Why Elon Musk wants to enshittify Social Security
WHAT MATTERS: Elon Musk's attack on Social Security aims to weaponize the program's data and enshittify the service, hoping to kill its popularity. Why? In hopes of privatizing the massive program.
Every few weeks, another study confirms that a basic monthly income "works." Writing people checks improves people's lives and does it without sapping motivation—every time. The only question that seems to remain is: Why is anyone bothering to study this as if it's a controversy, considering that America's grand experiment in a basic monthly income proves the same every month?
Our Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI), AKA Social Security, lifts 16.5 million older adults out of poverty and provides most retirees with most of their income. To call Social Security "beloved" is too coy. 79% of Americans view it favorably, nearly double Donald Trump's approval in a recent Quinnipiac poll and more than double Elon Musk's approval in just about every poll.
If "Social Security" were on a ballot, it would beat every person or thing except for maybe "Medicare" or "Spontaneous orgasm while eating pizza." However, Social Security is not on the ballot. The party that cannot wait to kill Social Security, on the other hand, is. And that party thinks they've discovered the secret sauce to achieving the destruction of Social Security they have envisioned since its founding in 1935.
The two times this century that a Republican candidate for president won the popular vote, he immediately tried to gut Social Security.
George W. Bush did it by rolling out a privatization plan that never came up in the campaign. He failed when Democrats decided their negotiating stance was "Nope."
Trump's gambit is to put a tweaked billionaire who declared Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" in charge of the program, unleashing him to slash personnel, offices, and the entire infrastructure that has kept America's promise to our people for 90 years. As Trump has asked for $45,000,000,000,000 to build what can only be called a network of concentration camps to hound out immigrants who are dying to pay taxes and help keep Social Security solvent longer, 7,000 employees are being eliminated from the Social Security administration. As Elon Musk's hackers have pilloried the data collected on every American's payroll to build what's looking like a panopticon to target immigrants, Musk's team is threatening the integrity of the program with a rush rebuild of the system that has been built to provide continuous payments since the 1950s.
“If you weren't worried about a whole bunch of people not getting benefits or getting the wrong benefits, or getting the wrong entitlements, or having to wait ages, then sure go ahead,” says Dan Hon, a consultant who has advised government IT programs, told WIRED.
Still, Social Security is so popular that it forced one of the few retreats Musk's JV hacking team has made since they started the intrusion into our government. Phone service for Social Security was slated to be cut, which would have forced immobile beneficiaries to seek out Social Security offices, which are also being cut. That phone service is now back but will now include some experimental antifraud technology, which wastes time, money, and energy considering the program's microscopic—0.00625 percent—fraud rate.
Oh, yeah, and now, apparently, if you want to get information directly from the Social Security Administration, you have to use the infested app Elon bought to try to elect fascists everywhere.
What is the goal here besides giving older Americans heart attacks?
Is Musk really aiming to break the brightest light in the tunnel of existence for most Americans before the next election? Maybe? Maybe they imagine they will defang democracy so thoroughly by then that they can get away with everything.
Or, more likely, they just want to leave Social Security mostly functioning as is but far shittier with the goal of making it a little shittier every day. Think of Twitter but with the lifeblood of America's elders and disabled neighbors. This process of enshittification was first defined by the great Cory Doctorow:
HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Cory Doctorow
Private sector enshittification monetizes every possible click your fingers make. Elon's enshittification aims to make people hate the government as much as Elon Musk hates the government.
Musk, like Trump, is a born reactionary, tuned innately into the "Strict Father" worldview of hierarchy and dominance defined by Dr. George Lakoff. His views on particular policies are based entirely on his view of whom it helps. If it helps him—like the $35 billion in subsidies taxpayers have fronted him—it's a good policy. If it helps people who aren't straight white cis and compliant to his perverse view of how gender should function, he probably thinks it threatens humanity.
Social Security creates a pillow for Americans to dream of resting their head upon. It's one of the few institutions that separates us from the barbarism of a company store existence.
Thus, Trump and Musk's team want to destroy what makes Social Security such a lifesaver: reliability.
On the All-In podcast, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that if his 94-year-old mother-in-law didn't get her Social Security check, she "wouldn't call and complain." Who would? He said, "A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining."
You could say they want older Americans to starve to death and be investigated if their stomachs growl too loud because that's what they're saying. They're trying to get people used to the idea that they cannot trust Social Security that they agonize over the thought of Social Security so that they eventually hate Social Security SO MUCH that they're willing to trade it for some privatized cryptocurrency scam retirement account that will only be there for maybe one out of thirteen Americans like Elon Musk is for his kids.
Musk did not invent this strategy of enshittifying our safety net. It's a big part of how conservatives have come this close to defeating the advances of the New Deal and the Great Society.
Jessica Calarco—author of Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net—explains how entwined concepts of a "DIY model" and "meritocracy" have helped Republicans thoroughly gut our social safety net. While propagandizing the myth that you must get by without government help, Republicans have hollowed out the little government available to make it so meager, burdensome, and difficult to sustain that we're fooled into thinking a fulsome set of social guarantees that exist in every other rich country are just not possible here.
They want to take your Social Security. There's no doubt about that. But Elon Musk plans to make it so awful that you will thank him for transferring your Social Security to your X account. It's sick, clunky sci-fi, and almost impossible to imagine coming into reality. Who would even want that? But that's what they said about the Cybertruck.
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