The Wizards of "Good"
A few years ago I sat with a group of young “executives” at MTV, seeking MTV’s support for an anti-racist initiative being developed at the Calhoun School. They were managing charitable giving and were quite breezily confident. To my amusement and dismay, they referred to themselves as “Wizards of Good” and quickly turned the conversation toward what might be good for MTV.
This was the opening paragraph in a blog post I wrote in 2021. The post went on to critique the educational policies of the Biden administration and the cocksure people he appointed to key roles. They, like an entire generation of educational wizards, were enthralled with their own data analyses and the data-driven practices that were certain to improve education as measured by the mountains of data they would collect. Then, as now, there was very little interest shown in actual human children, how they learn, and how their data-driven drivel would affect those actual children.
Suffice it to say that nothing has changed since then, at least not for the better.
(It seems rather quaint to recall “an anti-racist initiative.” In the current environment I could lose my job for typing such a phrase. Fortunately, I don’t have one to lose.)
The Wizards of Good were Millennials, the first generation to be saturated in technology and social media.
What brought this to mind are the illegitimate antics of Elon and the Muskateers. Elon is supremely overconfident, as is his immediate subordinate, Donald. They are both spoiled rich kids who, like so many spoiled rich kids, underestimate their immense good fortune and wildly overestimate their own abilities. In Musk’s case, there may have been a smidgeon of spectrum-y cleverness contributing to his success. In Trump’s case, privilege created a bully and there is scant evidence of any redeeming cognitive abilities.
The Musketeers remind me of my MTV Millennial Wizards. They are young, arrogant, and dangerous. They are overconfident in the power of technology and believe, with absolutely no evidence, that a good algorithm can fix anything. In their enthusiastic embrace of a mission to root out - something or another - they will code, decode, slice, dice, downsize, rightsize and deploy algorithms without the slightest ethical or human qualm.
My guess is that they are not as intentionally sociopathic as their political overlords, but their disinterest in the downstream effects of their work is an equally pernicious brand of sociopathy. The tens of thousands of unemployed and their families, the starving children abandoned by USAID, and the future victims of a shattered public health system, don’t really know or care if the perpetration was viciously intentional or blithely incidental.
Of course the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is neither a department nor efficient. Its illegitimate mission is promoted as a means to identify waste, fraud and abuse, thereby trimming trillions from the federal budget. If you believe that, I’ve got a $400,000,000 Cybertruck contract to sell you.
The actual mission of DOGE is to isolate the government expenses that support the poorest and most vulnerable, so that those expenses can be labeled “fraudulent” and then drastically cut. This is just the latest in a never-ending parade of conservative campaigns to lie about social welfare programs so that they can shrink them and drown them in a bathtub of malice.
The other DOGE accomplishment has been to “find” and “delete” every instance of “DEI,” “CRT,” “racism,” or “privilege,” they find in any database or document. This is not exactly “wizardry,” as even a boomer like me can manage that modest technological challenge.
The comical element of this tragicomedy is the buffoonish inefficiency of the efficiency department. Elon seems to be constantly talking about breaking a few things and making mistakes. Many, many wizard-directed cuts, to people and programs, have been announced with great fanfare and then withdrawn with a whisper. “Breaking a few eggs to make an omelet” is a tired proverb, but the “eggs” in this case are people’s lives and livelihoods.
Whether Millennials in 2015 or Musketeers in 2025, the self-satisfaction of young technocrats is offensive. I credit - discredit - much of it to the capitulation of education to the alleged glories and opportunities of technology. STEM, aka science, technology, engineering and mathematics, has been a sham from the start. It has been mostly about teaching kids to code and selling technology to schools.
All of the things that develop compassion, empathy, creativity and imagination have been diminished or surrendered entirely. Even adding “A” for arts to create STEAM was a useless contrivance to mute critics.
So now we have the inevitable result. A generation of technocrats serving the ambitions of a generation of autocrats. Amazon, Google, Tesla, SpaceX, Facebook/Meta and others are amassing wealth at an unprecedented level for their anti-democratic owners.
The Wizards of Good are anything but.