Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:02]
Quinn Slobodian
If you look at what Doge was, in the end, it was about bringing together different parts of the federal government to make it easier to use AI tools and advanced technology to identify racially marked invaders of the American polity and round them up for removal.
- [00:24]
Al Letson
Coming up on More to the Story, Boston University professor Quinn Slobodian. We talk about what he calls muskism and how capitalism and America are being reshaped by technology and the particular worldview of Elon Musk. Stay with us.
- [00:44]
Jane Butcher
Want to make a lasting difference to Reveal and protect independent journalism. Right now, it won't cost you a thing. Hi, it's Jane Butcher from Boulder, Colorado. I've spent my life fighting for justice, which is why I'm a longtime supporter of Reveal and the center for Investigative Reporting. I'm stepping up to protect the future of fearless independent journalism. And you can, too, by joining CIR's Legacy Challenge. Just let Reveal know you're going to include them in your legacy plans. Provide some basic information, and here's the really exciting part. A generous donor will contribute up to $10,000 now to fund Reveal's essential reporting in honor of your gift. Your legacy gift of any size makes an impact not just in the future, but right now. If you'd like to join me or want to learn more, please reach out to giftsevielnews.org again, that's giftsevielnews.org the Legacy Challenge is only available for a limited time. Stand up for the truth today.
- [02:04]
Al Letson
This is more to the story. I'm Al Ledsen. Everywhere we look, our world is being transformed by technology. Data centers, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and the screens, screens, screens everywhere. Many of the designs of this New World Order come from the mind of one man, Elon Musk. My guest today is Quinn Slobodian, a history professor at Boston University. He co authored a guide for the Perplexed with Ben Tarnoff, a book that claims Musk has not only transformed tech, but reimagined the relationship between capitalists and government, reorganizing our lives in the process. Quinn, so happy to have you here today. Tell me how you and Ben went about writing this book. Like, what brought you to it?
- [02:50]
Quinn Slobodian
He and I, we've been friends for years, and we always are talking about the news of the day and so on. And of course, Musk has been the news of the day for a while now, but we both had the same relationship to him for years, which is that they wanted to not think about him. We wanted to banish him from our minds. And mute him off our timeline because he was just too obnoxious and took up too much oxygen and too much space. But then we both actually ended up reviewing separately the Walter Ives Isaacson biography that came out a couple of years ago, and we found it a little bit more interesting than we expected. And when he really bulldozed into the center of American life with Doge, we felt like there was space for some different take on him, which is where the book originated. Someone who could put him in the context of history and see him as a kind of a symptom of his time, rather than either a deranged madman or an inspired genius, which seemed to be the way he was being portrayed publicly.
- [03:48]
Al Letson
After working on this book, what did you come away from when you think about Elon Musk?
- [03:56]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, it was funny because the SpaceX IPO, which happened now about a month and a half ago, which was the biggest IPO in human history, briefly made Musk a trillionaire. All went down after the book was long written, after the book was actually published. But it really kind of helped to validate, I think, a lot of the claims we made in the book, including the idea that this present stage of capitalism, the era of digital capitalism, Silicon Valley's kind of supremacy over the American economy, and in a way over the rest of the world too, is built on a couple of things that aren't always that obvious. One of them is a very close and symbiotic relationship to the government. They need the American state. And I think we still haven't really gotten our heads around that publicly in the conversation about what's happening with tech. So that was something we really felt was important to emphasize. SpaceX only exists because of the global war on terror, where it became an important service provider for the United States government. Also, the way that Silicon Valley spins its stories, we talk about that as financial fabulism. They project a future that is yet to come and anoint themselves as the ones who will bring that future into being. Even if this promise is based on all kinds of untested technologies, unverified engineering problems, Most recently in SpaceX's case is this idea they're going to put football field size data centers into low earth orbit, something that they don't even have a prototype of. So this intermingling of a small number of tech firms run by a very small number of people into the kind of foundation and core of the American economy, built on, in many ways a kind of a tissue of fabrications and exaggerations, but backed up by the strength and power of the American ability to issue dollars. This is really the kind of paradox that we wanted to set out in the book, and one that I feel like we've grown even deeper enmeshed into since it was published.
- [06:08]
Al Letson
Let's go back and talk about where Elon Musk comes from and how we got to where we are. So Elon was born in South Africa and raised there. How do you think growing up during apartheid shaped his personal views of the world?
