Wow! Yesterday’s mega trolling began with media waking up (late) to the subversive meaning of the acronym D.O.G.E. Corporate media attacked in unison like a flock of robot vultures. Proving (once again) that libs lack any sense of humor, Rolling Stone played the annoyed straight man in a surly article headlined, “Elon Musk's Dumb History With the 'Doge' Meme His Govt. Office Is Named After.”
Back in Bitcoin’s meteoric heydey, you’ll recall all the chronic video game addicts who were becoming superyacht-wealthy while the rest of us were still trying to decide whether the chance to get rich was worth having to figure out what “digital currency” was, since it all sounded just like schemes proposed in several very interesting get-rich-quick emails we received from Nigerian princes, which turned out to be disappointing duds.
Anyway, around that time, some snarky 4CHAN memers got together and created a parody of bitcoin, their own based-on-thin-air digital coin. It was a “real” digital coin, in that you could buy it and sell it, but it was always intended to mock the whole bitcoin phenomenon. The name, DogeCoin, is what gave the joke away.
The true origin of the name “DOGE” is lost in the wilds of the prehistoric internet, like around 2010. Nobody knows for sure. But the most popular explanation is related to a 26-year old Japanese kindergarten teacher and pet-blogger who posted cute photos of Kabosu, her Shiba Inu, on her popular stream. She decorated the little guy with rainbows and smileys and happy things appealing to the kind of hardcore Japanese pet fanatics who wheel their canines around in baby strollers.
In one now fateful image, the joyful Japanese blogger worked super hard on the cuteness and tried a little too hard trying to new a new demographic. Atop the other decorations, she attempted an English caption, but sadly misspelled “dog” as “doge,” and the rest, as they say, was history. Kabosu the Shiba Inu became a meme, but —as so often happens in these unfortunate cases— not the good kind.
There are other explanations. It might not be Kobasu’s fault. However it happened, “doge” became generic internet shorthand about hapless mistakes, kind of like what happened after Trump mistyped “covid” as “covfefe,” but nerdier. ‘Doge’ suggests someone who shouldn’t be allowed to use the Internet. Since Elon was always a tech guy (his empire began with PayPal), he knows the dialect, and found it funny when the 4CHAN nerds actually created a real but parodic digital coin named DogeCoin. Doge the coin started trading at $0.01, and has at times reached as high as $0.74, all on a joke. Elon has long been a DOGE fan, and it’s rumored he’s bought lots of the invisible, quixotically named non-asset. Elon was once even sued for hundreds of millions by “investors” (ahem) for allegedly manipulating the stock by constantly joking about it on Twitter. (The case was dismissed.)
So in a terrific, sweeping Cecil B. DeMille-style comedic journey, the original DOGE meme —itself about hapless, unthinking error— is poised to become the acronym for President Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.G.E. (Some might say most of the federal government is a hapless mistake, which probably gives bureacrats too much credit.)
In other words, D.O.G.E. evokes a layered lasagna of themes: cute Shibu Inus, parodies of digital currencies, small rebels fighting against a complex and non-transparent giant using humor, and a subversive, even slightly mean, but intensely funny concept of mocking people for doing things they are badly underqualified to do. Like running a government.
To be clear, despite Rolling Stone’s accusatory headline, Elon had nothing to do with minting the concept of “doge,” or even the mocking digital coin. Like most tech-savvy folks, he just knew what it meant. The fact ‘doge’ will now be attached to an ambiguous, ill-defined, conceptual-only “department of efficiency” that has yet to be formally created offers wonderful double and triple comedy layers dripping with sweet irony. The whole thing is delightful and profoundly hilarious.
Which is exactly why liberals like the joyless Rolling Stone editors cannot stand it. It’s no laughing matter! Corporate media is trying to push a narrative metaphor, that the Trump Administration is a joke, but the joke is really on them.
