AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is holding his first Cabinet meeting today. The White House has confirmed attendees will include Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who’s expected to talk about DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which is working to dismantle the entire U.S. government agencies and reduce government services.

Earlier this week, 21 staffers at DOGE resigned in protest over Musk’s actions. In a joint resignation letter, the engineers, data scientists, designers and product managers wrote, quote, “We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services. We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions,” they wrote.

The mass resignation comes amidst growing questions over the legality and effectiveness of DOGE’s actions. Last week, DOGE claimed it had saved taxpayers $8 billion by canceling a single immigration-related contract. In fact, it wasn’t $8 billion; the contract was $8 million. DOGE has since removed references to this and four other large contracts it had highlighted on its so-called wall of receipts, removing all top five.

While Musk is attending today’s Cabinet meeting, the White House claims — it’s claiming the actual head of DOGE is a little-known government employee named Amy Gleason, currently on vacation in Mexico. She reportedly was not aware the White House was planning to reveal her name.

Meanwhile, Musk has given a new ultimatum to federal workers to justify their jobs or risk being fired, this despite pushback from several agency heads.

As Elon Musk tries to reshape the federal government much like he did after taking over Twitter, we’re joined by a prominent critic of Big Tech, Cory Doctorow. He’s a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has a new book out. It’s called Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel.

Cory, it’s great to have you with us at the table here in New York. Why don’t you start off by responding to what Elon Musk is doing? He’ll be apparently at this Cabinet meeting — though he’s not a Cabinet member approved by the Senate — today with President Trump. When did you first come to know Elon Musk? And tell us his story.

CORY DOCTOROW: Oh, it’s a funny story. So, I’m a science fiction writer. I write, broadly speaking, cyberpunk novels. I’ve also been involved in digital rights for about 25 years. And one day, Elon Musk tweeted that he considered himself a utopian socialist in the model of Iain M. Banks. Now, I knew Banks a little. He was a friend and a friendly colleague of mine, a socialist science fiction writer from Scotland. And I said, “You know, I knew Iain. He was an ardent trade unionist. You’re under innumerable investigations by the NLRB. I don’t think you can call yourself a utopian socialist in his model, in his mode.” And Musk replied —

AMY GOODMAN: Remember, no curses.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, indeed. Musk replied, “Well, I’ve read his classic Culture novel series, and there are no trade unions there.” And I said, “Yes, but it takes place in a far future where you have giant spaceships with a trillion people on them traveling at a thousand times the speed of light, controlled by artificial intelligences with many millions of times the capacity of human beings.” And he said, “Well, I have very advanced factories to make my Teslas.” And I said, “There is an enormous difference between the world imagined by Iain Banks and the process of eking out very tiny gains in the efficiency of making electric vehicles.” And he called me an “enemy of humanity” and blocked me. So, that was my only experience with him.

But, you know, like innumerable tech bros, he has mistaken cyberpunk for a suggestion rather than a warning. As someone who is in the business of writing a lot of warnings, I find this baffling and, indeed, very demoralizing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Cory, you also work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tries to defend freedom in technology, law and policy. How do you respond to Musk’s claim that he believes in free speech absolutism?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, I’m very proud to have worked with EFF for 23 years. We are the first organization to have filed a lawsuit that names Musk and DOGE by name. We are suing over the Privacy Act for the privacy of Americans and federal workers.

You know, this idea that Musk is the apotheosis of a kind of tech ethic, it’s easy to fall into if all you pay attention to are tech bosses and the odd, you know, broccoli-haired brown shirt that they send into our federal agencies. But when you look at what tech workers have historically done, you find a cohort of people who, by and large, got interested in tech because they themselves experienced something profound and liberatory by connecting to networks that connected them to people all over the world and to, you know, disfavored political views, like the idea that Black lives matter or women shouldn’t be routinely sexually harassed by their bosses, all of these things that have come to the fore thanks to the ability of people to organize over tech. And they want to bring that liberatory power to other people.

And often they’ve been able to hold the line against their bosses, even as their bosses opted for this very callow, you know, rent-seeking approach to things, because tech workers were in such high demand. They weren’t unionized, but they had a lot of power that arose from their scarcity. The fact that you could walk across the street from any Big Tech shop and get another job the same day that paid just as well, if not better, as the job you were in meant that tech workers often told their bosses to go to hell, when their bosses told them to screw up the things that they had missed their mothers’ funerals to ship on time.

