by CEDRIC DURAND
In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the army general Stumm von Bordwehr asks, ‘How can those directly involved in what’s happening know beforehand whether it will turn out to be a great event?’ His answer is that ‘all they can do is pretend to themselves that it is! If I may indulge in a paradox, I’d say that the history of the world is written before it happens; it always starts off as a kind of gossip.’ Last week, with Donald Trump’s return to power, gossip swirled as the giants of the tech industry gathered at his inauguration. Front-row seats were reserved for Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Tesla’s Elon Musk, with Apple’s Tim Cook, Open AI’s Sam Altman and Tik Tok’s Shou Zi Chew sitting further back. Only a few years ago, the vast majority of these billionaires were outspoken supporters of Biden and the Democrats. ‘They were all with him’, Trump recalled, ‘every one of them, and now they’re all with me’. The crucial question concerns the nature of this realignment: is it a simple opportunistic turnaround, within the same systemic parameters? Or is this a moment of rupture worthy of being called a great event in history? Let us risk this second hypothesis.
Trump, as we know, is fond of lavish tributes. When courtiers flock to his Mar a Lago mansion, doesn’t it seem like a miniature Versailles? But the president is no aspiring Louis XIV. His project is not to centralize authority in the state, but rather to empower private interests at the expense of public institutions. He is already seeking to reverse the Biden administration’s fledgling attempts at interventionism by repealing its green subsidies, anti-trust policies and taxation measures, so as to widen the scope of action for corporate monopolies at home and abroad.
Two of his executive orders, signed on the day of the inauguration, underscore this trend. The first revoked a Biden-era mandate which required ‘developers of AI systems that pose risks to US national security, economy, health, or public safety to share the results of safety tests with the US government’. While public authorities previously had some say in developments at the AI frontier, this minimal oversight has now been removed. The second order announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Musk. Based on a reorganization of the US Digital Services, established under Obama to integrate information systems between different branches of the state, DOGE will have unlimited access to unclassified data from all government agencies. Its first mission is ‘reforming the federal hiring process and restoring merit to the civil service’, ensuring that state employees have a ‘commitment to American ideals, values and interests’ and will ‘loyally serve the Executive Branch’. DOGE will also ‘integrate modern technologies’ into this process, meaning Musk and his machines will be given responsibility for the political supervision of federal civil servants.
In the first hours of Trump’s second term, then, tech entrepreneurs managed to shield their most profitable ventures from public scrutiny while gaining significant influence over the state bureaucracy. The new administration is not interested in using the federal state to unify the dominant classes as part of a hegemonic strategy. On the contrary, it is trying to emancipate the most bullish fraction of capital from any serious federal constraints, while forcing the administrative apparatus to submit to Musk’s algorithmic control.
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