- [06:26]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, it's interesting, right, because there is an answer that's close to hand, which is just that he imbibed the racism of the society in which he lived. And although he denied it for some time, it has sort of resurfaced now in his defense of white Afrikaner minorities in South Africa and his continual fabrications about projects of so called white genocide in South Africa. So most of the time when people talk about Musk and his upbringing, that's the way it's discussed. And we think that there is some credibility to that. One can certainly make that case. But there's another side to it that we want to emphasize in the book because it's less focused on, which is the political economy of apartheid South Africa. So apartheid South Africa was extremely reactionary and backward in its social order, but it was actually also very good at importing and making use of cutting edge technologies to support that reactionary social order. That included IBM mainframes to carry out the work of apartheid, the sorting of populations in hierarchical ways. It included the development of their own nuclear technology right up to their own functioning nuclear bomb by the early 1980s. And it included building out their own auto sector importing licenses to build Datsuns, Fords, Toyotas domestically. So all of that added up to something we called fortress futurism, a kind of sense of being surrounded by enemies outside, beset by enemies within, and using technology to harden your autonomy and sovereignty in a time of continual social low level conflict and crisis. To us, that mentality really runs through Musk's businesses up to the present. He's really selling you tech to fortify yourself in a time of social unrest even now. Ecological collapse, geopolitical uncertainty.
- [08:26]
Al Letson
What are his thoughts about how people interact with tech and how does human emotion play into that equation? Because, you know, it seems to me like he kind of views humankind as potential cyborgs, like computers that could be programmed.
- [08:42]
Quinn Slobodian
I mean, I think it's certainly true that from a pretty young age, specifically after he acquired a programmable personal computer while still a teenager, In South Africa, he saw the potential of the computer. And he then started to indeed, as you say, see the world through the lens of what computers can do. He started to see computers as a kind of a control unit for reality. And once they were interconnected into the World Wide Web, and certainly once all kinds of new technologies were getting rolled out. By the end of the 90s, when he was in Silicon Valley, this sense was being reinforced. As a famous interview he gives to CBS News in 1998, where he describes the Internet as the superset of all media. He says, everything's going to get folded into it. Banking, entertainment, communication. Soon everything will happen through the Internet. And at the time, that was far fetched. I mean, we were still in the era of paper, newspapers and everyone sitting down around the television for the evening news. But of course, that prophecy kind of came true. But the question that I think you're raising, which is interesting, is where does emotion fit into that? Right? Is it the case that the more networked we are, the more emotionless we become and the more kind of cold and calculating and there I would say that Musk would say strongly no. That in fact, becoming a cyborg in part becomes a story of being susceptible to waves of emotion that then pass through the network technologies that we use. He was very explicit about this a number of times, and we quote it in the book, that as we become what he calls a giant cybernetic collective through constant social media use, through kind of fixation on our phones and our screens, then we actually activate the kind of animal emotions in our personalities as much as we activate the rational kind of prefrontal capacities that humans have. I think that's the main thing is, though, Musk does sort of give that impression of seeing the world dispassionately, perhaps sometimes, or without normal forms of empathy. In fact, of course, famously, he sees empathy as an exploit in human programming. Nevertheless, he sees what's coming to existence, this cyborg society, as one prone to activation actually by emotion at a new level.
- [11:13]
Al Letson
So when I think about Musk, of course I think about tech and money, but I also think about his racist views on things like immigration, the great replacement theory. Like, he really pushes this idea that there is a conspiracy to replace white people with minorities. His beliefs all seem to circle around racism and money.
