Sound Research WIKINDX

"Asimov was interested in how history moves from one epoch to the next. (Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire served as his initial inspiration.2) In Foundation, he presents a model of historical motion where eras do not follow one another in an orderly sequence, like a line of railroad cars. Rather, the seeds of the new era germinate inside the preceding one. The Foundation is created in the first Empire to serve as a nucleus for the second. There is a similar story to be told about the emergence of Muskism over the past half-century. It arose from specific historical conditions while pointing beyond them toward something new." Chapter 1: Fortress Futurism

"But South Africa was not only a white-supremacist state. It was also a modernizing one. Apartheid, the South African intellectual W. A. de Klerk argued, was “an attempt to remake a society in the total vision of a socio-political ideal.”9 The regime, as the historians Paul Edwards and Gabrielle Hecht remind us, pursued “a technopolitical project” that commanded the loyalty of those who subscribed to its prime directive: the construction of a utopia founded on racial segregation.10"

"Whereas the basic principle of Fordism was mass production plus mass consumption, South Africa’s variant preserved mass consumption as a privilege for the white minority. In the 1980s, the political scientist Stephen Gelb gave the South African system a name: racial Fordism.15" Chapter 2: The Superset

"The year before the magazine’s first issue, Kelly gave a foretaste of its grandiose house style in his 1992 book Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, in which he talked about how the internet was turning people into a “single interconnected superorganism,” creating a “distributed intelligence.”10"

"By the time Musk made it to Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s, however, the network was about to be privatized. In April 1995, the National Science Foundation, a federal agency, relinquished control of the internet’s core infrastructure to the private sector, demanding nothing in return.13 The residents of the old internet were mostly researchers and academics. As late as 1993, addresses ending in .com (an abbreviation for “commercial”) comprised a mere 1.5 percent of websites. By 1996, they accounted for fully half of the total.14 The speed of the shift alarmed some observers, among them science-fiction writer William Gibson. “The thing I love about [the internet] is that it’s transnational, non-profit—it isn’t owned by anyone,” he said in 1994. If corporations took control, he feared it would become an “infomall” where every byte came from a corporate menu.15"

"In February 1999, Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million. Musk walked away with $22 million.21 Zip2 was losing money when Compaq bought it. He had been rewarded—but not for building a profitable business. If Silicon Valley showcased the value of state symbiosis, it also underscored another theme that would become equally integral to Muskism: financial fabulism. Fabulism is a literary genre that mixes fantasy and realism. The dot-commers, likewise, told stories about the extraordinary transformations that the internet would bring to people’s everyday lives—and, by doing so, raised billions to build the future they foresaw. In the past, the typical Silicon Valley executive was low-key and technical, known for their engineering prowess. The flashy style of a Steve Jobs was the exception, not the rule. But in the 1990s, as tech grew more financialized, founders were forced to become more charismatic. To secure a good valuation, you had to be able to inspire confidence"

"When raising money for Zip2, he had built a big case around a normal PC and wheeled it around to venture capitalists to make them think his software ran on a supercomputer. “The investors thought that was impressive,” Kimbal recalled.22"

"In the 1990s, the value of a startup lay not in current earnings but in imagined future profits. What set Musk apart wasn’t engineering skill or business acumen, but his unshakable belief in the future—and his talent for making others believe in it too."

"Science fiction in the mouth of the right entrepreneur could conjure capital from thin air."

"What if the digital revolution was in fact a counterrevolution? Apartheid South Africa and Silicon Valley were not as far apart as they might seem. Both put their faith in technology and technocratic thinking. Both were infatuated with the engineer and the engineering mindset. (The German economist Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, reflecting on Fordism in 1925, praised its “dictatorship of technical reason.”39 The phrase could apply just as easily to apartheid South Africa as to Silicon Valley.) Of course, the stated values of the two places were different. Apartheid’s engineers forged a system of racial oppression; the techno-utopianism of the 1990s, by contrast, equated digitization with democratization. In practice, however, the internet reconfigured social inequality rather than eliminating it. If Silicon Valley spoke the language of freedom, such language was misleading. Underneath, one could find the principle of reactionary technocracy at work."

"The metaphor was telling. In software, a superset refers to a programming language that contains the features of an earlier language but adds new capabilities. Musk believed the internet would do the same for media. It would assimilate older forms while introducing a new capability: interactivity. In the CBS interview, Musk described the internet as “the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent.” Unlike a magazine, a radio, or a television set, the internet was something you could talk back to." Chapter 3: Sovereignty as a Service

"But there is another way to understand Musk’s turn to rocketry in the early 2000s. By creating the internet, the government had helped make him a millionaire. Space represented the next big publicly funded business opportunity. Speaking at Stanford the year after starting SpaceX, he stated this rationale quite explicitly: I think there’s perhaps an analogy here. Where just as DARPA served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the internet in the beginning, it may be the case that NASA has essentially done the same thing by spending the money to develop some of the fundamental technologies in the beginning. And then once we can bring [the] commercial free enterprise sector into it, then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we saw in the internet.18"

