On Inauguration Day, many felt real euphoria at the prospect of a wholesale renovation of America’s institutions. And, as I’ve argued often, our constitutional democracy does need renovation—the various elites are disconnected from the people, bureaucracy afflicts everyone, and many of us find it impossible to hold our elected officials accountable. Yet I fear that the renovations we’re about to get will take us in the wrong direction.

Americans have been yielding sovereignty to tech magnates and their money for years. The milestones are sometimes startling, even if one has long been aware of where things are heading. I was astonished and alarmed when I learned, in the summer of 2023, that Elon Musk had, within a span of five years, built an orbital network comprising more than half of the world’s active satellites. His share has now risen to more than 60 percent. Already in 2023, he controlled battlefield communications infrastructure used in the war between Ukraine and Russia. Musk is currently the head of Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, which is taking over the U.S. Digital Service. At the same time, he may be making a bid for TikTok’s American platform. Ownership of TikTok brings immense power. In December, the Romanian elections were canceled in the middle of voting because of fears that propaganda from Russia, by means of TikTok, was driving the election results.

Musk is well on his way to controlling the world’s communications infrastructure. This is not by accident. He swims in an intellectual universe, alongside his PayPal associates Peter Thiel (who funded J. D. Vance’s Senate campaign) and David Sacks (now Trump’s AI and crypto czar), whose writers advocate for replacing democratic leadership with a CEO-monarch, and argue that higher-IQ “sovereign individuals” should rule over people with lower IQs. Musk, Sacks, and Thiel all spent formative boyhood years in South Africa. As the historian Jill Lepore noted in The New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather took the family to South Africa for the sake of apartheid, having left Canada after being jailed for his leadership activities in the Technocracy movement, “whose proponents believed that scientists and engineers, rather than the people, should rule.” Thiel has made “freedom” his life’s pursuit. Since 2009, he has argued that freedom is incompatible with democracy, and that “the fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”

[Brooke Harrington: The broligarchs are trying to have their way]

Two original MAGA leaders, Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, have railed against this “techno-feudalism.” That is what they see Musk and his allies trying to bring about, whether in collaboration with Trump or by using him as their puppet. For the first time ever, I find myself agreeing with Bannon and Loomer.

The whole situation went from concerning to surreal when, two days before his inauguration, Trump issued a meme crypto coin, known as $TRUMP. A memecoin is a form of cryptocurrency that has no value-creating function in the crypto ecosystem. Instead, it references some popular phenomenon and gains its value only because of people’s interest in that popular phenomenon. Typically, memecoins also lack the security that could render them a stable part of the crypto financial infrastructure.

The fully diluted value (or market cap when the full supply is circulating) of  $TRUMP, 80 percent of which is owned by entities that the Trump family controls, shot up within 24 hours of its release to more than $70 billion. It is now bouncing around between $20 billion and $30 billion—meaning the president now holds something like 75 to 80 percent of his wealth in crypto. That goes well beyond monetizing the Trump brand through T-shirts, gold sneakers, and steaks. This time, Trump has auctioned himself. Leaving aside the technical substrate, there is arguably little difference between $TRUMP and the president posting a deposit-only Swiss-bank-account number online, into which people can deposit funds and privately show him the receipts for their deposits. His personal wealth now depends on these depositors. He has turned himself—and therefore his office—into a for-profit joint-share stock corporation. People with $TRUMP in their crypto wallets are the shareholders.

[Read: The crypto world is already mad at Trump]

Who knows if the president intended this outcome, but leaders in the crypto space have long hoped for the replacement of nation-states with “network states” encompassing communities that come together on the blockchain. They are celebrating $TRUMP as the first crypto community to have gained control of a nation-state’s powers by capturing the president’s attention through control of his digital wallet. If what Trump has done is upheld as legal or becomes a norm, other global leaders have every incentive to do what he did, turning democratic governance into corporate governance. Melania Trump, for one, has already followed suit; her coin was issued a few days after Trump’s.

Last week, the DOGE homepage displayed the icon for Dogecoin, which Musk has declared to be his favorite coin, and which he holds. (He has faced litigation as a result of accusations that he sought to pump it up; the lawsuit was dismissed.) The icon appeared in vibrant color against a black background. It was removed within 24 hours.

