You were never really here

I went out and protested my former employer.

It was an unseasonably cold, wet day. A couple dozen of us stood in front of the grand steps that I had scaled, with a hint of entitlement, so many times over almost 15 years. Now the same security personnel with whom I exchanged a few pleasant words every morning were posted above us at the top of those steps, not menacingly, but their positions a declarative fact: you don’t belong here anymore.

Just behind them and to their left are large windows in a row: my friend’s office, my friend’s office, my empty office, my boss’s office. I have no warrant to approach them now. I’ll be stopped if I do.

I admire the organizers of these small rallies for believing that they make a difference, that staring down the monolithic facade of this government building can disrupt the vandalism going on inside. Demonstrating conviction of any kind is a direct challenge to the cynicism of the people who’ve taken over in there, and I think a lot of these MAGA sellouts understand this. There’s a difference fairly universally understood between honestly opposing something like a government program and attiring yourself in its robes to desecrate it. No matter how strongly one opposes the administrative state, the recognizably duplicitous extra step one must then take to join it must reverberate loudly in one’s ears.

There were five speakers, and they all delivered reasoned, uplifting defenses of the department’s work and the people who do it (and did it). Some were former civil servants and some were allies. Others stood next to them to hold umbrellas over the paper on which their remarks were typed. One rally-goer held an umbrella over the amplifier. A small choir sang “Solidarity Forever.”

Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made.

I saw friends. There were some who had chosen to stay in their jobs, and they snuck away from their deathly quiet offices for a few minutes, eyeing the photographers and lowering their umbrellas over their faces when the phones and cameras pointed their way. There were some appointees who had left as required in the transition. People who I had looked up to almost like celebrities, now milling around in their sneakers. I met a couple of people for the first time whom I had passed who knows how often in the hallways without ever becoming acquainted. I’m learning from smart people that the joy of togetherness is a powerful antidote to authoritarianism, and I’m grateful at least for a few moments of shared defiance.

Maybe it’s the weather (or something like that), but I also felt a pounding sadness. I hadn’t been back in this last month. I hadn’t felt physically that reversal of the locations of safety and danger, occupied that photonegative space where the signals were all wrong. Even when the marauders arrived, and my body went on high alert for the poison darts that might come out of nowhere, it still felt like the space was mine; they were intruding on my turf. That’s gone. What’s left in the vicinity of that Brutalist headquarters is uncanny and alienating, a haunted de Chirico piazza where bad dreams breed.

Still, I don’t think it matters much how big and busy the scenes of our resistance are, especially now in this bated atmosphere of fear and impotence. Crowd size is a metric of tyrants and TV executives. The number of comrades who spark in us a sense of togetherness is the right number. Go to the streets with anyone you can find and declare you are a free people, and that will be enough. We all hunger for a hit of exhilaration as the reward for the risks of protest. Others in that slanting rain might have been energized in that way. I was with them, even if I was too addled with the perplexity of the newly adrift to feel what they felt. Sorrow can also tell us we’re not alone.

But the union makes us strong.

We should, I guess, sort of, mark what might or might not be an occasion: Elon Musk has departed the government. He bullied himself into, among other places, this diary — really its primary antagonist over these past seven months, in a way that still feels violative and obscene — and exits now in a manner that’s just as disorienting for its unobtrusiveness. I almost didn’t register it. It feels so anticlimactic and inconsequential. But if his exit isn’t important, then neither was his presence. Yes, he wrecked things. He wrecked my life and most of my friends’ lives. He inarguably made the world a worse place.

Couldn’t anybody have done that?

Marco Rubio, given the full authority of the Department of State, possesses every lever he needs to starve and deny medicine to millions of the world’s poor and destabilize their governments. Linda McMahon, spaced out as she is, could’ve closed the Department of Education all by herself. The tick-tock for the destruction of my career and the functioning of the federal government was laid out in Project 2025 long before Musk tumbled into the back of the jocks’ convertible on its way to terrorize the nerds. I still remember the conversation with my dad when it dawned on me — at a time when Donald Trump’s political career was over because he sent a raiding party to murder the vice president and anyone else they could find — that President DeSantis was absolutely going to have us all fired.

