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The Dark Enlightenment: the Tech Oligarch Ideology Driving DOGE’s Destruction
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.
Mar 23, 2025
The future of American democracy isn’t being dismantled by accident; it’s being systematically replaced to prepare the way for something entirely new.
A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk aren’t just tearing down institutions—they’re laying the groundwork for an experimental new kind of authoritarian rule.
The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.
Americans are baffled by the brutal, relentless attack on the institutions of America that they’ve launched.
Why would they destroy our reputation around the world by shutting down USAID? What’s wrong with the federal government helping poor school districts or giving college students Pell Grants? Why gut billions in scientific research that’s kept America at the forefront of the world and saved literally hundreds of millions of lives?
Paul Krugman recommends a psychiatrist weigh in; Dr. Bandy X. Lee (a frequent guest on my program) points that out, noting, “How exactly this plays out is, as I have said, a spiritual question.” Three New York Times writers even had a lengthy back-and-forth on the topic, under the title: “Is Destruction the Point?”
- Some speculate that Musk and Trump are both tight with Putin and they’re destroying our government at his direction, helping achieve the goal he’s had since his KGB days to destroy America from within.
- Others think it’s just a way of crippling government programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and the Post Office so they can now be profitably taken over by private industry.
- Democratic politicians tell us Musk and Trump are just trying to cut government spending to pay for the $4 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will be introducing in the House in the next few weeks.
They’re all wrong.
The simple answer is that these people intend to replace the 240+ year “American Experiment” with a brand new governance “experiment” of their own. One that was largely developed in computer rooms around San Francisco.
There’s an actual ideology behind all this, and it isn’t the old-fashioned Ayn Rand libertarianism that was such a rage during the Reagan era.
This hot new experimental ideology, enthusiastically embraced by Silicon Valley billionaires and their “tech bros” dismantling our government, is called the Dark Enlightenment or the neo-reactionary movement (NRx).
And it’s not entirely new; they believe they have proof that it works, which can be found way over on the other side of the planet. I’ve been there, in fact, and it does seem to be working just fine… if you don’t care about freedom.
Back in 1994 I published a book proposing that ADHD wasn’t a brain disease or disorder but, instead, a form of brain wiring that would be highly adaptive during humanity’s long hunter-gatherer period but can present a struggle for people in today’s factory-like school systems. Time Magazine did a cover story about it, including an article featuring my book, and suddenly I was in demand literally around the world.
One of the countries I visited during the book tour that ensued (the book’s available in more than a dozen languages) was Singapore. A parents’ group had reached out to my publisher and set up an opportunity for me to talk about my theory and ways schools could be reinvented to work for both “normal” and ADHD kids.
I gave the speech and laid out a series of suggestions, and during the Q&A that followed, one of the parents asked how to best convince schools to adopt some of my ideas. I suggested they should “become politically active,” a standard answer in most every other country I’d visited (and here in America). Little did I realize the significance of that phrase.
When I got back to my hotel, an internationally famous five-star tower with a beautiful atrium, my room had been torn apart. The mattress and box springs were on the floor, as were the contents of my suitcase. Every drawer was pulled open. My toiletries kit was all over the bathroom floor.
I called hotel security to report what I thought was a break-in or robbery, although I couldn’t immediately see that anything was missing. The head of security showed up in my room five minutes later with the hotel manager. They looked around the room with neither shock nor alarm.
The manager explained, with a hint (but only a hint) of apology in his voice, “The police were here,” as if that explained everything
“They did this?” I asked, as I recall.
He nodded and said, “Presumably.”
“Why?” I demanded.
Both men shrugged. The head of security asked me if I’d engaged in anything illegal while in Singapore, particularly bringing illegal drugs into the country, and I indignantly denied even the possibility. They shrugged their shoulders again and offered to send a maid up to help make put the room back together.
