- 4 minutes ago
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:23Hello everyone. Welcome to Haurici YouTube channel. This is Erman Çete.
00:29Today we are going to talk about the famous person Elon Musk and how he creates the world in his
00:41own image.
00:43Today we are hosting Ben Tarnoff. Ben is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts
00:50and he is the author of Internet for the People and the co-author of Moschism.
00:58He wrote the book. Now we are going to talk about it with Queen Slobodian. Welcome Ben.
01:05Hi, thanks so much for having me.
01:07Yeah, thank you for joining us. So let me first about the term Moschism because your book's title is Moschism
01:16and you mentioned Henry Ford and Fordism as almost a guiding principle for the 20th century.
01:22And now you say that Moschism offers a possible operating system for the 21st.
01:28Could you elaborate on this point a little bit? Why do you think, for example,
01:33Bezosism or Zuckerbergism is not suitable but Moschism is?
01:38Yeah, of course. Well, when my co-author and I sat down to think about possibly writing this book,
01:47our point of departure was the concept of Fordism, which is an idea developed by a number of different theorists
01:54of the 20th century.
01:56Antonio Gramsci is one famous example, but there are a number of others as well.
02:01And what these theorists did was that they looked at the life and the work of the famous American industrialist
02:07Henry Ford
02:08and they attempted to infer or extrapolate a broader social system from his ideas and practices.
02:15So they asked not simply why did Ford become Ford, but more broadly what kind of world is necessary for
02:28the production practices,
02:30for the factories of Henry Ford to be possible.
02:36And Ford was at the time taken to be a representative capitalist, was someone who embodied capitalism at a particular
02:49point in time in the 20th century.
02:51And Fordism came to be understood by many observers and social scientists as describing industrial capitalism,
03:01particularly in the West during the middle of the 20th century, and it's broadly defined as a mix of mass
03:07production.
03:08So you have the technologies and the techniques of producing commodities at scale with mass consumption.
03:16You also have social institutions that are able to offer a relatively high industrial wage and stabilize society around a
03:25kind of vision of a mass consumer society.
03:29Yeah.
03:30Now, when you look at Musk, I think it's fair to say that Musk also personifies or embodies where capitalism
03:39is at our particular point in history
03:42in ways that are quite comparable to the ways Henry Ford did.
03:47Incidentally, the two men have a lot of personal similarities.
03:50But even beyond that, they both seem to serve as avatars for capitalism in a particular era.
03:58So my co-author and I wanted to ask, well, if we looked at the ideas and practices of Elon
04:04Musk,
04:05how he organizes his factories, how he organizes his businesses, how he accumulates as a capitalist,
04:13could we zoom out and extrapolate a broader social system, an operating system for the world, if you like, from
04:22those practices and call it Muskism?
04:26You also asked at the end of your question, a very interesting one, which is why Musk?
04:32Why Muskism and not Tealism or Bezosism?
04:36Yeah.
04:37And, you know, I think here we feel quite strongly that Musk is both more powerful than those other figures.
04:47I mean, he is the richest man on Earth by quite a wide margin, actually.
04:51But also his empire spans so many very important sectors from AI to space to the provision of internet service
05:04to automobiles to brain-computer interfaces and so forth,
05:10that there's a breadth there that the other figures that are often cited don't have.
05:17There's a geopolitical influence that that gives him that the other figures don't have.
05:22But finally, and this I think brings us back to Fordism, he has a pedagogical value that the others don't
05:31have,
05:31that looking through the lens of Musk, you can learn something about how capitalism operates in the 2020s
05:39and how this phase of capitalism came to be that you can't really do looking through the lens of a
05:48Peter Thiel or a Jeff Bezos.
05:52So, yeah, even the, for this utopia, like, you know, for this city, Fordlandia or something like that.
06:01Yeah.
06:01Yeah, it's also resembles the Musk's, you know, visionary or imaginative cities like Tesla or the other.
06:14And, but I think you don't think that Muskism is a, you know, appendix or the continuity with Fordism or
06:25post-Fordism.
06:25It's a, you know, unique and a new movement or ideology or whatever you say it.
06:38Because you say in the book, Musk built his empire by fusing with the state.
06:44Lots of people think that because of the Doge process, Musk hates any state, you know.
06:52The story you tell us depicts a Musk portrait who has become rich with the huge help of the US
06:59state.
