The Technocratic Coup of the Binary Billionaires
The Rise of Empire 2.0 : How Technocrats Are Engineering the Post-Democratic State
Abstract
This dispatch inaugurates a three-part investigatory and analytic series tracing the rise, entrenchment, and projected future of Technocratic Neo-Apartheid (TNA) and Technocratic Neo-Colonialism (TNC) as twin modalities of global algorithmic control. Anchored in the foundational premise that digital power is not neutral but increasingly weaponized by state-corporate elites, this essay identifies a key bloc of techno-authoritarian actors—Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Jared Kushner, and others—who orchestrated, enabled, or accelerated a technocratic soft coup during and after the Trump administration. The piece contextualizes this coup not as a discrete rupture, but as the logical digitized extension of apartheid, settler colonialism, and race-based economic governance.
The dispatch maps the genealogy of this ideological cohort; documents the infrastructure they co-opted or built; and outlines the emergent predictive governance system reshaping citizenship, agency, and political power through code, surveillance, and platform control. Drawing from current journalistic investigations, institutional records, and ideological writings (e.g., Curtis Yarvin, the Dark Enlightenment), it presents a rigorous profile of each lead actor while framing their work within broader political economy and AI ethics critiques.
Introduction: The Coup That Didn't Need Tanks
“You didn’t vote for them.
You didn’t elect them.
You didn’t even ask them to lead.
But they govern anyway.”
In a moment increasingly defined by crisis—climate collapse, generative AI revolutions, the erosion of trust in institutions—a subtler revolution has unfolded, almost imperceptibly to the public eye. Unlike coups of the past, this one did not require tanks in the streets or soldiers at the gates. It required only code, contracts, and crisis.
While mainstream narratives centered on the political theater of the Trump presidency, a deeper structural shift was already underway. A bloc of interconnected technologists, venture capitalists, data brokers, and militarized contractors were not simply adjacent to power—they were installing themselves into its control panels. This was not a coup against Trump; it was a coup beneath and around him.
And yet, it was Trump’s administration that served as the vessel—willing or unwitting—for their ascent. From Jared Kushner’s introduction of predictive surveillance systems into federal immigration policy to Larry Ellison’s provision of Oracle’s back-end infrastructure for state policing, these actors deployed technical control as political conquest.
Their collective agenda was not bound by party or platform. It was bound by belief: that democratic processes are inefficient, that social chaos demands algorithmic order, and that political legitimacy should flow not from consent but from code.
This dispatch begins the work of naming these actors, mapping their influence, and exposing the ideological DNA of their project. In doing so, it rejects the temptation to view Trump-era disruptions as anomalous. Instead, it reveals them as engineered—part of a long arc of digital colonial expansion and algorithmic authoritarianism dressed in the garments of innovation and disruption.
Section I: The Quiet Compilers of the Coup
The technocratic coup currently reshaping the contours of governance in the U.S. and beyond was not the work of a singular actor or a rogue administration. It emerged from a constellation of elite entrepreneurs, defense contractors, venture capitalists, and ideological theorists who saw in the chaos of Trump’s presidency a rare opportunity: the chance to codify control systems at scale under the guise of disruption.
Their methods were not merely political—they were infrastructural. Together, this network of figures formed what we are identifying here as the Coup Bloc, a soft junta of algorithmic capitalists whose projects reflect a deep hostility to democratic regulation and egalitarian governance.
Their success lies not only in technological innovation but in the deployment of crisis as cover, language as laundering, and code as command. What follows is a profile of their intentions, infrastructures, and ideological blueprints—beginning with their most visible avatars.
Elon Musk — The Platform Monarch
With the acquisition of Twitter (now X), Musk did not simply buy a social network—he seized a global attention engine and converted it into a sovereign platform governed by opaque ideological filters and monetized information warfare. Musk’s public narrative of “free speech absolutism” masks a calculated use of platform governance to elevate reactionary voices and suppress systemic critique.