And so, even as we saw the dismantling of other forces that disciplined tech companies — the dismantling of antitrust law, that allowed these companies to buy all their competitors, merge to monopoly and reduce the internet to five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four; the regulatory capture that sees grotesqueries like Keir Starmer firing their top tech trust buster and replacing him last month with the former head of Amazon UK; as we saw the expansion of IP law that made it illegal to jailbreak devices and add ad blockers and privacy blockers and do other things that allow, say, gig workers to refuse to take jobs unless the wage rose to a threshold that all the gig workers in a region agreed was sufficient for a living wage — even as those forces melted away, you saw tech workers holding the line against their bosses.

And I think this is one of the reasons that tech bosses are so horny about AI. If you listen to the rhetoric carefully, you’ll hear that what they really are excited about is not just the idea of generically replacing labor with AI, but specifically replacing coders with AI. And if you talk to experienced coders about what it’s like to copilot your programming session with AI, very experienced coders say, “Oh, well, I can get a little bit of efficiency gains around the edges.” But the idea that you replace all those very experienced coders and replace them with low-level coders without much experience who just supervise the AI is a recipe for producing tech debt at scale, where you have lurking bugs that eventually come back to bite you in the butt. But for tech bosses, firing this uppity workforce, adding to the quarter-million that they fired in 2023, the 150,000 they fired in 2024, the tens of thousands they fired this year, the ones that Facebook has just announced they’re going to fire with a 5% across-the-board wage cut that’s coupled with double bonuses for their executives this year — you know, this is the thing that excites them, is the ability to get rid of the last group of people who, like these tech workers who just resigned from the U.S. government, have said, “I will not allow my boss to harm my users.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you — a speech you gave in Toronto on Monday evening, you talked about the Trump presidency as an existential crisis, but also one that presents opportunities. What kind of opportunities?

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, sure. You know, when life gives you SARS, you’ve got to make sarsaparilla. And if you look at the worst tech policies around the world, they came at the end of a coercive process delivered by the U.S. trade representative, who said that if you want free trade with the U.S., if you don’t want to have to pay tariffs when your goods are exported to the U.S., you are going to have to agree that it’s illegal to reverse engineer and modify U.S. tech products, which means that you can’t modify the digital diagnostic system in a car so that any mechanic can fix it without buying $10,000-per-vendor tools from the official vendors. It means that if you want to refill printer ink cartridges so that you can make your own generic ink in country rather than paying the American firms, like HP, the incredible premiums they charge on ink — I mean, I know ink is not our biggest issue here, but ink costs $10,000 a gallon. It’s the most expensive fluid you, as a civilian, can purchase without a permit. Ink is so expensive that now you print your grocery lists with colored water that costs more per milliliter than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion. And the only reason that Canada, Mexico, European countries, countries in the Global South can’t refill their ink cartridges is reverse engineering the lock on the ink cartridge is illegal.

Now, if the only reason we have these laws is because these countries have pursued a tariff-free relationship with the U.S., and if Trump is engaged in this, like, unscheduled midair disassembly of the global trade system, and now we have Canadians faced with 25% across-the-board tariffs to ship their goods to the U.S., why bother keeping these laws on the books? And if they do remove these laws, if we do allow domestic tech competitors all over the world to reverse engineer, modify and erode the high monopoly rents extracted by these American tech firms, we do something very effective in this trade war, because the only thing keeping the S&P 500 afloat are these tech monopolists. If you take the Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500, you’ve got a stock market that has been in decline for a decade. And when you decompose their balance sheets and you see where they get all their money, it’s from price gouging on repairs, service, parts, consumables, software.

You know, every time a Canadian software author writes an app and a Canadian customer buys that app, 30 cents of every dollar that Canadian customer spends makes a round trip through Cupertino, California, where Apple takes 30 cents out of it. We could just abolish that system and create a 30% premium for every newspaper that collects subscription dollars through an app, every software author, every musician, every book author, every music or games creator who runs through these big U.S. app stores. And if you did this, you would kick American big industry right in the dongle.

