Trump, as we know, is fond of lavish tributes. When courtiers flock to his Mar-a-Lago mansion, doesn’t it seem like a miniature Versailles? But the president is no aspiring Louis XIV. His project is not to centralize authority in the state, but rather to empower private interests at the expense of public institutions. He is already seeking to reverse the Biden administration’s fledgling attempts at interventionism by repealing its green subsidies, anti-trust policies and taxation measures, so as to widen the scope of action for corporate monopolies at home and abroad.

Two of his executive orders, signed on the day of the inauguration, underscore this trend. The first revoked a Biden-era mandate which required ‘developers of AI systems that pose risks to US national security, economy, health, or public safety to share the results of safety tests with the US government’. While public authorities previously had some say in developments at the AI frontier, this minimal oversight has now been removed. The second order announced the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Musk. Based on a reorganization of the US Digital Services, established under Obama to integrate information systems between different branches of the state, DOGE will have unlimited access to unclassified data from all government agencies. Its first mission is ‘reforming the federal hiring process and restoring merit to the civil service’, ensuring that state employees have a ‘commitment to American ideals, values and interests’ and will ‘loyally serve the Executive Branch’. DOGE will also ‘integrate modern technologies’ into this process, meaning Musk and his machines will be given responsibility for the political supervision of federal civil servants.

In the first hours of Trump’s second term, then, tech entrepreneurs managed to shield their most profitable ventures from public scrutiny while gaining significant influence over the state bureaucracy. The new administration is not interested in using the federal state to unify the dominant classes as part of a hegemonic strategy. On the contrary, it is trying to emancipate the most bullish fraction of capital from any serious federal constraints, while forcing the administrative apparatus to submit to Musk’s algorithmic control.

The increasing concentration of power in the hands of the techno-oligarchs is by no means inevitable. In China, the relationship between the Big Tech sector and the state is volatile, but the former is generally forced to accommodate itself to development goals set by the latter. In the West, too, public bodies have on occasion pushed back against corporate monopolism – with Congress, the US Treasury Department and the Fed uniting to block Facebook’s crypto-currency project, Libra, in 2021. For the economist Benoît Cœuré, ‘the mother of all political questions is the balance of power between government and Big Tech in shaping the future of payments and the control of related data’. But Trump is now tilting this balance even further in Big Tech’s favour. He followed up his executive orders by instructing regulators to drive investment in cryptocurrency, while preventing central banks from developing their own digital currencies which could act as a counterweight. We can expect more such policies further down the line: deregulation, tax breaks, government contracts and legal protections.

This radical project on the part of the world’s leading power could have serious implications: reshaping the relationship between capital and the state, classes and countries, for years to come. It threatens to accelerate a process that I have elsewhere described as ‘technofeudalization’. As large corporations monopolize knowledge and data, they centralize the algorithmic means of coordinating human activities, from working practices to social media use to shopping habits. With public institutions increasingly incapable of organizing society, the task then falls to Big Tech, which gains an extraordinary capacity to influence individual and collective behavior. The public sphere is thereby dissolved into online networks, monetary power is displaced into crypto-currencies, and Artificial Intelligence colonizes what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, heralding the steady appropriation of political power by private interests.

The weakening of mediating institutions goes hand-in-hand with an anti-democratic impulse – or, more accurately, a hatred of equality. Since the publication of the techno-optimist manifesto ‘Cyberspace and the American Dream’ in 1994, large parts of Silicon Valley have adhered to the Randian principle that creative pioneers cannot be bound by collective rules. The entrepeneur is entitled to run roughshod over weaker beings who threaten to constrain him: workers, women, racialized and trans people. Hence the rapid rapprochement between Californian liberals and the far right, with Musk and Zuckerberg now casting themselves as culture warriors fighting to reverse the tide of wokeness. Algorithmic governmentality enshrines the right to ‘innovate’ with no accountability to the demos.