“If you don’t like the algorithm, build your own.” — Elon Musk
His alignment with surveillance-capitalist infrastructure is deeper than is often acknowledged. Through Tesla’s behavioral telemetry, Neuralink’s biometric ambitions, and Starlink’s potential militarization, Musk’s ecosystem embodies the infrastructure of TNA/TNC: predictive, privatized, and imperial.
Peter Thiel — The Philosopher General
As co-founder of Palantir and a public admirer of Carl Schmitt, Thiel represents the intellectual spine of the coup bloc. He advocates explicitly for the suspension of democratic norms in the face of disorder, positing crisis as the precondition for elite rule.
Thiel’s writings and investments trace a clear lineage from surveillance capitalism to authoritarian technocracy. Palantir’s contracts with ICE, local law enforcement, and global intelligence networks operationalize this worldview in software form—rendering populations legible, sortable, and pre-emptively governable.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” — Peter Thiel, 2009
Larry Ellison — The Infrastructure Mogul
Often overshadowed by more flamboyant figures, Ellison’s Oracle Corporation has been called “the technology provider of choice for some of the most sinister corners of the American surveillance state” (Yahoo News, 2024). Oracle’s systems run in the background of child welfare agencies, policing software, and welfare screening tools—all disproportionately targeting Black and working-class families.
“The NSA should collect everything.” — Larry Ellison
Ellison’s infrastructure is essential to both Technocratic Neo-Apartheid, through domestic predictive interventions, and Technocratic Neo-Colonialism, via Oracle’s partnerships with governments seeking to deploy surveillance over post-colonial populations.
Jared Kushner - The Bureaucratic Conduit
Kushner’s role in the Abraham Accords and the introduction of biometric surveillance into immigration control represents the marriage of techno-authoritarianism and geopolitical restructuring. Through his alignment with private contractors like Anduril and Palantir, and his normalization of Gulf-Israel surveillance collaboration, Kushner built bridges between reactionary tech and diplomatic architecture.
His proximity to Stephen Miller and the adoption of AI-driven deportation modeling systems during the Trump administration are central evidence of Kushner’s role in exporting TNA logic under the cover of policy modernization.
Curtis Yarvin — The Coder-Theorist
Operating in the shadows of the coup bloc is its ideological engineer: Curtis Yarvin, a software developer and originator of the “Dark Enlightenment.” Yarvin proposes that democratic politics be replaced by “CEO-kings”—unaccountable technocrats ruling by algorithmic efficiency.
“If you control the narrative, you control the state.” — Curtis Yarvin
His philosophy—once dismissed as fringe—now echoes through the rhetorical defenses of Musk, Thiel, and others. The anti-democratic, post-political logic of narrative sovereignty, predictive control, and technocratic exceptionalism draws directly from Yarvin’s playbook.
Collective Pattern: From Data Brokers to Digital Kings
What unites these men is not party affiliation, but ideological conviction:
That control is best exercised through infrastructure, not law.
That democracy is inefficient, and algorithmic governance is superior.
That mass behavior should be steered, not negotiated.
Together, they form a technocratic vanguard—a coup bloc whose methods are predictive, whose logic is proprietary, and whose empire is built not on borders but on back-ends, algorithms, and surveillance flows.
Section II: Infrastructure as Ideology — From Platforms to Panopticons
“The greatest trick of the new rulers is convincing the governed that their power is technical, not political.”
The contemporary technocratic coup did not arrive with proclamations or manifestos—it arrived through infrastructure. Lines of code, server farms, machine-learning models, predictive dashboards, and “public-private partnerships” that promised efficiency while quietly redrawing the lines of power. What was once considered the domain of policy or legislation has now been subsumed by systems engineering. But behind the appearance of technical neutrality lies an unmistakable ideological project: to replace democratic negotiation with algorithmic determination.
These infrastructures—built by Oracle, Palantir, Anduril, X/Twitter, Tesla, and others—do not simply process information. They shape reality. They decide what data is worthy of notice, who is seen as risky, what outcomes are statistically inevitable. In this new regime, control is no longer enforced by decree. It is embedded into the design.
Oracle and the Normalization of Predictive Bureaucracy
Larry Ellison’s Oracle has often escaped the high-profile scrutiny faced by Meta or X, but its role in facilitating technocratic control is perhaps the most entrenched. Oracle powers the databases of governments, health systems, and police departments. It is, in many ways, the unacknowledged spine of the surveillance state.