Two features of the $TRUMP memecoin are especially troubling. First, there is the question of who owns the coin. Initial activity for sales of $TRUMP—and, therefore, its financial backing—came from buyers on the platforms Gate and Binance, which are restricted in the United States. Although it will take years of analysis to determine who the eventual beneficial owners are, the reliance on Gate and Binance suggests that early uptake occurred abroad, and particularly in markets controlled by U.S. adversaries—China, Iran, North Korea, Russia. As of 2023, according to a Wall Street Journal report, U.S. trading volume on Binance was very low. Users in China provided Binance with its greatest market share, at 20 percent of trading volume, and about 10 percent of Chinese customers were at the time identified as “politically exposed persons”—that is, according to the Journal report, “government officials, their relatives or close associates who require greater scrutiny due to their greater risk of involvement in bribery, corruption or money laundering.” Because memecoins depend on a collective belief in their value, investors (other than the issuer) who buy the coins are the people who hold up that value. Those early movers on the Gate and Binance platforms can be meaningfully understood to have handed Trump billions, at least on paper. (Steve Gregory, the Gate CEO, was invited to the inauguration.) They also hold power over that wealth. If they withdraw confidence and dump their assets, the value of the coin would trend toward zero. So Trump now appears to owe most of his new wealth to crypto investors in adversary states who are quite possibly closely connected to governments themselves—investors whom the rest of us are not able to identify, but who can identify themselves to him by proudly waving their $TRUMP-filled digital wallets.

[Read: Hawk Tuah wasn’t what it seemed]

Second, there is the question of what it means to convert political office into something that is subject not merely to the general pressure of financial influence but to the power of shareholders over an officeholder’s immediate personal wealth. This is of course why other presidents and senior executive-branch officials have sold off their investments or placed them in blind trusts for the duration of their terms. The neo-reactionary voices in the tech space—the NRx crowd, as they call themselves—have for some time wanted to take the powers of governance over territory out of the hands of nation-states and place them into the hands of platform-based collectives committed to capitalism first and foremost. For years we’ve watched the problem of money in politics get worse and worse, but the Trump coin takes the matter to another level. It provides the technical means for enabling the vision of total capture of governance institutions by tech communities.

What speculative futures are now possible? The president could easily organize a one-token, one-vote referendum—as many coins and decentralized autonomous organizations, which are built out of blockchain communities, already do—among asset holders on major U.S. public-policy issues. Think of it as a corporation giving shareholders their one vote per share. Yes, a corporation has to please its customers—in this analogy, American voters—but it really needs to please the shareholders who help sustain the share price. If $TRUMP were to introduce a voting mechanism for asset holders in this way, it would immediately implement the long-held anarcho-capitalist dream of converting global governance regimes into for-profit joint-stock corporations—minus any Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure requirements, which the president has hinted about relaxing. If other leaders do what Trump has done, then we would see global governance structures generally privatized—and political leaders provided with great incentives to collude with the common interest of capital holders, rather than governing for a true cross-class common good.

Where would that leave voters? In a position somewhat akin to fans at WWE wrestling matches. Politicians, all beholden to a community of shareholders separate from their voters, would collude in steering toward benefits for those shareholders, while pretending to fight one another in public. Imagining such a possibility would seem crazy if people in the tech world hadn’t been writing so much about just this kind of governance structure—and if the technical pieces weren’t now all falling neatly into place.

Trump promised back in 2016 to “drain the swamp,” and he was correct, as I’ve written before, about the need to restore experts to their rightful place as servants of the people rather than quasi-autonomous technocrats who order the world as they think best. But instead of draining the swamp, Trump appears simply to be importing even larger crocodiles from Silicon Valley: multimillionaires and billionaires who mostly couldn’t give a fig for self-government of, by, and for the people. The man who vowed to slay the old “deep state” appears ready to accept a new, more totally controlling, one.

