Weekend Reading: Musk's World View
The Tech Nabobs at Trump's Restoration: New Overlords or Captives?
The game plan, such as it is, is chilling in its comprehensiveness and disregard for the workforce. It’s laid out in the Washington Post, In chaotic Washington blitz, Elon Musk’s ultimate goal becomes clear:
DOGE’s early directives, its technology-driven approach and its interactions with the federal bureaucracy have provided an increasingly clear picture of its end goal for government — and clarified the stakes of Trump’s second term.
If Musk is successful, the federal workforce will be cut by at least 10 percent. A mass bid for voluntary resignations — blocked by a federal judge in Massachusetts who has scheduled a Monday hearing — is expected to be the first step before mass involuntary dismissals. Those are likely to include new hires or people with poor performance reviews, according to a plan laid out in memos issued over the last week by the Office of Personnel Management, which is now under Musk’s control. Unions this week advised workers to download their performance reviews and personnel files in preparation for having the information used against them.
As much as half the government’s nonmilitary real estate holdings are set to be liquidated, a move aimed at closing offices and increasing commute times amid sharp new limits on remote and telework. That is intended to depress workforce morale and increase attrition, according to four officials with knowledge of internal conversations at the General Services Administration, another agency taken over by Musk.
“We’ve heard from them that they want to make the buildings so crappy that people will leave,” said one senior official at GSA, which manages most federal property. “I think that’s the larger goal here, which is bring everybody back, the buildings are going to suck, their commutes are going to suck.”
To replace the existing civil service, Musk’s allies are looking to technology. DOGE associates have been feeding vast troves of government records and databases into artificial intelligence tools, looking for unwanted federal programs and trying to determine which human work can be replaced by AI, machine-learning tools or even robots.
That push has been especially fierce at GSA, where DOGE staffers are telling managers that they plan to automate a majority of jobs, according to a person familiar with the situation.
“The end goal is replacing the human workforce with machines,” said a U.S. official closely watching DOGE activity. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.”
The defenestration of the federal workforce could clear the way for Trump and Musk to cancel federal spending or eliminate entire agencies without approval of Congress, an unprecedented expansion of executive power. This week, Tom Krause, a Musk ally, was installed to oversee an agency in the U.S. Treasury Department responsible for executing trillions of dollars in annual payments to the full array of recipients, from contractors and grantees to military families and retirees. The Bureau of Fiscal Service has long simply cut the checks as ordered by various federal agencies, but Krause’s appointment may change that.
In Elon Musk’s Revolutionary Terror, you can find a good summary of what’s going on and why there’s more to it than shock and awe:
Nearly twenty years ago, the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote a classic account of the shambolic American takeover of the Iraqi government, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” Most memorably, he described what a Times reviewer called “the lethal combination of official arrogance and ineptitude” that plagued the foreign occupiers from Washington who, after the 2003 U.S. invasion, moved into the Green Zone—the walled-off compound that had once belonged to Saddam Hussein. Young conservatives were favored, heedless of experience. Some job seekers were asked their views of Roe v. Wade. Others were hired after sending their résumés to the right-wing Heritage Foundation back in D.C. While Baghdad spiralled into out-of-control violence, the G.O.P. ideologues who reported for duty in the desert worked to privatize Iraqi government agencies, revamp the tax code, and launch an anti-smoking campaign. A clueless twenty-four-year-old found himself in charge of opening an Iraqi stock exchange. It didn’t work out well.
I was reminded of this gloomy chapter in American history while reading accounts this week of Elon Musk and his small army of anonymous intern-hackers, who have been deployed on Donald Trump’s behalf inside an array of agencies to take control of computer payment systems and government H.R. functions. A nineteen-year-old high school graduate who now has access to sensitive government information is known online as “Big Balls.” A former intern at Musk’s SpaceX, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska, is now working out of the General Services Administration. Scenes of low comedy and spy-movie drama have been reported throughout the federal government—an unclassified e-mail listing all recent C.I.A. employees was sent to the White House to comply with a Musk decree; workers at NASA were ordered to “drop everything” in order to scrub the space program’s Web sites of offending references to banned phrases such as “diversity,” “Indigenous People,” and “women in leadership.” Musk and his command team at the Department of Government Efficiency, a made-up agency with no legal power that Trump established by executive order on his first day back in office, have been sleeping at the Office of Personnel Management.