This emerging regime of accumulation also replaces the logic of production and consumption with that of predation and dependency. While the appetite for surplus remains as voracious as in previous periods of capitalism, Big Tech’s profit motive is unique. Whereas capital traditionally invests to lower costs or meet demand, technofeudal capital invests to bring different areas of social activity under its control, creating a dynamic of dependence which ensnares individuals, businesses and institutions alike. This is partly because the services offered by Big Tech are not commodities like any other. They are often critical infrastructures on which society depends. Microsoft’s giant blackout in the summer of 2024 was a stark reminder that airports, hospitals, banks and government agencies inter alia are now reliant on these technologies – allowing the monopolists to charge exorbitant rents and generate endless flows of monetizable data.

The end result is generalized stagnation in the global economy. Profitable enterprises in other sectors are seeing their market position weakened as they become ever more reliant on the cloud and AI, while the wider population is subject to the the predations of rentier capital. The technofeudalists’ vast need for resources also leads to increasing ecological destruction, with new carbon-intensive data centres springing up across the globe. As growth slows, political polarization and economic inequalitiy deepen, with workers fighting over a shrinking share of the wealth.

This raises a number of strategic questions for the left. How does the fight against Big Tech relate to extant anti-capitalist struggles? How should we concieve of internationalism in an age where technofeudal power transcends national borders? Here it may be worth bearing in mind the main precepts of Mao’s classic On Contradiction (1937), deftly summarized by Slavoj Žižek:

The principal (universal) contradiction does not overlap with the contradiction which should be treated as dominant in a particular situation – the universal dimension literally resides in this particular contradiction. In each concrete situation, a different ‘particular’ contradiction is the predominant one, in the precise sense that, in order to win the fight for the resolution of the principal contradiction, one should treat a particular contradiction as the predominant one, to which all other struggles should be subordinated.

Today, the universal contradiction remains that of capitalist exploitation, pitting capital against living labour. But the technofeudal offensive represented by Trump and Musk may change this situation, creating a new principal contradiction between American Big Tech and those whom it exploits. Should we reach that point, the task of the left would change dramatically. Taking China’s colonial wars as an example, Mao explains that

When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, the various classes in that country, with the exception of a small number of traitors to the nation, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. The contradiction between imperialism and the country in question then becomes the main contradiction, and all the contradictions between the various classes within the country (including the contradiction, which was the main one, between the feudal regime and the popular masses) temporarily take a back seat and a subordinate position.

In the present context, this would mean forming an anti-technofeudal front that reaching beyond the left to various democratic forces and fractions of capital at odds with Big Tech. This hypothetical movement could adopt what we might call a ‘non-aligned digital policy’, aiming to create an economic space outside the grip of the monopolists in which alternative technologies could be developed. This, in turn, would imply a form of digital protectionism – denying access to US tech companies and dismantling their infrastructure wherever possible – as well as a new digital internationalism, with people sharing technological solutions on a cooperative basis.

Needless to say, any such alliance would have to confront various structural barriers. Because of the complex interpenetration of capitalist interests, with investments bound up with one another across different sectors and territories, it is hard to determine which fractions of capital are more aligned with Big Tech and which ones could be pressured to join the opposition. There is also the fact that national bourgeoisies are famously unreliable partners when it comes to developmental projects outside the imperial core; they are typically more interested in increasing their own rentier wealth than in effecting the kind of structural change that would put an end to dependency. And there is the danger that, even if it were to succeed in assembling these forces, an anti-technofeudal front would be vulnerable to bureaucratic capture – entrusting the development of digital alternatives to experts rather than actively involving the popular masses.

Yet the tech billionaires have their own obstacles to confront. Their project – to use an alliance with Trump to tear down the last remaining obstacles to algorithmic control – has an extremely narrow social base, and the speed at which it is advancing is sure to generate resistance from both the general population and elites. It must also contend with China’s digital prowess, as rival companies like DeepSeek attempt to undermine Sillicon Valley’s image of invincibility. Could American technofeudalism therefore turn out to be a fragile Leviathan? Will Trump’s return to power be remembered as a ‘great event’, or is this merely false gossip?

Cédric Durand

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