Intentional Inexistence

Proposal for a DOGE-inspired artwork

Jun 26, 2025

These days I anticipate Masha Gessen’s essays with a mixture of dread and desperate need for clarity. Their increasingly dark, yet lucid assessments of how the United States is quickly descending into autocracy are guided by their firsthand experience of how the same process took place, albeit in a much slower pace, in Russia under Putin over the last two decades.

But because I tend to always look back at historical parallels, it is an older Russian period that I have been thinking about recently: the Tsarist Russia of the 1840s, an expansionist period during which Tsar Nicholas I governed with a conservative ideology of repression and censorship. It is the context within which Nikolai Gogol wrote Dead Souls.

In Dead Souls, the protagonist is Chichikov, a mysterious character who goes around Russia visiting landowners to offer to purchase the names of dead serfs. Landowners had to pay taxes on the serfs they owned, but this was determined by the census, which was conducted infrequently; as a result, landowners would often have to pay taxes on serfs who were no longer living. Chichikov’s scheme is to quickly inflate his assets to take a giant loan against these “dead souls” and run with the money.

I began thinking of Dead Souls when Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative to “reform” Social Security began to unravel in real time. Musk had claimed widespread fraud within the system, asserting that 150-year-olds were still collecting benefits. In fact, the Social Security Administration (SSA) clarified that the individuals Musk cited were not receiving payments but merely lacked recorded dates of death. The apparent irregularity stemmed from legacy software systems within the SSA that included 18.9 million Social Security numbers of individuals born in 1920 or earlier who had not been officially marked as deceased. A July 2023 report by the Office of the Inspector General confirmed that "almost none of the number-holders discussed in the report currently receive SSA payments." A senior SSA official later affirmed that DOGE’s claims were baseless and deeply misinformed. Still, Musk persisted in portraying the Social Security system as a hotbed of corruption.

Though separated by two centuries, it’s hard not to see the echoes of Dead Souls in this spectacle—the opportunistic manipulation of the dead through bureaucratic sleight of hand. In Gogol’s novel, Chichikov amasses “ownership” of deceased serfs to inflate his social standing and creditworthiness; in Musk’s case, the insinuation that millions of dead people were drawing benefits seems aimed less at financial gain than at bolstering his image as a reform-minded visionary. Both operate in a theater of bureaucratic absurdity, where fiction masquerades as truth and power is built on illusion. Gogol’s searing critique of corruption and institutional dysfunction—in works like The Government Inspector and The Overcoat—resonated profoundly with later writers of bureaucratic farce and existential absurdity, from Dostoyevsky (who famously said, “we all came out from under Gogol’s Overcoat”) to Kafka and Beckett.

There are many artists who have explored the topic of how bureaucracy suffocates reality and fudges the limits of logic and the irrational, but also the border between life and death. One of them is Taryn Simon, who in her photography project “A Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters”, traces the bloodlines of Shivdutt Yadav, an Indian man who was illegally declared dead through bribery in local land registry offices, clearing the way for others to seize his property.

In this brave new world where the muddle of bureaucracy redefines reality, and where we have witnessed this illustrative governmental episode led by a Silicon Valley tech bro, it is inevitable not to think of how the alternative world of AI also intersects with these fabrications. In 2019, Philip Wang, a former Uber software engineer, created the site www.thispersondoesnotexist.com, which upon every refresh generates a random, photorealistic portrait of an entirely fictional person. Wang utilized StyleGAN, a form of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which was developed by Nvidia, which draws from massive face datasets to produce endless composites. The site is deeply creepy and has occasional glitches, which some users sometimes upload to other sites- usually if the person portrayed is standing next to someone else, the second figure is only partially visible but displays some grotesque deformity in their face.

It so feels appropriate to consider an installation using these tools to conjure up DOGE’s Dead Social Security souls.

The concept of “Intentional Inexistence” is one that I have been attracted for years for its inherently poetic contradiction (as in, I am consciously deciding to make myself believe that I do not exist, so my success in doing so also constitutes my failure, because intentionality is inescapably a proof of existence as per Descartes). It originates in the Middle Ages from scholastic philosophers as early as Thomas de Aquinas and it does not pertain to the self, but to the capability of the mind to concoct impossible things, like unicorns. The concept was first articulated in this way by Franz Brentano in the 19^th century as a key element of his theory of intentionality. He also argued that “perception is misconception” (Wahrnehmung ist Falschnehmung), which is another way to help understand the basic principles of demagoguery, which intentionally makes us believe inexistent things.

This installation would draw from passages of Gogol’s Dead Souls that are pertinent to the present political moment, narrated in AI-generated video by Avatars generated from www.thispersondoesnotexist.com. Here are 20 such fragments that are particularly apt to the moment.