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When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE is the Trumpian equivalent.

American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a merging of state and industrial power. The entrepreneur Henry Ford promoted a system of industrial organization that came to be known as “Fordism,” whereby the state would intervene in the economy to guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteen-thirties, I.B.M. did business with the Nazi government through a German subsidiary, lending its technology to projects like the 1933 census, which helped identify Jews in the country. As a recent feature in the Guardian by Becca Lewis laid out, Silicon Valley itself has exhibited right-wing tendencies for decades, embracing misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement. The journalist Michael S. Malone was issuing warnings about emerging “technofascism” way back in the late nineties, when he warned about “IQ bigotry” in the tech industry and the willingness of people to push forward digital revolution while “tossing out the weak and wounded along the way.” But our current moment marks a new conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and day-to-day government operations. American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as DOGE, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.

Musk has slashed the ranks of federal employees, shut down agencies whose authority challenges his own, and leveraged artificial intelligence to decide where to cut, promising a government executed by chatbots such as Grok, from Musk’s own A.I. company. DOGE has gained access to Americans’ private data and developed tools to e-mail the entire federal government at once, a digital megaphone that Musk recently used to demand that employees send in a list of their weekly accomplishments. As Mimura put it, “You try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re getting into something almost totalitarian.” The techno-fascist opportunism goes beyond Musk; one can sense other tech entrepreneurs and investors slavering to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and Silicon Valley capitalism, building infrastructure on a national scale. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has arranged his own deals with Trump’s government, including Stargate, a heavily hyped data-center project worth a potential five hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own five-hundred-billion-dollar investment campaign in the U.S. over the next four years, including a plan to begin building A.I. servers in Texas. However nebulous, these extravagant plans signal a spirit of collaboration. On Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that Apple’s plans demonstrated “FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING.”

Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe the way that places such as San Francisco or Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to which many western tech companies have outsourced I.T. services, have been remade in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley. According to McElroy, the first signs of Washington’s current siliconization can be traced back, in part, to the Administration of Barack Obama, who embraced social-media platforms such as Facebook as a vector of government communication. For a time, digital platforms seemed to support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode state power” in order to more quickly replace it.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James Pogue has explained, their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech companies. In a January interview with Ross Douthat, of the Times, Bannon said, “They have to be stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the world.” Whereas the MAGA right wants to restore things as they were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In the Times interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.

Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an American monarchy have enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerationist attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.” Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian “techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said. He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment: “You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

Techno-fascism’s cold-blooded pursuit of efficiency quickly results in a state of alienation that may not be appealing to either side of the political spectrum. If Japan is any example, the collaboration between technocrats and right-wing politicians is unlikely to last forever. In 1940, the Japanese Prime Minister announced the New Order movement, which sought to overhaul the government’s structure to create a single-party state with absolute power. Mimura, the historian, said, “It reminds you a little bit of now: everything needs to be fixed, all at once. It is a little eerie to draw that historical comparison: this is the New Order in America.” Yet the power of Japan’s technocrats began to wane. When the country started faring poorly in the war, the military pushed to continue the campaign past the point that technocrats considered feasible. Kishi, the architect of technocratic Manchuria, left the government in 1944. Still, as Mimura explained, the bureaucrats had no political constituency or party to hold them accountable for their techno-fascistic program. When the U.S. sought to rebuild Japan, in part as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the region, Kishi and his colleagues were the ones who set about industrializing the nation once more. Their status as unelected officials meant, ironically, that they could stage a return to politics without “any blood on their hands,” Mimura said. In 1955, Kishi helped establish a new political party, and a few years later he became Prime Minister.

[Kyle Chayka is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His column, Infinite Scroll, examines the people and platforms shaping the Internet. His books include “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.”]