Quinn Slobodian in the NY Review of Books:
For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government. Young men with smirking profile photos and scandalously thin curriculum vitae have become the shock troops of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They are strolling through the halls of power, messaging federal staffers en masse to stay home and accessing internal intelligence reports. According to Wired’s reporting, one DOGE staffer who later resigned over his racist social media posts had both read and write access to the Treasury’s payment systems for at least a day. Three years ago, as a sixteen-year old intern, another had been fired by a data-security firm for allegedly leaking information to a competitor. Like the QAnon Shaman at the senate rostrum on January 6, this is Grand Guignol, a spectacle both serious and ridiculous. For the second time in five years, people are forced to ask: can you cosplay a coup?
Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent. The tech critic Cory Doctorow has described these men as “broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts,” fighting enemy institutions as a sort of Tesla Jugend. The sociologist Ho-Fung Hung suggested they were Red Guards of a Great Github Cultural Revolution, storming the headquarters and confronting the party in the name of a purer reading of the master’s texts. The economist J.W. Mason compared their actions to the dismemberment of the former Soviet state in the 1990s—private looting under foreign supervision. Musk himself referenced a beloved far-right meme when he posted that “not many Spartans are needed to win battles.”
None of the analogies are very persuasive.
More here.
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