Tressie McMillan Cottom, Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work. NYTimes, Feb. 12, 2025.
Musk’s escapades are political posturing staged like a video game side quest. The DOGE playbook is to target an office of which most Americans have only a vague notion. Then Musk’s operatives label the office a villain in overblown comic terms — “a criminal organization” as Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development. Then, the executive branch uses DOGE to pick a fight it knows it can win.
Musk’s fans love his narration of power as a vicarious gamelike experience of dominance. These fans don’t find the DOGE escapades chaotic or confusing. If anything, the bombastic flouting of norms and laws makes the world more sensible to them. It is government and civic life they don’t understand. Musk clarifies a scary world for them, putting it in terms they understand. Bad guy. Good guy. Evil. Villain. Kill. Win.
This is propaganda, but it is also a skilled manipulation of content in a content-saturated culture. Increasingly we cannot escape the closed world of bite-size performativity that feels like the real world. All of our emotions are fuel for the content machines that don’t care what we feel, only that we do.
Welcome to the metaverse. We foot the bill and the game-masters reap the profits:
It is fast becoming clear that this content-driven chaos is going to be the M.O. of Trump 2.0. Trump may have learned in his first term that there is a political price for not feeding your loyalists enough content. Governance got in the way of the content machine he built on the campaign trail. Since then, he has had four years to refine his strategy. Chaos is central to his deployment of unchecked executive power. But chaos has to be tended like a fire. It needs the right amount of constant oxygen to keep it going.
That is Musk’s utility to Trump. He is willing to fill in for Trump by consistently producing DOGE’s bureaucratic takeovers as content. [...]
What we have is a president who made his career as a real estate developer and an empowered minion leading the federal government to move fast and break things. It is a politic of socialism-for-me and scarcity-for-thee: chasing government contracts while simultaneously compromising the government’s ability to pay its bills.
There's more at the link.
I recommend you haul yourself over to scaredketchup's YouTube channel for some alternative programming. I stuck two of scaredketchup's apocalyptic post-nuclear satyrathons here: THIS Revolution's NOT gonna' be televised. It's on YouTube, baby, and it's coming in hot. Hot! Hot! Hot!
Ugh . . . (From your sister): Every now and then I watch Gad Saad to keep apprised of his self-proclaimed only-virtue-possible viewpoints. When asked if Musk's over all effect would be positive or negative, he said "Positive". With not a single mention of the illegalities at work. The end justifies the means?
ReplyDeleteGad Saad is a trip. Rather a bit self-satisfied, no?
DeleteAlso, Musk taking his 4-year old child to the press conference with Trump because "I thought he would like it" is clearly also some part of the game scenario. An attempt to turn down the volume on his overblown terms? his lying? What parent in their right mind thinks this is conference a child would like? Though I have to say, the child, sitting on his father's shoulder, stuck his fingers in Musk's ears. Demonstrating he knows how his father moves in the world? (He actually mimicked him quite a bit, within seconds of gestures even without seeing him.)
ReplyDelete