What Elon Musk really wants
What kind of society is Trump’s favorite oligarch working toward? (Hint: There will be no jobs in it)
Today’s the deadline for federal employees to respond to Elon Musk’s “Fork in the Road” buyout offer.
Would you want to work for a boss who thought little enough of their employees to fire them all in a mass e-mail — especially one that frames severance pay as a special, don’t miss out, act now, limited-time offer?
A large-scale reduction, in response to the President’s workforce executive orders, is already happening,” a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management said in an email. “The government is restructuring, and unfortunately, many employees will later realize they missed a valuable, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the deferred resignation offer.”
Given Musk’s past, it’s unlikely he’ll deliver on the severance package, and, so far, there have been few takers. That says a lot about how committed government workers are to their jobs. The dismissive attitude towards that commitment expressed in the e-mail, on the other hand, reveals how Elon Musk’s coup is an attack on labor, not just on the federal workforce or organized labor or any of the traditional targets of supposed Republican reforms, but on the dignity of labor — and maybe even on the dignity of human beings in general.
In endorsing Musk, the party that used to attack every Democratic policy move as “job-killing” has embraced just that, on a massive scale, in the interest of making it easier for the already obscenely wealthy and powerful to aggregate even more wealth and power.
This week, even as Congressional Democrats started to find their voices and pushed back at Elon Musk’s illegal, unconstitutional agency dismantlings, and the courts put the brakes on Trump’s impoundment order that threatened to freeze all federal funding, new waves of mass firings by e-mail have gone out.
The White House is laying off (putting on administrative leave, technically, since the firings aren’t legal) nearly the entire staff of USAID — calling thousands of employees home from overseas on just a few days’ notice, upending countless lives. They’re even offering “buyouts” to the entire CIA, according to the Wall Street Journal’s Joel Schectman.
But what exactly does the White House gain by firing potentially every federal employee?
Mass firing isn’t uncommon in the tech industry, so it’s not really surprising that a tech oligarch like Musk would look to create “efficiency” this way. But it goes a lot further than just rightsizing a couple of offices by eliminating a few positions.
For a clue, it’s worth looking back at some of the darkest, most twisted fantasies of the tech industry. The other day Anand shared an inside view of the dystopian anti-labor notions at the heart of the A.I. industry’s vision of the future:
“If we get back to the context of these meetings,” Marty said, pleasantly but with great authority, “we’re trying to think of ways that you can create interesting new businesses.” He offered some kindling: “If Uber wants to replace all the drivers by robots, do we want to replace all the writers by A.I.? I’ll pause there. It strikes me that those are the kinds of things we should be talking about here.”
Now we were talking. This was some major disruption: a bunch of non-writers debating how to replace all the writers. I was taking careful notes, so that the replaced writers of the future would have some record of how the purge went down.
The future Musk and his fellow broligarchs seem to be wrecking their way towards is starting to look a whole lot like that vision. In fact, they seem to be putting it into practice right now. It’s how the teams Musk’s “department” is sending out to take over government IT systems describe their mission.
As 404 Media’s Jason Koebler reported, Former Tesla employee Thomas Shedd, in his new role leading the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS) sees his job as replacing the federal workforce with…chatbots.
“Because as we decrease the overall size of the federal government, as you all know, there's still a ton of programs that need to exist, which is this huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force, which is why you all are so key and critical to this next phase,” he said. “It is the time to build because, as I was saying, the demand for technical services is going to go through the roof.”
Musk and his fellow tech oligarchs are steeped in fantasies of a decentralized “network state,” where private corporations take care of the business of governing and a basic set of laws enforce themselves, through the blockchain. Nobody will need government services, so they won’t need to exists. As Gabriel Gatehouse wrote of the idea’s popularizer Balaji Srinivasan for the BBC:
“Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.”
If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “network state”: startup nations.
Getting back to that Stanford meeting that Anand wrote about, once you add A.I. to the mix, the idea is that ultimately everything will be done by robots, so nobody will need a job, either. And, sure, some benevolent hyperintelligence that can handle all of that might be invented someday down the line. But for now, Trump and Musk are moving fast and breaking things — and as they’re doing it within government institutions, they seem mostly to be breaking things, by putting lots of people out of work, scrubbing records, and sacrificing institutional knowledge.
