Journalism in the Age of Techno-Kings

Before Elon Musk, there was Henry Ford: an attention-seeking car manufacturer, newspaper owner, and media celebrity who pushed reactionary views on the public and transformed society around his business interests. “Fordism” was more than a mode of production, it was a way of organizing society, involving large factories, nuclear families, stable employment, and affordable cars, refrigerators, and televisions.

In a new book, Muskism, Ben Tarnoff, a technology writer, and Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, analyze Musk in similar terms, as a maverick businessman who stands for a new type of society and a new social contract. They find that “Muskism” provides a far more dystopian package than Fordism’s offering. It is a world of strict and unforgiving hierarchies where governments exist in symbiotic relationship with Silicon Valley, social welfare erodes, and Musk is a self-appointed “techno-king.” Want safety or stability? Buy a Cybertruck. 

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, Tarnoff and Slobodian join cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss Muskism’s vision of society, where it came from, and what the implications for journalism are. What does Muskism offer the public besides dystopia? How did Musk’s purchase of Twitter fit into his plans? What does journalism free from Muskism look like?

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:07

Hello and welcome to Journalism 2050 from uh the Tau Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and Columbia Journalism Review. I'm Heather Chaplin. I'm the founding director of journalism and design at the New School.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hi, yes, I'm Emily Bell. I'm the director of the Town Center for Digital Digital Journalism, which you've just um just just mentioned. How are you, Heather?

SPEAKER_04 0:30

I'm not too bad. I'm very excited today. And I was actually thinking about how everyone starts their podcast by saying how excited they are to have the guests. But I are we are excited today. We are excited. I have witnesses who could tell you like what happened to my face when I saw your book. Um so I am really genuinely excited to introduce Boston University professor Quinn Slobodian. I hope I got that right, and Peck Writer and the founder of Logic magazine, Ben Tarnoff. They are the authors of the new book, Muskism, A Guide to the Perplexed. Great title, guys, uh, which suggests that Elon Musk is not so much a glitch in the system as the system itself. Uh to give you a little teaser, they say Muskism sells itself as the future but entrenches age-old hierarchies. It offers autonomy for some and exclusions for others. It's pro-natalist but anti-immigrant, futurist but reactionary. It speaks of humanity but warns of empathy. So welcome, guys, and thank you so much for coming.

SPEAKER_02 1:35

No problem. Happy to be here. Thanks so much for having us.

SPEAKER_04 1:38

Seriously, just the just the copy on the um flap in the jacket. I was I read it out loud to my husband and simply said, and there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Like, don't even need to buy it, just read it in the bookstore. Seriously, you yeah, your your flap copy is too good, but seriously, you you really are summing something up that felt like was waiting for a name. So I'm I'm super excited to talk to you. I want to first just give a little bit of context. So this is a uh podcast that is where Emily and I have been trying to look at, as the name tells you, the future of journalism in a somewhat long-term way. But as anybody who's been thinking about the future of journalism for some time, as both Emily and I have, will tell you, the question, how do we save journalism, doesn't really feel like the right question anymore, that it increasingly feels like how do we make sure that news and information is circulating and a watchdog function is being fulfilled in the new way that America and the world is being organized. Uh, what we're living through now is obviously not the liberal democracy imagined in the 1700s. So we want your help trying to understand what is this new system that we're finding ourselves living in. And I suspect muskism is a great phrase and a way of understanding it. So first tell us what muscism is.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

Well, in the introduction to the book, we offer kind of a one-line capsule summary of muskism, and we describe it as the promise of sovereignty through technology. So it's our argument that we try to elaborate throughout the book that Musk is not really in the business of selling cars, rockets, or satellites so much as that he is selling a promise that both individuals and nation states can, in an increasingly unstable world, fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures. But of course, in doing so, they deepened their dependency on him and his infrastructures.

SPEAKER_02 3:41

Yeah, and the way that we went about it was really analogous self-consciously to the way that scholars have talked about Fordism. So people have made the kind of obvious and superficial comparison to Musk and Ford between Musk and Ford in the past. Both build cars, both are right-wingers, basically, both have antagonism towards finance in certain ways. But the way that, especially social scientists, particularly related to something called the French Regulation School in the 1970s, thought about Fordism was to ask not only how does the factory work, but what kind of a social world is required outside of the factory to make the factory possible.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Yeah, so so are you paying your workers enough that they can buy the cars that are coming off the assembly line?

SPEAKER_02 4:26

At the basic level, exactly. So there's a mass production plus mass consumption angle. But then beyond that, even things like the nuclear family or the male breadwinner model, the idea of intergenerational upward mobility, eventually even the national space of the welfare state, these all become kind of essential components of something called Fordism. So there's a social contract at the heart of Fordism. And the thing that really was kept presenting itself as kind of a riddle for Ben and I was what would the analog be in Muskism? You know, what is the social contract? What is the equivalent of the living wage, intergenerational upward mobility, the nuclear family in the era of high digital capitalism that we're living under right now?

SPEAKER_00 5:09

And it also made me think a bit of Stafford Beer and this, you know, the system is what it does, which I'm sure I've got that quote wrong. But essentially, that's I think when Hetha said this is about it's it's so good that you found a word for it. Because I think what you're what we're looking at is something that we don't quite have we know what it is, but we don't quite have words for it.

SPEAKER_04 5:30

This thing you said about the the Fordism and the the social contract, I the Ford workers did earn more. What do we get from Muskism besides an illusory promise that's actually not in our best interest?

