One year into this tragicomic experiment in high-altitude groveling, and the results are exactly what any sentient being with a pulse and a passing knowledge of human greed could have predicted. It’s the anniversary of the Great Silicon Genuflection, that glorious moment when the supposed 'disruptors' of the world lined up to kiss the ring of a man they spent years pretending to despise. If you listen closely, you can still hear the collective sigh of relief from Palo Alto as the masks of 'ethics' and 'social responsibility' were finally, mercifully, discarded for the much more comfortable attire of state-sponsored cronyism. The odor of sulfur that the tech elite once claimed to smell whenever Donald Trump’s name was mentioned has been replaced by the intoxicating scent of fresh ink on multi-billion-dollar government contracts.

The media, in its infinite capacity for being surprised by the obvious, is currently 'analyzing' how Big Tech reaped enormous rewards from caving to Trump. Analyze? There’s nothing to analyze. It’s a transaction. The tech titans didn’t 'cave'—they performed a strategic pivot into the arms of a benefactor who understands that the only thing better than a monopoly is a government-subsidized monopoly. The Right, in its typical moronic fervor, thinks this is a victory for 'free speech' or 'nationalism,' blissfully unaware that they are simply being refined into more efficient data-oil for the very machines they claim to distrust. Meanwhile, the Left continues its performative fainting spells, clutching their pearls while posting their outrage on the very platforms currently being used as diplomatic leverage in Trump’s trade deals. They are all, without exception, participants in their own digital serfdom.

Let’s look at the centerpiece of this unholy alliance: the executive order prohibiting states from passing laws to regulate Artificial Intelligence. This is a masterstroke of bureaucratic nihilism. By stripping local governments of the power to question the opaque, biased, and frankly hallucinating algorithms being shoved down our throats, the administration has turned the entire country into a giant beta test for which we never signed a waiver. It’s not about 'innovation'—it’s about immunity. It’s about ensuring that when an AI-driven credit score or hiring tool decides you’re a liability, you have no one to complain to but a server rack in a Virginia data center that has more legal rights than you do. Trump isn't protecting the future; he's selling the right to automate human misery to the highest donor, while the CEOs nod along like bobbleheads on a dashboard.

And oh, the 'diplomatic visits.' There is something deeply nauseating about watching billionaire CEOs acting as co-negotiators in international deals. These aren't business leaders; they're the new court viziers, whispering in the ear of a man who views the entire world as a branding exercise. They travel the globe, not as representatives of American ingenuity, but as the digital muscle for a regime that treats the Treasury like a private piggy bank. Billions in government funding are flowing into these companies, recycled from the pockets of the very people who will eventually be replaced by the technology they are inadvertently financing. It’s a closed loop of stupidity where the only thing that trickles down is the contempt the people at the top have for everyone else.

The data center boom is the physical scab on the landscape of this arrangement. We are witnessing the literal paving over of the natural world to accommodate the infinite hunger of 'the cloud.' It’s a fitting monument to our era: vast, windowless monoliths consuming massive amounts of power to process useless data for a population that has forgotten how to think without a prompt. It’s the infrastructure of our obsolescence, and we’re cheering for it because it might make the stock market tick up another half-percent before the inevitable crash. We are sacrificing the physical world to house the digital hallucinations of billionaires who wouldn't spend a nickel to save a drowning man if there wasn't a tax credit involved.

Even the attempts at international resistance are pathetic. Take Australia’s social media ban—a desperate, flailing attempt by a mid-sized bureaucracy to assert control over a digital landscape that has already moved past the concept of national borders. It’s like trying to stop a flood with a 'No Swimming' sign. The tech giants don’t care; they have the backing of the most powerful military-industrial complex on the planet and a President who views any regulation as a personal insult to his new friends. The Australian ban is just a footnote in a story about the total collapse of the nation-state in the face of corporate-state mergers.

In the end, everyone gets what they deserve. The politicians get their photo ops and their funding; the CEOs get their deregulated playground and their billions; and the public gets to sit in the middle, staring at their screens, waiting for the next algorithm to tell them what to be angry about. It’s a perfect system of mutual exploitation. Happy anniversary. I’d say I hope you’re proud of yourselves, but I know better. Pride requires a level of self-awareness that was scrubbed from the collective consciousness long ago, probably by a software update you didn't even notice while you were busy arguing about nothing.