The Tesla Cybertruck is quite the sight. Its nondescript and oversized body protrudes across road lanes with sharp steel corners. It is no secret, however, that the Cybertruck is mostly for show: many reviews and crash tests have gone viral for demonstrating the flimsy quality of this indestructible-looking machine. But I don’t only hate the Cybertruck because of its poor durability, or because Elon Musk is Donald Trump’s (former) groupie. The sight of the Cybertruck driving down a civilian street fills my stomach with a certain primal dread. It is intimidating, even frightening. Tesla’s design for the Cybertruck signals something much more ominous about not only techno-fascism’s consolidation in the West, but what techno-fascists envision for humanity’s future.
In her essay on the fascist aesthetic, Susan Sontag argues that fascist art is defined by a paradoxical glorification of heroic or violent strength and mass submission. Displays of the body, either in heroic idealized form or in vast armies marching in unison, defined the fascism of WWII. European fascism in the 1930s was particularly anti-intellectual and championed the return of the body; jubilant and subservient virility over the cranky societal criticism and ambiguous artistic experimentation of the preceding decades.
The contemporary tech bro brand of fascism is concerned with the same motifs of virility, strength and order, but turns to tech innovation as its major pillar. Rather than worshipping the perfect body, today’s concern is the perfect IQ. In this vein, the rise of the techno-fascist makes sense. In her book Planning for Empire, Janis Mimura develops the concept of the techno-fascist in the context of the Japanese empire, defined as fascist rule led by technocrats rather than political strongman figures. A group of Japanese engineers and industrialists who had designed and implemented a system of exploitation in occupied Manchuria were also assigned to high-ranking posts in the Japanese government, where they went on to steer imperial policy under the Emperor. One may easily draw parallels to the most powerful technocrats in Silicon Valley closely aligning themselves with the Trump administration, and even taking on bureaucratic positions in it, in Musk’s case.
Fascism is also deeply intertwined with masculine insecurity. After severe personal or social traumas, the individual is plunged into confusion. Fearing homogenization and chaos, which in the psychoanalytic tradition symbolize the feminine or the mother’s womb, fascist movements tend to emphasize violence and will-to-power as antidotes to a lost masculinity. The social upheaval heralded by the BLM movement or the deconstruction and increasingly fluid expressions of gender, for example, certainly qualify as a rupture to the Western male psyche, sublimating the need to assert strength and order.
The Tesla Cybertruck embodies the hollow machismo inherent to fascism. One could even say it embodies the persona of Elon Musk himself; paranoid about the woke left’s pervasive criticism of masculinist power structures, Musk attempts to emulate the swagger of a militant leader. Similarly, the Cybertruck emulates the military tank with a futuristic twist with its brutalist steel body. But Musk’s persona only thinly veils his insecurities, and the Cybertruck’s exterior only thinly veils its fragility. Car testers on YouTubers have gone viral for exposing the Cybertruck’s flimsy design. Its frame has been exposed as non-durable and structurally unsafe; its steel doors easily crumble inside after moderate impact; and even at the Cybertruck’s official launch, its “armour glass” windows did not survive the impact of a demonstration where a steel ball was thrown at the car on-stage. Why an American driver might need “armour” glass is unclear, for surely the commute to Silicon Valley doesn’t involve bullets or rugged terrain. If anything, a war against the “woke left” is the battle of choice for techno-fascists face today. In the Cybertruck, Musk uses the aesthetic signifiers of strength to wage his war against wokeness. One could not imagine a more fitting progeny for a wimpy technocrat who relents about the deterioration of traditional masculinity online.
Interestingly, the Cybertruck’s angular, military scale stands in opposition to 20th century futurism; visions of “futuristic” automobiles from the latter half of the twentieth century were characteristically compact, sleek and aerodynamic in appearance. Take the Ford Mustang I Concept (1962), the Buick Century Cruiser (1969) or the Pontiac Banshee (1988): the cutting edge was low to the ground and built to be as fast as possible. Let’s even look at EPCOT, Walt Disney’s car-centric utopia from 1966 as an example: while it was planned to be an autocratic company town, a mecca of consumer luxury stacked on top of an underground shipping centre, mock-ups for even EPCOT’s cars reveal a humanism that the Cybertruck lacks. EPCOT’s “People-Movers” are high-speed but family friendly pods that travel along tracks to the city’s core. The name EPCOT itself stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, indicating that its ‘innovations’ were designed with communal cooperation in mind. But rather than prioritizing fluidity and efficiency, 2025’s car of the future incites fear. A cumbersome and obnoxious presence in the midst of city traffic, the Cybertruck’s popularity signals a version of the future that is no longer collective; it heralds a techno-fascism, the tyranny of the technologically “advanced” few.
In “Capitalism with a Transhuman Face,” Ana Teixeira Pinto notes that the current iteration of alt-right tech fascism emerges in contrast to the former optimistic era of tech humanism, led by figures such as Bill Gates. “If every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution, this one could say that the rise of crypto fascist tendencies within the tech industry bears witness to the failures of the ‘digital revolution’, whose promises of a post-scarcity economy and socialised capital never came to pass.” Tesla’s website advertises the Cybertruck not driving on city streets, but navigating through a simulated post-apocalyptic landscape. It rams across otherworldly red mountains and black sand beaches, devoid of human presence. The Tesla Cybertruck is not only anti-human: it is anti-Earth. It was designed in the image of a post-apocalyptic, extra-planetary world, where human life on Earth has been desecrated and abandoned, and only a select few strongmen have survived to dominate the terrain of a new, lonely frontier.
Milena Pappalardo is a writer and artist based in Toronto and Montreal. She completed her Hon. Bachelor in Political Science at the University of Toronto. She loves to write about the political and psychoanalytic undercurrents of fashion, art and culture.