The Age of Optimized Rule

How the 21st Century State is Quietly Redefining Autocracy

Meniscus Obscuro
Power has always evolved. The crude methods of kings and dictators—war, conquest, brute force—are relics. Modern power is sleek, optimized, and largely invisible. It no longer needs jackboots. It needs only compliance. And the best kind of compliance is the kind that feels like progress.

If you still believe in the myth of government as an institution of laws and representation, you haven’t been paying attention. The modern state is not shrinking, nor expanding—it is evolving. It is shedding its inefficiencies, discarding its excesses, and being refactored by those who see governance as a problem to be engineered rather than debated.

Trump understands this—not in the way a theorist like Curtis Yarvin does, but in the way a hustler does. He doesn’t need to grasp the deeper mechanics of techno-autocracy; he only needs to see how it benefits him personally. And he does. Musk, on the other hand, is something different: an actual believer in the technocratic future. Not a politician, but a man who wants to rule the digital infrastructure of civilization itself.

Together, they represent the two faces of the new power structure—the opportunist and the engineer, the one who exploits and the one who builds.

This is not just a restructuring of government. This is the emergence of a new ideology—one that prioritizes efficiency over deliberation, optimization over representation, and control over consent.

Austerity for You, Empire for Them

The narrative of “small government” has always been a useful distraction. A simpler state, a freer people—this was the promise. Libertarians, conservatives, even classical liberals bought into it. They imagined a world where government would finally shrink, leaving people to govern themselves.

But the sophisticated observer knows better. Government is not shrinking. It is simply disappearing from view.

• The inefficiencies of the old state—deliberation, oversight, transparency—are not being eliminated; they are being optimized for executive control.

• The structure of governance is not vanishing; it is being privatized, automated, and placed in the hands of those who best understand the architecture of power.

• The era of politicians is fading. The era of technocrats and financiers is beginning.

Musk’s role in Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is not a joke—it is a blueprint. It represents the full embrace of a corporate-autocratic model, where efficiency is no longer a virtue, but a justification for consolidating control in fewer hands.

And the hypocrisy is breathtaking. When billionaire technologists claim they’re merely providing “tech support” to the administration, they’re obscuring a fundamental truth: they aren’t the help—they’re the architects. They’re not fixing the government; they’re replacing it with their own vision, their own infrastructure, their own power centers.

The promise of limited government is nothing but an illusion. Government is not being dismantled. It is being redesigned—not for the people, but for the executives.

Algorithmic Rule: The Silent Dictator

The modern state does not need to ban books, jail dissidents, or station troops in the streets. Why would it? Those are the inefficient tools of the past. Today, power is algorithmic. It does not demand obedience. It simply optimizes the conditions where obedience is the only rational choice.

Musk understands this better than anyone. This is why he did not simply buy Twitter—he bought the world’s most powerful influence machine. Why waste time controlling newspapers when you can own the algorithm itself? If you can dictate who is seen, who is silenced, and what narratives thrive, you do not need to rule by force.

The tools of modern control are not shackles and cells, but infrastructure and code:

• A government does not need to jail dissidents when it can erase them digitally, financially, and socially.

• It does not need a Ministry of Truth when it owns the recommendation algorithms that decide what people believe.

• It does not need a surveillance state when people willingly carry their own tracking devices in their pockets, complete with cameras, microphones, and biometric data.

Meanwhile, the ruling class performs its time-honored ritual of distraction. They point to the border, to immigrants, to the poor—crafting elaborate narratives about who is stealing your job, your security, your future. They manufacture crises that demand attention while the real transfer of power happens silently, in server rooms and corporate boardrooms.

Musk’s government contracts are no coincidence. He controls satellites, communications, electric grids, transportation networks, artificial intelligence, and military technologies. And unlike Trump, who merely exploits power, Musk is engineering it into something permanent.

They build the machine. He presses the button.

Power is No Longer Elected—It’s Installed

This shift is not just about convenience or efficiency. It is ideological, but its ideology is hidden behind the language of optimization and inevitability. And at its core, it is profitable.

• The old ruling class—elected officials, legacy media, public institutions—are being phased out. They were too slow, too inefficient, too beholden to public input.

• In their place, a new ruling class emerges—engineers, financiers, technologists. Not people who campaign or debate, but people who own the networks, platforms, and data pipelines that shape reality itself.

