My project is an automated email generator that sends emails to the “Department” of Government Efficiency. A few weeks ago, Elon Musk, the person appointed to lead DOGE, sent out an email to all federal employees asking them to respond with five things they did in the last week. Musk later tweeted that failure to respond would be taken as resignation. Every federal employee is supposed to respond to the email each week before Monday at 11:59 PM. Soon after someone posted a screenshot of the email, people (non-government workers) took to social media to share their outrageous and hilarious responses to it. They inspired me to be a menace and send a few of my own outlandish emails. I wondered if there was a better and more streamlined way to send the emails, and this hack provided the perfect opportunity to make that possible. After all, people use templates all the time to email their representatives. I began designing by exploring the iPhone Shortcuts app on my iPhone, but I realized the app didn’t have any of the programming logic I needed, so I switched to coding it on the Mac version of shortcuts. The shortcuts app also allows me to share the code with any Apple users who can then run it on their devices.
My design was guided by Dune and Raby’s principles of ‘B’ design. I wanted the work to be critical, problem finding, in the service of society, humorous, provocative, and most of all I wanted it to make people think. The humor component comes in with each of the possible list items the code picks from. Each list item falls under two general categories. The first is general time wasting actions anyone can do in the office setting. The second category is duplicitous or immoral things that DOGE and Donald Trump have done during the second administration, like cutting USAID contracts with private companies that manufacture food for starving children abroad. I will never forget when the owner of the company, Mana Nutrition, said that these were children at the “end of the rope.” Ending the contracts also meant none of the food with the USAID label could be distributed, meaning children would starve to death while the food goes to waste. A lot of things on the internet make me cry, but nothing has made me sob like this in a long time. Other items of the list are less heart-wrenching, but alarming nonetheless. For example, “helped move confiscated documents onto the plane back to Mar-A-Lago.” Even though these list items might get a chuckle and the idea of sending loads of emails to the DOGE inbox is hilarious, none of what is happening is funny. My goal is that the generated “5 things” lists make people stop and think about what is happening in the federal government, primarily the oligarchy unfolding before our eyes as the richest, unelected man in the world runs the government. I acknowledge that an assemblage of this project is that you have to be fine-tuned into current events, so it may not be as provocative or humorous to someone who is not.
Another framework that shaped the idea of this generator is Balsamo’s idea that “through the practices of designing, cultural beliefs are materially reproduced, identities are established, and social relations are codified” (3). I’d argue that the final iteration of my hack functions to ensure that oligarchy doesn’t become a regular part of our culture or something that we reproduce over and over again with different leaders. It also works to make sure we don’t codify a micro-managing social relationship between oligarchs and the federal employees who make the government run. This project also highlights the importance of ‘B’ design as material evidence of resistance to an executive branch that is inherently anti-American and unconstitutional.
Sources
Anne Balsamo, “Design” from International Journal of Learning and Media (2009), pages 1–10
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, “A/B” and “Design as Critique” from Speculative Everything: Design Fiction and Social Dreaming (2013), pages vii and 33-45
