00:34:06.000count individuals and more the global investor class, that that's really who this is for.
00:34:12.380And when you take that frame, you can see that there's been a series of very specific episodes
00:34:20.180where Musk has experimented, kind of flexed his ability to do asset price inflation through
00:34:30.180posting, posting about Dogecoin, Dogecoin going up, putting Bitcoin in his bio, Bitcoin going up,
00:34:38.400joking, not joking about taking Tesla private and Tesla going up. He has developed this technique
00:34:46.280of what we call attention alchemy, where just as a company like Facebook has engineered this
00:34:52.980elaborate, data-fied apparatus for converting attention into money, he's managed to do the
00:34:59.140same at the scale of a single individual. And you can't understand the valuation of his publicly
00:35:04.460traded firms without that persona. Right. Another thing he shares with Trump,
00:35:09.900the kind of pump and dump economy that's focused on a charismatic leader.
00:35:14.820You've pointed out that there's a kind of almost cybernetic or cyborg kind of decision making in his fusing with the Twittersphere.
00:35:22.580And you point out in your discussion of the woke mind virus, quote unquote, that this is kind of a figure for the uncontrollability of our modern cyborg selves.
00:35:31.920And that's sort of the flip side of the very coin of what he celebrates Twitter for, right?
00:35:36.680You say, when we fuse with our machines, it is hard to predict where such fusions might lead.
00:35:41.280And that's something that I find very, very fascinating.
00:35:44.340There are certain versions of this he celebrates, and then there are others he's terrified of.
00:35:48.120But it's a little hard to tell how he distinguishes one from the other.
00:35:52.920So this is where we make use of Donna Haraway's work, and in particular her famous Cyborg Manifesto of the 1980s.
00:36:00.080And Haraway, in that incredible text, observes that developments in information technology and biotechnology are making new kinds of embodiment possible, new kinds of identity possible, and potentially new kinds of collective political practice possible.
00:36:19.060And she identifies progressive possibilities.
00:36:24.000There are no guarantees for those progressive possibilities.
00:36:27.520Importantly, she also cautions that these same technologies can be used for oppressive purposes.
00:36:34.060But the reason Quinn and I found that such an important text for understanding what we think of as Musk's cyborg turn is that it helps articulate an anxiety that Musk and I suspect others in the Silicon Valley leadership class feel about the technologies that they have helped create.
00:36:56.060And this is an anxiety that becomes, I think, very visible in the early 2020s and in particular with the rise of the new tech right that consolidates around Trump in 2024, which is the possibility that the technologies of, let's say, smartphones and social media, which the Valley had celebrated and really the entire country had celebrated as instruments of liberation, of openness, of democracy, of personal empowerment and so forth.
00:37:26.060Could be used by various social movements to undermine traditional social hierarchies, to undermine traditional understandings of gender and sexuality, to challenge class structures, and so forth.
00:37:42.860And this is not a kind of abstract threat. If you think about the role that social media and smartphones played in the extraordinary upsurge of social movement activity since Occupy Wall Street, which we could trace through Black Lives Matter and Me Too and all of the various expressions of what we could call the new American left.
00:38:02.280We're now, I think, in 2026 at a stage in our development where we are thinking a lot about the shortcomings of Internet-facilitated politics, and rightly so.
00:38:11.580But we did have Twitter revolutions in this country, just as there were Twitter revolutions in the Middle East for the Arab Spring or in Spain or the movement of the squares and so forth.
00:38:22.860And that, for Musk in particular, becomes a very significant problem by the early 2020s.
00:38:30.600and this is how we understand his notorious phrase, the woke mind virus. This is a phrase
00:38:37.580that more than any other is associated with Musk's turn to the right in 2021, 2022. And it's often
00:38:43.340kind of laughed off as something very strange or perhaps to be understood metaphorically.
00:38:50.500Quinn and I insist that we take it literally.
00:38:54.340Musk really believes that wokeness, which is a very difficult term to define,
00:38:58.920But we could kind of gloss as any movements that challenge traditional hierarchies of one kind or another have infected the technologies of networks such that they're able to reprogram people to behave in certain ways.
00:39:17.720And therefore, the best thing that someone like Musk can do, who is keen to protect and strengthen those traditional social hierarchies, is to take control of those technologies and transform them into instruments of conserving the existing arrangements of power in society, a term that we use to describe this development as cyborg conservatism.
00:39:42.860That seems exactly right. The woke mind virus is the theory of social contagion, but cyberneticized to some extent, right? It's not an accident that it seems to have occurred to him right as his daughter comes out as his daughter, right?
00:39:57.140The question I would ask in closing is to what extent we can then still call Elon Musk a futurist, right?
00:40:03.500When you think about this as cyborg conservatism, the big distinction here seems to be Neuralink makes you even more you,
00:40:09.080while the woke mind virus, which is transmitted via social media, can make Vivian Wilson break with you if you're Elon Musk.
00:40:16.120So is a futurism that's all about the future repeating and intensifying the hierarchies and value judgments of the past really about the future?
00:40:25.320Is it not just sort of nostalgia with extra steps?
00:40:30.540I mean, there have been, of course, efforts to understand the particular styles of futurism that have been associated with reactionary politics, including capital F futurism.
00:40:41.120Which famously was proto-fascist and then formerly fascist.
00:40:44.900And we have been inspired by those efforts. Jeffrey Herff has the term reactionary modernism, which is one way of trying to understand this mix of old and new. But I also wonder if that's not the wrong framing because, you know, there's nothing necessarily progressive about the future full stop. And I think in 2026, we should probably be able to appreciate that fact.
00:41:11.060I'm not sure the future is a category that holds a lot of promise, frankly, for most people, which is a kind of a demoralizing fact. But increasingly, when we've explored this category of the future of futurism, it seems that the only folks who are talking about it are people like Musk.
00:41:31.000that the kind of reactionary future has become the horizon of the future, period,
00:41:37.460and that for everyone else, there's a certain kind of futurelessness.
00:41:42.420You know, you see this particularly in younger people,
00:41:44.060which, you know, the two of you with the connection to a university
00:41:46.960probably have more exposure to than I do.
00:41:49.280But that's kind of what strikes me so strongly.
00:41:51.860So, I don't know, that's a kind of somewhat depressing mishmash of thoughts.
00:41:58.040This podcast is very in touch with the youths, it's true.
00:42:01.000I think I hear something in that statement, Ben, that really rings true. It feels like, you know, OK, the liberal democratic forum has sort of outlived its conditions of possibility. And there's kind of one set of potential successor models that are all being offered by the right. And the left is sort of interested in, I don't know, like fighting each other on Twitter or what's left of them anyway.
00:42:25.180And that is why we have our listeners who surely will save us all.
00:42:31.200So no pressure, darling listener, but it's all on you.
00:42:34.940But I do want to thank you, Ben, for coming and talking about this extraordinary book
00:42:40.040and taking time out of what sounds like a very busy day of work and child care.