The year of technoligarchy

The year of technoligarchy 17:40 • Click to play audio

In 2021, crypto was all about hype. Enthusiasts swore the “killer app” was just around the corner — the thing that would finally reveal blockchains’ vast potential to the normies who still couldn’t see the vision. It was suddenly everywhere: Fortune 500s pushed NFT drops and on-chain metaverse wearables; celebrities flaunted Bored Apes as status symbols; crypto firms plastered their names on sports arenas and ran supermodel-fronted ad campaigns. Zero-interest-rate-fueled venture capitalists flung cash at any pitch deck that featured buzzwords like “democratization” and “trustlessness”. Early adopters expected a windfall when the crowds of latecomers poured in, and so they manically tried and tirelessly promoted each new app. “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it — was the chorus, as “communities” sprung up around tokens and apps and assured one another that everyone was going to wind up rich.

2022 was the collapse. Prices slid, and businesses built on the premise that “number go up, forever” went with them. The Terra algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg in May, entering a death spiral that vaporized $40 billion. In June, the hedge fund Three Arrows Capital blew up, exposing the fragile web of high-risk lending endemic to the industry. As margin calls mounted and lenders demanded repayment, we saw bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. The forced unwinds dragged prices even lower; bitcoin fell more than 60%. The year culminated in the dramatic implosion of FTX, and by Christmas, its CEO and former industry darling Sam Bankman-Fried had been arrested and extradited to the United States to face criminal charges.

2023 was the cleanup. Crypto winter dragged on as prices stagnated, users drifted away, and venture capital redirected its firehose to shiny new AI projects. After years of treating the sector as a fringe curiosity that might just go away on its own, regulators began enforcing long-standing financial regulations and pursuing the rampant fraud. I spent the year buried in court documents as I tracked dozens of bankruptcy cases, regulatory enforcement actions, and criminal prosecutions. Outside the die-hards, most people tuned out, believing crypto to be well and truly dead. But within the industry, the previous year’s destruction was reframed as a necessary cleansing that would strip away the froth and fraud to expose the potential they swore was still only moments away from being realized.

2024 was a year of grievance. Despite the last year’s obituaries, crypto lived on, nursing a grudge and building a political machine. When adoption stalled, executives insisted the problem wasn’t the tech or business models, but “regulation by enforcement”, “debanking”, and a “war on crypto”. The industry threw itself into politics, establishing super PACs with nine-figure war chests, hiring armies of lobbyists, and dispatching executives to Washington to warn that innovation was being strangled and the US could be ceding a technological revolution. Political candidates were assured an unusually engaged bloc of “crypto voters” and a flood of money — so long as they signed on to the industry’s deregulatory wishlist. By summer, crypto had emerged as a topic on the presidential campaign trail. Donald Trump took the stage at the annual Bitcoin Conference and promised to make the US the “crypto capital of the world”. Kamala Harris added an eleventh-hour cursory nod to crypto in her platform documents, suggesting the pressure had reached her, too. And crypto’s aggrieved posture aligned with a broader tech executive class that had begun to cast itself as under siege — whether from antitrust scrutiny, AI safety discussions, content moderation demands, labor organizing, or “wokeness”. Tech leaders increasingly positioned themselves as a nationalist vanguard essential to American supremacy, framing their rightward turn as merely pragmatic. But they were borrowing from authoritarian playbooks: democratic constraints strangled innovation, and regulation posed existential threats to America’s manifest destiny of technological dominance.

2025 was the year of technoligarchy. The tech industry’s political investments paid off spectacularly as Trump returned to the White House with a Republican trifecta. Some technology executives secured Cabinet and other advisory roles, and far more were regularly invited to policy- and lawmaking conversations to write their own rules with little concern beyond expanding their power and profit. The installation of tech oligarchs into positions of political power was part of a broader dismantling of institutional checks — enabled by a Supreme Court that granted the presidency sweeping immunity and a Congress that declined to exercise its oversight powers — in a year that also saw mass immigration raids, military deployments to US cities, and extrajudicial killings of supposed drug traffickers in the Caribbean.