The next morning, I had breakfast with some of the parents I’d met the afternoon before and told them what happened. They explained, in a whisper, that I never should have mentioned “politics” in my speech.
“It is not allowed here,” as I recall one telling me.
Singapore has come a ways from the mid-1990s, but is still an authoritarian state. As Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein wrote for Mother Jones:
During his reign, [Lee Kuan Yew, aka LKY, Singapore’s former leader] successfully fused pro-corporate libertarian economics and state socialism, creating a distinctly conservative mishmash of social and political control.
Singapore has banned all kinds of free speech; intervened in marriages and family planning; encouraged eugenics; caned people for minor crimes; created an ethnically homogeneous ruling class; treated the migrant worker population as second-class citizens; and, famously, banned chewing gum.
This is LKY’s model: economic development above all else—even human rights. A “soft” authoritarianism, as Fareed Zakaria has called it. “The exuberance of democracy,” LKY explained, “leads to indiscipline and disorderly conduct, which are inimical to development.”
According to the philosopher-king of the Dark Enlightenment movement, the guy who woke up JD Vance, and the billionaires who support him, Singapore is their explicit model for America’s future.
As Kaiser-Schatzlein writes about Curtis Yarvin and the other Dark Enlightenment thinkers who have inspired Musk, Theil, Vance, et al.:
For a new breed of right-wing thinkers, politicians, and activists, LKY’s approach to government is appealing. Curtis Yarvin, Silicon Valley’s resident neo-monarchist, compares LKY to FDR—both good examples, he says, of a unilateral leader.
And Nick Land, an accelerationist philosopher, calls LKY an “autocratic enabler of freedom.”
To them, LKY is the paradigm of an illiberal ruler who created a paradise for his subjects: a freedom without rights, a prosperity without disorder.
Sure, Republicans are going to gut government spending to pay for tax cuts for the billionaires who own them. And they definitely want big Wall Street banks to run Social Security just like George W. Bush handed more than half of Medicare (so far) over to giant for-profit insurance companies. After all, both industries represent such big campaign donors.
But this goes way beyond merely making billionaires richer or giving corporations more power over our lives. The audacious experiment Musk has embarked on—which Trump probably doesn’t even understand—involves the fundamental transformation of America from a nation ruled by its own people into one where decisions are made by a very specific elite group of self-selected “genius” white male technocrats.
And once AI reaches the ability to think with the intelligence of a genius-level human—Artificial General Intelligence or AGI—some of these guys believe that most of the decision-makers and agencies of the federal government can simply be replaced by banks of computers, deciding who gets what, when, and why.
All it’ll take is a monarchical leader who, like KLY, brooks no dissent.
Trump could be that leader—or at least the useful-idiot-frontman for the technocrats like Vance and Musk who are really running things—and the gutting of federal agencies opens up a space to replace them (and their workers) with AGI-based computer systems.
Rana Foorahar explains it in The Financial Times:
The philosophy argues that democracy inherently leads to social decline, because of the development of deep state bureaucracies that are unable to control oligarchic forces, and that societies should be run like corporations, with a kind of CEO Monarch in charge.
As Yarvin has said, “If Americans want to change their government, they need to get rid of dictator phobia... One way of dealing with that is... hire two executives and make sure they work together and there is really no other solution...”
And they’re much further along in the process of both gutting government and seizing total control of our political system to implement this experiment than most Americans realize.
- A new site that lays out exactly how they’re progressing toward their goal of kneecapping the federal bureaucracy is project2025.observer; according to the site, they’re about 40% of the way there, although the courts may set them back temporarily.
- And the project for billionaires to take complete control of our elected officials (and thus our government, at all levels) is also nearly complete: Fully 18% of all spending on the 2024 elections was done by just 150 billionaire families who represent a mere .00000045% of the American population.
The Dark Enlightenment has little use for democracy; openly disdains notions of equality as proposed in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution (viewing them as unnatural and counterproductive); and rejects what they call “Whig historiography,” which assumes history inevitably progresses toward greater liberty and enlightenment.
