The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
By Gil Durán
Avid Reader, 352 pages, $30
Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology
By David Golumbia
Minnesota, 480 pages, $34.95
The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West
By Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska
Crown Currency, 320 pages, $30
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
By Jacob Silverman
Bloomsbury, 352 pages, $30
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
By Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff
Harper, 242 pages, $30
The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
By Michael Steinberger
Avid Reader, 292 pages, $32.50
Of all the signs of the “vibe shift” that reverberated across America when Donald Trump returned to power, the much-photographed presence of nearly every major tech industry grandee near the inaugural dais last January was perhaps the most striking. More than any other major American business sector, tech had overwhelmingly backed Democrats for three decades. In 2016, when Trump first ran for office, 80 percent of tech CEOs donated to Hillary Clinton and her aligned PACs, and from the industry’s employees, Clinton received $60 for every dollar given to Trump. A 2017 survey of 600 tech elites found that just 8 percent of them had voted for Trump the prior year. Regardless of how many of the CEOs present at the 2025 inauguration had actually pulled the lever for or donated to Trump, they were eager to give the impression they had.
“How exactly to interpret Silicon Valley’s rightward shift remains open to debate.”
How exactly to interpret Silicon Valley’s rightward shift remains open to debate. The explanations that have been proffered thus far fall into two main categories. The first sort of account focuses on opportunistic alliances and material incentives, while the second identifies the crucial factor in the ideological commitments of the industry’s leading figures. In its simplest version, the materialist account notes that Trump is a uniquely transactional politician, susceptible to flattery by other powerful people; having failed to pursue the advantages of this approach during his first term, many tech leaders decided to change tack. This narrative is accurate enough as far as it goes, but fails to explain why an industry that long sold itself as more idealistic than pragmatic suddenly became unabashed about cutting deals.
An answer to this question can be found in Jacob Silverman’s book Gilded Rage. The crucial background for understanding the mindset Big Tech leaders brought into the current political moment, Silverman argues, was the end of the “historical one-off” of post-recession zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP). During the 2010s, this unprecedented monetary regime flooded venture capital firms with cash, and thereby “minted numerous millionaires and billionaires in tech and finance, even when some appeared to produce little in the way of public value or even viable businesses.” ZIRP’s suspension of the laws of economic gravity fostered delusions of grandeur, prompting entrepreneurs to present themselves more as philanthropic messiahs than normal businessmen. Its abrupt end amid the pandemic-era inflation surge created an existential threat to tech, to which no response could be too radical. “Rather than compete on innovation and appeal to customers,” Silverman says, the industry “would have to bend government policy.” And as its leaders realized, “Trump, for a fee, would give them virtually anything they wanted.”
The second sort of account of tech’s rightward lurch, which foregrounds ideology over material exigencies, can be found in Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich. At the outset, Durán makes clear that “tech’s embrace of Trump … wasn’t just about money.” Instead, by lining up behind Trump, “the tech industry revealed its true face.” What was revealed in this mask-off moment was what he calls “tech fascism,” until then an underground ideology he associates above all with Peter Thiel and his circle. Somewhat implausibly, Durán presents Thiel as “the real power behind the throne” in the second Trump administration, even though the investor steered clear of the 2024 campaign and has spent much of the past year and a half delivering lectures on theology.
Durán’s polemical flair comes at the expense of analytical precision when he tries to characterize the ideology of Trump-aligned tech leaders. Mussolini, he explains, “sought to bundle every institution of Italian society under unified state authority”—hence the term “fascism,” from fascio, meaning “bundle”; comparably, he declares, “tech fascism bundles powerful technologies … toward authoritarian goals.” Of the many attempts to apply the f-word to Trump and adjacent figures, this etymological red herring is particularly unconvincing. Is the defining feature of fascism really “bundling” different things together? Don’t other sorts of regimes try to do this too? In his 1944 essay “What Is Fascism?” George Orwell enjoined his contemporaries “to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.” Durán might have benefited from following this advice.
