To add onto this, though this is clearly just the early stages, I think what we’re seeing with the consolidation of the Silicon Valley elites and Big Tech giants under the Trump faction is, in many ways, a coup by America’s “New Money” Tech oligarchs against the traditional 20th century financial/industrial institutional elite that the MAGA Republicans had moved away from and therefore had visibly coalesced under the Democrats. I was listening to TrueAnon’s take on the Republican “shift” of Big Tech and they highlighted the persecution complex that Silicon Valley had under Biden, where people like Zuckerberg were dragged into Congress and made to endure a televised grilling. This was something that would have never happened to the likes of Dimon, Soros or Buffett.
Given that explosive stock market capitalization had made these Tech oligarchs far wealthier than the “Old Money” ever had been, it must have been humiliating for narcissistic freaks like Zuckerberg who have megalomaniacal messiah complexes from usually being just in their Silicon Valley yes-men echochambers to experience being treated this way when they’re also the new overwhelming power in America’s elite. These deeply resentful individuals then saw in Trump’s admin a way to finally have the Big Tech power base institutionally reconstituted at the top of the hierarchy, above the “Old Money.”
Rather than LARPing as a character in some British drama about “New Money” losers spending the entire series trying to ingratiate their way into the “Old Money” elite nobility, they’re deciding to simply flip the table and pull down the entire superstructure to rebuild from the rubble something that can acknowledge the powerbrokers. The destruction of all these old levers of American institutional power and the government careerists that have decades of networks with the “Old Money” elite (including in places like USAID, RFE and VOA - though it shows a bottom line of US imperial consensus still exists as RFA is untouched and unmentioned in all this) is to pauperize the latter’s connections within the US state and to reset the playing field in a way favorable to the recognition of the overwhelming wealth of the new Big Tech oligarchy. The intent is to demonstrate an overwhelming show of force that demonstrates their political power through what Trump is able to do with their sponsorship, rendering it impossible for the Big Tech elites to be alienated and treated the way those like Zuckerberg were under Biden.
There’s definitely an internal contradiction within America’s elite classes that has ballooned with the monumental capital accumulation from, especially, the past decade through the seismic technological gains. The paradigm of America’s upper class composition was indeed one of finance for most of modern American history, but I do suspect that the rise of Silicon Valley has suddenly created a new power base that has the capacity to come into friction with the traditional institutional elite.
The fact that many of these tech oligarchs like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg eclipse the traditional financial elite in wealth means that they have no interest in falling in line at the bottom of the pecking order as “New Money.” The recent TrueAnon episode about them really highlights the sense of “persecution” these narcissistic freaks obtained during the Biden government.
To be frank, they do have a compelling case to sell in that the state apparatus firmly believes technology is the primary means to secure American hegemony and sees their much fantasized ultimate showdown with China as one defined primarily by technological capabilities. So this is a contradiction in which they believe in their own self-importance as the lead actors of modern America and much of the state apparatus also believes the same thing. If that is true, all those avenues you highlighted of the further “technologification” of American society would be inherently to their interest and would cyclically entrench their explosive influence in modern America.