SPEAKER_03 5:46

Yeah, it's a good question, and and one that we actually struggled with. Because if you think about, you know, Quinn laid out the definition of Fordism as mass production plus mass consumption, you have on the one hand basically a business model, a strategy for making money, and on the other hand, a strategy for stabilizing society by essentially securing social peace, by purchasing um a degree of social consent. When we look at Musk and Muskism more broadly, it's fairly easy to identify the accumulation strategies, to talk about digital capitalism, to talk about um what we describe as state symbiosis, this effort to integrate with the state as a client and a backstop for private ventures. But when you turn to the question of consent and legitimacy, this is actually where Muskism becomes quite thin. I mean, you can think of Musk's relationship with his reply guys on social media as a kind of fan contract where you can get this kind of dopamine hit by getting a reply from Musk. Now in the the newly transformed X, you can even have your own feeds monetized. Um so it's a way that he's kind of both algorithmically amplifying the content of his allies and also getting them paid in the process. But the the issue here is that the fan contract doesn't scale very well. So it's actually a weakness in Muscism, but I think one that we're inclined to see kind of symptomatically, actually, that that Musk, of course, is not the only member of the American ruling class who's disinterested in the question of consent. Think about Trump. You know, just the absolute lack of attempt to manufacture any consent for the Iranian conflict.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yes, yes. Well I mean that's so interesting. I think that point about um the fan contract obviously doesn't extend to women, generally speaking, I would say, probably. Not for the most part. There's not a lot for me and Heather in uh atting.

SPEAKER_02 7:42

Well, I mean, if you're if you're you know sh the blonde influencer on the European far right with very large follower counts. And you're willing to preach the remigration of Muslim-born populations, then you might start to get his attention. But those are the kind of the only other than, of course, the mothers of his many children, um, otherwise the circle of women of power. Although Gwynn Shotwell is effectively runs SpaceX, so that is um an exception. But yeah, this question of the kind of the consent side is the part that probably l dovetails most of the kind of things you all are discussing here in the journalism space, too.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

Well, I actually was wanted bef before we get into the sort of who's in and who's out and who gets to decide in this worldview is the question of who owns the infrastructure seems so key to the future we're moving into. And I was really struck, you wrote this idea of states ceding their sovereignty to such a degree that it's forced to buy it back in increments. And this massive shift away from this any notion of public good and public ownership, sort of this feels like a complete turn, complete tr attempt to undo everything that we've done since the progressive era and the New Deal. And so I was wondering if you can talk about the that a little bit and what it means to have these private people, even separate from the politics of Musk at first, owning this infrastructure and what that means for sovereignty.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Yeah, I mean I think it helps to place this particular ism that we're throwing into the conversation alongside other isms that people have proposed. So we've already discussed Fordism. But in fact, those French regulation theorists were interested in Fordism at the time they were in the late 60s and early 70s because they saw Fordism actually breaking apart. They thought that, you know, the beginnings of outsourcing the um first recessions in post-war Europe had caused some doubt about the long-term durability actually of this virtuous circle between rising wages and um rising standards of living and rising profit margins for the big actors. The the period that they inaugurated really in the 1970s, as they described it, was post-Fordism. And we now know, you know, in retrospect, that consent, this problem was dealt with in different ways in the era of post-Fordism. It wasn't through collective bargaining agreements and kind of lifetime employment effectively with large manufacturing firms, but it tended to be instead the uh securing of mass prosperity through things like asset price inflation. So ownership societies become the way that people feel a sense of um commitment to the political system. This is, of course, comes along with indebtedness and the and the ease of acquiring consumer credit, along with an ideology of both customization, you can pick the version of any goods or lifestyle you want, but also then responsibilization. So a sense that if something is going wrong, it's because you yourself have a kind of personal failing. So we so what you're describing is, I think, not entirely novel, right? Like this the progressive model has been undone for some time now. And the normal term is neoliberalism for this period as well. But the thing that struck us as different about what Musk is doing is he doesn't really operate with the classic neoliberal binary of the state and the market, right? I mean, from sort of Thatcher through Reagan through Clinton up really even into the Obama era, there was this assumption that the state really can't do anything well, so you need to put things in the hands of the market. And in fact, that's partially why the biggest boosters of Silicon Valley from the 90s up until very recently were Democrats. Because it was part of a kind of Clintonite neoliberal perspective. What's interesting about the last several years, so let's say since 2016 or 17, is that state market binary is sort of blurring. So in fact, whatever Trump is inaugurating is something that is happier with the clear, visible hand of the state organizing economic affairs. Um it's becoming something a bit more like a state capitalism than a neoliberalism. And what's interesting about Musk is he is a very active and willing participant in that new synthesis. So we wouldn't actually, I think, see Musk as a neoliberal. We certainly wouldn't see him as a libertarian because he actually and he also isn't just a crony capitalist. He's not just, you know, securing patronage to kind of parasitize the state the way that arguably like Trump's sons are doing, right? Left, right, and center. Um rather, he's actually building out certain kinds of state capacity at the expense, as Ben introduced at the top, of a kind of new dependency. So that's what was interesting for us was like this reset of state capacity.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

Oh sorry, Heather, I'm just gonna cut across you having said I'll just sit sit here and say nothing as you knew that was not gonna happen. Um so one thing that it actually struck me, uh I spent a lot of my career covering Rupert Murdoch as a um media mogul. And one of the things that's very clear if you watch Murdoch is that he's not really about exploiting the free market, he's about exploiting political relationships and existing regulations, particularly where he can have them moulded around his uh business interests. And it felt it felt like you'd identified almost exactly the same thing, and I was sort of ah, okay, you know, but we had that separation, I guess, you know, even then, even in the very recent part of Rupert Murdoch being very close to the Reagans and the Thatchers of this world. You've now got Musk's that's that's a closer relationship, and the nature of his infrastructure is I guess um it is integrated in a way that our communication systems and our systems of war and our systems of commerce are all now in the same space. What shift does that uh uh represent in terms of our overall environment that we're operating in? I've written down technical authoritarianism here, which again I don't sort of feel I'm not sure it's the right word.

