‘The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy’ by Gil Durán“Picture this: A loosely organized cabal of obscenely wealthy tech moguls aim to overthrow democracy and replace it with a corporatist dictatorship,” said Kevin Truong in The San Francisco Standard. The premise, undoubtedly, “would make for a good political thriller.” In Gil Durán’s new nonfiction hit, it makes for more unsettling reading. Durán, a journalist who’s also been a spokesman for Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, argues that tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the main patron of JD Vance’s career, sits at the center of an active and powerful circle of tech evangelists who believe democracy is obsolete, technology will create a utopian future, and their cohort is an elite that should decide how the future unfolds. The claim would sound like mere conspiracy theory, said Tonya Mosley in NPR.org, except that the players Durán identifies “have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years.”“You could not ask for a more hair-raising compendium of the insane things that Silicon Valley moguls have advocated for,” said Laura Miller in Slate. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has touted as formative to his beliefs a 1997 book, The Sovereign Individual, that arguably predicted the rise of cryptocurrency and AI while also forecasting the collapse of nation-states and emergence of individuals smart and powerful enough to pursue their ambitions without constraint. Thiel can count Elon Musk and fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreessen among his allies, and all appear to have been influenced by alt-right blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates putting the U.S. under the rule of a CEO-style monarch and has talked about the need to develop “a humane alternative to genocide” to address Earth’s supposed excess of unproductive individuals. While Durán “gives perhaps too much credence to the viability of Silicon Valley’s most authoritarian dreams,” his book is a “much-needed” wake-up call, warning us that today’s tech giants should be feared, not blindly worshipped.Durán claims that tech moguls view the Trump regime as a vehicle for the expansion of their power, and “few could dispute this,” said Steve Rose in The Guardian. Remember the many tech titans standing behind him at his 2025 inauguration? Or how they helped the Trump family make billions off cryptocurrency? The payoffs have come in government contracts such as Palantir’s estimated $13.7 billion annual haul as well as in the wrecking ball taken to government oversight. Trump has even backed such nutty ideas as building 10 “Freedom Cities” that would be exempt from many existing regulations. Thiel and his allies haven’t fully triumphed yet, though, as indicated by the recent surge in public opposition to data centers. With any luck, “this could be a radicalizing moment.”