In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.

Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.

If the mandate of Doge was to “[modernise] federal technology and software to maximise governmental efficiency and productivity”, in the words of the executive order that launched the initiative on 20 January 2025, the reality was a strengthening of the state’s surveillance capacities. Over time, Musk had become convinced that the real bugs in the code were people, especially the non-white illegal immigrants whom he saw as pawns in a liberal scheme to corrupt democracy and beneficiaries of what he called “suicidal empathy”. He understood empathy itself in coding terms. It was an “exploit” or a software vulnerability against which the system architecture needed to be hardened.

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.

Call it StateX.