Tech Won't Save Us - The New Tech Oligarchy w/ Gaby Del Valle

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Gaby Del Valle to discuss the inauguration of Donald Trump and what the tech oligarchy hopes to get from their relationship with him.Gaby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge and is working on a book on ecofascism that will be released by Bloomsbury in 2026.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Gaby wrote about Elon Musk’s plans for DOGE and the eugenic ideas in Silicon Valley.The Guardian published an opinion piece titled, “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.”Tesla applied for more H-1B visas as it was laying off thousands of workers.Support the show

I don't think that there's been a vibe shift. I think the vibes were there. They've been there for a long time. They want deregulation. They want to do whatever it is that they want to do. And they found someone who will let them do that as long as they throw a ton of money at him. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Martz, and this week my guest is Gabby Del Valle.

Gabby is a policy reporter at The Verge and is writing a book on eco-fascism that will be released by Bloomsbury in 2026. Now, the event that we have all been dreading has arrived. Donald Trump has been inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States and standing right behind him as he was doing that inauguration, as he was making his speech, were some of the richest people in the world. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, a lot of tech folks were attending this inauguration to show their support for Donald Trump, for his MAGA movement, and to make sure that their

interests are aligned with the new extreme right-wing president of the United States. These are some of the most powerful people in the world working for their own interests, regardless of the wider consequences. They are showing that this tech industry was never about some kind of like higher ideals or a better capitalism but was always like any other industry trying to enrich itself and because these companies have become so large because the people behind them have become so rich they're even worse than what has come before. It's not a new thing, but this shows very clearly that the United States is ruled by an oligarchy and tech billionaires have taken their

place within that oligarchy to ensure that the U.S. government is going to serve their interests. That means that opposition over the next four years cannot just be about opposing the government and what the government is doing, but also opposing this tech industry that is so often positioned itself as being separate from government, outside of government, that government is the bad guy, but the tech industry are the good guys. That was never true. And this shows very clearly that that is the case. Now, I wanted to have Gabby on the show to go through what we saw during the inauguration, to go through how these tech billionaires are looking to benefit from their relationship to Donald Trump and how this Department of Government Efficiency, headed up by Elon Musk

and controlled by Elon Musk, is going to try to reshape government, not just to serve the tech industry's interests, but to serve this wider right-wing project that these tech billionaires have embraced and have made themselves a part of. Gabby and I had a great conversation going through all of those issues, and I think that you're really going to enjoy it. And I don't really see a point on dwelling any further in this introduction other than to say that more than ever, criticism of this industry, critical perspectives on this industry are going to be more important than they have been. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn't listen to the critics earlier, didn't listen to the critics at moments where

it could have made a greater impact to start restraining the power of these tech billionaires and of these tech companies because people were more interested in the prosperity and the money that could be made off of these growing companies that are very highly valued and that were creating a lot of wealth for the United States and for certain investors. And now we see the consequences of that. So as always, if you enjoy this conversation, if you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show or this episode on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so we can keep having these critical in-depth

conversations so you can get access to premium interviews from our Data Vampires series. You can join supporters like Finn from Hamburg, Vivek from Mumbai, Victor from Spain, and Jonas from Switzerland by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Gabby, welcome to TechWon'tSaveUs. Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. It's great to talk to you. You had a piece last year that we were going to talk about last year about Doge, but then, you know, things happen and we get to this point where the 47th president, I think he is, Donald Trump is returning to the White House. He has just been inaugurated. So I thought, you know, while we're talking about Doge, and we'll get to that a bit later in the conversation, you know, it gives us

the opportunity to talk about how Donald Trump is being inaugurated now. These tech billionaires got prime placement, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk were lined up behind him, you know, as he was giving his speech and getting inaugurated as the new president. You know, what do we make of the scene we saw there and the wider ties between tech and the Trump administration? Yeah, I mean, I think what people in Silicon Valley are saying is that there has been a vibe shift. And I don't think that there's been a vibe shift.

I think the vibes were there. They've been there for a long time. They want deregulation. They want to do whatever it is that they want to do. And they found someone who will let them do that as long as they throw a ton of money at him, money and also public support. I think what we saw culturally during the last Trump administration was a kind of cultural shunning, you know, and this time there's not as much of a cultural shunning. There is in fact an embrace from certain aspects of both pop culture and business.

And I think that that, for Trump, is worth almost as much as all the money that Elon Musk threw at his campaign. No, it's completely wild. And I might have said it on the show before, I can't remember. But as a Canadian watching, it's wild to see major businesses and business leaders contributing millions of dollars to an inauguration of a president. Canadian watching, like it's wild to see major businesses and business leaders like contributing millions of dollars to an inauguration of a president. Like if we had like business leaders contributing that kind of money to like prime ministerial swearing in or something like it

would be like, this is total corruption. Like it would never go. But yeah, in the United States, it seems like fair game. Yeah. I mean, every inauguration is such political theater. So it's not just Trump, but like, it felt like overdrive. Yeah, it's just wild, right? And I believe I read that like this inauguration, the amount of money that they've taken in is more than any in history, right? And it does seem like so many of these corporate leaders, not just in the tech sector, but in wider corporate America seem to want to show to Trump that, like, look, we're on your side. We are going to contribute

