Since January 2025, when a menagerie of tech billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk proudly sat front row at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, much has been written about tech’s growing influence on the US government.
The startup-ification began almost immediately: First, Trump appointed venture capitalist David Sacks as the country’s first (and last) AI czar; less than a month later, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency massacred the federal workforce, slashing nearly 400,000 jobs identified by AI as government bloat. Today, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia sits at the head of Trump’s National Design Studio, DOGE’s spiritual successor that promises to redesign “how Americans experience their government.”
But if tech’s richest men were able to gain full control of the nation, how exactly would Americans experience their government?
Adrian Daub, Stanford professor, podcaster, and author, sets out to answer that in his latest book, What Tech Calls Governing, released last month by Stanford University Press. In a readable 127 pages, Daub argues this theory by analyzing the history of the tech industry, the forces that continue to drive it, and how the narratives tech founders tell about themselves shape our collective reality.
Earlier this week, Daub called from Palo Alto to chat about his book, the future, and of course, the billboards.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You open the book by describing the billboards along 101 and talking about how far detached they’ve become from the reality of the drivers passing them by. Why did you decide to use this as a framing device?
I think because the basic thesis of What Tech Calls Governing is that you can’t understand what tech calls governing unless you understand that they’re not actually that interested in governing us. Specifically, they like to be in control, but they don’t necessarily like all the messiness that comes with being in control of other people. I think that there’s a tendency to kind of assume that their power hunger is for a particular kind of power that they can easily identify. And I thought these billboards were really interesting icons for a kind of claim to control and to dominance that doesn’t really know what to do with itself.
A big theme of the book is that there is a difference between dominance and governance. How would you explain that difference?
Basically, governing has some sort of sense of reciprocity. This, too, is something where the billboards mark a serious shift. There was a time when, as I say in the book, even 10 years ago, when these billboards in principle were looking to reach customers, right? A lot of it was pretty incomprehensible back then, too, but for many of them you could imagine the kind of person that is being appealed to by this billboard, like, “Here’s a new gizmo you could buy.” Or customer relation management where, of course, you and I might not care, but there are enough people who use CRM software that it makes a certain amount of sense that a person would look at it and be like, “I don't know this particular service, I should check it out.” That’s really not what these are doing anymore, and it gives you a good sense that it’s unclear where we figure in their fantasies of domination. And governance doesn’t work that way.
Governance is, to some extent, a two-way street. You cannot be in charge without the people that you’re in charge of reflecting something back at you. Either subverting your intentions or affirming them. Either pushing back and grumbling, or gladly executing on your vision, or whatever it is. Governance is all about mediation. Nothing is ever as envisioned by the person in charge, it’s always messier than in the reality, the lived reality, than it is in someone’s head. And if you think about the promise of AI, the way it is culturally figured right now, it’s removing that mediation. It says what’s in your head can go straight into reality, without any of that noise that we associate with living in a society, working in a workplace, and acting in a democracy.
In the long run, I like our chances of pushing back. Whether this is stuff on data centers, whether this is the anti-Flock revolt, whether this is just someone in a company saying, ‘I’m not going to change my workflow, this is ridiculous.’
You talk a lot about Twitter in the book, specifically “VC Twitter,” where really powerful venture capitalists and tech oligarchs have these totally nonsensical public exchanges. What place do regular people have in calling out that this is not reality? Why does it feel like the masses have no leverage in shaping this reality?
Well, I think that’s the performance of it, right? VC Twitter is ping-ponging a ball back and forth between two or three people who “matter,” over the heads of hundreds of thousands of others. That’s why you don’t put it in the Signal chat, that’s why you put it on Twitter. You want the witnesses, and you want to also exclude those witnesses. Like, “This isn't for you, even though I’ve made it public and you can all see it.” With a lot of this stuff, it is about technology, but they’re essentially language games. They’re about inclusion and exclusion, they’re about value judgments, they’re about hierarchies. They’re about deeply social things, but they use stuff like AI as a way to make those distinctions, to make them appear objective, make them appear dispassionate, make them appear inevitable.
Now, I’m a literature professor, I’m not a tech reporter. I’m not going to tell you what I think AI can and can’t do. But I think I don’t have to, because the important thing really is that we have to distinguish between two things: what the technology can do, and what language games that technology enables — what it allows people to think, how it allows people to rank certain things — and that has very little to do with the technology. It has everything to do with how the AI boosters look at other people’s jobs. It’s almost a moral worldview. Who deserves immiseration or the destruction of their professional lives, who deserves dignity and who doesn’t.
Is there any kind of point of leverage people can use to bring things back down to reality, or has the train already left the station in that regard?
