What was Doge? Just how Elon Musk tried to gamify federal government

Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teen coders set out to beat the enemy of the United States: its individuals

In 2025, when Elon Musk signed up with the government as the de facto head of something called the “division of federal government effectiveness”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “large stupid devices”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he clarified that “the only method to reconcile the databases and remove waste and fraud is to actually take a look at the computer systems”.

Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, teenage flaunts and vicious triumph dancings over mass firings. Leading a team of adolescent coders and mid-level managers drawn from his collection of business, Musk intended to enter the codebase and rewrite policies and budget plan lines from within. He would certainly drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy shouting and kicking right into the electronic 21st century, scanning the components of cavernous areas of declaring cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The endeavor combined features of personal equity-led restructuring with start-up monitoring, fired through with the sensibility of video gaming and rightwing culture battle. To do well, he would need “God setting”, an overview of the whole.

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Source: The Guardian

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