It's a DOGE Eat Dawg World
How the Cult of Efficiency Has Mutated into Soul-Crushing, Terrifying Self-Parody
I’m not sure why the Almighty Algorithm thought that it should serve me an ad for Dawg Food, the new “meal” kit made for people who “don’t care what they eat, and will happily eat the exact same thing every day.” My entire life, and most of my social media presence, is oriented around what I will be cooking or eating. I watched the ad in humor, then disbelief, then horror, waiting for a punchline that never came. I double-checked date of the post, assuming it had to be April 1st. Nope. Dawg Food is a real product, marketed to real people (let’s be honest— to men). The tagline even screams, in all caps, that it is “HUMAN FOOD MADE FOR THE DAWG IN YOU,” in case there was any confusion.
Still, I think I can be forgiven for my skepticism. How could this not be a joke? After all, the sci-fi sitcom Futurama mocked the idea over 25 years ago:
Matt Groening, creator of Futurama, has a history as an animated Nostradamus: an episode of The Simpsons (which he also created) “predicted” in 2000 that Donald Trump would one day be President. Groening and his co-writers, I imagine, wouldn’t cope to owning some sort of crystal ball. They simply wrote funny jokes that unfortunately became true. In the blessed vacuum of fiction, dog food for human bachelors and the star of The Apprentice becoming President are simply great punchlines. (Edit: I’ve just been made aware that Dawg Food is an actual SNL sketch from last year, too).
The problem is, they’re no longer punchlines. Serious, wealthy people— the people running our society at this very moment— think that there is nothing funny about these ideas at all. More than one person thought that Dawg Food was a good goddamn idea. At least one of those people had the money to make it a reality. If I really squint, and maybe slam back 2-3 Vodka Red Bulls, I can almost hear the boardroom arguments for designing and selling irony-free human kibble. Think of the time saved shopping and cooking, the lower grocery bills, the nutritious blend of protein and nutrients that just kidding WHAT THE FUCK, DAWG?!
The promise of Dawg Food, like so many new products and Instagram videos, is “efficiency.” Simplifying meal time with quick-cooking, unseasoned kibble lowers stress by offering men “one less decision” to make (kinda like the Dawg Founders made “one less decision” by having ChatGPT steal their colors, font, and brand identity from Liquid Death and Mug Root Beer). Products simplifying dinnertime have been around for decades, in various guises, from low-brow TV dinners and Lunchables to Netflix-but-food subscriptions services like Blue Apron and Factor. But Dawg Food, sold by the pound in a bag with more pictures than words, stands alone in its rejection of food as anything but an obligation, calories and nutrients to be efficiently optimized, instead of one of the great joys of living. That it exists in the same time period as AI-generated art, which promises to free artists from actually making art, is not a coincidence. The same venture capitalists who genuinely believe that “people don’t enjoy making music” are likely the same ones shoveling dog food down our throats.
Questioning whether “efficient” technologies make us lazier or less human is a tradition so old that even Helen Keller got in on it. I don’t want to sound like one more Puritanical doomsayer, here, but like… this is dog food. For people. And what’s even more terrifying is that it’s barely pretending it’s not! The heart of the marketing campaign is that giving up variety in your meals is worth it for the time it will save you. But if the goal of efficiency is not to free up more time to have a great meal or pursue a passion like making music, what is the goal?
2025 may well go down as the Year of the Dawg. Better yet, the Year of the DOGE. I get a terribly is-it-all-a-simulation feeling when I think about the cartoonishly dystopian canine mascot of the Department of Government Efficiency while writing about human kibble. The similarities of the two organizations go beyond the animal plastered on the marketing — they’re both deadly symptoms of a larger cultural shift that has tricked us into seeing optimization as the highest human value.
One of my favorite videos in the past few years is of a musclebound, lock-jawed influencer bragging about how he's “manipulated time so that [he] gets 21 days in a week.” By acting like every day he lived was actually three days, he has so optimized his time that he literally gets three days in one. In what I can only assume was a creatine-fueled stroke of divine inspiration, he realized that we’re all idiots for believing it takes 24 hours to complete a day, "just like some dude in a cave did.” Watch and learn from the master, dawg:
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The only downside to cramming so many days in the week, really, is how quickly one tears through bags of Dawg Food! They currently only deliver on Mondays, though and I’m not sure which of the three Mondays they mean.
Look, I have nothing against being more efficient, either in public or private life. There is plenty of bloat and waste to cut in the world. Hell, I wash and dry my Ziplock bags. What irks me, terrifies me, is the veneration of efficiency as the end goal of progress, rather than the means to attain it. Efficiency is such an effective buzzword of propaganda because it is incredibly difficult to argue against in in theory. What kind of idiot doesn’t want things to run more smoothly?
