The rise of “Muskism” – Will we live in Elon Musk’s nightmare future?

Hello and welcome back to the bunker bringing you handmade human-sourced news without

the nonsense every week day morning. I'm Andrew Harrison. Today, every age gets the

hyper-dominant rich guy at deserves. And in our case, it's someone who both unites and

is a product of some of the most powerful, dangerous, and anti-democratic currents in

the world. Made colossally rich by technology, radicalized by the weird, wealthy company he keeps

until he's become indistinguishable from a fascist in some respects. A true disciple

of founder theory where the boss is king and marinated in the smirking irony and governance

by shit-posting ethos of the internet. Elon Musk is the world's biggest, most powerful,

richest pen and the arse. But if the writers of a new book are correct, it's not Elon

Musk you need to worry about, it's muskism. The philosophy he embodies, which is risen

without trace, or perhaps without being named yet, and threatens to be the operating system

of the 21st century, which is Fordism was the operating system of the last century. What

is muskism? What did it come from? And even when Elon Musk himself disappears, are we doomed

to live in a muskist future? Quince Labodian is Professor of International

History at Boston University and the author of books including Crackup Capitalism and

the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Hello, Quince, thanks for coming in.

Happy to be here. And Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts.

These books include internet for the people. Hello, Ben, welcome.

Hi, thanks for having us. The book, which I really, I enjoyed it while

simultaneously being terrified and very, very concerned. It's subtitled a guide for

the perplexed and I am that perplexed person. I must admit, I hadn't really put together

the pieces of everything that makes Musk who he was. I just seen him as like a rich guy

who buys other people's companies and then says, I'm a technologist.

You points out that he has been driven by ideas all along. Quince, what's the essence

of muskism? Well, for us, it was really started out as a question. I mean, we were the perplexed,

I suppose, when this began. And one of the ways people have tried to understand colossal

egos and influence of industrialists like Musk in the past have been to ask, you know,

what kind of world is required for their wealth? What kind of world is required for their

production model? The most obvious case here is Henry Ford. And social scientists over

the decades have extrapolated this idea of Fordism. Our proposal was that we could learn

something similar. If we asked, what kind of world is necessary for Musk to make the

money he makes through rockets, cars, social media platforms, now AI companies? And to

see what kind of, in fact, social contract was being offered to the population in return.

Ben, one of the key things that stands out is we're always told Musk's incredible. He's

a businessman. He's an entrepreneur. And you describe in the early stages of the book

in detail how effectively he kind of parasites his companies upon the state until they become

so essential that he can kind of retro take over to build himself into the very kind of

infrastructure of the United States and all the states were possible. The state funds

your growth? Yeah, absolutely. And this is probably most

clearly seen in a company like SpaceX, Musk found SpaceX in 2002. And by 2024, so two

decades or so later, he controls 95% of all US orbital launches. So Musk has become

de facto gatekeeper for US government access to low earth orbit. And indeed, for many

governments around the world, that illustrates a theme of our book, which is state symbiosis.

Musk is not a libertarian. He doesn't want to shrink or displace the state. He actually

wants to fuse public and private power such that states cannot exercise their sovereign

functions unless they purchase services from him as a monopoly private provider.

And there isn't really enough lot of democracy there. No, I don't think that under muskism

democracy is actually a very operative concept because he doesn't think in terms of the individual

as the starting point. He really thinks the computer is the starting point. So if you

fully inhabit a kind of muskist digitized view of human society, everything is downstream

of machines. And if you want to change society, you don't do politics in the old fashion

sense. You actually attempt to reformat or re-engineer the code base of the machine.

And the code base of the machine is what us? Well, he does believe that people are largely

programmed, that are increasing integration with what he describes as the giant cybernetic

collective through our entanglement with interfaces like social media, increasingly cause

people to behave as if they are so-called non-player characters in video games. So he does

have a very programmable view of what the human being is. And that accounts for his uniquely

cybernetic view of politics, Borbaraadua.

Quinn, you talk about musk succession with a thing called the superset, which I'd never

really heard up before. But the idea is that the internet and digital services wrap so

much around everything. They subsume all activity, not just communications and data management,

but pretty much everything you do is passing through the digital world. Hence, any number

of techno thrillers where somebody decides to take the internet offline and anarchy and

seers. But it's like, musk wants this world to happen. And I'm kind of done found out

in what ways this distinct from, say, a Chinese total state surveillance system.

