When I spoke with Gil Durán, he was gearing up for a career milestone and a troubling setback. His book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” was due out in a week. And his YouTube channel, “The Nerd Reich with Gil Durán,” was on the verge of being deleted over what he said were frivolous copyright strikes.
Potentially losing your 27,000-follower channel while promoting your book would be far from ideal. Durán didn’t consider the timing to be a coincidence. A Bay Area journalist, he’s been tangling with tech oligarchs and some of their most sycophantic believers for years, including during the recalls of San Francisco school board members and the city’s progressive DA, Chesa Boudin, in 2022. Tech oligarchs are not fans of Durán; in April, his X account was permanently banned for responding to one of Palantir’s manifestos with “TLDR: Fascism.”
As Durán writes in “The Nerd Reich,” which was released on Aug. 18, we’re long past the days of (perceived) benevolent billionaires who simply hold the “eccentric beliefs of rich men who hated taxes.” In fact, he said, “this framing is now dangerously obsolete” and “has now curdled into something even more sinister: tech fascism.”
The Silicon Valley-backed San Francisco recalls were just the tip of the iceberg. Top tech figures have bigger aims, Durán said. Their big break came in 2024, when they helped secure another presidential term for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Trump’s crypto glad-handing, and the ascension of his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance—a now-reticent protege of Peter Thiel—have made Durán’s definition of tech fascism all the more prescient.
“Tech fascism bundles powerful technologies—AI, crypto, defense tech, social media platforms, surveillance systems—toward authoritarian goals,” Duran writes. “These technologies are bound together under the control of a small, interconnected group of oligarchs who, simultaneously integrated into the highest levels of government, are creating an authoritarian infrastructure with boundless power. Its goal, like MAGA’s, is to privatize the public and eliminate democracy.”
Among the powerful characters profiled in “The Nerd Reich” are Thiel, the pseudo-intellectual who funds tech fascism in the shadows; Curtis Yarvin, a far-right blogger who’s fervently anti-democracy while admitting that he’s “not exactly allergic” to white nationalism; Vice President Vance, who’s a fan of both Thiel and Yarvin; Balaji Srinivasan, a wealthy venture capitalist and obsessive media-hater who penned a book called The Network State: How to Start a New Country; and Elon Musk, who’s ideologically aligned with the tenets of tech fascism, even if he’s not quite smart enough to be a spokesperson for it.
“The Nerd Reich” is sobering and terrifying. It pieces together the tech fascist movement in America, as well as ongoing attempts at establishing anti-democratic “freedom cities” around the world that are ruled by wealthy right-wingers. And it makes a convincing case that Thiel and Srinivasan in particular are existential threats to an already-fragile geopolitical order.
I admit one of Thiel’s pet projects does not intimidate me, though. I’m referring to “seasteading,” where you set up an autonomous settlement in the middle of the ocean. Thiel reportedly gave $500,000 to help launch the “Seasteading Institute,” a nonprofit that has seemingly struggled to stay afloat, if you will.
There’s other good news in the fight against tech fascism, Durán told me. “Billionaires have become very, very unpopular,” he said. “Even MAGA voters understand that the tech billionaires are bad. Tech billionaires are really not polling well now. And this coincides with a movement against data centers and a big attitude shift against AI, which people perceive as a danger and a threat to their families, to the economy, to their lives.”
Another positive sign: Durán’s YouTube channel isn’t going to be deleted after all (at least for now). The channel’s pending strikes have been resolved. Durán believes that whoever filed the strikes realized they were probably giving him even more publicity; YouTube didn’t respond on the record to my inquiry.
Excerpts from my recent conversation with Durán are below. They’re edited and condensed for clarity, and also presented as video clips. And if you’re interested, you can buy a copy of “The Nerd Reich” here.