I have no doubt the Federal Government could benefit from a careful audit. Louis Brandeis, the 19th century father of the scientific management system (a precursor of the current efficiency movement), believed that a focus on governmental efficiency could help the common man the most, going so far as to proclaim that “efficiency is the hope of democracy.” Before you link him to DOGE, however, it’s important to recognize that Brandeis’ first project wasn’t slashing and burning government contracts, but taking railroad corporations to task for arbitrarily raising prices on consumers. A far cry from kneecapping the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which exists to protect regular folk from financial fruad, in order to “save taxpayer money.”
Therin lies the rub: Brandeis’s scientific management was a rigorous, tested, and goal-driven enterprise. Success (lower prices for consumers) was clearly defined, and efficiencies clearly targeted to reach this goal. But the Cult of Efficiency so well encapsulated by DOGE, Dawg Food, and AI-artists is nothing but self-parody. It is a hollow mimicry of efficiency, incapable of justifying its own existence, because efficiency, by definition, is only helpful in service of some other goal. It is tautologically incapable of being the goal itself. Saying “our aim is to be more efficient” is like saying “our aim is to transport.” Transport what? Where? To whom?
The idea that government should be a business, ruthlessly slashed to the bone in the name of optimization, neglects to recognize that the government is not, and should not be, a profit-seeking institution. The public good is not an enterprise but a service we all pay for: just because it is inefficent to have a post office in rural Maine doesn’t mean Mainers shouldnt get mail. Viewing the public sector solely though the lens of Silicon Valley / Venture Capital-style efficiency metrics feels like cutting down all the trees to optimize the forest. In the case of the cuts to the National Park Service, that’s not even a metaphor.
Well-meaning liberals like to point out that NPS is actually a profitable entity, but such arguments accidentally validate the DOGE project by implying that profit is a meaningful goal for a Yosemite Park Ranger. The real benefits of National Parks, however, could never show up on a balance sheet.
Viewed through the warped lens of efficiency, of course we should replace our National Parks with more profitable mines and mini-malls. Of course, we should eat pre-portioned meat and veggie slop. Of course, we should let robots make our music for us. Most things that make life worth living are grossly inefficient. But we cannot let a bunch of soulless, grubby-fingered tech bros and tubby would-be dictators convince us that efficiency is the metric that matters most. The Cult of Optimization is an ouroboros, and we’re stuck both eating and being eaten alive, maybe literally— look too hard at the tagline “Human Food for the Dawg in You,” and you get to Soylent Green levels of cannibalistic horror pretty quickly.
The horrors, of course, are already here. What’s a more efficient way to get rid of government dissenters, after all, than to ship them to El Salvador without due process? Just last week Secretary of State Mini-Me Marco Rubio was bragging about how cheap and convenient these definitely-not-concentration-camps were. Millions of his supporters cheered at Trump’s idea that they’d “never have to vote again,” so easily soothed into being serfs. So is it really that hyperbolic to think that Dawg Food’s promise of “one less decision” is not symptomatic of a larger, more pernicious movement to strip us of far greater autonomies? The Vice President of the United States, backed by some of the most influential and wealthy CEOs in the world, openly lauds books about replacing democracy with a CEO-style monarch. Line up for your kibble, kiddies, and get back to your desk.
It is getting easier and easier to consume classic science fiction — particularly the dystopian kind — as a how-to manual. Fictional entities in Futurama, 1984, and Dune that even middle schoolers clearly identify as the bad guys are the now models for aspiring autocrats, influencers, and tech bros. Stumbling towards a world where people proudly eat fucking dog food is a level of dystopia so insane, however, it was once reserved purely for comedy.
The promise these not-so-subtle villains make, both in fiction and in real life, is that giving up things like cooking, voting, and not-committing-genocide will remove the obnoxious friction of life and make everything run more smoothly. Efficiency is the highest good, optimization the vaunted end point. That we can understand how awful this is in fiction and yet acquescene to it in real life should terrify you. But most of these books predicted that, too. When confronted by the poetic soul of “John the Savage,” New World Controller Mustapha Mond admits that the dream of frictionless society wasn’t forced upon the masses, but demanded by them:
“Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered… People were ready to have their lives controlled then. Anything for a quiet life… it hasn’t been very good for truth, of course. But it’s been very good for happiness. One can’t have something for nothing.”
The truth is, as much as Dawg Food abhors me, there are a great many people who are interested in these kinds of “life hacks.” Millions still support DOGE, Musk, and the President. Democracy is an unweildy pain in the ass. Life could stand to be a little simpler. One can’t have something for nothing, it seems, but you most certainly can get nothing for something. It comes in a 7 lb bag, beef or chicken, $59 plus shipping and handling.