The Politics of Inherited Future
Elon Musk is often described as the man inventing tomorrow.
In reality, it would be more accurate to say that he decides which of yesterday’s tomorrows finally gets built. His originality lies less in imagining new futures than in turning twentieth-century science fiction imaginaries into technological reality.
Of course, this is never a neutral process. The imaginaries that the world’s first trillionaire has chosen to operationalize share a common logic, one that essentially cashes out in the following way: limits are overcome through engineering, not negotiated through politics.
It is not so much about whether these imagined technologies can be built. More and more every day, they can be. It is more so about why these particular futures, rather than others, have become the dominant horizon of technological ambition and what kind of social order they are helping to create. The critical question, therefore, is not so much what is being built, but why it is being built and for whose purposes.
Retrofuturism, or Converting Science Fiction into Engineering Programs
The first thing to say is that Musk is not a technological visionary; he rarely invents genuinely new futures. He is a retrofuturist, meaning that he selects from an inherited archive of technological dreams and gives them capital, engineers, and a corporate structure.
Retrofuturism means the revival of futures imagined by earlier generations. Its futures can be drawn from the chrome-and-silver rockets of pulp science fiction, the inventions dreamed up or displayed at World’s Fairs, the aesthetics and ambitions of Cold War space culture, the excitement of early cybernetics, postwar technological optimism, and much else.
What distinguishes Musk is that he treats these imagined futures not as stories, but as engineering agendas and opportunities for capital accumulation. As he sees it, his companies are mechanisms for turning cultural imagination into technological reality. This is why he has repeatedly cited Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series as a key influence on his thinking about the survival of civilization. Likewise, his flagship AI chatbot, Grok, was explicitly named after the intelligent guide in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Although Musk’s companies operate in different industries, they all revive inherited technological imaginaries. Three of these are of particular importance: expansion beyond Earth, automation of labor and mobility, and the augmentation of the human body and mind.
The Imaginary of Expansion
SpaceX offers the clearest expression of the first imaginary. Its ambition is not simply to launch rockets more efficiently or support scientific exploration, but to make humanity multiplanetary and eventually establish a self-sustaining city on Mars.
Musk has linked this outlook, again, to Asimov’s Foundation books, a series shaped by imperial decline and the preservation of civilization through distant colonies. The reference is revealing for more reasons than one. On its own, Musk’s need to frame his technological ambitions in this way, at cosmic scale, tells us a lot about his outlook. But the reference to Asimov is also revealing in a specifically political way. It demonstrates that space, for Musk, can be seen as an answer to civilizational vulnerability.
Critics of Musk have homed in on this feeling of vulnerability, suggesting that it reveals the reactionary core of his vision. This is why Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, in Muskism, argue that Musk’s is a “fortress futurism.” They tie this orientation to his childhood in apartheid South Africa, claiming that South Africa, in the late apartheid era, was pursuing a future that was technological and self-sufficient, and at the same time highly exclusionary, and claim that this combination lives on in Musk. As Tarnoff told the New York Times, Musk “envisions the factory as an enclave, garrisoned against the instability of a hostile world.” Likewise for the private colony on Mars.
The focus on South Africa can be too reductionist, however. Musk’s vision also belongs in the lineage of a longer history of twentieth-century science and science fiction. Gerard O’Neill’s proposals for off-world colonies, for instance, can be seen as forerunners to Musk. So can the speculative narratives that emerged during the Cold War, in the halls of government and in novels and films, too. All treated expansion beyond Earth as a response to scarcity, overcrowding, ecological crisis, or nuclear destruction.
The point is not that Mars exploration is inherently escapist. NASA and other scientific institutions pursue it as a legitimate scientific endeavor. What distinguishes Musk’s vision is that Mars is conceived as a site for permanent human settlement, justified as essential either to the survival of the species or, more controversially, to preserving a technologically advanced social order perceived as increasingly constrained on Earth.
The political implications are significant. The expansion imaginary suggests that ecological and social limits need not be governed but escaped. Rather than reducing pressure on Earth by changing patterns of production and consumption, it seeks to extend them into space. It also points toward forms of political exit: Mars is the cosmic successor to libertarian projects such as seasteading, which proposed floating cities beyond the jurisdiction of existing states, a vision itself inspired by earlier science fiction, including Jules Verne’s Propeller Island. The same logic extends to orbital computing and space-based infrastructure, where data, energy, and intelligence are imagined as operating beyond terrestrial, and potentially democratic, constraints. The frontier becomes an alternative to political reform.
The Imaginary of Automation
A second imaginary can be gleaned from two of Musk’s other firms: Tesla and the Boring Company. Here, the central promise is not expansion, but the reduction of human effort in work and mobility. This becomes manifest most clearly in Tesla’s work on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, and the Boring Company’s vision of subterranean transport.
Optimus, also known as “Tesla Bot,” revives one of the oldest avatars of technological modernity. Namely, the obedient humanoid robot, who can be put to use for unsafe, repetitive, or boring tasks. But the rhetoric being used to sell the product goes further, casting Optimus as a technological innovation that could transform labor itself and free human beings from drudgery.
