If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Matteo Wong on Signal at @matteowong.52.

A new phase of the president and the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize and remake the civil service is under way. The idea is simple: use generative AI to automate work that was previously done by people.

The Trump administration is testing a new chatbot with 1,500 federal employees at the General Services Administration and may release it to the entire agency as soon as this Friday—meaning it could be used by more than 10,000 workers who are responsible for more than $100 billion in contracts and services. This article is based in part on conversations with several current and former GSA employees with knowledge of the technology, all of whom requested anonymity to speak about confidential information; it is also based on internal GSA documents that I reviewed, as well as the software’s code base, which is visible on GitHub.

[Read: DOGE has ‘god mode’ access to government data]

The bot, which GSA leadership is framing as a productivity booster for federal workers, is part of a broader playbook from DOGE and its allies. Speaking about GSA’s broader plans, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently installed as the director of the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), GSA’s IT division, said at an all-hands meeting last month that the agency is pushing for an “AI-first strategy.” In the meeting, a recording of which I obtained, Shedd said that “as we decrease [the] overall size of the federal government, as you all know, there’s still a ton of programs that need to exist, which is a huge opportunity for technology and automation to come in full force.” He suggested that “coding agents” could be provided across the government—a reference to AI programs that can write and possibly deploy code in place of a human. Moreover, Shedd said, AI could “run analysis on contracts,” and software could be used to “automate” GSA’s “finance functions.”

A small technology team within GSA called 10x started developing the program during President Joe Biden’s term, and initially envisioned it not as a productivity tool but as an AI testing ground: a place to experiment with AI models for federal uses, similar to how private companies create internal bespoke AI tools. But DOGE allies have pushed to accelerate the tool’s development and deploy it as a work chatbot amid mass layoffs (tens of thousands of federal workers have resigned or been terminated since Elon Musk began his assault on the government). The chatbot’s rollout was first noted by Wired, but further details about its wider launch and the software’s previous development had not been reported prior to this story.

The program—which was briefly called “GSAi” and is now known internally as “GSA Chat” or simply “chat”—was described as a tool to draft emails, write code, “and much more!” in an email sent by Zach Whitman, GSA’s chief AI officer, to some of the software’s early users. An internal guide for federal employees notes that the GSA chatbot “will help you work more effectively and efficiently.” The bot’s interface, which I have seen, looks and acts similar to that of ChatGPT or any similar program: Users type into a prompt box, and the program responds. GSA intends to eventually roll the AI out to other government agencies, potentially under the name “AI.gov.” The system currently allows users to select from models licensed from Meta and Anthropic, and although agency staff currently can’t upload documents to the chatbot, they likely will be permitted to in the future, according to a GSA employee with knowledge of the project and the chatbot’s code repository. The program could conceivably be used to plan large-scale government projects, inform reductions in force, or query centralized repositories of federal data, the GSA worker told me.

Spokespeople for DOGE did not respond to my requests for comment, and the White House press office directed me to GSA. In response to a detailed list of questions, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for GSA, wrote in an emailed statement that “GSA is currently undertaking a review of its available IT resources, to ensure our staff can perform their mission in support of American taxpayers,” and that the agency is “conducting comprehensive testing to verify the effectiveness and reliability of all tools available to our workforce.”

At this point, it’s common to use AI for work, and GSA’s chatbot may not have a dramatic effect on the government’s operations. But it is just one small example of a much larger effort as DOGE continues to decimate the civil service. At the Department of Education, DOGE advisers have reportedly fed sensitive data on agency spending into AI programs to identify places to cut. DOGE reportedly intends to use AI to help determine whether employees across the government should keep their job. In another TTS meeting late last week—a recording of which I reviewed—Shedd said he expects that the division will be “at least 50 percent smaller” within weeks. (TTS houses the team that built GSA Chat.) And arguably more controversial possibilities for AI loom on the horizon: For instance, the State Department plans to use the technology to help review the social-media posts of tens of thousands of student-visa holders so that the department may revoke visas held by students who appear to support designated terror groups, according to Axios.