SPEAKER_03 14:21

Well I think here and elsewhere Musk offers us a useful vantage point on certain broader historical developments. And I think one of the things that people are trying to figure out right now is if neoliberalism is fading, you know, as I think is a point of consensus among people across the political spectrum, or as in crisis or in mutation, or at least the old style of neoliberalism seems to be breaking down, what is taking its place? What is the new ism? And for us, we're not trying to simply throw another one on the pile, it's a very oversaturated space. We want to be mindful of everyone's attention. But we do want to make a case that Musk and Muscism offer something unique in this discussion. And one of the things I think it offers is it illustrates the mechanism by which a new political economic order can emerge through an old one. Right. And so I think again, Musk is a perfect um uh petri dish for this because what we call the neoliberal era, in which the assumption by policymakers is that the private sector has a monopoly on innovation and dynamism, and if the public sector wants to get anything done, it needs to push as many of its functions as possible to the private sector. This was the logic specifically implemented at the Pentagon during the early years of the war on terror by Donald Rumsfeld that gave SpaceX its opportunity to scale. This is uh the opening that Musk takes advantage of and presents himself as the entrepreneurial whiz kid from Silicon Valley who can transform the economics of launch by bringing the agility and the visionary qualities of the tech industry to what was then a kind of moribund and declining aerospace industry. And in fact, he succeeds. I mean, SpaceX manages to reduce the cost of putting mass into orbit by more than 90% over the course of 20 years. So he does, you know, in a way kind of validate that neoliberal assumption that dynamism of the private sector can be unlocked to the advantage of the public sector, but in doing so, I think spawn something that's not quite neoliberal, right? The child of that we could not cleanly describe as neoliberal because what Muscism is ultimately oriented toward is not the hollowing out of the state, but rather the increase of state capacity through private means. So if you're the Pentagon and you suddenly have a much cheaper way to saturate space with satellites, that increases your state capacity quite significantly in terms of war fighting. Of course it increases your dependency on Musk as well, but it can't be cleanly described as a diminish of sovereignty of the kind we would dis we would think about in the post-Fordist or neoliberal era.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

Do we also think it's a muddying of regulation and accountability?

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Yeah, I mean, for me as someone who is on this neoliberal question spent some time about 20 years thinking about neoliberalism now, it's I've I had to ask myself more than once, you know, what is fundamentally different about what we're describing in comparison to the way that Hayek spoke or the way that Milton Friedman spoke. And at a basic political level, and this maybe gets into an important contribution, I think, of the book, is that Musk doesn't think about politics in at all in the basic building blocks of liberalism. So for all of their faults, and I I have written books documenting them, the neoliberals still did at some level believe in the idea of the individual. They did still believe in the idea of freedom, liberties, and actually rights, rights of a certain kind, usually market rights that could overrun human rights, and so on, but that was their vernacular, the language of classical liberalism still. What's so striking about Musk, and why I think we feel like it required a kind of a new label, is that he is getting his political concepts from the space of software engineering in particular, and coding, right, in even more particular. He, as a teenager, uh coat, you know, writes his first pieces of software, sells his first pieces of software with the programmable personal computer of the Commodore that he gets from a Pretoria shopping mall in um the 1980s. And ever since then, the way that he thinks about organizing social relations, social bodies, polities is thought about first through the metaphor of code and met and the metaphors of, as we all know now, viruses, bugs, um, the need to optimize and and cleanse software to make it pr operate at a at a smoother and and a higher level. None of those things have anything to do with classic ideas of political philosophy. Right? So it's not about even building hegemony in the sense of persuading enough people that the interest of the powerful is also their own interest, so that they become kind of naturalized into a new common sense. That's how, let's say, Gramsci, but in a way, all, you know, De Tocqueville, the whole all of the greats of political thinking have assumed society to work. Musk doesn't. He thinks that society is a code base, and that if you redesign it in such a way that only your memes are reproduced and copied throughout it, and the corrupted code and the mind viruses that work against your interests are isolated and contained and removed from it, then um the social engine will hum along and purr perfectly. So it it the individual is not actually addressed. The individual is always thought about in relation to a kind of a totality. And that is a deeply peculiar way of looking at the world and a strange and unsettling way of um trying to uh organize the unruliness of civil society as we know it. It's not at all a pluralistic way of understanding society. And and yet, as we call the second half of our book, Cyborg, it is the only way to understand how he goes about his business from the reckless acquisition of Twitter for$44 billion to now the integration of X into XAI, into SpaceX. And this question that is on every investor's mind, which is what does a rocket and satellite company have to do with the social media platform, is actually quite explainable if you think about politics in this machine-first way that he does.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Well, I was going to say you you use the word reckless in relation to his purchase of Twitter. And I think we all saw it as reckless. Sure. Books were written about it, yeah. Books were written about it. Doesn't look quite so reckless now. Is that just ha is that just accident?

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Well, it's funny because I think one of the reasons I think it looks smarter in retrospect is because he's got so thoroughly transformed what Twitter is, and even I would say more broadly, what our understanding of a social media platform is. So I think by its own terms at the time it seemed quite strange. And you know, it took it took basically uh legal compulsion for him to finish the acquisition. I think by all accounts he had some ambivalence in in actually uh going through with it. But uh when you look at how he has uh completely reconfigured the platform since, in particular turning It into not just a uh you know a platform that that prioritizes and privileges right-wing speech, but I think more broadly one that is committed to a kind of increasing automation of speech through Grok. I mean, because that's really the story now, is that social media for Musk is become a kind of playground for AI, a place where you can train AI, but also a place where you can um attempt to market and monetize various AI services by pushing your chatbot into interactions. And you know, when you look at what a company like Meta is doing, it's a it's a similar business strategy. You know, if you go on Instagram or or Facebook, like you're you're constantly being um being pushed, these AI companions. Um, so in a way that I think once again, Musk may have gotten there a little bit earlier than his competitors, but this notion that social media may increasingly be oriented towards interactions with AI avatars rather than other human beings seems likely to consolidate in the future.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

