15-03-2025
Elon Musk Wanted the Cybertruck to Look Like 'the Future.' But It Reminds Us of One Particular Past.
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In the 1980s, Irvin, a 12-year-old child in Soweto, in apartheid South Africa, drew a foreboding picture. Irvin sketched an angular, armored military vehicle: the Casspir, a ubiquitous sight in the nation's townships during the final decades of apartheid. The apartheid state deployed the Casspir to patrol and terrorize Black African communities in the name of keeping 'peace.' Irvin's drawing captured how, for Black people under apartheid, the hulking steel frame of the vehicle represented an intimidating and oppressive military intrusion into everyday life.
Decades later, the Tesla Cybertruck, lately a prime target for protesters demonstrating their dislike of CEO Elon Musk, blurs the boundaries between the battlefield and the public street. When Tesla released the Cybertruck in 2023, its dramatic style polarized the public. Popular theories abounded about its unusual look. Many speculated that its inspiration had come from spaceships of science fiction. In discussing the car's aesthetic early on, Musk referenced cyberpunk and Blade Runner, a film that features sleek metallic vehicles, though with rounded silhouettes designed for aerodynamic speed. He's also used the phrase 'The future should look like the future'—a reference, his biographer Walter Isaacson said, to a question his son Saxon asked him once: 'Why doesn't the future look like the future?'
Whether or not this was intentional, the Cybertruck's harsh, sharp edges remind us, instead, of something from the past: the larger armored personnel vehicles that patrolled streets throughout Musk's youth in apartheid South Africa. In the 1980s, the Casspir proliferated across the country, moving from the battlefield and onto the streets. Initially improvised as a way to circumvent international sanctions against the apartheid government, the Casspir mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle was invented and produced domestically. It was a rugged all-terrain vehicle intended to withstand gunfire and mine explosions. It could drive up to 60 mph and be modified to add artillery functions.
Eventually, the Casspir was deployed to patrol townships, the residential neighborhoods where many Black South Africans lived. As violence and flames engulfed the streets of the nation, Black South African children like Irvin drew and wrote about the apartheid security forces and its tools—dogs and Casspirs—chasing and shooting at them in their schools, streets, and homes. By the 1990s, the Casspir had become an iconic global symbol of apartheid oppression.
Musk would have likely seen the Casspir vehicles in the South Africa of his childhood. He was born in Pretoria, one of the nation's three capitals, during apartheid, in June 1971. When he was 5 years old, tens of thousands of Black South African children protested the government's policy to impose Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the apartheid state, in schools. In Soweto, where Irvin lived, the South African police fired bullets into a crowd of unarmed, protesting children, killing scores of them. This episode became known as the Soweto uprising. It was one of many massacres.
Around 1985, when Musk was in his early teens, Oliver Tambo, the leader of the then-banned African National Congress, called for people to resist apartheid and 'make South Africa ungovernable.' The apartheid regime called a state of emergency and decided to conscript white South African men 18 years old and above to serve in the South African Defence Force to protect its white citizens. In this effort, the SADF invaded, attacked, and killed apartheid's 'enemies' at home and abroad in Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, and Namibia.
Musk left South Africa in 1988, after graduating from the prestigious Pretoria Boys High School, and a year shy of being subject to military conscription.
But South Africa is not the only place where military vehicles have roamed civilian streets. Over the past few decades, the U.S. military has been steadily off-loading military-grade equipment to U.S. police forces for use on domestic civilian populations.
The Casspir, too, is part of this story. In addition to shielding and supporting the apartheid government until the late 1980s, the U.S. purchased and deployed Casspirs during the second Gulf War invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, before manufacturing its own Casspir-inspired mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles. These vehicles are part of the military-equipment transfers, and they now patrol American streets. We saw them during the spectacular use of force against Black Lives Matter protesters in places like Ferguson, Missouri.
American pop culture across the political spectrum is infused with romanticized frontier violence and militarism, from camo and Americana fashion styles to gun culture and the popularity of tradwife and prepper consumption. These trends ask us to imagine survival individualistically and not as a product of social movements or collective interdependence. Rather, they constrict the imagination, narrowly encouraging us to fortify literal and metaphorical walls, to consume our way into fantasy 21st-century homesteads, and to envision modern warfare finally coming to U.S. soil.
The Cybertruck capitalizes on these fears. Its marketing, for example, explicitly taps into the current apocalyptic visions pervading both right- and left-wing political imaginaries—from climate disaster to nuclear, civil, and class warfare. Heralded as being 'built for any planet,' it showcases a Bioweapon Defense Mode and a 'built-in hospital grade HEPA filter' that 'helps provide protection from 99.97% of airborne particles.' One third-party Tesla modification company, aimed at civilian and government clients, sells Cybertruck upgrades so it can run on jet fuel, diesel, biodiesel, and electricity.
The idea that a Cybertruck could become an artillery vehicle is not just hypothetical. Unsanctioned by Tesla, various users, ranging from a YouTuber to Chechen forces fighting for Russia in Ukraine, have modified a Cybertruck by mounting machine guns to its bed, turning it into a lightly armored weaponized machine. Government forces, such as the police in Southern California and Dubai, are using the Cybertruck as part of their fleets—although in those cases its usage is symbolic and not for patrol duties. (Irvine's vehicle will be part of its DARE program, for example.)
To be clear, the Cybertruck is not designed for actual combat, but it allows consumers to play make-believe. For some, the vehicle's appeal lies in its vision of the world as an apocalyptic battlefield. During the Cybertruck's launch, Musk himself declared that 'sometimes you get these late-civilization vibes' and that the 'apocalypse can come along at any moment, and here at Tesla we have the best in apocalypse technology.' Its pseudo-futuristic vision is militaristic, stainless-steel fortified, masculinist, individualistic, and unforgiving. Indeed, some Americans' embrace of the Cybertruck is not entirely surprising. It builds on the nation's historical popular adoption of militarized personnel vehicles, such as the civilian consumption of Jeeps and Hummers. Jeeps came into civilian use after their deployment in World War II, and Hummers were the civilian adaptation of Humvees featured in American wars in the second half of the 20th century.
Whether or not Musk or the Cybertruck's designers made a conscious decision to draw inspiration from the Casspir, the Cybertruck can be understood as part of this darker history of science-fictional, militarized vehicles, used in civilian life, that make a show of their own impenetrability—one captured, for example, by 12-year-old Irvin in apartheid South Africa. More broadly, these historical linkages force us to rethink and seriously question the militarization of our public spaces and culture and the attempts to normalize and monetize them. Whether through Casspirs or the Cybertruck, apartheid's militarized, cultural, and psychological legacy roams our streets.