"Musk’s shifting rhetoric in the early 2020s seemed to reflect a loss of innocence regarding clean energy, aligning instead with a more dystopian view of the future. The humanitarian rhetoric of the Obama years faded. As climate conflict and crisis made the world a more ruthless place, not all humans would survive. Musk hoped to go one step further and eliminate humans altogether. The Cybertruck, as the name suggests, was inspired by the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Cyberpunk futures are characterized not only by extreme levels of social inequality but also by the disappearance and disintegration of the human through automation and augmentation. It was no accident, then, that the introduction of the Cybertruck coincided with a broader shift: in the early 2020s, Musk began emphasizing that Tesla was an artificial intelligence and robotics company. On 19 August 2021, at Tesla’s first “AI Day,” he announced Optimus,"

"In TRIC, he saw a continuation of these efforts at organizing space. Koolhaas limned it in blank verse: Because it takes place in the countryside, TRIC is a stealth revolution . . . The buildings here are not for humans but for things and machines. Thousands of years of architectural and cultural history are ditched. Debates, predictions, ideologies thrown overboard. It is post-human. These structures are based strictly on codes, algorithms, technologies, engineering, and performance, not intention. There is no formalized entrance; there are no users, only robots. Not to hinder process is the one ambition.53" Chapter 5: Attention Alchemy

"Web 2.0 wasn’t just built on clever technology—it was a product of monetary policy. After the 2007–8 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve slashed interest rates below 1 percent and kept them there for nearly a decade. It also printed money to buy government bonds and other securities. Investors looking for higher returns gravitated to Silicon Valley. As the scholar Nick Srnicek points out, this was the political economy that enabled the rise of the platforms.6 If the government had produced the conditions for Web 1.0 by funding the creation of the internet, it did the same for Web 2.0 by engineering a long period of ultra-cheap money."

"It was a strange time to decide to become extremely online. Yet that is exactly what Musk did. He first tweeted in 2010 but remained, at most, a casual Twitter user. Starting in 2015, this began to change. That year, he tweeted 617 times—an increase of 226 percent from the previous year. It marked the onset of Musk’s tumbling into the social media fray. In 2017, he tweeted 1,162 times—an average of three posts per day. By 2018, his annual tweet count had hit 2,288. By 2024, he was posting an average of sixty times a day and sometimes as often as forty times an hour.34"

"At times, they edged into toxic territory. In 2018, after British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth criticized Musk’s unhelpful efforts at rescuing twelve kids stuck in a cave in Thailand, Musk jokingly called him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.43 When Musk was taken to trial, he lashed out at the press. After winning the case, he fired his public relations firm.44 He was already breaking up with the legacy media and edging closer to the internet of trolls.45 Social networks were his message machines and, as he had shown, could be money machines too."

"One of the best diagnoses of the shift came from an unlikely source: Jackson Palmer, an inventor of Dogecoin. “In this system of griftonomics, hypercapitalism, rentier capitalism,” he told an interviewer in May 2022, “increasingly people are doing nothing but making money off doing nothing.” As for Musk, Palmer added, he “was and always will be a grifter but the world loves grifters. They love the idea that they may also be a billionaire one day, and that’s the dream he’s selling.”66" Chapter 6: Cybernetic Collectives

"But social media had a limitation. If Twitter made us into cyborgs, it did so in a primitive way. The bottleneck, Musk believed, was the interface. Bandwidth was throttled by ten clumsy fingers, tapping on a keyboard. “The communication rate between you and the cybernetic extension of yourself is slow,” Musk warned. It’s “like a tiny straw . . . we need to make that tiny straw like a giant river.”20 Neuralink promised to vastly increase the bandwidth between digital and biological systems. One of Musk’s favorite films is Ghost in the Shell, an anime from 1995 set in 2029. It features characters with cyborg hands that can type not only individual letters but chords—thus massively increasing the speed of data entry. This was something like how Musk hoped Neuralink would work. And such a breakthrough would, in turn, reduce the risk of a superintelligent AI killing us all by facilitating our unification with the machine. If one goal of Neuralink was “solving a bunch of brain-related diseases,” Musk said, the other was “the mitigation of the existential threat of AI.”21" Chapter 7: Godwin’s Engine

"This raised the prospect of a woke evil dictator—or, as he put it in a conversation with Joe Rogan, a “super oppressive woke nanny AI that is omnipotent,” and which might “execute you if you misgender someone.”42 Musk’" Chapter 8: State X

"This raised the prospect of a woke evil dictator—or, as he put it in a conversation with Joe Rogan, a “super oppressive woke nanny AI that is omnipotent,” and which might “execute you if you misgender someone.”42 Musk’" Chapter 8: State X

"An analysis of tens of thousands of tweets by Bloomberg found that Musk had become “X’s biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracies.” In 2024, he tweeted over 1,300 times about immigration and voter fraud, receiving about 10 billion views in total.68 An analysis run by the Economist found that, by 2024, Musk was posting about immigration almost twice as often as his second-favorite topic, free speech.69"

"Marko Elez, a member of DOGE who was given write access to federal payment systems, put this pithily when he posted that 99 percent of Indians on temporary work visas “will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys.”70"