No. This is not science fiction.
No guns, laptops. Not soldiers, engineers. Not at night, but in broad daylight, fresh badges gleaming with fresh authority.
Systems succumb. Treasury payment databases, personnel files, security clearances - the digital nervous system of modern governance. Young tech workers, sleep-deprived and driven, beds rolled into federal offices, work through the night. They move with the youthful energy of a startup, but their code quickly reshapes the machinery of state power.
Legacy leadership is helpless. Dumbstruck. Career officials see it happening but are paralyzed.
Any pretense of control slips. Public statements about 'curbs' and 'oversight' come hours after systems are already breached, agencies already shuttered, walls already torn down. The cat isn't just out of the bag - it's rewriting the rules of the house while the owners still claim it's safely caged. Private power flexes in broad daylight, mocking the very idea of public restraint.
Each change seems defensible - efficiency improvements, cost-cutting measures, modernization initiatives. Together they form disruption that overwhelms every institutional response. By the time lawyers draft their first motions, three more systems had been compromised. While Congress schedules hearings, entire agencies are being locked out of their offices.
The signs. Yellow police tape across agency doorways. Memorial walls to fallen civil servants taken down in the night. Security guards changed, databases locked, credentials invalidated. Decades of institutional knowledge erased with keystrokes. Those who object find their security clearances under review. Those who speak up see their personnel files flagged.
Money changes course. Grant payments are delayed by "review processes." Contracts suspended pending "efficiency analysis." Foreign aid frozen for "systems updates." The digital pathways of government finance blocked by algorithms no one understands. Behind them all, AI systems search federal databases identifying targets for "optimization."
The resistance fruitless. File lawsuits, and the policies shift just enough to render them moot. Pass legislation, and implementation is cleverly delayed by technical requirements. Launch investigations, and the relevant data is "migrated" to new systems. The weapons of democratic oversight find no offense against administrative ghosts.
This isn't reform but strategic dismantling. Public health data vanishes from websites, global aid programs freeze, research is retracted, expertise scattered. Each institutional failure, whether engineered or real, becomes justification for further destruction. Replace public systems with private control, collective protection with individual risk, shared knowledge with ideological preference. The message becomes clear: you are on your own. Yesterday it was foreign aid, today public health data, tomorrow tax collection and education. The pattern accelerates: disable, claim inefficiency, dismantle, repeat.
Some call it a coup, but that word belongs to a world of generals and tanks. This is a hijack hack of democracy's operating system. The Constitution stands unchanged, elections continue, courts remain open. But the administrative machinery that translates law into action now responds to a different code, guided by private wealth wielding public power.
The malleable adapt, learning to phrase initiatives in the language of efficiency and cost-benefit analyses. Others retire, taking their institutional memory with them. The public barely notices, too consumed by daily political theater to see the revolution in plain sight.
An unelected billionaire seizes the machinery of state, not through force but through administrative access. Young tech workers, barely out of their teens, gain control of Treasury systems, personnel files, security databases - the digital nervous system of governance. While Congress debates and courts deliberate, they create facts faster than democracy can respond. The genius lies not in breaking the rules but in rendering them irrelevant, building a new framework within democracy's empty shell. By the time the pattern becomes clear, the transformation is complete. There's no going back - they've changed not just the players but the game itself.
Raw power, executed through technology, hollows out democracy from the inside out.