In its short existence, Musk’s small occupying force has gained access to the entire U.S. Treasury federal payments system—to what end, no one yet knows—and has seemingly orchestrated the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the decades-old federal agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world. Upcoming targets reportedly include everything from the Department of Education to the government weather-forecasting service and the U.S. aviation system. Federal employees were given a deadline of Thursday at midnight to accept Musk’s offer of a government-wide deferred-resignation “buyout.” A federal judge has delayed the move, which was expected to yield more than forty thousand takers—well short of the five per cent or more of the federal workforce that Musk hoped to purge, but still an enormous upheaval whose repercussions will echo for years.
In a series of posts on X, the social-media site that Musk owns, the world’s wealthiest man bragged of feeding U.S.A.I.D. to “the wood chipper,” claimed the agency was a “criminal” enterprise, and crowed about “dismantling the radical-left shadow government.” This seemed like a far cry from his initial mandate of serving as an “outside volunteer” to advise Trump on possible budget cuts. Let the record show that, at 3:59 A.M. on day sixteen of the Trump restoration, as Democrats sputtered ineffectually about an unelected billionaire’s illegal power grab, Musk openly proclaimed his project as nothing less than “the revolution of the people.”
A day later, I spoke with a Republican who worked closely with the architects of America’s botched Iraq invasion. I asked whether he had been surprised by anything so far in a Trump Administration designed to shock. Yes, he replied—Musk’s sneaky takeover of the apparatus of the vast U.S. executive branch was something entirely new in the annals of global coups. “Elon figured out that the personnel, information-technology backbone of the government was essentially the twenty-first-century equivalent of the nineteen-fifties television tower in the Third World,” he observed, and “that you could take over the government essentially with a handful of people if you could access all that.” My friend, incidentally, chose to speak on background despite his years of public criticism of Trump, noting that a think tank with which he is affiliated receives government contracts. Fear, in this revolution, as in all revolutions, is perhaps the most effective weapon of all.
Sometimes you have to state the obvious, which Brian Barret recently did in Wired: The US Government Is Not a Startup, he wrote,
Get rid of most of the workforce. Install loyalists. Rip up safeguards. Remake in your own image.
This is the way of the startup. You’re scrappy, you’re unconventional, you’re iterating. This is the world that Musk’s lieutenants come from, and the one they are imposing on the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration.
What do they want? A lot.
There’s AI, of course. They all want AI. They want it especially at the GSA, where a Tesla engineer runs a key government IT department and thinks AI coding agents are just what bureaucracy needs. Never mind that large language models can be effective but are inherently, definitionally unreliable, or that AI agents—essentially chatbots that can perform certain tasks for you—are especially unproven. Never mind that AI works not just by outputting information but by ingesting it, turning whatever enters its maw into training data for the next frontier model. Never mind that, wouldn’t you know it, Elon Musk happens to own an AI company himself. Go figure.
Speaking of data: They want that, too. DOGE agents are installed at or have visited the Treasury Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Small Business Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor. Probably more. They’ve demanded data, sensitive data, payments data, and in many cases they’ve gotten it—the pursuit of data as an end unto itself but also data that could easily be used as a competitive edge, as a weapon, if you care to wield it.
And savings. They want savings. Specifically they want to subject the federal government to zero-based budgeting, a popular financial planning method in Silicon Valley in which every expenditure needs to be justified from scratch. One way to do that is to offer legally dubious buyouts to almost all federal employees, who collectively make up a low-single-digit percentage of the budget. Another, apparently, is to dismantle USAID just because you can. (If you’re wondering how that’s legal, many, many experts will tell you that it’s not.) The fact that the spending to support these people and programs has been both justified and mandated by Congress is treated as inconvenience, or maybe not even that.
Those are just the goals we know about. They have, by now, so many tentacles in so many agencies that anything is possible. The only certainty is that it’s happening in secret.
Musk’s fans, and many of Trump’s, have cheered all of this. Surely billionaires must know what they’re doing; they’re billionaires, after all. Fresh-faced engineer whiz kids are just what this country needs, not the stodgy, analog thinking of the past. It’s time to nextify the Constitution. Sure, why not, give Big Balls a memecoin while you’re at it.
