Only a few weeks ago, the orange monster of the Unites States was speaking in the very place his Neo-Nazi thugs wanted to destroy not so long ago – the US Congress. In typical showbiz-fashion – the master-propagandist Trump announced that the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over! 

Democrats pointed to Elon Musk – an unelected pretend-to-be Uber-administrator currently well on the way to annihilate the US government, including Medical Care.

Meanwhile, it is the unelected South African Elon Musk, who seems to be the mastermind of digital coup, that is ravaging the huge section of the administration of the American state.

He is not alone. Overall, there is the growing power of greedy tech-oligarchs under Donald Trump. Actually, tech-moguls like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have not even liked each other very much for a very long time. But now, things are different.

Now, both belong to the innermost circle of Trump’s oligarchy. With the help of their corporations, digital politics played a substantial role in recent US elections. 

Unfortunately, the guiding motto of digital propaganda is digital hype first – think second – unless, of course, thinking can be eliminated at all. Thinking is to be succeeded by hyped-up emotions and, of course, algorithm-driven hate message.

Beyond that, the most important thing to realize is that the time of the big surveillance scandals is over. In fact, the time of surveillance as such is almost over as well. This is the Age of Mass Deception and online manipulation – soon to be driven by artificial intelligence.

It also means that the time when EU-Commission boss Ursula von der Leyen known as Censure-Ursula is also over. In short, the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum is no longer needed in the digital world. 

Everyone can post the greatest nonsense on the net. And corporate algorithms will make sure that their far right online scum rises to the top.

Of course, there is a lot of digitally expressed opinion in any election. It illustrates how many digital aspects have become a matter of course, in more or less, all policy areas that are in need of legal regulation.

Some legislatures like the European Union will once again deal with the monitoring of digital communications, administrative digitization (tedious), broadband expansion (too slow), data protection (needed), IT security, digital education, digital health information (important), digital weapons (horrifying), and the climate impact of AI (substantial).

Questions about artificial intelligence (AI) will certainly remain with us for a while – a long while. They will not disappear as quickly as previous tech-hypes such as Y2K, block-chain, Bitcoin, etc.

Rather surprisingly, the debate about data retention will be twenty years old in 2025. It is a topic that is – unfortunately – still not off the table and it might even be getting worse under the orange man’s digital oligarchs now, virtually, running the US government.

Maybe it would be a nice opportunity to hold an anniversary gala for digital oligarchs to celebrate the non-regulation of your online data. In that way, the oligarchs can use, abuse, misuse, buy and sell your private data – at will. The free market, once again, bites you and your private data in the bum.

It is most likely that the digital oligarchs would like to go back on that road instead and shovel even more of your data into their ever growing moneybag. Of course, their orange messiah wants it and even better, he can sell his free market idiocy rather convincingly to his adoring disciples.

So far, when it comes to data storage, the ultras of the free market always prevailed. Certainly, dealing with these topics would have been more meaningful than the topic of, for example, hyping up migration. But then again, racism wins election – data retention policy does not.

Yet, these questions about IT are questions that affect many people in everyday life – whether online or offline. Yet, for Donald Trump and his worshippers, health insurance, for example, will be a little cheaper if it comes without some sort of data protection.

After all, the US has the most expensive health care system that delivers the worst outcome. Even the free market flagship of corporate business – the Harvard Business Review – seems to know it.

Under the digital oligarchs, Americans will be deprived of decisions on whether they should decide if they would rather pay a little more, to be able to decide for themselves whether or not and for how long, and where and by whom their personal health data is stored on the Internet. As democracy takes a backseat under Trump, his digital oligarchy runs under the motto, 

Your Digi-Führer knows best!

If, for example, sensitive health data on mental illnesses, abortions or medical restrictions – which are, after all, none of the bosses’ business – end up on the net visible to everyone, including your boss, because the digital oligarchs got their way on IT (in)security, the consequences will – again – be borne by those who saved a few cents.

It’s not just about corporate online platforms – euphemistically known as social media – but also about private data stored in corporately owned clouds. 

And it is about your data stored on servers of (perhaps still) public institutions like kindergartens, schools, universities, state and community authorities, but also on servers run by health insurance companies, home insurance companies, the police, the privatized security industry, the courts, and on it goes, the list is endless.

But these digital issues are not even obvious on the side-lines of an election campaign. By now, it becomes clear that there is another digital policy issue, the impact and magnitude of which no-one can fully estimate, yet.

This issue is the digital coup d’etat currently on the way in the US. It came with the kind support of the major US tech companies and adjacent digital oligarchs. 

Corporate IT bosses have decided that it is more profitable for them to side with Donald Trump. Capitalism is about profits, not civil society, the future of a nation, global warming nor human rights.

