{"id":22351,"date":"2026-03-17T06:37:27","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T05:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/what-was-doge-how-elon-musk-tried-to-gamify-government\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T06:37:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T05:37:27","slug":"what-was-doge-how-elon-musk-tried-to-gamify-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/17\/what-was-doge-how-elon-musk-tried-to-gamify-government\/","title":{"rendered":"What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n

In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d, he declared that governments were poorly configured \u201cbig dumb machines\u201d. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that \u201cthe only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers\u201d.<\/p>\n

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. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need \u201cGod mode\u201d, an overview of the whole.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nSteeped 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
\nIn 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d, he declared that governments were poorly configured \u201cbig dumb machines\u201d. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that \u201cthe only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers\u201d.
\nMuskism 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. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need \u201cGod mode\u201d, an overview of the whole. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the \u201cdepartment of government efficiency\u201d, he declared that governments were poorly configured \u201cbig …<\/p>\n

What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":22352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22351"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}