I think that's such a powerful way of putting it, not least because if you're a journalist, and particularly if you're a journalist in the 2000s, then Twitter came along and was actually infrastructure for you, particularly actually if you were a a a local journalist. I mean we think about it as the big names, um tweeting all day long. But actually the real value of it was that you could be in a remote part of the country and you could know what the school board was doing, but you could also talk to somebody who's at an environmental conference in Norway and find out and it it felt like such a violation because it felt as though that was a piece of infrastructure that needed improving and it just blew up.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

Yeah, I think I mean talking about the future of journalism as you all both are in this podcast uh uh at a broader level, I think it's really relevant because one of the things we want to do in the book is not to make this a kind of uh everyone just needs to unplug, you know, tech is evil kind of a manifesto. It's not actually a Luddite um tract. And it isn't partially because, you know, events move so quickly that sometimes one needs to be reminded of things that happened just in the last ten years, right? That now, for example, when the fact that Jack Dorsey sat on stage at the code conference with D. Ray Mickelson with a shirt that said stay woke hashtag made by black employees at Twitter. And for him, this was one of the first times that the term woke had entered his own vocabulary, and it meant something, you know, up for the black community for decades and decades, and it was about being mindful about vigilante white violence and about police brutality, and it helped to spark something that was actually quite extraordinary in this country, right? I mean, social media platforms and Twitter did allow for many of those kind of liberty, liberatory energies that had long been promised from the 90s onward. What is interesting that happened in the meantime, though, is that as you're indicating, the journalistic community became so dependent on Twitter disproportionately. I mean, the joke that it became the kind of assigning editor, right? Right. The fact meant that, you know, you could look at this social media platform, which never was one of the largest ones, right, was always just being heavily used by a small fraction, but a select fraction of cultural elites, political elites, business elites, meant that it was a very kind of vulnerable choke point, right? It offered itself for appropriation and transformation. So in our sort of exuberant embrace of it, we actually ended up exposing ourselves in ways that we perhaps hadn't realized at the time. And that did Musk know that? We've we have all the transcripts of the chats that went up to the acquisition of Twitter. He didn't seem to be particularly canny in that process. But it is interesting that one person we quote in that moment, not someone who I tend to quote very much, but Curtis Yarvin, um, at the time of the acquisition had a very interesting uh substack that I still remember where he said, I don't think much is important, but I think this is important. Because he I think he saw accurately that this was a kind of uh a bottleneck in the information environment that if it could be squeezed and even turned off, then the consequences would be really great. And a really concrete example of this that for some reason always sticks in my head is um in the course of writing this book, um Jared Lido was uh at a premiere for a film at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, and he had a kind of a staged kung fu fight with an Optimus robot in front of the theater. And it seemed certain that the robot was being remote operated because actually Musk hasn't figured out how to make autonomous humanoid robots yet. And I just I wanted to cite it, but then I wanted to be able to put in the footnote, you know, this was actually remote operated. But I what happened was I went on X, because that's where I had seen it, and I searched, and all I saw was reports of the facts that it had happened. Right. And then there would be a TMZ.com, MSN, that would just say, you know, people are talking about the fact that this humanoid robot appeared to fight Jared Liddo, but there was no one who either had the assignment to or the resources to figure out whether or not.

SPEAKER_00 27:30

No reporting. Right, no reporting connected. We barely have enough of this results to report.

SPEAKER_02 27:38

So in this case, all you had was the kind of the ripples of the spectacle, and that was now what we had as an information environment. And that was actually, even though it seems trivial, like a real gut-wrenching moment for me where I was like, wow, actually one has no means of finding out the truth about this incident. All we're left with is that it happened, therefore the spectacle is the truth.

SPEAKER_00 27:59

Aaron Powell Again, if you extrapolate that out, that is what we're now seeing with AI. I mean, we look at Grok a lot and how those experiments are, as you say, shaping what that platform is. But I think the way you've just connected that is also it's a pretty horrible moment to understand that this is a completely different information, not just environment but economy as well, that um is really there to stop accountability or any kind of discussion of accountability or sense making around that.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

Maybe that's and the LLM model is such that it is uh self-consuming, right? It's a kind of uh it's a kind of Ouroboros model where the more nonsense that's produced, then the larger the the training data will be for the LLM to reproduce said nonsense. And if you've set the weights all the way and and done the tutoring of it the way that Musk has with something like Rock, then you are actually able to see a method in what can otherwise seem like compulsive behavior on his part, right? I can this is one of the things we sort of realized at some point that when he was posting all the time, staying up all night, you know, like on X hours a day, Twitter hours a day, people were like, well, he's really losing it. Like Musk is coming undone. And maybe he was, he probably was, but also he was figuring out how to work the algorithm to his advantage. And also, if you think about the internet's truth as just the sum total of what has been said on the internet, then the more you say, the more it aligns with your views. So there actually is a kind of a method in the madness of flooding the zone in this seemingly compulsive way.

SPEAKER_04 29:36

Well, that's terrifying. Um it seems like a good segue into maybe talking a little bit about explicitly about his ethos. Um you know, he grew up in South Africa. I think you write very eloquently about that. You use this phrase a mood of mastery. And I thought that really said a lot. Um you say Muscatism has always been committed to a vigorous defense of hierarchy. Some humans are born to rule, others to be ruled. Class, gender, and race are the structural principles. So tell us what it means. We've sort of talked a bit about the way he's taken over some of the infrastructure and his relationship with the state. Now let's talk about the ethos that he's pumping into our system.

