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As a boy, I can still remember going to the Donnell Library just off 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City and heading home with science fiction novels under my arm. Though in my young life I never traveled far, in my mind, thanks to those books, I was a planetary journeyman. Jules Verne took me to the moon (not to speak of 20,000 leagues under the sea). H.G. Wells left me in the middle of London as the Martians were invading. Isaac Asimov transported me into the Milky Way to experience the fall of a galactic empire. Ray Bradbury whisked me into an increasingly bookless future, Philip K. Dick led me onto a planet where my country had lost World War II and had been occupied by the Japanese and the Germans, while Ursula LeGuin left me on the ambisexual planet of Gethen. And so it went.
But until recently, I must admit that science fiction remained just that -- fiction. I never truly felt I was on a sci-fi planet. Yes, I experienced American presidents of wildly varying types, skills, and horrors, ranging from John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. Still, I never imagined that someday so many other Americans, myself included, whether they wanted to or not, would become apprentices to one Donald J. Trump and his pal Elon Musk, the richest man on what still passes for Planet Earth and a character distinctly out of some grim, otherworldly fiction writer's imagination. (Neither, of course, did any science-fiction novelist!) And yet, as we live through Trump's -- yes! -- second coming, it's hard not to feel that, for the first time in my life, I'm actually in a science-fiction novel on another planet. Admittedly, I don't even know who the author of this work of fiction might be and I can't claim to fully grasp the plot, but I do sense that I'm there. And with that in mind, let me turn you over to TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the must-visit Informed Comment website, to explore this strange all-American planet we indeed now find ourselves transported to. Tom
Cyberpunk Nation
How Donald Trump's America Is Being Hacked by White Nationalism
By Juan Cole
The opening weeks of the second Trump administration have produced daily headlines that read -- no, this is not hyperbole! -- like science fiction. The spectacle of a South African tech billionaire and his cronies staging a twenty-first-century cybercoup with the acquiescence of an aging lunatic of a president beggars belief. Elon Musk has given vast powers to young, even teenaged plenipotentiaries like Edward "Big Balls" Coristine, 19, who had earlier been employed by Musk's brain-chip project Neuralink and has now been made a special adviser to the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Technology and the Department of Homeland Security. The Trumpian lists of forbidden words and concepts have reminded some observers of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984.
High Technology and Squalor
Insights into our present crisis, however, are also offered by science fiction novels that, over the decades, imagined artificial intelligence, brain-Internet interfacing, the decline of the state in the face of tech corporations, and the development of largescale digital systems and ways they might be hacked. Such works coalesced into the cyberpunk school of sci-fi writing in the 1980s and 1990s. Heirs to that tradition like novelist William Gibson may now be seen as the reluctant prophets of -- yes! -- Elon Musk's invention of a new Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE for the second Trump era.
Cyberpunk has especially resonated in South Africa, its themes explored by authors like Lauren Beukes, whose 2008 novel Moxyland is set in a futuristic Cape Town that labors "under a tyrannical and vigilant government and media." As she explained, "I'm always writing from that perspective of growing up under what was a utopia for me and a repressive violent state that destroyed lives and futures for Black people when the racist government wasn't actively murdering them." Cyberpunk themes have also deeply shaped video games like Canadian-South African director Neill Blomkamp's Off the Grid, in which Mega Corporations are pitted against one another in a contest for dominance.
The racist tinge to Donald Trump's and Elon Musk's ongoing hacking of the government should also bring to mind Blomkamp's 2009 "first contact" movie, District 9, which highlighted the determination of White nationalists to cannibalize the resources of populations who had been marginalized precisely to make them vulnerable enough to be looted. With its simultaneous depiction of high-tech wonders and social squalor and its foregrounding of corporate rather than state power, District 9 also has significant cyberpunk themes.
On January 31st, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) noted, leaks from the Treasury Department revealed that high-ranking government employees were mounting resistance to ad hoc DOGE head Elon Musk's demands that his team of young hackers be given entry to the financial-transaction systems managed by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). That's the unit that makes virtually all government payments, control of which amounts to control of the government. It soon became clear that DOGE operatives had indeed been given authorization to access BFS platforms. As a result, Elon Musk, the CE0 of three private corporations, has gained the ability to oversee government financial transactions (with no questions asked about how he might use the information obtained to enrich himself or harm competitors).
By mid-February it was clear that one of Musk's acolytes, 25-year-old Marko Elez, had for some time obtained overwrite privileges at the BFS -- power, that is, to override the entire federal budget, if he (and Musk) wished to. Elez briefly felt he had to resign due to past messages on social media boasting of his racism, including his advocacy for "Indian hate." His cause was nevertheless adopted by Vice President JD Vance (whose wife Usha is, ironically enough, from India). For right-wing movements, whipping up hatred of racialized minorities is crucial to getting into and staying in power, and disciplining Elez would have undermined Vance's project -- in comparison to which his wife's honor is apparently of little interest to him. You undoubtedly won't be surprised to learn that Elez was soon reinstated.
Overwrite Privileges
Musk maintains that he's reducing government waste by capturing the Treasury Department infrastructure and arbitrarily firing large numbers of government workers. He essentially abolished by fiat the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main government distributor of aid globally, which he bizarrely characterized as a "criminal" organization and the employees of which he called "worms." He abruptly cut off its field agents in dangerous areas like the Congolese capital Kinshasha from their email access and funds to escape a potentially hazardous situation.
Nor was that agency the only object of his ire. In his view, vast swathes of the government are unnecessary and wasteful. No matter that his own companies have fed from the public trough to the tune of nearly $21 billion dollars since 2008 and his DOGE team has been enormously wasteful and dangerous. For example, they fired hundreds of personnel at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration who oversee the country's nuclear arsenal. When the Gen Z DOGE ninjas finally thought better of it, they couldn't immediately rehire the experts since they didn't have their personal emails and had already abruptly closed their government accounts.
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