Rushing into a generative-AI rollout carries well-established risks. AI models exhibit all manner of biases, struggle with factual accuracy, are expensive, and have opaque inner workings; a lot can and does go wrong even when more responsible approaches to the technology are taken. GSA seemed aware of this reality when it initially started work on its chatbot last summer. It was then that 10x, the small technology team within GSA, began developing what was known as the “10x AI Sandbox.” Far from a general-purpose chatbot, the sandbox was envisioned as a secure, cost-effective environment for federal employees to explore how AI might be able to assist their work, according to the program’s code base on GitHub—for instance, by testing prompts and designing custom models. “The principle behind this thing is to show you not that AI is great for everything, to try to encourage you to stick AI into every product you might be ideating around,” a 10x engineer said in an early demo video for the sandbox, “but rather to provide a simple way to interact with these tools and to quickly prototype.”

[Kara Swisher: Move fast and destroy democracy]

But Donald Trump appointees pushed to quickly release the software as a chat assistant, seemingly without much regard for which applications of the technology may be feasible. AI could be a useful assistant for federal employees in specific ways, as GSA’s chatbot has been framed, but given the technology’s propensity to make up legal precedents, it also very well could not. As a recently departed GSA employee told me, “They want to cull contract data into AI to analyze it for potential fraud, which is a great goal. And also, if we could do that, we’d be doing it already.” Using AI creates “a very high risk of flagging false positives,” the employee said, “and I don’t see anything being considered to serve as a check against that.” A help page for early users of the GSA chat tool notes concerns including “hallucination”—an industry term for AI confidently presenting false information as true—“biased responses or perpetuated stereotypes,” and “privacy issues,” and instructs employees not to enter personally identifiable information or sensitive unclassified information. How any of those warnings will be enforced was not specified.

Of course, federal agencies have been experimenting with generative AI for many months. Before the November election, for instance, GSA had initiated a contract with Google to test how AI models “can enhance productivity, collaboration, and efficiency,” according to a public inventory. The Departments of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs, as well as numerous other federal agencies, were testing tools from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and elsewhere before the inauguration. Some kind of federal chatbot was probably inevitable.

But not necessarily in this form. Biden took a more cautious approach to the technology: In a landmark executive order and subsequent federal guidance, the previous administration stressed that the government’s use of AI should be subject to thorough testing, strict guardrails, and public transparency, given the technology’s obvious risks and shortcomings. Trump, on his first day in office, repealed that order, with the White House later saying that it had imposed “onerous and unnecessary government control.” Now DOGE and the Trump administration appear intent on using the entire federal government as a sandbox, and the more than 340 million Americans they serve as potential test subjects.

Donald Trump’s approach to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn’t. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he’s said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe.

But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president’s latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter—indeed, he is willing to increase it—and that his opposition to Ukraine’s independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win.

[Jonathan Chait: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

In recent days, Trump has said he is “looking at” a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine’s president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky’s domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face.

Trump exposed his preferences most clearly in his decision to cut off the supply of intelligence to Ukraine. The effect of this sudden reversal—which does not save the American taxpayer any money—was immediate and dramatic. Russian air attacks, now enjoying the element of surprise, pounded newly exposed Ukrainian civilian targets, leaving scenes of death and destruction.

The grim spectacle of watching the death toll spike, without any appreciable benefit to American interests, ought to have had a sobering effect on the president. At least it would have if his ostensible objectives were his actual ones. Instead, he seemed visibly pleased.

Paying close attention to his rhetoric reveals the significance of the turn. Speaking to reporters from his desk in the Oval Office, Trump, asked whether the bombing campaign changes his oft-expressed view that Vladimir Putin desires peace, affirmed that it does not. “I believe him,” he said. “I think we’re doing very well with Russia. But right now they’re bombing the hell out of Ukraine, and Ukraine—I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine. And they don’t have the cards.” It was Trump himself, of course, who had taken “cards” away from Ukraine by suddenly exposing its cities to bombardment.

A reporter asked if Putin was “taking advantage” of Trump’s move. Trump made clear that the Russian president was doing precisely what he had expected. “I think he’s doing what anybody else would do,” he said. “I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting ’em harder than he’s been hitting ’em, and I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now. He wants to get it ended, and I think Ukraine wants to get it ended, but I don’t see—it’s crazy, they’re taking tremendous punishment. I don’t quite get it.”

[Olga Khazan: Putin is loving this]

Why not, a reporter asked, provide air defenses? “Because I have to know that they want to settle,” Trump replied. “I don’t know that they want to settle. If they don’t want to settle, we’re out of there, because we want them to settle, and I’m doing it to stop death.”

