Musk interestingly has this way of excluding the majority of the population from consideration, what he variously calls non-playing characters or NPCs, which is a category from video games, or sometimes bots, vampires. And this is a much more stark version of insider and outsider group creation than even hierarchies of race because it takes this one step further by taking very seriously the idea that other people are not only not human, but they in some way don't even exist, which is the literal reading of Musk's adoption of Nick Bostrom's simulation theory, which is that most people are simply programmable parts of a simulation, and only a small number of people are actual players.

MUSKISM—Its Roots, Nature & How to Fight It w/ QUINN SLOBODIAN & BEN TARNOFF

Speaking Out of Place hosted by David Palumbo-Liu

In this episode of the Speaking Out of Place podcast, Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff about their new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. This is much more than a biography or popular account of Elon Musk, it is a radical analysis of a deeply disturbing, computational way of seeing the world. We see a mind that is profoundly troubled by any contagion spreading into seemingly closed systems—it can take the form of racial others, transpeople, “woke” populations, or most generally and dismissively, “Non-Player-Characters.” We talk about the dangers this mindset and its manifestations have on democracy and the public sphere, and argue that what we should do is to “embrace the woke-mind virus as a counter-revolutionary act.”

Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. His books, which have been translated into ten languages, include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy, and Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Slobodian is a Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6; he has been an associate fellow at Chatham House and held residential fellowships at Harvard University and Free University Berlin. Project Syndicate put him on a list of 30 Forward Thinkers and Prospect UK named him one of the World’s 25 Top Thinkers.

Ben Tarnoff is a writer from Massachusetts. His books include Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do-and How They Do It, and Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic, among other publications.

Speaking Out of Place is produced in collaboration with The Creative Process and is made with support from Stanford University.

Speaking Out of Place, which carries on the spirit of Palumbo-Liu’s book of the same title, argues against the notion that we are voiceless and powerless, and that we need politicians and pundits and experts to speak for us.

Judith Butler on Speaking Out of Place:

“In this work we see how every critical analysis of homelessness, displacement, internment, violence, and exploitation is countered by emergent and intensifying social movements that move beyond national borders to the ideal of a planetary alliance. As an activist and a scholar, Palumbo-Liu shows us what vigilance means in these times.  This book takes us through the wretched landscape of our world to the ideals of social transformation, calling for a place, the planet, where collective passions can bring about a true and radical democracy.”

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of literary criticism and theory, culture and society, race, ethnicity and indigeneity, human rights, and environmental justice. His books include The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, and Speaking Out of Place: Getting Our Political Voices Back. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Al Jazeera, Jacobin, Truthout, and other venues.
Bluesky @palumboliu.bsky.social
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