From Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism loc 1222:
In the time of the pandemic, we learned to see ourselves as a potential risk to other people, a stance that required personal sacrifices. The sovereign individual became abruptly countercultural. The panicked sense of lost sovereignty resonated with the prevailing sociophobia of the far right, entailed in the assertion that any communal abridgment of individual freedoms is despotic: ‘social distancing is communism’ and ‘masks are muzzles’.
A process enacted through a “conversion-machine, transforming panic over threatened individualism into authoritarian desire”: what Elon Musk has been consumed by and what he seeks to build and expand?
Mark Carrigan 