According to a 2024 Yahoo News investigation:
“Oracle is now the technology provider of choice for some of the most sinister corners of the American surveillance state.”
One striking example is its role in the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, where algorithmic tools were used to score families for potential child welfare interventions. These predictive models—built on historical data imbued with racial bias—effectively pre-targeted low-income Black and Latino communities under the guise of ‘efficiency’ and ‘risk reduction.’
Such systems function as digital redlining—automating centuries-old patterns of racialized surveillance while avoiding public debate or consent.
Elon Musk’s Closed Loop of Influence and Extraction
Elon Musk is not merely a CEO—he is an infrastructure builder of consent. Through his control of X (formerly Twitter), Neuralink, Tesla, and Starlink, Musk has created a closed behavioral feedback loop where user activity, emotional volatility, and biometric input are harvested and modeled to further shape user behavior.
“If you don’t like the algorithm, build your own.”
— Elon Musk, while presiding over an algorithm that amplifies right-wing grievance and suppresses Palestinian solidarity
At Tesla, behavioral AI systems study driving habits, user preferences, and reaction times. These are not just for ‘improvement’—they feed predictive modeling systems that tie users more deeply into Musk’s corporate ecosystem. Neuralink, while still nascent, openly aims to create interfaces that blur the line between thought and computation—a project that carries disturbing implications for surveillance, autonomy, and neuro-rights.
Predictive Policing as Preemptive Discipline
Technocratic Neo-Apartheid (TNA) relies not just on knowing what people have done, but predicting what they might do. Palantir, in concert with local police departments and ICE, deploys software that builds threat profiles based on social connections, neighborhood demographics, and online activity.
In Detroit, facial recognition systems—many powered by private contractors—have been used in over 100 arrests, despite a high documented failure rate and a disturbing trend of misidentifying Black individuals at disproportionate rates
(The Guardian, 2019)
This is not policing in the traditional sense—it is algorithmic preemption. Communities are scored, flagged, and mapped not based on individual guilt, but statistical risk.
The result is a new form of digital containment: neighborhoods that are persistently over-surveilled, residents whose movements and social ties are treated as suspicious, and systemic patterns of harassment cloaked in the language of probability.
Infrastructure Is Never Neutral
All infrastructures are ideological. Whether a bridge, a database, or a machine learning model, each encodes assumptions about the world—about who deserves access, who should be watched, who is assumed to be a threat.
The infrastructures of TNA and TNC are no different. They are built to enforce racial hierarchies without naming race, to implement control without courts, to erase consent through interface design and predictive closure.
We are not merely witnessing a shift in tools. We are witnessing a shift in how power is designed, deployed, and disguised.
Section III: Ideological Origins — The Yarvin Blueprint and the Collapse of Consent
“If you control the narrative, you control the state.” — Curtis Yarvin
The technocratic turn in governance is not a fluke of innovation or a neutral outcome of technological evolution. It is the intentional expression of an ideology—a vision that devalues democracy, elevates algorithmic rule, and seeks to consolidate decision-making into the hands of unelected elites cloaked in technical expertise.
At the center of this ideological scaffolding is Curtis Yarvin, the Silicon Valley monarchist, better known by his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, and author of the “Dark Enlightenment.” Far from a fringe figure, Yarvin’s writings have been foundational for a generation of tech elites disillusioned with liberal democracy and enticed by the promise of sovereign executive power.
His influence is no longer theoretical. It is operational.
Yarvin’s Core Doctrines and Their Digital Application
Yarvin’s ideology begins with a simple provocation: Democracy is broken. CEO rule is the solution. He envisions a post-democratic society run by an all-powerful executive—a “CEO-king”—whose authority is absolute, whose legitimacy derives not from votes but from competence, and whose decisions are enforced through computational clarity rather than messy public deliberation.
His most infamous contributions include:
The Cathedral: Yarvin’s term for the perceived left-liberal ideological hegemony of media, academia, and bureaucracy. Tech elites have reinterpreted this as justification for building parallel structures of influence outside traditional democratic accountability.
