Over the past few weeks, the false promise of the American Dream has been replaced by the brutal reality of the Broligarch Nightmare. Crafted by a dystopian team-up of tech billionaires, white Christian nationalists, and various transphobes, misogynists, rapists, and racists, all the horrors of the United States have been amplified and accelerated. At the same time, any artifacts of its progressive potential are swiftly being erased, deported, or incarcerated. As tech bros disassemble the government with assistance from artificial intelligence (AI), they are building both the world they want and the weapons to secure it.
While some might find legitimate merit in the disassembly of the US government, which has operated as an imperialist warmonger for more than a century while generating vast inequalities and repression at home, the concerns expressed here are not about defending what was, but are about what is being built in its place, and who is building it, and what harms they are producing now and intend to inflict moving forward.
Hacking the government
“In the span of just weeks,” reports Foreign Affairs, “the U.S. government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.”
The breach has seen Elon Musk’s unsanctioned and unsupervised “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) modifying computer programmes, accessing encrypted keys that secure financial transactions, altering audit logs that record system changes, connecting unauthorized servers into networks, and training AI software on sensitive data. The young misogynist tech bros working for Musk have brought the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley to Washington, DC. As Kelly Hayes notes, “what’s being broken is the machinery of government.”
Foreign Affairs warns that the situation has gone far beyond unauthorized access—any of the systems that the DOGE boys have mucked around in could now be vulnerable to anyone seeking access to federal data. Furthermore, as the Philadelphia Inquirer eloquently explains, the blitzkrieg led by Elon Musk “and his small cult of 20-something dude-bro minions against the federal government” has so far included “crushing foreign aid and consumer protection, threatening the Department of Education and seeking a chokehold over the entire federal payment system.”
The way DOGE has approached the government reflects the same dangerous spirit with which Musk has operated his companies, including the cavalier attitude he has displayed in regard to his exploding rockets. (When the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Space X launches due to safety concerns, Musk complained about the “broken regulatory structure” and asserted, “Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.” Unsurprisingly, Trump fired the FAA’s top administrator as one of his first acts in office.) It’s also the same anti-regulation and anti-transparency attitude with which Musk has run Telsa. A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration once said that Musk “considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him.”
But the “move fast and break things” approach to government is even worse than crashing rockets or self-driving cars. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s description of Musk’s rise to unelected leader of the United States is particularly apt:
The newest dystopian thriller that everyone is talking about these days is a little hard to swallow, even by Hollywood standards. The supervillain is an almost cartoonish sort: The world’s richest man with a drug habit, 11 scattered kids, and a penchant for sleeping on couches (if at all). With his posse of young male tech groupies, he uses his billions to first buy the political discourse, then a greedy puppet president, and finally, through him, the levers of government.
It’s almost too late when the masses learn the villain’s real purpose: To replace the flawed humanity of democracy with machines designed by an unaccountable tech elite. And the heroes of our story—a gaggle of activists, outsider journalists and mid-level politicians who realize the truth—are running out of time.
Musk’s rampage through the Treasury Department and other federal agencies, firing workers and cancelling programmes that have helped millions of people survive in the United States and abroad, is in part about funding tax cuts for the rich and financing the Musk’s companies. (Musk’s claims about freezing government contracts and ending corruption are vanquished by reality—while Musk is decimating the US foreign aid and education budgets, SpaceX received a $7.5 million contract with NASA and Telsa is forecast to win a $400 million contract to provide armoured vehicles to the State Department—although after Drop Site News broke that story, the government has reportedly scrambled to conceal or even backtrack the contract.)
But the DOGE mission is about more than money—it’s fundamentally about dismantling democracy. It’s about replacing humans with machines. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be,” one government official told the Washington Post. “And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats.” Even other Silicon Valley executives are ringing the alarm bells about the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the DOGE project. Mike Brock of the financial technology company Block writes, “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.” He explains that those supporting DOGE’s efforts “believe that democracy is a kind of inefficient mob rule, broken beyond repair,” and “that a high-tech-flavored ‘creative destruction’ could replace it with a notion of better government through computer engineering.”
DOGE’s use of artificial intelligence to pursue its goals are key to the pace and intensity of the ongoing destruction. The New Yorker reports that DOGE is using AI software to identify potential budget cuts at the Department of Education and to scan Department of Treasury grant proposals for forbidden terms—including “climate change” and “gender identity”—and then block the proposals. In the process, the New Yorker argued, “Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot.”
