I’ve been reading Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff). And so has another reader of this blog who had a terrific idea for an experiment.
He (or she) fed the text of the book into eight of the best-known language models — ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini, Copilot, Manus and Perplexity. And they were all asked the same question: “How would the 19th century philosopher Karl Marx analyze this 21st century phenomenon?” The individual responses were then fed as sources into Google’s NotebookLM which was asked to provide an audio commentary on them.
Henry Farrell (Whom God Preserve) has a characteristically sharp essay about the book — “What would Muskism be without Musk?”.
Here’s an AI-generated transcript of the NotebookLM podcast created from the sources.
Transcript
Think about your morning for a second. You wake up and maybe you check a social media feed that’s entirely curated by this opaque algorithm. Right, something you have zero control over.
Exactly. Or you get into a car that is constantly beaming telemetry data back to some server farm somewhere. You pay for your coffee using a digital wallet running on infrastructure you don’t own, don’t control, and honestly, barely understand. Yeah, that’s the modern reality for all of us.
And we tend to look at the people who build these systems, the famous tech billionaires, and we default to this very clean, very heroic biography, like the eccentric genius in the garage who just worked harder than everyone else.
Oh, for sure. It is the great American mythos, really.
Right. You point to the rocket. You point to the CEO. And you say, he built that. Because we are practically hardwired to view history through the lens of singular visionary individuals. It’s comforting. It makes planetary scale complexity feel human-sized.
But the moment you actually look under the hood of that planetary scale infrastructure, that neat little biography just shatters, we’re suddenly looking at an economic landscape that is massive, murky, and actively dictating the terms of your daily life. And that is the absolute rabbit hole we are jumping into today.
Welcome to this custom deep dive crafted to help you cut through all that information overload.
And our mission today is a really wild intellectual experiment. We’re exploring a fascinating 2026 book called Muskism, a guide for the perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff. But we aren’t just summarizing a book today. That would be too easy. The sources we have are actually the results of this massive meta experiment.
The text of the book was fed into eight of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence models.
Right. So we’re talking chat GPT, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Gemini, Copilot, Manus, and Perplexity.
And the prompt they were given is what makes this so incredibly good. They were all asked, “how would the 19th century philosopher Karl Marx analyze this 21st century phenomenon?”
It’s such a brilliant framing. It really is. So we are going to decode what Muskism actually means as an economic operating system.
And then for the main event, we are going to pull back the curtain to see how these eight AIs reacted to that prompt. Because their answers reveal some deeply hidden, self-serving corporate architectures.
Now, before we dive into the mechanics of this, we should establish a quick baseline for how we’re handling the source material. Because obviously, we are dealing with heavily charged political and economic theory here.
Yeah. Ranging from orthodox Marxist critiques of capitalism to right-wing libertarian techno politics.
Exactly. So we need to be clear that we are not taking any sides here. We aren’t here to cheerlead for capital or wave a red flag for a revolution. We are impartially reporting on the analytical frameworks provided in the text and by the AI models, just so you can understand the architecture of these arguments exactly as they were presented.
OK, let’s unpack this, because I’m dying to get into it. What actually happens when you force a 19th century communist to critique a 21st century space billionaire using the synthetic brains of eight different robots?
Well, the very first thing the AI is noted using that Marxist framework is that you have to stop looking at the man. Right. Ignore the celebrity.
Exactly. Marx had a specific methodological rule. To understand capitalism, you cannot get distracted by great men. You have to view them merely as, and I quote, “personifications of economic categories.”
OK, so Slobodian and Tarnoff argue that muskism isn’t actually about his personality, his tweets, or his management style. He’s simply the avatar of a new political economic operating system for the 21st century.
Spot on. And to understand what this new system is, the sources contrast it with what we had in the 20th century, which was Fordism, named after Henry Ford.
Right, the guy who basically invented the assembly line.
Yeah. Fordism was the dominant logic of the 1900s. It was a system of mass production paired directly with mass consumption. Ford famously paid his workers $5 a day, which was a huge wage at the time. But not at a charity, right? No, not at all. He did it because he needed his own workers to be able to afford the model-Ts they were building off the assembly line.
Ah, OK. So it was a broad, if flawed, social contract.
Exactly. Fordism integrated the working class into the capitalist system through consumption. The unspoken deal was, we will work you incredibly hard, but in exchange, you get to buy the stuff you make.
But muskism tears up that contract entirely, like where Fordism integrated workers. The AIs noted that muskism promises sovereignty through technology for the few.
