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.
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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, reinforced by endless repetition. Gamergaters were motivated primarily by two grievances: that feminists were criticizing sexism in video games and, crucially, that these same feminists seemed to have more sex than the Gamergaters. This is no exaggeration. The whole campaign first started as targeted harassment of a female (now non-binary) video game developer whose bitter ex-boyfriend riled up a mob against her by telling them she had sex with lots of men. It soon spread to target other outspoken feminists, especially those who criticized video games, but the underpinning of sexual jealousy was always present.
Gamergaters realized quickly that outsiders would not be sympathetic to their real complaint, which was, “How dare women who have sex more than me make me feel bad about my sexist video games?” Instead, they invented a claim that female game developers were exchanging sex with male journalists for good reviews. It wasn’t true, but “ethics in journalism” was credible-sounding enough to trick gullible journalists into writing stories that cast Gamergate in a more sympathetic light than the misogynist witch hunt deserved.
Musk and his DOGE-bros are using the same tactic now with false claims that their goal is “saving money.” This is absurd to anyone who looks even a millimeter below the surface, and not just because the touted “savings” are lies. Musk’s decisions aren’t informed by research and analysis. They’re vindictive, erratic, and fueled by outright lies and racist grievances. Whatever “targeting” is going on is guided by Musk’s desire to kneecap agencies that threaten to expose his corruption. But the parrot-like repetition about “saving money” is causing the press to amplify the lie with headlines that falsely describe DOGE as a “cost-cutting” effort. The text of these articles often debunks the talking point by pointing out that Musk’s numbers are made up, but most people don’t read articles. All they get is a vague sense this is a “cost-cutting” effort and don’t realize that actually, it’s a fascist culture war dressed up in “efficiency” costumes.
DOGE needs to be understood not just as the small group of people trying to destroy the federal government from the inside, but as a larger social movement that lives primarily on X (formerly Twitter) and is driven by Musk’s cult of personality. The sea of braying donkeys screaming for the heads of federal workers on X is gross, but it does generate the energy and sense of momentum necessary for Musk’s activities. The clamor is especially helpful in silencing Republicans in Congress who might otherwise object to the economic threat from mass firings and defundings in their communities.
The recruitment strategy to build this crowd of haters comes straight from Gamergate: Appeal to people by enticing them to take their insecurities out on your chosen scapegoat. With Gamergate, young men were encouraged to redirect their sexual frustrations and social anxieties away from useful projects like self-improvement and toward bellowing hate non-stop at a group of women who were turned into symbols of everything the Gamergaters feared they would never have: fulfilling jobs, active sex lives and cool haircuts.
It’s important to understand that Gamergate failed.
The same thing is happening with DOGE, except the scapegoat is no longer “hip young feminists” (though the DOGE-bros hate them, too), but federal workers. The psychological projection of their own flaws and insecurities on these anonymous workers isn’t subtle. The accusations that middle-class federal workers are “parasites,” “frauds” and “thieves” sound quite rich coming from people who seem to have nothing to do all day but scream invective online and who often are knee-deep in cryptocurrency, a market that appears only to exist for crime and degenerate gambling. As Read said, many people involved in DOGE were recruited to the far-right during Gamergate. It makes sense that the psychodrama of losers in their 20s that was aimed at cute girls has now, as these men age, shifted its target. Now they hate people who represent a successful middle age of having a stable job that means something to the world.
Witch hunts are nothing new, but one way Gamergate innovated is by gamifying abuse and harassment. Gamergaters acted like they were all playing a big video game, but instead of killing zombies or goblins, the targets were real people. The rhetoric and logic of video games were all over Gamergate, except instead of the big boss being a monster in a castle, it was a woman in the world they hoped to break mentally through sustained harassment. This attitude allowed the Gamergaters to create moral distance from their actions. By pretending it was all just a game, they could avoid dealing with the fact that they were doing real harm to real people.
Because of Gamergate, the online right refers to anyone who opposes Donald Trump’s agenda as an “NPC,” which is a gaming term for “non-player character,” such as the zombies or goblins you fight, or, if you’re playing a Mario game, mushrooms you squish. As right-wingers on forums have explained, they believe opposition to Trump inherently means a person “can’t do or think on their own,” and that they only hate Trump because that’s what they’re told to think. Needless to say, dehumanizing people like this is a standard tactic for justifying abuse, harassment, and even violence. Musk is a big fan of calling anyone he disagrees with an “NPC,” such as in 2022, when he mocked opponents of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with the insult.
As Paul Waldman wrote in his newsletter last week, this logic allows Musk to tell himself and his followers that the “suffering he brings down on NPCs is meaningless, because to him our lives are without real meaning. Fire thousands of federal workers, cut off vital services — who cares? Those people don’t matter.”
Musk’s attitude was on full display Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He whipped out a chainsaw, the kind of goofy weapon you might see in a video game, except that it’s real people whose lives he’s ruining while he grins at the cameras. During his talk, he said, weirdly, “I’m not sure how much of the left is even real,” as if half the country were nothing but, well, NPCs. He also insisted repeatedly that the important thing is “having fun” while he fires people at random, takes away food and health care, and threatens the economic stability of the country and the world. But hey, it’s all just a fun video game, right? If you screw it up, just hit “restart,” right?
This is all depressing, but there is some hope to hang onto. It’s important to understand that Gamergate failed. Thousands of people, mostly men, spent inordinate amounts of time screaming invective online at feminists, but ultimately, they accomplished nothing. They didn’t make feminism go away, that’s for sure. They didn’t even make video games less “woke,” which is why they’re still whining about it now. All they did was turn themselves into worse people. Telling yourself that other people are “NPCs” is a self-soothing lie, but it doesn’t make it so. Other people have brains and can see this vile behavior for what it is. Polls show that Trump’s approval ratings are starting to fall — and quickly. The more people see Musk’s illegal assault on the federal government, the more worried they get. And unlike a video game, he can’t turn it off and make the mess he’s created just go away.
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