What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government
Elon Musk’s office featured a gaming rig complete with an oversized curved screen, and the Doge website had a leaderboard for tallying cuts in real time. But beneath the jokes and cosplay lay a serious conviction. If the state was just a database, then inefficiency came from bad data: undocumented foreigners, ghost employees, even “vampires” collecting social security. These were bugs in the codebase, irregularities to be traced, quarantined and purged. Musk had revamped and retrained Twitter into X. To him, the US state was just another system – a glitchy dataset to be scrubbed and optimised.