our little bit to this to show that we're supporting you. And, you know, we hope that that is going to mean positive policy action, I guess, in the future, right? Yeah, absolutely. Or even no policy action, because I think the other thing is that he is so vindictive, like he wants to humiliate these people. And he kind of has like he's threatened to break up Google and he publicly hated Mark Zuckerberg for years. It's a power game that he's playing. Yeah, that's a really good point. And, you know, it's wild to see these people now lining up behind him. You know, Mark Zuckerberg saying that he is a badass last year, saying that he's been praying for Trump when the assassination attempt happened. And of course, now, you know,

going on Joe Rogan and, you know, saying all these other things basically to say, like, you know, I am very much aligned with this right wing turn, not just in the tech industry, but in the broader society to get behind Trump and to show that our platforms, our corporate decisions are going to support the agenda that him and the people who support him have. So that, you know, as you say, we can try to get these policy actions that are going to be beneficial to our company, whether it is trying to take on other governments, say in Europe or beyond that are trying to regulate Meta or Facebook, but also making sure that, you know, the types of things that are a threat to the company domestically start to go away as well. As I was seeing that image earlier this week of,

you know, the tech billionaires lined up behind Donald Trump, I was also thinking of something that Joe Biden said in his final speech to the nation or whatever it was called, where he talked about the formation of a tech oligarchy, right? And I feel like, you know, as people who've been watching this for a while, I think we've probably seen this forming for quite some time. It seems a bit belated, you know, the recognition from these people at this level of power. But I think it is an accurate reflection, an accurate description of what we are seeing today. I think it absolutely is. And I wonder if, this is maybe a hot take, but I wonder if it's because the Democrats didn't get the tech oligarchy. Is he jealous? I mean, I do think that Joe Biden was this kind of interesting anomaly in the Democratic Party of 2024 where he was actually more like little guy union worker than your average Democrat. And, you know, he had all kinds of other

things going on. But I think the Democratic Party has become this kind of white collar worker educated city type party. And that means that they think that they should have gotten not the tech billionaires, but at least the tech workers. And, you know, they probably did get a fair share of the tech workers. But I mean, yeah, the Biden assessment is completely right. The FTC under Biden did so much, like so, so much. So it's not like there was nothing actually happening. But at the same time, like if you have Uber's like former general counsel, an Uber lawyer advising the Harris campaign. Like that's not the CEO of Uber. That's not Peter Thiel. It's not Elon Musk.

But it's kind of like both sides are elite parties. And one side just has more money and more reactionaries or people willing to be quiet about how the party is reactionary so that they'll be left alone. As you're saying, you had Tony West, this chief legal counsel or whatever he was at Uber, you know, basically take a break from his job at Uber to advise the Harris campaign, because I believe he's Kamala Harris's brother-in-law or something like that. David Plouffe as well, or Plouffe or however you pronounce his name, I believe also did work with Uber, but also some of these other tech companies, you know, and was very prominent during the Obama administration was also part of the Harris campaign. And we know that some of these people were influential in trying to push the campaign not to go too hard on corporate America and calling out some of these tech companies and stuff, right? Meanwhile, as you're

saying, you had this action against the tech companies or this attempt to, you know, move forward these antitrust cases, certain regulations and things like that under the Biden administration. But at the same time, it's like it feels a bit too little too late, almost like they had been able to build up their power to such a degree that it was so difficult to challenge at this moment because of actions taken during the first Trump administration, but also during the Obama administration to allow them to accrue this amount of power that, yes, okay, they might be a tech oligarchy now, but that probably could have been headed off at an earlier moment if, as you're saying, these two parties weren't just so obsessed with, you know, cultivating wealth and access to

power and, you know, large companies, regardless of the bigger cost that those things have for society. That's what I was trying to say. You just said it in a much more articulate way. And I mean, you also had, you had Reid Hoffman stumping for Harris, you had Mark Cuban, and it just rings a little hollow. Yeah. Who can get the most or the best billionaires to back them? Yeah. Trump clearly won on that this time around. I feel like more of them were like in the Clinton camp, you know, a number of years ago. Right. Yeah. Yeah, they were. And I think I mean, I don't know if it was a respectability thing or if it was because they actually believed in like Clinton style liberalism or if they just thought there was no way he was going to win and they were like hedging their bets. But I think like the first

Trump campaign, people thought it was an aberration. People thought there's no way this guy is going to be president. And then he was president and he was president for four years and he got impeached and it didn't matter. And now I think the shock of it has worn off and there's almost a level of pragmatism that we're seeing from the tech elite. I think they are doing the most rational thing for themselves. I think in 2016, many of them said, I am taking a stand for democracy. I am taking a stand. And in 2020, it was, I am taking a stand against racism.

We are YouTube stands with Black Lives Matter. You don't see that so much these days. No, absolutely not. Instead, you see the end of DEI. You know, Meta needs a more masculine energy. They need to take on the woke and, you know, the threats, the free speech and all this kind of stuff, right? Exactly. I feel like one of the big conversation points that came out of the inauguration was obviously Elon Musk was there as usual.

