The New Feudalism

DOGE Is Building a Big Brother That Will Lord Over Most Americans - But Not the Technocracy

This weekend was Passover - when Jews recount their enslavement in Egypt, their escape, and via a 40-year diversion through the desert, their ultimate arrival in the promised land.

As we were recounting the hardships of our ancestors, I couldn't help but imagine the world our current trajectory is leading us into. A new kind of servitude - not in the service of the pharaohs and their earthly legacies but rather to a new ruling class: the technocracy who are systematically capturing our government "for the people, by the people" and transforming it into one that adheres to their needs. They intend to wield ultimate power based on their access to data. They've already rigged elections, but that's nothing compared to what is coming.

Today we begin a 5-part series about the new feudalism - the Big Brother Elon Musk is building and why it may take many more than 40 years to escape the capture currently underway.

2035: Data Lords

Imagine waking up in 2035 - a mere ten years from now.

Your smart bed, integrated with sensors, has already uploaded your sleep data to the central network, tracking your vitals and reporting them to the tech overlords’ algorithms. A notification pings on your mandatory neural implant—a cold, synthetic voice from your “boss,” a holographic AI projection representing the “company” informs you your productivity score dropped 2% overnight due to insufficient REM sleep. Failure to improve could result in reduced data access, limiting information, entertainment, or even basic communication.

You check your permissions app to see what you're allowed to do today. Your social credit score dropped after your private message criticizing a government contractor was flagged by the sentiment analysis system.

As you walk down the street, targeted messages follow you from screen to screen. Not just based on your purchases, but on conversations the microphones caught in your home. That argument with your spouse? Marriage counseling services appear. That health condition you've told no one about? Your medical records and search history reveal otherwise, and your insurer has already been alerted, mixed in with propaganda: “Data is Order. Obey the Network.”

You've applied for a job, but the interview feels like a formality. The hiring AI already knows everything: your kindergarten temper tantrum, your teenage rebellion phase, the protest you attended in college, every financial mistake, every relationship, every message you've ever sent. Your entire life exists as data points in the system. You're completely transparent, completely known, but at the same time reduced to a number - a score of everything.

You look up at the gleaming towers where the Data Lords live. They're different. Their information is protected, their movements untracked, their communications truly private. They have access to the system but aren't subject to it. They can see everything about you, but you know nothing about them except what they choose to reveal. They've probably already determined if you'll get that job, the unseen hand of how everything seems to work these days.

They are wealthy in the traditional sense, but money is secondary to what really matters: control of the datasphere. And they control it all – every federal database, every private platform, every sensor network. It's the ultimate power citadel run by the neurodivergent and perpetually isolated, technically capable but socially inept class who have overthrown the established order by hacking it.

This isn't science fiction. It's the logical conclusion of what's happening right now within the federal government. A world controlled by tech overlords who monopolize all data access.

Move Fast, Break Things

What's happening right now at DOGE has all the hallmarks of a Silicon Valley hackathon – a sprint-like event where programmers collaborate intensively over a short period, often just 24-48 hours, to create functioning software. It's a secular ritual of the Facebook “Move fast and Break things” era, where sleep-deprived engineers fueled by Red Bull and pizza compete to build something new at breakneck speed, with minimal oversight or ethical guardrails.

According to WIRED, DOGE engineers are huddled with representatives from Palantir – the data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel, another billionaire with a notorious appetite for power and influence. The company's name itself reveals its ambitions – a "palantir" is a fictional "seeing stone" from Lord of the Rings that allows its user to see across vast distances and into the minds of others. "For the past three days, DOGE and a handful of Palantir representatives, along with dozens of career IRS engineers, have been collaborating to build a single API layer above all IRS databases," WIRED reports.

The single API may make the IRS more efficient even as it hands these private individuals visibility into the net worth of every individual, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see what’s going on here, and what will come next.