Fordism

And I think it's super cool that you thought of that and wanted to kind of play with that further.

Yeah, I mean, at one point I thought, should I, like, really lean into it and see what might happen if I tried to make a kind of Fordist assembly line? But in many ways, part of what I think the first chapter is trying to get me, like, as I was writing it, right, trying to reckon with, is how much our idea of change over time and progress as a way of marking one version of change over time draws on a set of metaphysics that we should be thinking much more critically about.

Yeah, something we've talked about a little bit so far, but I definitely wanted to touch on more was that Ford had many white supremacist beliefs and was notably anti-Semitic, as you said.

And this made him quite controversial amongst the general public.

This guy named Stephan Link has also written on this really, I think, quite powerfully.

And in these two, I mean, one from the sort of late 20th century and one really much more recent, you know, I think maybe 2015 or something like that, this book, a book called Forging Global Fordism.

These are figures who are these are historians who are thinking about how broad Ford's appeal was and how we make sense of that.

And reading those books helped me try to think about this challenge, both as a controversial figure who.

And why is that? We don't find meaning at work because the work is standardized to a large extent for many people, because we don't have that much control over what we do.

Workplace models such as Fordism and Taylorism emerged in the early 20th century as manufacturers looked for ways to boost productivity and lower costs.

By breaking work into specialised tasks and concentrating decision-making at the top, they made production more efficient but often left workers with little control over their daily work and a growing sense of disconnection from it, says Fred.

So basically, we divide labor to maximize the output, so the productivity.

Um, I'm sorry to them for that, but we'll put it in the show notes.

But anyways, Muskism is this idea that we are transitioning out of a period of Fordism, which was largely like the era of industrial mass production, right? Assembly lines and, and, and, um, you know, sort of specialization of labor and then efficiency gains that came from that.

And moving into this, this, this new era where the nation state has actually lost a lot of power and doesn't have the power to say, like collect tax like it used to do and spend like it used to do.

And so, it doesn't have the ability to lay out infrastructure and new industrial pathways or, or lay out new industrial policy like it used to do.

If this is the case, the song could be interpreted as a barely veiled criticism of capitalism, Henry Ford having not only created one of the most famous automobile brands of all time, but perhaps more significantly given his name to a labor model based on standardized mass production and the assembly line.

a model denounced by some people as having transformed mankind into a machine-like slave of industrial progress or Fordism.

Thus, any color you like could also mean that the choice offered by society is no more than pure illusion, a non-choice in other words, which I thought was pretty interesting.

That's all from that book that we've been referencing.