SPEAKER_03 30:19

Yeah, well, probably the the place to begin would be, you know, what Quinn said a moment ago, the notion of the world as code, which is an assumption that that Musk has, I think is not limited to Musk. You know, a lot of a lot of people who fell in love with computers early on, who had this experience of kind of becoming one with the machine through all-night coding sessions and went on to found companies in Silicon Valley. You know, he belongs to a milieu for for whom this is, I think, widely the case. But but as as is often the case with with Musk, he can be kind of an indicator species for for us, something who who somebody who kind of provides um uh uh somewhat more uh radicalized expression of of more familiar uh trends. So in the case of of Musk, why that computational frame is is useful is because it really inflects how he thinks about what a subhuman is. This notion of segmenting humanity into more and less human is not particular to Musk. Um arguably it's uh it's uh integral to Western civilization from its origin. And it's certainly a feature of far-right politics. Uh for Musk, what's distinctive is using the kind of subhuman or seeing the subhuman through a computational lens. And the NPC is a good example of that. The NPC, for folks who aren't familiar with the term, this is non-player character, which is a concept from video games where if you are a player character, you will be navigating the gaming environment and interacting with characters who are there to kind of entertain you, to provide you with useful information, um but are software, are programs who have defined dialogue trees, you know, limited range of of motion. And NPC uh has become, has at this point for years, been Musk's favorite term of abuse. But it's not just meant in a kind of inflammatory way. I think in our view, it really reveals something uh quite important about his worldview, which is that some people are real people, very few, but most people are subhuman NPCs who are essentially programmed and programmable. And that means in turn that you can engineer social consent if you can find ways to seize the correct choke points of the network and circulate new kinds of code. So it's not just a a kind of interpretive frame of, okay, you know, there are all of these fake people walking around. It also gives you a theory of uh power, a theory of politics, one that in our view is quite inadequate, that in fact backfires. Because when Musk tries to do politics, he thinks of it in terms of meme politics. That you uh find various ways to meme harder in order to reprogram people's worldview so that their behavior better aligns with his own interests, and that when people are behaving in ways contrary to his in his interest, it's because they have been infected by a woke mind virus, right? A term that is most closely associated with his turn to the right. And these are essentially bad memes. Bad memes that have infected people's brains and uh uh you know, have them behave in all sorts of ways that Musk finds strange and illegible. So I think that's that's kind of the the aspect of it to keep in mind. It's it's both a way of seeing the world in a very frightening way, but also a theory of how to change the world.

SPEAKER_02 34:07

And as an ethos, I think, to it. Um it shows how what's happening for him is on the terrain of kind of digital discourse. And it's another way, I think, to see the the internet as being a terrain of struggle, really, since the 1990s up to the present, in which the dominance of either the left or the right is not always clear. That there have been moments, in fact, when the left does seem to be using network technologies in ways that are, you know, consonant with its own outcomes, and then other times the right responds. Um of the touchstones for us is Donna Haraway's 1985 Cyborg Manifesto, which is perfect for our purposes or ends up chiming up perfectly with the way we're trying to lay out the problem because she says, on the one hand, the cyborg is clearly the child of the military industrial complex, right? It comes out of the research and development of the Department of Defense. We don't have computers, we don't have the internet in its form unless it's of use to the state and of use to the military. But once it has been, you know, unleashed and once it has been put into civilian hands, then people make different uses of it. And they actually end up undoing sometimes the categories that they have been given in advance. So the Internet and the cyborg for her is the possibility of a scrambling of gender binaries, a scrambling of racial identifications, and that the internet and cyborg technologies are always a place where a fight is happening between the two. It could be, as she calls it, a site for the informatics of domination, but it could also be a site for kind of libertari forms of collective and experimental self-understanding. And we think that Musk is very aware of this. And he he deeply, because he believes in a code theory of politics, he's very, very invested in making sure that he's the one who's oversight over it. And he wants to make sure that the emancipatory potential that someone like Haraway saw in technology remains extinguished and unavailable. So that we use the term cyborg conservatism in the book and draw attention, among other things, to one of the great ironies, which is that one of Musk's favorite ways to describe what he's doing is to reprogramming the matrix. It's a term he uses more than once before he's entering the government with doge. He also, of course, regularly refers to taking the red pill. And, you know, anyone who knows anything knows that the Wachowski siblings that made the matrix intended these explicitly as allegories of trans identity. Right. Right. So the idea of the matrix was not about, aha, I have seen the matrix, therefore I'm going to re-inscribe like traditional binaries of gender identity, for example. It was about being able to think outside. The last movie they made has Keanu flying around. Um this seems to point to both a kind of key feature of his ideology, but also kind of a weakness, right? Because it shows also that they're scared, actually. And they're they're frightened of the things that um expose their vulnerabilities, right? Um Ben and I were both really impressed by this piece that someone we know named Kevin Baker wrote about Project Maven and its uses. And he points out the fact that it's quite interesting that what is now such an essential part of AI targeting technology for the Department of Defense was also the site of one of the most important mobilizations of tech workers against the Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

Project Maven is the surveillance um project which involves the technology of a number of companies which has been uh implemented to target civilians and it sort of it kind of is the industrial attack complex and do they call it target generation?

SPEAKER_02 38:04

Yeah, so it was originally a contract to Google, but then because of the uh opposition of the the employees at Google, it ended up shifting to Palantir. And then just as of this week, as of yesterday, I think actually, it's now been um integrated officially into Department of Defense uh technology as the way to find targets. Right. There's an interface you can see uh tutorials of it online.

SPEAKER_04 38:31

It's so interesting. I d I I remember I sort of said something similar when we were talking to Rushkoff, which is as I was reading this book and then hearing you talk, so my father was a programmer in the night like an early 1960s programmer at Johns Hopkins. And so when I'm reading the stuff about Musk, I'm like, yeah, my father was saying this stuff in the 1970s. Like there is nothing but my father was a he considered himself a post-scarcity anarchist. You know, he was far, far to the left. But my whole childhood was all about this the coming of of the single human consciousness, which he was saying was this great thing. I thought sounded horrible. And it's just fascinating to me how it it's this and it and at you're the reading this and listening to your notes, the first time it sort of occurred to me that it's a coder mentality that has something to do with the bond that happens between the person and the machine, maybe. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

It's just really well it's kind of one of the things just that it's it's so funny and seems so ham-fisted when Musk or Carp or Teal try to kind of address problems of consent or culture. So I just saw a clip of Musk, you know, on stage at the at the launch of the Terrafab or the launch of the initiative to make the Terrafab. So to have their own AI chip manufacturing capacity that Intel will help them with. And he's like, yes, so this the future's gonna be great. You're gonna like what if you could go to Saturn on the weekend?

