Trump 2.0 - Destroy democracy/Machine overlords

The rapid onslaught by Musk and his pseudo-government agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has happened in a scattershot, unpredictable way that has also left the Beltway media in the dust. Few, if any, seem to understand what Musk, DOGE, or their hands-off patron in Trump truly want. It’s true that massive cuts in the programs that empower middle-class Americans will mean more money for things that Musk, Trump and their allies want, including more tax cuts for the super-rich and a large deportation army. But a community of folks who pay attention to Silicon Valley — the new center of power, not Washington — says the bigger idea is darker and much more sinister.

“This isn’t a spontaneous coup — it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be ‘disrupted,’“ a veteran Silicon Valley executive, Mike Brock, wrote in a recent essay, The Plot Against America. He explained: ”DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes."

[L]ongtime watchers say the dangerous techno-fascism behind Musk’s DOGE has a long-time patron in Musk’s ally and fellow South Africa-raised billionaire, Peter Thiel, and a key inventor: Curtis Yarvin.

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A 51-year-old computer engineer and blogger with a following going back to the 2000s, Yarvin is unknown to most Americans but his radical ideas have grown deep roots in some MAGA circles. In many ways, his views are deeply problematic on issues like race [...] . But Yarvin’s bigger ideas about the failure of democracy and the need for a kind of monarch, or a dictator, with the value system of technological elites — cemented after the 2008 financial crisis — have gained admirers that include Vice President JD Vance.

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Yarvin and a circle of “thought leaders” in Silicon Valley and other far-right communities believe that democracy is a kind of inefficient mob rule, broken beyond repair, but that a high-tech-flavored “creative destruction” could replace it with a notion of better government through computer engineering.

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Ultimately these ideas were adopted by billionaires with the power in an age of unlimited campaign spending to change America like Thiel, who notoriously wrote in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

Ideas from this extreme-right intelligentsia spent the last 15 years morphing, remarkably, into reality. These include controlling the flow of information (Musk buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022), a Yarvin 2022 proposal called “RAGE” for Retire All Government Employees (thus, the DOGE-led push for mass resignations and firings of the federal workforce), and the more recent Silicon Valley embrace of cryptocurrency as a tool to disrupt the institutions of a comatose democracy. Now, Musk’s DOGE team is racing to replace the fired or locked-out civil servants with generative artificial intelligence in what a TechPolicy Press writer calls “an AI Coup,” because it “concentrates power with those who understand and control this system’s maintenance, upkeep, and upgrades.”

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[A] perfect storm put this nightmare on the brink. For one thing, a majority of rank-and-file voters also lost faith in government as well as the institutions that support civil society, if perhaps for different reasons. Even more importantly, the anti-democratic ideas of Yarvin and Thiel found both an even wealthier ally in Musk and also a front man in Trump, the bridge with an ability to seduce MAGA voters, even as he agreed to cede enormous power to billionaires, in a Faustian bargain to gain four more years in the White House.

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Government by AI isn’t more efficient, just inhumane, and it’s also a lie, because the real decisions aren’t actually being made by computers, but by the corrupted humans who program them. And their unbridled faith in Silicon Valley elites is often an excuse to govern America with the same foundations of white supremacy and misogyny that thrive in the tech world.

  The Philadelphia Inquirer