One of the most unnerving aspects of billionaire Elon Musk’s illegal rampage through the federal government is how stupid it is. To be sure, the more important issue is that it’s reckless and evil. Under the false auspices of “efficiency,” he’s slashing workers at random and targeting entire departments that happen to have the power to hold his businesses accountable for law-breaking. But the sadism is accompanied by a trollish glee that reads far more like a 13-year-old boy’s failed attempts at humor than what one would expect from a 53-year-old businessman and father of 12. The name of the initiative is Department of Government Efficiency, mostly so it can be abbreviated to “DOGE,” a silly meme from 12 years ago turned into Musk’s favorite cryptocurrency. He tweets about DOGE non-stop, grasping onto self-serving lies and conspiracy theories with a credulity so all-encompassing it cannot help but be willful. He does this under profile names like “Harry Bōlz” — and we’re all a little dumber for reading that.
DOGE owes everything to Gamergate, from its aesthetics to its tactics to its manpower, which largely draws on the same young men — now 10 years older — who were radicalized to the far-right via social media.
Fascists have always been clowns, but it’s a 21st-century innovation that they’re so proud of their juvenile behavior. Unfortunately, many in online journalism saw this coming a decade ago, with the emergence of the dumbest social movement in American, and probably world, history: Gamergate. For those blissfully aware of this history, Gamergate was the first major crowd-sourced harassment campaign of the social media era. On its surface, it was mostly a bunch of young gamers having a year-long tantrum because they didn’t want women getting girl cooties on their video games. But for those of us who watched it closely at the time, it was a troubling portend of what turned out to be a full-blown fascist movement.
DOGE owes everything to Gamergate, from its aesthetics to its tactics to its manpower, which largely draws on the same young men — now 10 years older — who were radicalized to the far-right via social media. As journalist Max Read pointed out recently, Musk’s project isn’t “like” Gamergate, but “straightforwardly is Gamergate, composed of many of the exact same people” rehashing the same unjustified grievances. Literally, in between bouts of attacking federal workers as “parasites,” Musk and his fanboys also whine that video games are too “woke” and this justifies fascism.
Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.
But what DOGE owes to Gamergate goes much deeper than the gripes of those suffering arrested development. The propaganda tactics and strategic incoherence of DOGE come straight out of that year of Gamergaters sharpening their techniques through a sustained — and still painfully stupid — harassment campaign against feminists online.
The first lesson of Gamergate was the propaganda value of bad faith,