In his much-celebrated book, The Third Wave, futurist Alvin Toffler describes technology as “the dawn of a new civilisation”. Technology has made great strides, solving many of our problems. Technology has also been part of the knowledge production system and institutions. Today, we not only use technology, we live technology. But technology is not created in a vacuum. It is not a one-click solution either. What is worrying is the geopolitics of the big tech. High-tech has come to signify high politics too. Experience suggests that digital and tech advancements are geopolitical issues of the highest order.

When technology is created, it is built with the developers’ worldviews, values, beliefs and assumptions. Today, the new plutocrats of Silicon Valley are working like predatory wolves. Must we be surprised when America’s high-tech czars led by Elon Musk should be taking the country towards what Japanese economist Taichi Sakai ya called “a high-tech Middle Ages?” How has the US, the world’s high-tech leader, come to such a stage? Why is the American dream cracking? The answer is obvious. The economy in the “land of the dream” has become global but politics hasn’t. No wonder therefore, French sociologist Jean Baudrillard should describe the US as a land of “utopia achieved.”

If you “get out of your car in this centrifugal metropolis, you immediately become a delinquent: as soon as you start walking, you are a threat to public order, like a dog wandering in the road” Innovation serves the plutocrats. Today, technological solutionism has become the romantic utopia in the US. You may call it a techno-utopian pipedream. When the technological future becomes unpredictable, policy-makers drive in the dark. It has also impacted other sectors including academia. As the Washington Post writes, the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute is working on a proposal to Make America First in AI. Marc Andreessen, a venture-capitalist billionaire, has published a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in which he claims, technology is the solution to environmental degradation. He further writes that AI is a ‘philosopher’s Stone’ that can stop pandemics.

If the likes of Andreessen have their way, Trumperica will be marching towards the ‘dark academia’ and ‘choose your own adventure’ epistemology will gain respectability. And reessen boasts, “we are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt… “We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.” Musk holds the media in disdain. He has won the battle for attention against the media. His X has turned into MAGA’s mouthpiece. Brooke Harrington in his book “Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism” uses the term “Broligarchs” referring to America’s big tech bros who are now shaping American politics. The male tech plutocrats from the Silicon Valley now run the country with their dark money.

They are known for their desire for what one analyst calls power without accountability. Tech bros are the new Pharaohs and modern-day czars in the digital age. They are the self appointed guardians of public trust, gatekeepers to corporate culture and thought. Tech billionaires are creating a world where the rich wax, the middle-class wanes and the poor live in hardscrabble conditions. Barrington explains that the big bros are a class apart. But they are by no account anarchists. They don’t wish to break rules. In fact, they need a government.

They believe they are smarter people who deserve to be above the law. They are natural allies of Trump as they see any form of democratic control as illegitimate. Big bros claim a special status: The Sovereign Individual, to borrow the title of James Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s book. That explains why the tech bro-in-chief, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be leading the department of government efficiency in the Trump Administration. Their task will be to dismantle the government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditure, and restructure federal agencies. Musk has already begun the job. He has suggested mass-firings as is publicly identifying “fake jobs” and associated federal employees on X.

These tactics are aimed at sowing terror and fear in federal employees. The missionary big-tech oligarchs often blame the immigrants and minorities of various hues for all the ills. They may occasionally castigate the amorphous elite but never the capitalist class. What one sees in the US and elsewhere is what a columnist with The Nation Magazine Stephen Crowley calls “oligarchic capture of politics”. Tech bros have found a way to deal with Trump: chin up and whistle. How have tech bros acquired such power? The reasons are not far to seek. Both Republican and Democratic governments have weaponised the world economy by allowing the tech giants and other garden-variety oligarchs to have a stranglehold on key sectors. Business commands the resources. Cloud computing is the exclusive preserve of mega firms like Amazon and Microsoft. Communication channels have for long been monopolised by business groups. The submarine fibre cables too are in the hands of the private companies. No wonder, the private sector dominates major levers of power.

Musk is a class apart. As Time magazine writes, his monopoly of low orbit satellite communications has enabled him to hold “unpre cedented level of privatised geopolitical power concentrated in the hands of a single, politically erratic tycoon.” Consequence-free bad behaviour is his passport to success. As journalist and media entrepreneur Natalia Antelava explains, “the Broligarchs of Silicon Valley have not just grabbed untold riches, they have created products that none of us can or want to live without”. We are so used to this eco-system, that the power and ubiquity of these devices and their services have taken hold of our lives. Tech bros have built “the digital architecture of our lives.” The tech industry in the US is still a boys’ club. The doors to the technology field remain virtually closed to women.

Musk often mocks advocates of the LGBT+ community. It is anybody’s guess where women will find themselves in his scheme of things. He would perhaps expect women to “follow the white rabbit.” One analyst calls Silicon Valley “feudalism with better marketing.” It harbours new robber barons. They expect the Trump Administration not to Make America Great Again but to usher in a new gilded age. The broligarchs’ real aim is to make America and the world in their own image.

(The writer is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)