The modern state has already become a badly wired spreadsheet still pretending to be a government, and the Penguin Tariff might be my all time favorite example of this.

I’m talking about when Trump went on TV with his flash cards reading off the countries hit with his new tariffs. The administration denies that AI wrote the tariff plan but come on. Trump imposed a 10% tariff on an uninhabited patch of rock in the Indian Ocean where the only residents are penguins.

That’s what happens when policymaking becomes a loop between a chatbot that auto-populates the tariff list and a clueless president who just clicks approve because the machine’s confidence score is high.

You can trace the same tendency back to that deportation case I covered in my article Deported by an Algorithm where the ICE database spat out a deportable flag and officials just ran with it. No one really decides anything anymore. They just read outputs. State officials have become interpreters of machine spit back, reciting whatever the AI says.

What looks like elite incompetence is often just interface lag. They’re trying to perform the illusion of steering while the machinery runs itself. That’s why they sound so stupid when you ask them questions. They don’t know what’s happening because no one does. The most powerful people in the world are literally reading printouts. The CEOs read dashboards. The presidents read summaries written by LLMs that were trained on old summaries written by earlier LLMs. It’s simulation on top of simulation, and the humans on camera are stuck doing “leadership” in a machine they no longer control.

When Jake Tapper asked Brooke Rollins how the administration managed to put a 10% tariff on an island full of penguins, here’s what Brooke Rollins said: “Well, I mean, that—come on Jake. Obviously… [laughs] Here’s the bottom line. We live under a tariff regime from other countries. I don’t come up with every formula but I’m involved.” To my mind, that sounds like someone trying to laugh off a machine error they don’t know anything about. When pressed again later, the administration responded saying “no country is left off” in its new tariff formula, basically admitting that the decision was part of a blanket, formula-driven policy rather than tailored human judgment.

Point is, today’s officials look dysfunctional because they are. They’re trapped inside an auto-completed state, tasked with defending policies they didn’t design and can’t even explain.