Make Way for Corporations

DOGE is replacing nation with corporation. And, oh yeah, it needs us to die. Soon.

A few weeks ago, as Americans expatriating from TikTok were getting acquainted with their Chinese counterparts on RedNote, also known as Xiaohongshu, one of the Chinese users observed (as roughly translated here), “Looking at America, we don’t think of you living in a different country because, to us, you look like you’re living in a corporation.”

What does that even mean? To live in a corporation?

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is trying to answer that question. If they continue to get their way we’ll soon know…if we live long enough to hear the story.

A Washington Post story that came out this yesterday explains what Musk is trying to do - yet, as dire as it all sounds, they’re sugar-coating it for the readers.

The subhead says DOGE is trying to “shrink government, control data…and ‘replace the workforce with machines.’” Of course that’s not his ultimate plan - or final solution, if I may - as all of that says this: humans are expendable.

Taken on Easter Sunday 2013 in the martyred city of Oradour-sur-Glane, which was burnt to the ground as its citizens were locked in workshops, garages and the church, shot and left to be incinerated, by German Panzer divisions which stopped there en route from Bordeaux to Normandy, for no apparent reason other than to erase the city and all of its people. The city was left exactly as the Germans left it, rather than be rebuilt to flower over the destruction and carnage. Vehicles were left to rust in situ. Only human remains were removed. Apart from the wear-and-tear of weather, this is as the Germans left the city when they returned to their race to join their comrades facing the Allied invasion which had just begun. The powerful don’t care about us.

If you’re a billionaire tech bro, most humans are harshing your mellow. They’re polluting the planet and accelerating its descent into a place of human inhabitability faster than you can build the off-planet safe space you’ve been building space ships to take you to. In a world with AI and automation they are running, barely any of us are essential workers - certainly not those of us who are disabled or retired - and it’s their immediate goal to reduce that to zero of us.

Even if you’re in the workforce and an obedient consumer of goods, your value as a productivity engine is rapidly becoming superfluous in an age of automation and machine learning.

The tech bros don’t actually need you. They have all they need many times over. They’re at the point where humans who don’t directly service their whims and desires are interfering with their ability to enjoy their wealth.

They want…no, they need most of us to be dead. As soon as possible. They don’t care what you look like, or where you went to school, or who you know, or how much you earn, or who you voted for, or which god you worship, or how eagerly you have licked the boot…

…because all of us are breathing and polluting the dying planet they now own - and we don’t.

That’s why U.S.A.I.D. had to go. Sure, the agency efficiently projects American “soft power” across the globe better than the military, but DOGE isn’t trying to make America stronger. It’s trying to make America a shell corporation for billionaire tech bros to live the happy lives they’ve “earned” without people from “shithole countries” dragging down the system and changing the climate.

If you think there’s an appeal to be made by talking of children who are starving while food from American farmers spoils and rots in containers stranded at remote quaysides, consider that such a vignette depicts optimal DOGE.

DOGE isn’t concerned so much with shrinking government, or controlling data, or “replacing the human workforce with machines” (as a friend of Musk told the Washington Post) except to the extent all of that serves the broader - can it be more obvious now? - goal of decimating Earth’s human population.

Will Social Security checks go out on time next month? If you’re a tech bro, why would you want that to happen, apart from perhaps buying a few months’ more time to avoid backlash.

Do people seriously believe Washington politicians who say that the intent of any number of Trump Executive Orders was never to eliminate this aid package, or to impact these programs, or to suffocate these farmers, and so on and so on?

They were not taken by surprise that Trump was inaugurated. They had those Executive Orders teed up and drafted to commit sweeping assaults on people, regardless of their nationality, political party, skin color, and - for the most part - economic status.

The DOGE team seems to have correctly calculated that as long as the Administration is actively going after trans folx and immigrants and all the least powerful people, then those of us who still have some small measure of power and influence will selfishly decide that we can mark ourselves safe from DOGE and Trump, buying them all the time they need to come after us, too.

That’s the same wager that’s been made from people of power, great and small, all throughout history that has led to so much needless, man-made misery. We fell - or are falling - for it, as scripted.

