Protecting the State from Oligarchs

Guest contribution by Jannis Brühl 

The state is under attack and the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley should be seen as the vanguard of this attack. Having launched an experiment that is not limited to the US, they are trying to determine if something other than Western democracy is possible. By quickly and effectively building parallel structures or by directly dismantling government structures altogether, tech futurists and tech entrepreneurs have become allies of right-wing populists to take advantage of the sluggishness of democratic processes.

It is, however, possible to ignore their overblown, conspiratorial claims while still fundamentally heeding their criticism of public administration and taking it as an incentive for improvement. Indeed, doing so may prove to be the most effective weapon in defeating this attack.

Critics of the state have hit a nerve, and not without reason. Take Wohngeld Plus – a form of housing benefit – for example. Its implementation brought certain parts of municipal-level administrations to a standstill, with other housing benefit applications taking up to 40 weeks to process as a consequence. Opaque, inaccessible administrative language even discourages the public from filing their tax returns, and this despite the fact that many people are entitled to rebates. Two-thirds of Germans think the state is overburdened. According to lawyer and bureaucracy expert Julia Borggräfe: “It’s astonishing that despite these alarming figures, not a single political party put this issue at the top of its agenda. The relationship between a functioning state and a strong democracy hasn’t quite landed among political decision-makers – despite how glaringly obvious it is.”

This idea could prove key in the rather loud but thus far ineffective debates on “saving democracy” from right-wing authoritarianism. Journalists and experts have been pushing back against disinformation for years now, yet the pull of the online communities that cobble these twisted world views together – coupled with the fact that people can get by with zero recourse to reliable information – are simply too strong. There is, however, a way to counteract this defamation of the democratic state. The facts ought simply to speak for themselves in people’s daily interactions with it. Public administration should be helpful, transparent and comprehensible. Rules, too, must be removed where they cannot be justified – provided that this does not cause concrete harm.

The goal of the libertarian-authoritarian attack on the state is to render it unable to act. Strengthening the expertise of civil servants is a useful countermeasure given that a civil service that brings real knowledge and competence to bear will deliver results that are palpable to the public. Of course, this expertise cannot remain confined to an ivory tower and must rely instead on continual citizen feedback: in the digital age, this is easy to ensure. Indeed, the libertarians may even serve as a source of inspiration in this regard. One of their standard works – Simple Rules for a Complex World – could be reread as “a state should be strong, but uncomplicated”. 

Instead of giving in to the temptation to tear down bureaucracy for cheap applause, politicians too should repeatedly remind people that these rules are not an end in and of themselves. The modern state is not a nuisance – it is a fascinating invention.

Die einzige Alternative zu einer Bürokratie, die sich an Gesetze hält und dabei manchmal ineffizient ist, ist die Herrschaft des „Vaters“, des Patrons, oder einfach: des Führers. Das sollte jedem bewusst sein, der sich die simple Disruption der Bürokratie wünscht. The only alternative to a bureaucracy that abides by the law – and is, as such, sometimes inefficient – is the rule of the “father” or the patron, that is, of one sole authority. Anybody calling for some simplistic disruption of government bureaucracy should be conscious of this.

In modernising the state, we may even learn something from the technology by which the oligarchs got rich: user orientation over pure legal certainty. Of course, it is unlikely that an interaction with a government office will ever deliver the same dopamine hit as social media or as mobile phone games. But every time it works as it should, and without driving the person who uses it half mad, that individual will not come away with the impression that the state is just there for its own sake, or that some people’s interests are better served than those of others.

Germany already has the tools for intelligent bureaucracy reduction. The National Regulatory Control Council (NKR) examines new laws to see if they will generate additional bureaucracy and seeks to ensure that for every new rule, an old one is removed. However, politicians have overridden its findings and ignored its recommendations again and again. In case of doubt, politics trumps modern administration. Hopefully, the NKR’s integration of into the Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation, created in 2025, will give it more influence. Problems such as that of each federal state developing its own software for the same function will hopefully soon be solved. It is, however, essential that plans for streamlining and digitization are implemented unbureaucratically.

It also makes sense to involve the private sector in bureaucracy reduction so as to prevent a deepening conflict between the business lobby and the state, such as has occurred in the US. Equally, the interests of the workforce and of other social groups must also be represented in the process of bureaucracy reduction. After all, defending against the excessive influence of US companies should not prove a gateway for lobbying by German ones. It should instead lead to sound solutions in the interests of citizens and of democracy. If German and European companies happen to make a profit as a result of these sound solutions, all the better. 

In Germany, campaign donations have, until now, not proven decisive for elections. If the country is to prevent money from the tech industry, from individuals such as Elon Musk, and from other economic sectors from flooding the political sphere, it needs to establish caps on donations. At the moment, wealthy individuals from other EU countries can also make unlimited donations. Ultimately, the EU has plenty of extremely wealthy entrepreneurs that want to support the radical right’s agenda of disruption. External interference of this kind is a realistic scenario in an age of international alliances between tech entrepreneurs and nationalists.

Artificial Superintelligence is frightening, and yet, powerful AI can serve the public interest provided it is not secretly developed in shadowy laboratories by Open AI, Meta or xAI. Across many different levels, the oligarchs are making us a proposition in a bid to manipulate us. Their promise is one of liberation from society, from rules, and from our own limitations as human beings. Faced with a ruse such as this, our task is to preserve humanism and to regain support for democracy in a world that is as highly technologically advanced as this one.