'The Nerd Reich' tracks the 'unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics'

Transcript TONYA MOSLEY, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. For 20 years, Silicon Valley's unofficial slogan has been to move fast and break things - the breaking, the price of progress. But my guest today says what's being broken right now is American democracy. In his new book, journalist Gil Duran argues that a small circle of Silicon Valley billionaires and the venture capitalists who fund them have concluded that democracy is in their way and that they should be governing in its place. As the outgoing president, Joe Biden gave a similar warning against what he called the rise of a tech industrial complex.(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)JOE BIDEN: Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time. Nothing offers more profound possibilities and risks for our economy and our security, our society for very - for humanity. Artificial intelligence even has the potential to help us answer my call to end cancer as we know it. But unless safeguards are in place, AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work and how we protect our nation.MOSLEY: Five days after that speech, at President Trump's inauguration, in the seats closest to the president, the ones normally reserved for family and former presidents, sat some of the most powerful men in tech - Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai. And later that day, Musk stood behind the presidential seal and made a gesture much of the world read as a Nazi salute.Duran's new book, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy," argues that the men behind the president that day were not there to celebrate him. Their presence was proof that 30 years of patient, well-funded work had finally paid off. He writes that some of them were inspired by a 1997 book called "The Sovereign Individual," which predicted digital money would dissolve countries, and with a blogger named Curtis Yarvin, who argued America should be run like a corporation, by a CEO with the powers of a dictator.Gil Duran began his career at the San Jose Mercury News, then spent 15 years in California politics, working with Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris. He returned to journalism in 2018, running the opinion pages at the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner. He now writes the newsletter The Nerd Reich. Gil, welcome to FRESH AIR.GIL DURAN: Thanks for having me.MOSLEY: There was a time when a book like this, arguing that tech billionaires are unmasking themselves, and they have this plan to end American democracy and replace it with things like corporate city-states, it would have been shelved as a bunch of different conspiracy theories. But a lot of what you write about, you didn't have to uncover, you didn't have to unmask. You built the case out of their own writings and speeches and interviews because basically they have been stating their beliefs and aspirations out loud for years.DURAN: I think we were witnessing the unmasking of Silicon Valley's true politics. They finally were comfortable to reveal their full selves to everyone. And I think for many years, their democratic alignment was mostly self-interest because we had democratic presidents who had important contracts, government contracts, who had power. And so they needed to get along with whoever had power. And now that Trump was returning to power, they saw an opportunity to align with him and to try to realign the country's politics to something more to their liking. I think it's grown quietly, as we've seen many of these people become billionaires and multibillionaires and even one temporarily become a trillionaire.Once you have people who have so much wealth amassed, then they want power. But for some people in Silicon Valley, specifically Peter Thiel, this idea of using technology to amass wealth and then turn that into monopolistic political power is something that was not accidental. It was something that was carefully cultivated over many decades. And as you said, none of my book came from secret documents, or it's not guessing. This is stuff that these guys have been saying on the record very explicitly for decades.MOSLEY: OK, let's break this down a little bit more because, I mean, most people might assume that if democracy breaks under all of this tech money and power, it's collateral damage because these are rich men chasing profit, and the country suffers along the way. Part of - a big part of what you are also arguing is the opposite of that, that the breaking actually is the goal.DURAN: Definitely. My book is about a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that in the 21st century, technology will make democracy obsolete. And it goes back a few decades. In 1997, if you want to know the full root of it, there was a book that came out called "The Sovereign Individual" that predicted that in the 21st century, technology would result in the end of democracy and nation states like the United States. Specifically, the book said that two technologies - one, something called cybercurrency, which we would today consider crypto, and another called advanced automation, which is basically AI - would collapse the economy and thereby the government itself and would lead to the rise of a new cognitive elite, these sovereign individuals, wealthy individuals who, by making the right investments and the right moves, would be able to profit from the destruction of the United States and other democratic nation states.And the book was very poorly reviewed and sounded like a conspiracy kook book to most people, but it had such a profound effect on Peter Thiel that he has credited for being one of the reasons why he started PayPal, as an effort to get ahead of this predicted cybercurrency that would transform politics in the 21st century.MOSLEY: Right. Peter Thiel read it. He grabbed onto it. He, as you mentioned, is the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and he's a major funder of Facebook, which made him a billionaire. You know, in particular, when we talk about Thiel in the past, it has always been that some of his ideas around democracy and politics were strange and fringe. He'd written, among other things, that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. And part of what you're saying here is this book, "The Sovereign Individual," had a huge impact on his belief system. But how did that form his desires and aspirations?DURAN: Well, in the decades after "The Sovereign Individual" was published, you see Thiel continue to make moves that are clearly based on the book. But, of course, you have to know the book in order to know that, and most people were not familiar with the book because while it became a cult hit in Silicon Valley later, at the time, it was sort of an obscure book that many reviewers dismissed as kooky conspiracy theory, apocalyptic. Yeah, right, the United States is going to be collapsing on the 21st century. This seemed like a joke back in the good old days of 1997. But in the subsequent years, Thiel goes on to give speeches and write essays where he talks about the rise of a digital currency that's coming and then will subvert everything and cannot be stopped by Washington, which will have zero idea of what it's really about.In 2010, he gives a speech where he says that government is fundamentally evil. And this is weird because at the time, he's a cofounder of Palantir, which was started with investment from the CIA and which is a major government contractor. So you usually don't see government contractors calling the government fundamentally evil in public forums. And he goes on to become somebody who spreads these ideas to other important figures in Silicon Valley, like Marc Andreessen, like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase. And in his book "Zero To One," which is about startups and how to succeed in Silicon Valley and business, Peter Thiel says it's important to start a business that runs like a cult because cults are organizations of total dedication, where people care about them more than anything else, and this is the way to really get things done, is to start your own cult.And I would say that what Peter Thiel was able to do is take his fringe interest in these ideas and sort of start a cult where he spread them to other important people who are now mostly billionaires and who are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into our election and are aligned behind Trump. And if you look at what Trump is doing, a lot of the ideas that he's pursuing are ideas that were first thought of and promoted by Peter Thiel and these billionaires.MOSLEY: Thiel's protege is the vice president, JD Vance. His surveillance company, as you said, holds the ICE contract. Sixteen of his people work inside the administration. So this has gone beyond a cult within Silicon Valley, and now it touches government. With JD Vance in particular, you write that he is essentially Thiel's investment. He helped Vance get his first job in tech, his conversion to Catholicism, he funded his Senate seat. Walk us through how that relationship carried Vance to the White House.DURAN: Vance first met Thiel at Yale Law School in 2011 when Thiel gave a speech there, and Thiel invited him to come out to California someday. In a - within a couple of years, Vance is in Silicon Valley, working for a venture capital fund that was cofounded by Thiel. Then, when Vance goes back to Ohio, decides to start his own venture fund, it's with money from Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and others. When Vance