He's the richest man in the world. He has spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing the Trump campaign and getting it to this point. And of course, we'll talk about his role in Doge and what it might mean for the government in a little bit. But, you know, at this big rally that happened after the inauguration, Elon Musk went up and made a speech and gave a salute that, you know, let's be real. It looks like he was given a Nazi salute there. And I feel like to me that speaks to this wider embrace of the far right that we've been seeing from someone like Elon Musk. But I wonder what you made of that, you know, being in the United States and seeing

the power these people are going to have for the next few years. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to be honest with you. It looks like a Nazi salute, but Elon Musk is the kind of like 50 something year old man with like 2010 internet humor brain. So I think he thought maybe he was dabbing. And I think the fact that it looks like a Nazi salute is he will use to be like, oh, haha, you guys are so easily triggered. Like you think this is a Nazi salute? It's not a Nazi salute. And while we spend all this time being like, was it a Nazi salute? Was it not? Was he just exuberant on stage because of his hard work paying off? It being like, was it a Nazi salute? Was it not? Was he just exuberant on stage because of his hard work paying off? It's like, well, the man is retweeting actual

Nazis. Like it doesn't actually. That's what really matters. Yeah. Like the important thing here is that he is out here doing great replacement talking points on the social media platform that he owns. So I don't want that to get lost. think I think the fact that he did something that probably was a Nazi salute on stage obviously horrible but if he had gone up there and delivered like a sober reasonable speech and they had then gone on to do what they're going to do I think it would still be still be pretty bad. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. And I thought the same thing when I initially saw it, I was like, maybe he is doing a Nazi salute. Maybe he's not. But I feel like part of it is probably like a message to his base into like the MAGA base, you know, who want to see something like this,

but also this opportunity to like, own the libs or troll or whatever, given, you know, the kind of personality we know that he has by how he posts. So like terrible jokes like that are also the kind of things that he loves to do. Exactly. Yeah. He, he just, it's like he's 14 years old, unfortunately, but he's the richest man in the world. And like in his fifties, it's pathetic, but unfortunately, like he has so much sway and power over like all of our lives it's terrible it's really embarrassing like i don't want there to be like a cool like far right billionaire like but it's almost it just hurts more to be like this guy's a dweeb yeah there

was this headline in the guardian i can't remember exactly what it was the other day it was like you know i expected the return of the far right or something like that, but I didn't expect them to be like so weird. I'm totally butchering what that headline actually said. I know what you're talking about. I'm going to have to put a link to it in the show notes so people can go check it out. But one of the other things that we saw on inauguration day, of course, you know, Donald Trump had been signaling this leading up to it was basically that he was going to sign a ton of executive orders on the first day, things to roll back policies from the Biden administration that they didn't like, but also to set up the agenda that he had campaigned on to his people, but also the types of things that he has been promising to, you know, his donors and the people

who are supporting them over the past little while. You know, there are many different aspects of that many different orders we could talk about. I wonder, you know, what aspects of it stood out to you as you saw the list or some of the reporting on the types of executive orders that he signed? I want to take a step back really quickly and just talk about the lead up to the election. The America First Policy Institute was drafting these for months and months and months. They had these ready to go out the door. And the fact that going back to what I said before about how the first Trump administration seemed like an aberration internally, it was pretty chaotic. There was a lot of turnover. There was a lot of instability. They couldn't always figure out how

to do the things that they wanted to do. This time it's different. Like this time they came in locked and loaded and ready to go. The one that stood out most to me was birthright citizenship because it was like this kind of perfect combination of white nationalism, nativism, and then also this kind of snide little jab at Kamala Harris because of the children of people here on non-immigrant visas are also not considered citizens and also just completely illegal, like a complete misreading of the 14th amendment. And immediately they got sued over it yesterday. I got an email from the ACLU last night at like 10 PM, but it's going to be tied up for probably his entire four years in office. And yeah, I mean, this is going to have,

if it's allowed to go into effect, just these reverberating effects that will be worse for the economy, will in some ways be worse for the tech industry because of like the amount of people here on H-1Bs who have children here. And that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. That's not the point. The actual policy is not the point here. Well, I guess it is the point, but the downstream effects of the policy are not the point. Yeah, exactly. I think that's a really important point, right? And I saw someone say that it's very likely Elon Musk's own kids with his first wife would not be American citizens under this policy because it's unlikely either of them had green cards at the time that they were born, right? But doesn't matter, because someone like that, you know, can evade all these types of things anyway. And of course, it's only

future focus that's not going back and taking things away, at least not at this moment. But I think what you were saying there as well, before talking about that order is really important too, right? In the sense that there was a lot of preparation before Trump came to power to make sure that this agenda was in place in a way that that was not the case with the first Trump administration, right? You know, we know the stories about how chaotic it was, how he brought in a lot of people from the establishment as part of his cabinet who, you know, he had disagreements with, but, you know, he felt that he needed to work with this larger Republican party. Now he is in full command of what is happening there. And the wider effects of that, you know, we're already seeing it, right, with these executive orders that were passed on the

