Impunity in government and tech

I write on the day of the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital, by a paramilitary force of the American government. Just two weeks earlier, Renée Good, a writer and a mother of three, was killed by that same force. The horror and tragedy of the killings, taking the form of public executions by masked men, is now compounded by federal government officials at the highest levels, who not only obstruct state-level criminal investigations, but positively assert that the agents involved acted rightly and lawfully in killing their victims. These lies, directly refuted by abundant video evidence in both cases, are not intended to be believed by any appreciable number of people. Rather, they are an attempt to assert that the regime and its agents are entirely unconstrained, that they will be bound by neither morality nor law.

When my anger and sadness in the wake of these killings is interrupted by cogent thought, what I find myself thinking about is impunity. No American in possession of their senses can fail to notice the growing lawlessness of the nation and the increasing brazenness of its occupiers, ranging from repression at home, where masked men abduct citizens and noncitizens alike at their whim, to aggression abroad, where we threaten our closest allies in violation of basic decency and binding treaties. Federal officials, starting with the President himself, conspire openly with business elites to mutually enrich themselves by plundering the government and sabotaging its regulators. While the depravities are varied, what their perpetrators have in common is a belief in their own impunity: that they deserve to be unconstrained and that, if their movement prevails, no one will succeed in constraining them even as they tighten their grips over their perceived inferiors.

From the tangled web of factions that comprise the regime, I would like to consider the special role played the tech industry and its oligarchs. It might seem unfair to single out tech in a post prompted by killings committed by CBP and ICE; certainly, I would never wish to detract from the imperative that DHS be defunded and disbanded, a commonsensical position now finally entering the mainstream. The fact is that, while it is hardly the only faction implicated in today’s violence and corruption, the tech industry is seriously implicated. In the first place, Google and Apple have directly abetted ICE by banning apps to track the movements of ICE agents. But focusing on such everyday acquiescence would be overly narrow and literal-minded when there are far deeper connections between America’s tech industry and its authoritarian movement.

Tech as regime ally

Shortly before the change of power, I wrote of the unprecedented political campaign by tech oligarchs to secure an election victory for Trump-Vance. For this they are being handsomely repaid not just with access and influence, but with lucrative contracts and even, in the case of DOGE, extralegal powers to directly set policy.

Begin with J.D. Vance himself, a creature of tech who owes his political career mainly to the patronage of Peter Thiel. More than simply as holder of the title Vice President, Vance is implicated in this month’s tragedies. Why anyway is Minneapolis, a mid-sized city with few undocumented people, the current target of CBP and ICE? The answers are several, but one is the scapegoating of Minnesota’s Somali community, accused of welfare fraud in day care centers. Vance has been the government’s central propagandist against Somalis and relatedly against Haitians, starting in the 2024 election campaign and continuing to the present. Just two weeks ago, Vance spoke of a “Somali problem” to justify the occupation of Minneapolis. And no government official has more stridently attempted to blame Renée Good for her own death than Vance. In all these ways, Vance, and by extension his patrons in tech, are complicit in the brutal killings in Minneapolis. That alleged welfare fraud is an absurd pretext to deploy immigration enforcement is just another expression of impunity, a refusal to be bound by any requirement of sense or logic.

If that connection seems abstract, consider a more direct one between the tech oligarchs and manslaughter. In his tenure as head of so-called DOGE—not in fact a Department of the federal government—Elon Musk’s most significant act was to destroy USAID, a foreign aid agency with a modest budget but enormous impact. While a precise accounting will be a difficult ongoing project, early estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of people, most of them children, have already died from malnutrition and infectious diseases as a direct result of USAID’s termination. Those people, among the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, will never receive the recognition that Renée Good or Alex Pretti do, but their lives matter no less for it. With DOGE now finished, it seems that tech’s only lasting legacy as a quasi-official organ of the state will be a deliberate mass-death event.

While Musk and Vance are the most obvious links, the tech industry is emeshed with the regime in a much broader if less visible network of patronage. To give just one symbolic example: on this very day of Pretti’s killing, having presumably seen the grim news in the morning, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Apple CEO Tim Cook, AMD CEO Lisa Su, and others this evening make a pilgrimage to the White House for a special screening of Melania. The new vanity documentary about the First Lady was funded and promoted by Amazon, with Jeff Bezos reportedly taking a “personal interest”.

The Trump-Vance regime is propped up by a range of business and media elites, but I single out the tech oligarchs because their collaboration is the most open, influential, and destructive.

Impunity within tech

To understand why the tech industry, once ostensibly part of the liberal cultural coalition, has aligned itself with an authoritarian movement, we must understand something of the oligarchs’ psychology. Drawing such inferences is harder than just reading the news. Fortunately, compared to business leaders from other sectors, the tech oligarchs seem unable to resist broadcasting their motivations.

Consider this NYT interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, conducted by conservative pundit Ross Douthat in the lead up to the Trump-Vance inauguration. Andreesen triumphantly recounts his break with the Democratic Party and embrace of the right. In his telling, the ground was prepared by the left-liberal social movements against Trump’s first term and during COVID, which he perceived to be radical and threatening. Andreesen says:

So maybe just the short thing I’ll tell you about 2016 to 2020, there were a series of additional 10-X-ing events — of radicalism and intensity of all the politics…

And then of course, Covid hits, which was a giant radicalizing moment. And at that point, we had lived through eight years of what was increasingly clearly a social revolution. Very clearly, companies are basically being hijacked to engines of social change, social revolution. The employee base is going feral. There were cases in the Trump era where multiple companies I know felt like they were hours away from full-blown violent riots on their own campuses by their own employees.

Then came the Biden administration, apparently also a source of radicalism, even an existential threat.

And my point is, we were softened up for the Biden radicalization. Then when the Biden administration turned out to be far more radical than even we thought that they were going to be…

Then they just came after crypto. Absolutely tried to kill us.

They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto. Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics.

The solution to this perceived persecution must thus be an allegiance with the second Trump administration:

We need this kind of random terrorism coming out of the federal government to end. These agencies running wild. That stuff needs to be brought to heel. And the new administration has been very vocal about how they intend to fix all of that.

A great deal could be written about the rhetoric on display in this long interview and what it implies about the psychology of Andreesen and his peers, but a common theme is already apparent from these few quotes. Andreesen rejects as illegitimate and intolerable any group that would constrain the powers of tech leaders.

In the first quote, that group is rank-and-file employees at tech firms. The MeToo movement and the hiring boom during COVID temporarily empowered tech workers, who demanded new privileges, such as working from home, and new protections, such as from discrimination and sexual assault. This was experienced by tech bosses as a revolt by labor to be crushed. Many people, myself included, will struggle to sympathize with Bay Area tech workers who have been far overcompensated. Yet their positions are now far more precarious, and the pressure against them will continue to be ratcheted up.

In remaining quotes, the would-be constrainers are regulators in the Biden administration. If the government’s legitimate interest in regulating cryptocurrency and AI, new technologies with profound social consequences and enormous externalities, is seen as “terrorism coming out of the federal government,” then it is little wonder that actual state terrorism—secret police executing civilians on the streets—becomes an acceptable price to pay for relief. The alliance of American authoritarians and tech elites is thus one born not just of coincidence of interests but of the shared conviction that, as superior specimens of humanity, they deserve to act with unrestrained power and total impunity.