Yeah, I mean, this term superset was kind of unlocked in insight for us as well. It comes

from an interview that musk gives in 1998 when he's still relatively young, just in his late

30s still, and had just made his first fortune in Silicon Valley, was on his way to making

his first fortune. And on CBS News, he actually makes the statement that the internet was becoming

the superset of all media. It was going to wrap in advertising, radio, television, newspapers,

stock markets, soon everything would run through the internet. At the time that was actually

not true yet, right? I mean, one of the things we were surprised to discover is that paypal.com,

the website and payment service that he developed with Peter Teal was more visited than the

New York Times website in 1999. It was more visited than NFL, the National Football League

in 1999. So they were actually intuiting something and in fact, helping create a certain technological

reality that was not yet the case. As the years have gone by, this world that they were kind of

dreamcasting or predicting has become more and more our reality. And I think that one of the

things we find helpful about musk is he's a kind of a diagnostic tool. He's saying something that

is partially true about our reality than often exaggerating it and twisting it in ways that

become distorted. So it is true, actually, that in some ways we are cybernetic collectives. It's

true that we live a lot of our lives through the cloud software and the email software and video

conferencing software that Silicon Valley provides that we communicate through social media that the

stock market does certainly operate in a digitized way. Money creation operates in a digitized way.

It's only been in the last few years that it's become totally normal to not carry currency around

with you. So we have been actually sort of following the lead that he was intuiting early on,

which makes it possible for him to imagine that all one needs to do is seize the computer

and reality will follow in its wake. One of the surprises was I'm not fond of this guy,

right? He just seems to everything awful. He seems to be involved in it. He's like, people go,

oh, he's great. He's like the Tony Stark of the real world. Yeah, but Tony Stark's a hero and he's

not a hero. One thing that surprised me is in the early part of the book, a kind of positive

Elon Musk is on show. The guy wants to get involved in clean technology. His apparent ambitions

in the early part of his career for space are laudable. And then, you know, through a process of

events, which we'll come on to discuss, this guy turns into one of the most dangerous because

richest men in the world, but also falls so hard for extreme right wing politics that he becomes

unrecognizable. Is there an alternate timeline where we kind of, you know, we get good Elon?

Well, you earlier used the term parasitism to describe Musk's relationship to the state and

then Ben responded by describing the symbiosis. And those are not synonyms, right? Like, there's a

real difference. The parasite over time consumes the host and then the relationship is completed.

The symbiot by contrast creates a kind of equilibrium. And if you look at what Musk has been

able to offer the state, the American state over the years, and in some case the Chinese state,

the German state, he's often been able to provide them something that is in itself not kind of

corrosive or evil. So we use this term electric autonomy by describing, for example, this

really undiscovered or undiscussed moment when Tesla gets its first big loan from the

Department of Energy. It gets almost a $500 million loan in 2009, effectively saves the

company from collapse. Why does it get that loan? Because Barack Obama comes into office as

basically an anti-war president. He wants to get the United States out of the Middle East.

To do so, he needs to reduce dependency on foreign oil. To do that, you have to rapidly electrify

the auto sector. You have to get heavily into renewable energy, especially solar. And Musk is

standing there as someone willing to perform that act for him to produce an attractive consumer EV

that people actually want to buy. So there's a point where the same principle states

symbiosis, electric autonomy looks one way. Flash forward 15 years, and he's selling the cybertruck.

It looks like he's preparing for a different kind of future. So he often changes with the times

as much as he changes the times. That's one thing that really fascinates me. The cross between,

you know, I know it takes a long time to cash your mind back up the time when Tesla's were cool.

And the Tesla is this kind of like warm red roadster thing that has 1950s conversations.

And the cybertruck just looks like a kind of a block of titanium. And I think he tweeted that

the cybertruck is the kind of truck that George Dread would drive. I'm like, no, just shut out

a motorbike. He does not have your car. But he does anger the nerds this way. And I'm not

not. But he has kind of externalized his worldview into the physical designs of his products.

Yeah, certainly. I mean, in our view, cybertruck actually really embodies this fascination with

techno sovereignty. This notion that Musk is promising sovereignty through technology, which is

our capsule definition of muskism. But in the case of the cybertruck, also in the case of

solar panels, energy storage systems, and so forth, what Musk is really selling is sovereignty

scaled to the level of the individual or the household. He's promising that in the world of

extreme weather events of geopolitical instability, you can fortify yourself in your Tesla dome.