Exit, Not Voice: Influenced by Albert O. Hirschman, Yarvin urges elites to “exit” democratic systems rather than reform them—building alternative jurisdictions (digital or territorial) governed by technocratic fiat.
Patchwork Governance: A theory of decentralized autocratic city-states run like corporations, free from public oversight, powered by capital and coded rules.
These concepts are not just philosophical abstractions. They have been codified into real-world applications by figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and David Sacks—each applying Yarvin's logic through infrastructure, platforms, or capital.
Thiel, Sacks, Musk: Yarvin’s Executives-in-Waiting
Peter Thiel, Yarvin’s early patron, has long funded ideological and technological efforts aligned with the Dark Enlightenment. His Palantir platform exemplifies algorithmic preemption as governance, and his investments in “seasteading” and alternative statecraft betray a commitment to exit over reform.
David Sacks echoes Yarvin’s hostility to democracy, branding the administrative state as the true threat. His podcast, investments, and platform advocacy push for a CEO-led technocracy under the guise of free market restoration.
Elon Musk, through Twitter/X and Neuralink, mirrors Yarvin’s drive for executive sovereignty: one man ruling information flows, setting rules unilaterally, while publicly deriding democratic regulation as inefficient.
Yarvin himself has acknowledged their importance:
“Thiel is the smartest man in the world, and Musk is the most effective. We need kings, and they're already on the throne.” — Curtis Yarvin, Substack post, 2022
The Collapse of Consent: From Sovereignty to Simulation
The appeal of Yarvin’s ideology lies in its brutal clarity: stop pretending everyone’s voice matters. Replace the theater of democracy with the efficiency of computation and kingship. This is not about violence or coups—it’s about consent rendered obsolete through engineered perception.
The emerging technocratic class does not seek legitimacy through popular will. It seeks obedience through predictive infrastructure, trust through branded charisma, and power through capital and code.
Yarvin’s ideological descendants are not fringe extremists—they are mainstream platform owners, military contractors, and billionaire philanthropists.
From Theoretical Extremism to Operational Power
Yarvin's ideas once circulated on blogs and in academic corners. Now, they inform corporate boardrooms, venture funding priorities, and policy experiments. As "Consent Engineering" replaces consent, and as algorithmic governance replaces public accountability, the blueprint becomes reality.
What began as the Dark Enlightenment now emerges as a new kind of empire: one that does not need to convince, only to compute.
Section IV: Geographies of Enforcement — From Gaza to Georgia
“It’s tech-enabled apartheid.”
— Human Rights lawyer, on Israeli surveillance systems deployed in occupied territories
The technocratic coup is not confined to theory, nor is it abstracted within Silicon Valley boardrooms. It is being tested and refined in real-world laboratories — most notably Palestine and marginalized communities across the United States. The tools of algorithmic oppression are not merely conceptual; they are operational, brutal, and expanding.
A. Gaza as Prototype: The Militarized Lab of Technocratic Neo-Apartheid
A May 2024 report by the Associated Press revealed a chilling development: Israel has deployed an AI-powered targeting system named “Lavender”, designed to pre-select targets for assassination in Gaza. The system generated mass lists of Palestinians based on predictive profiling, often without confirming combatant status — and soldiers were reportedly expected to “approve” hundreds of kill targets per day.
“Lavender did not distinguish between combatants and civilians.”
— AP News, 2024
Lavender and its accompanying surveillance systems — Gospel for infrastructure strikes, and Where’s Daddy? for tracking individuals — represent the fully weaponized form of AI governance. These systems embody:
Predictive violence as policy
Algorithmic erasure as norm
Zero transparency, zero accountability
This is the technocratic execution of apartheid — one in which the cold logic of code replaces ethical calculus, and human lives are reduced to data points on a dashboard.
B. Domestic Deployment: Black Communities as Predictive Targets
The predictive targeting model is not limited to foreign “conflict zones.” Systems first tested in Palestine are now mirrored in U.S. policing, social welfare, and border control.