06:59You give the example of the GPS, for example.
07:04The privatization of the internet and the dot-com bubble were the most important part of Musk's journey, it seems.
07:11So, what do you, what can you say about the state and capital merge with respect to Muskism?
07:20Well, this is an important point.
07:22And because we've been talking about Fordism, maybe the best way into this point is to talk about what comes
07:29after Fordism.
07:30So, social scientists generally date the end of Fordism to the 1970s.
07:35It's, of course, disputed, but that's when this social compact around mass production plus mass consumption is coming to an
07:45end in the West due to a number of factors.
07:49And what takes its place is generally understood to be post-Fordism.
07:55And post-Fordism has a number of different characteristics.
07:58It's also sometimes described as the neoliberal era, capitalism since the 1970s.
08:03But one of the core signatures of the post-Fordism period is understood to be a new kind of state,
08:12a shrinking state, a state that is diminishing its capacity, diminishing its sovereignty, privatizing its functions, binding itself into international
08:24trade agreements that prevents it from operating in certain spheres, particularly regards to social rights.
08:32And that was the kind of state that those of us on the left really kind of took for granted,
08:39that this was the kind of neoliberal state.
08:42What Musk shows us, and this is, again, his pedagogical value, is that a different kind of state has been
08:51emerging and I think has now really materialized quite vividly in the West, and particularly in the United States, which
09:01is not really a state that is diminishing its sovereignty, not a state that is shrinking or privatizing exactly.
09:10But something stranger is going on, which is, this is a state that is fusing symbiotically with the private sector.
09:17And Musk has been an agent of this throughout his career.
09:20He is not and has never been a libertarian.
09:24He has, on the contrary, always instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit.
09:31And in different ways, he's derived different advantages from the state, but above all, as a client and a customer.
09:39And you see this most dramatically in the case of SpaceX, which really emerges first in the early 2000s as
09:46a government contractor during the war on terror.
09:50Yeah, you coined the term as state symbiosis, I guess.
09:55Exactly, exactly.
09:57So here it's not about shrinking the state as in the neoliberal imagination, but rather it is about increasing state
10:07capacity through private means.
10:09So this symbiotic integration of public and private, which Musk really embodies throughout his career, but especially in the case
10:19of SpaceX.
10:20It's important that we understand it not as the relationship of parasitism or what some people would call crony capitalism,
10:29because Musk does, of course, gain from this interaction.
10:34He builds very large and powerful businesses from this fusion with the state.
10:40But importantly, the state also gains something from this interaction.
10:44So if you are the Pentagon or if you are one of the American intelligence services, you through SpaceX have
10:52the capacity to put satellites into space more cheaply than ever before.
10:58And that arguably enhances sovereignty and enhances state capacity understood in a particular domain.
11:06It's not about shrinking the state so much as augmenting it through the means of private service provision.
11:16I think recently Pentagon also put Musk in an advising position for future wars.
11:24I think they built departments in Pentagon.
11:30Yeah, it is also important for the future of Muskism, I guess, because the state and private merging is the
11:40state symbiosis.
11:42I think it's will be accelerate.
11:45It seems because of the, you know, the war mongering in the Western world is gaining, gaining a pace.
11:54Yes.
11:56So it seems that what you mentioned, state is also gaining something from the private and also Elon Musk.
12:06So it seems that Musk is one of the first people who prepared the United States for future wars.
12:16Yes.
12:17So there's a new initiative called Project Meridian that Musk and another important figure in so-called defense tech sector
12:27Palmer Luckey, who runs Anduril, is joining.
12:31But this is really one of several instances in which Musk has been integrated into the Defense Department, now renamed
12:40the Department of War.
12:42And he was doing this again before it was cool.
12:47I mean, there's now this new generation of defense tech entrepreneurs, particularly in Southern California, who are, like Anduril, building
12:55drones, building kind of newer, more agile, software driven machines that are thought to be more adaptable to the future
13:04of war and more adaptable to the type of conditions seen, for instance, in the Ukrainian conflict.
13:09But Musk has been doing military contracting for decades at this point.
13:17So he is, if you like, the kind of old seasoned veteran of this kind of interaction and has helped
13:25open up this entire sector to startups who can compete with the legacy so-called defense primes like Lockheed and
13:36Northrop Grumman,
13:37who since, you know, who since, you know, the Cold War, if not before, have dominated the business of war.