Instead, like Julius Evola, Thomas Carlyle, and Oswald Spengler, they argue that “classical” societal structures that ruled the world for millennia (like feudalism, monarchy, or cameralism) are superior to democracy and, completely ignoring the history of the development of modern democracy, should—with a high-tech AGI twist—replace today’s democratic “experiment.”
(Ironically, a large portion of the infrastructure that this movement is using was financed by fossil fuel billionaires who simply wanted to avoid paying income taxes and to have their oil companies deregulated so they could make more pollution and thus more profit. Similar to the people who funded the rise of Hitler—including Fritz Thyssen who wrote the book I Paid Hitler after WWII as an apology—many are now surprised, and some even frightened, by the turn of things.)
They are pushing forward with the “move fast and break things” slogan of the Tech industry that Mark Zuckerberg popularized. And they are having breathtaking success, between that strategy and the billions of dollars they are easily able to spend to seize the political power to fulfill their vision. They call themselves “Masters of the Universe” without a trace of irony.
Some high-profile observers of American politics are alert to this takeover-in-progress that most of our media has completely missed. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, for example, recently wrote for his Substack newsletter:
Behind Vance and Musk is a libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Curtis Yarvin comes as close as anyone as being their intellectual godfather. He has written that political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding America’s social order.
In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure.
Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
He notes that these tech-bro “oligarchs of the techno-state” want to replace “inefficient” democracy with “an authoritarian regime replete with technologies they control.”
Rachel Maddow has similarly featured stories about Yarvin and others like him on her program, albeit infrequently. The New Yorker has written about the movement, as have multiple other publications.
Lefty intellectuals and progressive thought leaders are suddenly waking up to the Dark Enlightenment experiment that, like a glacier finally reaching the sea, has been slowly consuming the GOP as it moves along and is now—with hundreds of millions from Elon Musk buying the White House for Trump—suddenly cleaving off massive icebergs of damaged governmental institutions.
But a much wider understanding of what’s really animating Trump’s and Musk’s experimental destruction of our government is needed.
If Americans don’t wake up to the Dark Enlightenment’s creeping grip on the people who control our democracy, we may soon find ourselves living in a country where elections are meaningless, the government serves only the ultra-rich, and freedom exists in name only.
Pass it along… and get into the streets!
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The Big-Tech Warmongers’ American Dream Would Be a Nightmare for the Rest of Us
By all means, let’s unite around a common purpose. But that purpose shouldn’t be a supposedly more efficient way to build killing machines in the service of an outmoded quest for global dominance.
Mar 19, 2025
Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.
As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?” And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands—in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”
Why not put our best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease, and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?
Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is not just a but the genuine path to national salvation, and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”
Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.
Militarism as a Unifying Force
Karp may be right that this country desperately needs a new national purpose, but his proposed solution is, to put it politely, dangerously misguided.
Ominously enough, one of his primary examples of a unifying initiative worth emulating is World War II’s Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. He sees the building of those bombs as both a supreme technological achievement and a deep source of national pride, while conveniently ignoring their world-ending potential. And he proposes embarking on a comparable effort in the realm of emerging military technologies:
The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield—the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century.
And here’s a question he simply skips: How exactly will the United States and its allies “retain exclusive control” of whatever sophisticated new military technologies they develop? After all, his call for an American AI buildup echoes the views expressed by opponents of the international control of nuclear technology in the wake of the devastating atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II—the futile belief that the United States could maintain a permanent advantage that would cement its role as the world’s dominant military power. Nearly 80 years later, we continue to live with an enormously costly nuclear arms race—nine countries now possess such weaponry—in which a devastating war has been avoided as much thanks to luck as design. Meanwhile, past predictions of permanent American nuclear superiority have proven to be wishful thinking. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume that predictions of permanent superiority in AI-driven weaponry will prove any more accurate or that our world will be any safer.