Well, yes and no. In the long run, I like our chances of pushing back. Whether this is stuff on data centers, whether this is the anti-Flock revolt, whether this is just someone in a company saying, “I’m not going to change my workflow, this is ridiculous.” But I think we can only do that in order to run out the clock, because in the end I think what this is, really, is a bunch of capital looking for a value proposition.
In the end, the only thing that really stops this is the valuations of these companies returning back down to Earth. Like, I don't think we’re going toward a world in which there’s no AI. What we are going toward is a world in which we are judicious, where companies decide where it makes sense to use it, which tasks maybe could be automated and which really ought not to be. However, I think that is going to clash with the valuations of the big AI companies that really seem to be premised on the downright apocalyptic claims about what this technology will one day be able to do. So we kind of need to run out the clock until such a moment where the investor class starts second-guessing these companies, and we suddenly are in a position where we get much more targeted AI applications in certain aspects of our work lives, and it kind of disappears from other parts of our lives. But I think the impetus from that will not come, unfortunately, from each and every one of us resisting. I mean, we can try that. We should do it still, but this much money trying to find a way to to make more money, that’s going to be a hard thing to contend with.
That clock you’re referring to is obviously sort of ambiguous. In the book you reference a few different time horizons, including what you call “the future” and “the long term,” and the book ends with you sort of admitting that tech has dominated us and owns “the future.” Where does the 2028 election fit into that timeline?
Well, in the long term, I don’t think they’ll be able to dominate the way they do. But right now, it’s a race, right? They’ve made the bet that they can outrun American democracy.
These are very impressive companies, but my bet is on democracy, I have to say. And I say it a couple times in the book that I don’t think they like the position they’re in. It’s not a dominance that comes from self-confidence, it’s a dominance they’ve had to rush into in order to forestall regulation, forestall state intervention, forestall their own middle management rebelling against them. And the reason I think they can’t like where they are is because 10 years ago they seemed apolitical. Like, what could you have against making the world a better place? They were not just American companies, they were global companies. They were these fun nerds, how could you be mad at them? All of that is fully disenchanted. They’re affiliated, whether they like it or not, with the Republican right. They depend on the wanton prevention of regulation, not even deregulation but literally just being like, “You can’t regulate this.” They’re fully onboard with this hard-right project, with the America First project, which is not the place you want to be in a world where Canada is trying to figure out who to sanction in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. And they’re now fully associated with a right-wing cultural movement and a retrenchment of masculinist and white supremacist ideology.
If — if — American democracy is degraded to a point that we can no longer get a democratic[ally-elected] president, maybe that bet will pay off. But the moment the pendulum swings the other way, the moment we have an election that returns the other party to power, I think they’re really going to find themselves in a deeply uncomfortable place.
Even though the book is only about 100 pages, it’s so wide-ranging: You cover capital, masculinity, vibe shifts. What motivated you to make the central point governing? Was there a moment, like DOGE, for example, when you knew that would be the focus?
I had the idea before DOGE came on the scene, but I wrote it largely while DOGE was happening. So DOGE is definitely part of it. But the original impetus was that I got interested in Prop 22. Then there was the Six Californias thing from [venture capitalist] Tim Draper. I was like, “Oh, these people who spent all this time saying they weren’t interested in government sort of reaching for the levers of government.”
Then came DOGE. So yes, during the actual writing of the book, DOGE is very much in the background there: the sneering contempt, the withdrawal from a logic of care, the weird AI fetishism that’s essentially just white supremacy with a few extra steps thrown in, like that was so clear in DOGE.
You’ve written several books on tech, so some readers may be surprised to learn your background is not in tech but in German literature. How does that inform your view of tech and tech’s approach to shaping reality?
One way of putting it is I’m trying to do a literary analysis of the story these people tell of themselves and to themselves. The ability to tell stories really catapulted this industry into sort of the popular imagination, and the political imagination, of the country, to the point that it becomes a reservoir for storytelling in other fields. You might remember how people kept talking about, like, “We need to Uberize this government service.” It becomes a template that people can turn to to make points that have nothing to do with technology. It’s really about how they think the government should govern. And of course at the end of that stands something like DOGE, which very explicitly was the promise to run the government like a startup, with all the horrors that entailed.
To me this is a story you can tell as a literary scholar, because it is a story about storytelling. It’s a story about political rhetoric. If that rhetoric by itself can be analyzed, if shifts can be registered, it can be interpreted. Like, why do they present themselves differently? What is the role of the consumer in this? What’s the role of individual choice in all this? What’s the picture of hierarchy and merit behind this? Those are all questions that you can analyze as a form of political storytelling, and that is to some extent what the book’s about.
So, what does tech call governing?
Control without responsibility. That’s my formula. Control that doesn’t have an echo, that has no downstream effects on the person doing the controlling.