The thing about most software startups, though, is that they fail. They take big risks and they don’t pay off and they leave the carcass of that failure behind and start cranking out a new pitch deck. This is the process that DOGE is imposing on the United States.
No one would argue that federal bureaucracy is perfect, or especially efficient. Of course it can be improved. Of course it should be. But there is a reason that change comes slowly, methodically, through processes that involve elected officials and civil servants and care and consideration. The stakes are too high, and the cost of failure is total and irrevocable.
Musk will reinvent the US government in the way that the hyperloop reinvented trains, that the Boring company reinvented subways, that Juicero reinvented squeezing. Which is to say he will reinvent nothing at all, fix no problems, offer no solutions beyond those that further consolidate his own power and wealth. He will strip democracy down to the studs and rebuild it in the fractious image of his own companies. He will move fast. He will break things.
From a more technological point of view, see From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem by Dan Hill:
In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you.
So who is going to stop the evil housekeeper from plugging a computer in and telling IT staff to connect it to the network?
What happens if someone comes in and tells you that you’ll be fired unless you reveal the authenticator code from your phone, or sign off on a code change, or turn over your PIV card, the Homeland Security–approved smart card used to access facilities and systems and securely sign documents and emails? What happens if someone says your name will otherwise be published in an online list of traitors? Already the new administration is firing, putting on leave, or outright escorting from the building people who refuse to do what they’re told.
New York City is fixing the relationship between government and technology–and not in the ways you’d expect.
It’s incredibly hard to protect a system from someone—the evil housekeeper from DOGE—who has made their way inside and wants to wreck it. This administration is on the record as wanting to outright delete entire departments. Accelerationists are not only setting policy but implementing it by working within the administration. If you can’t delete a department, then why not just break it until it doesn’t work?
The background for all that’s unfolding, it seems to me, can be gleaned from three things: in terms of technology and human behavior, see an article from 2006, The Hazards of the Digital Maoism: New Online Collectivism, by Jaron Lanier, on the perils of online mob behavior; a documentary from 2013, Google and the World Brain, was prescient about about creating AI:
Finally, a longform article, Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand (2018) looks at the world view peculiar to the new crop of Digital Nabobs:
Then, there are two remarkable podcasts, remarkable because of how clearly they provide both a timeline and a coherent explanation, of what’s going on, from the rise of populism and the New Right, and the role of technology and the developers of that technology —from the proponents and critics of whatMusk’s doing — with the added benefit that both perspectives inhabit the big tent of Trump’s own coalition.
I. Marc Andreessen on Trump, Biden, Musk and Why Silicon Valley Moved Right
There’s some interesting portions of the transcript for our purposes, when Andreessen candidly discusses how and why he turned to the Right:
Douthat: When did you start to have doubts about the synthesis of Silicon Valley and the Democratic Party?
Andreessen: The breakdown was during the second Obama term. It took me by surprise. I think maybe the one person it didn’t take by surprise is our mutual friend Peter Thiel. As with a lot of things, I think he saw it coming earlier than I did. But it definitely took me by surprise.
And just to give full context there: I had met Obama in, I think, ’06 or ’07, when he was a new senator. And he seemed great. It’s the perfect package. It’s literally everything that you could possibly dream for in a president. He has all the right social views, and he seems like an inheritor of Clinton-Gore. He says all the right things about capitalism at the time and about entrepreneurship. He’s clearly in love with tech.
ou may recall the 2012 election. It was literally the story of social media saves democracy, like it was literally that Barack Obama, the good guy, uses advanced technology, including the internet and social media to save the country from the Nazi fascist Mitt Romney. And this was, like, wall-to-wall positive press coverage.
This was also, by the way, in the wake of the Arab Spring, which at the time, you’ll recall, was, like, an unalloyed good. Obviously all these countries are going to be much better off. Obviously the fact that these protests were organized on social media sites run in the United States was a sign of how we were going to bring democracy to the world.
