Fordlândia, again
In 1928, Henry Ford built a company town in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon to secure rubber for his cars. He called it Fordlândia. The workers got American-style houses, a hospital, a time clock and a long list of Ford’s rules about how to eat, drink and spend their free time. The rubber never came in the volumes Ford needed, the workers revolted against the rules, and in 1945 the company sold the land back to Brazil at a large loss.
As a Brazilian-American, I have always found that story both fascinating and a bit sad. Listening to Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s new book on Elon Musk, I kept coming back to it. Ford was not only selling cars. He was selling a complete way of life, and he was willing to build it from scratch in someone else’s country to prove it worked.
The book asks what way of life Musk is selling today. For this month’s theme on AI and health, I want to ask a narrower question: what is Musk promising to do with our minds and bodies, and who gets to benefit from it?
The book
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed came out in March 2026, and I listened to it on Audible over a few weeks. Slobodian is a historian, best known for Hayek’s Bastards, and Tarnoff is a writer that has covered the tech industry for years. Together they bring a mix of economic history and knowledge of Silicon Valley that I found useful.
This is not a biography, and the authors are clear about that. Musk’s story is there, from his childhood in apartheid South Africa to Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and his time running DOGE. They even include how his grandfather was a leading figure in the technocratic movement of the early 20th century, but I digress.
They are after something bigger than the man. They see him as the avatar of a playbook for our postliberal moment, a set of habits and beliefs that others are already copying, and they call that playbook Muskism.
The book has two parts. The first, “Foundation,” takes its name from Isaac Asimov’s novels, whom Musk read copiously in his youth, and covers how he built his empire, often by plugging his companies into government. The second, “Cyborg,” covers his belief that humans are already becoming cyborgs and that someone needs to steer that process. I will spend most of this review on the second part, since it is where AI and health meet.
From Fordism to Muskism
The central move of the book is the comparison with Ford. Fordism was more than cars rolling off an assembly line. It became the shorthand for how capitalism worked in the twentieth century: mass production paired with mass consumption, a steady wage, and a family in the suburbs with a car in the driveway. The authors call Fordism the operating system of the twentieth century and argue that Muskism offers a possible operating system for the twenty-first. Ford never used the word himself, and Musk has never used “Muskism” either.
The differences are as telling as the similarities. While Fordism was built on large numbers of workers, Muskism is built on engineers, robots and vertical integration, with the aim of taking as many humans out of production as possible. While Ford needed government to build the highways his cars would drive on, Musk needs government as a customer for rockets and satellites and, for a period in 2025, as a seat at the table.
The biggest shift, in my view, is on the consumption side. Ford sold you a car and let you decide where to drive it. Musk wants to sell you a way of seeing the world, through X and Grok today and potentially through a chip in your brain tomorrow. That is a far more intimate product, and it is why this book belongs in a conversation about health.
AI: merge or be left behind
Musk’s relationship with AI is full of contradictions. He has called it our biggest existential threat, helped found OpenAI partly out of that fear, and then fell out with Sam Altman over the direction it took. You would expect someone with those worries to argue for slowing down. Yet, his answer goes the other way: if AI is coming regardless, humans should merge with it before it leaves us behind.
In his view we are already cyborgs. He has said in interviews that our phones, feeds and social networks are extensions of our minds, and that society today is one giant human-machine collective. For Musk, the merging is already happening. What he wants to fix is the slow connection we have now, typing with our thumbs.
Grok is the mind side of that project, an AI shaped to reflect his view of the world. Neuralink is the body side, a direct link between the brain and the machine. The authors argue his goal goes further than making cyborgs. He wants to make sure “the right kind of cyborgs” are being made, and that phrase is where the AI question becomes a health question, and also a faith question.
Neuralink: healing or sorting?
I want to be fair here, because there is real good in this technology. Brain-computer interfaces are among the most hopeful developments in medicine today. Neuralink’s first patients, people living with paralysis, have used the implant to move a cursor, play games and type using only their thoughts. Giving someone back the ability to communicate with the people they love is an act of restoration, and faith communities should celebrate it.
With that said, the book pushes us to look past the first patients. Musk has been open that therapy is the starting point and that the long-term goal is enhancement, a high-bandwidth link between the brain and AI for anyone that wants to keep up. Medicine has a long tradition of drawing a line between treating illness and upgrading the healthy. Muskism does not seem very interested in that line.
That raises questions bioethics already knows well. Who gets the upgrade first, and who pays for it? Who writes the software that sits inside someone’s head, and who is allowed to change it? The authors describe what they call a cyborg conservatism, a future segmented by gender, race and class, where enhancement follows the same lines of privilege that already exist.
There is a deeper health theme in the book that I did not expect: Muskism speaks in medical language. The authors explain that Musk sees our networked collective as something that can be infected, so speeding up our fusion with machines is not enough. He also needs to control the interfaces, from social media to neural implants to AI, to prevent what they call ideological contagion. Ideas he dislikes become a virus, the woke mind virus. Empathy itself becomes, in Musk’s words as the authors relay them, something like an autoimmune disease, the body attacking itself. When health language is used this way, a neural implant is no longer only a medical device. It becomes a possible tool for deciding which thoughts count as infection.