Technology Will Not Save Us
Karp’s views are in sync with his fellow Silicon Valley militarists, from Palantir founder Peter Thiel to Palmer Luckey of the up-and-coming military tech firm Anduril to America’s virtual co-president, SpaceX’s Elon Musk. All of them are convinced that, at some future moment, by supplanting old-school corporate weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they will usher in a golden age of American global primacy grounded in ever better technology. They see themselves as superior beings who can save this country and the world, if only the government—and ultimately, democracy itself—would get out of their way. Not surprisingly, their disdain for government does not extend to a refusal to accept billions and billions of dollars in federal contracts. Their anti-government ideology, of course, is part of what’s motivated Musk’s drive to try to dismantle significant parts of the federal government, allegedly in the name of “efficiency.”
An actual efficiency drive would involve a careful analysis of what works and what doesn’t, which programs are essential and which aren’t, not an across-the-board, sledgehammer approach of the kind recently used to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to the detriment of millions of people around the world who depended on its programs for access to food, clean water, and healthcare, including measures to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS. Internal agency memos released to the press earlier this month indicated that, absent USAID assistance, up to 166,000 children could die of malaria, 200,000 could be paralyzed with polio, and 1 million of them wouldn’t be treated for acute malnutrition. In addition to saving lives, USAID’s programs cast America’s image in the world in a far better light than does a narrow reliance on its sprawling military footprint and undue resort to threats of force as pillars of its foreign policy.
The most damning real-world example of the values Karp seeks to promote can be seen in his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.
As a military proposition, the idea that swarms of drones and robotic systems will prove to be the new “miracle weapons,” ensuring American global dominance, contradicts a long history of such claims. From the “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam to former President Ronald Reagan’s quest for an impenetrable “Star Wars” shield against nuclear missiles to the Gulf War’s “Revolution in Military Affairs” (centered on networked warfare and supposedly precision-guided munitions), expressions of faith in advanced technology as the way to win wars and bolster American power globally have been misplaced. Either the technology didn’t work as advertised; adversaries came up with cheap, effective countermeasures; or the wars being fought were decided by factors like morale and knowledge of the local culture and terrain, not technological marvels. And count on this: AI weaponry will fare no better than those past “miracles.”
First of all, there is no guarantee that weapons based on immensely complex software won’t suffer catastrophic failure in actual war conditions, with the added risk, as military analyst Michael Klare has pointed out, of starting unnecessary conflicts or causing unintended mass slaughter.
Second, Karp’s dream of “exclusive control” of such systems by the U.S. and its allies is just that—a dream. China, for instance, has ample resources and technical talent to join an AI arms race, with uncertain results in terms of the global balance of power or the likelihood of a disastrous U.S.-China conflict.
Third, despite Pentagon pledges that there will always be a “human being in the loop” in the use of AI-driven weaponry, the drive to wipe out enemy targets as quickly as possible will create enormous pressure to let the software, not human operators, make the decisions. As Biden administration Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put it, “If you have a human in the loop, you will lose.”
Automated weapons will pose tremendous risks of greater civilian casualties and, because such conflicts could be waged without putting large numbers of military personnel at risk, may only increase the incentive to resort to war, regardless of the consequences for civilian populations.
What Should America Stand For?
Technology is one thing. What it’s used for, and why, is another matter. And Karp’s vision of its role seems deeply immoral. The most damning real-world example of the values Karp seeks to promote can be seen in his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Not only were Palantir’s systems used to accelerate the pace of the Israeli Defense Force’s murderous bombing campaign there, but Karp himself has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Israeli war effort. He went so far as to hold a Palantir board meeting in Israel just a few months into the Gaza war in an effort to goad other corporate leaders into publicly supporting Israel’s campaign of mass killing.
Are these really the values Americans want to embrace? And given his stance, is Karp in any position to lecture Americans on values and national priorities, much less how to defend them?