I took this photo in 2009 at Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, Piazza Navona, Roma, Italia. The fountain, which features an obelisk of Roman conquest, was sculpted and designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini for Pope Innocent X. It was built at great public expense during a great famine and in disregard for the common folk who sold goods and wares in the plaza. Protesters chanted "We do not want obelisks and fountains. We want Bread, Bread, Bread!" Pope Innocent circulated spies among the crowds to arrest all who were disloyal or took exception to the gawdy display of power and to his callous disregard for the citizens of Rome. The powerful don’t care about us.

There were a few days post-inauguration where I thought they were ironically going to prove how much Americans depend on a strong federal government - except that’s the problem isn’t it? That too many Americans - most of them without even realizing it - depend on a strong federal government? Those people are in the way. Most of us. They - no we - we’re the ones who need to be drained from the swamp. We’re the ones who DOGE must urgently needs to take off the books.

The pace they’re moving at is calculated to complete their work before enough people catch on to the fact that DOGE wants us dead.

DOGE is destroying whatever it touches - and do you still think there’s a plan to replace any of it with something “better?” Has anyone even floated out such plans with a trial balloon?

The idea isn’t to shrink government. It’s to replace government completely with corporation. It was always stupid for people to believe that shrinking government could happen in a vacuum, with life going on as usual except with less government. Nature abhors vacuums, and corporations exploit them.

The government, for all of its flaws, at least extends a Bill of Rights to the people. With corporations all you get are the terms of service with a mandatory arbitration clause, which they’d also happily deny us if the government would let them go that far.

If we aren’t quite ready to accept that Americans live in a corporation, DOGE has definitely put us on that fast track - or, better still for the tech bros, if DOGE performs more efficiently than the public presently expects, we’ll be taken off that fast track and shunted off on a rail car to a final destination where the trains go no further.

Forgive me for being a Debbie Downer. That’s not my point. My point here comes from a place of hope that, if people can see this DOGE death cult for what it is - and how all-consuming and unfiltered its ripping to shreds the lives of all Americans who aren’t billionaire tech bros, maybe we can stop it.

You will laugh at this, and I can’t blame you given the gravity of what I’m sharing here, but it’s actually because I’m an optimist that I am writing this, firmly believing that we are at a crossroads of history and that we - and others - can still make the right choices. All dystopian literature is, at its core, an expression of optimism, and this post is nothing but my song of hope for the People. (I took this photo along a canal in Toulouse, France. Now I know why.)

Maybe the courts will stop wrestling with ideas that are worthy of debate among honest thinkers and order relief because DOGE is engaging in practices that are beyond the hypotheticals contemplated within existing case law and constitutional jurisprudence.

Maybe Congress will step up, realizing that they, too, are dead weight in the world the tech bros are carving out for themselves as - for now - all Congress offers in this oligarchy is a temporary veneer of legitimacy, which is to say the Congress itself stands at the precipice of irrelevancy in the eyes of the tech bros.

Trump himself is golfing his way to the same irrelevancy once everything is downloaded and there’s nothing left to the branch of government he outsourced for demolition. Even if it’s unreasonable to think he cares, maybe we can still hope that Trump will take offense at some slight or misstep by Musk and unintentionally put an end to DOGE while he has the power to do so.

Anyway, it looks more and more like DOGE is doing nothing more than designing a new world order that’s safe for the tech bros.

If you think about it, in its most sustainable, fully-automated, unregulated state, the new world order DOGE will leave behind once it has plundered the government, can thrive only where most of us are dead and none of us, no matter who we voted for or which loyalty oath we’ve taken, are safe from that fate (or other outcomes where we might wish for the lethal alternative).

It’s too late to eat the rich - an expression that people thought was too rude, but is nowhere near as brutal as their actual plans for us. Still, it would be super cool if some handful of the people who - for now - have the capacity to do something to reverse that would get a clue and claim some agency for themselves, if not humanity. The problem for all of us is that - as the German general command demonstrated throughout the duration of the Third Reich - the people possessed of power to stop humanitarian catastrophes are always inclined to make the wager that the buzz saw of oppression won’t be thirsty for them before they will accept the risk of failing to complete the one job they were sworn to perform.

And, yes, I send my apologies and acknowledgments and h/t’s to all those brothers, sisters and other siblings, living and dead, across this big blue planet of ours who have been sounding the alarm long before DOGE - and long before America in many cases - that we’re all enduring an existential threat of oppression even though its crosshairs are not yet directly pointed at all of our foreheads.