Detroit’s Facial Recognition System (reported by The Guardian, 2019) wrongly identified suspects with an error rate disproportionately affecting Black residents.
Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, powered by Oracle’s software, used opaque predictive models to flag predominantly Black and Brown families for intervention.
Palantir’s Predictive Policing Algorithms have been contracted in multiple U.S. cities, creating heat maps of “pre-crime” zones — often indistinguishable from racial redlining.
“Predictive policing is techno-racism.”
— Tawana Petty, Data Justice Activist
The pattern is clear: technologies validated abroad are imported for domestic control — calibrated to suppress dissent, marginalize the poor, and algorithmically preempt communities long targeted by systemic violence.
C. Oracle and Ellison: The Quiet Architect of Infrastructure-Level Oppression
While tech outrage focuses on Musk and Meta, Oracle Corporation, under Larry Ellison, has embedded itself into the machinery of state-level oppression.
“Oracle is now the technology provider of choice for some of the most sinister corners of the American surveillance state.”
— Yahoo News (2024)
Oracle’s systems now power:
Police data aggregation platforms
Predictive analytics in welfare and child services
Border surveillance systems
Foreign government contracts in post-colonial nations
Ellison, an outspoken supporter of authoritarian governance and close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, has built an infrastructure of global digital apartheid.
Oracle’s reach is often quiet, but its impacts are structural, embedded, and expanding.
D. The “Israel Model”: TNC Exportation of Predictive Oppression
Israel has become the global template for authoritarian governments seeking to suppress resistance through AI and surveillance. The “Israel Model” — tested on Palestinians — is now exported through:
Military AI systems
Border control packages
Disinformation counter-measures
Predictive threat scoring software
The AP report confirms:
“Israel is not just deploying AI — it is exporting these tools globally.”
The result is a feedback loop between governments, tech companies, and private contractors like NSO Group, Anduril, Palantir, and Oracle — erasing the distinction between military occupation and civilian oversight, foreign wars and domestic policing.
Section IV: The System They Built Still Runs
They didn’t just build a toolkit of control.
They built a new regime.
The architects of TNA and TNC did not create discrete technologies to be retired after crisis. They built and embedded full governance infrastructures — adaptable, predictive, and self-reinforcing — that continue to scale even when public attention fades. These systems are not idle remnants of a prior administration or outdated wartime tools. They are the scaffolding of an emerging global order.
Across agencies, jurisdictions, and now borders, these tools of surveillance, risk scoring, algorithmic profiling, and behavioral management are not being dismantled. They are being upgraded. Militarized. Privatized. Exported.
The same predictive models once used to track insurgents are now used to monitor school children.
The same risk-scoring software deployed in ICE raids is now determining which families get investigated by child protective services.
The same biometric systems piloted in border enforcement are now shaping global refugee admittance, foreign aid disbursement, and criminal sentencing.
A: Datafied Governance Doesn’t Expire
Once a data system is embedded, it tends to expand.
Once a risk model is funded, it rarely gets defunded.
And once predictive profiling is normalized, it becomes the default logic — even when the threats it was designed to counter no longer exist.
In 2023, Amnesty International found that U.S. police departments still use facial recognition systems known to have false match rates for Black faces exceeding 40%.
In 2024, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirmed that several federal agencies were still using Trump-era AI contracts — including border surveillance systems and biometric ID platforms — without updated civil rights assessments.
These are not dormant leftovers.
They are the living core of modern bureaucratic power.
B: Predictive Governance Is Not Just a Tool — It’s a Worldview
TNA and TNC rely on a foundational belief:
That risk can be calculated.
That identity can be scored.
That behavior can be predicted — and preemptively managed — through technological systems.
This belief is not just present in ICE software or DoD contracts.
It is now embedded in child welfare tools, public health triage models, urban policing grids, and even school threat assessment software.
The logic is simple but deadly:
If someone can be a threat, they must be managed as one — even before they act.
And who gets labeled a “pre-event threat” is determined by past data, system bias, and opaque algorithmic thresholds.
C: The System Has No Expiration Date
There will be no press conference announcing the end of TNA.
There will be no treaty to dissolve TNC.
Because the system is not static.