And then basically, in retrospect, what happened is after Obama’s re-election in 2012 through ultimately to 2016, things really started to change. The way the story gets told a lot now is that basically Trump was a new arrival in ’15, and then basically lots of changes followed. But what I experienced was the changes started in 2012, 2013, 2014 and were snowballing hard, at least in the Valley, at least among kids. And I think, to some extent, Trump was actually a reaction to those changes.
Douthat: Those changes you’re talking about, are they fundamentally about policies being made by the Obama White House, or are they fundamentally about the big shift leftward among young people that clearly started in that era?
Andreessen: So I would say both, and the unifying thread here is, I believe it’s the children of the elites. The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.
They fan out into the professions, and our companies hire a lot of kids out of the top universities, of course. And then, by the way, a lot of them go into government, and so we’re not only talking about a wave of new arrivals into the tech companies.
We’re also talking about a wave of new arrivals into the congressional offices. And of course, they all know each other, and so all of a sudden you have this influx, this new cohort.
And my only conclusion is what changed was basically the kids. In other words, the young children of the privileged going to the top universities between 2008 to 2012, they basically radicalized hard at the universities, I think, primarily as a consequence of the global financial crisis and probably Iraq. Throw that in there also. But for whatever reason, they radicalized hard.
Douthat: But when you say they radicalized, what did that mean for Silicon Valley? What did they want? I mean, at this point, you’re a venture capitalist. You’re no longer a start-up guy. So you’re investing in a lot of different companies.
So you have a pretty, I assume, pretty wide view of the action. What was it that was desired from the new left-wing politics pre-Trump? We’ll get to post-Trump.
Andreessen: Revolution. What I now understand it to be historically is a rebirth of the New Left. So it’s very analogous. I’ve spent a lot of time talking to David Horowitz about this because he lived through it 40 years earlier.
It turned out to be a coalition of economic radicals, and this was the rise of Bernie Sanders, but the kids turned on capitalism in a very fundamental way. They came out as some version of radical Marxist, and the fundamental valence went from “Capitalism is good and an enabler of the good society” to “Capitalism is evil and should be torn down.”
And then the other part was social revolution and the social revolution, of course, was the Great Awokening, and then those conjoined. And there was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver and their conversation with you was: “When do I get promoted, and how much do I get paid, and when do I end up running the company?” And that was the thing.
By 2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: “[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.”
Douthat: But they’re working for you. These are people who are working for you.
Andreessen: Of course. So I had this moment with a senior executive, who I won’t name, but he said to me with a sense of dawning horror, “I think some of these kids are joining the company not with the intent of doing things for us but destroying us.”
They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost. And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside. All-hands meetings started to get very contentious. Where you’d get berated at an all-hands meeting as a C.E.O., where you’d have these extremely angry employees show up and they were just completely furious about how there’s way too many white men on the management team. “Why are we a for-profit corporation? Don’t you know all the downstream horrible effects that this technology is having? We need to spend unlimited money in order to make sure that we’re not emitting any carbon.”
So you just take the laundry list of fashionable kind of radical left-wing positions of that time, and they’re spending a huge amount of time at the company, basically organizing around that. And I will say, in fairness, I think in most of these companies this kind of person never got to be anywhere close to 100 percent of the work force.
But what happened is they became, like, 20 percent, maybe 30 percent. And then there’s this big middle of “go along, get along” people who generally also consider themselves Democrats. And they’re just trying to follow along with the trends.
So you take this activist core of 20 percent, you add 60 percent of “go along, get along” people, and all of a sudden the C.E.O. experiences, “Oh, my God, 80 percent of my employees have radicalized into a political agenda.” What people say from the outside is, “Well, you should just fire those people.”
But as a C.E.O., you can’t fire 80 percent of my team. And by the way, I have to go hire people to replace them. And the other people at the other companies are behaving the same way. And I can’t go hire kids out of college, because I’m just going to get more activists. And so that’s how these companies became captured.
Douthat: This is all happening by 2016, when Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee, which we’ll treat as a decisive break toward whatever the next phase of Silicon Valley ideology is. But in 2016, the Democratic Party as an institution actually started putting sustained pressure on Silicon Valley. What you’re describing with radicalized employees is pressure, but it’s not Washington, D.C., getting involved. It’s only after the election that Silicon Valley is seen as responsible — through Facebook, through social media, through Russian disinformation, through allowing disinformation for getting Trump elected. That’s the point at which the Democratic Party in Washington starts putting pressure on tech companies. Does that seem fair?
