Quinn Slobodian

Sokak szerint megőrült, vagy mindig is őrült volt, mások szerint vizionárius zseni, akinél jobban senki nem lát bele a jövőbe. Az biztos, hogy kevés ember van a világon, aki Elon Musknál nagyobb hatással lenne a technológiai, gazdasági, sőt világpolitikai folyamatokra. Vagy úgy általában az emberiség jövőjére. Az ő rakétái állították pályára a Starlink-műholdakat, amelyek nélkül már szinte elképzelhetetlen a háború. Ő gyártja a világon a legtöbb elektromos autót. Ő vezeti azokat a kutatásokat, amelyek célja az emberi agy és a számítógép összekapcsolása. Az ő háttérirányításával és algoritmusain keresztül zajlik a globális támadás a fennálló világrend ellen. És ő akarja elvinni az emberiséget a Marsra.Óriási a tétje annak, hogy megértsük, mit akar ez az ember. Még mielőtt túl késő lenne. A két kiváló amerikai szerző a muskizmus megfejtésére vállalkozik - és a kép, amelyet elénk festenek, hátborzongató.A világpremierrel egy időben magyarul is megjelenő kötet a Financial Times, a New Yorker és a Literary Hub szerkesztősége szerint is 2026 legjobban várt könyve."Mélyenszántó bepillantás Musk törekvésébe, hogy az univerzum urává váljon... A muskizmus doktrinája a kevesek gazdagságát s egyben politikai uralmát jelenti: a SpaceX az űrben, az X és a Grok a számítógépeinken, a Starlink minden telefonon... Hogy "disztópikus", az nem elég erős szó arra a technokrata jövőre, amelyet a szerzők előrevetítenek ebben a komor, de nagyon fontos könyvben."KirkusQuinn Slobodian a Bostoni Egyetem történelem professzora; a mai világpolitikai és gazdasági folyamatokról szóló fontos könyvek szerzője; 2024-ben a brit Prospect magazin a világ 25 legjelentősebb gondolkodója közé sorolta.Ben Tarnoff Massachusettsben élő technológiai szakíró, az Internet for the People című könyv szerzője, valamint a Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do - And How They Do It társszerzője. Rendszeresen publikál a New York Review of Booksban, emellett írásai megjelentek többek között a New York Times, a New Yorker és a New Republic hasábjain is.

Who on earth is Elon Musk and what is he doing? Is he a hero, a villain, or does he swing constantly between those two poles? According to the constant media gush driven by his every act and pronouncement, Musk is best understood in personal terms. This book argues differently. Rather than seeing Musk as an individual, it sees him as an avatar of something called Muskism: a playbook for our new postliberal age. It’s not that Musk himself holds a coherent set of beliefs; you could say his life is one long improvisation. And he’s certainly never used the word Muskism – just as, a century ago, Henry Ford never used Fordism to define his own postliberal modernity. In exploring the forces that have shaped Musk, from South Africa to Silicon Valley, Space X to DOGE, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff outline the motifs and practices that have come to dominate our own crisis-ridden world. Muskism, they show, speaks the language of crisis and emergency to invoke a less human future: where humans are purged from the productive process and, through social media and video games, merged with the machine. This is a worldview in which the technocrat is king; which piggybacks on the state to achieve supremacy; and in which only a select few deserve salvation. If you enter, this book warns you, you will grind and you will live in the shadow of one man – but the rewards could be priceless and the alternative might be extinction.

A revelatory exploration of how today's right-wing authoritarianism emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but from within it Bracingly original... Hayek's Bastards demonstrates how a history of ideas can be riveting. Slobodian grounds intellectual abstractions in the lives of the people who espoused them... His book offers an illuminating history to our current bewildering moment, as right-wing populists join forces with billionaire oligarchs to take a chain saw to the foundations of public life, until there's nothing left to stand on' - Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed. Communism had been defeated - and Friedrich Hayek, the spiritual father of neoliberal economics, had just about lived to see it. But in the decades that followed, Hayek's disciples knew that they had a problem. The rise of social movements, from civil rights and feminism to environmentalism, were now proving roadblocks in the road to freedom, nurturing a culture of government dependency, public spending, political correctness and special pleading. Neoliberals needed an antidote. In this illuminating new book, historian Quinn Slobodian reveals how, from the 1990s onwards, neoliberal thinkers turned to nature, in an attempt to roll back social changes and to return to a hierarchy of gender, race and cultural difference. He explores how these thinkers drew on the language of science, from cognitive psychology to genetics, in order to embed the idea of 'competition' ever deeper into social life, and to advocate cultural homogeneity as essential for markets to truly work. Reading and misreading the writings of their sages, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, they forged the alliances with racial psychologists, neo-confederates, ethnonationalists that would become known as the alt-right. Hayek's Bastards shows that many contemporary iterations of the Far Right, from Javier Milei to Donald Trump, emerged not in opposition to neoliberalism, but within it. As repellent as their politics may be, these supposed disruptors are not defectors from the neoliberal order, but its latest cheerleaders.

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation - and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians - from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel - around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled. Crack-Up Capitalism is a propulsive history of the recent past, and an alarming view of our near future.

Look at a map of the world and you'll see a neat patchwork of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. From the 1990s onwards, globalization has shattered the map, leading to an explosion of new legal entities: tax havens, free ports, city-states, gated enclaves and special economic zones. These new spaces are freed from ordinary forms of regulation, taxation and mutual obligation - and with them, ultracapitalists believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether. Historian Quinn Slobodian follows the most notorious radical libertarians - from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel - around the globe as they search for the perfect home for their free market fantasy. The hunt leads from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the medieval City of London, and finally into the world's oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where capitalism and democracy can be finally uncoupled. Crack-Up Capitalism is a propulsive history of the recent past, and an alarming view of our near future.