SPEAKER_00 40:10

And and then if you listen to that, that sounds quite nice to me right now. It's never been appealing before, but now.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

But it's such like it's such a low-energy attempt to retire. Right. So so you you can see that when they if they have the mentality, like as the engineers, they have already secured really all of the um state uh leverage that they need, then the story they tell to everyone else really just becomes a kind of um a footnote that can be sort of figured out between the bathroom and the stage or whatever. So the idea of Western civilization or you know, yeah, defense of the West, birth rates, just like whatever meme sort of wanders through the timeline.

SPEAKER_04 40:59

I I really was struck reading this how unimpressed I was with him. I mean, I'm impressed with what he's achieved. He's taken the and the you're in you do so nicely these inflection points like 9-11 and then the green energy. You know, he he's brilliant at seizing the opportunities and manifesting his his will, but his vision is completely boring and not that in not that imaginative. I feel like there's echoes of it, you know, for decades and decades, if not, I don't know, some of it reminded me of Germany pre-World War I.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

You know, like it just feels very well it's the hack of the vivarian problem of charisma, right? I mean, th that's the thing about the coder's mentality is if society is just code, then you don't need charisma. Right?

SPEAKER_04 41:47

You just need to or good ideas.

SPEAKER_02 41:50

Well, you just insofar as they're a functional and adapted to the task at hand. But the traditional ways of like bonding with the population, you know, the way people think about populism, you have the category of the people that many diverse people can sort of project their own interests into, and there can be what like Laclau and Move call a kind of chain of equivalence that emerges in the process of a social move movement or even an election campaign. I mean, the way Mamdani operates is, you know, very classic, right? I mean, you could draw a straight line between the French or the American Revolution to Mamdani's campaign last year. Try to draw a line from anything that was done in the liberal classic period of revolutions and the way Musk operates, you will at some point hit a squiggly line that will go through your father's, you know, laboratory and kick out around here. So it really is a uh I think a testament to the radically disruptive quality of computerization on social life.

SPEAKER_03 42:48

So I but I think Musk used to be more charismatic. Like if you look you know it may that's quite a question of taste. But if you look at we as we did look at videos of his presentations and interviews over the course of his career, I think there are periods in which he could present a quite appealing persona. Uh you know, without offering too functionalist an argument, hopefully we avoid that in the book, uh I think that uh dynamic may track a deeper shift, which is the extent to which he is less and less a consumer-facing entrepreneur. Because if you think about Tesla, t the importance of Tesla for Musk has uh receded relative to SpaceX. SpaceX is kind of the big story for Musk. And even within Tesla, EV sales, you know, they they're they're trying to reposition themselves less as a car company and more of an AI and robotics company. Right. Okay. So and again, this isn't specific to Musk. Arguably Silicon Valley as a whole has undergone this real shift away from consumer tech toward so called hard tech. Where the state in particular is a very important client, but it's really about enterprise now. It's not about kind of individual customers. So I think that's part of it too. And it's kind of what Quinn was alluding to. Once you've done all of the hard work of positioning yourself as the ideal state partner, you don't really have anything left in the tank for the retail crowd because it doesn't matter as much.

SPEAKER_00 44:21

I mean you've written a lot about the culture of Silicon Valley, right? So so uh uh Musk is an outsider to some extent to that, even though he's a beneficiary of the dynamics of this and he's uh you know code code obsessed. Um I just wondered uh what you what you think if what you think about the culture of Silicon Valley now, you know, if we're we're look at uh this new type of cyber cyber conservatism, which I don't I think may have been there all along that Silicon Valley came out of the defence industry. Uh but as um Quinn was just saying, you know, you you actually have worker resistance there now in a way that you uh maybe wouldn't have had uh 15, 20 years ago. Um has it chang uh has is it fundamentally changing? I think we're so focused on the mosques and you know the Trumps and the top of the pyramid. What what's actually happening in the places where all of this thinking and and making um wants took place?

SPEAKER_03 45:22

Yes, I mean I think the answer is yes, it's absolutely fundamentally changing. I mean I think Silicon Valley, you know, when you think about its inception as a semiconductor manufacturing zone in the post-war period, it uh you know, from its very beginning kind of uh enters a series of technological paradigm shifts. You know, from, you know, to put it very reductively, from the semiconductor era to the personal computing era to the dot-com era to the platform era. We're now in the midst of that next shift, which is the AI era. And I think, you know, the the things to to keep in mind there are not just the kind of obvious headline figures of the enormous amount of investment that these firms are putting into this technology, but but that qualitatively this is a very different type of paradigm than the one that preceded it. So the platform era was all about being asset light, was about really letting your users do the work. I'm clicking around on Facebook, I'm making data, it it it turns into targeted advertising. We're all very familiar with this dynamic. It's not that that's disappeared. In fact, that's important because that's generated the cash flow out of which the generative AI boom has for the most part been financed. But the the business model has now shifted, where now you have a very expensive technology that is very energy intensive, that requires a mass construction of data centers, and also requires uh clients abroad. So it really matters that you're getting into the Middle Eastern market, the Chinese market, that you're trying to push American technological dependence on your chips, on your LLMs, on your app ecosystems. So that, you know, as you might expect, necessitates a different relationship with the state. Right? The state actually becomes a really integral partner in that business strategy. And we've seen that very dramatically under the current Trump administration, where they've been uh opening up federal land for data center construction, trying to roll back environmental review to speed up data center construction. But even a future democratic administration would face pressures toward uh playing that same partner role because you have the leading faction of American capital. It's basically the whole growth story for the American economy, and they're saying this is what we need. The state is going to be under enormous pressure to partner with them regardless. So I think sometimes people get a little bit distracted or place perhaps too much emphasis on the ideological component of the Silicon Valley Trump coalition. Yeah. And for certain actors within that coalition, there are ideological aspects, no doubt. But I think for most figures, there are just simple material considerations. And on the Trump administration side, I think that probably policymakers of any party would face pressure to partner with these private sector actors given their prominence and given how integral they are to the American economy.

