The Sneakiest Power Grab You’ve Never Heard Of (And Why It Should Scare the Democracy Out of You)
Inspired by Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People post and Gregory Shill’s “Silicon Valley Power Grab”
Picture this: You’re a well-meaning voter in California. A ballot initiative shows up promising utopia—affordable housing, sustainable development, a gleaming future for you and your neighbors. Sounds great, right? You squint at the fine print but everything looks... mostly okay. You vote yes.
And just like that, local democracy gets stuffed in a Tesla trunk and driven off a cliff.
That’s the scenario law professor Gregory Shill lays out in his scathing, brilliantly clear piece, “Silicon Valley Power Grab.” And he’s not being dramatic—he’s just describing what’s already happening, right now.
At the center of this drama is a mega-development dreamt up by a clutch of Silicon Valley’s elite. Think venture capitalists with god complexes. It’s called California Forever, and they’ve bankrolled a ballot initiative for Solano County that, on the surface, sounds like rainbows and housing. But underneath, it’s an iron-fisted override of local government authority.
The plan would create a blank-slate city—privately masterminded and beyond the meddling reach of county regulators. Sounds efficient? Maybe. But Shill points out this initiative strips away land use authority from elected officials, replacing it with centralized control by, well, the people funding the city itself.
And this isn’t just a zoning issue. It’s the blueprint for how Silicon Valley might start treating democracy like a bug in their code—annoying, inefficient, and in need of a workaround.
Now imagine your town is a giant game of SimCity. You and your neighbors all get to play—sometimes it’s messy, but hey, it’s democratic. Now imagine a billionaire walks in, unplugs your controller, and says, “Thanks, I’ll take it from here.” That's what this initiative does—it cloaks a transfer of power in the comforting language of “community building.”
Shill warns us: this could be the model for future coups—not military tanks, but money, branding, and ballot measures. It’s what he calls “privately-financed public rulemaking.”
Because You Are Not Scared Yet
And if the phrase “privately-financed public rulemaking” doesn’t chill your spine, maybe this will: “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like” by Carole Cadwalladr.
In it, she lays out how digital platforms have been used to hijack public opinion, undermine elections, and destabilize truth itself. Shill’s power grab isn’t digital per se, but it’s from the same dark playbook—just wearing a Patagonia fleece instead of a troll farm badge.
We tend to think of coups as things that happen elsewhere—loud, violent, overt. But this one? It’s quiet. It’s bureaucratic. And it’s legal.
So yeah, read Shill’s piece. Then read it again. And when your next ballot shows up with “The Infrastructure Enhancement & Emergency Housing Act,” maybe think twice before checking “yes.” Because sometimes, that warm, fuzzy language is just a blanket over a democracy-shaped trapdoor.