we are in full Ministry for the Future territory this summer

History strikes back.

"For Muskism, this border war had to be waged in such a way as to erase some lines while hardening others. Humanity should merge with the machine—so long as it remained segmented by gender, race, and class. Call it cyborg conservatism." - Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Quinn Slobodian on Edward Fishman:

In the end, consumers will be...consumers. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/b...

Elon Musk has too much power right now. My mind is buzzing after a conversation with @quinnslobodian.com co-author of the new book "Muskism" I highly recommend a listen/watch on the latest episode of Foreign Policy Live. You can watch the *free* video intv here: open.spotify.com/episode/3dCv...

No, Muskism does not come as a package. One is no more required to accept his demands for ethnic cleaning to embrace lithium ion battery EVs than one has to adopt William Shockley’s eugenics to use the semiconductor.

Alberto Romero has been among the more even-handed "insiders" of the AI boom. He has generally contended there are several paths commercial AI might follow, but the most likely is a mild post-hype crash followed by profitable diffusion (no AGI). Yesterday, he turned uncharacteristically bearish.

Only upside being it is itself a very A24 premise (things don't go well)

The civic center acceleration is happening so quickly that I'm not even sure most academics are aware of it . . . but I think the center-right is using a convenient set of overlapping circumstances- conservative ascendency in state legislatures, defunding of humanities, post-encampment backlash

Like extremely well-paid - this is where all that money that is supposed to be used to hire actual humanities scholars at public universities to do actual peer-reviewed research and teach courses that aren't geared toward ideological indoctrination is going careers.historians.org/jobs/rss/223...

They have a real strict firewall set up so it’s basically none of my concern. flaminghydra.com/weve-all-got...

AfD attacking the Bauhaus, playing the fascist hits. www.ft.com/content/a9bb...

"Thinking through forests: Colonialism, capitalism, and the global timber trade". Iva Lučić and I are excited to share the special issue on Timber Colonialism. #envhist @nichecanada.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Good clear post from @pkrugman.bsky.social about why people hate AI---and why this is not just the usual popular resistance to new technology. People hate the message, they hate the means, and they hate the messengers. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-does-e...

Interesting that Hyundai is using their Boston Dynamics Atlas robot as the "face" of the company in World Cup ads just as the Korean Metal Workers’ Union votes to strike over robots on the shop floor. www.ft.com/content/e5f2...

Good one on @flaminghydra.com from @lukeoneil47.bsky.social, not regretting my subscription

🌟❗Et demain ? Les nouvelles formes du capitalisme❗ ✍️par Sven Beckert, Sophie Cras, Arnaud Orain @ehess.fr @crh.ehess.fr, Quinn Slobodian 🗞️ @maglhistoire.bsky.social "1000 ans de capitalisme" 📆n°545, Juillet-Août 2026 ▶️ www.lhistoire.fr/et-demain-le...

Grok is now in the history manipulation business. And what more important history to distort at this moment than that of the 14th Amendment.

One of our arguments is Neuralink is underrated for insights into what we call Musk's cyborg turn.

Not a car guy but

The authors of 'Muskism' – a historian and a technology writer – aim to show that Elon Musk is most usefully understood not as an individual but as a symptom of deeper historical forces. Their intellectual ambition is notable and largely vindicated. trib.al/7fSOiJs

Looks like Musk's "no you're the mass murderer" bit didn't work to get the SpaceX stock price back up, curiously.

This has got to be the weirdest human evolution story I've ever covered. I'm still baffled -- yes, baffled -- by these results. 🏺🧪

Like someone else, he has the trait of completely absorbing the worldview of the last person he spoke to. Almost memetic you could say.

As I said to a reporter last week, maybe we talk too much about Musk as the first trillionaire and not enough about him as the last one. www.theguardian.com/business/liv...

A Dem victory in the mid-terms alongside successes for as diverse a range of characters as Mamdani, Magyar or Albanese also indicate how social media power that obsesses Musk does not guarantee hegemony. Outcomes that demonstrate limits of tech power fundamentally contradict Musk's worldview

almost cute to see them keep trying

Honest moment in Douthat interview when Vance said his biggest fault is he’s a striver.

3/3

Quite obviously freaked about being called in front of a Democratic congress in 2027.

Algae is everywhere

Classic online reactionary maximalist meltdown: Thing I'm Opposed To must not only be bad in same vague sense but actually the worst thing ever and responsible for all the world's ills

“As we know the English historically struggle here in Boston” was a funny line

Now available for preorder, arriving in warehouse 10/02/2026: dukeupress.edu/content-mach... Duke UP gave me a discount code for 30% off paperback preorders: it's E26CNTNT ♥️👍

the sleep of reason produces posters

The wealthiest man in the world posts utter fictions at a machine-gun pace to his no-choice audience of tens of millions. These fictions cause deadly race riots in UK, terrible crises in many countries, and here justify his destruction of the org that solves these very problems

In the last three hours, Musk has posted that USAID “was central to the creation of COVID-19,” “funded coronavirus research in China that killed millions of people,” “was used for terrorism,” and “killed millions.”

@theobserveruk.bsky.social columnist queries AI models about the titular ism of our book, finds "Grok, Musk’s own LLM, deflected any direct critique of him by using fatalistic Marxist language to predict capitalism’s inevitable collapse" observer.co.uk/news/science...

Anti-Prime Day starts…NOW! 🥳 Today through 6/26, enjoy free standard shipping site-wide, all while supporting local, independent bookstores.

The Times literally played swelling strings on the podcast when Vance discussed his "sacramental" love for his wife. Can't say they're not doing their best!

My first publication under my new name is an article out today in Modern Intellectual History on the notion of "job-killing regulation" www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

You can now preorder the paperback of Make Your Own Job, with this gorgeous new cover!! www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

my favorite player at the tournament is also a writer. a brutal but moving testimony.

Now is the time of Monsters Inc.

Good thing I was making that stuff up about Austrian paleolibertarians adopting race science.

The first season of After Order podcast concludes with a live-recorded conversation exploring the central premise that has run through the series: that we are not living through an interregnum between stable systems, but through a period of sustained disorder.

is AI getting worse

Watching France-Iraq reminding me of one of the more unusual reviews I've ever received—of Globalists by way of a young Mbappé in 2018 by Charles Mudede www.thestranger.com/books/kylian...