- [11:37]
Quinn Slobodian
Racism and capitalism are impossible to separate from each other in the American story. And Musk is a modern variant of that. I think you're right. I think that the way I see it is that his particular kind of racism is about Assigning a kind of hierarchical value to humans. Right. Placing them on a scale of worth and utility that he thinks maps onto place of origin and actually specifically skin color. And he can do that in a way that both works to support his own business model, because he is selling people sovereignty. He is selling defense against what he sees as incursions and invaders. So if you look at what Doge was, in the end, it was about bringing together different parts of the federal government to make it easier to use AI tools and advanced technology to identify racially marked invaders of the American polity and round them up for removal. So this really becomes one of the ways that Musk builds up a kind of legitimacy for the central role he's starting to play in the American political economy by saying, I am the one who will defend this country against those who have illegitimately entered it and continue to exist inside of it. So that kind of racism says some people are value creators and some people are illegitimate value takers. And luckily they're color coded, so we can use that as a helpful way to identify and purge them. So there is a kind of instrumentality, too, to his spouting of xenophobic rhetoric, but at its base, and I want to make sure I get to that, there is a core belief in a hierarchy of demography in the world. The decline of the white race and its birth rate is, to him, something that he has repeatedly said is the biggest challenge that humanity faces. So he does sincerely seem to believe that the special endowments of white people are necessary for future human economic progress. And if that balance shifts too much, if the whites become too much of a minority, then the light of economic progress will also snuff out. So that is an extremely essentialized understanding of where economic capacity comes from, where innovative capacity comes from. That is racist to an extreme that it's actually very unusual to hear in public discourse in the United States. And that is saying a lot.
- [14:31]
Al Letson
Yeah, it seems like he is not the sole person doing it, but he is a part of a movement to take these very far right ideas and kind of move them into the mainstream.
- [14:46]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, I think what he did, what you could say his big added value was for the far right, was to add that element of futurism. If you take Musk's side, then generative AI is going to solve the problem of white collar work. Humanoid robots is going to solve the problem of blue collar work. We're going to distribute the profits that come from these spectacular new economic breakthroughs to the rightful native population, and voila. Like the problem of the economic shortcomings of a xenophobic economic immigration policy, which are obvious to all economists, will be solved through technology. So suddenly you can bring in a whole new cohort of supporters and voters who are especially younger people who have never probably been that drawn to the nostalgia of a good paying union job at the Ford plant, but are certainly interested in the idea of using reversal basic income based on crypto investments and AI taking, you know, solving the employment problem.
- [15:50]
Al Letson
Coming up on more to the story.
- [15:52]
Quinn Slobodian
If the promise is that the robots are going to do the work and the AI is going to do the work, then what exactly are people going to do, right? What is the social contract of muskism?
- [16:03]
Al Letson
But before we get to that, let me ask you a favor. To make conversations like this one happen, we need support from you. So please make a gift today. Keep conversations like this one coming head to revealnews.org gift again, that's revealnews.org gift and thank you. All right, don't go anywhere. We'll be back with historian Quinn Slobodian in a moment. You're likely listening to this podcast because you love independent journalism, so why not make it official? Show some of that love on your sleeve, literally. Head over to the Mother Jones magazine store today. You'll find limited edition 50 year anniversary shirts, dad hats for the critical thinkers, and even baby onesies for the future hellraiser in the family. Stand with independent journalism and look good while doing it, too. Visit the Mother Jones store today@motherjones.com store. That's motherjones.com store. This is more to the story. I'm Al Letson and we're back with author Quinn Slobodian. Now, through your book, you compare Fordism to muskism.
- [17:29]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah.
- [17:30]
Al Letson
What are the major differences between the business practices of Henry Ford and Elon Musk?
- [17:36]
Quinn Slobodian
What Fordism was at its peak was a combination of mass production and mass consumption. So you had profits being made by the people who owned the factory. But then you also had a kind of compromise with the workers who worked in the factory, who got rising wages, who got social benefits, who got trade union recognition, who got enough money so they could buy that thing that was coming off the assembly line. Right. I mean, this is the virtuous cycle that knit together this period of prosperity in the United States and Western Europe. For those people who were lucky enough to be welcomed into that social contract, it bought legitimacy. What's strange about muskism is he doesn't really offer a equivalent to that Right. So there is no equivalent of cradle to grave social protections and a good paying job for the majority of the adult male population to say what Fordism was. In fact, there isn't a very vague vision of what this is actually going to look like. It seems that if the promise is that the robots are going to do the work and the AI is going to do the work, then what exactly are people going to do? What is the social contract of muskism? And we see a couple of alternatives that are being floated by Musk either explicitly or implicitly. One is the kind of far fetched idea that enlightened capitalists will simply redistribute the profits to the people. They've never done that in history. Why would they do that now without incredible pressure? The other is that you will be locked into kind of a cult of Elon and so ideologically bolted onto him that you'd never question his decisions. Right. And that is really what the X.com and Xai project is about, is creating a silo and an echo chamber so complete that you are sort of compelled to digest his talking points and his content, such that your own mentality might over time drift towards his. And this is no longer just speculation. In fact, now social science studies have shown that regular X users are actually ending up points to the right on the political spectrum. And that's arguably one of the ways that Musk could solve the problem of consent in an era where materially, it's clear that only a few people are going to actually capture the gains from something like the AI breakthrough.