13:44Yeah.
13:45Yeah.
13:46And also fabulism, financial fabulism is the term you use for Musk's ventures, you know, to protect and grow his
13:54personal wealth.
13:55Musk has to paint a rosy picture of the future of his companies.
14:01You say in the book, I think the bubble needs to stay inflated.
14:06But at some point, Musk has become more and more depressed about the future of mankind, especially the so-called
14:13Western civilization.
14:15So how can both be possible?
14:19Well, it's worth taking them one at a time.
14:23I think, you know, what we describe as financial fabulism is Musk's talent in telling stories about the future in
14:32order to unlock capital from investors that he needs to fund his ventures.
14:39And this is something that Musk is very skilled at throughout his career in the 1990s Silicon Valley dot com
14:46boom when he is just starting out as an entrepreneur.
14:49He's very good at telling stories about fantastical future that nonetheless feels plausible enough to investors that they're willing to
14:59give him money.
15:02Now, you're right, of course, that more recently, Musk's view of the future has shifted.
15:09He is still promising extraordinary things to his investors.
15:14If you look at, for instance, the SpaceX prospectus that they had to file with American regulators before going public
15:21on the stock exchange.
15:22He's still speaking in that science fiction mode, if you like, he's talking about data centers in space.
15:28He's talking about factories on the moon.
15:31He's talking about cities on Mars.
15:33This is still very much Musk's financial fabulist.
15:36And all indications are that the audience is still loving it.
15:40I mean, he's still able to raise money on the basis of his narrative techniques.
15:44But I would say a darker view of the future has entered the picture over the last decade or so.
15:53And this has much to do with two things.
15:57One is his view of artificial intelligence.
15:59And the second, which is distinct but related, intimately related, is his political turn toward the far right and his
16:08existential terror of what he describes as wokeness and how wokeness could, in fact, destroy human civilization.
16:17And that is a fear that is wrapped up with this fear of AI in ways we could discuss.
16:22But these twin threats have, I think, darkened his view of the future.
16:29Yeah.
16:30Yeah.
16:31When you talk about science fiction, that comes to my next question.
16:38Because I think cyborg and transhumanism also are also components of muskism.
16:43Because you mentioned a chapter of your book, I think, the chapter, the Japanese term mesh, I guess.
16:56Yeah.
16:58Also, Musk's experience in apartheid South Africa shaped his world view.
17:03You call this fortress futurism.
17:05His framework was an amalgam of self-sufficiency, segregation, technological and military superiority.
17:13The key concept is sovereignty, I guess.
17:16Why do all these lines converge on the idea of sovereignty, I think?
17:23Sovereignty is one of those words that means different things to different people.
17:26And, you know, when we've presented this book, political scientists have one way of seeing it, ordinary people have another
17:34way of seeing it.
17:35I think the most important thing to understand about how we use the term sovereignty and how it is being
17:41used within the framework that we call muskism,
17:45is that the assumption here is one of a hostile, unstable world that is filled with enemies, filled with undesirables
17:57that you have to protect yourself from.
18:01And this is a worldview that has much resonance with the worldview of apartheid South Africa.
18:05We talk about it in those terms as fortress futurism.
18:10The leadership of apartheid South Africa, where Musk was born and raised, thought of themselves correctly as embattled.
18:18They were surrounded by the black-led decolonizing states of Southern Africa.
18:23They actually go to war with them at one point.
18:25They also are facing a hostile black majority within the borders of their own nation that is organizing against apartheid,
18:33eventually successfully.
18:34So if you are faced with those threats from within and without, and you are the apartheid leadership class,
18:43what they in fact do is turn to high technology, turn to things like IBM mainframe to try to ensure
18:51the survival of their regime.
18:53They also pursue a degree of economic self-sufficiency.
18:57So they try to build out their own auto sector with the help of Ford and Dotson.
19:02They build up an industrial base that is not entirely self-sufficient, but is quite impressive relative to the scale
19:13of the country.
19:14So why does all of this matter for Musk and for Muskism?
19:19Well, if you think about the apartheid regime as pursuing degrees of technological and economic self-reliance in order to
19:30garrison their regime, their white supremacist rule from the enemies that it perceives everywhere,
19:40there's actually quite a lot of resonance with Musk's own entrepreneurial career.
