Hey, Kyle.

Hey.

Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you for having me again.

So you just wrote this really great piece for The New Yorker about Elon Musk, his so-called Department of Government efficiency, and something called techno-fascism.

What is techno-fascism?

It's a big question for right now, I think, that we're all considering and possibly living.

On one level, techno-fascism, I think, is the integration of the government and radical technology. So it's fascism or authoritarianism carried out through technological means,

which in this case might be artificial intelligence or, I mean,

digital platforms dictated by billionaire industrialists.

But on another level, techno-fascism can also mean technocratic fascism.

And technocracy is government by experts and bureaucrats, kind of technical people. And I think that's

kind of happening as well as Elon Musk installs these helpers through Doge who are Silicon Valley

elites and Silicon Valley workers. So we're kind of seeing the ideology of technology infiltrating

the governments on a much deeper and more impactful scale than we've ever seen before.

I see. So there are kind of like two things going on, which is one,

using AI to either identify how to cut costs or to literally replace people. And then there's

the second part of it, which is replacing the heads of government agencies with AI technocrats.

Yes, I think. And that is the first step, I think. I mean, they're kind of

displacing the federal workforce. And then I think the next step that they aspire to after a

bunch of brutal cost cutting is to see what they can automate. And the technology that they'll

use to automate is the same thing they've been selling for a few years now, which are these AI models and digital agents and, you know, the artificial intelligence technology that they've been investing billions of dollars in.

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