Healing restores a person to wholeness. Enhancement, in this vision, sorts people into those worth upgrading and those that are not. Hence the health question in this book is not only whether the chip works. It is who the chip is for.
Who counts as human?
Musk has taken to calling his critics and opponents NPCs, the non-player characters of a video game that follow a script and fill the background. In gaming culture it is a joke. In his hands it becomes a way of saying that people who disagree with him are not really thinking, only running code. The authors are careful here. They do not call Musk a racist, but they trace his view of the world back to his upbringing in apartheid South Africa, where order depended on everyone knowing their place. In Muskism, they argue, purity and hierarchy go together. When you pair that view with a technology that can upgrade some minds and not others, the joke stops being funny.
This matters for health more than it may seem. Anyone that has built predictive models knows that a system only sees the people its builders decided to count. In a 2019 study published in Science, Ziad Obermeyer and colleagues found that a widely used commercial health algorithm rated Black patients as healthier than equally sick White patients, because it used past spending as a stand-in for medical need. The bias cut the number of Black patients flagged for extra care by more than half (Obermeyer et al., 2019). Nobody designed that model to discriminate. With that said, an AI built by people that see most of humanity as background characters will not need bad intent to do harm. It only needs to treat some patients as less real than others.
The Abrahamic traditions say the opposite. Genesis teaches that every person is made in the image of God, with no exceptions for IQ or productivity. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 teaches that whoever saves a single life is as if they saved an entire world, and the Qur’an repeats it in Surah 5:32, presenting it as a law given to the Children of Israel. In these traditions, there is no NPC.
Hindu tradition arrive at the same place by a different road. The Bhagavad Gita (6.29) describes the wise person as one that sees the same Self abiding in all beings, and Mahayana Buddhism teaches that every sentient being carries the potential for awakening. Whether we call it the image of God, the Atman or Buddha-nature, these traditions agree that human dignity comes with being human. It cannot be earned, and it cannot be upgraded with a chip.
Who is riding whom? A question from Walden Pond
The second question comes from closer to home, at least for American readers. In the 1840s, a small group of writers in Concord, Massachusetts, wrestled with what the first industrial age was doing to the human spirit, as railroads and the telegraph remade American life. The Transcendentalists are a fitting bridge from the traditions above, since Thoreau kept the Bhagavad Gita with him at Walden Pond and wrote of bathing his mind in it each morning. They saw a version of our moment more than 150 years ago, and they left us some good questions.
Thoreau warned in Walden that our inventions are often “improved means to an unimproved end.” A chip in the brain can make us faster at searching, typing and responding, but will it make us any wiser, kinder or more present to the people around us? Emerson wrote that “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” If our minds are wired directly to X and Grok, it is fair to ask who is riding whom.
Thoreau went to Walden because he wished to live deliberately, to strip life down to its essentials and see what it had to teach. That is a health question as much as a spiritual one. We already know what constant connection does to attention, sleep and mental health, especially for teenagers. Neuralink promises to remove the last gap between us and the network, the few seconds it takes to pick up the phone. Thoreau would have seen that gap as precious, the small space where a person can still choose. I would encourage us to ask what happens to contemplation, to Sabbath and to simple quiet when there is no longer any distance between the mind and the machine.
Whom should AI serve?
I came away from this book more concerned than when I started. My concern is less about Musk the man and more about the playbook, which is bigger than him and which others in Silicon Valley and in government are already running. Even if Slobodian and Tarnoff are only partially right, the implications are alarming. AI already touches our bodies through diagnostics, wearables and now implants. The question for us is what kind of health, and what kind of human, it will serve.
Faith communities bring a long memory to that question, including a memory of what happens to visions that ignore the grain of creation. According to the historian Greg Grandin, Ford never consulted an expert on rubber trees. He planted them in tight rows, like machines on an assembly line, and built an incubator for the blight native to the Amazon. Not one drop of Fordlândia latex ever made it into a Ford car. The judgment came from the forest, and from the workers that rioted against rules written for them in Michigan.
Something similar may be waiting for Muskism. The authors note that both men held almost all their wealth in their own company’s stock, so Muskism depends on constant belief in the next breakthrough. The body pushes back too. Weeks after Neuralink’s first implant in 2024, some of its threads retracted from the patient’s brain. Creation has a way of answering visions that refuse to listen to it, and the people treated as NPCs have a way of refusing the script.
By 1945, Ford’s company had given up on the Amazon. The forest defeated his rubber trees, and today Brazilian families live in his Michigan-style bungalows. I would encourage us to build visions for AI and health that listen to the body, to the earth and to the least of these, so that what we build is still standing when the forest comes back.
Sources
- Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Penguin)
- Brendon O’Connor, Why Muskism is not just post-Fordist, it is post-humanist, USSC, June 2026
- Ziad Obermeyer, Brian Powers, Christine Vogeli and Sendhil Mullainathan, Dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations, Science 366, 447 to 453, October 2019
- Greg Grandin, interviewed in Fordlandia: The Failure of Ford’s Jungle Utopia, NPR, June 2009
- CNN, Neuralink’s first brain chip implant developed a problem, but there was a workaround, May 2024
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
