"Muskism" as cultural eugenics
A review of Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff's "Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed."
Half a century ago, Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” Dawkins was comparing cultural influence to genetic transmission as an emergent form of biological replication:
We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain, individual men the world over.
But if you don’t like the propagation, how do you stop it? We’re living through some experimental trials by one of the world’s most powerful people, eager to iterate a new form of cultural eugenics for the rest of us.
Almost half a century after the coinage, in 2022, the tech billionaire Elon Musk tweeted at Richard Dawkins about the need to stop a nefariously successful kind of meme, progressive liberalism. “The woke mind virus is penetrating the firewalls of some of the world’s smartest meat computers at a prodigious rate!” Musk barked at Dawkins. Musk had just embarked on a historic effort to delete this “meme” from the human mainframe, first by revamping Twitter and later via the Trump II administration’s job-slashing DOGE.
In their critical new book “Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed,” Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff define “Muskism” as an ominous new kind of operating procedure for governments and companies.
Where “Fordism” was once the term describing Henry Ford’s mastery of mass production to create a society of mass consumers, Elon Musk’s project narrows the beneficiaries but broadens the scope. Muskism is an admixture of Silicon Valley strategies — world-eating market monopolization, achieved through bureaucracy-slimming “Agile” project management — coded onto something like apartheid South Africa’s fortress racism, which Musk was raised under. Just add robots and rockets to the old-timey white-nationalist rhetoric.
In a series of arresting passages, “Muskism” describes a pattern of dehumanization running through Musk’s career, a signal increasingly drowning out other noise:
If the state was just a database, then inefficiency came from bad data: undocumented foreigners, ghost employees, even “vampires” collecting Social Security. Like the mind viruses that threatened the cybernetic collective, these were bugs in the codebase, irregularities to be traced, quarantined, and purged. … His approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data — whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff, or illegitimate people — could simply be deleted. …
In a theory often cited by Musk, Nick Bostrom speculates that we may be living in a simulation running on a mainframe in the future. Further, many of the people around us may not be human beings but computer programs: what Bostrom calls “shadow-people,” convincing imitations that lack interiority. …
Shadow people have been a bright line through Musk’s career. At PayPal, they were fraudsters with false identities; at Twitter, first bots, then the far-fetched notion of “ghost employees” — the belief that many of the people on the payroll were not actually real humans. Musk also expressed this idea through the concept of the NPC. Biden was “an NPC with a limited dialogue tree”; the press a “hivemind” or “drone collective” of “NPC media puppets.” He shared the meme of a head being opened to swap out a chip reading “Tesla good” for one reading “Tesla bad.” The caption: “New program for NPCs.” “Individuals should always wonder who wrote the software running in their head,” he commented. “Most humans have very limited firewalls,” he elaborated elsewhere, “so are easily programmed.”
Democracy decentralizes power; Muskism recentralizes it by liquidating the bureaucratic class, which had emerged to manage democracy’s increasingly complex companies and societies. Executive strategies like zero-based budgeting — where every line item is proposed to be eliminated, thus forcing it to justify its survival — “rarely succeeds in cutting costs” as much as reconcentrating power in the budgeter’s hands, Slobodian and Tarnoff note. “Efficiency became the alibi for centralization.” And once you fully control a platform, you’re better positioned to control and edit its inputs. The rest of us are democracy’s inputs.
In one of “Muskism"’s other most insightful passages, Slobodian and Tarnoff cite Musk as an exploiter of the sociologist' Paolo Gerbaudo’s concept of “the digital party,” one of the great modern paradoxes of politics and technology:
In the 2000s and 2010s, a handful of new political parties emerged that promised to use digital tools to give voters a direct voice in the selection of candidates and policies. From Germany’s Pirate Party to Italy’s Five Star Movement, these newscomers offered a particular vision of how the participatory qualities of the internet could unleash a new kind of participatory politics. In Gerbaudo’s account, however, the parties actually became autocracies, where a “superbase” followed a “hyperleader” who spoke on its behalf. Without the formalized structures of representative democracy, one figure took outsized power. In an echo of the internet’s evolution, decentralization cashed out as monopoly.
Musk’s X capitalized on this seemingly paradoxical dynamic. His version of the town square would be open to everyone but would be designed in such a way as to empower the one person standing on a soapbox in the center: himself.
It’s not a bad thing to want to influence people. To live actively in a democracy, to want to govern in order to fix problems, requires influencing others. But what characterizes a eugenics mindset is a refusal to take other people as a given, plus a desire to reshape their terms of engagement (without reshaping your own), without consent and without negotiation. It really does boil down to whether you see other people as non-player characters, as Musk does.
Well, the authoritarian is right to fear the woke mind virus. A liberal education, the arts, dialogue, are all forms of cultural replication, as the former rulers of Elon’s homeland knew very well. “In white-ruled South Africa, the government refuses to permit TV on the ground that it would corrupt both the white minority and nonwhite majority,” TIME Magazine reported in 1964. “Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd has more or less put TV in a category with atom bombs and poison gas. ‘They are modern things, but that does not mean they are desirable. The government has to watch for any dangers to the people, both spiritual and physical.’” The difference between Verwoerd and Musk is that the prime minister hadn’t thought to — or couldn’t afford to — own the broadcast station, pick the shows, and make the TV sets tunable to one channel. To propagate itself in the future, domination would have to evolve.