Trump’s rhetoric signals an important evolution in his policy. He is no longer arguing for peace at any price. Instead, he has identified a good guy (Russia) and a bad guy (Ukraine). The good guy definitely wants peace. The bad guy is standing in the way of a settlement. Consequently, the only way to secure peace is for the good guy to inflict more death on the bad guy. Increasing the body count on the bad guy’s side, while regrettable, is now the fastest way to stop death.

This is the same moral logic that the Biden administration and NATO employed to support Ukraine—the way to end the war is to raise the cost to the party responsible for the conflict—but with the identity of the guilty and the innocent parties reversed.

If you want to see where Trump’s position is going next, pay attention to the bleatings of his closest supporters, who echo his impulses and point it in new directions. Elon Musk, for example, has begun demanding sanctions on Ukraine’s “oligarchs” and blaming them for American support for Kyiv. This is an echo of Putin’s long-standing claim that Ukraine is dominated by an unrepresentative class of oligarchs who have steered it away from its desired and natural place as a Russian vassal. The fixation with Ukraine’s corruption and the push to replace Zelensky both reflect Russian war aims. Putin wishes to delegitimize any Ukrainian government mirroring its population’s desire for independence, which would allow him to control the country either directly or through a puppet leader, like the kind he enjoyed before 2014 and has in Belarus today.

Ukraine certainly has its share of wealthy, influential business owners, but not nearly to the extent of Russia itself, whose entire economy is structured around oligarchic domination. And Trump is even less disturbed by corruption than he is by a lack of democracy. His administration’s earliest moves included defending or pardoning American politicians charged with corruption and ending enforcement of restrictions on bribing foreign governments. For that matter, Musk himself, who has obliterated conflict-of-interest guardrails by running much of the federal government while operating businesses with massive interest in public policy, fits the definition of oligarch neatly.

Senator Mark Kelly recently visited Ukraine and wrote on X, “Any agreement has to protect Ukraine’s security and can’t be a giveaway to Putin.” (His post did not mention Trump.) Musk replied, “You are a traitor,” which would be a rather odd sentiment unless one considered Ukraine an enemy of the United States. Where Musk is going, Trump is likely to follow.

[Anne Applebaum: The rise of the Brutal American]

Trump inherited an American government pushing to defend Ukrainian sovereignty. He has reversed American policy rapidly. The American position has already passed the point of neutrality. The new American goal is no longer simply to end the war, but to end it on Putin’s terms. Asked on Fox News Sunday if he was comfortable with the possibility that his actions would threaten Ukraine’s survival, Trump responded blithely, “Well, it may not survive anyway.” That is not merely a prediction. It is the goal.

Historians like to play a parlor game called periodization, in which they attempt to define an era, often by identifying it with the individual who most shaped the times: the Age of Jackson, the Age of Reagan. Usually, this exercise requires many decades of hindsight, but not so in the 21st century.

Over the past 25 years, the world has bent to the vision of one man. In the course of a generation, he not only short-circuited the transition to democracy in his own country, and in neighboring countries, but set in motion a chain of events that has shattered the transatlantic order that prevailed after World War II. In the global turn against democracy, he has played, at times, the role of figurehead, impish provocateur, and field marshal. We are living in the Age of Vladimir Putin.

Perhaps, that fact helps explain why Donald Trump’s recent excoriation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office felt so profound. The moment encapsulated Putin’s ultimate victory, when the greatest impediment to the realization of the Russian president’s vision, the United States, became his most powerful ally. But Trump’s slavish devotion to the Russian leader—his willingness to help Putin achieve his maximalist goals—is merely the capstone of an era.

Nothing was preordained about Putin’s triumph. Twenty years ago, in fact, his regime looked like it might not survive. With the color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan, Russian influence in its old Soviet satellites quickly withered. The threat was that democratic revolution would spread ever closer to the core of the old empire, Moscow, as it had in the dying days of communism. Indeed, as Putin prepared to return to Russia’s presidency in 2012, after a stint as prime minister, protests swelled in Moscow and spread to other Russian cities, and then kept flaring for more than a year.  

