The Nerd Reich — have the tech elite given up on democracy?

There is now a gallery of books criticising the tech industry and its oligarchs. Gil Durán’s stands out for having the most darkly amusing title. With the equally blunt if less humorous subtitle Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, The Nerd Reich makes the case that a coterie of rich, powerful men are not just ideological critics of the status quo: they have given up on our entire system of governance.

Anti-democratic ideas “have now become the operating principles of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world”, writes Durán. And when a nation is “betrayed by its wealthiest citizens . . . existential crisis follows,” he adds.

The traditional authoritarian backlash to liberal democracy — Vladimir Putin et al — has received years of attention. The tech-infused variant is now rightly taking more focus. The éminence grise is PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in 2009, a quote that is not as infamous as it should be.

Durán, a journalist and former junior aide to Californian politicians including Kamala Harris, starts where others have done: a 1997 book by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual. It predicted that “microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state”, while a “cognitive elite” would “increasingly operate outside political boundaries”. The Sovereign Individual was not particularly original for the time, but it chimed with Thiel and others in the tech community, whose talent and achievements had made them arrogant.

Perhaps The Nerd Reich’s most striking observation is how obvious their deformed sense of politics was, in retrospect. Thiel publicly complained that US democracy had gone downhill since the 1920s because of the expansion of welfare and the enfranchisement of women. He explained that PayPal came from realising that his ideas “could never win an election”, but that “maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world . . . through technological means”.

The anti-democratic worldview was most bluntly articulated by Curtis Yarvin, a writer who specifically argued that the US should have a “national CEO” otherwise known as a “dictator”. Among those familiar with Yarvin’s ideas were Thiel and the now vice-president JD Vance. (Vance, Durán says, is “almost entirely a creation of Thiel”, who financed his initial run for the US Senate.)

The Nerd Reich exposes an ongoing incoherence in the Silicon Valley elite. At times, the tech revolutionaries yearn to be free of government: they want to move into space, start countries at sea, and invest in cryptocurrency.

Under President Donald Trump, the zeitgeist has shifted to control of the state apparatus. Durán argues that tech leaders have been “partnering enthusiastically with authoritarian regimes”, providing surveillance and more. “Instead of collapsing government, they colonized it,” he writes. Crypto allows a “feast” of corruption. Libertarianism, be damned.

Reading The Nerd Reich, it’s easy to see how the tech masters, used to acting at warp speed, became contemptuous of democratic politics.

Their apparent contempt for humanity is less comprehensible. In an interview last year, Thiel was initially unable to say if he would like the human race to survive. “There’s so many questions implicit in this,” he hesitated, before eventually answering yes.

Durán has a flair for publicity. He has said he was banned from X after describing Palantir’s “technological manifesto” as fascism. (Durán’s discussion of what actually qualifies as fascism is superficial. He posits that, while Mussolini and others harked back to a mythical past, tech fascists appeal to a glorious future — or Armageddon.) His outrage, however, can make The Nerd Reich monotone.

Having spent much of the book criticising people aligned with the Republicans, Durán ends by claiming that “the greater threat” is in fact posed by Democrats who allow themselves to be co-opted by the tech industry.

His ultimate proposal is the abolition of billionaires. It’s not an inspiring ending. Exposing anti-democratic ideas, controlling campaign finance, reforming the US Supreme Court and regulating emerging technologies would be hard, but they still seem like more viable ways to reclaim the future.

The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán Simon & Schuster £25/Avid Reader Press $30, 352 pages

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