The Nerd Reich inadvertently presents its readers with an enigma. Durán focuses on exposing a worldview he regards as risible, yet he also suggests again and again that its adherents have been stunningly adept at using it to divine the future. For instance, he tells us that Thiel’s thinking mostly derives from the 1997 futurist tome The Sovereign Individual, by the investment gurus William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson. The book, Durán tells us, “is a work of zero academic merit produced by two men for whom dark prophecy and lurid conspiracism became a mechanism for profit.” And yet, he informs us later, Thiel’s “hopes and fears about the twenty-first century, inspired by The Sovereign Individual, have largely come to pass.” Similarly, Durán describes the “network state” theory of Thiel’s fellow right-wing tech investor Balaji Srinivasan—the idea that digital technology will enable a proliferation of privately owned governments—as “stunningly undercooked, offered with such conspiratorial self-certainty that you have to wonder whether anyone has bothered to ask [Srinivasan] if he’s alright.” But under Trump 2.0, Durán says, “the United States came to resemble a de facto network state.” How did ideas of such little merit prove so apt in their prognoses, or else so efficacious as actionable political programs? So eager is Durán for his readers to regard his subjects with withering disdain that he forgets to explain to us how people in the thrall of such silly notions have managed to use them as a “blueprint” to take over the world.
A no less denunciatory but somewhat more rigorous ideological exposé can be found in the late scholar David Golumbia’s 2024 book Cyberlibertarianism. Although Durán cites Golumbia, the latter’s approach is quite different from his. For Golumbia, “it is less the obvious, interested advocacy of right-wing politics by openly libertarian figures like David Friedman, Peter Thiel, or Eric Raymond that is of primary concern” than the way “the discourse of ‘the digital’” is “subtly embedded within broader right-wing ideology.” What defines this discourse, according to Golumbia, is the notion that “digital technology is or should be beyond the oversight of democratic governments,” which is the core tenet of “cyberlibertarianism” as he defines it. This view has sometimes been presented by figures like Thiel, Srinivasan, and Curtis Yarvin (Durán’s main targets) as overtly anti-democratic in its implications. However, as Golumbia documents, it has far more often been framed as enabling a superior form of democracy. Indeed, a great deal of left-wing organizing in the first two decades of the twentieth century celebrated digital tools in precisely these terms. A version of cyberlibertarianism has also been enshrined in law; Golumbia cites, for instance, the principle that “code is speech” and merits First Amendment protection as such. The implication of this principle is that when it comes to tech, “governments cannot regulate what corporations do,” in effect placing technology beyond state oversight.
In the basic rhetorical modus operandi of cyberlibertarianism, Golumbia argues, digital technologies—from e-commerce to social media to cryptocurrency—are “claimed to promote freedom” and “cloaked in the rhetoric of human rights.” However, this rhetoric conceals the true objective: “the freedom of a few … to skirt laws, regulations, rules, and institutional norms that were put in place to protect people as individuals and as groups.” Since Golumbia’s death in 2023, though, tech leaders have increasingly dispensed with the first move—this is what the “mask-off” moment identified by Durán amounts to. As I have argued, tech’s continued appeals to cyberlibertarian clichés are increasingly scattershot and incoherent. Industry leaders are now more likely to argue for light regulation on national security grounds, asserting that if America doesn’t give its entrepreneurs free rein, China will race ahead of us.
This is where Durán’s claim that Thiel and his allies used The Sovereign Individual as an effective “blueprint” for governance in the new millennium really falls apart. Rees-Mogg and Davidson’s core prediction was that decentralized network technologies would irreversibly weaken the power of large, centralized nation states; the result, they argued, would be a sort of universal balkanization, a fragmentation of states into smaller polities that would compete to sell their services to mobile, wealthy, high-IQ “sovereign individuals.” Instead, as Thiel acknowledged in his 2020 introduction to a new edition of the book, “the single biggest ‘megapolitical’ development since the book came out” has been “the rise of China” as a “nationalist, ethnically homogeneous, decidedly statist” superpower. Strikingly, given his reputation today as an AI accelerationist hostile to state power, Thiel also wrote there that “AI is communist,” intrinsically favorable to the expansion of the power of large centralized states, and might even “make it possible to centrally control an entire economy.”
Much of the tech industry seems to accept that a close alliance with the national security state is the key to AI dominance; even crypto, the technology Thiel counterposed in 2020 as the “libertarian” opposite pole to “communist” AI, is now entangled with the federal government and monetary policy under Trump 2.0, in an astonishing departure from its anti-state origins. The main sense in which the current administration is realizing the tech libertarian dream of privately owned government is in Trump’s use of the presidency as a lucrative branch of the family business—albeit not exactly in the lean startup mode promoted by figures like Thiel, Srinivasan, and Yarvin. Appropriately, Srinivasan recently relocated his “Network School” from a Malaysian enclave adjacent to Singapore—long the tech libertarians’ ideal polity—to Kazakhstan, a notoriously corrupt petrostate. Actually existing “private government,” it turns out, may just be good old authoritarian kleptocracy.