first day, and we're going to continue seeing it. Because I know that, you know, the Heritage Foundation and a lot of these other really right wing groups were very heavily involved in crafting a plan for what this sort of administration would look like and the types of actions that they would be taking. I believe, you know, part of that was kind of called Project 2025, but I'm sure it's a bigger vision or plan that they have for the American government. And that sets up some really troubling developments that are going to be coming, not just for the United States, but, you know, I'm sure people all over the world are really going to be feeling the effects of that because of the power that the United States holds. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And then on the subject of other

executive orders, I wanted to talk really briefly about the ones about how there are only two genders, male and female, and the one rolling back DEI programs. And these two are kind of indicative to me of the ideological project that has united the tech right and the more traditional socially conservative right. There's this, you know, belief in like pushing back against liberal excess, pushing back against woke or what Elon calls the woke mind virus. And it kind of ultimately comes down to biological essentialism. You've got a lot of people in tech, a lot of pseudonymous writers talking about the links between race and IQ and how DEI is actually causing underqualified people to take jobs that that should be going to more qualified people, more qualified people with higher IQs, ergo

white men. They do have this funny bit where they say it's not racist to believe in the links between race and IQ because white people are the third highest IQ and not the first or second. I wrote about this for the Baffler last year, the kind of race science, eugenic underpinnings of a lot of this anti-DEI stuff. The anti-trans stuff is the same thing. It's like this belief that, you know, there is a rigid hierarchy of race, of sex, of gender, of intelligence. All of these things are intertwined. Everybody has a proper social role and everybody should adhere to that role. And, you know, they say the Democrats, they're abandoning nature. They're abandoning what is right. Or from the tech perspective, they're abandoning science. They're abandoning

these things in favor of woke political correctness. And, you know, it's both vindictive, but also beyond kind of owning the libs. Like this is the ideology. I think it's a really important point, right? And especially as we've seen someone like Elon Musk be promoting these ideas around population and around IQ for so long and have so many of those things have been absorbed into this larger tech community where you have a growing number of people who are in tech, especially people who are influential and kind of near the top of the industry, you know, embracing these ideas and repeating them. And these are reflections of ideas that we have seen in the Valley for a long time, you know, as someone like Malcolm Harris wrote in his book, Palo Alto, you know, kind of laying out a lot of

this history. These are things that we need to understand. And these are not completely novel ideas, right? They have been floating in these circles for a very long time. And it's more like seeing a resurgence of, you know, these types of socially conservative eugenic ideas, rather than this emerging out of nowhere. And we should be so surprised that people in tech feel this way. Definitely. I mean, the Harris book explains it perfectly. Silicon Valley is where a lot of this ideology, if not originated, then flourished. And it's just coming back home. It was always kind of there under the surface. And now it's just out. Once again, the vibe did not shift. Maybe some masks slipped off, but this has always been part of it.

Exactly. Yeah. You know, you've had people like Peter Thiel and David Sachs who've been promoting shift. Maybe this mask slipped off, but this has always been part of it. Exactly. Yeah. You know, you've had people like Peter Thiel and David Sachs who've been promoting these types of things for a long time. You know, we had this moment where the tech industry wanted to appear socially progressive and maybe some of them even felt that way, especially during the Obama era, right? Because it made sense to get close to the Obama Democrats and to make sure that they were, you know, passing policies that were in their favor. But it's quite clear that the political tides have shifted. And, you know, these people have become very powerful, very wealthy, have very particular ideas about the world and how it should work. And we're seeing that reflected in the types of things that they're saying and the political movements that they're supporting with all the kind of harm and problems

that come with that. So just to build on what you were saying there about the number of executive orders, I wanted to call out a few others as well. You know, unsurprisingly, we saw Donald Trump pull out of the Paris Agreement. He had done that during his first term as well, and ended a lot of Biden's policies to incentivize the purchase of electric vehicles, something that you would imagine someone like Elon Musk would be against, but that is not the case. And he declared, you know, drill, baby, drill again. They're going to be trying to extract a lot more fossil fuels. The United States is already the top oil producer in the world right now. And, you know, apparently, despite the fact that Elon Musk positioned himself as this climate champion for so long,

you know, he seems to be very much behind this push to eradicate environmental policies, regardless of what that means for the climate. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about Elon is that so much of his wealth comes from government contracts that it doesn't really matter that, you know, it's going to be less incentivized to buy electric vehicles. Obviously, Tesla is what people know him for, but that's not where most of his money is coming from. And there's so much of it. It doesn't actually matter. I also wanted to point out that I think recently over the past couple of years, he's really stopped talking about climate change as this massive civilizational threat. And he has shifted to talking about population decline and potential underpopulation as the threat to humanity and civilization. As we know, he has many kids, many, many kids with different women. And I think that he has this kind of mentality that everybody should be having babies,

but especially the best and brightest among us. So I eat him. And, you know, if the climate goes to shit, like there's Mars, so it's fine. It's okay. And, you know, if the climate goes to shit, like there's Mars, so it's fine. It's okay. And if you can't afford to go to Mars, that's too bad. My great grandkids are going to be there. I mean, I think it's a combination of emphasizing for all of these people, not just for Musk, short-term financial gain at the expense of actual civilization, humanity, et cetera, but also monetizing the collapse. And yeah, I'm really dreading what the next four years and also 40 years are going to look like on that front. Yeah, well, and there was even a point in Donald Trump's speech yesterday after he was inaugurated,

