Review of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (HarperCollins, 2026)
In probably the most famous futurist artwork, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Umberto Boccioni depicted an erect man thrusting forward with velocity, abstracted into intersecting bronze planes and fluid surfaces, as if shaped by momentum. He has no arms and his head is a helmet; man and machine are merged.
The idealizer of futurism, Tommaso Marinetti, talked of “preparing the creation of the mechanical man with replaceable parts.” In Gino Severini’s 1915 painting, Armored Train in Action, five faceless, crouching soldiers are fragmented into composite elements of a train-mounted gun, their individual identities disappearing into the speed and rhythm of mechanized war.
For all that futurism was an audacious, thrilling embrace of the possibilities thrown up by breakneck technical progress — an attempt to reconnect human experience with new social forces. The death drive was always present: the subsumption of the human by the machine and of thought by the oblivion of speed.
Marinetti’s glorification of war — “the world’s only hygiene” — was the clearest expression of antihuman tendencies that would be made grotesquely manifest as Europe became a charnel house. A long liberal period, characterized by war practiced in faraway places “over there” was interrupted by growing tensions between major powers, exploding into a world war.
As geopolitical conflict increases today, there are some — see historians such as Christopher Clark or Richard J. Evans — who see our time as analogous to the end of the Belle Époque. The unipolar liberal order gives way to a multipolar one of waning empire and rising rival powers, as distant imperial adventures once again redound to ground war in Europe.
Over in the New World, Henry Ford installed the first moving…
Auteur: Alex Hochuli
