Muskism

These large these billionaires with near trillionaires these days are really the only ones who can afford to lay out the kind of infrastructural costs that it takes to go to space and stay in space.

Oh, yeah, this is the Muskism stuff, right? The Muskism stuff, yeah.

Explain that for the audience.

Oh, that's going

to be my job to explain Muskism? Okay.

I mean, I'm stuck with the impossible job of trying to articulate camp in a clear way.

Maybe you can do the Muskism piece.

Let me camp it up.

So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What is this world that he is flexing his power and taking on real risk to build? Quinn Sablodian is a professor of international history at Boston University.

He's the author of several books, including Globalist, Hayek's Bastards, but relevant for here, Muskism, which he co-authored with Ben Tarnoff.

He joins me now.

Quinn Sabodian, welcome to the show.

And now he's vocally calling for the merger of Tesla and SpaceX, which would be the largest merger in history.

and would precisely bring together the part of his empire that does atoms in the form of humanoid robots with the part that does the AI under the umbrella of SpaceX.

But then I think one aspect of Muskism which we need to keep our eye on is that he's actually propelled by the need to create an impression of invulnerability.

which is actually belied by the truth.

So, you know, and I think I don't know why he didn't end up doing it.

I mean, it's it's so fruitless to speculate on his personal motivations, although I should mention that I think Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's book Muskism, which came out earlier this year, is a great approach to him that asks not like, how can we explain this guy? But how can we use him to understand the capitalism that has rewarded him and that he now is kind of the emblem of?

Yeah, he's a bellwether, right.

Yeah, yeah, very much.

And this was before Gamergate or anything.

And I went into writing this book about video games with the question from anthropology, show me the games of your children, I'll show you the next hundred years.

And I feel so often today that I saw everything back in the early 2000s about what was coming.

You've already said so much that I want to dig into, especially you hit my sweet spot when you were talking about the inherent links between authoritarianism and misogyny.

What's worse, to your point, Emily, is that this has been acknowledged.

So in our work with The Chilling, we interacted with companies.

We, under commission to UNESCO, had direct interactions with Facebook, and I wrote about this in a chapter of The Chilling, in a particularly horrific case involving a journalist in Northern Ireland, a woman called Patricia Devlin, who was a crime reporter.

who received during the pandemic a very credible threat such that the police came to her door to warn her of death threats that had been surfaced in the context of online violence directed at her and against her then infant, to rape her infant, with details of the address where that infant was being cared for by her grandmother.

And we are also excited to invite to the podcast someone who I have never met, but I am excited to meet, and that is Ben Tarnoff.

Ben is a writer, and they are both the co-authors of the recently released Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed.

Guys, thank you so much for joining us.

Yeah, happy to be here.

particularly, I would say, deregulation, financialization, stuff, Quinn, that you've written about before, which is the de-centering of parts of the neoliberal state.

But you guys in this book offer a more positive account of Musk, not in the good sense, but like a more active sense of that.

He is actually introducing a new form of production that you guys term Muskism.

So obviously, I want to talk about that because when I read the book, it did seem to me that he's really more parasitic than innovative.