[Read: Putin is loving this]

Preserving his power, both at home and abroad, necessitated a new set of more aggressive tactics. Resorting to the old KGB playbook, which Putin internalized as a young officer in the Soviet spy agency, Russia began meddling in elections across Europe, illicitly financing favored candidates, exploiting social media to plant conspiracy theories, creating television networks and radio stations to carry his messaging into the American and European heartlands.

Just as the Soviet Union used the international communist movement to advance its goals, Putin collected his own loose network of admirers, which included the likes of the French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, who venerated Putin for waging a robust counteroffensive on behalf of traditional values, by claiming the mantle of anti-wokeness. The fact that so many Western elites abhorred him titillated these foreign fans.

Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration

One of Putin’s core objectives was the protection of his own personal fortune, built on kickbacks and money quietly skimmed from public accounts. Protecting this ill-gotten money, and that of his inner circle, relies on secrecy, misdirection, and theft, all values anathema to democracy.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Kleptocrats, in the mold of Russian oligarchy, ardently desire to sock away their money in the relative safety and quiet anonymity of American real estate and banks. Not so long ago, a bipartisan consensus joined together to pass laws that would make it harder for foreign kleptocrats to abuse shell companies to move their cash to these shores. But, as one of his first orders of business, Trump has shredded those reforms. His Treasury Department announced that it would weaken enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act; his Justice Department disbanded a task force charged with targeting Russian oligarchs and relaxed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, such that Putin’s allies can hire lawyers and lobbyists without having to worry about the embarrassing disclosure of those relationships. The Trump administration has essentially announced that the American financial system is open for Russia’s kleptocratic business.

As Putin has sought to impose his vision on the world, Ukraine has been the territory he most covets, but also the site of the fiercest resistance to him—a country that waged revolution to oust his cronies and that has resisted his military onslaught. Until last week, the United States served as the primary patron of this Ukrainian resistance. But the Trump administration has surrendered that role, thereby handing Russia incredible battlefield advantages. Because the Trump administration has cut off arms to Ukraine, it will exhaust caches of vital munitions in a few months, so it must hoard its stockpiles, limiting its capacity to fend off Russian offensives. Because the U.S. has stopped sharing intelligence with Kyiv, the Ukrainian army will be without America’s ability to eavesdrop on Russia’s war plans. All of these decisions will further demoralize Ukraine's depleted, weary military.

Just three years ago, as European and American publics draped themselves in Ukrainian flags, Putin’s Russia seemed consigned to international isolation and ignominy. For succor and solidarity, Putin was forced to turn to North Korea and Iran, an axis of geopolitical outcasts. But Trump is bent on reintegrating Putin into the family of nations. He wants Russia restored to the G7, and it’s only a matter of time before he eases up on sanctions that the Biden administration imposed on Russia. And Trump has done more than offer a place among the nations. By repeating Russia’s own self-serving, mendacious narrative about the origins of the Ukraine war, he lent American legitimacy and moral prestige to Putin.

The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization's very survival.

[Garry Kasparov: The Putinization of America]

Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.

What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.

Now, with a like-minded counterpart in the White House, he no longer needs to make a case against democracy to his own citizens. He can crow that the system is apparently so unappealing that even the United States is moving away from it.

J. D. Vance doesn’t look like himself. In recent days, memes have spread across social media in which the vice president’s face has been Photoshopped to give him cartoonishly chubby cheeks. He looks like a bearded baby or Humpty Dumpty. Sometimes, he is holding a lollipop and wearing a child’s baseball cap with a propeller affixed to the top. One meme takes his edited baby face and adds lusciously curly locks, while another changes his skin tone to a gentle purple hue, making him look like a Willy Wonka–inspired human blueberry. In every image, Vance has been reanimated as an utter doofus.

These memes first appeared in October, when a user on X posted an image of Vance captioned: “For every 100 likes I will turn JD Vance into a progressively apple cheeked baby.” But baby-faced Vance has gone fully viral since last week, when the vice president clashed with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Many of the photos, the most popular of which have received tens of thousands of likes on platforms such as X and Instagram, include captions that imagine Vance talking like a small child who cannot yet properly pronounce his words: “You have to say pwease and tank you, Mistow Zensky.”

Of course, people love making memes that portray their political adversaries as hapless and incompetent. That’s not exactly what’s happening with these images of Vance. The memes are going viral on the left-wing internet. But they are equally, if not more, popular on the right. Explicitly pro-Trump accounts on X that otherwise spend their time bashing liberals are posting embarrassing memes of their party’s second in command.

