So, it was capitalism after all. More specifically, crony capitalism. I am talking, of course, about how the leaders of the tech world revealed themselves before and after the 2024 presidential election, when just a little more than half of America (and a surprisingly diverse group for an anti-DEI candidate) decided to give the job once again to the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
But what was quite different this time was the growing participation from the tech elite, with some falling in line before the election, some waiting until after, and one—Elon Musk—taking an even more prominent role, effectively gaining control of the U.S. government for the price of getting Trump back into power.
For tech leaders at this moment, the digital world they rule has become not enough. Leaders, in fact, is the wrong word to use now. Titans is more like it, as many have cozied up to Trump in order to dominate this world as we enter the next Cambrian explosion in technology, with the development of advanced AI.
I cannot explain fully why a small majority of U.S. voters did what they did, because it is for many and varied reasons, including inflation, immigration, a ginned-up panic over trans athletes, and post-pandemic yips, in which I have only glancing expertise. There is no doubt we all are muddling through unusually aggrieved times. But I can tell you how we got that way, because of the part I do know about, which has been a crucial element to what has happened: the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech moguls, and their willful carelessness and sometimes-filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence in managing it.
When combined with a lack of empathy and enormous financial self-interest—which I’ve been pointing out at least since Silicon Valley potentates marched up to Trump Tower in late 2016 like sheeple to pay homage to the president-elect—it is basically a familiar trope: greed (of the few) over need (of the many).
And that has resulted in the damaging and warping and siloing of us all, courtesy of many of the people I wrote about in my book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, about the promise and then souring of Silicon Valley. It is these characters who want to reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once. To update the old Facebook maxim of “Move fast and break things”: Move fast and crush everyone. This was bad enough as a business axiom, but when it’s applied to the entire apparatus of our democracy, it’s terrifying.
My memoir of my decades covering these people—from when they had nothing to now, when they have it all—focused on a range of characters, including the late Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who was by far the person I most thought of as a true tech visionary. While some might disagree—not everyone was keen on his use of what was jokingly called a “reality-distortion field” conjured up to sell his always nifty hardware—Jobs stood far and away above the men who followed him, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and, of course, Elon Musk of, it’s fair to say, Elon Musk Inc.
Jobs, who was definitely a crafty and manipulative charmer, also had a set of basic values he stayed true to, from protection of privacy to making quality products, unlike this trio for whom the acquisition of wealth, the hoarding of power, and endless self-aggrandizement have become the goal. Unlike Jobs, who left behind a legacy of innovation and even wonder, the titans who followed him are so poor, all they have is money.
To be fair, Musk’s efforts were once certainly loftier— pushing into existence an electric-car industry that had not previously had any traction; cutting the costs of rockets and space travel and much more. Let me clearly acknowledge that this was all indeed inspiring. That is, until his epic megalomania, personal foibles, and other deep-seated character flaws—which had always been there, lurking—took over his mind completely and sent it into the outer limits.
After years of mocking Trump, Musk changed drastically during COVID and became ever more manic and cruel, as he swung hard right down conspiracy highway. That was why I predicted on my book tour in March 2024 that Musk would back Trump extravagantly, even after he had just as vehemently said he would remain politically neutral and promised not to donate to either candidate.
Hello, he is lying, I thought at the time. Under a Biden administration—and then, after he stepped down as nominee, a Harris administration—Musk would have received the usual scrutiny of his businesses. He must have known that under Trump, if he ponied up time and money, and, most especially, if he deployed the platform formerly known as Twitter to power Trump’s propaganda machine, an unfettered billionaire’s paradise awaited him.
Soon enough, besides funding a PAC and taking over Trump’s ground game in swing states, Musk was showing off his stomach while bizarrely jumping up and down on a variety of stages across the nation. And, of course, he was pushing a flood of inaccurate information on X and puckering up to Trump like a particularly enthusiastic remora, sometimes referred to as a suckerfish or shark sucker. (Hey, I don’t make up the words.)
As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, even if it meant cosplaying as a beta to Trump’s alpha. It’s paid off: His net worth has nearly doubled after Trump’s victory—it sits at $348 billion today—with billions more possible as he remakes the government in his image. Soon after Trump’s victory, the president announced the formation of the jokingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—which I suggested might more accurately stand for “Department of Grandstanding Edgelords”—to be run by Musk and (briefly) a fellow look-at-me billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. With its power, staff, and efficacy undefined, it sounded more like an episode of The Apprentice.