TechPolicy has described DOGE’s actions as “an AI coup,” noting that it “concentrates power with those who understand and control this system’s maintenance, upkeep, and upgrades.” Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, argues that what’s happening at the federal agencies is “a stark portrait of why power seeks to automate—and why, in enterprise AI, it has found an ideal vessel for corporate and administrative automation.” Displacing labor is part of the goal, Merchant explains, noting that DOGE “is seeking to winnow the federal workforce by driving out nonpartisan workers with the lowest tolerance for the new, ideologically motivated regime, and promising to replace the bulk of their tasks with AI.” But more than that, the AI coup is about control:
Automation necessitates the narrowing of scope, of information input into a system, of possibility—so that a job or a task or work can be more predictably and repetitively performed on behalf of an administrator. In DOGE, we see the logic of automation—of enterprise AI—being imposed by a nascent oligarchic state. We thus see less information available to the world, fewer options available to the humans working to provide it, fewer humans, period, to contest those in power, as that power concentrates in their hands.
The idea that “millions of government workers can be replaced by AI systems that have trouble counting to 50, are still prone to hallucinations, cannot ably function in physical spaces, and have no institutional knowledge—is absurd on its face,” argues Merchant. Similarly, the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that “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.”
But the absurdity of the claims of efficiency or neutrality offered by the AI coup is not really the point. The motivations of those behind the coup are clear: AI, the Inquirer notes, “offers an excuse to govern America with the same foundations of white supremacy and misogyny that thrive in the tech world,” and to generate “more obscene wealth for themselves and the same impunity for their crimes that Trump has granted himself.”
As WIRED reported, Musk recruited some of his minions from Palantir, a company that provides its AI technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli Defense Forces, and whose co-founder Peter Thiel financially backed JD Vance’s political career all the way to the vice presidency. WIRED notes that each of these men “display a childish hunger for power as well. This hunger is childish in that there remains no conception of the other. Our lives do not matter to these people—in the adolescent sense of superiority that pervades the tech robber baron class we are lesser beings, therefore undeserving of say in the world they childishly believe they created.” They are actively trying to build a new world, but fail to recognize or acknowledge that their world is one of massive inequality, a climate crisis, and overt fascism.
Inequality, climate crisis, and human rights violations are being exacerbated by these men’s development of, support for, and use of AI. Arguing that AI is doublespeak for austerity, Amnesty Tech staffers point out that where AI has been deployed in the public sector it has consistently created punished people living in poverty and marginalized communities. Stargate, Trump’s vanity AI project to build clusters of gigantic data centers across the country, is case in point. The data centers, activist Koohan Paik-Mander writes in CounterPunch, will be built on federal lands, collectively use as much power as small European nations, require massive volumes of water, and compel the construction of new nuclear reactors. While this may suit the techno-fascist vision of billionaires, it will mean further poverty and pain for most people and the planet.
As WIRED says, the broligarchy continues “to act as greedy children, dumping billions into an AI industry that sucks up our water, backing Trump and fossil fuel extraction, and attacking any semblance of democracy.” Within this wreckage, “there isn’t space for most of us in the world that will result from their actions. They’d prefer to replace workers with robots and AI, with no plan for the billions of angry people who will remain except violence.”
Weapons of the broligarch
Violence is indeed a big piece of the AI project. And as always, the US government is seeking a monopoly on violence.
The tech bros have been laying the groundwork for this AI coup for years, but the shape of it is becoming crystal clear now. Speaking at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris on 11 February, Vance ominously warned the world that it must support Big Tech and US artificial intelligence enterprises—or else. Accusing certain governments of “tightening the screws” on US tech companies, he said, “America cannot and will not accept that, and we think it’s a terrible mistake, not just for the United States of America, but for your own countries.” Railing against European regulation of AI, Vance claimed, “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety.” The United States refused to sign the multilateral pledge, endorsed by 60 other governments at the Summit, to “reduce digital divides” and “ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy.”
This approach to global AI governance is quite the turnaround from 2023, when tech industry leaders, including Musk, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and a top Google AI researcher—signed an open letter warning that “the risk of extinction from [artificial intelligence] should be a global priority.” Musk, Altman, and others also signed another open letter calling for a six-month pause on the development of AI, citing concerns about “an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds.” However, many of the signatories, including Altman and Musk, proceeded full steam ahead with AI development.
Now, as The New York Times reports, “there’s much less talk about AI risks” because “executives seemed to have realized it’s easier to get policymakers excited about AI if they’re not worried it’s going to kill them.” Downplaying the risks of the technology is essential to its use for taking over the government and dismantling democracy. Downplaying the risks is also essential for its weaponization. And as the tech bros take over the US government, there are also insidious signals about their designs on the military—specifically, on the development and management of weapon systems.
