Ctrl + Alt + Delete the President. Last week, after a violent riot at the capital, Twitter and Facebook erased the President of the United States from social media. He was further banned from, or severely restricted from communicating by: Reddit, Twitch, Shopify (??), Snapchat, TikTok, and Stripe. Within 24 hours, amidst a chorus of “it’s just the free market, losers, if you don’t like it build your own app,” Google and Apple worked in concert to remove Parler, the “free speech” alternative social media app popular on the political right, from their app stores. Amazon followed the move with the equivalent of tech industry napalm, taking the extraordinary step of suspending Parler from using Amazon Web Services, effectively shutting the company down. The loosely-framed charge against both Trump and Parler was incitement of violence and insurrection. There were no trials. There was no evidence presented for any crime formally argued. This is law in the age of corporate oligarchy. It is purposefully ambiguous, it is uncompromising, and when you run afoul of the powers that be, there is no recourse. Not even for the “most powerful man in the world.”

This of course begs the question: who is actually in charge right now?

Today, the internet is a life-critical layer of our world. In some sense, what happens on the internet — from payments to communication — is all that matters, as without it few things of significance in the “real world” are possible. You would be forgiven for not remembering that Trump was impeached last year, as it meant practically nothing. But erasing him from the internet? If this sticks, and Trump can no longer communicate or raise funds at scale, a small handful of unelected tech executives just ended a president’s political career. In theory, they can legally do this to anyone, which means they are effectively the most powerful people alive. Silicon Valley is our nation’s shadow capital, argues Katherine Boyle, and welcome to the shadow state. It is not a democracy.