Initially, a number of people theorized that this unelected commission was a clever way for Trump to sideline the billionaire who had helped to take him over the line to victory. I myself was not sure Trump would tolerate anyone taking attention off him. But so far, he has.
As of this writing, tens of thousands of Americans in government roles have already been fired by Elon’s tech toadies. Musk has gotten rid of regulators who just happen to oversee his businesses, in agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and USAID. While Trump has recently made noises about reining in Musk’s power, he also said that if Cabinet members don’t shrink their own agencies, “Elon will do the cutting.” And, anyway, Musk as a long track record of doing whatever he wants.
What is happening is shocking, in a way. But if anyone is not surprised, it’s tech reporters who saw, over the past decade, what these people were becoming. Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms. They denigrate media, science, activism, and culture, and spend their time bellyaching about the “woke-mind virus” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Those programs, despite their occasional annoyances, were directionally correct. As I often point out, the opposite of woke is asleep; the opposite of DEI is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s just the way an increasing number of techies want it and, with Trump and Musk at the wheel, the goal toward which they are now reengineering our country.
Before the stakes got even higher, there was a warning about what was happening as AI expanded. With trillions of dollars there for the taking, investments are being made by the same small coterie of companies and people that now controls the entire federal government. So are the important decisions about safety and more, which should be made by an independent and fair government and its citizens.
There are no laws regulating almost any of it, though the Biden administration gave it a shrugging try for a little bit. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention.
“The ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy,” wrote one of my favorite philosophers, Paul Virilio. “This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture.” This seems vanishingly unlikely today.
Where is the hope, then? One glimmer came to me this past year in an interview I did with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, in which he pointed out that science and illumination were not the immediate beneficiaries of the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, in about 1440, though some tie those developments together. In fact, even a century later, Copernicus’s groundbreaking On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres sold only 500 copies. What was a best seller right after the press was in heavy use was a book by an obscure writer named Heinrich Kramer titled “The Hammer of Witches,” a demented treatise on satanic women who stole men’s penises and hid them in a nest in a tree, I kid you not. When we spoke, Harari noted that the popularity of the book spurred witch hunts, in which tens of thousands of people—mostly women—were killed.
“The thing is the printing press did not cause the scientific revolution. No,” Harari told me. “You have about 200 years from the time that Gutenberg brings print technology to Europe in the middle of the 15th century until the flowering of the scientific revolution.”
He went on: “How did, in the end, we get to the scientific revolution? It wasn’t the technology of the printing press; it was the creation of institutions that were dedicated to sifting through this kind of ocean of information, and all these stories and developing mechanisms to evaluate reliable information and to be trusted by the population.”
That is, indeed, the possible exit from the mess we now find ourselves in—swimming in oceans of information with an ever-decreasing number of facts to keep us afloat. Except, unlike the expansion that tech gave to the enlightened before, the institutions of today, such as media, science, and education, are being slowly destroyed by technology. And there seems to be no way out of this world, especially as egomaniacal entrepreneurs like Musk and others fork over small pieces of their vast fortunes to buy up everything from global media to, yes, a president of the United States.
And there they are, thus, everywhere we look, running everything, a fate that Paul Virilio predicted in a 1994 interview with the now-defunct technology journal CTHEORY, when he worried that “virtuality will destroy reality.” That is precisely what is happening 30 years later, although it is much worse than I think we are prepared to acknowledge, even now as Musk presides over Oval Office press conferences and White House Cabinet meetings as Trump’s enforcer and sees himself as a kind of global superhero.
In our many interviews over the years, Musk often referenced science fiction, which he looked to for inspiration. During that 1994 interview, Virilio referenced a short story that I imagine Musk knows, “in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow, which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.”
The interviewer then asks the single best question I have ever heard—a question that I wish I would have had the perspicuity to ask of the many tech leaders I have known over three decades, especially Musk, who via DOGE now is building what techies call a “God view” dashboard of our nation and the world: “But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?”
And from Virilio, the best answer: “We’ll dream of being blind.”
It’s not the worst idea.
This essay has been adapted from the epilogue of Swisher’s book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story
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