• Figures like Musk, Thiel, and their allies do not need votes. They do not need elections. They need only the infrastructure of control, and they already own it.

This is not just a restructuring of government. This is the creation of a new model of rule—one where the public does not need to be convinced, only processed.

The Master’s Tools, The Master’s House

In the old world, power had to be seized. It had to be fought for. But the modern rulers of the world—the ones who own the platforms, the algorithms, the infrastructure of control—they do not need to seize power.

They already have it.

Power is no longer about votes, laws, or constitutions. It is about who owns the servers. It is about who decides what can be seen, what can be heard, and what can be erased. It is about who writes the code that governs society itself.

But perhaps their greatest miscalculation is this: the tools they built to control us contain the seeds of a different future. The same technologies that enable unprecedented control could—under different social arrangements—create unprecedented freedom.

These tools, these networks, these algorithms—they are not inherently instruments of domination. They could be instruments of collective liberation. The computational power that tracks your movements could plan equitable distribution of resources. The networks that monitor your consumption could coordinate production without waste. The platforms that shape your beliefs could facilitate genuine democratic deliberation.

The question is not whether technology will transform society. It already has. The question is: who will own it? Who will control it? Who will decide its purpose?

• A billionaire class that sees efficiency as the highest virtue?

• A political elite that sees power as its birthright?

• Or could it be owned collectively, democratically, by those whose lives it shapes?

We caught a glimpse of this alternative vision during the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, when Kendrick Lamar delivered a performance that, as some critics have noted, felt like a diss track not to another rapper, but to America itself. The imagery was unmistakable: red, white, and blue dancers forming and deforming the American flag, a choreography that seemed to question the very idea of national identity and empire.

As the music built, Lamar declared:

“The revolution 'bout to be televised. You picked the right time, but the wrong guy.”

The performance, much like his past work, was not just spectacle—it was a parable, an intricate interrogation of America’s political theology and its ever-evolving systems of control. Scholars at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture have analyzed Lamar’s work as a form of political theology, noting that his artistry consistently wrestles with the tension between prophetic critique and empire. As Femi Olutade and Evan Rosa observe, Lamar’s performances often function as both resistance and revelation, confronting his audience with the systems they tacitly support (Yale Center for Faith & Culture, 2025).

While mainstream commentators dismissed the show as entertainment, others saw it as something far more disruptive—a moment of clarity in an era of engineered distraction.

Our submission to techno-autocracy is a choice, not an inevitability.

What made the performance so threatening wasn’t just its critique, but its clarity.

When power depends on invisibility, visibility becomes rebellion.

When control requires compliance, embodied resistance becomes contagion.

Those who control the infrastructure know exactly what they fear: that we might collectively imagine different possibilities. That we might see technology not as their weapon, but as our tool.

Of course, some might object—can we really use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house? Audre Lorde famously warned against such illusions, arguing that oppressive systems cannot be overturned using the very mechanisms that sustain them. If surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and digital monopolies are designed for control, can they ever be wielded for liberation?

It’s a fair question. And perhaps, under the current order, the answer is no.

But history tells us otherwise. The printing press, once a tool of state and religious authority, became an engine for revolution. The radio, once a tool for state propaganda, became the voice of underground resistance. The internet, once envisioned as a military-controlled network, briefly opened new possibilities for decentralized movements before being reabsorbed by corporate giants.

The tools of power are never neutral—but they are also never beyond reclamation.

The key is not to naïvely trust that technology itself will liberate us. It won’t. But neither is it an inevitability that it will only serve oppression. The structures of control are built by people, and what is built can be rewritten, repurposed, and, if necessary, dismantled.

Technology is not destiny. It is a battlefield.

The servers are theirs—for now. The code is theirs—for now. The infrastructure is theirs—for now.

But they have not yet decided our future.

That is still in our hands—if we choose to take it.

Meniscus Obscuro is an independent analyst and writer focusing on the intersection of technology, power, and political influence. Meniscus examines how techno-autocrats, corporate monopolies, and ideological movements shape our world by exploring the deeper currents beneath modern governance. With a critical eye on historical revisionism and elite networks, their work seeks to uncover the hidden mechanisms driving contemporary events