On election night, the effective-accelerationist influencer @BasedBeffJezos posted a photo of Donald Trump along with Dana White and Elon Musk, captioned “CEO, CMO, CTO of the USA.” The country, the post implied, has become a tech company. The next day, Beff Jezos added, “America is back in the warm embrace of the techno-capital machine.”
Once upon a time, tech platforms were the thing upon which politics happened. They were the stages, the soapboxes, the ad markets, the open field for whatever users brought. They have always played host to politics. But with the second election of Donald Trump, the relationship has entered a new phase. The figure of the politician is converging with that of the server admin.
The server is the basic unit of power on the internet. The earliest “sysadmins” were the people who ran bulletin-board systems on their handmade computers, starting in the late 1970s, well before the internet itself was publicly available. Running these online communities in their homes, connected to local users by phone lines, the admins treated their users like houseguests. And like good hosts, the admins were in charge. They were the arbiters of what was acceptable and not, and they had the power to enforce their rules. If you didn’t like the rules, you could leave and go somewhere else.
Over time, these servers became more sophisticated. The norms of the early admins became hard-coded into the software and culture of social media. The result is a regime that still reigns. In my book Governable Spaces I call this regime “implicit feudalism.” Just as “feudalism” was a later caricature for what the complex governance of the Middle Ages never was, this was a caricature of how to run a healthy community. All power resides with the server admin and whomever else they designate. Communities exist as distinct fiefdoms, under the absolute rule of their local admins. The punishment for anything is censorship and exile. Some admins have adopted the only-sort-of-joking title “benevolent dictator for life.”
As social media moved from bedrooms to data centers, the norm of implicit feudalism didn’t go away. It merged with the “Californian ideology” of 1990s Silicon Valley, a belief that technology could serve as a replacement for the inconveniences of politics. In lieu of the messy elections, boards, and bylaws of offline organizations, online communities have relied almost entirely on their software-supported admins. This is true at the level of corporate CEOs as much as for the Steve Kornacki Fan Club Facebook page.
Platforms have always been political—whether you consider the many underground, gay-friendly servers in the early bulletin-board days or Google’s close ties to the Obama administration. But politics and platform administration have still seemed like two different things.
That changed when Donald Trump rose to the top of the GOP ticket—not by holding a succession of lower offices, and winning over party leaders, but by tweeting. He wasn’t an admin (yet), but he realized that platform power could short-circuit party power.
As his first term wound down, the QAnon movement stoked conspiracies among his supporters thanks to the prophecies posted by the admin of the anonymous platform where they appeared. He was apparently in touch with the White House. Admin power and political power were converging.
It was only fitting that, after leaving office, Donald Trump turned his attention not to a presidential library but to a platform. He became the major owner and user-in-chief of Truth Social, a Twitter clone built for the MAGA faithful. Then, in 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X. Soon it became clear that his intent was not to run a money-making business but to promote his politics, which more and more converged with Trumpism. The Trump family, meanwhile, has announced World Liberty Financial, a crypto platform for them to admin.
The eminent philosopher of admin-ism is Curtis Yarvin, a entrepreneur-influencer who makes implicit feudalism explicit: Since CEOs and benevolent dictators seem to work pretty well online, why not just put one on charge of the government? This kind of admin monarchism seems finally in reach thanks to Trump’s government-wide victory. But it has been a long time coming.
We have been practicing for this in our daily deference to admins online, and in being admins ourselves. To accept the regime of the admin means trading democratic norms for software-aided autocracy. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed when he wrote home to France about the United States in the 1830s, the health of democracy at large scales depends on using it at small scales, too. As much as any constitution or court, the best safeguard against tyranny is infusing democracy into everyday life.
More recently, the activist-philosopher adrienne maree brown put the point this way: “Until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.” For many of us, the closest thing we have to the local are the online spaces we share.
Given the choice between defending a broken democracy and electing an admin, American voters chose the admin. But unlike in an online community, if the admin of a country doesn’t suit us, we can’t just click away to a different one.