Things are going even worse than I expected

On our unelected President Elon Musk, and mourning the loss of foreclosed potential futures.

This blog has been dormant for a few weeks. It’s my longest hiatus in quite awhile.

There are a few straightforward reasons — the start of another semester, a bit of family travel. I wrote an article for Tech Policy Press, titled “Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire.” I’ve also spent the past week fighting the flu. (And the flu won.)

But the larger reason is I’ve found myself a bit overwhelmed watching everything fall to shit so unearthly fast.

Garrett Graff has written the definitive piece on the past few weeks, taking an angle that I suspect he’ll need to turn into a running series. He’s decided to write about it in the same voice he would use as a foreign correspondent:

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.

Elon Musk has, for all practical purposes, seized control of the U.S. Administrative State. If he follows the same course of action he favored during the Twitter takeover, he is likely to simply stop having the government pay for things he doesn’t think it should pay for. (This is a man, mind you, whose established policy directive was “Elon doesn’t pay rent.”)

This is all flatly illegal. Doing illegal shit is part of the change management strategy. Don’t honor contracts or existing obligations. Make the other side renegotiate or sue to stop you. Reap the benefits in the meantime.

You shouldn’t be able to do that with a multi-billion dollar corporation. You really cannot be doing it with the full faith and credit of the United States.

What happens after Elon decides to turn off funding to a disfavored social program, and a judge tells him “no that’s illegal. Pay the money.” and Elon just shrugs and says “I answer to the President and the President doesn’t like this program?” (The correct, short answer is “a constitutional crisis.” And the longer answer is “we don’t know for certain and the whole idea was to never find out?”)

I did not expect Elon to be this much of a factor in Trump’s government. I thought the other Trump sycophants would see him as a threat, and that his taste for the spotlight would start to alienate Trump. That still might happen. It hasn’t even been two weeks.

And yet, here we are. The best template for understanding what is happening to the U.S. government isn’t Trump’s first term. It isn’t Project 2025. It’s Musk’s Twitter takeover.

The tech barons are looting the government. I’m wondering whether I should be assigning Balaji Srinivasan’s stupid book to my digital futures class. Hell, I might have to assign it to my stratcomm class as well. That’s ludicrous! The only reason anyone should pay attention to Balaji is to make fun of Balaji!

That is… nuts. It is actively worse than what I was imagining and I was imagining some really quite awful things.

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When I’m not staring aghast at the headlines, I find myself quietly mourning some of the potential futures that have now been foreclosed.

Henry Farrell flagged the following Paul Graham tweet in his most recent post (which is really worth a read, by the way).

Set aside the whining about “wokeness” for now. (I’ve already said plenty about Graham’s, uh, big feelings on the subject.) Let’s focus on the “Warren appointees.”

Rebuilding the administrative state takes time. Lina Khan and Gary Gensler and Rohit Chopra and the rest of the civil servants spent the Biden years attempting to reassert the capacity of the U.S. government to actually make, apply, and enforce regulatory decisions. Paul Graham and Marc Andreessen and their billion groupchats couldn’t stand it.

(I wrote a long bluesky response thread to that atrocious Andreessen interview too, btw.)

It has become fashionable among centrist contrarians to ask whether the regulators achieved enough. They pissed off and radicalized the tech billionaires. Was it really worth it? Maybe we ought to have spent the Biden years letting crypto scams grow unchecked, telling Big Tech to just keep carving out monopoly rents, and telling a nascent AI industry “I’m sure whatever turns a profit for you is fine?”

I think the obvious answer is that four years was not enough. It is harder to build durable, stable systems than it is to break them. Antitrust cases and industrial policy take time to bear fruit. So what I find myself wondering is what could they have accomplished if they had been granted more time?

It reminds me of the sense of dashed hopes among progressive legal scholars after the 2016 election. Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly in February 2016. After decades of a 5-4 conservative Supreme Court majority, Barack Obama was poised to appoint a non-Federalist Society member to the Court. The nominee was Merrick Garland, and Mitch McConnell denied Garland a vote, effectively stealing the seat. (Which was then handed to Neil Gorsuch.) But progressive legal scholars spent the bulk of 2016 figuring out what claims and arguments they might be able to advance in the near future. (Overturning Citizens United, for instance!)

I am not a legal scholar. I just hang out with them sometimes. But what stands out in my memory is the ambient sense of pragmatic hope. There were things they could do. Plans to hatch. Strategies to set in motion. They saw a window of opportunity beginning to open, and they positioned themselves as best they could.

And then we lost. And those plans had to be discarded. They were designed for a potential future — a better one, from where I stand — that ceased to be a possibility.

I think those “Warren appointees” would have done a lot of good with four more years. I think it would’ve mattered. Paul Graham would’ve hated it, but maybe he would’ve adapted/experienced an ounce of personal growth/gotten over it.

We’ll never know now. It’s such a goddamn shame.