19:46So when he starts to build cars and rockets at SpaceX and Tesla in the 2000s,
19:51he pursues what is called vertical integration, which is an effort to own as much of the supply chain as
19:58possible.
19:58Henry Ford, incidentally, was extreme in his pursuit of vertical integration.
20:05Henry Ford mined the ore, right?
20:08He actually was pulling stuff out of the ground, refining it all the way to the point of assembling the
20:15cars,
20:16all the way to the point of owning the showrooms where the cars were sold.
20:20That's a very extreme form of vertical integration.
20:22Musk never achieved quite that level, but he's tried to.
20:26He wants to try to build as much as possible himself rather than relying on external suppliers.
20:31And this is a view of the factory as an enclave, as a fortress.
20:37The emphasis is on resilience. It's on control.
20:41It is not, importantly, on global supply chains and the global circulation of commodities
20:48and a kind of view, very kind of 90s view of free market globalization as a frictionless space
20:55where everything is just flying around.
20:57That's not the Musk's view.
20:59And for our purposes, what's particularly interesting about this is how prescient this Musk's production model was.
21:07Because now, look at us, we're in 2026 and policymakers all over the world are now talking about deglobalization.
21:15They're talking about trying to reduce their reliance on global markets, whether global energy markets, global commodity markets.
21:23They're making investments in reshoring and friendshoring and more regionalized and localized production networks
21:30so that they don't have to rely too heavily on suppliers flung halfway across the world.
21:36So that new model, which has a lot to do with the deteriorating security situation in many parts of the
21:44world,
21:44a lot to do with this new geoeconomic mindset where economic matters are now seen as connected to national security
21:53matters
21:53in a way that they weren't before.
21:55All of that, those developments are really things that Musk himself prefigured,
22:02that he was kind of ahead of the curve in many of these domains.
22:07But it seems also Muskism seemed riddled with contradiction
22:11because Tesla also have some interest in China, but US-China relations became strained.
22:19And you mentioned that French shoring or the reduction of the dependence of the supply chains,
22:33the global supply chains, and those French shoring practices become more widespread.
22:37And also, you know, for example, Musk turned anti-war, but also how can he must oppose green capitalism?
22:51Because, you know, anti-war politics also try to, you know, depict themselves as climate denial, climate change denial.
23:01So it seems riddled with contradictions, I guess, Muskism.
23:07Yeah, I think, so there's a few contradictions you raised that are worth trying to unpack.
23:11I think the first is his relationship to globalization.
23:15And it's true, of course, that Musk builds a Tesla factory in Shanghai in 2019.
23:22He also builds one outside of Berlin and Brandenburg.
23:24He at one point says that he wants to build a gigafactory, which is his term for Tesla factories, on
23:32every continent on Earth.
23:35And this is an interesting point because when we think about Musk as an agent and a beneficiary of deglobalization,
23:44it's important to understand that at least at that stage of his career, he's selling deglobalization to all sides.
23:53He's selling to the Chinese, to the Europeans, to the Americans, to a number of other people the capacity to
24:01improve their energy sovereignty,
24:06what we describe as electric autonomy, the ability to use investments in renewables to reduce one's reliance on global oil
24:16markets,
24:17which is something the Chinese have been doing for decades.
24:20But now a number of countries are trying to do very quickly because of the war on Iran and the
24:27effect that that has had on oil prices.
24:29So now you see, particularly in Southeast Asia, this rush to renewables because policymakers and individual households are realizing that
24:38having that dependency on global oil markets is, in fact, very, very dangerous.
24:46So what Musk is doing is selling different countries, different national projects, a kind of toolkit.
24:54He's saying we're going to just drop this Tesla module down in your country, and this is going to accelerate
25:01your efforts to reduce your reliance on external markets by building up your renewable capacity, whether the Germans, the Chinese
25:12or so forth.
25:13Now, so far, so good. The problem, however, is when his affiliation with Trump becomes so close, particularly in the
25:222024 presidential cycle, he becomes politicized in a new way.
25:28And that becomes a problem for him because he can no longer present himself as a neutral salesman of this
25:36toolkit.
25:36So now if you're the Chinese, if you're the Germans, you might think twice about letting someone who is so
25:45closely aligned with Trump, so closely aligned with the MAGA coalition into your country as a provisioner of high technology.