Andreessen: That’s 100 percent true. That’s completely correct. I would just say that I went through the description of ’13 to ’16 because when the main Democratic machine kicked in and decided that we were to blame for Trump, the overwhelming response for basically everything, other than Peter, was just like, “Yep. You got us. We’re guilty. We did it.” Because, as you know, it’s, like, wall-to-wall coverage in the news. I’m reading The New York Times every day, and I’m watching MSNBC every night, and I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have we done?”…
Andreessen: I’m a good responsible Democrat. I’m a good responsible citizen of America. I’m like, “I have to understand what’s happening. I have to be able to process reality.”
Douthat: I want to push on this a little bit. So do you think when Mark Zuckerberg gets hauled in front of Congress to be grilled about disinformation and things like that, do you think that he thought, “Yes, Facebook is deeply and profoundly responsible for Donald Trump getting elected and Vladimir Putin influencing American politics”? Because my perception in the Trump years was that a lot of the people at the top of Silicon Valley were essentially going along with these narratives because they were afraid of their employees and because they were afraid of Democrats in Washington.
I wrote a column about this at the time. I said that in any dispensation, businessmen have to ask themselves, “What am I required to do to make money unmolested by the government?” And so Zuckerberg is thinking, “Right now, what I’m required to do is run a sort of strict anti-disinformation fact-checking apparatus and say the right things in front of congressional committees.”
Andreessen: So I don’t want to speak specifically for Mark, but the —
Douthat: Right, no. People high up, generally.
Andreessen: I’ll speak for the group because there’s a lot of similarities between the different players here for the same pressures. I’ll just speak for the group.
First of all, let me disabuse you of something, if you haven’t already disabused yourself. The view of American C.E.O.s operating as capitalist profit optimizers is just completely wrong.
That’s like, Goal No. 5 or something. There’s four goals that are way more important than that. And that’s not just true in the big tech companies. It’s true of the executive suite of basically everyone at the Fortune 500.
I would say Goal No. 1 is, “I’m a good person.” “I’m a good person,” is wildly more important than profit margins. Wildly. And this is why you saw these big companies all of a sudden go completely bananas in all their marketing. It’s why you saw them go bananas over D.E.I. It’s why you saw them all cooperating with all these social media boycotts. I mean, the level of lock step uniformity, unanimity in the thought process between the C.E.O.s of the Fortune 500 and what’s in the pages of The New York Times and in the Harvard classroom and in the Ford Foundation — they’re just locked together. Or at least they were through this entire period.
I find it’s funny, because the only true groups of people who think that corporate C.E.O.s are just profit-optimizing machines are people on the far left, who are full-on Marxists, who really believe that, and then people on the far right, who I think fear that the C.E.O.s are like that but also maybe hope that they are and then later realize that they’re not…
These people aren’t robots. They’re just not. They’re members of a society. They’re members of an elite class. They either come from the top, most radical education institutions, or they are seeking as hard as they can to assimilate into that same class.
Then, by the way, you’re not just doing that yourself. You also have a family. And if your kids are in college, I mean, God help you, they’re coming for you. Then you’ve got your radicalized employee base, and you maybe could have nipped the radicalization five years earlier, but now you can’t, because it’s now 80 percent of your work force.
By the way, you also have your shareholders, and this is where things get really bananas. A big part of the tipping point was when the major shareholders turned and became political activists.
So you’re in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you’ve got the press coming at you. You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the [federal] government coming at you…
So maybe just the short thing I’ll tell you about 2016 to 2020, there were a series of additional 10-X-ing events — of radicalism and intensity of all the politics. And so it was Trump’s nomination, it was Trump’s election, and then it was Russiagate. It was like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees…
There were quite a few people like me. Now, none of us were sticking our heads up at that point because, to be clear, it was way too dangerous…
None of us were particularly moral heroes at that point. But there were lots and lots of underground peer-to-peer discussions from 2018 through to 2021 saying, “OK, things are off the rails.” And my point is, we were softened up for the Biden radicalization. Then when the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be then that’s what generated the response that ultimately —
Douthat: So what, in concrete terms, does that mean? What are the policies that shocked or surprised you about the Biden administration?