No, the right doesn’t appear to be posting unflattering memes of Vance because it has turned on him. As I wrote when Vance joined the Republican ticket, he uniquely appeals to various factions across the party. The online right, in particular, has long appreciated Vance’s recognition of it (he follows some of its most prominent accounts on X, such as Bronze Age Pervert).

So why is the right willing to make fun of one of its own with memes? One user on X who goes by the name Aelfred the Great and frequently shares right-wing memes has been posting and reposting the unflattering viral images of the vice president. “They’re just funny,” he told me when I asked him about them. For what it’s worth, Vance seems to agree, or at least says he does. On Thursday, he told a reporter for The Blaze that he thinks the memes are “funny.” Others on the right swear that by posting images of Vance as a man-baby, they’re actually helping him. “The right is having so much fun roasting Vance’s baby fat that it’s just completely neutered the left’s capacity to make fun of him,” one right-wing account, @martianwyrdlord, wrote in a post that garnered about 22,000 likes on X. “This feels like a precursor to Vance’s inevitable presidency,” Auron MacIntyre, a prominent MAGA influencer, posted. “He will have been so thoroughly memed that he becomes immune to the effect before ever entering office.”

It wouldn’t be the first time that politicos have tried something like this. The “Dark Brandon” memes of Joe Biden and the coconut-pilled memes of Kamala Harris initially started out as right-wing attempts to denigrate the Democrats. “Dark Brandon” caricatured Biden’s reputation on the right as a doddering old man by imagining that he harbored a secret personality as a cold-blooded killer. And “coconut-pilled” began when the right harped on a clip of Harris recounting how her mother had once said the phrase “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree.” Harris then awkwardly laughed.

Both the Biden and Harris memes eventually made their way to Democrats, who tried to lean in to the jokes. Biden supporters made memes that earnestly portrayed him as a savvy, Machiavellian political operator (with laser eyes, of course). Harris supporters started putting coconut and palm-tree emoji in their display names on social media, calling themselves “coconut-pilled.” This strategy seemed successful at the time. As my colleague Charlie Warzel noted when people first started coconut posting, the memes had an “authentic” and “maybe even fun” energy to them. In both instances, it felt like Democrats could take a joke and even spin it around to their favor. In the end, this tactic did not work out. Biden’s age caught up with him, and Harris’s folksy awkwardness didn’t seem to charm voters.

The Vance memes might work against the vice president even more. There is no silver lining to looking like a doofus. As trivial as they might seem, memes about politicians can be telling. “Dark Brandon” memes wouldn’t have been quite as funny if Biden was actually sharper and quicker than he seemed. “Coconut-pilled” memes wouldn’t have endured if Harris didn’t frequently say bizarre and confusing things. Whether or not they consciously realized it, by spreading such memes, liberals were copping to some uncomfortable truths about the politicians they supported. The Vance memes seem to contain an admission as well: that even some conservatives do not see him as essential to the current MAGA movement.

Consider the fact that Democrats have long tried to embarrass Trump with memes and images of him as an infant, a Cheeto, and other forms. None of it has really stuck, even ironically, on the right. Trump’s own base just doesn’t see him that way, and they instead often make memes portraying him as heroic and muscular. But for a vice president who was picked with widespread support in his party, Vance, at times, has almost seemed like a fringe figure in Trump’s second term. He is, of course, overshadowed by the president himself—but also by Elon Musk, who is gutting the federal bureaucracy through his Department of Government Efficiency, and by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has legions of fans as part of his “Make America healthy again” movement. Vance might nominally be more powerful than Musk and Kennedy, but he’s easier to forget about.  

That might be why the memes of baby-faced Vance have been so popular. Vance has taken such a back-seat role in the administration that when he tried to assert himself in the Zelensky meeting, it did look slightly forced and unnatural—like a child trying to boss around a group of adults. The best jokes always have a kernel of truth in them. The same goes for memes.

So, it was capitalism after all. More specifically, crony capitalism. I am talking, of course, about how the leaders of the tech world revealed themselves before and after the 2024 presidential election, when just a little more than half of America (and a surprisingly diverse group for an anti-DEI candidate) decided to give the job once again to the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

But what was quite different this time was the growing participation from the tech elite, with some falling in line before the election, some waiting until after, and one—Elon Musk—taking an even more prominent role, effectively gaining control of the U.S. government for the price of getting Trump back into power.