You know, if you’re angry at Elon Musk, don’t just get performatively offended about his Nazi salutes. Make it legal for mechanics all over the world to jailbreak Teslas, so that every subscription feature in that Tesla that generates the recurring revenue source that creates Tesla’s ridiculous earnings-to-valuation ratio — all of those car owners can just for one price get all that service unlocked. Elon Musk never gets another dime from them. That really hits him where it hurts. He loves the attention that he gets from the Nazi salute. He’s going to be a lot less happy if he can’t get, you know, a couple hundred bucks every month from every Tesla owner for access to the full battery or the acceleration curve or any of the other things that he sells as a subscription in his cars.

AMY GOODMAN: Elon Musk recently appeared on Fox News, as usual alongside President Trump, defending his actions at DOGE.

ELON MUSK: One of the biggest functions of the DOGE team is just making sure that the presidential executive orders are actually carried out. And this is — I just want to point out, this is a very important thing, because the president is the elected representative of the people, so he’s representing the will of the people. And if the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people and preventing the president from implementing what the people want, then what we live in is a bureaucracy and not a democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s what — some of what Elon Musk said. But I also want to follow up with what just happened at HUD, Housing and Urban Development, the agency. All the workers were ordered back. Washington Post reporting that the Trump administration plans to slash, what, half of the workforce of HUD. Current and former employees said the cuts are likely to upend housing markets, make homes less affordable, roil mortgage transactions. On Monday, when workers returned to work, the screens all over HUD on all the floors at HUD headquarters were apparently hacked to show a looped AI-generated video portraying — and we’re going to show this — President Trump kissing the feet of Elon Musk. The video was labeled, in big white letters, “long live the real king.” Even as a science fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, could you have imagined anything more strange than this reality we’re living in right now?

CORY DOCTOROW: Well, as a science fiction writer, I especially appreciate the fact that Elon Musk has two left feet in that AI-generated image. You could not ask for a stupider timeline than the one in which you get these AI gonks in your weird propaganda videos. Look, this is a funny spectacle. It’s very interesting to see, and I’m sure this gave heart to a lot of demoralized HUD workers. And the point of this chaotic blitz is to demoralize their opponents, right?

You know, in the reality-based world, even if you are worried about government waste, even if you want to make the government smaller, you have to acknowledge the empirical fact that payroll accounts for 4% of the federal budget. If Elon Musk manages to cut 50% of the federal workforce, a move that would leave us without functional roads or aviation or any of these other things that you kind of need if you’re going to make money out of the economy, he would cut 2% of the federal budget. You know, you can find a couple trillion dollars in government waste. All you have to do is look for Beltway bandits who are marking up their services to the U.S. government by triple-digit margins. Unfortunately, those aren’t the people that they’re pursuing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Cory, I wanted to ask you about Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old suspect, or charged with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This is eerily reminiscent of one of your novels, Radicalized, in 2018. Could you talk about that novel and also how this issue personally relates to your own life?

AMY GOODMAN: And, Juan, Cory is having a little trouble hearing you. But he’s asking about Luigi Mangione and if you can relate it to what happened there with also your own experience.

CORY DOCTOROW: Yeah, sure. So, I’m going to have to out myself here: I’m a Canadian. Like all the best Americans, we’re everywhere. We’re just like serial killers. We look just like everyone else.

And in 2019, I published this book called Radicalized, and there’s a novella in it, this title novella, Radicalized, which was a rumination on my experience as a Canadian moving to the United States and for the first time encountering this gun culture firsthand and being somewhat baffled, not just by the, you know, obvious problems of having guns everywhere, but by the very strange nature of gun violence, right? We have a country in which very heavily armed, very angry men shoot people for the most absurd reasons, right? In my local subreddit for the town I live in, in Burbank, you will see people saying, “Well, I hate the people who use their phones in the movie theater, but I wouldn’t dare say anything to them about it, because they might shoot me.” You know, I was only in country for a few days before someone told me, “You must never flip off someone in traffic. They’re going to kill you.”

And yet you have these guys — mostly guys — heavily armed, who have the people they love most in the world, their wives, their children, who are being condemned to die by insurance executives who’ve taken thousands of dollars out of their paycheck every month since they entered the workforce, and those people walk around seemingly without ever fearing anything. So I wrote this novella about a message board where these guys hang out, a message board for men whose wives and children are dying of cancer and who’ve been denied care through the insurance market, and who — just like a lot of other online communities full of very angry people, turns into a festering pit of violence — and who then embark on a campaign of suicide bombings and killings across the country, men who’ve lost everything, lost their families, and find themselves with nothing else to live for.

