Soft(ware) power
A coup looks different in a world where software is power.
This is gabestein.com: the newsletter!, which is a completely irregular note primarily focused on the intersection of culture, media, politics, and technology written by me, vitalist technologist Gabriel Stein. Sometimes there’s random silly stuff. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here. See the archives here, and polished blog versions of the best hits at, you guessed it, gabestein.com.
First, some fun personal news. I’m a 2025 Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. It’s a huge honor, not least because my fellow…fellows are an incredibly impressive group. Throughout the year, assuming research universities make it that long, I’ll be looking at how academic and non-academic communities can learn sense-making techniques from each other to produce trustworthy knowledge given the changes to the global information ecosystem in the last two decades. Seems all the more vital in the world we’re entering where our government will likely no longer be capable of producing trustworthy knowledge. So, if you’ve got thoughts about that, research I should read, people I should talk to, please let me know!
And now, let’s say it: DOGE is a coup. Or a hostile government takeover. Authoritarian power-grab. Whatever Very Bad thing you want to call it, call it that Very Bad thing and don’t kid yourself that that’s what it is. As historian Tim Snyder wrote, this may not look like the movie version of a coup, but that’s because the center of power in the modern world isn’t a location you roll up to with a bunch of people with guns, like it used to be. The center of power in the modern world is software.
Today, DOGE seizing control of the software system that makes payments for the federal government is the same thing — in some ways even more effective — as seizing control of, say, the Capitol Building, as the January 6 insurrectionists attempted to do. And, by all accounts, it appears that DOGE succeeded.
So, now what? Look, I dunno, I’m just some dude. But here’s one thing that I think is crucial to understand in this moment:
As I’ve been writing for years, the overarching project of many of the Big Tech oligarchs, once focused on at least nominally beneficial-to-society “moonshots,” appears to have settled on a new target: carving out techno-libertarian fiefdoms where they can play out their sci-fi fantasies free from interference or judgement. When most folks say this, I suspect they mean it in the traditional sense of neoliberal deregulation within existing nation-states. When I say it, I mean that their project is to literally create autonomous state-like structures where they can experiment with whatever they want, without consequence.
I know that sounds totally ridiculous, but the decentralized “network state” is already a pretty widespread idea in crypto circles, and bringing about autonomous corporate city-states led by authoritarian CEO-kings is the stated goal of the once-fringe Dark Enlightenment movement, key figures of which appear to have gained a foothold in the administration. If you’ve ever worked in Big Tech, you’ll recognize exactly where these ideas came from and just how compatible they are with some of Silicon Valley’s core cultural beliefs.
As I wrote in 2021 about my brief early-career experience at Google, the degree to which these companies provide not just livelihoods but food, activities, camaraderie, and nonstop, interesting and important-feeling work, can become all-consuming and make it easy to start forming your identity around being part of the company — especially if you’re of the age and inexperience of the acolytes Musk seems to be bringing on his raiding parties. Combine that daily experience of total abundance with the cult-like status of some of these companies’ leaders and the toxic myth that, because you can create powerful world-changing software, you’ve earned the right to solve everyone’s problems whether they want you to or not, and you have all the conditions you need for some of these people to believe they should control society — if only they could find a way to force the pesky, and under Biden, increasingly threatening, federal government to cede control of territory normally exclusively reserved for nation-states.
Territory like, I don’t know, pretty much all of Big Tech’s most visible innovations over the last few years: autonomous digital versions of currencies (crypto), the trade of goods and services (NFTs/smart contracts), governance and enforcement mechanisms (DAOs), and, well, people (AI agents). If you wanted to force the government to give up its monopoly over some of these critical functions and replace them with your own private versions, a pretty effective way to do it would be to take over its payment software and start feeding the data from that system into your proprietary AI to help make spending decisions.