But the idea, his vision of the world, his vision of countries is there must be high and

impenetrable borders, his vision of companies and supply chains, high and impenetrable borders,

right the way down to your own bathroom, high and impenetrable borders. I cannot stop thinking

about his youth in South Africa and how that must have conditioned him because, but a deep

psychological level, this is not a recipe for diverse society and a heavily social society, is it?

Yeah, well, I think in the same way that there's a small but important distinction between

symbiosis and parasitism. I think there's a small but very important distinction between

the kind of absolute closure you're describing and then the semi-permeable membrane that

Muskism actually implies. South Africa is fascinating to us as a kind of template for what we call

Muskism, not so much because it was white supremacist society and based on clear racial hierarchy,

even though that ends up resonating quite a bit with Musk in the present day. But because of the

political economic form it took, so it offered a kind of a third way, if you think about it, between

global American capitalism and Soviet style command economy on the other, it did a bit of both,

right? It sealed the borders in military terms. It hardened its infrastructure, but they also

embraced high technology, right? They had their own nuclear program. They brought an IBM

computers. They got licenses from Ford and Datsen and Volkswagen to build those cars inside of the

country. So it wasn't quite an impenetrable wall. It was one that let some things in but not

other things. It's quite hard to think about South Africa and sort of put the racism to one side,

isn't it? It's like, it is the challenge. Stop thinking about the racism for a minute and look

at it. It was so very, very difficult. Yes and no, because in our argument, all of that is

necessary to make the racism a reality, right? I mean, you use the IBM computers to surveil and

sort out the labor population such that you can eject the black population back to the homelands

when unnecessary and assign them to the factories when necessary. So they go together actually.

Yeah, and it's very, very close to what you describe as Musk's plans for, you know, population

awareness management of immigration days in the United States.

I want to ask you about Musk's association with Trump because, you know, for all this,

and since it's the most infamous episode, this is post his extreme radicalisation, which we'll

talk about in a moment. Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, widely seen as a failure,

got an insufferable trolling logo of a dog. Musk is basically cast out. Well, did he actually

achieve what was intended? I mean, the kind of popular picture is basically a bunch of 19-year-old

vapors with nicknames like big balls get let loose inside the halls of governments,

run riots, damage everything, and the whole thing is wound down. But was that the actual goal?

Well, it's a good question. I mean, of course, the stated aspiration of Doge was to reduce the

federal budget. They came in initially with the goal of cutting two trillion dollars from the budget,

which is an extraordinary number. Musk later revises that downwards to one trillion,

which is still very ambitious. When Musk leaves the White House at the end of May 2025,

they claim hundreds of millions of dollars in savings from slashing various federal agencies and

programs. For what it's worth, the financial times when they did an investigation could only verify

a small sliver of that sum. And then you have the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which erases those

savings altogether. So by its stated aim, it was on its own terms of failure. I think if you actually

take a closer look at what did Doge operatives do when they went through the federal government,

you'll notice something else, which is that often their emphasis was on data integration,

was on taking databases of different kinds in different formats from different agencies

and putting them together so they could be queried, so they could be used to train AI models,

so they could integrate with AI systems partially in order to replace the many workers who were

being fired. And that in turn had a very important effect, which is that it made all of this data

more available to surveillance and specifically to immigration, detention, and deportation. So

Palantir is the single biggest beneficiary of these various Doge efforts. They come along,

they specialize in data integration and analytics. And if you like, they're kind of coming in the wake

of Doge, stitching everything up together and making that data available to agencies like ICE

that have now continued to really accelerate their efforts at mass deportation.

It is quite ironic that the intellectual energy behind the right has always been,

in the United States, there's been shrink government, shrink it till it fits in the palm of your hand.

And yet all of these initiatives, not just most but also Palantir, are actually about strengthening,

expanding, making more powerful the tools of governments. It's a miracle what you can do when

you don't want to be especially democratic about it. They are actually building a new big government.

Yeah, and I think that really points to what is possibly the most important development in

America and by extension global capitalism over the last 25 years or so, which is digitization.