It was a thought experiment. It was a way of reflecting on something that I found odd here in America. And when Luigi Mangione allegedly shot that insurance executive, I certainly felt a bit of the cold grue. When they found his Goodreads, I was very hopeful and ultimately gratified to see that he hadn’t read my book and mistaken it for an instruction manual. But, really, I think the strangest question about this is: How did it take so long for this to happen? Right? How did it take so long for people who are so angry to target the people who hurt them the most, instead of their intimate partners or the guy who cut them off in traffic or the person using their phone in the movie theater?

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Cory Doctorow, we’re talking about the old book, Radicalized. You’ve got a new book. You’re traveling the country and the world promoting Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel, wearing your mask so you can be safe. Very quickly, summarize it for us and what it’s like to be going around this country at this moment.

CORY DOCTOROW: Sure. So, Martin Hench is this recurring forensic accountant character that I’ve written now in three different books. His story is that from the 1980s to the mid-2020s he has been in Silicon Valley unwinding every scam that every tech bro could cook up. And he’s kind of the Zelig of high-tech crime. So, wherever you have a scam, you’ve got Martin Hench.

In this novel, I go back to his origin story, the early 1980s, where as an MIT dropout who leaves the computer science program because he’s too busy programming computers to do his computer science homework, he ends up getting a CPA, following his genius programmer roommate to Silicon Valley and getting embroiled in one of the weird PC fights of the days, because the PCs were very weird when they first kicked off.

He ends up in a battle between two companies. One’s called Fidelity Computing. It’s a pyramid selling scheme that targets faith groups, run by a Mormon bishop, an Orthodox rabbi and a Catholic priest, who recruit parishioners to prey upon one another to sell each other crappy PCs that are locked into their ecosystem forever. They’re sort of a primitive pyramid scheme Apple, where you can only use their special fanfold paper with slightly wider sprockets on their printers, their special floppies in their floppy drives. Their software is incompatible with anything else. And there is a rival company, founded by three women who were his top sales reps, who have left this company to found a rival company to rescue these parishioners who have been trapped in this grift. One is an Orthodox woman who’s left the faith because she came out as a lesbian, and her family kicked her out. One is a Mormon woman who’s left the LDS over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. And one — your next guest will like this — is a nun who’s left her order because she’s gotten involved with liberation theology movements in Central America during the Dirty Wars. And they are kicking off what seems like a commercial battle, but which turns into a shooting war, because people who are willing to make millions of dollars stealing from their parishioners are not above spectacular acts of violence to maintain that grift.

What I think of this book as is a return to the first days of computing, when the seeds of a word I coined that I can’t say on the air, for reasons that anyone who’s watched a famous George Carlin sketch will know, a word we can euphemistically call “enpoopification.”

AMY GOODMAN: You’re famous for this word.

CORY DOCTOROW: This word that was the word of the year by the American Dialect Society, Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary, the British New Scientist magazine. Enpoopification, soon coming to a book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next October, is a theory that describes platform decay, how these platforms lock people in and then abuse them and become worse and worse, but we can’t seem to leave them, until they’re just a giant pile of crap. And we’ve all experienced this decay of platforms that we relied on in so many ways.

And, you know, the seeds of that were planted back in the 1980s. There were always people who looked at computers and thought about how they could use them to exploit, surveil and lock in the people around them. And then there were people who looked at them and saw in them the potential for a great liberatory project. And that fight between good and evil has been underway since the '80s. But in the ’80s, something remarkable happened. You had the ascent of neoliberalism and the dismantling of antitrust law. You know, we forget this, but the Apple II Plus went on sale the same year Ronald Reagan went on the campaign trail. And this was the moment in which we started to legalize predatory — new predatory forms of capitalism. It's the moment where pyramid schemes were legalized by Jerry Ford. And so, that’s why I find myself writing about this now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Cory Doctorow is who you’re listening to. He’s a science fiction author, activist, journalist. His new book, just out, is Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel. Cory Doctorow has been working at the Electronic Frontier Foundation for over 20 years.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at a rare victory for death row prisoner Richard Glossip before the U.S. Supreme Court. It threw out his conviction and called for a new trial. We’ll speak with his spiritual adviser, anti-death penalty crusader Sister Helen Prejean. Back in 20 seconds.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Mama’s Cryin” by Territorial, from the album Tlaxihuiqui, released by Die Jim Crow Records and recorded by incarcerated people at the Colorado prison, the Territorial Correctional Facility.