South African Roots and Future Visions

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