Postliberal modernity - from Fordism to Muskism

"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. "
Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff , Muskism, A Guide for the Perplexed, 2026 >>
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/muskism-9780241805114

Quinn Slobodian on New Fusionism, Libertarian Eugenics, and Far-Right Capitalism >>
https://www.illiberalism.org/quinn-slobodian-on-new-fusionism-libertarian-eugenics-and-far-right-capitalism/

Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff, A Global History of Elon Musk >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHTC4nFObac

#Muskism #neoliberalism #Fordism #hierarchy #exclusion #AI #AutomationOfConsent #NewFusionism #IQFetishism #eugenics #xenophobia #misogyny #paleoconservatism #neoconservatism #FarRight #book

Muskism by Quinn Slobodian

A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age

#IQFetishism: #SiliconValley #TechRight: "The IQ fetishists like to think they are living in a near future where they – the pure creative information workers imagined in the 1990s – have been elevated through their high intelligence and innate ability. They were not simply in the right place at the right time, bobbing along in a sea of liquidity in an era of zero interest rates. They were, like the staff at the Apple Store, geniuses.

With the dream of cryptocurrency – and its many related fantasies, from non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) – deflation, and the figurehead of the avenging nerd, the founder of crypto exchange FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, behind bars, a gullible tech right has sought refuge in its consistent creed. “[Bankman-Fried] always seemed low-IQ to me,” wrote one tech CEO in a post hoc justification.

Perhaps the darkest direction that tech-right thinking could go was foreshadowed by Yarvin in 2008. Speculating about the transformation of San Francisco into a private entity called “Friscorp”, he wondered what could be done with the city’s unproductive residents. After considering and then dismissing the idea of pulping surplus “hominids” into biodiesel for city buses, he suggested “the best humane alternative to genocide” was “not to liquidate the wards… but to virtualise them”."
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/09/rise-new-tech-right-iq-cognitive-elite

The rise of the new tech right

In 1958, the British sociologist Michael Young published what would become a celebrated dystopian novel – and a novel dystopia – with an enduring coinage in its title: The Rise of the Meritocracy, 187

New Statesman