MUSKISM—Its Roots, Nature & How to Fight It w/ QUINN SLOBODIAN & BEN TARNOFF
“ Musk interestingly has this way of excluding the majority of the population from consideration, what he variously calls non-playing characters or NPCs, which is a category from video games, or sometimes bots, vampires. And this is a much more stark version of insider and outsider group creation than even hierarchies of race because it takes this one step further by taking very seriously the idea that other people are not only not human, but they in some way don't even exist, which is the literal reading of Musk's adoption of Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, which is that most people are simply programmable parts of a simulation and only a small number of people are actual players.”
In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. This is much more than a biography or popular account of Elon Musk, it is a radical analysis of a deeply disturbing, computational way of seeing the world. We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the form of racial others, transpeople, “woke” populations, or most generally and dismissively, “Non-Player-Characters.” We talk about the dangers this mindset has on democracy and the public sphere, and argue that what we should do is to “embrace the woke-mind virus as a counter-revolutionary act.”
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Slobodian is a Guggenheim Fellow. has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.
Ben Tarnoff's books include Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do-and How They Do It, and Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. He's a contributor to the New York Review of Books, NYTimes and The New Yorker.
(4:02) How childhood in apartheid South Africa shaped Musk’s worldview
(10:17) Humans as NPCs
(16:37) Memes & far-right discourse
(20:52) Engineering ideology through Grok & probabilistic language models
(32:15) Automating consent & isolating the public sphere
(37:20) DOGE, the limits of cyborg optimization
(46:58) Unwinding tech monopolies, Embracing the woke mind virus
(52:32) Possible Futures of Carbon Musk & Contractor Musk
www.palumbo-liu.com https://speakingoutofplace.com Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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