"It is a superpower and you want to be right at the beginning of it, but it is very disconcerting," Trump told the algo-boosted elder-abuser Jake Paul last month. "It's going to happen. And if it's going to happen, we have to take the lead over China."

Technology is power, so naturally, most politicians will gravitate to it.

For decades, Silicon Valley and the Pentagon have appealed to "competition" and "survival" to justify total digitization. During the contactless Covid panic, digitized survival was a core principle of the global Great Reset agenda: unplug at your own peril. As we saw during that debacle, the real world manifestation of tech fantasies looked more like sorry hominids crippled by algorithmic parasites than an archaeofuturist blend of starships and classical architecture. But optimists insist technology is "neutral" and can ultimately be steered toward nobler ends.

Steve Bannon tried to warn Trump against this progressive influence. For the most part, he was a lone Luddite in MAGA circles, raging against a two-faced Machine that would "inevitably" pick up steam. Soon after Steve was hauled off as a political prisoner, a cohort of tech accelerationists publicly attached themselves to Trump like self-assembling nano-circuits in a schizoid's brain.

Following the botched assassination attempt on Trump—and seeing his heroic self-possession—the cyborg car dealer Elon Musk endorsed him and pledged $45 million a month to his campaign. Now that Musk's xAI supercluster has been fired up in Memphis, Tenn., and his X headquarters is moving to join Neuralink and SpaceX in Austin, Tex., it makes sense this Gray alien would commit himself to the MAGA wing of the Red Tribe. The vibe has shifted so hard, you can feel it in your screen-worn fingertips.