The UnPopulist

Donald Trump is a vehicle for Musk and Thiel to implement their radical ideas of replacing accountable governance with an unaccountable techno-monarchy

What are the ideas, ideologies, and motives animating this reactionary libertarianism that seeks to delete liberal democracy and replace it with its opposite? Mike Brock, an industry insider who helped build Cash App among other ventures, unpacks this worldview in a long but engrossing essay that he penned for his own Substack, Notes From the Circus. We present to you an edited version below. He has been marinating in this worldview at the highest echelons for over a decade and intimately understands its intellectual genealogy, extreme faith in technology, and terrifying, illiberal, futuristic vision for America and the world.

A shadow revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside Elon Musk’s DOGE, teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. In short, democracy is being deleted and replaced by AI models and proprietary technology—Musk’s claims about transparent, open-source governance notwithstanding. It is a coup, executed not with guns but with backend migrations and database wipes.

This coup, however, isn’t a spontaneous one—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis and worked its way from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance. And it has been driven by the idea that democracy, being not just inefficient but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress, is itself an obsolete technology that must be “disrupted.”