Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian: Muskism
After buying a hard copy of this book at the RiffRaff launch with Quinn Slobodian—Ben Tarnoff pulled out briefly before on account of illness—it has sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks while I’ve pottered around fulfilling various obligations to others and myself (a conference, a short presentation about my dissertation, a bikepacking route over the alps from Switzerland to Italy).
Muskism reads like a trade book. At least, it reads like it has been edited by an editor who doesn’t trust readers to hold arguments and episodes in their head from one chapter to the next.
I don’t judge this ‘tradey’ nature a bad thing, necessarily. Maybe many readers don’t, and the repetition certainly does give color to the vignette of Musk as a consciously contradicatory and thus psychoanalytically coherent character who represents a distinctive brand of 21st century capitalism. Tarnoff and Slobodian cast a thread that loops together the parts Musk played/plays in PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, and DOGE (both the Department of Government Efficiency, and the memecoin), hemming them together with alliterative seams such as “fortress futurism”, “attention alchemy”, “becoming bot”, “cybernetic collectives”, and “sovereignty as a service”,. The apparent mistrust of the reader’s memory from chapter to chapter does, however, make one think that a more more concrete theoretical position might have been developed had so much time not been spent looping back on previously established episodes.
The book’s subtitle—“A Guide for the Perplexed”—suggests a critical introduction to the life and times of Elon Musk, and it more or less delivers on this suggestion, to my mind. Muskism pieces together Elon’s erratic activities as milestones that mark a kind of progress towards a unified ideological project despite themselves, despite their apparently groundless individual motivations, and in doing so constructs Musk as iconic of his own memetic syntagm of capitalist caprice, ego, and devastation.
I’d recommend the book as a way to get churning on the empirical chaos of America’s catastrophic tech economy. Musk is certainly an important agent of this chaos, and the book covers his most notable shenanigans. In both the RiffRaff discussion and some others with the authors that are circulating online, a fair bit was made of Musk’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa, as Tarnoff and Slobodian present this in the book’s first chapter as the establishing shot of his psyche-qua-politics. Rearing its ugly head in recent years, Musk’s swing to the far-right in recent years, accentuated by his calls for the ‘repatriation’ of immigrants to their home countries across Europe and the United states, cannot but be compared to the racist and segregationist regime of South Africa’s Nationalist party. Tarnoff and Slobodian’s take here is not vulgar psychoanalysis: it is not that Musk’s childhood in South African apartheid represents a totalizing historical explanation for his xenophobic tendencies today. But this history is not unrelated, and nostalgia—the (mis)remembering and (mis)valuation of past events—weighs heavy on our estimates of the present’s psychic composition. The milieu of a billionaire’s troubled childhood is fertile material for a critical snapshot of what motivates the drive for capital, or lies beyond it.