On Elon Musk, DOGE, memes and extreme-right clown politics

On 29th November last year Florian Cramer was interviewed on the podcast “Corso – Kunst & Pop” by Deutschlandradio. Here’s a translation in English. For a Dutch version see here.

Bernd Lechler: Donald Trump has announced the creation of an agency to reduce bureaucracy during his upcoming term in office and has also filled the top positions. Megabillionaire Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who failed as a presidential candidate, are to head the agency. The Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE for short. That’s exactly what a crazy popular ten-year-old meme is called, in which photos of a Japanese dog are captioned with snappy phrases, and from which even a cryptocurrency has emerged, which in turn Elon Musk has pushed many times. Mr. Cramer, let us briefly explain to all of us who are not so internet savvy where this meme comes from. A Japanese kindergarten teacher simply posted photos of her Shiba Inu dog named Kabosu, and in 2013 it went viral. What was the joke?

Florian Cramer: “Yes, the joke was perhaps the appearance of this dog. It’s actually always hard to explain why something goes viral in memes. This dog, it almost looks like a toy dog and then has a cuteness factor, and was then varied in all sorts of ways, as is common in meme culture.”

Did it have any political connotations? Well, a meme that is initially just amusing is often used to comment on all sorts of things. You could say it’s almost like a language.

“Yes, actually it is always the case with these memes that they are apolitical at the beginning and then at some point they take on a life of their own and a political meaning. A very good example would be another meme, namely Pepe the Frog, originally a cartoon character, which then suddenly became the emblem of the American right-wing extremists during the first Trump election in 2016.”

And Doge?

“Doge then ended up in the cryptocurrency scene and as you said, the cryptocurrency Dogecoin was actually created as a joke. So the person who created this cryptocurrency didn’t take the currency itself seriously, but then had no control over the fact that it actually became an object of speculation and an actual cryptocurrency.”

Why do you think Elon Musk promoted this currency? He has caused price increases with various postings and has also said, for example, that you will soon be able to pay for Teslas with Dogecoins, but that never became a reality. What are his interests?

“Yes, that’s hard to say. Of course it’s business interests. So in this whole area of cryptocurrencies and memes, nothing is regulated. So if he did the same thing with Tesla stocks, for example, he would be engaging in market manipulation and would end up in court immediately. But because this area of cryptocurrencies is unregulated, he can push a cryptocurrency like this on Twitter, which he now owns under the name ‘X’, and rake in the profits, and nothing will happen.”

Then let’s get back to the DOGE department in the future US government. So if an agency that is supposed to slash the state under the leadership of Elon Musk is given a name that results in the abbreviation “DOGE,” as this meme is called. What does that mean?

“Well, on the one hand, it means that meme culture has become politics. The joke is no longer a joke, but we actually have exactly what media theorists have already stated in the eighties, but at that time in relation to television culture, with Ronald Reagan actually as the first example, namely that the simulation – I mainly quote the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard – becomes hyperreality, so that suddenly the game and the media simulation replace reality. And that’s exactly what has happened here. So what starts as a joke and a simulation in the media suddenly becomes a ministry. However, it must also be said that nothing is older than an old meme. You said in the introduction that “Doge” is now ten years old. So it’s a boomer meme. I can’t imagine younger people still appreciating the joke.”

In principle, however, we seem to be experiencing a meme-ization of politics, which is coming about after personalization. So does that mean that, say, the German Green Party politician Robert Habeck quoting Taylor Swift and the German pop singer Herbert Grönemeyer in a video instead of focusing on content is also part of it?

“Yes, but you could say that Grönemeyer is perhaps a bit old. Elon Musk may have a slightly more up-to-date operating system running on his meme machine than Robert Habeck. Germany is always a bit behind in that respect. And in Germany, of course, there is an even greater separation between popular and institutional culture. Grönemeyer is already more in the higher echelons and Doge is still almost underground culture. That’s also what’s special about American culture, that such subcultural trends suddenly become mainstream very quickly, are adopted, become political, etc., etc.”

What does it mean for this free space that a meme culture is, when it is instrumentalized by a US agency?

“Well, I think it depends entirely on the political stance of the respective meme actors. I think there are a lot of people in meme culture who come from the right-wing libertarian camp and are now cracking open the champagne bottles, like, ‘We’ve finally gotten where we always wanted to get.’”

Why the champagne bottles? So what does that mean in practice?

“In meme culture, there have always been half-serious, mystical or even occult tendencies. We might also have to explain where this term, ‘meme’, comes from. It originally comes from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. He introduced the term as a new word in a theory of genetics in the late seventies. According to him, what we observe in genetics, namely that certain genes prevail over other genes in Darwinian evolution, also happens in the information sphere. In other words, certain information prevails over other information and, as we would say today, goes viral. And that’s what he called ‘memes’. And when internet culture emerged in the nineties, these memes actually became a concrete visual-cultural phenomenon, namely these well-known internet joke images. But memes are actually much more than that; for example, they can also be words. Any form of information can go viral and thus become a meme. And what has always been an idea in meme culture is that memes actually have something like magical power. So that they spread like spells, so to speak, and then create their own reality. And that’s exactly what’s happened now.

The Doge meme has now proven its power, asserted itself in this darwinian evolutionary process, and become a ministry. This is actually water on the mill of all meme theorists and practitioners. Perhaps we should talk a bit more about the darwinism of Elon Musk. He really does practice it, and not only on the information level, but it is also known that he is an almost manic sperm donor. He is of the opinion that he belongs to an alpha class that therefore has to reproduce more than other classes. That is also one of the ideas he is propagating at this point in time, that the elite must reproduce more. These are almost fascist ideas that are being put into practice.”

But regarding the meme again, one could of course also say that a meme does not mean the world. Will we eventually say, “Well, that’s what Musk’s agency is called. What it does is much more important.” Or does a name like that create omens or mechanisms of action?

“I would say that such a name is first of all a wink or a nod to the trolls who are part of this meme culture. For the average citizen, it is simply the Department of Government Efficiency, and that person does not know that this joke is part of it. But the people who come from the meme culture, from troll culture, are taken along for the ride, so to speak. That’s what’s called a dog whistle in American. It’s an old rhetorical strategy, especially of extreme right-wing politicians, to say certain things that sound completely harmless and normal to the general public in mainstream discourse, but which, at a higher frequency, an ultrasonic frequency that only dogs can hear, are understood as a code by insiders or people who are part of that subculture. And the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, is a perfect example of this.”

In other words, Elon Musk is also saying or telling the people who understand his language that for him, all this is just great fun, a game?

“Yes, that is perhaps also the interesting thing about today’s debates, which are currently being discussed in all the media, whether Trump and his administration are fascist or not. And I think that these debates are perhaps not really productive or helpful, because fascism, also through the media image, through films et cetera, that has been shaped about it, is always understood in the sense of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, as this militaristic authoritarian, right-wing extremist form of government with screaming leaders in uniforms. What today’s extreme right does, however, is actually use exactly the opposite image. Not some screaming man in uniform, but clowns. That could be Trump, that could be Boris Johnson, that could be Geert Wilders here in the Netherlands, where I live, or it could be Milei in Argentina. That is really a recurring theme. Interestingly, by the way, not in Germany – that in Germany this new type of extreme right-wing clown politician has not yet emerged. But in the US, it has worked fantastically. In 2016, for the first time with Trump’s first election and now for the second time. And Elon Musk has adopted the rhetorical mode of the extreme right-wing clown and plays the full spectrum of this extreme right-wing troll clown discourse.”