- [20:17]
Al Letson
Silicon Valley used to be very anti government, but they've embraced a new level of partnership lately. What does it mean? And how is Musk using the US government to his advantage? I mean, for example, SpaceX is a great example of this. Without the American government, there is no SpaceX.
- [20:37]
Quinn Slobodian
I mean, without the American government, there is no Silicon Valley. The tech world has always been bound up in this really symbiotic relationship, meaning they give something back to the government, the government gives something often a lot back to them. There was this strange moment where people pretended like there was a disconnect and, and that was made possible, I think, by the fact that the dominant technologies and forms of making money in Silicon valley in the 2000s and 2010s were the things of the Web 2.0 moment. So they were social media apps, they were things like ride hailing apps, they were things like Amazon, you know, home product delivery, they were things like Google. What was the business model for these apps, you produce data for the platform, they take it and sell it onto advertisers. You actually don't need like a huge infrastructure to support that form of making money. It's pretty asset light. It's pretty investment light. You are the product in that era. Things have shifted now. And this is why Musk is helpful to think with. Right? Is as we move into the AI era after the rollout of ChatGPT, you know, you suddenly need a lot of infrastructure, you need a lot of assets. You can't pretend like you can unplug from the US Government anymore. You are going to need permits to drill on federal land. You are going to need permits to build Manhattan sized data centers, often on protected land, to clear the way of regulations. You have fused yourself to the Department of State and the Department of War in ways that it was easy to kind of repress and forget for decades. So that's really where we're at now in the Silicon Valley model. That era of dreaming of exit or escape is really kind of over. And in some ways that's a good clarification because it was never really over. We just managed to repress it for a while. And Muskism, as we describe it in the book, is a way to kind of make sure that we're on top of that story and not falling into this old, by now, rather boring seesaw between the them saying we don't need the state and us reminding them that they always needed the state. Right. We've actually gotten past that story now. And the question is now, how exactly are tech products refashioning America's ability to defend its own sovereignty? And the answer is quite a bit.
- [23:10]
Al Letson
Yeah. So we can't really talk about Musk without talking about his relationship and connection to Donald Trump. How has that played out over the last few years? And how has their relationship changed the connections between Silicon Valley and Washington?
- [23:26]
Quinn Slobodian
Well, the relationship between Musk and Trump is really fascinating because if it's the case, and we lay out the set of evidence to show that it is, that Musk has always relied on being backed up by Uncle Sam and has never really been ashamed about it, that he's always sought to see what service he can give to the American government at the time, then the question is, you know, what changed, if anything, in Trump's relationship to Musk? I think a couple things changed. I mean, one thing is that by going in so hard with Trump in 2024, he really bolted himself onto one side of the political spectrum in such a way that it seriously alienated a lot of his past customer base. That means that the economic costs of that alliance pushes Musk ever more to his reliance on government contracts. Right. If, if he's not going to be mostly consumer facing because he's just, you know, alienated half of his potential consumer base, then he's going to need even more of the big contracts to do Golden Dome, to do Star Shield, to do all of the Starfall, all of the new forms of backing up and beefing up the military industry that he has announced in the meantime. But more interestingly was the Doge experiment itself, because up until that moment, Musk had been always pretty happy to, let's say, outsource the problem of government to governments and to not try to govern directly. And yet Musk did that. And we see it in the book as a real attempt by him to change the balance of that state symbiosis, to sort of ask what would happen if I ruled directly? I as Elon Musk. And the effects were pretty catastrophic. Right? I mean, he, I think he, he found out something from that effort, which is that he wasn't good at governing directly. So Musk's relationship with Trump seemed to have, you know, flown too close to the sun in early 2025. And it seemed like that that alliance had crashed and burned by the early summertime. But as we know, things have righted themselves since. And Musk was on the plane with Trump to China, recently, regularly meets him, and even dines at Mar a Lago. So that balance, seemingly of state symbiosis as we describe it, has been returned, where he sort of says to Trump, you be the front stage guy and I'll be in the back. And that was, for example, $6 billion of contracts that SpaceX has already secured for Golden Dome will be compensation for my continued sympathy and support for what you're doing.