where he talked about the return of America's manifest destiny. You know, this notion that like, you know, America has this kind of God-given right to expand and how the United States is going to expand its wealth and its territory in ways that it hasn't in ages. And that one of the places it would be expanding its territory was by putting the stars and stripes on Mars and putting like boots on the ground there. And like, it's kind of wild to see all these like ideas mixed

up together and how obviously some of this is coming from his conservative backers. But some of it like this Mars stuff is also coming from Elon Musk and the tech folks who have embraced it. And then on top of that, of course, you know, talking about taking Greenland and Canada, where I am turning it into a 51st state and having our prime minister become a governor, that would be a really big state, though, you know, if it was the 51st state. Yeah, I think it might have to be a few different states, but we're not going to let it get there anyway. I mean, I guess, you know, we've got some really big ones with small populations, so maybe that's what they're thinking. I do think I wonder if the Greenland thing is this is not my own original thought.

I've seen people talking about this online, but what kind of internal climate data do they have? Like, what are they thinking here? Or is it just a kind of power move or is it both? I'm not sure. I can't say. I feel like it's kind of like this idea that the United States should own all of North America, you know, take Canada back, take Greenland.

It's all America. It can defend it all. Plus, you know, the Canada back, take Greenland. It's all America. It can defend it all. Plus, you know, the North is up there. The ice is melting. It's easier to get ships through there. I don't think any of it's going anywhere. You know, those sorts of plans, I hope, you know, as a Canadian, I guess we'll see what happens. Just to build on that, though, Trump also repealed Biden's industry friendly AI executive order, suggesting that AI companies are going to have even fewer restrictions on what they are doing. So we'll see what kind of impacts that has on the AI industry. I'm sure we're still waiting to see what he's going to do on crypto regulations and what's going to come there. But we know that the crypto industry was funding the Biden campaign

a lot. But of course, another of the big ones, and of course, you know, TikTok CEO Shuzi Chu was at the inauguration as well. You know, TikTok was supposed to be banned on the 19th. It went down for a few hours and came back. But, you know, this included, you know, a statement from Trump that the TikTok ban would be delayed at least 75 days to give it more time to come to some sort of agreement as they review what is going on. What did you make of how this plan for a TikTok ban has evolved? Trump's kind of change on this is flip-flop from his first administration and how we've seen this all play out. Yeah, I mean, he, as you said, was the original driver of this idea. It became, over the course of the Biden administration, this real bipartisan issue, it was very heavily

supported on both sides of the aisle. I don't remember the actual vote count, but, you know, it was framed as a national security issue. And we, in the lawsuit, some of the documents cited in the lawsuit mentioned these classified briefings that members of Congress had. And so much of that was redacted. Like, we actually don't know exactly why Congress banned TikTok. We can extrapolate from the publicly available information from what they've said, but we don't know. And I think for Trump, the national security thing is irrelevant. We don't know what the actual national security justification is. So I'm not saying whether that's good or bad. I'm just saying that's not his concern. His concern is the Biden government took TikTok from you. I'm going to bring it back.

That's kind of it. And also it's getting another tech CEO to fall in line because TikTok changed its little message from we're working on getting back to thank you, President Trump, for bringing TikTok back. I was in a Lyft yesterday and I'm just sitting there and the guy says, did you hear TikTok is back? Like and I opened the app and I saw the Trump pop up and I was like, oh, my God. Like it was like when he put his name on the stimulus checks. It's just a public facing move.

And it's pretty smart. Got to hand it to him. Oh, absolutely. Like it was kind of brilliantly played, right? The notion of banning TikTok, this platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use, is placed on Joe Biden. You know, he is taking this app that you enjoy from you for reasons that we don't totally understand or that don't totally make sense.

And so Trump is able to come in. I don't know why, you know, they positioned it right before the inauguration, you know, the date that it was going to be banned. It was kind of like handing Trump this opportunity. Right. And then, of course, you know, what happens is, of course, he takes advantage of that moment, says, yeah, we're going to bring it back. We're going to make it so that you can still, you know, use TikTok, this platform that you love, where, you know, there are a lot of Trump supporters as well who use it. There are also a lot of people who don't support Trump at all who use it, you know, and it seems quite likely that now that the app has not been banned, the company will still try to appease Trump in some ways, like the other social media companies will have to see

how that actually plays out. But, you know, it's a great way to start his administration with this platform that hundreds of millions of Americans use, sending a message to all its users who check the app saying, hey, President Trump brought TikTok back for you. Yeah. And one of the lawsuits was conservative influencers suing the Biden administration over banning TikTok. But I think one of the arguments was that this is a suppression of not just the First Amendment, but like specifically political speech because they were political influencers. And again, I don't think Trump cares about any of that. That's not really the point, but it doesn't hurt. Totally. It's a great early win to set him up for this administration and to make people think that he saved this app that you all like. One thing that we talked about briefly before we

started recording was these parties, you know, that these tech billionaires and tech companies were supporting. Peter Thiel, of course, had a pre inauguration party where he had a bunch of people over to his mansion in DC. You know, Mark Zuckerberg was there. JD Vance came over, you know, a bunch of other billionaires and connected people showing up there. Zuckerberg hosted a reception as well after the inauguration for Trump. You know,'s media company party that I heard Peter Thiel attended, heard as in I read on the internet. There was a party that I was very curious about, but unfortunately wasn't able to go to. And when I say unfortunately, I don't mean I would have had fun there. I mean, I would have wanted to see what the vibes were. Yeah, you wanted to see what was happening. I wanted to see what was happening. There is this publishing company called Passage Press.

