The Italian poet who is DOGE's unlikely muse

Boston Globe

14-03-2025

Angel investor and Silicon Valley power player Marc Andreessen has listed Marinetti among the patron saints of a school of thought Andreessen has branded 'techno-optimism.'
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1876, Marinetti was known in literary circles of the time as the 'caffeine of Europe.' In 1909, he published the
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'Literature exalted to this day thoughtful stillness, ecstasy, and sleep. We want to exalt aggressive movement, feverish sleeplessness, the running step, the somersault, the slap, and the punch,' Marinetti declared.
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Written in prophetic and apocalyptic tones, the manifesto posited that a new generation of young men — exclusively men, of course — 'nourished by fire, hatred, and speed' would give birth to a post-human civilization, finally free of old dogmas and institutions. The manifesto's closing line reads like a blend of beat poetry and a SpaceX ad: 'Standing on the top of the world, we hurl once more our challenge to the stars!'
In his 2023 essay '
Elon Musk also shares some striking similarities with the late author of the Manifesto of Futurism. Both champion speed, disruption, and an almost messianic faith in technological progress. Marinetti glorified the roar of engines and the 'hygienic' power of war, while Musk dreams of Mars colonization and AI supremacy. Marinetti wrote experimental poetry that he called '
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Both figures blur the line between visionary and provocateur, and both saw strongman politics as the preferred way to bring about the change they envisioned. At one point, Marinetti even parted ways with Benito Mussolini because he thought the Fascist movement had lost its original revolutionary zeal.
In recent decades, Futurist ideas have circulated widely in Silicon Valley, helping shape the ideological backbone of contemporary tech circles. Transhumanism (the idea that humanity is in need of a technological upgrade), the AI singularity, effective accelerationism, extropianism (the belief that aging and sickness are problems to be engineered out of existence), and other techno-utopian beliefs share something, implicitly or overtly, with the artistic and intellectual movement that redefined discourse in the years leading up to the two world wars. In their own ways, they all reinforce a narrative in which disruption is not just inevitable but desirable.
Andreessen embodies this belief, along with figures like Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's original Trump prophet, and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks. Andreessen has been involved in major deals with Musk and helped him hire people for DOGE in the early stages of the presidential transition.
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'But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to AI that we realized we had to get involved in politics,' he said, arguing that government regulation is a force preventing the development of world-saving technologies. In contrast, Trump would allow the disruptive forces of technology to flow freely.
Which brings us to Marinetti as the unlikely muse of DOGE. The Futurist poet idolized technological development but despised the constraining forces of the past. To build a new world, the old one couldn't simply be reformed or improved — it had to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch according to new organizing principles. For Marinetti, the sanctuaries of the fossilized, backward-looking mainstream culture were museums and universities, institutions that safeguarded a decaying status quo. Futurism, instead, would impose its shocking message by dismantling traditions and ravaging the respectable manners of official culture.
Similarly, DOGE is gutting the federal bureaucracy with futuristic zeal. Catchphrases like 'shock and awe,' 'flooding the zone,' and 'warp speed' have been used to describe the disruptive process of cutting costs, chasing fraud and waste, freezing entire agencies, and threatening to fire millions of federal employees. In Musk's view, these aren't simply government entities in need of reform — they are institutional structures that upheld the old order and must be dismantled and radically reconfigured.
As economist Tyler Cowen has
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From this perspective, public administration is where woke thinking has crystallized into entrenched institutional forms that persist even as governments change. Dismantling these mechanisms, then, becomes akin to surgery to remove a malignancy weakening the institutional framework of the United States. Like the Futurist intellectuals more than a century ago, the officials of this administration believe that destroying the rotten norms of the past is the only way to unleash the untamable forces of the future — forces supposedly long held back by corrupt elites and weak leaders.
Marinetti wanted to tear down museums and libraries; Musk wants to reset the federal government. And with taxpayer-subsidized rockets, firing emails, and provocations on X, he hurls his own 'challenge to the stars.'