Muskism
A Guide for the Perplexed
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- 予約注文
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- リリース予定日：2026年3月24日
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age
'A searing analysis of Elon Musk… Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything' - Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
'Impeccably researched and splendidly written, Muskism introduces us to a world full of promise and fear' - Branko Milanovic, author of The Great Global Transformation
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 Muskism: 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 postliberal 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 future: 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searing analysis of Elon Musk, historian Slobodian (Hayek's Bastards) and tech journalist Tarnoff (Internet for the People) argue that, just as Fordism "was the operating system" of the 20th century, "Muskism" is that of the 21st. While Henry Ford sold the promise of "rising living standards for all," Musk sells "sovereignty through technology," according to the authors, a vision of "a purified community defined by cultural and genetic membership in a white, European West, garrisoned by superior technology" and maintained through "purged social networks, ideologically cleansed AI models, and mass deportation of ethnic outsiders." Slobodian and Tarnoff track the "feedback loop of man and moment" that shaped Musk, following him from apartheid-era South Africa, where he learned "the lesson of fortress futurism" and militarized isolationism; to 1990s Silicon Valley, where techno-utopianism mingled with reactionary politics, particularly in the thinking of Musk's PayPal cofounder, Peter Thiel, who espoused that "extreme concentrations of power benefit humanity"; to SpaceX and Tesla, where "war-on-terror" era military-industrial contracts fueled plans for "tactical satellites" and energy storage systems that promised autonomy and sovereignty for both the nation but also for individuals; and finally to the second Trump administration and DOGE, a kind of end-stage of Muskism, wherein "the hunt for ‘waste, fraud, and abuse' blurred seamlessly into the hunt for illegitimate people." Muskism, the authors unsettlingly conclude, is ultimately about "purging those deemed out of place." Impressive and unrelenting, this grapples with a destructive ideology that seems poised to consume everything.
