But efficiency, like intelligence, was only ever a cover. The decimation of 18F makes a lot more sense when you recognize the threat that 18F posed to the ideological efforts underpinning DOGE and the rest of the “AI-first” movement: here was a group of talented technology practitioners with deep expertise across both the government and corporate sectors, who dedicated their time and skill to making government services accessible to all, especially those most in need. That is, they enabled care and support for those the modern-day eugenicists deemed worthy only of control, denigration, and impoverishment. It’s no contradiction that the same DOGE minions tasked with increasing “efficiency” immediately set upon removing pronouns from email signatures and deleting websites that spoke to gender and racial equality. The threat that 18F posed wasn’t to efficiency, it was to inequality. And it’s inequality that AI propagates, just as it was inequality that the skull measurements and IQ tests perpetuated.

This radicalized population erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, leading to one of the largest mass movements we had seen in our lifetimes, too. The intertwined nature of racial capitalism was newly visible, as people stuck at home began connecting the dots between our insatiable economy and the death drive of whiteness itself. Our country was rotten to the core, and we finally went outside to join with others and do something about it.

What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

And because members of the educated class dominate media and culture, they possess the power of consecration, the power to determine what gets admired and what gets ignored or disdained. Goodhart notes further that over the past two decades, it’s been as though “an enormous social vacuum cleaner has sucked up status from manual occupations, even skilled ones,” and reallocated that status to white-collar jobs, even low-level ones, in “prosperous metropolitan centers and university towns.” This has had terrible social and political consequences. The meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. Its gatekeepers—educators, corporate recruiters, and workplace supervisors—impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle-clearers. We shower them with approval or disapproval depending on how they measure up on any given day. Childhood and adolescence are thus lived within an elaborate system of conditional love. Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster—congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. This leads to an existential fragility: If you don’t keep succeeding by somebody else’s metrics, your self-worth crumbles. Some young people get overwhelmed by the pressure and simply drop out. Others learn to become shrewd players of the game, interested only in doing what’s necessary to get good grades. People raised in this sorting system tend to become risk-averse, consumed by the fear that a single failure will send them tumbling out of the race. At the core of the game is the assumption that the essence of life fulfillment is career success. The system has become so instrumentalized—How can this help me succeed?—that deeper questions about meaning or purpose are off the table, questions like: How do I become a generous human being? How do I lead a life of meaning? How do I build good character?

Along with books like Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization, Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors we Live By, William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Keith Johnstone’s Impro, this book is one of the anchor texts for this blog. If I ever teach a course on ‘Ribbonfarmesque Thinking,’ all these books would be required reading.