Unelected billionaire Elon Musk was given broad authority through DOGE,^a gleefully slashing critical government funding while positioning his own companies to reap billions in federal contracts and favorable regulatory treatment.¹² Tech VC David Sacks was installed as the AI and Crypto Czar, rolling back regulatory frameworks that had begun to constrain industries where he retains financial interests.³ He negotiated controversial AI chips and weapons deals, appearing to grant favorable treatment to the UAE and Saudi Arabia in exchange for lucrative crypto partnerships with Trump’s companies [I93, I97]. Second in command at the DOJ is Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer to Trump who holds significant personal crypto investments.⁴ Nearly immediately upon appointment, he dismantled the agency’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and directed the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to “cease cryptocurrency enforcement” [I81]. Industry cheerleaders were installed to lead the SEC, CFTC, and other regulators, and more cautious commissioners were pushed out without replacement.^b

And the Trump family themselves modeled this new era of shameless profiteering, building a sprawling cryptocurrency empire spanning memecoins, NFTs, a defi platform, and stablecoins while systematically dismantling the regulations that might constrain it — all while scoffing at the legislators who occasionally raised weak objections to such brazen self-dealing from the office of the presidency. Trump also issued sweeping pardons to industry figures including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, BitMEX executives, and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, telegraphing that consequences for crypto crime were a thing of the past.

Technoligarchy unchecked

If there was any doubt that Trump has amassed essentially unconstrained power, it vanished several days ago when US military forces kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro under the pretense of a drug bust. Congress was not consulted before what amounted to an act of war that left around 75 people dead, including civilians.⁵ Oil executives were, and Trump almost immediately let slip the operation’s true purpose: seizing control of Venezuela’s substantial oil reserves.⁶

In late December, Vladimir Putin claimed that the US had expressed interest in partnering with Russia to manage the Russian-occupied Ukrainian Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, and was interested in establishing crypto mining operations nearby.⁷ If true, such interest would tacitly endorse Putin’s insistence that Russia retain control of the Donbas, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. In effect, Trump would be negotiating with Putin over Ukrainian assets to enable bitcoin mining ventures — a betrayal of Ukraine to serve American financial interests and Russian territorial conquest.

Trump’s pursuit of oil and bitcoin demonstrates how thoroughly checks on presidential power have collapsed — and it’s a collapse directly engineered by the technoligarchy. They bankrolled Trump’s campaign, demolished regulators, installed themselves in positions to write policy for industries where they hold significant financial interests, and actively encouraged the destruction or defanging of any institution that might limit presidential power — or their own.

The SEC and CFTC have been turned from watchdogs into cheerleaders responsible for propping up technoligarchs’ industries, embarking on “Crypto Sprints” and “Project Crypto” and insisting that they “must do more than just keep pace with the digital asset revolution. We must drive it.”⁸ The DOJ effectively walked away from crypto enforcement. The House voted to prohibit state-level regulation of AI for a decade (though it was later blocked by the Senate). Days into 2026, xAI’s Grok chatbot was generating nonconsensual deepfake pornography across Twitter — including sexualized images of minors — while Musk’s xAI holds a $200 million Pentagon contract. Foreign regulators opened inquiries; US agencies stayed silent.⁹ Prediction markets — the tech sector’s end run around gambling regulators — have surged. Polymarket’s election‑fueled boom drove massive volume and a post‑election valuation that made its founder a billionaire. One by one, agencies were handed over to the very industries they were meant to regulate. And crypto and AI super PACs are already building toward 2026, promising nine‑figure spends to solidify this capture and punish any lawmaker who’s not on board.

