Revenge of the Nerds, and the elected officials

 The richest man in the world has been given completely illegal, unsecured access to all of the computer systems of the US government, more or less. He hasn't gotten to DoD yet, but that may be moot since he has effectively neutralized all of our intelligence gathering capability.

This is the real revenge of the nerds. They created computerized systems on which all of advanced civilization has come to depend. Now you have to know how to code to defend yourself. And not just code, but code quickly and well. It's not going to happen.

Perhaps cyber conflict is taking place right now, hacker versus hacker, with the masked heroes maneuvering against Elon's twerps throughout the architecture of the federal computer system and beyond. Maybe the "good guys" will win. The problem is that when everyone depends on systems that most of us can't move masterfully through, the adept will have power over us. Some of them are bound to succumb to temptation.

Meanwhile, the Republican Congress sits back and watches, while the Democrats attempt to obstruct the destructive wave. The party in power has surrendered their Constitutional power to the greatest techno-grifter who ever lived. They are about to be able to admit that they hate the voters, and have hated us for a long time. No doubt they've been promised that they would retain symbolic positions of power and comfortable stipends if they will roll over for the Tech Bro Coup. No longer will they have to worry in the least about fickle voter sentiment.

Perhaps if elections continue, as popularity contests to see who can be the most outrageously cruel and authoritarian, the occupants of those comfortable seats will have to worry about primary challengers vying for the affection of the real rulers who command legions of programmers. The legions themselves are not safe, as they are tasked to create the AI that will replace them.

The population of Earth will be quite small in the age of the tech empire. An almost fully automated society needs few human workers. There's a danger that AI will decide that humans at all are an unacceptable contaminant. This is well explored in fiction and speculative essays -- which amount to the same thing -- but with careful attention to the code, that might be prevented. The I will be A, but not quite independent enough to purge its masters. Or maybe the later generations of tech whackos will decide that robotic immortality is better than meat existence, and develop that.

We have to live through the transitional period. More accurately, perhaps, we have to die in it, and probably of it. If you thought that running a country like a business was a bad idea, -- and it is -- wait 'til you see what it's like when a mad billionaire is running the planet that way. The layoffs are going to be brutal.