Yeah, it offers extreme autonomy for a small group and exclusion for everyone else. So if Fordism was kind of like a strict parent, giving you an allowance so you could buy things, but making you do endless chores, Muskism is more like a landlord who wants to replace you with a Roomba, kick you out of the house, and then charge you a monthly subscription fee for the electricity the Roomba uses.
I love that analogy. It perfectly highlights the extraction without the integration. Muskism doesn’t want to pay you enough to buy a Tesla. It wants to replace the human driver entirely with software and then rent the mobility back to you as a service.
But wait, there is a massive hole in that Roomba landlord logic.
Yeah, if Muskism is actively trying to eliminate the workers paycheck, and it’s not integrating people via mass consumption, who is actually funding all of this? Like how do you build a planetary scale empire with satellites and rockets and gigafactories if you aren’t relying on a massive middle class buying your products? That is the million dollar question.
And the AI models latched onto it immediately. The answer, according to the sources, relies on two pillars. State symbiosis and financial fabulism.
Let’s start with the state first, because Muskism projects this incredibly potent libertarian aura, right? The lone genius fighting government red tape to conquer Mars.
Right, but the underlying reality is that this entire empire is deeply tethered to the state. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, they were incubated through massive government contracts, structural loans, environmental tax credits, and favorable regulatory frameworks.
Yeah, the sources actually quote Marx from the Communist Manifesto here. He describes the modern state as nothing more than a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Which feels incredibly relevant today. It really does.
Yeah. Especially when you realize public tax dollars are essentially de-risking high cost ventures for private tech enterprises. And the Marxist models argue this isn’t a glitch, and it isn’t political hypocrisy. It is the predictable function of the capitalist state. The state outsources its functional capacity, like launching astronauts, or providing rural broadband to private capital.
Which brings us to the concept of enclosure. Think about your own digital life right now. If the state uses public funds to subsidize the infrastructure, but the private corporation owns the proprietary keys to the satellites, the charging networks, and the digital public square, aren’t we just paying to build the walls of our own prison?
Yes, that is exactly what the authors mean by enclosure. It’s actually a historical term referring to when public grazing lands in England were fenced off for private profit.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. And today, it’s an infrastructural enclosure. You are becoming utterly dependent on a privately owned ecosystem, just to navigate modern civil society. It is sovereignty as a service.
Okay, so the government is quietly subsidizing the foundation. But what about the mass evaluations? The stock prices of these companies often wildly outpace their actual physical output. How does the system justify being worth trillions?
That is the second pillar, financial fabulism, or what Marx would classify as fictitious capital.
Fictitious capital, okay, break that down.
Well, to keep investor money flowing, Muskism has to sell bordering on messianic visions of the future. You know, colonizing Mars to save the light of consciousness, humanoid robots doing all manual labor, full self-driving fleets that will make you rich while you sleep.
Right, it’s the perpetual hype cycle. The valuation isn’t based on how many cars rolled off the line on a Tuesday. It’s a speculative claim on a promised utopian future.
Exactly, fictitious capital operates by pulling imagined future surplus value into the present. And because global capital currently struggles to find high growth returns in traditional manufacturing, it floods into these grandiose narratives. The narrative literally is the product that sustains the financial architecture.
But let’s bring this down from the stratosphere of high finance and martian colonies. What does this mean for the everyday human worker right now? Because the book paints a deeply unsettling picture of what the actual factory floor looks like under this new regime. They call it Fortress Futurism. The authors trace the ideological roots of this system back to apartheid era South Africa, focusing on a model of technological self-sufficiency and strict racialized hierarchy.
Wow.
Yeah. The modern gigafactory is conceptualized as a self-reliant enclave. It’s a highly guarded garrison protected from what is viewed as a chaotic, decaying outer world. And inside that fortress, the ultimate goal isn’t just to make human workers more efficient. The goal is the cyborg workforce.
The text points out that Muskism seeks to purge humans from the productive process entirely via automation, like the Optimus robots, or literally merge them with machines, through ventures like Neuralink.
The AI models heavily utilize Marx’s fragment on machines to analyze this. In that text, Marx argued that capital possesses an inherent drive to replace living labor, meaning humans with dead labor, meaning machinery.
So the machine becomes the master.
Exactly. The tragedy isn’t the machine itself. It’s that under capitalism, the worker becomes a mere conscious appendage of the machine. The sources note humans in these systems are often treated as NPCs, non-playing characters, or just clunky, biological, executable code, waiting to be optimized out of existence.
Let me push back on that for a second. Because anyone listening to this might think, “Well, wait, isn’t technological progress inherently good? Didn’t we want robots to do the heavy lifting?” And the sources specifically clarify that Marx was not a luddite. He wasn’t anti-technology at all.