SPEAKER_04 48:23

I I if I could, if you guys have like five more minutes, I would love to ask one non-journalism specific question, and then I promise we'll bring it back to what all this means for journalism. Is that acceptable to everybody? It's it's the relationship between muskism and the state that I just want to ask a little bit more about because I really hear what you're saying that this is not neoliberalism, this is not get rid of the state. But you definitely say in the book that it's it's an attempt to vassalize the state, which I thought was really interesting. And I do think the power dynamic between the muskism and the state is important. It's not equal, right? Like it is, you you say explicitly that it's the muskism is attempting to make the state its vassal, who then has to give it money in order to have access to infrastructure. So can you just and because the state nominally is put there by the people and Musk is not put there by the people, this power dynamic question feels really central to me. So can you just talk about that a little bit more?

SPEAKER_03 49:26

I would say it it certainly is an attempt to vassalize the state, but it's not always successful. You know, you could see actually the Doge experiment as one that that was an illustration of the failure of it. And I think in terms of the the balance of power between public and private within the dynamic that we describe as state symbiosis, I think it has to be understood as being continuously renegotiated.

unknown 49:51

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03 49:52

Where that balance of forces is an outcome of continuous struggle. And actually you could see an illustration of this with the dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon. You know, nominally it's about, you know, certain things that Anthropic says it's not willing to do. But more generally, you could look at it as a case where the Pentagon understands that its ability to exercise this core sovereign function of war making is increasingly dependent on a handful of small, very powerful tech firms on the West Coast. And it needs to discipline those companies in order to re-establish more power in that state symbiotic relationship. Now it's important to note that it this is about symbiosis, right? The Pentagon gets something from this exchange. It gets the ability to generate um these targeting lists with a an extraordinary speed, which lets them speed up their kill chain. So it's not, as as Quinn was mentioning before, uh quite a case of parasitism or crony capitalism. There is something be being exchanged, but I think the balance of power between the two has to be continuously fought out.

SPEAKER_02 51:04

Yeah, I mean we have we actually don't really need to speculate about what this dynamic looks like, right? I mean, one of the cases where it was tested out was with the Trump-Musk feud last year when Trump threatened to cut all SpaceX contracts, right? And to which Trump or Musk responded, okay, the Dragon capsule is hereby decommissioned, which would have meant, you know, as I commented at the time, would have meant that the American astronauts would be now stranded on the space station, right? So it was actually a hollow threat. There was no there is no substitute for SpaceX. But, you know, if need be, I mean the Artemis mission just happened, that wasn't a SpaceX rocket. If need be, if it really wanted to, could the United States government channel resources to strangle out, expropriate, and transfer technology from Musk's empire into a new one of, let's say, run by Jeff Bezos instead? Absolutely it could. That would be a question of political will. Um the case that that um Ben just mentioned with anthropic, right? Remember that the Hegzath responded by saying, okay, um we now declare anthropic supply chain risk. So we're treating it now the same way like ZTE and Huawei were treated, and its presence anywhere in sort of state-funded infrastructure is now forboden. It's taboo. That was in the courts. It's unclear if that would actually get pushed through. The other Silicon Valley companies very importantly signed amicus briefs saying that that is against the principle of the division between public and private power, let alone uh foreign and domestic producers. But you you know, we're seeing there in real time. Like the the it's not, I think, the the subordination of the state to these private actors is, you know, structurally there, but to circle back to the way we started the conversation, the Altmans and the Amadeus and the Musks and the Teals and the CARPS still need to outsource the problem of legitimacy and consent to Washington, D.C. They haven't figured out a way to govern on their own. And they probably wouldn't be able to, based on what we're seeing.

SPEAKER_00 53:10

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr. And and that enables me to bring in my um relevance question to uh future journalism, or rather, because all of this rolls up into um the press and large numbers of journalists actually being part of the same system. So whether you're whether your work, whether your news work is literally part of the same system because it's been ingested by a generative AI company, or whether it's because Larry Ellison.

SPEAKER_02 53:56

Or on the other side of your NPR and you've been just bailed out by Microsoft money indirectly by Bomber.

SPEAKER_00 54:00

Right, indeed. Yes, exactly. But but but having had that cut off by the trust. So this kind of the the information and the knowledge economy, you know, we're all um academics in one way or another here as well. Uh there's that's how does that so how does press freedom, how does academic freedom, how does the knowledge economy or the independent knowledge economy fit into all of this?

SPEAKER_04 54:22

I because I or maybe the maybe the question is, is there a role for the free press and the knowledge economy in this future?

SPEAKER_00 54:31

Yes, that's a better no, that's a much better way of putting it.

SPEAKER_02 54:36

Yeah, I think we hope so.

SPEAKER_00 54:37

I was gonna say, can we just say yes?

SPEAKER_02 54:39

I mean, in from an internalist from an internal point of view, I would say that no, right? I think from like a doctrinaire muskist point of view, let's say, then you know, it there is a very particular reason why Peter Thiel was paying people to drop out of university to come work for his companies, right? The idea of like highly instrumentalized attitude towards learning and that being only things that are aimed towards new kind of innovations and productivity gains inside of companies, I think, is um mother's milk for the kind of tech philosophy that we're describing. There is, of course, the tension there, and this is something we that Ben has already mentioned a couple times, the way that someone like Musk is not exactly like ex niolo, but is actually an exaggerated version of other things, which is that we are all at uh higher ed institutions at one level or another. And if you've been at them for the last 20 years, you know that idea of redirecting all learning towards practical applicability in frontier technologies is what provosts and deans and presidents have been saying since I've been teaching, since 2008. So they are actually only accelerating there, I think, an instrumentalized attitude that um is already kind of pervasive. But the idea of a contentious public sphere, or as I mentioned earlier, like a pluralistic understanding of the way civil society should work, in which we actually end up producing better outcomes because of the clash of opposing ideas that then have to find some kind of space of compromise, is I think the part that is least computable to the mentality that we're talking about here, right?