Despite the fact that his company is in the business of enabling devastating conflicts, his own twisted logic leads Karp to believe that Palantir and the military-tech sector are on the side of the angels. In May 2024, at the “AI Expo for National Competitiveness,” he said of the student-encampment movement for a cease-fire in Gaza, “The peace activists are war activists. We are the peace activists.”
Invasion of the Techno-Optimists
And, of course, Karp is anything but alone in promoting a new tech-driven arms race. Elon Musk, who has been empowered to take a sledgehammer to large parts of the U.S. government and vacuum up sensitive personal information about millions of Americans, is also a major supplier of military technology to the Pentagon. And Vice President JD Vance, Silicon Valley’s man in the White House, was employed, mentored, and financed by Palantir founder Peter Thiel before joining the Trump administration.
The grip of the military-tech sector on the Trump administration is virtually unprecedented in the annals of influence-peddling, beginning with Elon Musk’s investment of an unprecedented $277 million in support of electing Donald Trump and Republican candidates for Congress in 2024. His influence then carried over into the presidential transition period, when he was consulted about all manner of budgetary and organizational issues, while emerging tech gurus like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz became involved in interviewing candidates for sensitive positions at the Pentagon. Today, the figure who is second-in-charge at the Pentagon, Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military firms, including the emerging tech sector.
But by far the greatest form of influence is Musk’s wielding of the essentially self-created Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) to determine the fate of federal agencies, programs, and employees, despite the fact that he has neither been elected to any position, nor even confirmed by Congress, and that he now wields more power than all of Trump’s cabinet members combined.
As Alex Karp noted—no surprise here, of course—in a February 2025 call with Palantir investors, he’s a big fan of the DOGE, even if some people get hurt along the way:
We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.
Even as Musk disrupts and destroys civilian government agencies, some critics of Pentagon overspending hold out hope that at least he will put his budget-cutting skills to work on that bloated agency. But so far the plan there is simply to shift money within the department, not reduce its near-trillion-dollar top line. And if anything is trimmed, it’s likely to involve reductions in civilian personnel, not lower spending on developing and building weaponry, which is where firms like Palantir make their money. Musk’s harsh critique of existing systems like Lockheed’s F-35 jet fighter—which he described as “the worst military value for money in history”—is counterbalanced by his desire to get the Pentagon to spend far more on drones and other systems based on emerging (particularly AI) technologies.
Of course, any ideas about ditching older weapons systems will run up against fierce resistance in Congress, where jobs, revenues, campaign contributions, and armies of well-connected lobbyists create a firewall against reducing spending on existing programs, whether they have a useful role to play or not. And whatever DOGE suggests, Congress will have the last word. Key players like Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) have already revived the Reaganite slogan of “peace through strength” to push for an increase of—no, this is not a misprint!—$150 billion in the Pentagon’s already staggering budget over the next four years.
What Should Our National Purpose Be?
Karp and his Silicon Valley colleagues are proposing a world in which government-subsidized military technology restores American global dominance and gives us a sense of renewed national purpose. It is, in fact, a remarkably impoverished vision of what the United States should stand for at this moment in history when non-military challenges like disease, climate change, racial and economic injustice, resurgent authoritarianism, and growing neofascist movements pose greater dangers than traditional military threats.
Technology has its place, but why not put our best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease, and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?
Reaching such goals would require reforming or even transforming our democracy—or what’s left of it—so that the input of the public actually made far more of a difference, and leadership served the public interest, not its own economic interests. In addition, government policy would no longer be distorted to meet the emotional needs of narcissistic demagogues, or to satisfy the desires of delusional tech moguls.
By all means, let’s unite around a common purpose. But that purpose shouldn’t be a supposedly more efficient way to build killing machines in the service of an outmoded quest for global dominance. Karp’s dream of a “technological republic” armed with his AI weaponry would be one long nightmare for the rest of us.