Look, I don’t know where any of this is going and I don’t really know what to do. That’s not my lane. But here’s one recommendation I’ll make:
Start getting more of your information from trustworthy people who understand technologists and software if you aren’t already. And be increasingly cautious about the daily reporting of the traditional political media (the New York Times, major networks, Politico, Axios, NPR, etc.). I’m not insinuating that those outlets have no value or are inherently untrustworthy, although their ongoing capitulation to Trump’s extortionist lawsuits should give you pause. Even if they were all standing strong against the administration’s chilling efforts, though, establishment political reporting is mostly based on the workings of government and the psychology of politicians, not the workings of technology or the psychology of technologists. And that lens just does not capture this moment.
For example, read this NYT article on DOGE’s motivations and compare it to Wired and TPM’s reporting, from two days earlier, on the same thing. The Times doesn’t even mention the absolutely critical piece of technical information: even if DOGE only has “read-only” access to the system’s data, can they change its code? Whatever official access the Treasury gave to DOGE, that doesn’t matter if they also gained access to the system’s underlying code and thus can change the way it operates at will. To go back to our coup metaphor, controlling the code to the federal payment system is the pre-digital equivalent of, I don’t know, taking over a central bank and holding all of its workers hostage. Maybe the insurgents are letting the workers carry on as usual for now, but the point is that the bad guys can, at any moment, start forcing the workers to rip up checks and stop recording transactions at gunpoint. According to Wired and TPM’s reporting, that’s basically where we are. As far as I can tell, the Times has only mentioned the issue of underlying code access once to date: in a single bullet point midway through its Dealbook newsletter.
As another example, compare this NYT article (yes, I am picking on them) on why Musk and his cronies are so obsessed with an obscure part of the Treasury to this American Prospect piece on the man who was put in charge of it. The Times reads the situation through an institutional lens, assuming that DOGE is trying to stop payments that Trump disagrees with. This is true, and it’s enough to amount to a full-scale constitutional crisis on its own. But what Prospect understands is that what’s truly going on is a vulture capital playbook being run on the federal government itself. As much as they relish owning the libs, as I wrote above, I promise you Elon & co.’s core motivation is carving out their own pockets of unlimited power, not institutional power games.
So if you do nothing else, add more people who deeply understand the modern world to your information diet (and if you can, directly support their work). The fact that software runs much of the world, combined with the fact that tech oligarchs (and not just Elon) appear to be calling most of the shots in Washington, makes technology critics and reporters the best people to be reading right now to understand what’s going on. They’re the ones who know how software actually works and have seen parts of the tech world go from largely liberal political outsiders to incredibly powerful right-wing extremists in a decade. They have better sources among the people who actually seem to be in power than the political journalists. And, just as importantly, my guess is they’re likely to be far less impacted by political media’s institutional weakness — its obsession with access and palace intrigue over accuracy (remember this gem?).
If you’re not already, I would highly recommend subscribing to Cory Doctorow, who has been documenting tech abuses forever and makes great recommendations daily, as well as Wired, TPM’s Josh Marshall, who has unique insight as both a historian and digital media founder, Lawfare, American Prospect, Waging Nonviolence, and others who are experts in the way technology, culture, and media influence power in the modern world. If you follow others who you think fit the bill, please let me know and I’ll share them. I’m not yet ready to recommending that you stop reading outlets like the New York Times. But I think it’s time to stop putting their coverage at the top of your list for understanding what’s going on, and treating their work with justified skepticism.
Finally, if there’s any good news in all of this, it’s that the technologists are overplaying their hand in at least two ways. The first, as Josh Marshall writes, is that the factionalism of the new administration is already beginning to show. Right now, the Musk contingent’s goals are aligned with the Christian Nationalism faction, but I promise you that those folks don’t want to replace the administrative state with autonomous techno-states, they want to use it to force us all to re-adopt traditional Christian values, whatever that means.
Second, by focusing too much on the power of technology, they’re setting themselves up for failure when politics has a chance to catch up. In Silicon Valley, code is king. But in Washington, Donald Trump is, and he cares a lot about believing he’s in control. I don’t think this is truly viable, but I wonder what would happen if the opposition started accepting Musk’s theory about power by ignoring Trump and talking directly with the CEO who’s really in charge of the money. How long do you think Trump will tolerate someone going around claiming they’re calling the shots just because they know how to use a computer?