Last week, the erstwhile fire-breathing, MAGA-roaring, Trump-praising Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) appeared on 60 Minutes with host Lesley Stahl.
MTG recently fell afoul of Trump by insisting on the release of the Epstein files. The president turned on her with vengeance. He nicknamed her Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown and unleashed his online attack dogs. MTG quickly announced her resignation from Congress.
I want to zero in on one interesting tidbit from the 60 Minutes interview. It was her observation that GOP members used to gleefully make fun of Trump behind his back at every opportunity, but now act slavishly at his command. The reach afforded to him via social media and other technologies makes him someone you don’t want to cross – he can, and does, ruin careers in a single post.
It is not a new observation that he or she with the loudest bullhorn owns the message. But that is not the whole story – the real truth is that it is the makers of the bullhorns who now hold sway in US politics, not the person who speaks through one. Those are the tech billionaires, perhaps no more than ten of them.
In the last few decades, a quiet but seismic shift has occurred in the bedrock of US democracy. The “Tech Bro” influence – once confined to disrupting taxi services or hotel bookings – has disrupted the biggest industry of them all: the United States government. We are witnessing a system where technology billionaires, effectively American oligarchs, increasingly decide the direction of politics. They pick who wins, they pick who loses, and they decide which policies get written into law.
On the right, you have the holy trinity of disruption: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Their influence isn’t just about writing cheques; it’s about world-building.
Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire, has been playing 4D chess with American politics for years. He was the force behind JD Vance’s rise to prominence, bankrolling his Senate run and effectively catapulting him into the VP slot. Thiel doesn’t just want lower taxes; commentators have noted his interest in “sovereign individuals” who reside free of government control; he is sceptical that freedom and democracy are compatible.
The über venture capitalist
Then there is Marc Andreessen, the über venture capitalist who wrote the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, isn’t just investing in startups anymore; they are investing in ideology. Through what they call “American Dynamism”, they are pushing for a world where tech solutions replace government functions. Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz actually come from the left-wing – they were fervent Democrat supporters up until the Biden administration and their regulatory zeal, which Andreessen believed would hamper innovation, causing the US to fall behind others, specifically China. That flipped him into team Trump.
And, of course, Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) wasn’t just a business deal; it was a purchase of the public square. By tweaking the algorithms and amplifying specific voices, he has turned a communication platform into a political weapon. As Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage, points out, we are seeing a “radicalisation of Silicon Valley” where these figures are no longer content to just build gadgets – they want to re-engineer society itself. Musk doesn’t just lobby for laws; he effectively runs his own foreign policy via Starlink and has turned X into his personal voice for his specific brand of politics.
Others on the right (or at least the centre-right, or pragmatic right) are Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Larry Ellison, and Michael Dell; all directing their considerable financial muscle to their own political worldviews. Mega yachts and private islands are no longer that interesting.
On the other side of the aisle, the user might point to Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Bill Gates, and ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as liberal counterweights. But the reality is murkier and perhaps more cynical. They also know which way the wind blows, at least in this climate. But they also spend great gobs of money on politics, only more quietly.
So where does this leave elected officials? Mostly, on their knees.
Congressmen and women have become little more than customer service representatives for their donors. The cost of running a campaign has skyrocketed, and the only people with the liquidity to fund modern Super PACs are the tech elite.
Unseating sceptics and installing boosters
When a bill comes up to regulate AI or crypto, notice how fast the music becomes monophonic in Washington. We saw this with the crypto lobby’s massive spending in recent cycles – effectively unseating sceptics and installing boosters. As The Guardian reported, the crypto industry’s war chest is now one of the biggest in Washington, forcing politicians to “kiss the ring” or face a primary challenge funded by magical internet money.
These politicians aren’t stupid; they know who their paymasters are. They know that one angry tweet from Musk can unleash a horde of harassment and dry up small-dollar donations, while one favourable meeting with Andreessen can secure a seven-figure cheque for their Super PAC.
Commentators like tech critic Cory Doctorow often refer to the “enshittification” of platforms, where services get worse as they exploit users. The same is happening to our politics. It is being “enshittified” by billionaires who view the US government not as a sacred institution, but as a legacy code base that is buggy, inefficient, and due for a total rewrite.
Which brings me back to MTG. Nothing she said should really surprise us. But having been a flagbearer, her observation carries more weight than most, even given her unsavoury past (for anyone who doubts this, please look up her “Jewish lasers form space” comment).
We seem to have entered a new polity wherein voters and their representatives are merely a puppet show, with the script being written anonymously and the production being funded by rich men who think they have a better idea than the rest of us how to run a society.
Given the trajectory of things in the US and elsewhere over the last decade or two, one could be forgiven for wondering if they may be right.
[Image: reve.art]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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