Of course, contrary to the rosy narratives being used to frame this technology, there are obvious reasons why Musk, not humanity abstractly conceived, stands to benefit from the displacement of human labor by robotized capital. Musk has been a vocal opponent of labor unions in general, and specifically hostile to organizing in his own firms. He was recently instrumental in hollowing out the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was forced to admit it had no jurisdiction over SpaceX. The automation imaginary lies in making labor conflict disappear from view. Optimus recasts work as a technical burden to be eliminated, pushing questions of wages, bargaining power, ownership, and distribution aside. The upside, in short, is that robots won’t unionize.
Tesla’s autonomous-driving program belongs to the same imaginary and is evidence of some of the same tensions. Self-driving cars are an old dream: the 1939 New York World’s Fair already envisioned automated highways and technologically managed traffic, while later experiments by General Motors and RCA used radio control and embedded road systems to guide vehicles.
The Boring Company makes this continuity especially visible. Its tunnels promise relief from congestion yet preserve the private car by moving it underground. Its flagship project, the Vegas Loop, intensifies car-centered urbanism through technology. This imaginary rests on the ideal of the autonomous individual, centers private property through the personal vehicle, and expands rather than reduces commodified mobility. The machinery is new, but the social model remains rooted in 1950s American capitalism and urbanism.
The Imaginary of Augmentation
The third imaginary concerns the limits of the human body and mind, embodied in Neuralink and xAI.
Neuralink’s immediate medical goal is presented as very concrete: Musk claims that its “brain-computer interfaces” (BCIs) may restore autonomy to people with paralysis or severe motor impairments, cure blindness and deafness, and even treat depression, insomnia, and other conditions besides. While critics suggest that none of these advances are close at hand, and may not be possible at all, Musk’s rhetoric goes even further than what was stated above. He has described humans as already functioning as “cyborgs,” with phones and computers acting as extensions of memory and communication.
Neuralink thus becomes part of a larger project that seeks to make the connection between mind and machine faster and more direct. Its intellectual genealogy lies in cybernetics and transhumanism. And the scientific basis of its interventions was already emerging in the late 1990s, which is why critics claim that most of what Neuralink markets as innovations are in fact “nothing new” for neuroscientists.
What is somewhat novel is how Musk is renegotiating the balance between this technology’s potential for treatment and rehabilitation on the one hand and human enhancement on the other. Restoring communication to a paralyzed patient is a concrete medical objective. But presenting BCIs alongside artificial intelligence implies a broader claim about what human beings may become in the future. Musk’s cyborg comment is therefore not accidental and certainly not fantastical. He has stated that Neuralink’s “overall aim” is a “general population device.” This is why some doubt “how serious the company is about treating disease at all.”
xAI shifts augmentation from the body to knowledge. The company promises to accelerate scientific discovery and “understand the universe.” The reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a fictional device for navigating an incomprehensibly large reality, places xAI within an older tradition that views the machine as oracle: a system capable of processing more information than any human institution and answering questions at the scale of humankind.
The augmentation imaginary shifts attention from care and social support toward the technical enhancement of the individual, the building out of the long-anticipated half-man, half-machine cyborg. The ideal subject is no longer simply healthy or autonomous, but augmented by technology. At the same time, knowledge production moves toward privately owned computational systems, reducing the public role of scientific institutions and democratic debate.
The paradox here, then, lies in the fact that the potential restoration or extension of autonomy creates new systems of dependence. Through chatbots and other AI technologies, the public’s knowledge is reliant on systems whose training protocols are not transparent. Meanwhile, their bodily and mental functions rely on technologies that require them to turn those very functions into a commodity via data extraction that can, and most likely will, be repackaged and sold, or else otherwise utilized. What Musk is proposing has the potential to exponentially extend what is already common in “platform capitalism” to the inner workings of a person’s brain.
Engineering Away Politics
Taken together, expansion, automation, and augmentation form a consistent theory of progress in which limits are overcome through engineering rather than negotiated through politics, and in which all constraints are removed from the visionary entrepreneur.
Musk’s imaginaries shift political questions that could be handled democratically into technical questions to be addressed by private actors: climate change becomes a reason to leave Earth; labor becomes a case for robotics; traffic becomes a problem of software and infrastructure; and human imperfection becomes a problem of interface. In all of this, despite the egalitarian noises being made, what remains up in the air is precisely who is set to benefit should these imaginaries come to fruition. When framed this way, Musk’s technologies can be seen as engines of de-democratization.
This is why retrofuturism matters. The technologies may be new, but the futures they serve are inherited from the twentieth century, when progress was tied to accumulation, productivity, and the promise of limitless growth. They all belong to a broader capitalist mythology in which more energy, more production, more speed, and more control over nature would deliver abundance. And as has often been the case in capitalist modernity, securing this future is once again framed as dependent on unshackling constraints on the visionary capitalists themselves.
Musk’s retrofuturism is best described as a reactivation of that mythology. His projects give a second life to the American way of life imagined at its mid-century peak: technological mastery, private consumption, frontier expansion, car-centered mobility, and faith in growth without clear limits. What has changed is not the social order, but the technical means now available to pursue it.
The question is no longer whether these futures can be built. Some will, some won’t. The real question is why these futures, rather than others, have become the dominant horizon of technological ambition. Musk reminds us that technological innovation is never simply about inventing new machines, but about deciding which old dreams deserve to become reality, who benefits from it, and who is left behind.