Just ten days after the inauguration of Big Tech to the White House, OpenAI announced that it had signed an agreement with the US National Laboratories, including in relation to a “comprehensive program in nuclear security.” Futurism raised significant concerns about this announcement, highlighting “plenty of instances of OpenAI’s AI models leaking sensitive user data and hallucinating false claims with abandon” and asking how the company can ensure that its “frequently lying AI chatbots won’t leak the nuclear codes or trigger the next nuclear war.” Furthermore, given what has transpired at the federal government over the past few weeks, it’s not possible to have any confidence in tech bros having any access to anything related to nuclear weapons—especially as Musk keeps trolling Altman about taking over his company.
The coupling of AI and nuclear weapons, while terrifying, is not the only concern about how this technology is and will be used. The broligarch is already producing horrific AI technologies to “predict” crime or criminal behaviour, monitor and track migrants, and surveil activists. It’s now also going to fuel Trump’s deportation machine, and could be used soon to surveil online “sentiment” about ICE. The implications of this are profound for the constitutional right to freedom of speech. Together with the crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protestors—including the use of facial recognition to identify them and threats to deport them—attempts to silence critics of ICE are terrifying, as a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center told The Intercept. “Threats to ‘punish’ opponents or deport those exercising 1st Amendment rights combine with these invasive practices to create a real ‘thought police’ scenario.”
The use of AI to suppress dissent won’t stop silencing activists and migrants. The trajectory of horror this technology can produce is well demonstrated by the startup Anduril. As Michael Klare explains, Anduril began in 2017 with border security contracts, installing AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at US military bases in Japan and the United States. Later, it was awarded a contract to build surveillance towers on the US-Mexican border. After that, contacts for surveillance and attack drones started rolling in, and the company is now developing a prototype for the Air Force’s proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones. Most recently, Anduril announced that it is building a new billion-dollar factory that could “eventually produce tens of thousands of autonomous systems and weapons each year.”
The violent technologies produced by these companies can be applied to borders, policing, and war—and as long as the shareholders are making a profit, it seems there is no line they won’t cross. In fact, many of the broligarchs celebrate the violence of their products in ways that would make George Orwell gasp. At a conference sponsored by Palantir in May 2024, the top weapon manufacturers and technology companies gathered for the inaugural “AI Expo for National Competitiveness.” Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp justified Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and blasted the student encampments for Palestine, asserting, “The peace activists are war activists,” while those providing the weapons “are the peace activists.” Similarly gobsmacking, a recent New York Times article about the relationship between Christianity and tech billionaires quoted Anduril’s co-founder Trae Stephens as saying that he believed his company’s products are “just and moral” and that, like Oppenheimer, he is “accepting the fate of the divine in the execution of justice,” rather than a “love of violence.”
In reality, we’ve already seen the devastating effects of Israel’s use of AI systems in its identification and targeting of Palestinians to commit genocide. It is a horrifying example of the execution of injustice, and arguably, based on the glee with which Israeli soldiers have committed war crimes—as demonstrated in their own social media posts —does reflect a love of violence.
US companies, as usual, are keen not to miss out on building the capacity for this kind of slaughter. (Israel’s tech developments and deployments often guide that in the United States.) Just two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Google dropped its pledge not to build AI for weapons or surveillance. (Google has also removed Black History Month, Pride Month, Indigenous People’s Month, and others from its calendars and renamed the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America on its maps, cementing its broligarchy lapdog status.) Once upon a time, Google workers rose up against the company’s contract with the Pentagon to provide Project Maven’s drone targeting program. A few years later, the company is eager to get back in the game.
The game is already afoot. The United States has been developing AI-enabled weapons and autonomous weapon systems for years, while simultaneously blocking international regulation of such weapons. In 2023, the Biden administration greenlighted the Replicator initiative to “award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry.” At the same time, Biden’s diplomats at the UN in Geneva were stalling the negotiation of international law prohibiting and restricting autonomous weapon systems, even as the majority of the world is pushing for binding rules against weapons operating without meaningful human control.
Broligarch industrial complex
Echoing Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address, former US President Biden warned of the tech-industrial complex. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that really threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” said Biden. Unsurprisingly, he did not acknowledge the role of his own or past Democratic administrations in paving the way for this, including by providing ever-increasing funds for the border industrial complex, prison industrial complex, military-industrial complex, and nuclear weapon complex, and the emerging tech-industrial complex and likely AI arms race.