They are run by a formerly anonymous man who goes by Lómez. Now, I believe he was outed by The Guardian. Unfortunately, I don't actually remember his full name because I just remember Lómez. But, you know, it's out there. They published Steve Saylor's new book. It's pretty overtly race science stuff. And they had what they called a coronation ball on the 19th of January. I don't know who was there. I don't know anything. The tickets were $875. And in the invitation, there was something about the new tech right and how they were taking DC back. And, you know, I do

wonder who was there, who was there from the new tech, right? I have some guesses, but yeah, I mean, it's just so explicit now. I think the way that these people feel is that during the Obama administration and during the Biden administration, and maybe even during the first Trump administration, they were muzzled. They could not say the truth. They could not say what we're all thinking and big air quotes around that. I mean, I remember, I think his name was James Damore, who then started going by fired for truth for talking about how these equity programs were causing companies to hire less qualified, like inferior people. A lot of them think that. And now they think I'm allowed to say this for the first time ever publicly with my name attached, with my face attached. And I think in that sense,

there has been a vibe shift, not in what people are thinking, but in the amount of leeway that they think they have to publicly say these things. There's talk of repealing the Civil Rights Act. It's not just like edgy jokes. It's not just like shit posts on Twitter. It's like this could have real policy consequences, which would affect millions of people. Well, and which we're already seeing with those executive orders, right? And that's just the start, right? That's just the starting gun. And they have four more years to really double down on these things. And especially two more years where they control the House and the Senate as well. And it will be much easier for them to move things forward. You know, another one of those executive orders that were signed on the

first day related to Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, this thing named after a meme coin, a meme coin that was initially meant as like a kind of parody of the Efficiency, this thing named after a meme coin, a meme coin that was initially meant as like a kind of parody of the crypto industry, but has been taken over by Elon Musk. And, you know, he very personally identifies with it. But this executive order, you know, we have been talking for the past few months about how the Department of Government Efficiency is not actually a real government department, but, you know, is just kind of advising as to where the government might make cuts or what the Trump administration might do. But this executive order took the US Digital Service, which was set up by Obama to create the website for Obamacare,

and of course, has been doing other things to help deliver government services, you know, through digital technology and platforms and things like that, since then, renamed it the Department of Government Efficiency, so turned it into a real government department. So, you know, now I don't know if that makes Elon Musk a government employee or what's going to happen there. He might want to avoid an actual true title. But what is this Department of Government Efficiency? What is the idea behind it? What do you make of it? So I think this is another really interesting fusion of just your mainstream Republicans and these kind of esoteric far-right tech guys, because austerity is not a new concept. Elon Musk did not invent the concept of cutting government funding for social services. That is, in fact, a longstanding Republican priority. But at the same time, reading about what Elon and Vivek, who appears to now have been exiled

from MAGA, how they describe the Department of Government Efficiency, and specifically in the context of Trump's prior efforts to gut the federal bureaucracy of dissenters and people who were getting in the way of his policy plans by telling him, we can't do that, that's illegal, reminds me a lot of Curtis Yarvin's RAGE acronym, which stands for Retire All Government Employees. And the idea basically is to retire all government employees. The way that Trump tried to do that was through something called Schedule F, which would have reclassified a bunch of federal employees as political appointees, allowing him to just boot them all out. Because, you know, obviously the heads of agencies and of

departments, those people are subject to a confirmation process. They are political appointees. But then there's a bunch of career staffers under that whose job is to implement the policies, regardless of who's in office. There are lawyers and experts and all of these different people. And yeah, during the first Trump administration, some of those people were the ones who got in the way of what he wanted to do. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But they were still obstacles.

For example, family separation was floated as an idea multiple times before they actually implemented it as a policy. Caitlin Dickerson has this report in The Atlantic kind of breaking down like how it came to be. And it was discussed a number of times at a number of different levels before the actual family separation policy, non-policy. And I mean, part of the reason that Trump went through so many heads of the Department of Homeland Security is because the initial career staffers who had been working in Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, who was the face of family separation, they were all calling her a squish and saying she was soft and saying she didn't believe in MAGA.

And she was the face of that. I mean, I'm not defending her, but they did scapegoat her. They got rid of her and replaced her with somebody even more hardline. But it was framed as kind of like, oh, she screwed this up. Family separation. That was a bridge too far, I guess. So that's just one example. But the idea here is to have an autocrat. Yarvin first described this, to my knowledge, in 2012. So this is, again, on the kind of tech, right, not a new idea. And the whole Yarvin thing is democracy is bad. The will of the people is bad. He's said before, we need a benevolent dictator. We need someone to run the country like a CEO. And what was Trump's first pitch to voters in 2015?