On how “The Nerd Reich” came to be
On Peter Thiel’s enormous influence among tech oligarchs and the Trump Administration
Gil Durán: Peter Thiel is known as the godfather of the PayPal Mafia, a group of oligarchs who got their start at PayPal in the early 2000s. And he is also the godfather of the Dark Enlightenment or the Neo-Reactionary Movement, which is the name people have given to this extreme right-wing ideology that’s come out of Silicon Valley over the past decade. If you look at the people involved in these movements—Curtis Yarvin, the political guru who openly calls to replace democracy with dictatorship, and Balaji Srinivasan, the founder of the Network State cult—they say that democracies should be replaced with corporate-controlled territories. They’re all proteges of Thiel, who’s been able to create a cult of anti-democracy belief among influential people in Silicon Valley.
Thiel is a pseudo-intellectual. And nothing makes that more clear than the fact that much of his political worldview was inspired by The Sovereign Individual, a kooky apocalyptic conspiracy theory book that predicted different technologies would destroy democracy in the 21st century by undermining nation states. It predicted a cyber currency that would allow wealthy people to cross borders and hide their money from the government. Today, we would call this crypto. And the other technology was advanced automation, which we would call AI. As a result, countries like the United States would collapse, and it would be the dawn of a new era in which wealthy individuals freed from the chains of democracy and government would become so-called cognitive elites or sovereign individuals who would travel the world with multiple passports. They’d evade taxes, laws, and regulations, and live free of any society or country or nationality.
The book was very poorly reviewed at the time. People thought it was implausible and apocalyptic and unconvincing. But it had such a great impact on Thiel that he’s actually named it as part of the inspiration for PayPal. When the book was reissued in 2020, Thiel wrote the forward.
On Balaji Srinivasan and his attempts at establishing freedom cities
Gil Durán: In 2022, Balaji Srinivasan wrote a book called The Network State: How to Start a New Country, which laid out a blueprint for creating these new network societies that would eventually buy land, crowdfund territory, and create new nations. It’s basically the cult of The Sovereign Individual, backed by billions and billions of dollars.
In reality, building these corporate territories has been a lot harder than Balaji assumed. The best example to use is Próspera in Honduras, where a group of billionaire venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, et al, have supported a new sort of tech colony on the island of Roatán. They were able to carve out a special zone where they have different laws and rules. The people of Honduras are rejecting Próspera. In fact, the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled that it was unconstitutional for the previous government to award this sort of special zone. But now they’ve got a new president who’s very pro-billionaire.
In addition, you have this idea for something called Praxis, another billionaire-funded city that was supposed to be built somewhere in the Mediterranean, and then was going to be built in Greenland when Trump was threatening to take Greenland, and then was going to be at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but has never really found a home.
Most recently, Balaji Srinivasan created something in Malaysia called Network School, where he took over an empty apartment building and claimed it was the beginning of a new nation. He had a bunch of digital nomads go there to participate, but the Malaysian government caught wind of it. There was a whole drama about whether Srinivasan was allowing Israelis to attend, because Malaysia and Israel don’t have diplomatic relations. To make a long story short, Malaysia kicked out the Network School.
Balaji Srinivasan demanded a meeting with the prime minister and threatened that Silicon Valley would divest from Malaysia if he didn’t get it. He’s now announced plans to build a new Network School in Kazakhstan, which is an authoritarian country, so it’s perfect for these oligarch fascist types. The authoritarian president there wants to build a new crypto megacity in Kazakhstan.
There’s also actually a proposal to build a new kind of freedom city on the ruins of Gaza. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is involved. Trump posted an AI-generated video showing a Trump casino on the beach in Gaza, money falling from the sky, and Elon Musk sunning himself. So these ideas are clearly in the Trump sphere. While a lot of the projects have failed to find homes or been rejected by real countries, the thing about billionaires is they’re really dumb and they have enough money to be dumb for a very long time. They’re going to keep trying and they’re going to find people weak enough or corrupt enough to go along with their scheme.
On J.D. Vance, an acolyte of Peter Thiel
Gil Durán: J.D. Vance is in a real pickle. He owes his entire career to Peter Thiel, who made him a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, funded his venture capital firm when he went back to Ohio, and dropped a historic amount of money into J.D.’s Senate campaign. And then he made peace between Vance and Trump, because Vance had previously called Trump “America’s Hitler.” But Vance has risen to power at a time when billionaires in Silicon Valley are unpopular with a wide swath of American voters. So now he’s trying to pivot into some kind of religious figure and some kind of humble guy who’s trying to be a Christian statesman, which I don’t think anybody who’s familiar with the things that J.D. Vance says or does would mistake him for a Christian or a statesman.
