Mark O’Connell

Mark O’Connell writes about automobiles as an expression of technology, capital, and extreme visions of the future, using essays and criticism rather than straightforward industry reporting.

Space Oddity: Muskism and Automotive Futures

In his recent piece “Space Oddity” for The New York Review of Books, O’Connell takes Elon Musk as a case study in how an automobile and space entrepreneur turns ideology into a business model.

The article reviews Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, which follows Musk’s ascent to the status of the world’s first trillionaire by selling a future that few people would actually want to inhabit. O’Connell reads Musk not as a product chief or carmaker but as the figurehead of a belief system, treating electric vehicles, rockets, and infrastructure projects as props in a larger narrative about power and technological destiny.

This marks a clear difference from a generic automobile reporter, who might focus on models, performance, or quarterly results, while O’Connell focuses on how automotive and space projects function as symbols in a broader political and cultural story.

The structure of “Space Oddity” is typical of his approach: he works through a book’s argument in detail, tests it against Musk’s public persona, and draws out the moral stakes of technologies that promise escape from the limits of the present. The automobiles and rockets in view become part of a system of ideas rather than technical subjects in themselves.

His beat thus encompasses the automobile sector where it overlaps with big-technology ideology, billionaire power, and speculative futures.

Single-Player Politics: Capitalism, Violence, and Symbolic Acts

Another recent Review piece, “Single-Player Politics,” shows how O’Connell handles stories where violence intersects with corporate power. The article examines the alleged killing of a health care executive by Luigi Mangione and describes it as a move within a game of symbols, rather than only as a crime story.

O’Connell tracks how the act is conceived and received in a culture that treats corporations, technology, and infrastructure as abstract forces, and how an individual uses violence to insert himself into that field.

This focus on symbolic action and capital’s human fallout carries over to his longer work on true crime, notably his book A Thread of Violence, which follows Malcolm Macarthur, a man who committed a brutal double murder yet insists on his own decency. Across these projects, automobiles, public spaces, and everyday objects appear as part of the stage on which extreme acts take place, more than as technical subjects.

The through-line is the way people and systems of capital collide, rather than sector coverage alone.

The War App and Technological Power

In his Review article “The War App,” O’Connell writes about The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, a book that examines how technology and political power combine to shape the near future. His piece explores how applications, platforms, and the wider machinery of security policy change what it means to live in modern societies. Automobiles and other machines are treated as parts of this wider “republic” of technology, embedded in systems of data, surveillance, and logistics.

Across “The War App,” “Single-Player Politics,” and “Space Oddity,” his method is consistent: he reads political theory and long-form nonfiction closely, then uses that reading to explain how technology, including the automotive sector, functions as a tool and symbol of power. This is essayistic work, with long paragraphs and sustained argument, rather than beat reporting on product launches or policy minutiae. A generic reporter might separate automotive news from political theory; O’Connell treats them as inseparable.

Books, Characters, and Extreme Futures

O’Connell’s books give further shape to his coverage. To Be a Machine looks at transhumanist literature and philosophy and the desire to overcome the human body through technology.

Notes from an Apocalypse follows anxieties about collapse and survival, often through encounters with people who invest in elaborate technological or infrastructural schemes for the future. A Thread of Violence, his most recent book, combines true crime with a study of moral self-deception.

These works show a consistent interest in how technology, including cars and other machines, is used to mediate fear, ambition, and identity.

Within The New York Review of Books, O’Connell is described as a regular contributor who writes on subjects ranging from the post-punk musician Robert Lloyd to transhumanist literature and philosophy. Interview material from the magazine stresses his eye for strange juxtapositions, paradox, and characters who do not quite know themselves. Public author and speaker bios confirm that his work also appears in outlets such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Guardian, often in the form of essays that link cultural subjects to questions of technology and modern life.

Across these venues, O’Connell’s coverage of automobiles sits in a larger pattern: he follows the people, books, and ideas that frame cars, infrastructure, and transport as instruments of ideology, escape, and control. His reporting format is long-form essay and review, his sources are often books and extended interviews, and his distinctive value lies in connecting automotive stories to the moral and political questions that surround extreme futures.