I mean, the hypergrowth of a handful of Silicon Valley companies in particular,

that really changes the terms under which society takes place, the economy takes place,

and the state takes place. What you see now, not just in the case of Musk, but really through firms

like Palantir and Thropic and others, is that the government has become increasingly reliant on a

small number of technology firms for the exercise of its core sovereign functions. If you recall,

a recent spat between the Pentagon and and Thropic in which Anthropic was designated a supply chain

risk and further the use of Anthropics Claude model in the war on Iran, I think this really highlights

the extent to which certain libertarian fantasies can't be indulged in quite the same way because

of the depth of what we call state symbiosis, because of this fusion of public private power,

which is arguably downstream of the digitization of everyday life that's underway for decades at this

point. One thing that Kepti Karensma has read in the book was that, you know, to what extent can

Musk be separated from Muskism? Musk's personal impulse is his own personality, his own preferences

and his own dreams. The thing that all stands out to me is that he's so clearly steeped in science

and yet he always draws the most kind of cheesy and banal conclusions from it. He reads Isaac

Asimov's foundation and immediately decides civilization is doomed and he alone must save it through

big data like in the book. He reads Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and instead of wanting to just

wander around the world with his towel, just enjoying creation, he kind of becomes the sort of figure

that Douglas Adams would despise, kind of an information tyrant. As you're writing this,

do you think about his inspirations? Why he draws it all from this this pulpy world of which I am

a part, you know, I hold up my hand, I love all this stuff, but I'm not trying to change the world

in my own image. Yeah, I mean, to us, it points to a kind of a failure of analysis so far and

trying to understand what the tech right is. I think, you know, people like us read and love books.

We're inspired by books in many cases. We are the people that books made us. That would be not

true to say of Elon Musk and the other people that he governed Silicon Valley with. They don't

actually read books in the way you and I do. They use books as ways to signal affiliation or to

show a kind of in-group status and arguably to kind of distract and confuse the interpretive

classes of which were part. We really think that the way that the tech right, for example,

has been understood through the personal idiosyncrasies of someone like Peter Teal, has actually

really let us astray, right, to think that you can understand the nature of the hard tech turn,

the turn to military tech through Teal's fascination with Antichrist or this or that theologian

in Salzburg or the Lord of the Rings is really like to fall prey to a siop that they may be

intentionally or not intentionally playing on us. So our argument is that capitalists actually

don't work from eight till eight and then go home and get their ideas, whatever what they read

before bedtime. They get their ideology in the course of the working day. They get their ideology

based on what lands with investors, how they can build confidence around their stock or their firm

speculative promises, how they fulfill client demands, whether the government is available as a

contractor. So we in this book as much as possible are kind of trying to write an intellectual

history of musk, not through the breadcrumbs he's strewn around in his references to anime and manga

or fantasy, but specifically through the way he runs and has built his empire. So the reason

he loves and sites the matrix all the time is not because it's actually about an analogy to how

we fit into industrial capitalism. He likes the matrix because fundamentally he wants to treat

people as things and he sees a work of art that justifies dramatizes that and also dramatizes and

justifies his own turn to the extreme right. Well, the matrix is an interesting example because

the matrix is written by a trans woman, the matrix and the red pill, which have both been a

adopted by the manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate are really originally intended as allegories

of trans identity. So I think this perhaps speaks to what we were discussing a moment ago

of reading, for instance, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and sort of missing the point.

I mean, there is a kind of misrecognition, misappropriation happening here, but I think for us,

the way we understand this, as Quinn mentioned, is that it's less about understanding these cultural

objects for their intellectual content and more about thinking about them as memes, which can be a

somewhat foreign way for people who have been trained in humanistic study to think, but it's a very

engineering centric way of thinking about reality where it's not about participating in the public

sphere in some broader sense, but it's really about deploying these artifacts as signaling mechanisms

as provocations, as ways to generate effects on networks. Well, this is what I found really

fascinating about the second half of the book, which simultaneously details musk's move

rightwards, musk's move into the heart of government, but also viewed from another angle,

it looks a lot like a psychological collapse. I mean, the guy vanishes into a hall of mirrors

that he's built himself called X. He transforms Twitter into a colossal confirmation machine,

which keeps telling him he's not only right, but should go further, and you end up with the guy

way that a chainsaw are on stage and joking about feeding USAID into a woodchipper, which actually

occasions the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, it was, well, as you just mentioned

there, the idea that everything's a meme, nothing really means anything. Everything is just there

is a signal. Is that a core thing to muskism, or is that just part of Elon Musk's personal

psychological makeup? I mean, we really think it is core to muskism. So I started by saying we were

one of the perplexed, and one of the things we were perplexed about was the same thing that sounds

like you were in many were, which is quote unquote, when did Elon go crazy, right? What happened to

Elon Musk? Was it the ketamine, that kind of thing? Was it the ketamine? Was it his daughter coming

out as trans? Was it his snub from the White House? Was it the Black Lives Matter movement?

