Muskism: Who Builds the Future?
Technology is supposed to deliver us into the future. But whose future, exactly? Drawing on their new book Muskism, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff examine the ideology driving today’s tech elite: the fantasy that innovation can outrun democracy, evade accountability, and reorganize society in its own image. From AI to private infrastructure to the cult of the founder, they explore how Silicon Valley has turned the future into a political project—one shaped as much by myth, power, and profit as by invention. A timely conversation about tech, capital, and the competing visions of tomorrow already being built into the present.
Quinn Slobodian
Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. His books include Globalists, Crack-Up Capitalism, and Hayek’s Bastards. The last won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism. In April 2026 he published Muskism, with co-author Ben Tarnoff Muskism. He has written for New York Times, New York Review of Books, Financial Times, Spike, and others. A Guggenheim Fellow for 2025-6, he has also been a fellow at Chatham House, Harvard, and FU Berlin.
Ben Tarnoff
Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts and is the author of Internet for the People, The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature, and the co-author of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It, and—with Quinn Slobodian—Muskism. 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.
