What was DOGE? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government - Lemmy.World

Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people 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.