Opinion | It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either

Robb asks whether these developments “are a threat” and answers his own question:

To the extent that they want to dictate how networked decision making will be folded into existing decision making, they may be seen as one. The red — Republican — network is in control of this transition because they are the only ones focused on it. Nobody else appears to understand it. The red network IS in power. The Republican Party is a legacy political organization that serves it.

Gil Duran, a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, who produces a newsletter covering the tech industry, is sharply critical of recent developments. In an email, Duran wrote:

Having realized that money buys political power, these tech billionaires are now trying to buy the entire U.S. government. This is an unprecedented hostile takeover. With Elon Musk as their avatar, they openly dismantle the government and disregard the Constitution. They pose an existential threat to American democracy, and they see this as their moment to seize power.

Many of the tech billionaires who have merged with Trump believe democracy is an outdated software system that must be replaced. They want a future in which tech elites, armed with all-powerful AI systems, are the primary governing force of the planet.

The tech oligarchs, Duran argued,

are an existential threat to democracy. Look at the news. It makes no sense that a presidential administration would seek to crash the economy while allowing an unelected foreign-born billionaire to rip apart the government. This goes against every rule in politics. Trump’s poll numbers are sinking yet he’s taking no steps to correct the course. This is the logic of a suicide bomber.

These billionaires, Duran argued, “are fully in control of Trump’s MAGA Party,” but their ambitions go beyond that. “The Republican Party is simply a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism,” Duran wrote, but “it’s not just the Republican Party that’s lost its soul. The tech authoritarians are also moving to co-opt leaders in the Democratic Party.”

Duran pointed to newly elected Democratic Senators Elissa Slotkin and Ruben Gallego who, Duran wrote,

were elected with massive help from the Fairshake PAC, which was funded by Big Crypto to the tune of nearly $200 million in 2024. This is the same PAC that took out Sherrod Brown and Katie Porter.

The top strategists of Fairshake are Democrats, not Republicans. Now that Big Crypto has helped take control of the Republican Party, it is making a play to co-opt the Democratic Party. It’s crucial to realize that any Democrat who supports crypto has taken the side of the tech billionaires.

Daron Acemoglu of M.I.T., who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, wrote by email:

I find it a little disingenuous that Democrats and the Democratic-leaning press are now talking of oligarchy. There has been a tech oligarchy that was already hugely powerful before Trump’s second term and Obama was the president that played the most important role in their empowerment.

At the same time, in Acemoglu’s view,

Elon Musk’s influence is very problematic, and it goes beyond oligarchy. Most concerningly, he has become personally involved in data collection/capture and policy design and implementation. This is very very problematic. There I completely agree with Democrats and the liberal press.

Acemoglu argued that far more important than what Musk and DOGE are doing, is the fact that

There is a real, mortal threat from Trump against U.S. institutions. It is about setting up Trump’s personal rule, taking control of the F.B.I., D.O.J., O.M.B., G.A.O., and all other agencies that are supposed to be independent of executive power and turning them into tools of his own aggrandizement, corruption and empowerment. What Musk is doing pales in comparison in terms of threat.

Margaret Levi, a political scientist at Stanford and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, agreed in an email that Musk’s activities undermine democracy, but she too argued that the problem of excessive power exercised by tech executives is bipartisan.

“There is no doubt that the tech billionaires have extraordinary political power, particularly in Trump’s second administration,” she wrote. “Musk, of course, exercises that power directly, albeit unaccountably, through DOGE. It is unaccountable and, in some instances, illegal power; it is also irresponsible.”

The billionaires are also exercising indirect power, Levi argued, “through PACs, positions on boards of universities, their nonprofits, social media platforms and in multiple other ways.”

“Some are Republicans, some are Democrats,” Levi wrote:

The problem is not the political and scientific positions of these billionaires. The problem is that they are establishing an oligarchy in which great wealth also ensures great power. The guardrails that used to protect us and inhibit such oligarchical tendencies in the U.S. are degrading fast.

A significant contribution to the problems of high-tech influence over politics and policy is that much of the power exercised by tech oligarchs is invisible to the regular voter.