The Tech Broligarchy recipe

The seemingly never-ending DOGE / Elon Musk headlines feel like something out of a sci-fi novel: “DOGE employees gain accounts on classified networks holding nuclear secrets” (NPR), “DOGE’s Plans to Replace Humans With AI Are Already Under Way” (The Atlantic), and “Inside DOGE’s Plan to Invade the Treasury—and Throttle USAID” (Wired). 

We’ve officially lived through the first 100 days of the next level of tech-corporate control. Tech Bros have so much power and are reshaping the economy and government for their benefit. Meanwhile, they offer tech products that become “essential” to our everyday lives, which make them more money to buy policies and power that has a greater benefit to them/their bottom line— and so the cycle continues.

But what makes a tech broligarchy different from regular billionaire evil? It’s their plan to resource-grab, enshrine corporate power, and infiltrate and destabilize the government to gain control of the agencies that regulate Big Tech and the data that lines their own pockets. Here’s a breakdown of some of what we’ve been seeing in the last 100 days.

The one genius to control us all

A fundamental part of a Tech Bro’s orientation is the belief that they are so much smarter than everyone else. They think they are geniuses and a major driving force of that conviction is that people disagree with them. In fact, the more that people disagree with a Tech Bro, the more they think they are “on to something.” This illusion that they are the smartest person in the room gets them into the halls of power. In February, Trump took Elon Musk to an investment meeting, brought him on stage to get applauded and called him a “seriously high IQ individual.” It doesn't matter if their technological innovations don’t work, harm people, or are used for violence: Tech Bros believe — and get others to believe — they have created the greatest and most perfect things known to man. 

And once a Tech Bro walks into the halls of power, the project to never be controlled again starts in earnest. The beginning of the Trump administration started with the dismantling of agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), that would otherwise regulate corporations and keep consumers (us) safe. Under a stop-work order by Trump appointed leads, CFPB has dropped lawsuits against Capital One and Meta. While the targets of these investigations are celebrating evading accountability and a defanged CFPB, this move leaves us to fend for ourselves when corporations, including Big Tech, violate the law.

And because they are “so smart,” they can hack anything — including the government — in order to take control

Nearly every facet of our lives has changed because Elon Musk purchased the election from Trump in exchange for the formation of an "agency" ostensibly meant to trim government “waste” (it hasn't) and make us more reliant on multi-billion dollar corporations. Musk and DOGE treat the government like their own hackathon — an experimental exercise in creating a world that works for them, and them only. Over the last 100 days DOGE has installed new Tech Bro-approved department heads in agencies that they have no business being in charge of, and illegally gained access to information like our non-anonymized Social Security data in order to merge what they already know about us as users with what they learn from government data to create the ultimate and most valuable dataset. 

Business ideology & corporate power is the name of the game

Tech Bros want to get rid of what doesn’t serve their business bottomline. The more money and data they get to keep, the better. Treating the government like a corporation–an entity geared towards profit and revenue, rather than service and benefits management—means DOGE has spearheaded budget cuts in the IRS, Department of Agriculture, and many other agencies that provide crucial functions. We’ve seen the complete shutdown of programs and thousands of federal workers losing jobs that were deemed “unnecessary”. What will replace these workers or fill gaps in aid? Tech Bros want to privatize these services and profit off them, to our detriment. And how convenient that Tech Bros are also at the helm of the private technology businesses winning government contracts. While Elon Musk’s DOGE continued to purge federal workers, the so-called “agency” also “replaced” them with AI driven chatbots said to automate the work of “1,500 people.”

So what’s our antidote to the Tech Bro Takeover? 

We must organize for change that benefits the collective versus the wealthy few individuals and develop new strategies to navigate times like these. Kairos is working at both of these in a few ways:

The first 100 days of an administration is the time where we see the vision, policies, and overall platform a candidate ran on either deployed successfully or not. Trump’s second term has been chaotic. There’s been flaws and friction in his own party, as well as a lot of moves that continue to negatively impact our lives. This, however, does not mean it’s Game Over. We still have things and people to fight for. We have histories of resistance in this very country to lean on, learn from, and put into action. 

Until tech works for all.