Who Is Afraid of Elon Musk?
Another great book by Quinn Slobodian. This time co-authored by another top thinker and researcher, by a leading expert and activist on issues of everything Web-related, Ben Tarnoff. The book is Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. I will refer to the authors below as S+T.
S+T argue that there is such a thing as Muskism, distinct from the man himself. Muskism is one possible near future for the world economy. It is one possible version of what is replacing Fordism, one possible version of what usually gets referred to as post-Fordism. S+T encapsulate Fordism as 'mass production that makes possible mass consumption'. Although Henry Ford had far right tendencies, Fordism was also key in making Keynesian welfare states possible after World War Two.
Muskism is the new economy that Elon thinks he is creating.
Muskism is the new economy and new State that Elon Musk thinks he is creating. S+T document how other tech company CEOs, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andriessen and Sam Altman, converge in their practical plans for that future on key points, while disagreeing on others.
S+T highlight one area of disagreement: Thiel, Andriessen et al are libertarians. They want to eliminate what they call the Administrative State, that sets regulations for private capitalist businesses. They want maximum Laissez-Faire Capitalism.
Musk instead wants a fusion of a few private capitalist Tech corporations and the State. More specifically he wants to generalize what he already has with his many companies such as SpaceX and Starlink, a State that runs by granting near monopoly contracts to particular private contractors to provide key services to the government.
Muskism is just Elon’s version. All Tech companies seek some version of Tech Rule.
Both the Deregulate Everything Laissez-Faire libertarians, and those who prefer the Muskism version of Rule by Tech Companies, want just that, Tech Rule. They all want an economy and government and executive State and culture (an entire society) that is run by a handful of Tech companies who have near monopolies in their spheres.
Almost all the tech company owners see the acceleration of automation based on robotization of physical production, and the AI-ization of digital platform control of all human activity, as the cutting edge of the transition to what I will call Tech Rule.
The Tech CEOs understand quite clearly the threats posed by this, but they are okay with it. As long as they, and their tech companies, are put in charge. They are okay with it, as long as humans in two types of activity -- namely humans who are being Labour/Employees and humans who are being Democratic Citizens -- are not allowed to get in the way of Technocratic Digital Code and Technocratic private enterprise Rule.
All versions of Tech Rule are based on myths. They will rip society apart and then fail.
Having said this, Musk is not a coherent scientific or social scientific or humanities based thinker. Nor are any of the other Tech Bros. Most of their key assumptions and assertions have little or no basis in scholarship (or common sense experience) of any kind. Their plans may succeed in getting them to rule, but the society they usher in will malfunction and break down.
Musk is an industrial engineer with a physics background and a digital software coding background. And he owns multiple companies that depend entirely on the good graces of Donald Trump and the US State, who have granted Musk-owned companies exclusive monopoly supplier contracts in key areas, most of them Pentagon related. Ditto Thiel and Andriessen and Altman and most of the other Tech Bros.
So it is not a surprise that Musk has been opportunistic in loudly echoing Trump and MAGA ideology and policies.
At the same time, S+T show that this is an easy shift in public messaging for Musk to make personally. He has always held a number of reactionary ideas about the need to preserve 'natural' class, gender and racial hierarchies.
Muskism means the robotization and AI-ization of everything.
Back to what the book is about, Muskism and not Musk. S+T lay out an argument that what Muskism represents is one version of a Let Tech Companies Rule the World social and political project. It is what most of the Tech companies are planning. It is definitely what they are doing, each in their own way.
What then is the Elon Musk version of what I am calling the Tech Rule project (in order to include all the other versions)?
Tech Rule is based on the core idea that the entire society (economy, culture, government and Executive State) is coming under the rule of digital software, of Code. The cutting edge of this at the moment is robotization and AI, that are accelerants of digital software dictating all human activities.
Web 1.0 got the majority of humans onto the internet.
Web 2.0 platforms got almost all humans to become slaves to their digital apps and devices.
Muskism and the other versions of Tech Rule are perhaps Web 3.0. The new defining logic is that of ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and AI and robotization.
