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In President Biden’s Farewell Address on January 15, he said this:
Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America, of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America.
You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us about “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.
Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. . . .
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy, and our society. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation. We must make sure AI is safe and trustworthy and good for all humankind.
Steve Bannon’s pledge to get rid of Elon Musk before the Inauguration and make sure he isn’t given direct access to the West Wing in the White House has failed. Musk is setting up an office in the West Wing right now, and has been given full access to the president. He’s also been placing personnel throughout the new Trump government, and giving his imprimatur to people taking senior positions at the Pentagon and the State Department, including Troy Meink as secretary of the Air Force, after Meink helped Musk get a multibillion-dollar contract for SpaceX to build a spy satellite network for the federal government. How Musk’s new role will pass muster with federal ethics laws to prevent conflicts of interest and head off massive corruption is yet to be determined.
Meanwhile, Vivek Ramaswamy is bailing out of DOGE to run for Governor of Ohio on the JD Vance line. Even though Trump has sided with the Tech Billionaires in the H-1B visa fight, he (and apparently Musk) reportedly didn’t appreciate Ramaswamy’s contribution to that fight, when Ramaswamy blamed an American culture that “venerated mediocrity over excellence” for the need for tech companies to hire foreign-born workers. “Free speech” only goes so far with this regime, even for insiders and simps, and Ramaswamy was summarily axed. Politico reported that a Republican strategist close to the Trump advisors said Ramaswamy “just burned through the bridges and he finally burned Elon. Everyone wants him out of Mar-a-Lago, out of D.C.”1 A meme circulating among Speaker Mike Johnson’s staff featured Musk as Stalin and Ramaswamy as the chief of the Soviet secret police who was executed and then erased from official photographs. But Ramaswamy was seen at the Inauguration talking to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and he later posted a photo of himself shaking hands with Musk, while Musk put on his best Mussolini/executioner face. G’bye Vivek. Good luck.
When Trump announced his endorsement of the Stargate Project, a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others putting up the money, Musk immediately posted that this was a bad idea because “They don’t actually have the money.” And we’re talking about a lot of money, now and in the future, beginning with the construction of ten 500,000-square-feet data centers already under way in Texas and another ten to come soon. Each of them will pull more electric power than most cities.
In later posts, Musk called Altman a swindler and a liar, and Altman hissed back, “just one more mean tweet and then maybe you’ll love yourself.” The intraspecies enmity between these two Tech Billionaires goes back to a dispute over the destiny of OpenAI in 2018, when Musk sued Altman and then founded a rival firm, xAI, to directly compete with OpenAI.
Trump’s staffers were not happy with Musk’s outburst over Stargate and conservative talk show host Erick Erickson opined that Musk is the new Icarus, flying too close to the Trump Sun and headed for a fall. But Trump continues to protect Musk, so far, saying Musk just doesn’t like Sam Altman, “But I have certain hatreds of people too.” Trump needs a political enforcer, and at this point, Musk fits the bill.
In her column in the Wall Street Journal on January 24th, Peggy Noonan predicted that Trump “is going to utterly dominate our brainspace. He is a neurological imperialist, he storms in and stays.”
In his first few days in office, Trump has rolled out, as promised, a “shock and awe” campaign to flood the zone with so many outrageous actions and unconstitutional Executive Orders to disable and dismantle the federal government, that the opposition has lost all responsibility (the ability to respond). The White House press corps instantly became a gaggle of lap dogs, hanging on Trump’s every word and simpering, and the rest of the press is scrambling to regain their equilibrium in the face of this constant onslaught, and to figure out how the rules of journalism work in this new environment.
Shock and awe, also called “rapid dominance,” is a military strategy explained by Ullman and Wade in 1996 as a way to “affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fight or respond to our strategic policy ends” and “to paralyze its will to carry on.” The idea is to “seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.”2
Going forward, will Trump’s rapid-fire shredding of what’s left of the social safety net, the pardoning and sanctioning of violence against the opposition and the unprotected, and the flouting of the Constitution awe us into silence? Will the sheer magnitude and depth of corruption and cronyism being imposed inure us to it? Unless they’re coming after you in this first round, you can look away now and go back to what you were doing.
Will dis- and misinformation so dominate the social landscape that truth must go underground, to be discussed in secret rooms, with friends and collaborators? And will we re-emerge renewed?
1. Adam Wren and Holly Otterbein, “’Everyone wants him out’: How Musk helped boot Ramaswamy from DOGE,” Politico, January 20, 2025.
2. Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defense University, 1996), xxiv.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.