Status Updates From Muskismus

"Individuals should always wonder who wrote the software running in their heads," Musk commented. "Most humans have very limited firewalls," he elaborated elsewhere, "so are easily reprogrammed".

Musk's approach assumed that all expenditures were waste, and that bad data - whether fraudulent contracts, useless staff, or illegitimate people - could simply be deleted. What DOGE sought to automate, media researcher Eryk Salvaggio noted, was "not paperwork but democratic decision-making". Efficiency became the alibi for centralisation.

Musk understood empathy itself in coding terms. It was an "exploit" or a software vulnerability against which the system architecture needed to be hardened.

After acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off nearly 80% of its staff and forced the remaining employees to work harder. Meanwhile, he pushed the platform's content to the right. If the social network was an "information weapon", why not wield it against his enemies? To fight wokeness, Musk would develop a new pathogen, propagated through a cascade of counter-memes: the anti-woke mind virus.

As Musk put it on Twitter in 2019, "I am become meme." It would be a running joke for Musk, riffing on J. Robert Oppenheimer's famous invocation of the Bhagavad Vita after witnessing the first detonation of a nuclear weapon in 1945: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

Musk first tweeted in 2010 but remained, at most, a casual Twitter user. Starting in 2015, this began to change. That year, he tweeted 617 times - an increase of 226% from the previous year. In 2017, he posted 1162 times, and average of three posts a day. By 2028, his annual tweet count had hit 2288. By 2024, he was posting an average of 60 times a day and sometimes 40 times an hour.

In the most extreme version of Muskism, the human is no longer the subject of history, but its discarded scaffolding. The product is not a car, or even a robot. The product is a self-regulating infrastructure in which the world - like the factory - runs on its own. No operators, no workers - just endless production, unfolding without interruption or intervention.