There is, as previously noted, a subgenre of current publishing dedicated to dissecting Silicon Valley’s hard turn to the right.
In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, San Francisco journalist Gil Durán argues that destabilizing democracy is not a by-product but the point. The book builds on Durán’s blog and podcast by the same name.
Durán’s attention was drawn in 2021-2022 by four acrimonious, right wing-funded recall elections, first governor Gavin Newsom, then two school board members and the district attorney. He began investigating the radicalization of venture capital, starting with four articles at The New Republic.
The Nerd Reich follows the spread of ideas from a little-regarded book from 1997: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob, the former MP briefly famous for reclining on a Parliamentary bench during a debate on Brexit. The book offered an extreme version of common 1990s ideas: the Internet and related technology such as cryptocurrencies would destroy nation-states (bitcoin was in part intended to bypass government financial systems, and was the culmination of 20 years of cypherpunk discussions.)
Unlike Charles Arthur, who argued in 2021’s Social Warming that social media harms grew because no one cared to stop them, Durán unfolds more of a deliberate plan built by people who see democracy as an inconvenience. He finds their resentment surprising, given how many – Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, for two – are immigrants whose US lives have been extraordinarily fruitful and whose success has been fueled by government subsidies and contracts.
Durán is not the first to notice that resentment, and he credits the person who was: Paulina Borsook, who in 1996 published Cyberselfish, anessay in Mother Jones that she developed into a 2000 book. From observation, she spotted that Silicon Valley companies, once grateful for government subsidy, were turning hostile as “technolibertarians” complained of interference. Clean water, good roads, other infrastructure, none of that registered as government-conferred benefits. The book’s warning was largely ignored, to be rediscovered last year in, for example, the New York Times and more recently in Mother Jones. It will be republished next week with a new foreword from Durán.
It’s easy to forget now how recent widespread anger at billionaire techbros is. Borsook wrote while the dot-com boom was peaking, usually dated to the merger of AOL with Time-Warner, which was announced in January 2000 and completed in January 2001. After the crash, for nearly a decade the big action was the growth of Web 2.0 – blogs and peer-to-peer networking. The 2010s saw the rise of social media, mobile phones, and apps. It wasn’t until 2017 that Doug Rushkoff documented growing hostility to the technology industry in Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. In 2022, he followed up with Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which dissected “the mindset” of men seeking to survive “the event”, whose exact details were unspecified but was assumed to be apocalyptic. One aspect of that was that the rest of us are there to be exploited and discarded.
Earlier this year Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, offered “a guided tour of the innovator class”. In it, Silverman follows the attitudes Borsook spotted through to the 2024 US presidential election, choosing to focus somewhat on Elon Musk in his period of highest political visibility.
Only six months later, in Durán’s book, Musk is less of a major player, despite his DOGE adventures. Instead, Durán highlights Peter Thiel as the bigger danger, seeding the White House with 15 of his acolytes. Durán calls a-heartbeat-away-from-the-presidency JD Vance “almost entirely a creation of Peter Thiel”.
Seeing all these ideas migrate from the fringes to reach the center reminds me also of Michael Lewis’s 1997 book, Losers (US title: Trail Fever), in which he chronicled that same process in the context of the 1996 US presidential campaigns. Durán’s 2024 articles covering the plan of a group of tech billionaires to efforts by Calfornia’s Solano County and turn its cities into privately owned “acceleration zones” provide another example – from Balaji Srinivasan’s 2022 book, The Network State through California to US president Donald Trump’s beginning to talk last year about building freedom cities on public land, Newsweek describes them as “pockets of deregulated areas, with the aim of promoting innovation and technological advancements”.
Even Peter Thiel’s lectures on the Antichrist follow this pattern: in 2020 Talia Lavin’s book, Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, documented the right’s modern takeup of the medieval Christian crusades seen in online forums. When I wrote about similar rhetoric in the leadup to the turn of the millennium, I was told that every new apocalyptic cult recycles the same old tropes. And that – apocalyptic cult – is how Durán winds up framing this group.
Durán ends with a call to action: rethink our relationship with technology and rethink capitalism. Billionaires like Sam Altman sound weirdly socialist when they talk about universal prosperity. Maybe we keep the aspiration but find someone else to implement it?
Illustrations: Prophecies of Apocalypse, from Raphael’s Almanac by anonymouse circa 1927-1861 (via Public Domain Review).
Also this week:
– TechGrumps 3.44: My Nuclear Bunker Is Too Woke
– At Plutopia, we interview Finn Myrstad about his work at the Norwegian Consumer Council to reclaim the Internet.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