As Daniel Drezner points out, this goes all the way back to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s fantasia of the uselessness of regular people, who collapse into barbarism once the rich folks opt out of society:
Intentionally or not, the second Trump administration is engaged is a grand reverse experiment: rather than creating Galt’s Gulch outside the reach of the state, Trump has handed over the keys of the government to Elon Musk and his business associates. The question is whether it will work as intended or lead to an even greater cataclysm.
Even Elon Musk’s own A.I. isn’t onboard with his plan. Maybe that’s because it doesn’t have much to do with the world we actually live in.
That world keeps on turning because of an economy that’s dependent on people having jobs, and while there are plenty of concepts of plans out there about universal basic income, suffice it to say none of them are happening in the near term, given that Trump administration planning doesn’t even seem to take into account essential programs like SNAP or Medicare. Congressional Republicans may figure that kids who go hungry at school and depend on threatened federal programs can just pick up another job to pay for lunch, as Lauren Irwin reported for The Hill.
Brown asked McCormick about the implications of the funding freeze, and how it would particularly impact school lunches and Head Start, which helps young children from low-income families prepare for school.
Before I was even 13 years old, I was picking berries in the field, before child labor laws that precluded that. I was a paperboy and when I was in high school; I worked my entire way through,” McCormick replied.
Unfortunately those kids may have a whole lot of competition given how many people Musk’s “department” dreams of firing (DOGE’s early goals suggested firing half the federal workforce, some 1.2 million people). Not to mention all of the people and families and communities downstream from them who depend on their support, their services, and their spending power.
Oligarchs with private alternatives for everything may not see that, or feel it affects them, but as Mark Sherman and Will Weissert write for the Associated Press, the rest of us sure will:
Even a fraction of the workforce accepting buyouts could send shockwaves through the economy and trigger widespread disruptions throughout society as a whole, triggering wide-ranging — and as yet unknowable — implications for the delivery, timeliness and effectiveness of federal services across the nation.
Even if chatbots can pick up some of the slack of delivering services to the sort of customer-citizens the tech oligarchs may have in mind, all of those customers who are getting fired are workers too.
A business can — assuming you’re a capitalist — reasonably expect that folks get other jobs. There’s a good enough argument that it’s not the (former) employer’s problem. But a government that decides to create mass unemployment can’t just put that problem aside. It has to keep worrying about its citizens. And the knock-on effects of mass firings — recession, depression — matter to everybody.
It’s not just the federal workforce the White House and its unelected private hatchetmen have in their crosshairs. There’s a concerted attack on the regulations and institutions that represent workers in general. Trump has already tried to hobble the National Labor Relations Board (a longtime goal of the tech oligarchs, well before their overt turn to Trump). And as journalist Kim Kelly posted this week, DOGE has its sights on the Department of Labor next:
The Democrats may be getting it together as an opposition party, however slowly. People are calling their elected representatives and getting organized. Civil society groups are mobilizing to protest. They’ll need to make clear that Republican claims to be the voice of the working class are just marketing.
The question before everybody, as Florence Reece asked back in 1931, is still “Which side are you on?”
I think it's an interesting 'wrinkle' that people like Mr. Musk (on the autism spectrum and overrepresented within the tech industry), who lack both empathy and the ability to understand many if not most human emotions, are now in charge of 'reforming' the governmental institutions created to serve us messy/emotional humans. It explains much about his autocratic way of approaching his task: forget about selling his ideas and building consensus for them--to Musk, we aren't real, or even necessary. And btw, this may change, but has anyone else who's interacted with a chatbot or read an article generated by AI noticed a hard-to-describe absence of something I have to call (for lack of a better word) 'soul'--or call it sensitivity or nuance, if you will? Brrrr.
Musk is also on vengeance tour … USAID , while no doubt a ‘demonstration project’ for trump in killing an agency it also fought musk’s beloved apartheid and was one on many agency investigating a musk business. Now Rubio (I thought he was mediocre, but harmless ah well) is not going to G20 in South Africa and aid is being cut there.
A return to apartheid there
A return to Jim Crow or worse here.
Yes AI take over, a network stats; but only for white christian cis gendered men — for the rest of us die or serve those overlords.