"Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system."
"If the mandate of Doge was to [modernise] federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity, in the words of the executive order that launched the initiative on 20 January 2025, the reality was a strengthening of the state's surveillance capacities."
"Over time, Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants whom he saw as pawns in a liberal scheme to corrupt democracy and beneficiaries of what he called suicidal empathy. He understood empathy itself in coding terms. It was an exploit or a software vulnerability against which the system architecture needed to be hardened."
In 2025, Elon Musk joined the government as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), characterizing government as poorly configured and inefficient. Leading a team of coders and managers from his companies, he sought to digitize federal systems by consolidating fragmented databases and eliminating waste. His approach combined private equity restructuring with startup management and gaming culture aesthetics. However, beneath the memes and performance of mass firings lay a deeper agenda: Musk viewed the state as fundamentally a database system and increasingly saw certain populations, particularly undocumented immigrants, as exploits or vulnerabilities requiring system hardening. His initiative, while framed as modernization, functioned to expand governmental surveillance and control while redefining empathy as a security flaw rather than a human value.
#government-efficiency #surveillance-state #digital-modernization #political-ideology #system-architecture
Read at www.theguardian.com
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