I'm really good at business, so I would be really good at running a country. Running a country is like running a business. It's the same thing. You put a really strong guy in charge and he bullies people around until they do what he wants. And that's why I'm so good at business. I think there are a number of things that I want to pick up on there. But I think what you're saying is completely right. You know, I had Julia Black on the show before the election where we were talking about Curtis Yarvin and these ideas and how his writings have been influential,

not just within the tech community, but increasingly in this wider, you know, extreme right that is ascendant and really pushing the MAGA movement, right? I saw just the other day there was an interview with him in the New York Times, kind of a fluffy interview, if I can put it charitably, I guess. It's odd to see someone like this being treated in that kind of way, almost like legitimized publicly, which is really concerning and worrying for what is happening and where the United States might be going. But you also mentioned this broader plan to kind of change how the US government works to gut it of a lot of workers. And on the one hand, obviously, this is something, as you say, that the right wing has been wanting to do for a very long time, has been part of what they've

been doing. But it feels like through the government efficiency department and by having Elon Musk and some of his folks involved that you give it this like cloak of like being this tech thing, right? So it's good because it's involved with digital technology. And because of that now, you know, look, it's like Twitter. We cut so many employees from Twitter and it works so much better now. So why wouldn't you want the government to run in a more efficient way when we can still deliver all these services with you, but just not pay as much for labor and we're going to cut the budget and cut the costs and all this kind of stuff. And it feels like a complete fantasy, but you can see how people really start to go for it. Yeah, definitely. And I think if you look at it in conjunction with the other things that Trump said on the campaign trail to a voter, it was basically framed as the government

is bloated. Your groceries are too expensive. These things are actually related. We're going to cut the federal spending so that you can have more money in your pocket. Like this is the kind of simple framing that people really, really respond to when their groceries are more expensive. Not to say that's the sole reason why Trump won, but I think it's a very simple framing that obfuscates what, if any of this actually happens, will actually happen, which is that thousands of people are going to be unemployed. A lot of things are going to stop working. A lot of services that we rely on without even thinking about it are going to fall apart slowly. And some people will make A lot of services that we rely on without even thinking about it are going to fall apart slowly. And some people will make a lot of money. Yeah, I remember the talk of potentially

privatizing the US Postal Service, for example. But obviously, they have been targeting many other different things through these plans that they have, through the things that the Heritage Foundation and these other groups have put together that they're hoping to bring forward. You mentioned as well that Vivek Ramaswamy, who was one of the, you know, kind of, I guess, co-founders of the Department of Government Efficiency alongside Elon Musk has been pushed out. What do we know about why he is no longer involved? The great H-1B debate.

I've been waiting for this. Okay. I was actually not working that week and just passively kind of consuming the information, like not even in the right order. But as far as I understand, Vivek said something on Twitter. He called Americans lazy. He said Americans are lazy and they need to stop venerating Corey from Boy Meets World and they need to just like hit the books. Yeah. Praise Steve Urkel, if I remember correctly.

Yes. Again, I was not working this week. I hope I'm not spreading fake news, as they say. But I think it also had something to do with one of Trump's appointments being, I think, maybe the child of Indian immigrants, if not an immigrant himself. Again, I'm not 100% sure here where this all began, but it revealed one of the major fault lines between the tech right and the nationalist right, which are, again, pretty simplistic. Some of the tech people are nationalists. Some of the nationalists are tech people. Some of the tech people want H-1Bs and some of them don't. And all the tech people, a lot of your job on an H-1B, you have 60 days to find a new job or you have to get out of the country. At its best, it's a way for companies to source skilled labor from abroad. At its worst, it is a way to stifle dissent within your company

and have employees who can't really push back because their fate is tied to their job. There are a lot of criticisms of H1Bs. Some of them are better than others. But that's not really the conversation that was happening on X, the everything platform during that week. The conversation was they lied to us. They want to replace us. They are replacing us right now. And so Ramaswamy was he was cast out. He was let go. But yeah, I think this reveals some tensions between the kind of nationalist slash white nationalist wing of MAGA and the people who need H-1B workers to work for their companies. Yeah, you saw this real like hardcore MAGA base be infuriated by the suggestion that, you know, by these tech people who are supporting Trump, that they would still need the H-1B visa. Sure, you know, we can sacrifice all the other immigrants, but just let, you know, the tech workers keep their H-1B visas and H-1B

workers. And of course, Elon Musk was supporting that too. So you did see that real kind of schism, but then Trump came out and said, you know, we support keeping the H-1B visa because, you know, people like Elon Musk need it. And there was this interesting report that as Tesla was laying off a lot of workers last year, I think it was around 15,000, it was also applying to increase the number of H-1B visas it was going to have available to replace some of those people, you know, with lower cost workers who have those restrictions on, you know, their ability to leave a company and find a new job without being kicked out of the country, as you were saying. So yeah, I think that schism is an interesting one. And, you know, Ramaswamy now is out of the Department