Recently, Trump’s tech-oligarchs were demonstratively sitting behind the new president at his inauguration. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has already announced that he would abolish fact checks on “Meta” (Facebook, Instagram). 

This sounds rather un-dramatic at first. Yet, these checks by professional teams have been around since it was proven that the mass dissemination of false information – known as disinformation –  via Facebook had led to massacres and mass rapes of the Rohingya in Myanmar starting in 2017.

The deliberately setup, profitable and algorithm-driven dynamics of un-moderated content as transmitted on large corporate platforms can lead to a lot of violence. People will die. What interests Elon Musk pursues with “X” is obvious.

Meanwhile, top-tech-oligarch Musk prefers to show the Hitler salute and called to vote for Germany’s Neo-Nazi party – the AfD. In a campaign video of Germany’s neo-fascist AfD, Trump’s deputy-Führer appeared at the AfD party congress. It all adds up.

A recent study has proven that the mini-Führer’s “X” (Twitter) showed content of Germany’s Neo-Nazi AfD more often than that of Germany’s democratic parties. This too adds up. 

Since the change of government in the USA, Trump’s henchman Musk has been actively involved in German politics and US government activities. 

Yet, it is unclear in which “official” (read: unelected) function Musk operates. Far right coup d’état leaders do not need officialdom – they need to have their very own thiefdom.

The far right restructuring of the formerly democratic US government is dramatic in so many respects that the digital aspects are not always the focus. However, in reality, they play a significant role.

Far right digi-overlord Musk wants to get access to a lot of data and is rebuilding the software used by the US authorities. This is explicitly his Trump-assigned mandate.

A Trump/Musk-style digital coup d’état also means that all employees of federal authorities are forced to describe their own achievements in an e-mail – in true Stalin-style. 

Under mini-Führer Musk, these mails should be evaluated automatically and then be the basis for mass terminations of those who incur the disliking of the new and ideology-driven sub-Führer.

Today, many people might still think that all this is not (yet) relevant outside of the USA. Across the water, Europeans enjoy strong EU laws against hate speech, the incitement of violence, and the EU-wide takeover by a digi-Führer. 

Even if US IT-corporations have been very committed to in weakening this, in Europe at least, they are still there – for now.

But if Donald Trump’ Vice-President doubts that freedom of expression is secured in Europe and links this to the role of the US in security policy, it is obvious that the handling of content on US-American media platforms in the EU is changing – not for the better. 

This change is directed towards the ideological wishes of digital coup d’état’s Führer and their libertarian everything goes ideology in which hate speech flourishes. Ideologically, this is semi-legitimised as free speech.

Here is what much of this means. The coup d’état leaders of this US government want more racist, anti-Semitic, anti-disabled people, anti-women, and anti-LGBTIQ content. 

They fancy the white race. It gets worse. If there is a Wikipedia page called the Racial views of Donald Trump, not much more needs to be said on the issue.

To push his racist agenda, the orange bully-boss wants less intervention by democratic institutions that may play a role in subduing his hate speech. It is dangerous not to realize that their digital coup d’état does stop at US borders.

And the Führers of the digital coup d’état are ready to enforce that. What they do is a clear-cut attack on democratic institutions, on the democracy discourses as well as on democracy itself. 

In all honesty, democracy never had found really good conditions on corporate platforms driven by algorithms. Self-evidently, digital corporations are not democratic institutions either.

Virtually all of this is a significant threat to democratic societies – particularly those that are not part of the EU’s civil society umbrella. These may have to face the aggravation of conflicts.

Worse, it’s not just about online platforms. It is also about your personal data stored in corporate-owned cloud servers and your private files – often stored on US-owned corporate cloud servers.

It would be preferable if they were well encrypted, secured and protected from any unwarranted access. But unfortunately, this is not always the case. And the digi-oligarchs never wish for this to be the case.

Meanwhile, Apple has just finished encrypting iCloud in the UK. The idea is that Apple’s secretly-ordered backdoor will not be forced to include an access option for security agencies. 

Instead of that, Apple did something much worse: it opened the front door.

This is just one example of how political changes can attack IT and data security. Much worse is on the horizon. A new digital politics is coming, and we should dress ourselves warmly for its impact on us.

One might also look around in search for alternatives. One might not like to rely on the “questionable” promises of Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon to handle your data confidentially – especially now. 

In the tech world too, what is euphemistically labelled industry self-regulation remains a myth. It is a pro-business ideology, at best.

But it is not enough for us to look at individual solutions either. For most of us, to find alternatives in some obscure niches of the Internet will not be a viable alternative. 

What is missing are serious demands for non-profit, democratically governed and publicly funded online platforms. 

Beyond that, there is a need for the breaking up of digital monopolies that are run by those fostering the digital coup d’état that is currently on the way – in the USA, and perhaps, globally.

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