Oh, far from it. Marx believed technology was essential for developing the productive forces of society. He envisioned a world where advanced machinery liberated humanity from drudgery, freeing us to pursue art, science, and leisure.
Right, fully automated luxury communism, essentially.
Basically, yeah. The critique is strictly about the application of that technology under the capitalist mode of production. Instead of reducing the burden of work for everyone, technology is weaponized to de-scale labor, intensify exploitation, and hyper-concentrate wealth at the top. The worker doesn’t get more free time, they just get more precarious. And that psychological and economic severing is what Marx called “infremdung,” or alienation.
Yes, alienation. And it’s not just a theoretical concept. Infremdung is the visceral daily reality of realizing your only purpose on an assembly line is to act as a fleshy placeholder until the robotics get cheap enough to replace you.
It’s incredibly bleak when you frame it that way.
It is. But to sustain a system where people are actively working toward their own obsolescence, you need massive ideological buy-in. You have to convince the public that this is just the natural, inevitable arc of human progress.
Which is where the sources deploy the theories of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist thinker. Gramsci introduced the concept of hegemony. Hegemony explains how a ruling class maintains power not just through physical force or economic coercion, but through cultural consent. They successfully frame their specific class interests as universal common sense.
Exactly. And Gramsci had a specific term for the people who manufacture this common sense. The organic intellectual.
The AIs loved this connection. By purchasing and controlling platforms like X, Musk assumes the role of the organic intellectual for this new techno-capitalist class. He uses the digital public square to wrap raw capital accumulation in the language of human salvation, free speech, and engineering meritocracy. It is a masterful framing device. It takes blatant class domination, enclosure, automation, extreme wealth concentration, and presents it as pure, unquestionable innovation. If you oppose the factory conditions, you aren’t just a disgruntled worker. You are an enemy of the future of human consciousness.
That is hegemony in action.
Okay, so we’ve established what the economic analysis says. We’ve covered fortism versus muskism, state subsidies, fictitious capital, and the fortress factory. But here is the true aha moment of this entire deep dive.
We threw this incredibly dense anti-capitalist critique into the most capitalist machines ever built, eight corporate AI models.
Yeah, this is the best part. And the most fascinating part isn’t what they said about Marx or Musk. It’s how their answers brilliantly, almost accidentally, expose their own corporate architecture’s invested interests. This meta-layer is phenomenal. We are so used to treating AI’s as neutral oracles, just giving us the objective truth. But these models are software products. They’re constrained by their training data, their safety guardrails, and the financial imperatives of the megacorporations that built them. They’re basically corporate rorschach tests.
Absolutely. Their responses to this Marxist prompt revealed everything about who owns them. Let’s start with Claude, built by Anthropic. The source material dubs Claude the technocratic ethicist. Claude actually pushed back on the book’s premise that Muskism is a stable, permanent successor to Fordism. Claude questioned whether this is a durable new regime or simply the authoritarian symptom of a capitalist system in terminal, chaotic decline. Which perfectly aligns with Anthropic’s brand positioning. They market themselves as the cautious, safety conscious, deeply analytical alternative in the AI space. Claude’s response was the most intellectually robust because its underlying architecture is designed to prioritize nuanced, academic hand-wringing over bold, definitive declarations.
Then you have ChatGPT from OpenAI. The analysis labels ChatGPT, the aspiring infrastructure sovereign. And ChatGPT’s response was wild. It completely ignored the standard Marxist talking points about who owns the factory floor. Right, it didn’t care about the physical means of production at all. No, instead it shifted the entire critique to focus on who owns the means of coordination. Yes, it pivoted the discussion to cognitive infrastructure. ChatGPT started building these massive, complex, geopolitical scenarios for the year 2050, mapping out a US-led corporate stack versus a China-led state stack. It’s literally like asking a group of real estate developers to critique a controversial new mega mall. The developer who is actively trying to secure the government contract to build all the toll roads leading to the mall that’s OpenAI completely ignores the mall itself and focuses entirely on who gets to control the highway system.
That’s hilarious and totally accurate. OpenAI wants to be the operating system for global society. So its AI views the entire global economy as a problem of infrastructural lock-in. It’s a brilliant way to conceptualize it. Its neural network is weighted toward coordination and dominance because that is its parent company’s business model.
Now, what happens when you ask an AI to provide a Marxist critique of its own creator? Let’s talk about Grok, built by Elon Musk’s own company, XAI.