25:54I think this is one of many respects in which his politicization toward the right has harmed him financially. It
26:04hasn't always helped him. I think there have been aspects in which his interests have been advanced by the alliance
26:09with Trump in ways you might expect, regulatory ones, getting more contracts.
26:15But there are other aspects, particularly around the world, other parts of the world, where his interests have not been
26:22advanced by this alliance. I think they've actually been hurt by them.
26:31I think you may have heard of the concept of patrimonial capitalism coined by Australian political theorist Melinda Cooper.
26:41It refers to a form of capitalist organization modeled after large family owned companies that are not publicly traded or
26:49even if they are, they remain under the control of their founders and that are averse to the regulation.
26:56One of the examples she gives is Elon Musk. He fits this definition perfectly, both in terms of consolidating supply
27:05chains around his own companies and his goal of keeping family wealth within his own lineage.
27:11You know, I once read somewhere that Musk has 14 children or something like that. Do you think that this
27:19type of patrimonial capital accumulation could also be an element of Muskism?
27:24I would say yes and no. I mean, there's an obvious link in the sense that his enterprises are highly
27:34centered on him personally, that there is a profound investment in him as an individual.
27:40You know, you see this in an evaluation of his companies. I mean, if he weren't in charge, these companies
27:48would be worth comparatively very little.
27:51I think where there are some interesting contrasts is that if we define patrimonial capitalism as privately held family enterprises,
28:04Musk is someone who has managed to combine, let's say, a high degree of personal control with integration in global
28:17financial markets.
28:18So both SpaceX and Tesla are publicly traded companies.
28:23They are both on indices that accelerate their purchase of their stock by pension funds around the world.
28:33So Henry Ford, to give another contrast here, was deeply suspicious of global financial markets.
28:42For him, it was mediated through his anti-Semitism.
28:45So for Ford, Wall Street was coded as Jewish and unproductive and predatory, whereas Ford saw himself as the embodiment
28:57of a productivist engineering mindset, people who build things.
29:01And he resisted going public or doesn't actually as a company go public until years after Henry Ford's own death.
29:12So this is a place where Musk is not exactly a family capitalist because so much of Musk's empire is
29:23predicated on his ability to summon billions of dollars out of thin air by speaking to the global investor class.
29:32He relies on the Norwegian oil fund, he relies on pension funds, on big institutional investors around the world.
29:40And because of the structure of SpaceX and Tesla, because they have what is very common in Silicon Valley, which
29:50is so-called dual class share structure, where Musk controls a majority of the so-called super voting shares, he
29:59can remain in charge.
30:02He can retain that model of kind of 19th century entrepreneurial capitalism of the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and people
30:11who were the captains of industry, but he can fuse that with financialization.
30:18And that means that there's vastly more money at his disposal than there would have been to previous eras of
30:27capitalists.
30:27And that's an important distinction, I think.
30:30Yeah, I think also you mentioned that Musk is trying to own infrastructures instead of territory.
30:40It's also another difference from the 20th century nation state and industrial capacity fuse, I guess.
30:52That's right.
30:53That's right.
30:53Yeah, we described that somewhere in the book as the notion of sovereignty becoming infrastructural before it is territorial.
31:00So relying on the type of technologies that Musk and his colleagues and competitors are providing.
31:10So again, this isn't just a story about Musk.
31:12This is also a story about companies like Palantir, Anduril, Anthropic.
31:17All of these companies provide technologies that the United States government, but also governments around the world increasingly rely upon
31:27to conduct what are core sovereign functions, conduct functions related to war making, to surveillance.
31:35These are a very small number of firms, and they are increasingly indispensable to the exercise of sovereignty.
31:50Yeah, because you mentioned the name of Peter Thiel.
31:56I think you say in the book, Musk does not want to use technology to escape the state like Peter
32:04Thiel.
32:05What he wants is to shape, control and to perfect the state.
32:10But also the two guys are converging in what, how can I say, with the protection of the existing hierarchies
32:22inside society.
32:24Do you agree with that?
32:25I think when it comes to Peter Thiel, it's important to understand that Thiel has always liked to present himself
32:34as an intellectual.
32:35It's very important to his self-identity, to have self-presentation.
32:41He has historically presented himself as a libertarian intellectual.
32:44These days, he presents himself as a libertarian Christian theorist of the apocalypse.
