Finished Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich, which is a history of the last twenty years or so in Silicon Valley, and how the PayPal Mafia and other technologists turned against governments and liberalism.
I am perhaps closer to democratic decay conversations that the average reader, but there wasn’t much in here I didn’t know in one form or another, stitched together into a multi-year story of how Peter Thiel and the people around him reached the positions of wealth and power that they have today.
The title will tell you this isn’t a fawning biography, Durán – a journalist and political adviser to a number of Democrats – is rightly angry and concerned about what is being done to American democracy.
However, where the book didn’t land for me is the absence of the rest of the world. Not just in the usual American sense of no other country really being given any attention, but Durán’s hyperfocus on two dozen ultra-rich connected individuals who are driving this movement.
For a political operative, in particular, it was odd to see nothing – even in the final chapter – that considered why or how these people had built what political following they had; where the fractures might be within the network or – more important – between these billionaires and the wider Trump/MAGA/Techbro movement.
In particular, the last chapter, looking at the future, seemed to be very light on solutions other than “stop having billionaires”. Where were the mobilisation strategies? What are the political messages that need to be used? How can communities come together?
A Great Villain theory of history is not so very different from a Great Man theory of history – both over-emphasise the individual, the personal relationships, and the historical destiny of the people involved. Both make contingency and chance seem like divine ordinance.
If you believe that World Historical Figures exist, perhaps Thiel is one – one for the age of post-democratic technology. What comes across in the book, though, is how far he is from bringing a Fichtian synthesis to contending visions of the world. Rather, he is someone who is driven only by one dark, semi-apocalyptic vision, “made darker still by the lights of a perverted science”, as Churchill said.
Thiel’s politics and the companies he invested in influence billions of people every day, but those billions of people – at least, those in democratic countries – can push back and cut them down to size. That they have not yet does not mean they cannot, or that they never will.
Unfortunately the Nerd Reich doesn’t give us many clues on what we need to do to make that happen.