I read J.D. Vance’s recent memoir about his religious conversion, which he also owes to Peter Thiel. The ideas that inspired J.D. Vance to become a Catholic at the age of 35 were ideas he got from Thiel. He actually says that in the book, because he’s written about it so much in the past he couldn’t really hide it. But what’s missing from J.D. Vance’s memoir, which covers him going from being a law student to being the vice president of the United States, is Peter Thiel’s critical, essential role in every step of his career. That’s all erased from the book, which I found kind of hilarious because it shows you how afraid he is of having that connection, that dependency on Thiel exposed. And that’s why in my book I include an entire chapter on Vance’s relationship with Thiel: Maybe for the first time in history, we have a man one heartbeat away from the presidency who is completely owned by a radical, extremist, anti-American billionaire.
On Elon Musk and where he fits into the tech fascist movement
On crypto’s corrupting influence, and MAGA’s (current) stranglehold on tech fascism
Gil Durán: Trump has become a crypto billionaire since returning to office, and is part of the most openly corrupt administration we’ve ever seen. We’ve found out that crypto has a real use case besides drug dealing, human trafficking, money laundering, and terrorism: it’s a weapon of mass corruption. Suddenly, crypto has gone from not being a player to being the biggest player in American politics.
As long as they’re pumping money into the elections and backing up Trump with their influence, their algorithms, and their brands, the alliance between MAGA and tech oligarchs is going to remain a very powerful threat to democracy. It may not be perfect. They may personally not like each other too much, but they are united in a common project to destroy the pillars of democracy and make this country a fascist oligarchy.
On whether Democrats will stand up to tech oligarchs or ally with them
Gil Durán: The Democratic Party is very weak. And the only people more addicted to billionaire money than Republican politicians are Democratic politicians. I think people like Gavin Newsom are so hungry for billionaire money for their presidential campaigns that they are largely not attacking or criticizing the Silicon Valley fascist oligarchs directly. They’re going after Trump or after Vance, but Trump and Vance wouldn’t be able to do what they’re doing without the backing of the tech billionaires.
You have a project in California called California Forever, which is clearly very very related to the Network State idea. A bunch of billionaires secretly spent $900 million to buy up 60,000 acres of land in rural Solano County in Northern California to build a city in a place where there’s no water, no roads, no infrastructure, a whole list of endangered species in the area, and a law that specifically prevents a new city from being built there. The people of Solano County rejected this idea of building this new billionaire city. Now the billionaires have hired Governor Newsom’s consultants and they’re trying to push a secret deal through Sacramento that would force the city on Solano County.
It’s clear that 2028 is going to be a referendum on billionaire power in the United States. And it’s clear also that politicians like Gavin Newsom are servants of billionaires. And he’s not the only one. You’ve got Democrats voting for crypto bills. You’ve got Democrats talking about crypto as some kind of innovation tool. And that’s because they’re afraid. Crypto has made it clear that if you vote against their interests or even criticize them, they’ll spend to destroy you in a primary.
What we need are Democratic politicians who are not cowards, who are not afraid, and who have the moral gravity and the clarity to challenge this thing directly and courageously. We have to make it so that the more money crypto spins against you, the more people love you. We have to undermine the power of their money with something far greater than money, and do so with real moral courage and a bit of a revolutionary spirit. We have to crush billionaire power in the next few years, or billionaire power will crush us. In a democracy, people should not be afraid of billionaires. The billionaires should be afraid of the people.
"The billionaires should be afraid of the people.": Or simply not exist. Nobody needs a billion dollars of their very own, even under a fairly capacious definition of "needs". Of course, capitalism admits no limit to wealth accumulation, just as it admits no limit to economic growth. These refusals should be recognized as demented, with disastrous social and environmental consequences.
Durán surely is right about Newsom. However, it seems unlikely that anyone could win the Democratic presidential nomination who would seriously challenge the status quo of enmeshment with monied interests, which has been so very, very good to so many politicians, Democrats as well as Republicans. I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but I won't be holding my breath.