Andreessen: They came for business in a very broad-based way. Everything that I’m going to describe also, it turns out, I found out later, it happened in the energy industry. And I think it happened in a bunch of other industries, but the C.E.O.s felt like they couldn’t talk about it.
The problem is the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation. It was increasing insertion into basic staffing. Government-mandated enforcement of D.E.I. in very destructive ways. Some of these agencies have their own in-house courts, which is bananas. Also just straight-up threats and bullying.
Mark Zuckerberg just talked about this on “Rogan.” Direct phone calls from senior members of the administration. Screaming executives ordering them to do things. Just full-on “[Expletive] you. We own you. We control you. You’re going to do what we want or we’re going to destroy you.”
Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.
They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn’t know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn’t. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term…
So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.
So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.
We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.
We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”
We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”…
The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.
Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.
And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”
II. Steve Bannon on Elon Musk and the Battle for Trump's Ear
You have to listen to the whole thing, as Bannon gives a concise version of the rise of the new populism, from the Tea Party to the present. But for our purposes here, this extract from the transcript is the counterpoint to the tech wizards:
Bannon: Let me just give you a quick bunch of history. Obama and the progressive administration — him and Biden — are the most reactionary in American history.
No. 1, he made a Faustian bargain with the sociopathic overlords on Wall Street to bail us out of the 2008 crisis, which still hasn’t been resolved. At the same time, Obama and the established order went to Silicon Valley and made a deal with them.
And the deal was the following: We will allow you to become the wealthiest people in the history of the world. We will let you create an apartheid state. We will let you become monopolies. We will get no anti-trade. In fact, that’s why you got Google and Search. You got Facebook and what they do. You got Twitter and what they do. You’ve got Amazon destroying small businesses for the C.C.P. Every one of these guys is a monopoly. And the Justice Department for 10 or 12 years would just look the other way.
So we’ll let you become monopolies, we’ll let you become the wealthiest people on Earth. But here’s the bargain — here’s what you have to do: You have to make the hegemon, the United States, and the postwar international rules-based order and the ruling class of this country — you have to make us a dominant technological power of which we can have the commanding heights that can never be questioned.
And over the last 72 hours, what we’ve seen is two things: No. 1 is social media. The Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army created TikTok, which is far more powerful than all the social media platforms of these guys put together.
Forget that they use the information and the ownership. I’m just talking about the addictive nature and how evil can be put in it. And we now know that all the really — let’s say hundreds of billions of dollars, not tens of billions — that we put into the theory of the case of blunt-force computing power that say that the Green New Deal is forgotten. Climate change is forgotten. You’ve got to build power generators everywhere. You got to give over federal land for data centers everywhere. We got to burn more coal, more oil for these data centers because of our method of artificial intelligence. We understand that if this is not a PSYOP — which I don’t think it totally is, we’ve had our Sputnik moment — and guess what? The oligarchs that we created, who were all progressive Democrats, absolutely [expletive] face planted.
Now here’s the point. In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit — they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.
They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? Transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity.
And that’s why they’re all rushing — whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it — to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.
You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every [expletive] step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.
And the progressive left made a deal with these guys. They’re all lefties. Elon had the first awakening because as an engineer, he could kind of see the math. He fully supported our plan of a base plus election, to go get the low information voters and the Moms for America who had flipped during the pandemic.
He backed that strategy, and the dude wrote a $250 million check over five months, unprecedented, to back our play. He’s the first, but the rest of them, even Andreessen, they’re all superprogressive liberals, they’re all technofeudalists, they don’t give a flying [expletive] about the human being. And I don’t care if you’re Black, White, Hispanic, Chinese — they don’t care.
And they have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world. And you see this in artificial intelligence. We have no controls over this. We’ve allowed these monopolies to exist. And now we know they’re getting their ass handed to them, I think, by the Chinese Communist Party.
We’re in deep [expletive] right now. We’re in a crisis.
Now, Bannon zeroes in on Musk himself:
Bannon: Since Edison, he is maybe our greatest applied engineer. He is a genius at that level.
Douthat: OK, agreed.