All Elon Musk really created was the genre for a preordained narrative. The nihilistic YA gamer Catcher in the Rye flavor of it all. The drugs and weak gags and bug-eyed all-night Twitter logorrhea. He gave us the sophomoric wordplay of DOGE, without which I might never have started writing here, but I still would’ve been forced into the office five days a weeks by an entity with a less frivolous name. Of course the particular pawns who enlisted in DOGE and harried our agencies like a flock of demented sparrows reflected the juvenile tenor of their leader. Without Elon, a different breed of Lost Boys would have wielded the hammers. The way his off-putting personality and desperate mediocrity served to intensify the mental anguish of bureaucrats like me definitely gratified the Voughts and Alitos whose aims he served. That was all just icing, though.

Subservience to the larger techno-industrialist syndicate of which Musk is a prominent part is certainly a major reason the Republican Party shattered the Constitution and foreclosed prospects for peace and stability on earth — but even Musk is only a part of that. They are still coming for us. For generations, we’ve relied on the assumption that the purpose of technology is to liberate us from drudgery to pursue recreation, self-expression and companionship. Like good MBA students, they shifted the paradigm, and now offer technology that liberates us from recreation, self-expression and companionship so we can return to drudgery.

The AI founders and investors who’ll profit from that drudgery saw the way Donald Trump, driven purely by narcissism and vainglory, manipulated a nation’s terrified bigotry to turn it against its own well-being, and thought surely a tech company can do that, too. They will remake the world with their toys, and Trump showed them how to be unstoppable. The free market — like a free election — might not guarantee an outcome that ensures the unfettered expansion of their artificial future, so they seized the state to compel that expansion, with Musk as their man inside. I don’t mean to minimize the gleeful depravity of this abhorrent person, but Elon Musk also served somebody, and he did not come with any special talent or credentials for what he did, with the possible exception of being a child of apartheid.

What did he get out of it, in the end? (Other than Stephen Miller’s wife.)

It’s true that it’s unlikely Musk is really gone. He was a special government employee whose statutory deadline to leave is nigh. Given their indifference to most laws, that deadline is only operative because they want it to be. The president put Musk in charge of DOGE. The Solicitor General represented to the Supreme Court that Musk is “not part of” DOGE. There’s no reason to trust a shred of this leave-taking story. But let’s not turn him into a boogeyman, either. Here and not here. A disembodied Keyser Söze forever haunting all subsequent disasters.

“The world is what it is,” goes the opening sentence of V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” I know it’s hard to argue that Elon Musk is a nobody, but as he slinks off with a sad “did my best”, he does so with the bearing of a man who has become nothing, after all his damage.

I’m going to let him go. I’m going to let him be gone, at least until the trial. There is no doge.

As a related digression, I also want to share that I’ve finally been convinced by the argument that Substack is bad news. Having already deleted X (and Facebook many moons ago), I’d become too weary of the futile effort to purify all of my communal spaces of creeps and racists to really give due consideration to Substack’s harmfulness. It’s not really just about the creeps and racists, though. Marc Andreessen as a leading investor is using Substack the same way Musk is using X, as a propaganda organ that operates at an insurmountable loss — and I think we are past the point of trusting the eventual good intentions of companies that lose money by now — to abet a larger dehumanizing project. It’s a poisoned reservoir.

Now, I’m almost certainly never going to turn on paid subscriptions here. So for the time being I’m a drag on Substack’s books, generating no revenue for them. I still don’t really know what kind of activity will continue here now that I’m not a pinging signal from inside the citadel, so I’m not going to make any huge changes right now. There might, however, come a time when this whole operation switches to another platform, so I wanted to give fair warning.