Weaponizing government isn't what the Musk faction says

The value of bridging metaphors.

This will be a shorter piece than most - I’m writing a lot for other places right now, because of the times that we are in. I’m hoping to return to longer pieces (and considerably weirder ones too - I do not intend for this to become another Crisis Commentary of the Week Substack, since I don’t think I am particularly good at standard punditizing).

One of the pieces that I and Abe Newman have written is out at Lawfare. It argues as follows:

It’s hard for politicians and journalists to grasp what Musk and his team are doing, still less to explain it to the public. These efforts involve technical systems that are incomprehensible and boring to outsiders, few of whom even know that the Office of Personnel Management exists, let alone what it does. But even if no one pays much attention to these systems, they are the sinews of government—key parts of the infrastructure that hold the federal state together and manage its relationship to the outside world.

We are highly familiar with such systems and how they can be used. Our academic research, and our recent book, “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” explain how the U.S. quietly took control of similar technical systems that hold the world economy together and used them to exercise domination over allies and enemies alike. Now, Musk is seemingly doing to the U.S. government what the U.S. government once did to the rest of the world: refashioning the plumbing of the federal government into a political weapon against his adversaries.

and then goes on to describe in much greater detail what Musk’s operatives have been up to.

The comparisons in this piece are ours, but the factual research is not: we rely, as we explain on the great reporting that is being done by WIRED, Talking Points Memo, the Washington Post, Nathan Tankus and others. So what do people like Abe and I have to add?

Gideon Lichfield’s newsletter, Futurepolis, provides an indirect answer. As Gideon says (talking about ‘public AI’), it is really hard to write about intricate technical systems in ways that will excite the interest of policy makers, let alone the general public.

So you can’t just say this is “bridges, but for AI” or “power grids, but for AI.” However, there are a few different “X for AI” metaphors that can at least explain different facets of it. There are probably some other metaphors you could pick. … Again, though the point is that public AI is all these things. That’s what I think makes it hard to get a handle on, because there’s no one description that covers it.

To get people’s attention, you need to find bridging metaphors. None of these metaphors is going to be complete, but they can highlight particular aspects of the problem that you can then draw people’s attention to.

This too, is the problem with what Musk’s operatives are doing. They are targeting extremely dull seeming technical systems - financial payments infrastructure and so on. Their actions might add up to quite profound power shifts if they succeed. But it is really difficult to explain their importance to people who aren’t already paying attention to them.

Hence the article that Abe* and I wrote. What we do is to build a bridge between what is happening now and our own writing and research, which explains how the United States weaponized the boring financial infrastructure of the world economy, and turned it into an apparatus of surveillance and coercion.

The U.S. identified key choke points that allowed it to weaponize the world’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure to achieve its ends. Musk’s DOGE is weaponizing the U.S. government’s payment, information, and physical infrastructure in highly similar ways, carrying out an end run around the political structures that are supposed to restrain unilateral executive action. Just as when the U.S. weaponized the world economy over two decades ago, it is hard for those at the receiving end to understand exactly what is happening to them.

This comparison is intended to do two separate jobs simultaneously.

First - to provide a concrete and immediate example of how technical payment systems can be turned into tools of domination. A lot more people are familiar, at least in some loose sense, with how the US government has turned dollar clearing and the SWIFT financial exchange system - both of which were supposed to be neutral infrastructures - into sources of vast power. That helps them understand how Musk’s people can do quite similar things if they gain control of the previously neutral infrastructures that are supposed to allow the U.S. government to do its financial business.

Second, to turn a common argument made by the Muskfraktion against itself. The point of Abe’s and my broader research is that the U.S. has “weaponized” these infrastructures. Our book on the topic is titled Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. The people associated with Musk’s Twitter Files have claimed - on the basis of insinuations and bogus information - that the previous administration ‘weaponized’ federal government powers and social media platforms against conservatives. Our piece is quite deliberately crafted to turn that argument against itself; showing that it is actually they themselves who are doing the weaponizing.

So what Abe and I are trying to do is to figure out metaphors and comparisons that make a complex and highly technical problem legible to people who don’t understand the technicalities. This is not nearly as useful as doing the hard work of figuring out what the technical details of DOGE’s many-fronted attack are. Nor is it anywhere near as valuable as mobilizing people to push back against it. But Abe and I - like many other academics, experts and journalists - are trying our best to translate between the technical details and the public mobilization. Whether it turns out to actually be helpful or not, will depend on whether other people find that they can make use of it.

* I should be clear: Abe deserves sole credit for seeing that it was possible to do this.