Last year I published a book that began with an observation: Our most ordinary online spaces—such as Facebook, Discord and group chats—exhibit an extraordinary aversion to democracy. Offline, civic associations tend to have bylaws, membership rules and some basic means of dispute resolution. But online communities tend to rely on “admins” or moderators with the power to act as judge, jury and executioner upon others in their space. This form of governance goes back to the “sysadmins” who ran the earliest online communities in the 1980s and ’90s.
I referred to this phenomenon as “implicit feudalism.” The feudalism is implicit because tech companies frequently claim that online communities are acts of democracy. Yet in recent years, I argued, implicit feudalism has been becoming a template for “real life,” or “meatspace,” politics. When Donald Trump’s first term ended in 2021, he became the majority owner of his own social media platform, Truth Social. Tech industry figures such as Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin have been calling for government to look more like a C.E.O.-controlled tech startup.
This year, implicit feudalism appears to have become the ruling ideology of American government. We cannot understand the politics underway without seeing how the everyday politics of online life has shaped it.
“God mode” as a kind of politics
Mr. Trump is a man of the pre-internet world in many respects, but he rose to the presidency largely by posting provocations to Twitter—not by being elected first to lower offices, like every other president in recent memory. Since losing the 2020 election and being booted from major social platforms for encouraging a coup, he has recognized more acutely the importance of sysadmin power.
Now back in the White House, he is shilling a cryptocurrency and holding axes over the heads of Meta and TikTok. The sysadmin of X, Elon Musk, has been his governing partner. As Zeynep Tufekci pointed out in The New York Times, the best explanation for what Mr. Musk has been trying to accomplish with his Department of Government Efficiency—demanding data and source code, hooking up artificial intelligence—is to secure sysadmin-like powers across government for the presidency. He has been taking a system designed to resist privacy violations, political overreach and conflicts of interest, and turning it into the kind of all-seeing dashboard that a tech C.E.O. expects to wake up to.
Mr. Trump’s vice president, meanwhile, is JD Vance, a protégé of Mr. Thiel and reader of Mr. Yarvin who muses out loud about whether a president really needs to adhere to the rulings of courts. The first hundred days were an onslaught of potentially and blatantly unconstitutional executive orders, seemingly intended to present the courts with what a sysadmin would call a “distributed denial of service” attack—so many requests that the system breaks down. Taken together, the administration’s actions and political theories constitute a reinterpretation of the Constitution that posits the president as the grand sysadmin of the United States.
Donald Trump seems especially eager to reinterpret the sacred writ of the Constitution, too, especially after the brush with an assassin’s bullet left him convinced of his divine calling and purpose to rule. He has transitioned from what David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins call sacred kingship, which sets the king apart and aloft as a way of keeping him in check, into divine kingship, where the king assumes “metahuman” powers to reshape the earthly order. Whatever kind of king he might aspire to be, Donald Trump in 2025 is not ashamed to appear in memes with a crown.
Divine kingship and the sysadmin of a social network may seem like quite different forms of power, but both their mythologies and realities converge. “God mode” is a byword for sysadmin powers over a computer system; both a god and a sysadmin claim omniscience and omnipotence in their domain.
As even the anarchist Mr. Graeber could acknowledge, kingship seems to be a near-universal phenomenon in the history of human governance. Not all kings are called kings; some are queens, chiefs, presidents or prime ministers. Some kings are autocrats, some are close to powerless. But in each case, kingship is the manifestation of collective sovereignty in the body and being of a single person. In the ancient Mediterranean, years were marked by the reign of the current king. Today, the C.E.O.s of tech companies have the power to affect what ideas are “trending” at any given moment. When Meta and Twitter banned Mr. Trump in 2021, they demonstrated to him that his hold on power in the future would depend on his power over technology.
What kind of efficiency is DOGE after?
The political scientist David Stasavage has observed that centralized flows of information and control—“government efficiency,” in essence—has historically been a spoiler for democracy. Mr. Stasavage explains, “In many instances advances in production and communication undermined early democracy.” He describes how ancient Chinese rulers developed efficient means for centrally tracking and taxing the agricultural outputs of their subjects, and as a result they didn’t need to delegate power to local authorities. The comparatively inept European rulers, to get their bidding done, had to cede power to guilds, clerics, nobles and various other proverbial knights around round tables. If you can’t get high-fidelity information for governing, democracy becomes a compromise even power-hungry leaders feel compelled to accept.
Ezra Klein of The New York Times has been asking the right question: What kind of efficiency, exactly, is the Department of Government Efficiency after? And I think he also got the answer right: “It’s the Department of Government Control.” He explains, “If you control the computers, you control the money. And if you control the money, you control the power. And that genuinely does seem like something no one here has tried before.”
By seeking sysadmin-like power over the federal government, DOGE is attempting to undermine a congressional check on presidential power. It is rewriting the Constitution. This is not so unlike how the typical structure of small civic organizations from the pre-digital age has failed to migrate online. My mother’s neighborhood garden club, for instance, has bylaws that stipulate various leadership roles and selection processes for those roles; I have never seen such basic structures in place in a Facebook Group.
Perhaps the United States Constitution needs a radical reinterpretation for our times. After decades of chronic dysfunction in Congress, a stronger executive seems a plausible path for seeing that the will of the people gets done. Liberals need only think back to the legacy of an earlier strong president, Franklin Roosevelt, to appreciate this. (Mr. Roosevelt, who asserted executive power and pushed the limits of the courts, is one of Mr. Yarvin’s favorite case studies in favor of monarchism.)
But President Trump is also reminding us of the risks that a strong executive brings: capricious foreign policy, violent crackdowns on political speech and a depressing cult of personality. Sysadmin-style powers only escalate these risks. In a contract with Mr. Thiel’s company Palantir, for instance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is building an easily searchable database of domestic populations—notably, at a time when the president has threatened to use deportation against U.S. citizens he doesn’t like.
It is still possible to rethink our governing contract. When the U.S. founders called the executive the “president”—the one who merely presides—it was a radical claim about the possibility of self-rule. We could try to lean harder into that self-rule, rather than into kingship. And we can also aspire to something a lot better than the founders did—a self-rule unwilling to tolerate slavery, patriarchy, oligarchy and genocide.
At the “Hands Off” day of protest on April 5, I held a hand-drawn sign that said “No Kings”—as did many others. It is an obvious-enough sentiment. More esoteric, but no less essential, is the call for “No Sysadmins”—nobody with root access to our social systems, who can see all and control all at will. We could have federated social networks, controlled by communities rather than by billionaires, and we could have A.I. that is accountable to the people it impacts. We can fix the very real problems of nation-state democracy by taking back more power for ourselves rather than ceding it to an executive. We should beware of any claim that to have a healthy society, we need to give anyone God mode.
In a world with no kings and no sysadmins, we get an invitation: to govern ourselves, both within our borders and across our networks. We don’t have to take the invitation, of course, but at least then we would have the option of trying.