Tech leaders’ strategic embrace of Trump will likely prove less significant in the long term than the larger phenomenon of which it is a part: the transformation of Silicon Valley’s relationship to the state. From their early adoption of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” as a positive aspiration to the original utopian vision of social media as heralding a post-national “community,” the purveyors of digital technology saw themselves as transcending the nation state and facilitating new forms of social organization beyond its reach—even as they continued to be dependent on and imbricated with state power in various ways. As Silverman shows, the end of ZIRP forced a rhetorical and tactical shift. In effect, trading in the language of openness and borderlessness for a more jingoistic register proved a useful way to seek favorable regulatory treatment and public-private partnerships for data center buildouts.
“The end of ZIRP forced a rhetorical and tactical shift.”
In their book Muskism, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff find the most revealing case of the new “state symbiosis” paradigm in the career of the man whose name provides the basis of their titular coinage. The book fuses the material and ideological approaches. The authors treat the world’s richest man as an “avatar of a worldview,” but locate this worldview less in Musk’s prolific tweets than in his business strategies and technological schemes. Taken together, these constitute an “operating system for the twenty-first century”: a potential successor to Fordism and harbinger of new forms of social organization to be implemented by corporations and states.
Unlike his sometime PayPal colleague Thiel, Slobodian and Tarnoff argue, Musk was always guided by a “sense that governments were not something you should try to escape altogether. In fact, they might provide the conditions for profit-making,” especially for contractors in rapidly privatizing sectors like aerospace. Unlike during the Cold War, though, “design and production decisions were no longer dictated by the state… Instead, entrepreneurs would be the ones in charge.” Companies like SpaceX would be reliant on government contracts, but their innovation would be to make states ever more dependent on them over the long term. The success of this gambit was made clear, for instance, when Musk’s Starlink reportedly found itself in the position to dictate the course of the Ukraine war in September 2022. As Slobodian and Tarnoff remark, “when a single individual owns the infrastructure, he doesn’t need to run a government to shape geopolitics.” The short-lived DOGE project looks, from this perspective, like a less successful effort to apply this principle to federal bureaucracies, absorbing them into the operations of xAI.
Muskism is effective at showing how, beneath his erratic and often deranged public persona, Musk skilfully anticipated the new paradigm that has taken hold in the 2020s—far more so than the figures highlighted by Durán. In addition to fusing his operations with state power, Musk seems to have intuited the waning of globalization. At a time when offshoring and diffuse supply chains were still second nature to most businesses, he built Tesla factories in the United States and emphasized vertical integration. Likewise, he prioritized “hard tech” (cars, rockets, satellites) back when software was supposed to be eating the world, presaging the booms in data center construction and “new defense tech.”
Slobodian and Tarnoff don’t see the triumph of Muskism as foreordained, arguing that we are now in a period of “institutional breakdown,” that “at some point, society will stabilize on a new basis,” and that “Muskism could provide the foundation.” Looking beyond Musk’s right-wing image, they suggest Muskism is flexible enough to be taken in different ideological directions. Henry Ford was no social democrat, but the political economy he helped usher into existence “rewrote the social contract with a promise of rising living standards for all.” They don’t offer much hope for a more egalitarian Muskism, remarking that “it does not distribute rewards broadly,” but they suggest that under some conditions, “the Tesla ecosystem could materially improve people’s lives”—hinting at a potential return of Obama-era eco-conscious Muskism.
While other entrepreneurs were busy building mindfulness apps and delivery platforms, Musk helped jumpstart the rebirth of Silicon Valley as a revived military-industrial complex for a new era of geopolitical competition. He isn’t the only tech entrepreneur who managed to get ahead of this development. Toward the end of Muskism, the authors draw a comparison with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who is eager to tell anyone who will listen that he wants his industry to “return to its roots as a Pentagon contractor, albeit in a more sophisticated, nimble, and entrepreneurial form.” In his 2025 manifesto The Technological Republic, published just as Palantir was ramping up its military and intelligence work for the newly inaugurated Trump administration, Karp declared that “the technology sector has an affirmative obligation to support the state that made its rise possible” and decried the industry’s prior dedication to “chasing trivial consumer products.”
