On a disassembly - Regina Rini in TLS:

‘I used to like Elon Musk. There’s an openness to him, an unguarded transparency. While other technoligarchs remodel as Augustus Caesar (Mark Zuckerberg) or a curiously buff Jean-Luc Picard (Jeff Bezos), Musk has never pretended to be more than what he is: an awkward geek who likes cheesy science fiction and questionable wordplay. His dogged enthusiasm for reinvigorating forlorn technologies such as electric cars and space exploration is refreshing in a Silicon Valley trained to yip after every fleeting microtrend. Above all, I have appreciated his insouciant approach to failure. At his SpaceX, a rocket explosion is a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, a euphemism so blatant, it might as well be a wink.’

(…)

‘Then there is the saga of the federal Cybertrucks. Soon after Trump returned to office, the investigative website Drop Site News noticed a State Department planning document seeking to spend $400 million on armoured Teslas. (After the news broke, mention of Tesla was quietly edited out of the document.) No one has yet explained where the mammoth expenditure came from or why it seemed appropriate in a moment of Musk-induced savage austerity.’

(…)

‘This is the Musk playbook: promise big, wink often, never accept responsibility. The game is to make over-the-top claims so rapidly that recent gasps cover the echoing emptiness of earlier boasts. It is also a famously Trumpian tactic. The Art of the Deal (1987) preaches “truthful hyperbole” – or telling suckers what they want to hear.’

(…)

‘Kant hoped that our entertaining encounters with literary knavery might inspire us to careful moral reflection.’

Read the articlehere.

I’m afraid that encounters with knavery in literature will make knavery only more attractive, but literature doesn’t exist to make the readers better people, at best literature will turn readers into better readers, and hopefully they will realize that there is more to life than just five varieties of prudence.

Seduction is telling people what they want to hear in such a way they they can take as a truthful hyperbole, maybe even as intelligent criticism.

The customer is the book, the sales person the reviewer. The deal is – well – the deal.