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

Speaking recently on NPR, Bannon used the term techno-feudalism again and went on to explain: “These oligarchs in Silicon Valley, they have a very different view of how people should govern themselves … They don’t believe in the underlying tenets of self-governance.” This seems right. In his inaugural address, Trump echoed Lincoln, promising a new birth of freedom, but just a few rows behind him, among other tech luminaries, was Musk, nearly levitating with joy when Trump promised territorial expansion both on this planet and in space and cheered for DOGE—Musk’s agency and his favorite memecoin.

The principles of popular sovereignty were hard-won—principles that vest the ownership of government in we, the people, not they, the owners of memecoins. When early Americans before, during, and after the Revolution sought to make self-government durable, they circulated pamphlets that articulated the values and tools necessary for successful self-governance. The renovations we need will similarly depend on real understanding of self-government. I’ve been a civic educator my whole life, but now I see an even more urgent need to pick up the pace at which we spread the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers, as well as works that have updated those texts, to sharpen our collective understanding of what popular sovereignty requires.

After the British government first allowed the East India Company, traffickers in tea, to rule India, and then fell into a full fiscal entanglement with the company, Americans dumped the company’s tea in Boston Harbor. Maybe it’s time to dump Dogecoin.

To see how far the lines of normal have moved since President Donald Trump freed the January 6ers, briefly return to the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign. At the time, a hot issue was whether Trump harbored fascist tendencies, as some of his former aides alleged. The very notion struck most conservatives, including some who have criticized him from time to time, as ludicrous. “Trump says crude and unworthy things and behaved abysmally after the 2020 election,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, conceded, “but the idea that he bears any meaningful resemblance to these cracked movements is a stupid smear.”

Looking to dismiss the case, Lowry then reached for the wildest example of fascist behavior he could think of: “Obviously, Trump isn’t deploying a paramilitary wing of the GOP to clash with his enemies on the streets.”

Obviously? Immediately upon assuming office, Trump issued sweeping pardons and commutations for the approximately 1,500 people prosecuted for participating in the January 6 attacks, including convicted violent offenders. He might not have literally deployed any mobs yet, but he has freed members of paramilitary groups that are loyal to him, and who may see their pardons and commutations as license to act on his behalf again.

[Read: January 6ers got out of prison—and came to my neighborhood]

Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, led military-style maneuvers on January 6 and had an armed strike force nearby. This week, while strolling the Capitol in a kind of victory tour, Rhodes told CNN, “I don’t regret calling out the election as what it was.” The Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who had to direct the attacks from a distance (a judge had barred him from the city for vandalizing a Black church), expressed vindication and a desire for revenge. “We went through hell—and I’m gonna tell you, it was worth it,” he exulted on The Alex Jones Show. “The people who did this [to us], they need to feel the heat. They need to be put behind bars.” And the “Stop the Steal” organizer Ali Alexander said in a livestream, “I would storm the Capitol again for Donald Trump. I would start a militia for Donald Trump.”

The J6 pardons have chagrined many Republicans. But it is not going to make many of them rethink their support for Trump. If you want to understand why, look again at the sentence that Lowry wrote just before laughing off the hysterical fear of Trumpist paramilitaries. Trump “says crude and unworthy things.” He “behaved abysmally.”

Even when Republicans in good MAGA standing can bring themselves to scold Trump, their criticism is limited to discrete acts. Trump can say or do something bad, but he cannot be something bad. To acknowledge that his bad acts follow from his character and beliefs, and therefore offer a guide to his future actions, would throw into question the morality and wisdom of supporting him.

Before the fact, vanishingly few prominent Republican politicians or conservative intellectuals actively endorsed the notion of freeing the J6 criminals en masse. The party line before the inauguration held that Trump was in his rights to grant clemency to some of the nonviolent offenders, but not to the ones who’d beat up cops or planned the operation. The week before he was sworn in as vice president, J. D. Vance said, “If you committed violence on that day, obviously you shouldn’t be pardoned.” Even Representative Jim Jordan, one of the most flamboyant Trump devotees in Congress, wouldn’t endorse a full suite of pardons.