Bannon: Agreed. And so he looks at the thing as all kinds of mathematical equations. When he puts himself on something, he can solve it.
He is the most prominent of that crowd that has warned against artificial intelligence and artificial general intelligence. It’s one of the reasons he and Sam Altman at OpenAI have had so many big fights besides the profitability.
Douthat: Not big fans of each other.
Bannon: No, they hate each other. Part of that’s personal, but part of it is philosophical. And Brother Musk is probably the farthest down the line because he’s the most advanced in chipping.
I think Neuralink is one of the most aggressive about Homo sapien 1.0 or Homo sapien 2.0. Elon is at the tip of this, and Elon is actually on an applied engineering basis, not [expletive] talk, he is probably the farthest advanced for transhumanism.
People have to understand in the life, and when I say “life” I mean the next 10 years, of your audience, we’re going to be facing a dilemma for yourself and your kids: Do you enhance yourself? Do you enhance yourself either by genetic engineering? Do you enhance yourself by advanced chip design plugged into you? Do you advance yourself by artificial intelligence?
Elon is one of the top accelerationists about driving this thing faster. Accelerating at an increasing rate. You’re going to have to make a choice in your own life, not just politically in society — your own life.
Do I do this? Am I a Luddite? Will I get left behind? More important, will my children get left behind? Do my children have a shot to really play sports at a Division I level? Or will my kids have the ability to go to an Ivy League school unless I get them enhanced? These questions, deep questions, never before handled in mankind’s history, are going to happen in the next couple of years.
So some readings on this Technofeudalism:
From Yanis Vourafakis: Welcome to the Age of Technofeudalism:
Profit drives capitalism, rent drove feudalism. Now we have moved [from one system to the other] because of this new form of super-duper, all-singing, all-dancing capital: cloud capital, algorithmic capital. If I'm right, that is creating new digital fiefdoms like Amazon.com, like Airbnb, where the main mode of wealth extraction comes in the form not of profit but of rent.
Take the Apple Store. You are producing an app, Apple can withhold 30 percent of your profits [through a commission fee]. That's a rent. That's like a ground rent. It's a bit like the Apple Store is a fiefdom. It's a cloud fiefdom, and Apple extracts a rent exactly as in feudalism. So my argument is not that we went back from capitalism to feudalism. My argument is that we have progressed forward to a new system, which has many of the characteristics of feudalism, but it is one step ahead of capitalism. To signal that, I added the word techno.
From Curtis Yarvin, his views on the need for a kind of American monarchy: The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening:
So why is democracy so bad? It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
Speaking of Musk and DOGE:
Axios: What to know about Elon Musk's DOGE
Time: This Obscure Office Is at the Center of Elon Musk’s Efforts to Harness Federal Data
Wired Magazine: The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover (February 2) and Elon Musk’s DOGE Is Working on a Custom Chatbot Called GSAi (February 6)
New York Times: Young Aides Emerge as Enforcers in Musk’s Broadside Against Government (February 7)
Washington Post: How Elon Musk’s deputies took over the government’s most basic functions (February 8).
What is overlooked I think is something Musk himself has been repeatedly Tweeting about: Milton Friedman’s list of all the government agencies he felt ought to be abolished.
In his view, government’s functions are threefold: external defense, internal policing, and adjudicating disputes. That’s it.
If you look at Musk’s feed his other comments include what seems to me the view that drones should replace military aircraft, land and sea vehicles: Musk calls drones, AI the future of war in West Point interview.
Where this all comes together, is something I’ve long observed in the Philippine context. There are perennial complaints about the bloated bureaucracy but little action. I remember it used to said that the biggest single employer in the Philippines is the government; a vow to shrink government would be a declaration against the interests of a large portion of the population, in particular, the middle class, which one triusm puts it, is incapable of electing presidents but fully capable of ousting them. Not to mention it is self-harm when an administration decides to trim fat since it must lard its supporters with patronage. Similarly, the cheering of one subset of the American voting population ignores the outright panic if not outrage of another subset, the one comprising those losing jobs/livelihood/contracts; and for everyone else, the sight of tech whiz types being cavalier about individual lives, has to be bothersome sooner or later: Lawmakers flooded with calls about Elon Musk: ‘It is a deluge on DOGE’.