Was it the politicization of tech workers? I mean, the answer is yes, it's a bit of all of these

things, but our argument is really that we need to confront a kind of a deeper puzzle. So the deeper

puzzle is this. Everything you just said is correct, but the thing that needs to be explained is the

fact that the global investment community actually rewards him more and more and more at every stage of

that psychosis you're describing, right? It's not that he has spun out, you know, gone nuts,

and then been abandoned as a kind of casualty of excessive digitization or something. It's quite

the opposite. Actually, as he has gone from wave of psychotic outbursts to psychotic outbursts,

has only risen more and more in his net worth, has risen more and more in his stature in the world of

the globe's most supposedly responsible, rational-minded investors and stewards of the pension funds

and the life savings of the planet's peoples, right? So why? We think that the answer is that

his apparent psychosis is downstream of what we call his belief in the cybernetic imperative.

So we call that second half cyborg because starting around 2015, he, having already been enriched

by the first internet boom, has a sense that this is not going to slow down. It's actually going

to accelerate. We are more and more living our lives online, more and more of our personal actions

are being sensed and tracked throughout the course of the day. Whatever is happening in the world of

value creation and marketization is happening via the internet. So his argument is let's go harder,

let's accelerate, let's go deeper. Around 2015, he found open AI, you know, now one of the world's

most valuable private companies because he believes that if we don't go harder and faster into it,

that a digital superintelligence will emerge and annihilate humanity. So there is an imperative there

that the human machine merge needs to go faster. This is by the way when nobody thinks of him as a

nut job, right? He's still the bell of the ball at the Met Gala and so on around this time.

So he seems to be someone thinking responsibly about the new challenge of AI. What does he do at

almost the exact same time, about a year and a half later? He founds Nurelink, a brain computer

interface company which is designed in his words to be a means of widening the bandwidth between

us and our devices to get around the clunky choke point of our eyeballs and our thumbs and fingers

and to allow the great rush of information to go back and forth in a two way exchange with

the world wide web and all the network worlds beyond that. So he already has this language of

the cyborg which has always latent within it a potential risk. The risk is if you're building

something basically like an enormous network, it can become contaminated. It can become

beset by viruses that can stop the functioning of the network altogether. What we understand is

his right word turn gets translated by him through the idea that what he calls a woke mind virus,

absurd sounding term that he means totally literally, has infected the cybernetic

interface between us and our computers and everything and is now propagating at scale. He sees

something like the Black Lives Matter movement as an example of the woke mind virus in action.

He sees the climate movement as an example of the woke mind virus in action. He sees the democratic

party as an example of the woke mind virus in action. Mass immigration is the woke mind virus in action.

The only way you can stop this is by seizing, rebuilding and rewriting the source code of the

human machine interface. You need to buy x.com, you need to create xai, you need to create crock,

you need to enter doge and seize what he calls the bunch of computers that the government is.

So all of his steps of seaming erratic behavior are for one thing actually driven by a fairly

consistent belief and also tend to be out ahead of the cutting edge of global capital investment such

that now a few months from now the SpaceX IPO will take place. It will be the biggest IPO in human

history, barring any surprises. $1.75 trillion is what's expected. So if this is craziness

then one actually is led to a bigger question which is why is the global economy crazy in this

precise way. What are the most sobering implications in your book is that this is going to happen

anyway. Moscow, no musk. We are going to end up in it with a merger of states and private companies.

We're going to end up with a merger of data and humans that data will be the dominant side of

that relationship that far beyond everybody spends too much time on their phones will be surrounded

at all times by intelligent AI which will use on a daily basis and will gather data

about us and shape our world. What I want to ask you is do you think it's inevitable? I mean you

described muskism wrapped around a one particular very very distinctive personality. If he falls

under a cyber truck tomorrow does muskism still happen? Yeah I mean I think what you're asking is

could we imagine muskism continuing without musk? I think the answer is absolutely but it also

doesn't mean that muskism is inevitable and I'll clarify what I mean. Muskism as we see it

is really a particular ensemble of historical currents that would persist even without the

person of musk himself. So the increasing symbiotic relationship for instance between the public

and the private sector, the increasing digitization of everyday life now under the banner of artificial

intelligence. These are developments that are likely to continue even if musk somehow would

disappear from the stage and there are other actors that we could identify as fairly muskist

