At a 2010 conference Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel reflected on realizations that inspired his creation of PayPal – such as that with enough capital and engineering, one could circumvent the government.
“The basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority,” he said, continuing: “But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world – without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you – through technological means.” He added that “technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
The conventional wisdom about Silicon Valley is that over recent years, it drifted from liberalism to Donald Trump. Founders got red-pilled, or incurred petty grievances, or simply got too online. But journalist Gil Durán suggests there’s more to it.
“The key to that quote is Thiel basically saying ‘Hey look we can’t win elections because we’re a small minority, but maybe we can use technology to get what we want – maybe technology, not democracy, is the key to power,” Durán tells Prem.
In his new book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Durán pinpoints an insidious theory inside Silicon Valley: that democracy itself is an obstacle to their own freedom – meaning freedom from us, and from society. Engaging in democracy (even in backing candidates like Donald Trump) is not the goal anymore. The ambitions are much wider.
Some titans believe the U.S. is going to collapse, and that technological, privatized overseers will take its place. And these titans, Durán warns, are seeking to self-fulfill that prophecy – perhaps to fatal ends. “History is littered with people who thought a big apocalypse is coming…not quickly enough, we have to make it happen. And then people get hurt, people die as a result of these efforts to reach the prophecy. And it usually also ends poorly for the people pushing the prophecy.”
Watch the interview above to hear Durán lay out the quiet theories driving Silicon Valley’s attempted global takeover, why JD Vance is no more than a “puppet” of that movement, and how the media and Democrats failed to take these titans seriously – or are in fact working hand-in-glove with them.
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Click here to buy a copy of Durán’s book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. And if you’ve already read it, feel free to share your review of the book in the comments below!
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