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New book blames tech elite for nation’s ‘
Former Examiner Editorial Page Editor Gil Duran: “This is a direct attack on our political system. They believe this is the moment to accelerate and go for the whole thing.”Photo: David Fenton
A venture capitalist gives a multi-city lecture tour on the Antichrist.
A computer programmer and heavy psychedelic-drug user transforms into a blogger pushing for a national dictator to break the secret liberal cabal he believes controls the country.
A former cryptocurrency-company executive sets up shop in an abandoned city in Malaysia to try to create the next San Francisco there — and jump-start his plan to create sovereign city-states run by the tech elite.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are no stranger to kooks, druggies, religious fanatics and others willing to challenge laws, received wisdom, social norms and the status quo.
But in his new book, former Examiner staffer Gil Duran argues that the latest batch of the region’s seeming weirdos shouldn’t be dismissed as just more of the same.
In fact, the title of his book — “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy” — succinctly articulates the grave danger he argues that group poses to our country.
Gil Duran’s first book is slated to hit store shelves Aug. 18.
The basic ideas tying such people together are that tech billionaires should rule the world, democracy should be ditched, and anyone who opposes them or stands in their way is the enemy and should be destroyed.
The difference between the apparent kooks and cranks — whose number includes venture investor and Antichrist lecturer Peter Thiel — and those of the past, Duran said, is that the new batch has vast amounts of money and political influence and is using both to realize its vision, however crazy or dystopian they might seem to the rest of us.
“This is a direct attack on our political system,” said Duran, whose debut book hits store shelves Aug. 18.
“They believe this is the moment to accelerate and go for the whole thing,” he said.
By his telling, Duran — the former editorial-page editor of The Examiner — became interested in the role the tech elite was playing in politics during the recall elections in San Francisco in 2022.
Recall elections are rare. Successful ones are even more unusual. But in those elections, San Francisco removed four public officials in one year: District Attorney Chesa Boudin and three school-board members.
That caught Duran’s eye. So too did the fact that in those campaigns, Republican billionaires teamed up with tech moguls and Silicon Valley venture capitalists against The City’s progressives to oust the officials.
In between stints as a journalist, Duran had a long career in politics, working for Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Diane Feinstein, among others. Despite that experience, Duran was surprised by the Republican-Silicon Valley team-up, having not seen anything like it before.
“For me, that was mysterious,” he said.
“There was something I didn’t understand, and it took me a while to figure it out,” he said.
Trying to make sense of the alliance and what had happened, Duran started delving into the tech people involved in the recall, such as Garry Tan, now the CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator. He found that Tan and many others were self-proclaimed adherents of a movement called effective accelerationism.
Current Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan — seen during the opening day of Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal — has emerged as a powerful influence in San Francisco politics.Wikimedia Commons
He also came across a local activist named Emily Mills who was raising alarms about something called the “network state” and Tan’s ties to it. He read a book called “Crack-up Capitalism” about how a wealthy elite was trying to liberate itself from democratic accountability and state control.
And he started to put together a theory for what was going on.
While Tan and other Silicon Valley CEOs and investors tried to present themselves as moderates, they had embraced a radical political program, Duran found.
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Effective accelerationism — or e/acc for short — is the idea that society should press forward with technological development, particularly in artificial intelligence, without worrying about the consequences. The network state is the idea that online communities of like-minded tech entrepreneurs should found independent cities or zones that they could govern as they see fit, without any influence from the outside.
Duran came to see the recall elections as an initial test of tech power and the tech elite’s ability to implement its agenda. The elite’s influence would only grow in the coming years, with the takeover of the city’s Democratic Party and the Board of Supervisors by tech-backed business-friendly so-called moderates and the election of Mayor Daniel Lurie.
The tech elite would use that playbook again on a national scale in 2024, pouring money into Donald Trump’s election campaign and into those of other candidates who were seen as friendly to the cryptocurrency industry.
But Duran said he saw something else going on that wasn’t drawing as much attention — a move by the tech elite to use their power and influence and new kinds of technology to undermine democracy and empower an oligarchy.
Duran said the key figure in the movement is Thiel, who famously backed Donald Trump in 2016, giving the future president’s campaign a key donation days after news of a damaging “Access Hollywood” recording broke.
Gil Duran says the key figure linking together the political ambitions of several tech moguls is PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel (seen in Miami Beach, Fla., in 2022), who famously backed Donald Trump in 2016.Rebecca Blackwell
Thiel also was a mentor to and patron of Vice President J.D. Vance, helping him get his first job in Silicon Valley, hiring him to work at Thiel’s venture fund, backing his senatorial campaign and pushing for him to join Trump’s ticket in 2024.
But Thiel isn’t your run-of-the-mill Republican donor, in Duran’s telling. Instead he’s someone who has long taken a dim view of democracy and multiculturalism and worked to undermine them.
“He is the main source of a lot of these ideas,” Duran said. “And in doing this research, I realized that almost everyone I was writing about, actually, is connected to Thiel.”
As Duran recounts, Thiel was highly influenced by a kind of apocalyptic book that came out in the late 1990s called “The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State.”
The book predicted that technology, particularly digital currencies, would undermine nation-states and the global economy. It forecast that following their collapse, wealthy individuals would be able to largely govern themselves, and it offered advice on how people could position themselves for that future.
Thiel, according to Duran, saw the book not as a warning of an apocalyptic future or even as a guideline for how to make the best of it so much as a kind of program to follow. “Sovereign Individual” inspired him to form PayPal, an early attempt to create a digital-payments system that couldn’t be controlled by governments, according to Duran.
It also influenced his decision to back efforts to escape democratic accountability, such as a seasteading scheme that would have set up independent communities in international waters, and various network-state projects.
Thiel’s influence and connections go far and wide. Tan, for example, was an early employee at Palantir — the surveillance-technology company Thiel co-founded — and an acolyte of the venture capitalist.
Balaji Srinivasan, a former Coinbase executive who wrote a book about the network state, hosted the network-state conference Tan attended and set up the network-state school in Malaysia, got funding from Thiel for his two startups.
When Thiel wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible and it was a mistake for women to get the vote, Curtis Yarvin — a computer programmer turned dictator-promoting blogger — wrote in support of him. Thiel and Yarvin, who also advocated that the dictator implement a mass purge of the federal bureaucracy, quickly became friends.
Thiel and Elon Musk, who implemented a form of that purge last year as the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, worked together at PayPal. Thiel also invested in the Musk-founded SpaceX.
In Duran’s telling, it’s these figures — Thiel and his acolytes and fellow travelers among the tech elite — that represent the real cabal. Their push for the legitimization of cryptocurrency ultimately represents an effort to undermine the dollar, along with the wealth and power of the American state. The same group is also pushing for a block on AI regulations, in the face of concerns that the technology could lead to mass joblessness or harm democratic institutions.
And they’ve backed a president in Trump who has repeatedly and consistently undermined democratic norms.
The American political system was built with the idea of creating a balance of power among different actors. But Thiel and the tech elite have helped upset that balance, Duran said.
“We have a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires,” he said. “And this is an existential crisis that we’re confronting in our time
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