After Trump went ahead, his allies mostly stopped short of defending the pardons. Instead, they turned to a familiar menu of evasive maneuvers. Some expressed an implausible degree of unfamiliarity with Trump’s actions. (“I don’t know whether there were pardons given to individuals who assaulted police officers,” Senator Susan Collins said.) Others fell back on whataboutism. (“I assume you’re asking me about the Biden pardons of his family,” Senator Chuck Grassley sneered in response to a reporter’s question about January 6. “I’m just talking about the Biden pardons, because that is so selfish.”) Most expressed a desire to ignore the issue altogether. (“We’re not looking backwards; we’re looking forwards,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said.) Awkwardly, almost immediately after bleating about their desire to move forward, House Republicans announced a new committee to “investigate” January 6, which presumably will advance Trump’s alt-history of the event as an FBI setup, a Democratic security failure, a day of love, or, somehow, all three.

[Listen: Even some J6ers don’t agree with Trump’s blanket pardon]

The most revealing statement on the pardons came from House Speaker Mike Johnson. “The president’s made his decision,” he said. “I don’t second-guess those.” Here, Johnson was stating overtly what most of his colleagues had only revealed tacitly: that he does not believe that his job permits him to criticize, let alone oppose, Trump’s actions.

This admission has profound implications. It shows that Trump faces no effective constraints from within his party. Given the Republican trifecta, this means he faces no effective opposition from within the elected branches of the federal government. Even if his allies personally believe that a line exists that the president cannot or will not cross, what matters is that if he does cross it, nothing will happen to him. This realization ought to shake their confidence that the next imagined red line will hold. Instead, they have declined to revise any of their deeper beliefs about Trump.

The refusal to draw any broader conclusions from the January 6 pardons is evident not just on Capitol Hill but also in the handful of reproachful articles published in conservative media. The pardons are “a poor start for an administration that has pledged to end the partisanship of law enforcement and restore public order,” National Review editorialized. “This is a rotten message from a President about political violence done on his behalf,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. “For those who have supported Trump, this is a moment to recognize when he doesn’t measure up, morally or constitutionally,” the editors of The Free Press observed. The implication of these dutiful reprimands is that Trump has failed to live up to his values, rather than having fulfilled them.

In the midst of the Soviet show trials in 1936, Workers Age, an American communist newspaper, gently rebuked Stalin for his heavy-handedness. Sure, the defendants were guilty of sabotage at the behest of Trotsky, but execution was an excessive punishment. “Furthermore,” the editorial declared, “we do not hesitate to say that the bureaucratic regime of Stalin in the CPSU makes it extremely difficult for healthy, constructive critical opposition forces developing in the Party ranks”—as if inhibiting criticism of Stalin was some kind of unintended consequence of executing his rivals.

[Read: Republican leaders once thought January 6 was ‘tragic’]

The conservatives distressed over Trump’s mass pardons have a similar lack of curiosity about his motives. Why Trump would take such unfortunate actions, they do not ask. Could it be because he believes fundamentally that opposition to him is per se criminal, action on his behalf is per se legal, and any outcome in which he loses is illegitimate?

One might hope that Trump’s congressional allies, temporarily disappointed by his regrettable lapse in judgment regarding the January 6 pardons, might rethink their approach to the ongoing confirmation fights, which revolve around fears that the president will abuse his power. Given Trump’s reported desire to use the military to shoot peaceful protesters, maybe find a defense secretary who hasn’t written a series of hair-on-fire books depicting American liberals as tantamount to hostile enemy combatants. And given Trump’s obsession with criminalizing his critics, they might pick an FBI director who does not have an enemies list and who hasn’t produced a recording of a Trump anthem performed by violent insurrectionists.

Alas, the “moment,” as The Free Press revealingly put it, for expressing disappointment with the president has already passed. They are back to the workaday routine of supporting Trump’s efforts to keep his administration free of any official who might be stricken with conscience. There may be more moments of concern in the future. Indeed, the party’s acquiescence to Trump’s appetite for revenge and corruption all but guarantees it. But those moments, too, shall pass.

The internet, a friend of mine once argued to me, is like a sprawling city: Everyone knows there are neighborhoods you shouldn’t wander into, but it would be wrong to prohibit people from entering them.