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Elon Musk's Shiny New Dystopia Is Just White Supremacy in Cyberpunk Dress
The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from the politics of hatred and racialism.
Mar 08, 2025
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read—no, this is not hyperbole!—like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a 21st-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk’s brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
High Technology and Squalor
Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of—yes!—Elon Musk’s invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.
Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors “under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media.” As she explained, “I’m always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn’t actively murdering them.” Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp’s Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.
Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
The racist tinge to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp’s 2009 “first contact” movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of white nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.
On January 31s, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk’s demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That’s the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).
By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk’s acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS—power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for “Indian hate.” His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance’s project—in comparison to which his wife’s honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.
Overwrite Privileges
Musk maintains that he’s reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a “criminal” organization and the employees of which he called “worms.” He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.
Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they fired hundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn’t immediately rehire the experts since they didn’t have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.
As though intent on causing serial catastrophes for the United States, Trump and his crew then began firing employees of the Federal Aviation Agency without whom air traffic controllers say they cannot do their work. They appear to have done keyword searches for “probationary” employees of the agency whom they let go en masse, unaware that the term has a technical meaning in government. A newly promoted FAA employee with a high level of irreplaceable technical knowledge would still be “probationary” for one month.
And here’s the reality of our governmental moment in the second age of Donald Trump: Rather than cutting governmental fat, the president and DOGE are excising sinew and bone, amputating limbs from key public agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After all, every $100 million of funding for NIH-supported research (often at universities) generates some 76 patents. In turn, such breakthroughs can generate as much as $600 million in continuing research and development funds. Cuts to overhead at universities hosting NIH research threaten to bankrupt the country’s network of unparalleled research universities, setting the U.S. farther behind in a race to innovate in which China has already taken the lead. The DOGE cowboys may tell themselves that private industry will take up the slack, but (bluntly put) that’s a libertarian fairy tale.
Cyber Capital
The tech-bro oligarchy’s rise to power is intimately connected with profound changes in America’s political economy. This country has always had a capitalist system, but it has taken radically different forms over time. Each of those forms has had a strong racial dimension. Today, cyber capital seems in the process of becoming dominant, driven by the internet and large language models (misnamed “artificial intelligence”). The digital economy now represents 12% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than industry, and from 2017 to 2021 it grew seven times as fast as the rest of the economy. It is also giving a fillip to American trade. In 2022, government data indicated that “while U.S. real GDP grew by 1.9%, the U.S. digital economy real value added grew by 6.3% driven primarily by growth in software and telecommunication services.”
This development was foreseen by cyberpunk authors like Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is soon to be an Apple TV serial. His hacker hero, Henry Dorsett Case, takes on the fabulously wealthy Tessier-Ashpool SA, a clan-corporation with its own space station fighting the attempt of an artificial intelligence entity, Wintermute, to become autonomous. An amoral gun-for-hire and adrenaline junkie, Case gradually discovers that he’s actually working for that AI entity, which could be seen as a symbol for oppressed, non-autonomous workers or minorities, and is coerced into helping it. (The Cyberpunk genre often depicts a dystopian world in which the dispossessed, ranging from Haitians to immigrant Mongolians, form defiant subcultures never quite penetrated by white corporate digital power.)
The Ultimate in White Privilege
It has been argued that digital capitalism is intricately interlinked with whiteness as an ideology, serving to perpetuate a racial hierarchy that evolved over the past four centuries. Such a historical interconnection between whiteness and technology functioned as both a tool and a rationale for European colonial expansion. The technology-driven ability to ransack the rest of the world for its wealth turbocharged Europe and North America in the early modern and modern periods. In some instances, as was true with slavery in the United States, Black workers were simply kidnapped and made to work for no pay. The total value of the enslaved in this country on the eve of the Civil War has been estimated at as much as $3.7 billion, among the country’s biggest capital assets at the time.
