alt Hacker NewsPosts predicting this were apparently flagged as "political". For example, Bruce Schneier's warning [0]. For a site called Hacker News, DOGE unfortunately attracted a different priority of notoriety than, say, the numerous merger and acquisition and VC maneuvers reaching the front page. If hacker punks nominally subvert the established order by flaunting laws and authorities, then DOGE was very much hacking. Tina Peters is an unsophisticated hacker punk, She doesn't live up to the social engineering chops of Kevin Mitnick, but her plan did involve a Geek Squad uniform. Legendary but too "political". Attracts too much noise, not enough signal. That's why you didn't see an elevation of the developed thoughts you're talking about.
Since the beginning of DOGE, it has not been especially bold to predict:
- DOGE will cost more than it saves. The seminal errors, mistaking $ millions for $ billions, world-write permissions on their Drupal site, etc. convinced us that we can't expect deliberate professionalism.
- The very first whistleblower, out of NTSB, convinced us that exfiltration was the goal. This is within the top 5 whistleblower stories here. The critical detail was their instruction that access logs be scrubbed.
- And the general public smelled it, too. No one doubts that threats against Tesla dealerships were civil libertarian radicals, not recently-fired USAID bean counters.
- When Peter Theil's FBI handler, Johnathan Buma, went whistleblower a few months into DOGE, it wasn't about Theil. He saw a Russian active measure influencing Musk's inner circle. One of Kash Patel's first acts as FBI director was to order Buma arrested.
So, the commentary worrying about "big tech" was commentary within Y Combinator's sphere.