What Elon Musk's reading habits tell us about modern capitalism

The vision of perpetual optimization championed by Silicon Valley oligarchs is anti-culture, anti-civilization, and anti-human.

A few months ago, the fascistic cringe merchant who currently owns Twitter gave an obscure Greek poet from eons ago a big boost:

I realize there are more important things going on with Elon Musk than his reading habits, but do bear with me. Musk’s promotion of The Iliad (though, as you can see, he may have meant The Odyssey) is, of course, fairly bog standard stuff: for reasons that are pretty obvious, classical writers and texts — or at least the idea of them — have long been beloved by a certain kind of wannabe masculinist subset heavily represented in fields like tech. But what interests me here is the particular way Musk recommended listen to The Iliad (or was it the other one?), i.e. ever-so-slightly sped up.

In the same vein, I’d also like to enter the following into the record — which comes courtesy of a bluecheck grindset guy with the unimprovable name “Dickie Bush”:

The books in question are less relevant here than the attitude towards reading on display and what I think it ultimately represents. There’s an obvious philistinism to the idea of speedrunning a Homeric epic, and it’s nothing short of deranged to approach something like The Remains of the Day as a handbook for success in business (I’m not going to bother recounting the whole thread here, but for those who may be wondering: the Butler in Ishiguro’s wonderful novel, whose devotion to serving his aristocratic — and, as it turns out, pro-Nazi master — finally leaves him lonely and unfulfilled is said to have taught Bezos the value of taking risks…or something).

Albeit in slightly different ways, both reflect the same, underlying ethos of optimization, by which I mean: viewing anything and everything in purely instrumental terms. In this case, Musk and Bezos are applying that ethos to what should be the simple pleasure of reading a book. But, for several decades now, something like it has increasingly pervaded much of culture, society, and politics and its implications have been profound.

Thus, Silicon Valley oligarchs entreat us to take in books at increased speed, as if the words were simply raw data to be passively absorbed and uploaded to the brain (and to read great novels in search of management ideas). By the same token, media outlets and YouTube channels now reliably churn out lifestyle content that recasts basic activities like eating or sleeping as “practices” whose main purpose is to increase our productivity. Influencers suggest seeking out “high value” partners and friendships, as if every relationship is a business transaction in which we are making an investment and hoping for a return. (I alas cannot find it, but I vividly remember a fitness video I once stumbled across where the host recommended taking a daily afternoon walk to, in their words, “receive the benefits of walking.”)

One lubricant for all of this has clearly been social media, and the modern culture of analytics in general — wherein the likes of social clout, personal interactions, professional success, and so on can be game-ified with quantitative metrics (favourites, shares, ratings, etc). In one sense at least, virtually all human activity can now be directly measured and optimized accordingly.

Fundamentally, however, what really lies beneath the ethic of optimization I’ve been describing is the economistic logic of neoliberal capitalism. In her brilliant book. Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown describes that logic this way:

“…neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.

For Brown, what distinguishes neoliberalism from earlier variants of capitalism is the particular way it has reconfigured both society and self according to an intensely parochial idea of maximization which extends the structures of the market into every sphere of individual and collective life:

In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only and everywhere homo oeconomicus, which itself has a historically specific form. Far from Adam Smith’s creature propelled by the natural urge to “truck, barter, and exchange,” today’s homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues. These are also the mandates, and hence the orientations, contouring the projects of neoliberalized states, large corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, consultancies, museums, countries, scholars, performers, public agencies, students, websites, athletes, sports teams, graduate programs, health providers, banks, and global legal and financial institutions.

The Silicon Valley ethos of optimization, then, is really just one, particularly absurd expression of the ethic undergirding a market society — in this case from those who today form its ideological vanguard (which is to say, tech oligarchs). In this brave new world, nothing can really have intrinsic value. We no longer read for the sake of it nor interact with one another for non-transactional reasons. Life is, or should be, an unending hustle of atavistic competition and self-maximization in which each of us behaves like a sentient corporate firm and the world around us is pure commodity.

The problem, of course, is not the idea of efficiency itself. It goes without saying that all kinds of things can be improved by the application of instrumental thinking. But when the principles of market optimization are extended into every facet of culture and life, then nothing — by definition — can exist outside of them.

For our tech overlords, that’s an Elysium to pine for. It sure sounds like a dystopia to me.