Tech Power and the Crisis of Democracy

This piece is part of “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis,” in collaboration with Data & Society.

“Trump 2.0.” This coinage is often used to distinguish the current Trump administration from the first. The phrase is telling: it underscores that we’re in a new era and that behind the scenes, the people and forces driving this iteration of the Trump administration are different from those that came before. The second Trump administration is being driven to a greater degree by tech billionaires and their interests: self-dealing on public contracts; privatizing public services; expanding corporate power while crushing human rights; promoting crypto; removing guardrails against fraud, waste, and abuse; and pursuing personal vendettas.

The cadre of people driving today’s agenda is leveraging a set of interlocking ideologies related to technology to rhetorically justify and propel these changes. In this series, “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis,” we asked expert contributors to name and dispel the myths and ideologies that animate their actions. A number of ideological projects prepared the ground for today’s assault on American institutions; we will focus on those that run through data, AI, and the tech sector.

To fully understand the present political moment would require a sort of Kremlinology—to study the specific personalities and objectives of the people closest to political power. Those of us on the sidelines can only begin to disentangle these idiosyncratic ideas and motivations. But what is clear is that the changes we’re seeing advance the personal power and enrichment of tech elites at great cost to the capacity of average citizens to exercise their rights. What we are witnessing—in real time—is the growing capacity of a very small group of people to leverage the technology they own and control to impose their untested, anti-democratic visions of how to organize society and the economy on the rest of us.

Nonetheless, many Americans welcome the Trump administration’s changes, or at least how those changes have been portrayed to them. From a distance, the promise of a leaner, more efficient government, revitalized by state-of-the-art technology, would appear to satisfy generations of anger and mistrust over government waste and a lack of responsiveness to real problems. We have all been inundated with rhetoric about AI’s transformative potential. In this sense, AI seems useful for a self-styled “change candidate” who aims to fix Washington by shaking off a sclerotic bureaucracy powered by outdated, slow technologies.

However, the public needs to know what this vision conceals. In some form, AI may help improve the efficiency of certain government functions or increase citizen access to benefits and participation in democratic decision-making. Still, it must be responsibly integrated and with care. The abrupt declaration that Trump 2.0 will be an “AI-First” administration, combined with the centralization of power under the unitary executive theory, is a clear signal that government technology reform is at best a secondary motivator for Trump 2.0. Actual reform is done carefully, with public consultation, and includes transparent markers for progress. Instead, AI appears to be understood within this administration as a highly effective tool for consolidating power beyond the reach of the citizens whose interests it claims to serve.

Seeing behind this rhetoric will require people to better understand how AI and other data technologies work and how they centralize power. Their true purpose in this administration does not require them to work correctly: even broken systems can serve the pretense of “fixing government.” In this way, the term AI serves a key rhetorical role, providing cover for the destruction of public institutions in order to make them easier to sell for parts.

A source of this rhetorical power is the myth of AI’s limitless potential. The idea that AI systems can be applied at scale and across contexts without making mistakes has led the Trump administration to focus on accelerating their adoption, including through executive orders—such as one encouraging their use in K-12 education—and hastily deployed chatbots that promise to replace purged civil servants. These bombastic ideas, sustained by the myth that AI improves anything that it touches, are beneficial for tech companies’ profits, but not borne out by the evidence.

Unfortunately, this hype around AI is already damaging the government. We are already seeing disastrously flawed policy proposals drafted with tools like ChatGPT; commentators even suggest there is evidence that the tariffs program Trump announced in April was written by an LLM such as ChatGPT. Indeed, as federal agencies roll out new AI tools to their entire staffs at once, there is little evidence to suggest that these tools have been developed using careful consideration of safety, security, and privacy. An ethos to “move fast and break things” has one set of consequences for consumer technology, but much higher stakes in public services. For some services, such as social security check disbursement, sending checks out on time is a matter of life and death. Sadly, the reality of the exhortation to speed up government has in practice resulted in brokenness, backward workarounds, and delays.

Instead of speeding up and transforming government, the reckless acceleration of AI has had numerous deleterious effects on our civic institutions. Foremost, it centralizes power and diminishes the careful balance of power that the US has aimed to achieve between different branches of government. It has increased privacy risks for activists and immigrants by making their personal information easier to re-identify and target. Expropriation of data may also allow Elon Musk to target union activists in his companies and business competitors, and perhaps even his personal critics, for harassment. Musk and DOGE’s personnel decisions and hasty power grabs also put citizens directly in the line of harm by potentially exposing personal information, from domestic violence records to medical data, from banking details to tax records, all in violation of multiple laws, procedural norms, and privacy best practices.

Meanwhile, the administration has been using its platform to misdirect the public. When things go wrong, the Trump administration blames Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. When attention is drawn to the harms that DOGE has caused, Musk and Trump 2.0 officials mislead the public about evidence of waste and fraud. Contributors in our series will explore how more vulnerable groups have been used as scapegoats to redirect attention away from the project of dismantling and repurposing major American institutions.

The ideological agenda behind the headlines positions technology and its architects as power brokers in an increasingly illiberal environment. Their changes are bolstered by the narrative that AI is a force that will inevitably reshape society. To make informed choices about how to respond to this aggressive reshaping of the US government, we must examine these animating ideas. We approached authors for this series who have deep knowledge about the unusual views of reactionaries in the tech industry: whether it be fantasies of libertarian paradises built on defunct sea-based oil rigs, the vision of company towns in Texas and eventually Mars, enthusiasm for debunked 19th Century ideas about race science and eugenics, or the goal of replacing the US dollar as the global reserve currency, these more esoteric backstories can be disorienting to non-specialists. But, seemingly overnight, understanding the ties that bind these projects together—however strange they may seem—has become essential information for all of us to understand and grapple with.

Left unchecked, the changes we’re seeing will reshape the US—and the world—for generations. We hope that this series is a step toward re-narrating the present moment and deepening public understanding about what is happening and why. Correctly diagnosing today’s crisis depends on seeing behind the popular rhetoric about AI and government, toward understanding who benefits from these narrative frames and the changes to the distribution of power that they make possible.

“Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis” is published by Tech Policy Press in partnership with Data & Society. The series launched on June 3, 2025, with new essays rolling out over two weeks. Contributors include Esra’a Al Shafei, Luca Belli, Emily M. Bender, Brian J. Chen, Kevin De Liban, Gil Duran, Ben Green, Alex Hanna, Brian Hofer, Tamara Kneese, Natalia Luka, Tina M. Park, Alex Pasternack, Reem Suleiman, and Emnet Tafesse.

Read more pieces in the series:

• Using AI to Reform Government is Much Harder Than it Looks — Ben Green, June 3, 2025
• The Myth of AGI — Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender, June 3, 2025
• Austerity Intelligence - Kevin De Liban, June 4, 2025
• AI, Gig Workers, and the Erosion of Democracies - Luca Belli, June 4, 2025
• Why are Tech Oligarchs So Obsessed with Energy and What Does That Mean for Democracy? - Tamara Kneese, June 5, 2025
• Public Sector Triage of the Federal Government’s Data Hemorrhage - Reem Suleiman, Esra’a Al Shafei, and Brian Hofer, June 5, 2025