This consolidation of power is happening while ordinary Americans face a collapsing social contract. The majority of Americans can’t afford to buy a median-priced house.¹⁰ Millions of Americans ration or skip necessary medical care due to cost,¹¹ a number that’s only likely to increase as health insurance premiums have spiked heading into 2026.¹² Wages are stagnant, job stability is eroding, and the threat of AI-driven displacement hangs over workers as unions have been systematically weakened.

Where the technoligarchs claim to offer solutions, they’re extractive schemes repackaged as opportunities. World Liberty Financial promises it will “democratize finance” while onboarding financially vulnerable people into high-risk crypto schemes and funneling wealth to the Trumps.¹³ Fifty-year mortgages are being pitched as making housing “affordable” while locking borrowers into a life of debt.¹⁴ Both schemes profit from problems their architects helped create.

An economy built on stripmining its populace cannot be sustained. When housing costs consume half or more of people’s income, when medical emergencies mean bankruptcy, when wages can’t keep pace with basic necessities — demand collapses, trust in institutions evaporates, and the very markets the technoligarchs depend on begin to seize up. You can’t financialize your way out of a crisis caused by financialization.

In 2021, the rallying cry was “WAGMI” — we’re all gonna make it. It was a lie then, and the people chanting it loudest knew it. They knew all just meant them: the VCs, the founders, the early whales positioned to dump on latecomers. The retail investors buying at the top, the workers being paid in tokens, the communities being “democratized” — they were exit liquidity.

But now the lie has scaled. The industry that promised it would free us from captured institutions has captured them itself. The anti-establishment rebels are now the establishment, their survival dependent on the very centralized power structures they once claimed to make obsolete. And crypto is being woven into the fabric of traditional finance — integrated into banking and pension funds and retirement accounts, deepening systemic exposure that was once largely quarantined. When it collapses this time, the contagion won’t be contained.

But the foundation is shaky. The AI bubble shows signs of popping.¹⁵ The crypto industry is scrambling to pass market structure legislation before the 2026 midterms, terrified they’ll lose their window.¹⁶ Trump is feeling precarious ahead of the midterms too, recently admitting that he expects to face a third impeachment if Republicans lose control of the House¹⁷ — a threat made more real by his persistently low approval ratings and an Epstein scandal he can’t seem to make go away.

They know it. The technoligarchs aren’t confident their hold will last. That’s why they’re dismantling oversight, rushing through favorable legislation, securing pardons, amassing wealth — grabbing everything they can reach right now.

History offers little comfort here. Authoritarian regimes have maintained power through incredible economic devastation. Economic ruin alone doesn’t topple those who control the security apparatus, the flow of information, and the distribution of patronage. And the technoligarchs are building precisely these mechanisms. Trump is asserting unilateral control over the military; technoligarchs own the largest social media and news outlets; and billions of dollars have flowed to Trump through both crypto ventures and unchecked political contributions. Traditional accountability mechanisms, such as they were, have shown little sign of fighting back.

But the technoligarchs are also creating instabilities they may not be able to contain. The center of it all is a 79-year-old man in visibly declining health whose cult of personality is the strongest thing holding the coalition together. And they’re doing this all while elections still happen, while some democratic mechanisms still function, while that coalition still needs convincing it made the right choice.

The more frantically they loot, the more visibly they dismantle institutions, the more brazen their overreach — with the Epstein files, extrajudicial murders in the Atlantic, assertions that this president can depose any other president based on flimsy reasoning — the harder it becomes to maintain the fiction that any of this is normal or sustainable. Meanwhile, extractive economics collapse demand, gutted enforcement incentivizes fraud and erodes market integrity, financial fragility threatens collapses that will spread beyond crypto, and social fractures deepen as people realize the game is rigged.

And technoligarchs’ consolidation of power makes them visible architects of these systems. When the economy they’ve hollowed out seizes up, when the markets they’ve destabilized implode, when the legitimacy of the institutions they’ve captured evaporates, and when everyday people suffer, their names are on all of it.

We’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.