Welcome to Tech Brotopia

We are heading into new territory, folks. Elon Musk, who is, as everyone knows, the world’s richest man, rewrote a compromise budget bill that has now been passed by Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Ironically, the bill's biggest loser might be supposed president-elect Donald Trump, whose attempt to get two years of relief from having to meet a debt ceiling was roundly defeated by conservative Republicans.

Musk, on the other hand, won handily. He tested Congress and came away with a “proof of concept.” There is no doubt that he’s going to use it.

Musk can generate on-demand outrage, start culture wars, and trigger immediate compliance from the political party that controls all three branches of government. Armed with the ultimate online mob, he can direct them to digitally storm the U.S. Capitol within minutes. He can use his mob to threaten non-compliant politicians with a future primary. He can run unlimited, narrative-shaping political advertisements on an ad hoc basis. And it doesn't matter if what he claims is truthful. This week's posts were anything but. The truth is irrelevant. Reality is his plaything.

That's real power and that's the power he can use to reshape the federal government and all future budgets. If he doesn't like a program or a regulation or a budget allocation, he can simply call it out online and let his data-rich outrage machine work like an algorithm to overwhelm opposition. With 208 million followers, he can manufacture consent for nearly anything he wants. He only needs 5 percent of them to respond to a tweet or a meme for it to "go viral" and force it into the political system. He's shown that he can essentially rewrite or tank legislation.

Last week, in a characteristic bomb-throwing move, Trump had derailed a continuing resolution, legislation that would have avoided a government shutdown, which had been successfully negotiated by both parties. His intentions seemed to be: 1) to force a government shutdown during the Biden administration, no matter the consequences to Americans, particularly government employees, during the Christmas season, and 2) to suspend the country’s debt limit for two years, leaving him free to fulfill some of his big-ticket campaign promises.

As Maggie Haberman wrote in the New York Times: “…the episode demonstrated a well-established pattern by Mr. Trump. He often purposely blew up congressional negotiations during his first term, often with a tweet, only to be forced to retreat or give up his position in the face of an angry reaction from both allies and adversaries.”

But we are launching Trump 2.0, not Trump 1.0. On Friday, after Trump urged Republicans to vote for his replacement bill that would have lifted the debt limit, more than three dozen conservative Republicans ignored him, voting against the bill in an unprecedented show of independence. They can do basic math, and the national debt that rose $7.8 trillion under Trump 1.0, $23,500 for every person in the country, is a red flag to their constituents.

With Trump reportedly willing to play Grinch and shut the government down, presumably hoping to force his bill through in the ensuing crisis, Shadow President Elon Musk stepped in, and it appears he did so without Trump’s approval. The replacement bill that Musk supported passed both houses of Congress on Friday.

While the gyrations over the budget elicited the sobriquet "chaos monkeys" for the nation’s pols, the net results were anything but random. They perfectly aligned with the “disruption” of incoming Trump-Musk regime, characterized both by the Trump brand - corruption masquerading as populism - and its newest, and more dangerous iteration: Tech Bro contempt for anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow description of an Übermensch.

Key provisions that buttress the economy and are so universally popular they aren't in DOGE gunsights remained in the bill, including hurricane relief and an extension of the farm bill. But crucial aspects of the earlier compromise bill were dropped. The final budget bill reflects DOGE priorities: keep the economy humming while making the rich richer and the poor poorer. These include:

One of the many ways America’s health care industry turns illness into profits is through pharmacy benefit management companies, middlemen between drug manufacturers and insurers. Consumers are often penalized by their insurance companies for paying out of pocket and not using their insurance, yet these out-of-pocket prices may be cheaper, sometimes half the price, according to ProPublica. This could be the case for as many as 400 million prescriptions a year.

The reform originally included in the budget resolution would have required these companies, called PBMs, to be more transparent about their practices, and effectively eliminated their ability to retain part of the payments they receive from Medicaid.

Pharmacy benefit management companies have flown under the radar until recently, when their questionable business practices have come under scrutiny. On Dec. 17, The New York Times reported that drugmakers, including Purdue Pharma, paid pharmacy benefit managers not to restrict painkiller prescriptions. The Times' major investigative piece "The Middlemen" is well worth reading.

A provision that would have limited U.S. investments in China, particularly in technology, was stripped from the bill. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, protested the removal in a letter Friday to congressional leaders, saying that the move would benefit Elon Musk while harming the U.S.

Or as former Border Patrol officer-turned-immigration activist Jenn Budd put it on Blue Sky recently:

It was hard not to see the stamp of Tech Bro misogyny in the abandonment of a provision that would have enacted a federal law to restrict revenge porn, requiring social media and other websites to have procedures to take down an image within 48 hours of a victim’s valid request.

The most revealing omission was the Musk bill's abandonment of continued protections for low-income Americans whose food stamp benefits have been stolen. Usually this happens through online skimming devices that get recipients’ Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card information. Two years ago, Congress allowed states to replace the stolen benefits on a limited basis using federal funds. So far, states have replaced more than $150 million in benefits stolen from more than 300,000 low-income SNAP households across the country, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, citing U.S. Department of Agriculture data. That won’t continue unless the protection can pass in a standalone bill, the way childhood cancer funds excised from the bill have been restored, probably thanks to a media outcry.

Apparently kids with cancer was a bridge too far, even for the man who recently tweeted: "In most cases, the word 'homeless' is a lie. It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness."

Does American society exist online now, in a faux democracy captured by Musk? With his sidekick, Vivek Ramawamy, singing harmony, Musk only needs his tweets and memes to inflict the "pain" he predicted from the enforced Javier Melei-style Argentine austerity he believes we need to transform into a Tech Brotopia of unfettered surveillance capitalism.

The coming year will determine if his application of the Tech Brotopia model of “disruption” will install the ultimate surveillance capitalist in-between us and the political system. And we will find out if resistance to this disruption is futile.

We fucked around, and not just in the 2024 election. We willingly walked into this panopticon. We gave them the keys to our psyches and our subconscious drives and biases. And we accepted the filtered, data-collecting tollbooths they methodically erected in between us and every aspect of reality.

Now we find out.

JP Sottile is a writer, journalist, and editor of Newsvandal, a curated daily synopsis of the news cycle. This article has been expanded from the Newsvandal Substack.

He's Got All The Money (Whiskey) ::: Bobby Charles

It's Money That I Love ::: Randy Newman

Money Honey :::: Street & Gangland Rhythms

Poor People :::: Alan Price

The Richest Man In Babylon :::: Thievery Corporation

If I Were A Rich Man (Fiddler On The Roof)

Who The Fuck ::: PJ Harvey

Money Is The One True God ::: Blake Mills

Instant Karma ::: John Lennon