Big Tech has increasingly received Pentagon contracts over the past six years. According to the nonprofit research organization Tech Inquiry, three of the world’s biggest tech corporations were awarded approximately $28 billion from 2018 to 2022, including Microsoft ($13.5 billion), Amazon ($10.2 billion), and Alphabet, which is Google’s parent company ($4.3 billion). The Costs of War project also found that from 2021 through 2023, venture capital firms reportedly pumped nearly $100 billion into military tech startup companies.
The Democrats, as usual, have set the stage for the new regime to pour buckets of taxpayer money to develop the weapons it wants. Which is likely why DOGE hasn’t yet gone near the Department of Defense (DoD)’s $850 billion military budget—which includes for this year $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weapons. The Pentagon’s budget accounts for about half of all federal discretionary spending, and as activists have pointed out, “is plagued by cost overruns and it too often purchases dysfunctional weapons systems that don’t perform as advertised and don’t align with the department’s own declared strategy.”
While there are reports that DOGE has the DoD in its sights, and Trump has said he would like to cut the military budget in half, Senate Republicans are simultaneously pursuing an increase to the military budget by up to $346 billion over the next four years to fund both the Pentagon and the government’s cruel mass deportation plan, for which it wants to use the military.
DOGE also has not yet addressed the Department of Energy’s budget for nuclear weapons, even though ending the US nuclear weapon program would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget—and help save the world from potential nuclear Armageddon. As Dan Vergano of Scientific American argues, that would be “much more real, and smarter, than the imaginary trillions that Trump’s budget director paused in January to sniff for ‘woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,’ among other targets.” Trump is reportedly interested in reducing spending on nuclear weapons and “denuclearizing” along with China and Russia, but has also said this would only happen when things “calm down a bit”.
Musk, who operates his own industrial complex (which Reuters has found to have resulted in harms to consumers, worker, and laboratory animals), has had a tense relationship with the Pentagon. He has previously critiqued wasteful spending, with the F-35 fighter jet a principal (and legitimate) target of his wrath. But it remains to be seen how the traditional military-industrial complex, as compared to the new tech-industrial complex of Silicon Valley startups, might fare under the new regime in Washington.
Michael Klare suggests that if the military budget is increased, funding will likely keep flowing to both traditional weapon contractors like Lockheed Martin and RTX as well as the startups. But if the budget is cut by DOGE, competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could arise. Klare points out that this “might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.”
Either way, weapon makers will profit, and people will die.
The need for neo-Luddites
From its use to destroy democracy to its potential to destroy humanity, AI risks are very real, and very present. Much of the mainstream discourse on AI from those who are concerned about it focuses on “good governance” and “AI ethics”. But some human rights experts and activists are asking, is AI good for anyone?
From predictive policing to border control to targeting systems for weapons, AI is leading to human rights violations and even death. Furthermore, AI’s enormous energy consumption undermines any attempts to mitigate the climate crisis; the mining for minerals necessary to AI is leading to armed conflict and human rights abuses; and mega corporations are monopolizing the market on computing power, materials, and infrastructure.
Lawyer Marlena Wisniak and researcher Matt Mahmoudi note that the core logics underpinning how AI is designed are also destructive. These include the necessity of surveillance—and thus privacy violations—to make AI models work; the “very skewed, colonial, patriarchal, misogynist, and disinformation-laden hierarchies of knowledge” that AI models are trained on; and that “the outputs of AI systems are often seen as predictions, when they’re at best problematic ‘guestimates’ based on often unreliable and inappropriate logics and datasets.”
Wisniak and Mahmoudi urge us to refuse the techno-fascist fantasy of a world order ruled by AI, and call instead for the imagining of something different:
What if the enthusiasm and resources spent on AI were redirected to health and social programs? How might communities’ lives improve if the funds used for automated policing were invested in justice and reparations? What if the water consumed by data centers was returned to indigenous communities? What if we had the right to refuse rampant datafication and have meaningful choice in the aspects of everyday life we want to engage in digitally?
In the 1800s, as Brian Merchant writes in Blood in the Machine, working people rose up against automation threatening their livelihoods and lives. The Luddites took aim at the entrepreneurs, factory owners, and the machines themselves. “Even though that uprising took place two centuries ago,” argues Merchant, “it contained the seeds of a conflict that continues to shape our relationship to work and technology today. In many ways, our future still depends on the outcome of that conflict.”
We can see other remnants of the Luddites in the tech workers that have organized within their companies to cancel Pentagon contracts or who have quit their jobs in protest. We can even see these remnants in the development of alternative tech platforms that undermine surveillance, fascist algorithms, or monopoly power. But saving humanity from the destructive potential of AI—whether it comes in the form of a cut of a life-saving program or The Terminator—will require not just tech workers but all of us to refuse the world the broligarchs are building and work in solidarity to build something that works for the rest of us.