of Government Efficiency. It seems like he's going to announce a run for the governor of Ohio in the next little while. They've given him something to do, but he's out of this role. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency seems more and more like an Elon Musk zone. It does really seem like Elon Musk is very much in control of this thing. It will be shaped by his desires and what he thinks it should do and how the American government will act. And of course, we know he's brought in Steve Davis, who is the president of the Boring Company, who has been associated with kind of cost cutting and layoffs at his companies in the past. So do we have any indication right now of where this Department of Government Efficiency is going to go other than these major layoffs? Are they targeting

anything specific that you know of? There was the letter that Musk and Ramaswamy published in the Wall Street Journal before the great ousting. And it talked a lot about defunding organizations that receive money from the government, including their example was Planned Parenthood. And it was framed again as kind of like combating the woke mind virus. But in fact, this is also kind of a longstanding Republican priority. And I think that that is what will happen, not necessarily just with Planned Parenthood, but they're going to identify these line items that look ridiculous to your average person. Average person, again, in quotes. Before Trump's inauguration, I remember people were pulling up examples of government studies that government and in some cases, a really significant amount of money for researchers who, I mean, if you look at how we got like GLP-1, semaglutide, ozempic, things like that, like regardless of what you think of these medications, like that was the result of a seemingly unrelated study of an animal's urine.

And yeah, it sounds ridiculous to somebody who's not enmeshed in this stuff. I don't know anything about any of these studies, but I know that the money is going to be cut from things that help people, that lead to scientific advancement, that just make the country more interesting and rich and beautiful, like from arts programs, from these things that are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. It's not going to be cut from the military. It's not going to be cut from the Department of Homeland Security. It's not going to be cut from any federal agency

that contracts with Elon Musk or other Trump tech backers. And they are going to be enriched while the average person's life gets worse. Yeah, I think very well said. And even on top of that, we've seen suggestions as well that they might try to use this power to, you know, affect different issues that Elon Musk in particular cares about. There's been the suggestion that the Department of Government Efficiency would recommend steps that would make it harder to complete California's high speed rail system, you know, a system that has experienced its of connected to Musk or, you know, who agrees with Musk's ideas has been appointed to the head of NASA, I believe, and they really want to transform that and its mission, you know, to obviously benefit SpaceX more, I'm sure. So we can see a whole lot of ways that they can use this influence and this power, Musk in particular,

to reshape the government to serve himself and to serve these wider tech interests in ways that are, I think, going to be very concerning for, as you say, a lot of people. It's not going to be to the benefit of all Americans or all people in the world. It's going to be to the benefit of this small number of tech billionaires, these tech oligarchs, who have increasingly surrounded Donald Trump. So, you know, with all that said, exploring all these different issues of this relationship between the tech industry and Donald Trump and this wider right-wing movement, what we've seen from the inauguration and these early steps in the Trump administration and how the tech industry wants to benefit from it,

you know, what do you think we're teed up to see for the next four years? And what concerns does this create for you as you watch this relationship between Trump and the tech industry? One thing to note is that Trump is a very fickle person. He has a pretty fragile ego. And so unless these tech oligarchs stroke his ego for four years, which they very well might do, there could be feuds. There could be others getting ousted from the inner circle. I think what they are hoping is that Trump both lays off of their industry and breaks down any kind of obstacles to what they want to do. And I think, again, that very well might happen. I think the thing that I am most concerned about is this technology being used to further things like mass deportations, stifling of dissent, using facial recognition to identify protesters.

I think the tech oligarchs stand to gain a lot from their friendship with Trump. But I think the government has a lot of money to throw at technologies that will make it harder for people to oppose this publicly, that will make it harder for immigrants, that will make it harder for people who are incarcerated. I mean, right after the election, we saw in an earnings call, I believe, the CEO of the GEO Group, which is one of the biggest private prison companies in the U.S., talking about how this would be a really good opportunity for them because they have this contract with ICE for alternatives to detention, which are just like tracking tools. Some of them are ankle monitors,

some of them are on your phone, some of them are smartwatches, which again, to go back to Biden kind of creating the conditions for a lot of this, that program expanded significantly under Biden. Republicans at the time said it was contributing to a migrant crime, that these people should be in detention. Now, my guess is that they will say, we are using all of the government's resources to track these people until we can deport them. There's going to be a lot of money to be made from helping Trump uphold his agenda, in addition to the money that they're already making from their kind of day to day operations. Yeah, it's a it's a grim four years ahead. And you know, you're talking about how this is going

to be used inside the United States. I'm also thinking about how a lot of these tech folks are talking about using the spending power of the American government to make sure that they are putting a lot more money into like tech companies and startups that make arms and weapons and AI military applications and all this kind of stuff. Like it's a lot of problems everywhere. And these tech folks are very much enmeshed in the whole thing. They are allied with Trump on this and they want to see it all happen. Gabby, it's been great to break this all down with you to talk about this concerning relationship between Trump and the tech industry. Thanks so much for taking the time. Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Gabby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge and is working on a book on ecofascism

that will be released in 2026. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.