Musk's Government-By-Tech To Show The Limits Of Disruption
Date
11/20/2024 7:06:35 AM
(MENAFN- Asia Times)
On November 12, United States President-elect Donald trump announced he would appoint Elon Musk, the world's richest man, to lead a newly constituted Department of government Efficiency alongside fellow tech billionaire and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The new department will be tasked with reining in government bureaucracy, curbing government spending, and reducing regulation.
Musk has been outspoken in his support of Trump's campaign, which included potentially illegal financial“giveaways” to voters. Although Musk's direct involvement in electoral Politics is new, attempts by technology companies and their leaders to reshape public policy and governance have a long history, from transport and housing to town planning.
By looking more closely at some of these initiatives, we may be able to get a preview of what Musk's Department of Government Efficiency will attempt to do, what government-by-tech may look like, and what might go wrong.
Replacing public services
In 2013, Musk himself proposed a new form of public transport called the “hyperloop” to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco. And Musk's SpaceX is his attempt to out-compete the publicly funded NASA in building rockets.
But other tech companies have had similar ambitions.
Uber has made a series of attempts to replace public transportation . Companies such as Sidewalk Labs (a subsidiary of Google's parent company, Alphabet) have made efforts to substitute for urban infrastructure by building so-called“smart cities” that collect and analyse data about people's behaviour in order to make decisions about providing services.
An economist has even suggested that Amazon bookstores might replace public libraries. Tech companies have challenged public offerings in fields as diverse as education , identity verification and housing .
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