in their orientation like Alexander Carp for instance the leader of Palantir who would be agents

of muskism if you like even if musk himself were to disappear from the historical stage but I think

we're not making an inevitability argument. I think in many ways muskism is quite a fragile

formation and in particular its fragility is located in its weakness when it comes to thinking

about the question of social consent and legitimacy. If you think that politics and in fact everything is

downstream of computers and all you have to do is seize the computers and reprogram them in order

to reprogram the world as a whole that gives you a very thin and very incomplete vision of what

it takes to actually secure a degree of consent for your project. I think you see this partly in the

case of the Doge experience where to achieve for instance $1 trillion worth of cuts musk would have

had to touch social security and Medicare which are generally considered the third rail of American

politics because these are deeply popular programs that really either party can't touch too

and the reason is because they ensure the survival of millions of Americans and that is how the

American state at some level ensures a minimum level of consent of the sort it needs to govern.

The notions of consent, legitimacy, popular determination, popular will these are very foreign

concepts for muskism and I think it counts for a potential weakness that could be exploited.

Just in conclusion do you think that muskism might be sort of reaching its zenith or its high

points at the moment the relationship with trumpism is not great. Trump could well have overreached

himself with the Iran War. I mean the potential future that you paint is very disturbing but is

there a possibility that actually this may be as big as it gets? Yeah there's probably three factors

I would point to that would suggest that might be the case. I mean one would be that the consumer

appetite for musk's particular products is weak and falling right the Tesla car itself is ever

less popular in Europe it's been overtaken by the BYD sales were down 30% in the EU just last

year alone which has led musk to pivot the growth story of Tesla from cars to humanoid robots of

which there's not yet one functioning prototype or has one been sold to anyone so that's a big

bet that you know could very easily flop but more integrally I think the current Iran conflict

is an important case in point because it was certainly sold one can be assured by certain parts

of the administration as an AI-enabled war that would lead to unprecedentedly rapid success and

victory right the elimination of humans from the kill chain and the command and control structure

was a way to rapidly accelerate the location of targets as we know just from evidence already

but that did not lead to immediate military success right the fact is that the things that AI

can automate are not necessarily the things that matter in politics the things that matter in

politics are often questions of rootedness sovereignty you know counter-reaction emotion determination

that are not easily programmed and not easily programmed away so you can see there I would say

a kind of failure through the first attempt for a proof of concept of Silicon Valley's war

but the third deepest thing you could say is related to the SpaceX IPO I mentioned a second ago

why is Musk doing a SpaceX IPO he notoriously dislikes having publicly traded companies right they

have reporting requirements they're open to shareholder initiatives they are actually much more exposed

than a privately held company is in fact is he needs the money he needs to raise capital what does he

need to raise capital for for his AI company for X AI which is burning through a billion dollars a

month trying to catch up with the rivals who are so well ahead of it andthropic and open AI

what's he doing with that billion dollars one of the things he's doing is building out vast

data centers in the United States data centers that as in the case of Memphis or powered by

methane gas turbine turbines for their energy that are polluting the factory around them that are

causing a huge amount of popular resentment and popular backlash and one can see actually that this

current growth story that Silicon Valley is selling is based on the idea that first software swallowed

the world and now AI will swallow software to quote a tweet that Musk retweeted approvingly just

last week to do that you need to transform the material world in such enormous ways that that

third rail of consent and legitimacy that Ben appealed to is going to be touched over and over

and over again so the speed and urgency that Musk is rolling out his initiatives right now

can be explained as a sense of desperation to get out ahead of the machinery of democracy which will

kick in this November with midterm elections and two years later with a presidential election

and if they haven't shown tangible results if they haven't been able to purchase popular approval

for this kind of transformation and investment then you know Muskism's pillars will start to look

more like it if you look at the world through his cheesy science fiction lens as I've been

cheated to do in my life why would you fill a world with millions of robots if you need to get

democratic consent why would you fill the world with a controllable army i don't know

it's just complete puzzler isn't it quince liberty and bento thanks so much for coming to

a really fascinating conversation and i hope none of it comes true thanks much thanks

Muskism a guide for the perplexed is out on the 24th of March it's available to pre-order now

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the bunker was written and presented by Andrew Harrison and produced by Liam Tape with audio

production by Robin Lieber and art by Jim Parrot and music by Kenny Dickinson but managing

editor of Jacob Jarvis crew predator Andrew Harrison and the bunker is a pop-losses production

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