After Christmas I started writing a piece about the weaponisation of management in the wake of Trumpism. How the war on woke capitalism was turning management from a rational (sort of) means to a rational end – ie, identifying ‘what works’ and then using it to do things reliably better – to become an ideological end in itself, as big corporations rowed back from their climate-change and diversity commitments in the face of pressure from activists or legal proceedings by anti-woke Republican US states. That’s still the narrative. But in just three weeks it has moved from a national canvas to a global one, becoming a much bigger story: the self-weaponisation of management of the most powerful companies in the world in favour of an authoritarian president of a global superpower with territorial and economic designs on other sovereign countries, and indeed the whole world order. Another way of thinking about it might be ‘siligarchy’ – a  merger of Washington and Silicon Valley, on Washington’s, ie Trump’s, terms.

Just look at that $1tr worth of tech titans, including three of the richest men in the world, sitting in the front seats at Trump’s inauguration, seats seemingly purchased with the $1m that seemed to be the going rate for the tithe each had paid to the new president’s ‘inaugural fund’ (to receive which, as far as I can tell, is its only function). Given that Donald Trump has never been a fan of Big Tech and its perceived crimes against free speech, some rapprochement by the latter was to be expected. But that only partly explains the depth and alacrity of its collective grovel. This has seen, channelling Groucho Marx (‘I have my principles…and if you don’t like those I have others’) press barons Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon Shiong disowning their liberal newspapers, the Washington Post and LA Times, and spiking their pre-election presidential endorsements; Elon Musk from his lodgings in Mar-a-Largo demanding the overthrow of the ‘tyranny’ of Keir Starmer in the UK and the victory of the far-right AFD in Germany; and Meta chairman Mark Zuckerberg abandoning fact-checking and content moderation at Facebook and Instagram in favour of ‘free speech’ and a pushback against ‘creeping censorship’.

In short, it turns out that the Valley’s tech bros, far from being the libertarians many people took them for, are actually quite willing to make common cause with an authoritarian state, even or in fact especially with an authoritarian state, to advance their own profits and power. 

The ploy is both cynical and transparent. What Big Tech has that Trump needs is weapons of mass information, which they are happy to deploy in return for something that they covet: shelter from increasingly irksome European regulators. Already under scrutiny – Google, Apple, Meta and Uber have all been fined by the EU – the tech platforms now face a further regulatory squeeze under 2022’s Digital Services Act, which the EU is using to investigate them on a series of counts. Regulators can be surprisingly powerful. When X was banned in Brazil last year for failing to comply with court orders, a simmering Musk quietly backed down and paid the fines levied a few months later. It wasn’t a question of free speech but of sovereignty and the rule of law, Brazilian commentators approvingly noted at the time.

But with the advent of Trump 2.0, sovereignty is suddenly in play. In the face of Musk brandishing X as a megaphone to shout down rational politics in the UK and Germany (what price France, with upcoming elections and a surging far-right party, as next in line?), and Facebook and Instagram flooding the world with misinformation, regulation becomes an obvious bargaining chip. Bezos has welcomed Trump’s ‘energy around regulation’, hint, hint. Zuckerberg and J D Vance have protested that regulation is a tariff in disguise. More directly still, in his recent address to Davos Trump himself complained that fines levied by Brussels on tech firms for breaking competition rules were ‘a form of taxation’. ‘We have some very big complaints with the EU,’ he warned.

All this coincides with a strong corporate pushback – backlash is probably a better word – on what can now be fashionably dismissed as ‘woke’ management in general, as companies take advantage of the charged climate to undo some of the concessions made during and since the pandemic. Jettisoning fact-checking and dialing down DEI and ESG programmes saves jobs and money. It also clears the way for a return to the brash ‘move fast and break things’ management style that some male CEOs seem still to pine for. The increasing enforcement of office working is one aspect of this. Another, bang on cue, was Zuck’s lament in his podcast with Joe Rogan that the feminising of corporate culture had led to  a ‘neutered’ workplace in need of more ‘masculine energy’ and ‘aggression’ (that turned out well in the past, didn’t it?).

Zuckerberg also said he favoured a ‘repopulation’ of the ‘cultural elite class’. This presumably means the elevation of anti-censorship warriors like himself, fellow tech bros Marc Andreessen, Musk, Silicon Valley eminence grise Peter Thiel (like Musk, a product of apartheid-period South Africa), David Sacks, Trump’s crypto tsar (ditto), far-right ideologue Stephen Miller (‘the second most dangerous man in America after the president – and unlike the president he knows what he is doing’) and other Ayn Rand-y types like Curtis Yarvin and others even farther out. For a flavour of their thinking, see Thiel’s extraordinary and sinister piece in the FT which sees Trump’s second term as the reverse of an aberration – a signal of the final eclipse of the pre-internet ancien régime (that’s anyone that’s not them) and the  triumph of the ‘new and strange ideas’ that the unfettered, internet will bring. Beneath the disingenuous title, ‘A time for truth and reconciliation’, lies an ill-disguised call for retribution and alternative truth, with an entirely gratuitous reference to Jeffrey Epstein (a bit player in the Qanon conspiracy theory) slyly inserted to insinuate that people like him are among the failings that the old elite should be held accountable for.

In a column on his excellent Substack, Paul Krugman identifies something he calls ‘MAGA brain’: the Trumpian assumption that the only way to get results is through being vindictive, unfeeling and ruthless, with anything softer being interpreted as weak/wokeness that invites bullying. Allied to Trump’s belief in the sole primacy of power and the use of force to take or take down what he has decided he does or doesn’t like (sometimes on personal whim – eg wind farms, Panama), it adds up to mafia capo management – brutal, male, exclusively top down, inevitably corrupting everything it touches.  Under Trump, management is being taken back to the, albeit AI-assisted, Dark Ages.