A Service as Easy as Ordering Takeout: Tech, Startups, and the Business Ontology

The theorist Mark Fisher describes “the business ontology” as a dominant political orientation where “It is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run like a business.” This pervasive viewpoint has infiltrated every aspect of culture, including and particularly government services. This paper explores the business ontology surrounding digital government services, from the Obama-era USDS technocracy to DOGE’s current kleptocratic power grab alongside the history of the phrase “government should work like a business.” I also reflect on my own experience as a technologist in the age of “doing work that matters” as part of open source startup communities and “women in tech” gatherings during the nascence of online government services. In startup parlance, the central fact of government bureaucracies behaving like bureaucracies are “features not bugs,” and we must resist the fundamental misalignment of incentives between government and capital by moving public services more firmly into the public sector, with a strong orientation toward justice and service to communities, not customers.