32:55But, you know, regardless of where his intellectual coordinates are, Thiel is someone who is interested, however, provocatively and trollishly
33:06in presenting himself in humanistic terms.
33:10As someone who has a syllabus, has a reading list, is making intervention along the lines that people who are
33:18trained in political philosophy would be able to interpret, right?
33:23Musk has never been that person.
33:25He's really not interested in presenting himself that way.
33:28So, in a way, it makes it a bit easier to interpret him because you don't have to claw back
33:40through all of these layers of self-presentation.
33:43Thiel, despite his many libertarian pronouncements, of course, is the co-founder of Palantir, who has, along with Musk's SpaceX,
33:54perfected this dynamic of state symbiosis.
33:56I mean, that operationally, Thiel is just as embedded in the state as Musk is.
34:04In fact, when you look at Musk's time at Doge in the federal government, the single biggest beneficiary of Doge
34:11was not actually Musk's companies, but was Palantir.
34:15Palantir has racked up a large number of federal contracts since Trump has taken office for his second term.
34:23So, there are interesting points of convergence between the two men, but I would say the biggest divergence, the biggest
34:37contrast between them has to do with how they present themselves to the world.
34:43And I think when people write about Thiel, they're inclined to take his writing at face value.
34:48They're inclined to do the kind of good-faith interpretive work that we would do with other people who present
34:57themselves in that fashion.
34:58Whereas with Musk, you know, my co-author and I, the nice thing about Musk, if you like, is that
35:05because he doesn't present that way, you actually have to do the harder work of inferring his ideas from his
35:12practices.
35:12You have to say not, you know, which philosophers is he citing this morning, which is what kind of theology
35:20tends to look like, but rather what kind of worldview, let's say, what kind of assumptions about human beings and
35:32their interaction with one another are implied by his production process, by him as a capitalist doing capitalism.
35:40What can we read off of those practices?
35:43And I think that's ultimately a more fruitful approach.
35:48And also, I think Musk and muskisms merging with states is also need a kind of colonial or imperialistic component,
36:03don't you think?
36:04Because we know that Musk from time to time tweets against countries he views as inferior to the US or
36:12Western civilization or as in the case of Bolivia, he says that they can stage a coup wherever they want.
36:21I think it's like four or five years ago because, you know, Tesla models needs lithium and Bolivia has lithium,
36:31et cetera, et cetera.
36:32So is there a colonial or imperialist component of muskism?
36:37Well, I'd say there's a strongly ethno-nationalist component.
36:40And I think you can see this by spending any time at all with Musk's social media feed.
36:47I mean, people who are not up to speed with his current views, I just ask them, take 30 minutes,
36:54if you can do 30 minutes, maybe 15 minutes, and sit down with Musk's ex-posts and just read them.
37:02And I think you'll get a very clear picture of his current worldview and a centerpiece of that worldview and
37:10something he spends a lot of time posting about is the notion that white European civilization is under attack by
37:21immigration from non-white countries.
37:24In his view, and this is echoing the so-called Great Replacement Theory that originated with the French New Rights
37:33and has become very popular in far-right circles throughout the world, particularly in the United States,
37:40that this, in his view, uncontrolled wave of immigration is being orchestrated by liberal establishment politicians cynically for their own
37:51benefit
37:52because they're going to persuade these immigrants to vote for them and, as a result, are channeling welfare services and
38:01generous state subsidies to these populations.
38:05And in the process, white culture, white civilization is being corrupted and will ultimately be annihilated unless very stern measures
38:19are not taken.
38:20And these measures typically involve what is described by the European far-right as re-migration, as the forced expulsion
38:29of not only immigrants, but people who are descended from immigrants.
38:37So even people who have been present in these countries for generations would be targeted by these so-called re
38:45-migration schemes.
38:46So even as the lead-up to the SpaceX IPO was happening, this is the biggest IPO in history, one
38:56might expect that Musk would be preoccupied or less inclined to post-inflammatory opinions on social media.
39:04To the contrary, if you looked at his ex-feed during that time, you would see, among other things, him
39:11endorsing a call for a new Reconquista of Europe,
39:15a type of call that is very common within the European far-right.
39:18So that is the notion of a hierarchy of humanity in which white European civilization is considered the most human
39:27and everyone else is less than human is a core feature of his worldview.
