Personally I am surprised and unhappy that there is not a better understanding of the recent events around Trump since the election and what’s happening here. Lets simplify and talk about the underpinnings of events overall, to interpret what’s going on. I’m offering my experience to try to show what’s “behind the curtain”.
First of all Musk was hired because he promised Trump to elect him if he would agree to help Musk with his businesses. How obvious does it have to be? Musk then is able to use his experience at Twitter to redesign the federal government. That’s the story in a nutshell. It is simple and clear, easy to understand and verify with our understanding, logic, events and facts. No conjecture needed.
Secondly, Musk brought a team of his best programmers. These people as we can easily assume were involved in other Musk businesses like SpaceX and Twitter. They are highly skilled and motivated elite hotshot wizard programmers. (The types Musk wants to procreate). Our society has had a tradition for 40 years or more, and they’re the latest representatives of that. This work force starts with early computer companies, the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve been doing it myself, it’s an established practice, an occupational work force that has evolved through the 80’s, 90’s, etc. from times before Windows, the ‘Dec’ PDP computers, OS/2 and IBM, it ushered and was consumed by networking and was biased to Unix, which Steven Jobs adapted for Apple. It includes Apple, Microsoft’s WIndows, Linux, embedded, robotics and drone technology, medical technology and all of entertainment’s digitization, and warfare. There are different beliefs and sects in the field, beyond the original divisions of electrical engineering, hardware expertise vs. software ‘programmers’. We get started with Cobol vs. Fortran in the 60’s, assembly languages and lots of theoretical work with languages, grammars, databases and graphics software. Business vs. techie, science, and hardware people.
Musk’s guys are hopefully a healthy mix of this, but they’re obviously the more aggressive of them, the type that is attracted by working with drones, robotics, A-I floating point, not to mention cryptography and forms of math that influence society. But there are also softer more humane types of programmers that work more in the internet. These are live (“full-stack”, back and front end), web site programming, user interfaces, and database programs that fuel the apps, smart phones, notifications and API based work that integrates computing in our daily lives. The Musk guys are likely more the scientific types. They are revolutionizing chemistry and other scientific and math oriented analysis like flight. Things like inventions that can bring us new deadly poisons or drone strikes. Manipulation of populations with A-I. The targeting of elections with psychological scientific techniques to suppress certain sectors of the population and tilt the vote.
These are all obvious conclusions that can be drawn from recent history using the knowledge of how the tech industry has infiltrated our daily lives and now it targets the government itself, with this tech ‘coup’. I’m just reviewing recent history of the past half century leading up to now. So the goal of these tech bros, their milestones and hopes, consists of redesigning the practices of government algorithmically, with the hope of streamlining and increasing ‘efficiency’. These are their goals, obviously, and their methods are seemingly more opaque to people who are not experienced in modern engineering practices. Since I have worked intimately as an engineer and software director since I started with a computer science degree in 1978, I hope to convince you that it’s kind of obvious to me.
My point is that it’s not ‘rocket science’ to describe what’s going on because we have a long history of software development and engineering teams, at least 4 decades long, so let’s just talk about it, deal with it, follow the trail.
These 23 year old kids running things are boisterously following regular, academic and commonly studied and taught, well known tech team dynamics. What hard evidence is there? Well, we have seen the release of the surveys and questionnaires. Selections and required responses that ask: “What did you do last week? Describe your job and how you do it. What do you do?”. These are things every employee of any remotely tech oriented company is familiar with. Even school teachers are asked to fill out surveys and forms. It’s often cloaked in ‘Quality’ speak, terminology, and oversight. But these guys are figuring out, diagramming, designing software to take over and streamline who does what. Flow chart, cut things out, and see what happens when ‘leaf nodes’ are trimmed in the tree of the executive branch of the government.
The Tech Smokescreen
Saying that the work of the ‘Doge’ team is opaque, is going along with what they want, but they take advantage of what exists already; it’s not really opaque but it seems that way to us. It seems that way because most people don’t have tech, or engineering, work experience and so can’t follow it’s progress, procedures, mile-stones, all of that. So the opacity is inherent in the work. They just stay focused on what they’re doing. It’s been done already, in case you forgot, on a large company called Twitter. They fired or let go over half of the work force and turned it into a ‘lean’, or ‘agile’ company that just follows along and follows orders, but it is not creative research or work on the human side, it is optimization work. It’s impressive and theatrical.
Where Are We Going?
We can extrapolate the likely evolution of the organization. What overall changes will occur over time. These things happened at Twitter, and are part of the other organizational changes being mandated by good engineering practices and patterns. You can see that in the use of surveys and in the propensity to remove functionality to see and analyze the results of changes, including losing people, departments, and initiatives that they cannot easily assess and evaluate as being ‘core functionality’. We have to calmly study and keep abreast of anything we learn. Listen to what fired, severed, cut, people and contractors have to say about what’s happening. What written documents like the notorious surveys say, about their motivation and methods. Lets assume the obvious: categorization, processing, analysis is happening. What are the areas to address? What do people do? You can think of it being like the old “data entry” process. Type in the data, grind out computations on it, and get output. Test the output, make changes, and see what happens. Rinse and repeat, ‘Iterate’.
This is what Musk does to build his rockets, he iterates, analyzes, tries things, and most importantly, learns from mistakes. Tech people have the luxury of being able to perform trial and error and use the resulting knowledge to get what they want. Whatever the techies desire.
Back to Trump, what did he get from his bargain, his ‘great deal’ with Musk? He got what he wanted. Another chance to bolster his businesses and family, provide for his grandchildren, and very importantly to not lose his status as the great businessman and politician he wants to be known as. He is reborn like a Phoenix. To him, it’s working out just great! But if the ship starts to sink, he does not want to be in it. He might need some kind of life-boat. That’s what Musk does, build ships so that we can migrate, to space colonies and ultimately to Mars. That’s what Musk gets from the deal. They don’t like migrants coming to our land, but us migrating to another place like space is okay with them, just in case Earth is poisoned too far to survive a growing population of techies and their followers.
This is the story I’d like to lay out, but I’d also like to comment on Dr. Richardson’s comments equating the motivations of, and comparing Peter Thiel and Henry David Thoreau. That stung me, but this is enough for now!
Todd Marshall.
My experience in over 45 years in the tech industry.
BSCS Degree Rutgers, 1978. Worked in software as full time or contractor at: Vydec/Exxon information systems, Atari and Colecovision games, Doswell and Carabiner in the early multimedia era of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s(the OS/2 era), Pedagogue/Saba learning and assessment, Sesame Street CDROM games, the FAA (airspace communications), Imacor Inc. (medical ultrasound devices), Horiba Scientific(Spectroscopy), Tek-Instruments(airplane transponders), RDRTec(defense radar), AstroNova, ScottCare Holter ecg monitors.
