Silicon Valley's Playbook and the AI Coup
'Silicon Valley Playbook' video
I am not a big fan of the video format, but I certainly grasp its importance as a communication medium. Many of you came here thanks to YouTube!
A reader with advanced video skills convinced me to do a five-minute piece on "Silicon Valley's Playbook to Destroy America's Government." Since my goal is to inform as many people as possible, I'll bite the bullet and try some videos because I know they're a crucial form of communication in the 21st century (all of the young people in my family live on YouTube these days).
Please share with anyone who might be interested, and subscribe to the Nerd Reich YouTube channel for more (maybe...we'll test this out and see how it goes). And if you'd rather read the original piece upon which this is based, here it is:
Gil Duran
'AI Coup'
Elon Musk is using Artificial Intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction against the American government. "Elon Musk’s DOGE is feeding sensitive federal data into AI to target cuts," reports the Washington Post, describing it as "part of a broader plan to deploy the technology across the federal government."
In a must-read essay Eryk Salvaggio describes an "AI Coup" currently underway in Washington. "AI is a technology for manufacturing excuses," opens his devastating analysis of how artificial intelligence is being weaponized against democracy. While Silicon Valley prophets warn us about AI robots taking over by force, a more insidious coup is already underway: the systematic replacement of democratic decision-making with automated systems, justified by empty promises of efficiency.
At the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk deploys college-age operatives to seize control of federal computer systems. The Trump administration builds keyword blacklists to strangle research into algorithmic bias. And in agency after agency, civil servants who embody institutional knowledge and values are being ousted, perhaps to be replaced by chatbots that can be reprogrammed at will.
Writes Salvaggio:
Seizing congressional oversight of government spending and programs enacted by statute and handing them to an automated system would be the first sign that the AI coup is complete. It would signal the transition from democratic governance to technocratic automatism, in which the engineers determine how to co-opt Congressional funding toward the goals of the executive branch. Refusing to share insight into the system's outputs — deferring to a combination of security or even commercial concerns and myths of "black box" neural networks — would shield it from any real scrutiny by Congress.
His piece also suggests the AI coup can be defeated:
The AI coup emerged not just from the union of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. It is born of practices and beliefs now standard among Silicon Valley ideologues that are obscure to most Americans. However, the tech industry's weakness is that it has never understood the emotional and social complexity of actual human beings.
Much of what I describe above assumes a passive public, a compliant bureaucracy, and a do-nothing Congress. It assumes that operating in a legal gray area is a way to evade judicial oversight. This tactic is well-known in Silicon Valley, where technical innovation is increasingly rare, but regulatory evasion is common.
Read the entire essay: "Anatomy of an AI Coup" at Tech Policy Press.
Eryk Salvaggio
Key Takeaways
- AI is being used as a political tool to bypass democratic processes under the guise of efficiency. Rather than a violent coup, this is happening through bureaucratic purge and automation.
- Elon Musk is spearheading the effort through his role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he's pushing for AI to take over government functions, including budget decisions that constitutionally belong to Congress.
- The Trump administration and DOGE have placed young operatives (some 19-24 years old) in various government agencies to access computer systems, raising concerns about data privacy and proper oversight.
- The plan appears to involve deliberately weakening government institutions by removing civil servants and replacing them with AI systems that are likely to fail. This failure would then justify further privatization and control by tech companies who position themselves as the only ones who can fix the resulting problems.
- The administration is simultaneously working to weaken academic research institutions by targeting diversity initiatives and creating an alternative Trump calls the "American University," while implementing a keyword-based system that rejects research grants related to studying AI bias.
- The article warns that the ultimate goal isn't just automation but rather a transfer of democratic decision-making power to technical infrastructure controlled by a small group of tech elites, describing these as the elements of "technofascism."
- Salvaggio argues that the tech industry's strategy relies on moving quickly before public consensus can form, and that the solution isn't to debate whether AI can be trusted, but rather to question whether computerized systems should replace voter representation at all. "The argument must be that no computerized system should replace the voice of voters. Do not ask if the machine can be trusted. Ask who controls them."
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