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November 19, 2024 - 9:45pm
Elon Musk could make the US government operate like Silicon Valley, Dominic Cummings has claimed.
Speaking at New College Oxford about advances in AI, Boris Johnson’s former adviser said that a subset of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs could no longer ignore Washington’s overreach and may look to rebuild parts of the state that don’t function properly.
Cummings said he could “easily imagine” a new national industrial strategy led by tech elites like Musk, who has recently been appointed by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) along with former Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.
“It’s unclear how the whole experiment will go with a whole section of the Silicon Valley elite deciding that enough is enough essentially,” said Cummings. “The view always was in Silicon Valley that being thousands of miles away from DC was actually a great blessing because they could say ‘We can just do our own stuff and they’ll leave us alone’”.
Cummings went on to outline the ways that Silicon Valley elites might change government departments. “Option one is you go into the Air Force and fire the majority of people and restructure it completely, which is very hard to do in government,” he said. “But the other option is you just say ‘we’re going to do it differently’ and all the money the US Air Force was going to get for drones is no longer going to the US Air Force,” he argued.
Instead, the former Downing Street advisor argued that a separate legal entity should be created with its own powers and laws, which would be known as “Drone Force”. Cummings proposed making it exempt from “all the normal procurement rules” so it could “build like Silicon Valley does — i.e. super fast and optimised for speed and engineering — not optimised for Congress, all of the insane DEI stuff which they put in.”
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SubscribeI don’t know anything about Taleb but it’s seems to me that there’s a set of locked-in, rusted-on systems throughout the world that operate the same way whether in a communist regime or a supposedly democratic republic. These system serve those who control the levers, who cannot be removed through elections. To change it means violent disruption, not guns in the street, but pulling it apart and rebuilding. That needs very strong individuals who 1) know how to do it and 2) have the support to do it. As I’ve said before, we’ve been living in a dark, suffocating room for a long time and there are generations who have no idea that these things can be done and have been done before. Unfortunately they’ll find this frightening and resist such ideas as totalitarian or dictatorial, when in fact it’s the power of the individual, something they’ve been persuaded is dangerous.
This is discussed in Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations as “Distributional Coalitions,” that are “deeply networked relationships between industry, government, lobbyists, friend networks, academia, and pockets of family wealth intent on building in protection for themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The solution is “disruption.” But not revolution.
A couple of tech bros are never going to fix the lumbering bureaucracy in the U.S. It is so enormous and so many now are utterly dependent on it–from Boeing to Brides of the State–that an intervention sufficient to alter it meaningfully would induce a short to medium term economic catastrophe. Were one to winnow the dolts from the deep state, from whence cometh the talent with which to replace them? Silicon Valley 80-hour-a-week outside the box geniuses are never going to flock to government jobs just for the pension plan and health benefits. The bureaucracy is the polar opposite of a start up and will always have as its ultimate leadership politicians.
What was it Nicholas Taleb called them?
IYI.
Intellectuals yet idiots. We should pay no more attention to Cummings than we should to the numpties advising Starmer. They all come out of the same silo and have a similar level of experience in the real world. Which is to say: none whatsoever.
Whilst that may be true in a one sense, it’d be more valuable to critique the arguments that Cummings puts forward.
No-one can accuse him of not “thinking outside the box”, and even if his ideas don’t come to fruition (although they had some real-world effect with Brexit, since inexpertly rolled out) they’re also points of reference against which future events can be measured.