For tech leaders at this moment, the digital world they rule has become not enough. Leaders, in fact, is the wrong word to use now. Titans is more like it, as many have cozied up to Trump in order to dominate this world as we enter the next Cambrian explosion in technology, with the development of advanced AI.

I cannot explain fully why a small majority of U.S. voters did what they did, because it is for many and varied reasons, including inflation, immigration, a ginned-up panic over trans athletes, and post-pandemic yips, in which I have only glancing expertise. There is no doubt we all are muddling through unusually aggrieved times. But I can tell you how we got that way, because of the part I do know about, which has been a crucial element to what has happened: the wholesale capture of our current information systems by tech moguls, and their willful carelessness and sometimes-filthy-thumb-on-scale malevolence in managing it.

When combined with a lack of empathy and enormous financial self-interest—which I’ve been pointing out at least since Silicon Valley potentates marched up to Trump Tower in late 2016 like sheeple to pay homage to the president-elect—it is basically a familiar trope: greed (of the few) over need (of the many).

And that has resulted in the damaging and warping and siloing of us all, courtesy of many of the people I wrote about in my book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, about the promise and then souring of Silicon Valley. It is these characters who want to reign like kings not just over tech, but over everything everywhere, and all at once. To update the old Facebook maxim of “Move fast and break things”: Move fast and crush everyone. This was bad enough as a business axiom, but when it’s applied to the entire apparatus of our democracy, it’s terrifying.

My memoir of my decades covering these people—from when they had nothing to now, when they have it all—focused on a range of characters, including the late Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder who was by far the person I most thought of as a true tech visionary. While some might disagree—not everyone was keen on his use of what was jokingly called a “reality-distortion field” conjured up to sell his always nifty hardware—Jobs stood far and away above the men who followed him, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and, of course, Elon Musk of, it’s fair to say, Elon Musk Inc.

Jobs, who was definitely a crafty and manipulative charmer, also had a set of basic values he stayed true to, from protection of privacy to making quality products, unlike this trio for whom the acquisition of wealth, the hoarding of power, and endless self-aggrandizement have become the goal. Unlike Jobs, who left behind a legacy of innovation and even wonder, the titans who followed him are so poor, all they have is money.

To be fair, Musk’s efforts were once certainly loftier— pushing into existence an electric-car industry that had not previously had any traction; cutting the costs of rockets and space travel and much more. Let me clearly acknowledge that this was all indeed inspiring. That is, until his epic megalomania, personal foibles, and other deep-seated character flaws—which had always been there, lurking—took over his mind completely and sent it into the outer limits.

After years of mocking Trump, Musk changed drastically during COVID and became ever more manic and cruel, as he swung hard right down conspiracy highway. That was why I predicted on my book tour in March 2024 that Musk would back Trump extravagantly, even after he had just as vehemently said he would remain politically neutral and promised not to donate to either candidate.

Hello, he is lying, I thought at the time. Under a Biden administration—and then, after he stepped down as nominee, a Harris administration—Musk would have received the usual scrutiny of his businesses. He must have known that under Trump, if he ponied up time and money, and, most especially, if he deployed the platform formerly known as Twitter to power Trump’s propaganda machine, an unfettered billionaire’s paradise awaited him.

Soon enough, besides funding a PAC and taking over Trump’s ground game in swing states, Musk was showing off his stomach while bizarrely jumping up and down on a variety of stages across the nation. And, of course, he was pushing a flood of inaccurate information on X and puckering up to Trump like a particularly enthusiastic remora, sometimes referred to as a suckerfish or shark sucker. (Hey, I don’t make up the words.)

As inane as he looked, it was the best investment of time and money of Musk’s life, even if it meant cosplaying as a beta to Trump’s alpha. It’s paid off: His net worth has nearly doubled after Trump’s victory—it sits at $348 billion today—with billions more possible as he remakes the government in his image. Soon after Trump’s victory, the president announced the formation of the jokingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE—which I suggested might more accurately stand for “Department of Grandstanding Edgelords”—to be run by Musk and (briefly) a fellow look-at-me billionaire, Vivek Ramaswamy. With its power, staff, and efficacy undefined, it sounded more like an episode of The Apprentice.

