Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 election begins a new era for tech's political extremists. The right-wing elements of Silicon Valley have merged with the MAGA movement, at least temporarily, and the bet has paid off big. Republicans captured every branch of government. Trump will make full use of these powers to radically transform American democracy into something else.

It's not clear he will succeed, but he won't be alone in trying. Elon Musk has forsaken Mars for Mar-a-Lago, where the South African immigrant is positioning himself as Trump's co-president. Trump has tapped both Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head something called the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which caused the crypto product with the same name to surge. Musk, a major government contractor, may now wield significant power over the very government agencies formerly charged with regulating him and his friends. Expect vicious retribution, a flotilla of memes and, wherever possible, some kind of attendant crypto pumping scheme.

If there's one thing we know about these guys, it's that they have no sense of limitation. They believe they can do anything they want, even when reality proves otherwise. They mistake their success in certain areas of business for a universal kind of genius, and this creates a tendency to overreach. The Greeks called this hubris, and it usually doesn't it end well. But our would-be Silicon sovereigns don't believe in history. They believe they are bigger than history. They believe their destiny is to hoard infinite wealth, rewrite the code of civilization, establish themselves as the supreme leaders of the universe and – as crazy as this may sound – defeat even death itself. Increasingly, you will find them wrapping their tentacles around religion, trying to redefine God, spirituality and the concept of Eternal Life to reflect their own pernicious self-importance. (More on this later...)

As the saying goes: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." We are about to witness a spectacle of corruption unlike any in the history of the Republic, and we will be very fortunate if we still have one when this dark era concludes. Corporate power has always posed a threat to democracy. But this time is different. This is not a power grab aimed only at lax regulations or low taxes. These people have made a crucial extrapolation: In a system where you can buy power and legislation, it may be possible to also buy the entire system. Their short-term goal will be to break our democracy as much us possible, maximizing polarization, sowing chaos and making it increasingly more difficult to discern fact from fiction. This will make it easier to swallow whole.

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