It is not a policy.
It is not a law.
It is a living, learning infrastructure of power that evolves silently — embedded in procurement contracts, updated via cloud pushes, and scaled through public-private partnerships.
And unless explicitly dismantled, these systems will not only persist — they will grow more entrenched, more invisible, and more devastating to the communities already marked by systemic neglect and algorithmic suspicion.
The coup was not dramatic.
It was bureaucratic.
And it runs on the servers of stability.
Section V: Watchlist Briefing — Predictive Governance and Emerging Threats
“The systems built by Miller, Kushner, and Prince are not relics.
They are scaffolds for what comes next.”
This final section of Dispatch One distills the core threats, identifies new and emerging actors, and issues a watchlist-style briefing of individuals, organizations, and technologies playing instrumental roles in the expansion of Technocratic Neo-Apartheid (TNA) and Technocratic Neo-Colonialism (TNC).
This is not a conclusion — it is a beginning. These threats are active, adaptive, and accelerating.
VI.1 – Active Threat Architecture: The Evolving Scaffolding of TNA/TNC
Key Institutions:
Palantir Technologies: Core to predictive policing, refugee profiling, and biometric governance globally.
Oracle: Backbone of predictive analytics in child welfare, social services, and military contracts.
Anduril Industries: Physical manifestation of digital apartheid — AI towers, drone surveillance, and automated border control.
NSO Group: Exporter of weaponized surveillance used against journalists, dissidents, and entire populations.
Clearview AI: Creator of massive unauthorized biometric facial databases.
Current Deployment Arenas:
Gaza: Testing ground for AI-powered automated kill systems and biometric surveillance — a prototype for global expansion.
U.S. Inner Cities: Data-driven social service systems that predict "risk" before aid — often in Black and Brown communities.
Global South: Experimental AI-based credit and immigration systems that lock nations into extractive dependency.
These systems do not require your participation to surveil you. They only require your presence — and your data.
VI.2 – New and Emerging Actors to Watch
The future of TNA/TNC will not be carried forward by a single tyrant or CEO. It will evolve through networks of aligned actors:
VI.3 – Reframing the Threat
The public is still being trained to see threats in terms of authoritarian strongmen, partisan warfare, or foreign propaganda.
But the real, emerging threat looks like:
A clean interface
A predictive notification
A compliance requirement
A risk score
A nudged recommendation
An invisible blacklist
This is predictive governance without democratic process.
It is a technocratic regime of control without accountability.
And it is already here.
VI.4 – The Future Targets: Blackness, Neurodivergence, and Human Variance
A growing body of evidence reveals that the most vulnerable populations — Black communities, neurodivergent individuals, migrants, and children — are the test subjects of this predictive governance regime.
Neurodivergence is increasingly criminalized by algorithms that score “risk” based on emotional tone, eye contact, or perceived compliance.
AI content moderation is trained to flag dialects like AAVE as hostile or inappropriate.
Automated educational tracking scores poor and marginalized children early, feeding them into tiered opportunity systems — or predictive criminality pipelines.
What begins as “efficiency” in these systems always ends in eugenicist justification for exclusion, containment, or behavioral correction.
VI.5 – Toward a Strategic Counterforce: Next Steps for Dispatches Two and Three
The Dispatch series is not a doomsday chronicle. It is a reconnaissance document — meant to empower, inform, and strategize.
Dispatch Two will:
Map the genealogy of these actors and ideologies,
Expose how bureaucracies have quietly reoriented governance toward algorithmic authority,
And explore the theological, military, and eschatological motivations that animate the current technocratic caste.
Dispatch Three will:
Provide case studies of platform dominance and algorithmic suppression,
Offer mini-dossiers on new institutional actors,
And introduce community-driven, spiritually informed strategies to resist, subvert, and rehumanize systems of control.
Closing: This Is Not Inevitable
We end Dispatch One with this conviction:
The future is not a machine to be obeyed.
It is a space to be contested.
Technocracy is not destiny.
It is a design — and designs can be dismantled.
Stay connected.
Stay engaged.
And most of all — stay free in thought, in spirit, and in strategy.