Elsewhere, instead of outright slavery, an external system of oppressive colonialism was established to extract value from the colonial world for the metropole. South Africa was a classic example of how a white settler-colonial capitalist class from the Netherlands profited from the utter exploitation of Black labor. Consider it no accident that Elon Musk came from South Africa or that such a system, even after it was ended, gave birth to the “PayPal Mafia” of “libertarian billionaires” that has now taken over the U.S government (though they sold PayPal to Ebay in 2002 and no longer own shares in that company).
Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination.
Elon Musk grew up with the ultimate in white privilege, for which he is clearly nostalgic. According to his biographer Walter Isaacson, for instance, his Johannesburg-based father Errol “worked on building hotels, shopping centers, and factories;” held political office in South Africa while it was still an apartheid state; and opposed the very principle of one person, one vote. Black South Africans were excluded from the university Errol Musk attended, had their movements restricted by pass laws, could not shop in white establishments, and had no right to vote.
In 1971, when Elon was born in Pretoria, Black South Africans earned, on average, about a sixth of what the average white worker did. And keep in mind that his father Errol wasn’t even the most hardline supporter of the old regime in his family. He viewed his in-laws, the family of Elon’s mother Maye, as far worse. And indeed, Joshua Haldeman, Elon’s maternal grandfather, a Canadian Nazi, moved to South Africa in 1950 because he liked its apartheid racial segregation and ruling white nationalism. No wonder that, today, his grandson Elon is a supporter of Germany’s neo-Nazi party the AfD.
Peter Thiel, Musk’s comrade-in-arms among the tech-bro oligarchs, is from a German family that moved to the South African town of Swakopmund, which had a substantial German population—many of them unreformed Nazis who idolized Hitler. In the 1980s, at Stanford University, Thiel allegedly proclaimed that “apartheid works.” He now serves as the chief ventriloquist for Vice President JD Vance, hence Vance’s recent attacks on any European attempts to curb racist speech.
District 9
What a resegregated world would look like was imagined as science fiction allegory in Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9. In it, an alien spaceship, perhaps disabled, parks over Johannesburg in 1981. Its passengers descend and live in a ramshackle slum, District 9. After a while, the government decides to exile them to a settlement outside the city, hiring Multinational United, a private corporation, for the purpose. It begins evicting the aliens, smeared as “prawns,” brutalizing them and even performing experiments on them of the kind once used by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. The smarmy white Afrikaner Wikus van de Merwe starts as the corporation’s point man in executing that forcible relocation but becomes infected with alien DNA and begins transforming into one of them. Hoping to reverse that phenomenon, he aids an alien who adopts the human moniker Christopher Johnson. Johnson attempts to return to the mother ship and pilot it to the home world, having discovered to his horror that his people are being experimented on. The film is prescient in highlighting how contemporary capitalist states increasingly view immigration as a problem rather than an asset, how xenophobia drives violence and displacement, and how the role of private corporations in policing citizenship is on the rise.
The South African mafia and their fellow travelers are conducting a counterrevolution. Developments like the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act in the United States and the 1994 end of apartheid rule in South Africa both represented an international wave of reaction against racist politics. Such reforms made it distinctly harder for politicians and businessmen to gain and keep power by stigmatizing people of color and representing them as a “terrorist” threat to whites. The current cyber-coup in Washington, D.C. by this country’s tech broligarchy is intended in part to remove the stigma from such a politics of hatred and racialism.
It should be underlined that birthplace isn’t destiny. Many South African whites, Beukes and Blomkamp among them, are committed to democracy and determined to make their multiracial country work. Musk and Thiel have made a choice about how to respond to the racist culture in which they were raised, seeking to use Donald Trump and crew to create a 21st-century order based on digital authoritarianism and discrimination. Sadly, we have yet to see any of the libertarian racists now in charge of the U.S. government grow a conscience as Blomkamp’s Wikus did.
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