In 1995, after studying at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Musk left a Ph.D. program at Stanford to become a tech entrepreneur. He started a company called X.com in 1999. “What we’re going to do is transform the traditional banking industry,” he said. (Technocrats also planned to abolish banks. “We don’t need banks, bandits or bastards,” Joshua Haldeman once wrote.) Mr. Musk made a fortune when eBay acquired PayPal, which had merged with X.com, but in 2017 he bought back the URL, and it was at hand when he purchased Twitter and renamed it X, hoping to kill what he called the “woke mind virus” — echoes of his grandfather’s “mass mind conditioning.” Much that Mr. Musk has attempted to do at DOGE can be found in the technocracy manuals of the early 1930s.
Mr. Musk’s possible departure from Washington will not diminish the influence of Muskism in the United States. His superannuated futurism is Silicon Valley’s reigning ideology. In 2023 the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who helped staff DOGE, wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” predicting the emergence of “technological supermen.” It consists of a list of statements:
We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being.
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will. …
We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. …
We believe in greatness. …
We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.
Mr. Andreessen cited, among his inspirations, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” which glorified violence and masculine virility and opposed liberalism and democracy. It, too, is a list of statements:
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist. …
We want to sing the man at the wheel. …
We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. …
Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!
Ten years after Mr. Marinetti wrote “The Futurist Manifesto,” fists raised to the stars, he co-wrote the founding document of the movement led by Mussolini: “The Fascist Manifesto.”
Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.
That is still true, but unlike his forefathers, Mr. Musk does have a theory for the assumption of power. That theory is to seize power with the dead robotic hand of the past. It remains for the living to wrest free of that grip.
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