Musk recognizes this as a threat to humanity, and to him personally. So do all of the other tech company CEOs. Many are busy designing their own private escape routes from the world they are creating. Jeff Bezos and others are at least pretending to plan possible relocation to Mars, or to permanent massively big space stations. Most are more realistically figuring out how they can create Gated Communities that are protected from both society and nature.
“There is a technological fix to every problem. Leave it to us to write good code”.
Most Tech company owners think one thing, and publicly message something else. Their public message: Nothing to worry about here. There is always a technological fix to every problem. Leave it us to invent good code when we are in charge.
Some even admit that AI and robots may replace humans in many/most wage and salary labour jobs. Others admit that it will replace a lot of human decision making through democratic government.
All of the Tech Bros say: Don't Worry, Be Happy. Because there is a wonderful tradeoff. A Tech Rule society will be one where the digital software platforms will provide massive increases in autonomy to every human. There will be a libertarian utopia in which every individual user will be free to engage in unheard of extensions of human powers. Every individual will be playing amazing games of all kinds in a fully automated Leisure Society.
Elon seeks two fusions. Between Humans and Tech Machines. Between Tech Companies and the State.
Elon Musk is not so sanguine. His twist on the Tech Rule project is two types of fusion.
First it is to accelerate the fusion of humans with the digital software universe. Right now that means fusing humans with robots and fusing almost all human activities with digital devices.
Second, it is to increase the fusion of government and the Executive State and cultural institutions (e.g. media, education, health, leisure, arts) with the Tech company dominated private enterprise economy. The immediate goal in Musk's mind is to generalize the granting of near exclusive monopolies to private contractors to provide all the important services to government.
Musk even very explicitly recognizes that these two fusions, individual and corporate, will not be some kind of ‘50% Human-50% Not Human’ equal partnership.
The core of the State will remain a legal-coercive Executive power apparatus that has the legitimacy/authority to make foundational decisions. The people in control of that State will decide, for instance, which tech companies to hire to provide what specific services.
But Musk claims to believe that governments/States are not necessarily human institutions. Or at least governments can be reorganized to not be human run institutions. Musk claims that governments can be reduced to just programmable hardware, to just what he calls infrastructure, to just a machine that provides services. The 'power to decide' will lie with those in control of the digital software that tells the government hardware/infrastructure/machine what to do, and how.
(This is what Musk and DOGE were trying to start doing to the US federal government. It failed spectacularly, with one and a half exceptions. It massively increased the capacity of the federal State, and anyone with insider access to it, to do surveillance of government employees and all citizens of the United States. And it mostly failed, but it moved the ball forward, in centralizing control of all government activities by making them "legible" to digital software dictates.)
All the programming will be done by the Technocratic Elite.
Musk also recognizes that the fusion of humans with digital devices for an ever expanding range and depth in detail of human activities will not be one in which humans do their own programming. The programming will be done by a minority who are part of the Technocratic Elite -- the Tech company owners, and the engineers, and (semi)professionals, and skilled and semi-skilled tech workers, and as few manager bureaucrats as possible, and maybe a large number of smallish private subcontractors.
S+T also quote Musk as aiming to reduce the human role in any decision-making about the robots and digital devices that they are fused with to an absolute minimum. Musk sees this as eliminating the irrationally emotional human element in decision-making, especially any tendency to empathy.
More specifically Musk wants to eliminate any inputs to decision-making that undermine what he regards as the 'natural' hierarchies of class, gender, race and a long list of other things.
Musk calls this the elimination of the "Woke Mind Virus" that is supposedly contaminating the Engineering of Everything by Tech Rulers like him.
Elon seeks to eliminate the Woke Mind Virus. That means you and me.
S+T summarize: "Muskism had always been committed to a vigorous defence of hierarchy. Some humans are born to rule; others, to be ruled. Class, gender and race are the structuring principles. Twitter had propelled Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too. It had contributed to the popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and helped rekindle the American socialist movement. It had focused public attention on the problem of social inequality. For all these reasons, it had to be destroyed. In its place would arise a new platform, X, that would reaffirm the power of the boss. The boss doesn't want you to organize. He wants you to stay at work." (p124) Don't Worry, Be Happy.
Muskism may or may not ever replace Fordism as the predominant form of capitalism. Something will. Let us make sure that it is not any version of Tech Rule.