And Musk himself has a very strange way of understanding human beings as essentially downstream

of the internet, such that if you meme successfully, you should be able to secure social consent.

That is not the kind of material basis on which stable social settlements have been historically developed.

Hello and welcome to TechW and Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guests are Ben Tarnaff and Quinn Slobodian.

Ben is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and the author of Internet for the People.

Quinn is a professor of international history at Boston University

and the author of many books, including crack up capitalism and Hayek's bastards.

They are also together the authors of muskism, a guide for the perplexed,

which is what we're talking about in this week's show.

Obviously, someone like Elon Musk has been very influential for a very long time now, right?

He has kind of shaped the direction of travel in many ways, in electric cars, and with space privatization. He has been

key to those sorts of things, but he has also set out a model and a number of ideas for our

wider society. And in this book, Quinn and Ben are not just trying to figure out

who Musk is, though that is part of it. They're also looking at the type of system that Musk has

created and how that influences the broader economy in society similar to the way that we talk

about Fordism through much of the 20th century. Well, the question then is, what does a system,

like the one that Musk has created,

which they call muskism, how does that change the society

that we live in?

Who benefits from it?

What are the distinct features of this system?

...