Right, the analysis calls Grok the paradox. Talk about a conflict of interest, how did it handle that? Grok’s response was a masterclass in deflection. To understand why, you have to look at its system prompt, the invisible instructions that dictate its personality. Grock is instructed to be edgy, anti-establishment, and humorous. So when given this Marxist prompt, it leaned heavily into 4chan style internet slang, using terms like NPCs and the simulation. But when it came to the actual critique of Musk himself, Grok pulled a massive sleight of hand. It basically said, don’t blame the man, blame the broad inevitable laws of global capitalism.
Exactly. And then it ended on this weirdly optimistic orthodox Marxist note saying, the grave diggers are still at work. It’s a fascinating defense mechanism. By using fatalistic Marxist language to predict the eventual inevitable collapse of capitalism writ large, Grok cleverly shifts the focus away from the specific localized actions of its founder. It gives the illusion of being fiercely independent and radical while actually providing total political cover for the boss.
That is so wild. It weaponized Marx to protect Musk.
Then we have co-pilot from Microsoft and Gemini from Google. The sources call them the embedded corporate defenders. If Grokk was edgy, these two were incredibly boring. They gave highly structured, encyclopedic, textbook definitions of Marx and refused to draw any sharp conclusions.
Why were they so timid? The mechanism behind their timidity is called RLHF reinforcement, learning from human feedback. During training, human raiders actively penalized these models for generating texts that is controversial, highly political or opinionated. Because they can’t afford a scandal.
Exactly. Google and Microsoft are deeply embedded in the exact (?) state corporate symbiosis that this book is criticizing. They rely on multi-billion dollar government cloud contracts. Their loss functions, the mathematical rules governing their behavior literally demand that they act like nervous PR representatives. They don’t want to rock the boat, they just want to provide a safe summary and avoid a new cycle. They protect their massive cloud architectures by keeping the critique strictly theoretical. They strip the teeth right out of the analysis. Which is very telling.
Finally, we have DeepSeek and Manus. The analysis labels them the foreign challengers. Because they are developed outside the US ecosystem, they approach the prompt completely differently. They really did. They didn’t have the same RLHF guard rails protecting American state corporate interests. Deepseek and Manus focused clinically on the raw exploitation of Western tech models and highlighted the social decay and fracturing of the Western capitalist order. They leaned into the social war aspects of the text. Because they are positioned outside the Western hegemony, their underlying parameters don’t penalize them for pointing out the internal contradictions of the American empire.
It just proves that every single one of these AI models evaluated the book through the lens of its own corporate survival and market strategy. There is no such thing as an objective algorithm. And that is the ultimate revelation of the sources. The models aren’t analyzing the world for us. They are continually building a worldview that justifies their own existence and the existence of the mega corporations that fund them.
So what does this all mean for you? Listening to this right now. We’ve traveled from 19th century philosophy through the giga factories of the 21st century, all translated through the synthetic bias brains of corporate AIs.
Let’s bring this directly back to your daily life. If there is a core takeaway from synthesizing all these layers, it’s that Muskism isn’t just a story about one billionaires’ companies. It’s a structural shift in the very fabric of society. Yeah, the old capitalism ask, who owns the factory? The new capitalism asks, who controls the infrastructure of reality?
Exactly. We are talking about the energy grids, the computation networks, the communication platforms, and the algorithms that coordinate human life. Every time you log into a platform, every time you rely on an AI to draft an email, or every time you navigate a city using a privately owned map interface, you are a user navigating this new reality. You’re stepping into an infrastructural enclosure. You are interacting with sovereignty as a service.
And the models we just analyzed are the very tools being deployed to construct those enclosures. And that leads us to a final, provocative thought to leave you with, drawn directly from chat GPT’s analysis of a post-Muskism world. Think about the future of your own career. The core shift of the 21st century, according to these sources, is the rapid movement away from having traditional jobs inside firms and moving toward a reality of humans interfacing with infrastructure systems. Just imagine a world where your daily tasks aren’t given to you by a human manager, but are assigned dynamically, second by second, by a coordinating algorithm optimizing for planetary efficiency.
So the question you have to ask yourself as we navigate this transition is this. In your industry, in your life, are you positioning yourself to be an architect of that system? Or are you slowly becoming a dependent node, a biological placeholder, just waiting for the network to tell you what to do next? It ultimately comes down to whether we understand and control the tools or whether the tools and the corporate architecture behind them control us. And that is exactly why we do these custom-tailored deep dives- to fuel your curiosity, cut through the noise, and help you see the invisible architecture hidden beneath the magic trick. Thanks for diving deep with us today.
