Book about “Teslocracy”: Disruption is seen as a virtue, slowness as failure

Tech billionaires don't have to win elections; it's enough for them if elections no longer mean anything. This observation runs through “Teslocracy”, an anthology edited by Christoph Chwatal, Alexander Karschnia and Heimo Lattner. That's exactly why you should read it: not just out of curiosity, but as an urgent warning. Every industrial revolution has political consequences. Ford's assembly line system helped establish a social model of employment, wages and consumption. Is Elon Musk's Tesla the next turning point? The decisive factor for what the authors of the volume call teslocracy is not only what the company produces, but also what political environment favors its methods: quick decisions, little transparency, dependence on the priorities of a single owner.

Tesla's settlement in Brandenburg is an instructive case. The work was created as a result of negotiations that were largely conducted away from the public; the “Tesla speed” (Robert Habeck) was later celebrated. But speed is not politically neutral. A decision can be quick because construction occurs before the process is complete and public participation shrinks. In 2024, in Grünheide, the Tesla location, 62.1 percent of participants in a local citizen survey voted against the expansion of the Giga Factory. This with a voter turnout of 70 percent. The vote was not binding. The local council approved a revised plan. The citizens were heard, but not heard.

The mechanism is familiar: hesitation costs investment, companies tell governments. Each concession can be defended individually; the danger only becomes apparent as a whole. Democracy in this country is crumbling because of this gap between citizen participation and political power. However, the problem is not unavoidable. Governments could set common rules to prevent regions from competing with each other through increasingly extensive exemptions and concessions, as Marina Weißpflug shows in this volume.

What seems like unavoidable market logic is often the result of policies that could have been designed differently. Geert Lovink's confrontation with the US government agency “DOGE” extends this criticism to the state apparatus. Institutions are not machines made of interchangeable parts. Employees carry knowledge, archives preserve decisions, processes record the lessons learned from mistakes. Anyone who cuts these connections makes the state leaner, but also incapable of action. A state that can be erased can be rewritten. That's the frightening point.

Florian Cramer and Nienke Terpsma recall the avant-garde's fascination with speed, machines and destruction. The futurist Marinetti served Italian fascism. A contempt for institutions, which many leftists also have, is not automatically emancipatory. Today, disruption is seen as a virtue and slowness as failure. However, democratic deliberations take time. According to Cramer and Terpsma, the question is not how society can become faster, but rather what delay protects against decisions that are difficult to reverse. Marx says: "To be radical is to get to the root of the matter. But the root of man is man himself."

Christoph Chwatal, Alexander Karschnia, Heimo Lattner (eds.): “Teslocracy: ideologies of tech capitalism”. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2026, 296 pages, 22 euros

Democratic radicalism does not mean defending every institution, but rather strengthening people's power over the forces that shape their lives, today especially over the oligarchic-technocratic ones.