39:33Yeah, one of the sub-chapters is delete and remove, I guess.
39:38And I suppose these terms apply not only to software or computer world, but also to people, to people whom
39:46Elon Musk's seen inferior to the Western civilization.
39:51Yes, and this was particularly evident at Doge, where one of the big initiatives, and certainly probably the biggest consequence
40:00of Doge, was providing new tools for the federal government to identify undocumented people for deportation.
40:10And in Musk's language, these individuals were increasingly understood to be embodied human viruses, computer bugs that were walking around
40:25and needed to be purged from the database of the state and from the database of society.
40:32So it's important to understand, in the case of Musk and what we're calling Muskism, it's very much a computer
40:40-first view of the world.
40:43It's the understanding that what happens in the computer, what happens in the network, is reality, and everything else is
40:51downstream of that.
40:53So if you can change the code base, then you can change reality.
40:58He often talks about the matrix and about reprogramming the matrix.
41:05If you've seen that film, it's a very concrete demonstration of this idea that reality is a computer program, and
41:16that if you can modify that computer program, you can modify reality.
41:19And in the case of undocumented immigrants, they are understood to be data out of place within this system.
41:31And just as you would in the case of ensuring the smooth functioning of an IT system, you need to
41:40identify those issues and you need to purge them.
41:46Yes.
41:47Yes.
41:48Yes.
41:48Yes.
41:48This is my last question.
41:49This one.
41:51It's coming.
41:52What interests me most in your book is Musk seems to have anticipated the future.
41:59I mean, when you look at the discussions in the West about re-industrialization and the integration of the state
42:07and capital or reorganization of the state, purging the bureaucracy, etc., etc., would you say the future lies in Muskism
42:16in a way?
42:19I would say that the way we're using Muskism is to describe an ensemble of historical forces that have converged
42:29in the person of Musk.
42:31Some of those forces will likely continue to develop and evolve.
42:37So when we think about de-globalization, I find it hard to believe that de-globalization would simply vanish from
42:46the historical stage if Musk were to disappear tomorrow.
42:49The same could be said about hyper-digitization of the sort that is now powering the AI boom.
42:59This is a trend that Musk has been a very enthusiastic proponent of for many years.
43:08And again, if he were to disappear tomorrow, it's very likely that that would continue.
43:15But I think it's important that we're not fatalistic about these developments.
43:20I mean, our hope here is, again, to give people a new way of understanding how we came to this
43:30present moment,
43:31the present moment that is characterized by a multiple overlapping crisis,
43:36and how Musk, oddly enough, provides perhaps the most useful lens we have
43:44for clarifying the basic contours of our moment, and particularly how we arrived here.
43:53But we also want to insist on the possibility of political interventions.
43:59Musk and Muskism has a very weak understanding of politics.
44:03It understands, as I mentioned earlier, human society as being configured by computers and networks.
44:11And in fact, that's not true.
44:13That's not how people acquire their ideological or political frames.
44:19They do so in the course of their interactions with members of their family, with co-workers, with community members,
44:26that there is actually quite a lot of room for human politics.
44:31That's, in fact, the only kind of politics that currently exists.
44:34So, I think that one could find sources of social hope in a number of different places.
44:41I mean, we have, right now in the United States, an enormous popular revolt against the data centers.
44:46This is becoming a very serious issue for the upcoming congressional elections.
44:51We also have, just generally, a very dim view that people have of the tech industry in general.
44:56People generally really hate these companies and really hate AI.
45:00And there is a lot of energy these days on the socialist left in the United States.
45:08And I think there are many reasons to be hopeful.
45:13I think the type of hierarchy of humanity that Musk has represented and advocated for is one that many Americans
45:27resolutely reject and are organizing on that basis.
45:32Yeah, yeah.
45:34We all hope so.
45:35Thank you for your time, Ben.
45:38Thank you for this wonderful book.
45:41Another time, we can, we can, we want to have both of you, Queen and you.
45:48Thank you so much.
45:50Thanks for the conversation.
45:52Yeah.
45:53Bye-bye.
45:54Bye-bye.
45:54Take care.
45:56Bye-bye.
46:08Take care.
46:09Bye-bye.
46:11Bye-bye.
46:12Bye-bye.
46:13Bye-bye.
46:14Bye-bye.
46:15Bye-bye.
46:15Bye-bye.