The problem with my friend’s view is that whereas one has to go looking for bad neighborhoods, the internet’s dangers—specifically and most perniciously, pornography—come looking for you, even if you happen to be a child. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation found that dummy accounts that specified their age as 13 were regularly served up soft porn by Instagram’s algorithms. Upon the accounts’ creation, Instagram began showing the imaginary users “moderately racy” content, such as women dancing seductively or dressed provocatively. Once these accounts lingered on such videos, Instagram began introducing more graphic videos and posts. “Adult sex-content creators began appearing in the feeds in as little as three minutes,” the Journal reported. “After less than 20 minutes watching Reels, the test accounts’ feeds were dominated by promotions for such creators, some offering to send nude photos to users who engaged with their posts.”

In fact, porn is so ubiquitous online that it’s tempting to dismiss the preponderance of porn available to children as mainly harmless in most cases—a rite of passage for kids growing up on the internet. But childhood exposure to porn is a public-health concern with serious, long-term ramifications for children. Their interests are essentially collateral damage in adults’ right to consume porn as they please, and a massive industry’s interest in preserving its billions of dollars a year in revenue.

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Some websites take greater care than Instagram or X in preventing minors from accessing sexual content, and recent legislation across the South has begun requiring age verification before a user can browse sites such as Pornhub. But whatever safeguards are in place to protect minors online, they don’t seem to be working. A 2023 report by Common Sense Media found that the average age of first pornography exposure in American children is 12, and another 2023 survey conducted for the Children’s Commissioner for England revealed that a quarter of British youths ages 16 to 21 had been exposed to porn for the first time in primary school. An Australian survey last year, meanwhile, placed the average age of first pornography exposure at a little over 13. Just more than half of the American minors surveyed said that they had encountered porn accidentally; 38 percent of the British young people surveyed reported the same. If safeguards are in place to protect children from coming into contact with porn, they appear laughable.

Childhood experiences with pornography can be distressing for children and can negatively affect their sexual development. Research presented at the 125th Annual Convention of the American Psychology Association in 2017 found that the earlier a man’s first exposure to porn was, the more likely he was to desire power over women, suggesting that contact with porn at an early age may contort a child’s sexual development. One 12-year-old interviewed for the British survey said that her boyfriend had strangled her during their first kiss—part of a trend teenagers I interviewed in 2021 also brought up. A Taiwanese longitudinal study of youths further found that early porn exposure predicted an earlier sexual debut and participation in unsafe sex. A third of respondents in the Australian study indicated that they relied on porn for information about sex, a concerning substitute for proper education—the sort provided by people who know and care for children, not by people attempting to sell them sex. Along with these specific risks, children are also subject to all of the usual problems cited with the adult use of porn: internalizing unrealistic standards for sex, developing excessive consumption habits, becoming desensitized to sexual violence. The main difference is that when porn use begins in childhood, it steps in to miseducate desires that have yet to fully form.

Proponents of porn use generally crusade under the banner of free speech—the Free Speech Coalition, an organization currently fighting a Texas law that would require porn sites to collect proof that users are over 18, is a porn-industry lobbying group. On Wednesday, the FSC argued against the state of Texas over these age-verification laws before the Supreme Court, claiming that these laws abrogate the exercise of free speech. (Pornhub, along with other major porn distributors, has already withdrawn operations from several southern states with age-verification laws on the books.) Even an FSC attorney admitted at the Supreme Court that the organization recognizes the government’s compelling interest in preventing porn from reaching minors.

My friend who analogized the internet to a city with good and bad neighborhoods perhaps failed to consider that the people traversing those streets are in many cases children, and in our society, children’s issues are especially fraught—see recent conflicts about which books should be available to children in their school libraries, and about whether children should be allowed to change their identity at school or their body. All of these debates really are, as the scholar Rita Koganzon wrote in a Yale Law Journal article published last year, “part of an ongoing culture war between factions of adults.” It’s unfortunate that arguments over how to protect children from exposure to porn are very likely to be proxy battles between adults’ differing views on whether porn is good, bad, or neutral—each debate deserves to play out separately, without the interests of children being made subordinate to the interests of adults. The risks associated with childhood porn exposure are real, and worthy of society’s special attention.