For the last few years, AI vendors have had an interesting marketing playbook: they’ve described the potential power of the technologies as being so great that it could lead to an artificial general intelligence that could either kill humanity or leave us behind and head for the stars. We ignore its power at our peril.
As it turned out, OpenAI and Microsoft’s definition of “artificial general intelligence” was that the technologies would reach one hundred billion dollars in revenue. It wasn’t tied to capabilities around reasoning, and did not, in actuality, relate to a Terminator future. It just meant that they’d be making a lot of money from it. All the talk of humanity-destroying intelligence and the existential questions that derived from it just served to draw attention to their services. The awe inspired by the tales they were weaving would, they hoped, lead to more signed contracts, more subscribers, more dollars on their balance sheets. People would treat the technologies as being insanely powerful even if they weren’t, and that would be enough.
A decade or more ago, a new ride-sharing service called Uber started to supplant taxi services in major cities like San Francisco. While taxi services were typically licensed, often at great cost to the individual drivers, Uber drivers operated without any such restrictions. It was illegal in many cities, but the company intentionally created workarounds to prevent police, city officials, and taxi firms from gathering evidence. A tool nicknamed Greyball allowed them to tag users who they decided were trying to conduct a sting on the service. Those users would see fake cars, and their drivers would cancel quickly. In the midst of this disinformation, it became hard to gather real evidence and make a case.
Eventually, despite its illegality, Uber became saturated in each market. Cities found themselves either acquiescing or making regulatory deals with the company. Uber had evaded the authorities while growing quickly, and it became widely used. It was clear that cities were going to have trouble shutting it down, so they ultimately adjusted to accept its existence. Law enforcement had been too slow; Uber had outrun and outmaneuvered it, and now it was here to stay.
The same playbooks that have allowed high-growth tech companies to become effective monopolies in America are now being used on American governance itself.
Donald Trump is not a king and does not have the right to wield absolute power. He and his parties control all three branches of government, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are all Republican-dominated, but avenues for objection, checks on his power, and levers to limit his reach remain. But that doesn’t necessarily matter: Donald Trump is acting like a king. He is restructuring the government as if he were one, making statement after statement to reinforce that image. Much of it is hot air: things that will never come to pass. But just as if AI vendors pretend all-powerful artificial intelligence exists, people will act as if it does, I believe Trump’s CEO king act is designed to make us act as if there are no checks or limits on his abilities. We are meant to gaze in awe, and his critics to feel despondent, so that he can cement his imaginary powers for real and conduct his illegal business with impunity regardless of the regulations.
DOGE, which subsumed the USDS to become the awkwardly-named United States Department of Government Efficiency Service, is running ahead of regulations with the same gusto that Uber did during its early years. It should go without saying that inviting recent high school graduates and early twenty-somethings with no security clearance to wantonly access the personal data of every American, and to alter the source code that controls core government services, is illegal. It’s so outlandish that it sounds absolutely bizarre when you describe it out loud, like something from a speculative fiction fever dream, but it’s happening in plain sight. There are plenty of rules in place to prevent their activities from taking place. But who is going to catch up to them?
Eventually, DOGE will either be stopped or face regulatory restrictions on its activities and reach. But by then, it will be too late: the code will be altered, the personal information will be revealed, the funding spigot to core government services will have withered them on the vine. Legal objections have peppered up everywhere, but the cogs of justice are far slower than a bunch of entrepreneurial kids with the keys to the city. Lawmakers and civil rights organizations can shake their fists and say it’s illegal, but it’s done. DOGE isn’t just evading oversight: it’s moving fast and breaking things on a scale even Uber never dreamed of. It’s governance as a high-growth startup, where rule-breaking isn’t a side effect — it’s the entire strategy.
The important thing isn’t so much who is doing it as what is being done. Much has been made of the fact that Elon Musk is unelected, which is true: he is a private citizen with highly personal motives doing this work under dubious auspices. But the events of the last few weeks would be heinous even if they were conducted directly by elected officials acting in good faith. Stopping Musk from doing these things is a good idea, but the core problem is the acts, not the man.
The question, then, is what we do next.
In the New York Times, Jamelle Bouie points out that this wasn’t what brought most Trump voters to the polls:
For as much as some of Trump’s and Musk’s moves were anticipated in Project 2025, the fact of the matter is that marginal Trump voters — the voters who gave him his victory — did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.
One task is to pierce the reality distortion field of Trump’s court in the eyes of his opponents. We don’t live in a full-scale dictatorship (at least, not yet). All of this can be stopped. His power is limited, and can be curtailed. And at the center of it all, he is a small-minded former reality TV star with a tiny worldview who eats his steak overcooked and throws his plate at the wall when he’s having a tantrum. The emperor has no clothes, and those that oppose him must see that clearly. The bigger task is revealing that fact to the more reasonable of the people who elected him: people for whom the cost of living is more important than enacting some kind of perverse revenge on inclusive society.
Then I believe the next task is to build an alternative, not in reaction to Trump, but in itself, based on upholding core values and improving everybody’s quality of life. One of the challenges of being aghast at what is going on is that American institutions really have underserved the American people, and have often caused real harm overseas. It’s easy — and correct — to be worried about what it means to suddenly encourage the entire CIA to resign, but it’s an awkward rhetorical position to be put in to defend the institution. The CIA has a long history of arguably criminal behavior: conducting undemocratic coups, assassinating world leaders, and violating human rights in our name.
The status quo doesn’t work. The American people have made that clear. So it’s on us to invent something new. What does it mean to create a truly inclusive, peaceful, democratic society? What does it mean to have a peaceful foreign policy? What does it mean to focus on improving quality of life rather than an economic metric that encourages monopolies and billionaires while letting ordinary people suffer?
The playbooks of OpenAI, Uber, and others have long been countered by other modes of operating. Hockey-stick growth is not the only way to build software and serve people who need help. Co-operation, mutual aid, and collective collaboration have effectively re-made software, and through it the world, and we’re now seeing the fruit of that through movements like the open social web. High-growth tech has the flashy marketing moves and the attendant hype cycle, but quietly, other movements have been steadily building. The same is true for America.
As Bouie says in his piece:
Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.
Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.
I believe this is correct, and offer this idea for consideration:
The people with the ideas that can best save America are the people who are currently being pushed out of it. This is not a coincidence. Black women, trans activists, communities built on radical inclusion and emergent strategies, worker’s groups and communities bound in solidarity have created modes of communication and support that have transformed American society of the better. These are people for whom the shock and awe of a smoke and mirrors campaign does not work; who cannot be convinced to fit into a template designed to force people into being someone else’s profit engine; who have demonstrated the unstoppable nature of peer to peer mutual aid. It makes them dangerous. It also makes them more powerful than the dying gasp of the twentieth century we’re seeing sputter out before us.
We should listen to them: people who are often at the edges even though they deserve to sit at the center of society. They often see harms perpetuated before everybody else; they often see the solutions first, too. It’s not that it’s on them to save everybody else. It’s that they’ve been sounding the alarm and telling us what to do for decades, and nobody has been listening. It’s about time we did.
The same playbooks that have created monopolies, crushed labor rights, and gamed regulations are now being used to gut democratic governance itself. But these playbooks have always had an alternative: one rooted in cooperation, mutual aid, and community-driven solutions. That alternative exists; it’s just been drowned out by billionaires and venture-backed empire-builders. It’s time to listen to the people who have been building it all along.
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