- [26:17]
Al Letson
Yeah. Towards the end of your book, your conclusion, you have four futures for muskism. Can you kind of lay those four out for me?
- [26:29]
Quinn Slobodian
Sure. So one of those was the one I already kind of speculated about. We call it Carbon Musk. So what if Musk manages to pivot hard away from what is his ever deeper commitment to the global far right? He is now the preeminent member of the global far right. But what if he was able to somehow shed that stigma and become mostly focused on decarbonization objectives, electrification objectives? Again, that seemed pretty far fetched when we published the book, but actually it's feeling even a little less far fetched since the outbreak of The American Israel war on Iran because of the renewed interest in solar panels and EVs that have come about through the rising prices of oil. So maybe there's carbon Musk, right? Maybe he just goes green again and people say, hey, we hate his politics, but we like his products. Another one that we think about is contractor Musk. If you look at the valuation of SpaceX, upon which now much of Musk's future, and in some ways the future of the American AI bubble rests, then it wouldn't work just through government contracts. A lot of the profitability that's assumed in that valuation is from selling AI to companies. So called enterprise AI is like the lion's share of what they say they're going to deliver, which they're basically not delivering at all at the moment. The other thing we talk about is compound Musk. So what if he just kind of snaps and pulls a Howard Hughes and just withdraws to some compound outside of Austin, Texas and says, like, I'm just going to cook my brain with my self produced conspiracy theories on X and unplug from society and build out my 14 children to, you know, 10x more in some ways as a narrative, right? If this was a novel, I could see that happening. In reality, he seems to be so driven by that mandate and that motor we described of the capitalist to accumulate, accumulate, accumulate that I don't think he could bear it. The fourth, that is definitely already happening. That is perhaps maybe the best way to end the discussion is this idea of cyborg Musk. He sees cyborgs as already with us, right? He sees us as having become cyborgs through our fusion with the prosthetic devices that we carry around with us all day long. Our capacity as flesh and blood humans have long since been extended out through the technologies that we have folded into our lives. And the political possibilities of that, for Musk are legion. So first and foremost it means that democracy is kind of a red herring, that the idea that you need to organize society by counting heads, instead you can rewrite the coding and the programming to make people make the choices you want them to make ahead of time. And that is absolutely how he understands social organization as a subset of computer programming. And if you go against him, if you dissent, if you say something that is not in line with his preferred outcome, then you must be a bug in the system or a virus that needs to be either contained and removed or programmed away. So that real post democratic approach is downstream of his cyborg mentality. And it's, I think probably the most concerning aspect of everything he does. Because even the most violent, repulsive, racist and misogynistic things he says on his feet are somehow also part of this belief that we are just programmable cyborgs. And if we're misbehaving, if we're doing things like mixing and matching our genders, for example, then we must be just glitches that need to be smoothed out.
- [30:32]
Al Letson
Yeah, Quinn, thank you so much for talking to me today. This has been really enlightening. I had a great time.
- [30:38]
Quinn Slobodian
Yeah, it was a pleasure for me as well.
- [30:43]
Al Letson
That was Quinn Slobodian. His book with Ben Tarnoff is called A Guide for the Perplexed. We'll put a link to it in our show notes. If you liked this episode, be sure to check out our interview with journalist David A. Graham from February of this year. I talked with him about his book The How Project 2025 is Reshaping America and how the conservative hit Heritage foundation has influenced the Trump administration's policies, including mass deportations and the elimination of DEI initiatives. We'll also put a link to that episode in the show notes. Lastly, a reminder. We are listener supported. That means listeners like you, you can help us thrive by making a gift today. Just go to revealnews.org gift again, that's revealnews.org gift and thank you. This episode was produced by members of the Justice Society, Joni Binder, Josh, Sam Byrne and Carl McGurk. Allison Taki Delanides edited the show theme music and engineering, helped by Fernando My man Yo Arruda and Jay Breezy. Mr. Jim Briggs, I'm Al Edson and you know, let's do this again next week. This is more to the story. From prx.