“Musk helped jumpstart the rebirth of Silicon Valley as a revived military-industrial complex.”
Michael Steinberger’s biography of Karp, The Philosopher in the Valley, stands in contrast to Muskism, even if it touches on many of the same themes. Steinberger finds no “Karpism,” only an idiosyncratic man whose transformation into a leading representative of the tech industry during the second Trump term pretty much no one could have foreseen based on his earlier life. Unlike Musk and other peers, Karp showed no inclination at all to the tech industry until his Stanford Law School friend Peter Thiel recruited him to run Palantir. The selection was made, by all accounts, on the strength of Karp’s intelligence and forceful personality; it didn’t hurt that, despite his close association with Thiel, he described himself as a man of the left, which would help the company market its services to politicians and officials of varied political stripes.
Much has been made of Karp’s intellectual background as an admirer and would-be doctoral student of the left-wing German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who declined to direct his dissertation at Frankfurt’s Goethe University; he ended up working under one of the éminence grise’s students, Karola Brede. Karp’s research topic, as Steinberger recounts, was inspired by the resurgent debate about the Holocaust and antisemitism in Germany prompted by the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. By Karp’s own telling, growing up dyslexic with a Jewish father and a black mother had attuned him early on to the dangers of social exclusion and persecution, and his research was driven by that abiding concern.
As Palantir’s contracts with ICE and the IDF have become repeated flashpoints of controversy, many have wondered at the fact that the company’s CEO has this personal and intellectual background. But Karp, by Steinberger’s account, seems unbothered by these supposed contradictions. “From the start,” he writes, “Karp said that Palantir’s mission was to defend the West and liberal democracy.” His underlying worldview, informed by his upbringing and philosophical studies, was informed by a deep pessimism about humanity’s tendencies to intolerance and violence. Protecting liberal societies, he concluded, couldn’t be done with kid gloves on. At various points, he argued that effective counterterrorism was essential to preventing the rise of illiberal populist parties, who could take advantage of real dangers to exploit people’s fears.
Karp is perhaps best understood as a Cold War liberal born in the wrong generation. His career, and the twenty-some year history of Palantir, illustrates the deeper point that the tech industry always remained deeply imbricated with state power, even at the height of its libertarian rhetorical appeals—as the Snowden leaks made plain well over a decade ago. The Technological Republic attempts to furnish an explicit ethos to a rising technocratic elite that will oversee a new “union of science and the state.” As a precedent, Karp favorably cites Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts, during World War II, to “see that the machinery of the state … would spur the scientific community forward in service of, among other things, the advancement of public health and national welfare.” Judging by the increasingly incoherent but always aggressive anti-state rhetoric of other Trump-aligned figures in the tech world, this approach remains a hard sell. Most notably, Musk styled himself and his DOGE minions as outsiders and “disruptors,” rather than as pioneers of the sort of new “intimate collaboration between the state and the technology sector” Karp advocates.
Karp and his co-author, Palantir legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska, present their proposed collaborative enterprise as ideally cross-partisan, more structural than politically substantive. As Tanner Greer remarks, the authors “demand a pulpit for America’s technologists but never summon the courage to state what gospel they should preach.” Perhaps they are keeping their options open for the post-Trump future. But assuming the president’s tanking approval ratings herald another thermostatic shift in our political climate in the coming years, it isn’t clear that Karp will have much luck appealing to Democrats to take up his proposed project of technocratic renewal. The bellicose rhetoric of his recent public appearances has underlined his and his company’s connections with some of the current administration’s most unpopular initiatives, which will likely render him a toxic figure to most in the party he once supported.
What much of the Trump-aligned tech sector seems to want is state symbiosis—in the form of government contracts, public-private partnerships, favorable treatment for cryptocurrency investors—without even a pretense of democratic accountability. As the surging backlash to such tech initiatives as data centers and Flock cameras makes clear, the American public doesn’t much like that arrangement. Karp claims to want a more serious and durable pact between state and industry, but as Greer argues, “elevating Silicon Valley’s engineering elite into a governing class would require much more” than what he and Zamiska offer—specifically, “institutions, alliances, and traditions that root the wealth and expertise of our technologists in service to the nation.” Tech’s MAGA alignment may prove fleeting, but the merger of the tech sector and the state will likely not. What is missing is a political project to ensure that this fusion redounds to the public good.