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The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán. Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 352 pages. 2026.
The tech boom of the past quarter century has been one of the greatest wealth creation events in human history. Our species’ addiction to bright lights, blather, and self-gratification, powered by Moore’s Law and the breakneck development of technology, has generated trillions of dollars—the bulk of which have gone to a few dead-eyed men with a penchant for three-quarter zips. Today, the concentration of wealth in the hands of the wealthiest Americans far exceeds that of the Gilded Age and only continues to grow. The likes of Elon Musk now command fortunes that outpace the gross domestic products of entire nations. At the same time, all this vaunted technological “progress” and profit have coincided with, if not driven, extreme political polarization and a catastrophic breakdown in the social contract.
While the tech sector was presumptively “liberal” during the Obama years and even during Trump’s first term, the opening years of this decade marked a sharp rightward shift among Silicon Valley’s elite. Where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once spoke of the importance of honesty and human connection, he now defends the AI-generated propaganda and content-trash that pollutes Facebook. Where Palantir once claimed its software protected civil liberties and free speech, its CEO Alexander Karp now regularly rants about “woke” threats to Western civilization while championing AI-driven military dominance. Where Musk was once a vocal champion of climate action, he’s recently spent his time wielding a chainsaw at the Department of Government Efficiency, consuming high-grade psychedelic drugs, and ranting about Third-World migration on a platform he reverse-engineered into a racist cesspool.
