I'm Christopher Leiden. This is open source in the fog of Trump, too. What's new, we're asking?

The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new. Also, the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists

and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very idea of popular democracy and Republican government.

Further question, do citizens have to follow the action?

Matt Taibi's headline is, Nation Shrugs as Godzilla eats Washington.

Here at Open Source in the first month of Trump sequel, we're hovering in that

fog with two young historians of American finance, technology, and politics, and comparing

clues about the future that's under construction. Then turn up. Get us started. You've been

our reporter in some depth over the years on Silicon

Valley, where so many of the players and ideas in Trump II got launched, but it feels like a new

Silicon Valley that's come to Washington. Does it not? Well, there are so many ways in to thinking

about the new Trump administration. And one way

to think about it is what's different from the last time. This time around, a number of figures

from Silicon Valley have come together to back Trump in a much more outspoken way, in a much

stronger way. And of course, the so-called

co-president of Elon Musk is also a creature of the tech industry to some extent and looms

extremely large these days in the new Trump administration. So tech plays a role these days that it

didn't in the last Trump term and increasingly has become

integral to thinking about what Trumpism looks like now. You've been writing about the workplace,

the economics, the unionization, and not that kind of issue in the California story. Where do you

find those issues coming up in the new Trump version?

I think something that has puzzled people a bit who have been kind of casual observers of Silicon

...