Initially, a number of people theorized that this unelected commission was a clever way for Trump to sideline the billionaire who had helped to take him over the line to victory. I myself was not sure Trump would tolerate anyone taking attention off him. But so far, he has.

As of this writing, tens of thousands of Americans in government roles have already been fired by Elon’s tech toadies. Musk has gotten rid of regulators who just happen to oversee his businesses, in agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and USAID. While Trump has recently made noises about reining in Musk’s power, he also said that if Cabinet members don’t shrink their own agencies, “Elon will do the cutting.” And, anyway, Musk as a long track record of doing whatever he wants.

What is happening is shocking, in a way. But if anyone is not surprised, it’s tech reporters who saw, over the past decade, what these people were becoming. Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms. They denigrate media, science, activism, and culture, and spend their time bellyaching about the “woke-mind virus” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Those programs, despite their occasional annoyances, were directionally correct. As I often point out, the opposite of woke is asleep; the opposite of DEI is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s just the way an increasing number of techies want it and, with Trump and Musk at the wheel, the goal toward which they are now reengineering our country.

Before the stakes got even higher, there was a warning about what was happening as AI expanded. With trillions of dollars there for the taking, investments are being made by the same small coterie of companies and people that now controls the entire federal government. So are the important decisions about safety and more, which should be made by an independent and fair government and its citizens.

There are no laws regulating almost any of it, though the Biden administration gave it a shrugging try for a little bit. A bummer, right? But not unexpected if you have been paying even the slightest amount of attention.

“The ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy,” wrote one of my favorite philosophers, Paul Virilio. “This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a democratic technological culture.” This seems vanishingly unlikely today.

Where is the hope, then? One glimmer came to me this past year in an interview I did with the historian Yuval Noah Harari, in which he pointed out that science and illumination were not the immediate beneficiaries of the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, in about 1440, though some tie those developments together. In fact, even a century later, Copernicus’s groundbreaking On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres sold only 500 copies. What was a best seller right after the press was in heavy use was a book by an obscure writer named Heinrich Kramer titled “The Hammer of Witches,” a demented treatise on satanic women who stole men’s penises and hid them in a nest in a tree, I kid you not. When we spoke, Harari noted that the popularity of the book spurred witch hunts, in which tens of thousands of people—mostly women—were killed.

“The thing is the printing press did not cause the scientific revolution. No,” Harari told me. “You have about 200 years from the time that Gutenberg brings print technology to Europe in the middle of the 15th century until the flowering of the scientific revolution.”

He went on: “How did, in the end, we get to the scientific revolution? It wasn’t the technology of the printing press; it was the creation of institutions that were dedicated to sifting through this kind of ocean of information, and all these stories and developing mechanisms to evaluate reliable information and to be trusted by the population.”

That is, indeed, the possible exit from the mess we now find ourselves in—swimming in oceans of information with an ever-decreasing number of facts to keep us afloat. Except, unlike the expansion that tech gave to the enlightened before, the institutions of today, such as media, science, and education, are being slowly destroyed by technology. And there seems to be no way out of this world, especially as egomaniacal entrepreneurs like Musk and others fork over small pieces of their vast fortunes to buy up everything from global media to, yes, a president of the United States.

And there they are, thus, everywhere we look, running everything, a fate that Paul Virilio predicted in a 1994 interview with the now-defunct technology journal CTHEORY, when he worried that “virtuality will destroy reality.” That is precisely what is happening 30 years later, although it is much worse than I think we are prepared to acknowledge, even now as Musk presides over Oval Office press conferences and White House Cabinet meetings as Trump’s enforcer and sees himself as a kind of global superhero.

In our many interviews over the years, Musk often referenced science fiction, which he looked to for inspiration. During that 1994 interview, Virilio referenced a short story that I imagine Musk knows, “in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow, which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.”

The interviewer then asks the single best question I have ever heard—a question that I wish I would have had the perspicuity to ask of the many tech leaders I have known over three decades, especially Musk, who via DOGE now is building what techies call a “God view” dashboard of our nation and the world: “But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?”

And from Virilio, the best answer: “We’ll dream of being blind.”

It’s not the worst idea.

This essay has been adapted from the epilogue of Swisher’s book Burn Book: A Tech Love Story