SPEAKER_04 56:16

Does that mean we get to keep it in his post-human cyborg world?

SPEAKER_02 56:21

Unfortunately not. Yeah, no, I would love to say we're pretty grim, too.

SPEAKER_03 56:25

We're we're not really the people you are.

SPEAKER_04 56:27

Yeah, how's your opt- what's your area how how hopeful are you guys?

SPEAKER_03 56:30

Like we didn't put any of it in the book. No. I think so. Perhaps it it's useful for for thinking about it to think about like Musk as a media figure and how he contrasts with media figures in the past. We talked about Murdoch, you could think about William Randolph Hearst. You know, the the kind of how how has historically influence been exercised through a media environment? And there's you know a lot of cases of this. We could even think of Zuckerberg as a media figure in this respect. I I think what Musk is attempting to do, and which is something we've been trying to draw people's attention to because I I think it's actually a serious source of risk, is uh through Grok uh to create a completely self-enclosed reactionary information ecosystem. And through the production of Grokopedia, which is this right-wing clone of Wikipedia that Grok calls upon, uses as a source of truth in answering um queries when people ask questions of of the chat bot. I think it's important to actually situate that within this broader legacy because if you think about how people get information, you know, uh in uh in the good old days it would have been newspapers, television, radio. In the not so distant future, it would have been search engines, social media platforms. I think the direction of travel is that it's going to be an AI chatbot. Funnel. An AI interface of some kind. I don't know whether it's exactly gonna be a website, but it'll be some screen, and the back end of that will be a large language model. That's gonna be, and in fact, as I think we were talking about a moment ago, when you do a Google search, you get Gemini at the top anyway. So even even traditional search. Is moving that way. I think Musk perceives that direction of travel, and that's part of why GROK is so important. Because if you can own that interface, then you own what information people receive through that interface. And that I think is actually for me one of the more frightening prospects.

SPEAKER_04 58:44

Yeah. That literally just gave me very unpleasant shivers down my back.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

That's what we're here for.

SPEAKER_04 58:51

I was like, that's not the future I'm looking for. So can we conclude with what should we be doing? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 58:57

That's we'd like to end with what could we do differently, maybe what do we do?

SPEAKER_02 59:01

Well, the funny thing about this book is is that we wrote it very quickly. So we started it at at the time of Doge, really. It was last February that we actually looked at each other and said, okay, let's just turn this into a book. Um And that was in retrospect, now I think kind of like the zenith of power, really, for the big tech mega kind of fusion or coalition, right? That was the moment in which people were still quite kind of backfooted by what was going on. Um, people really hadn't caught up to at all to generative AI and how that might transform the classroom or human relationships to one another. So they really had a long runway there. They had 2025 where basically they could do anything, right? I mean, people just mobilization hadn't caught up, politicians hadn't caught up. And all they needed to do this kind of enormous build-out of the back end for the generative AI hyperscalers that were needed to help um run this stuff was cheap energy, cheap credit, um ignorant populations, and cooperative White House. And they had all four of those things. Those things were flying. In the last month or two, right, since March, since the Iran conflict, they've lost at least half of those. I mean, they've lost cheap energy. Strategically, that was not a great move. You know, Saudis are not opening their wallets anymore because they're worried about what's happening in their own backyard. And most importantly, populations have woken up to this, right? So the main um statewide data center, AI data center ban got pushed through a couple of weeks ago, Monterey, Oklahoma City. We're just gonna see those now line up like dominoes. In fact, now we're in a such a rapid backlash that the Republican and Democratic candidates for the midterm are kind of fighting with each other to figure out who can be more anti-AI.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

Right. Right?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:51

So that runway is like actually coming very rapidly to an end. And whether or not it is indeed true that they feel like their dominance is so absolute that they don't need to perform the act of persuasion is something we're going to find out.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:04

I was gonna say we will f there's a fact going on on that.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:08

Tune in again next year. I was gonna say this time next year we'll recontinue and find out.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:15

That's right, in the in an empty in the uh Joseph Pulitzer school of ARC.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:21

Yeah, we will it'll be like we'll be like three animes in skimpy outfits, like dancing for the camera.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:29

I just have to say, Emily has uh heard me say this, but and you can cut this and we we're over, but I used to cover video games.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:38

And the thing that got me into video games was this saying from anthropology, show me the games of your children, I'll show you the next hundred years. And I came out of it with this very freaked out vision of the future based on this personality that I've never found quite the right words to describe. And Emily has accused me of geek profiling when I'm geek profile. Because it's this personality who is very capable of handling mass amounts of information, is cognitively very intelligent in a very sort of traditionally masculine way, but really has no uh capacity for human connection or empathy. And when I got your book, I thought it was musk that I saw. And I've never quite yeah, and so I both was horrified and wanted to thank you because what you how you describe him is what I feel like I saw in 2005 covering early first-person shooter culture. So thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:41

You're welcome.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:42

Don't uh good help. And thank you so much for giving up time on your very um busy book tour. Thank you very much. And the book is called the book is called Muskism. It's available everywhere. We're a global brand, as you can tell. Um so it is a great book. Um I'm fantastically annoyed um that you wrote it so quickly as well. Um it'll never happen again. I was gonna say Heather's Heather's been writing a book for a while. Um me and the co-author have been writing a book for so long that we're now, oh, maybe it could just be a history book. Yeah. Um so so we're so thank you so much for this fantastic conversation. Yeah, thank you for your time.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:29

Super interesting. Good luck with the book. Listeners, buy it. It's good.