Life on Mars; Monopoly Menace; The Meme Bomb
Reading, Watching 04.26.26
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
I will be presenting a paper as part of “The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era: A Mini-Conference” at the University of Cambridge on June 2nd. Tickets are available online.
In case you missed it, Max Read and I spoke to Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian about their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.
Also, check out their essay “Muskism as Fordism:”
The first step to extrapolating Muskism from Musk is to counter the most common misreadings of the man and his ideas. One of the easiest to dispel is the notion of Musk as a libertarian. In fact, a core principle of Muskism is public-private fusion; the use of the state as funder, enabler, and backstop for high-risk, high-reward ventures—what we call state symbiosis. One can see this clearly in SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla. Musk is a stalwart critic of bureaucracy and certain kinds of regulation but certainly not the state as such. On the contrary, he has consistently instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit. He does so by promising to help governments fulfill their sovereign functions through reliance on his infrastructures: a dynamic we describe as sovereignty-as-a-service.
Another misconception is that Musk’s most high-profile company, Tesla, primarily sells a consumer car product similar to Ford’s—the Model Y as an electrified Model T. In fact, Tesla is not about cars. It’s about a vision of electric autonomy in an era of natural disasters, wars, and social instability. Musk has been able to capitalize on a period of global skepticism about the virtues of interconnected supply chains and offer a scalable model of sovereignty from the nation down to the individual in the home. The move from the Roadster to the Cybertruck tracks a shift from a bright green future of zero-carbon consumerism to a dark green future of climate breakdown and survivalism. At its most successful, Muskism taps into a desire for territorial hardening to external shocks, enemies, and undesirables. In a world of reshoring and rearmament, Muskism offers global infrastructure for national projects.
This worldview is also reflected in his embrace of vertical integration, an industrial model that is uniquely suited to our deglobalizing era. For decades, Musk has attempted to concentrate production as much as possible within his firms and to reduce his reliance on outside suppliers. Under Muskism, the factory is not a node within a global production network but an enclave. This strategy defied the conventional wisdom of the 2000s, the decade when Musk founded SpaceX and became CEO of Tesla, but would look prescient in the 2020s, as “a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics… laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” to quote Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s remarks at Davos earlier this year.
