Non-Fiction Reading Group Amsterdam

Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called a playbook for our new postliberal age.

It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own post-liberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world.

Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.

About the authors:
Slobodian is a cultural historian who studies how ideas about the market, the state, and freedom shape international politics—and how market radicals try to bypass democratic oversight through “zones” (such as free ports and special economic areas). He is the author or (co-)editor of seven books, including Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (winner of the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize), 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.

Ben Tarnoff is an American writer and technologist who writes about the political economy of technology.
His essays and criticism on how digital infrastructure and companies shape the internet (and, by extension, society and politics) - and on what democratic alternatives might look like - have appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Republic.