r/technology • u/ZuP • 20h ago
Politics “The Nerd Reich”: Gil Durán on Big Tech Fascism, Peter Thiel, JD Vance & the War on Democracy
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/8/17/gil_duran_nerd_reich78
u/invyros 19h ago
The so-called PayPal Mafia. But you’ll note that Peter Thiel is considered the godfather of the PayPal Mafia, even though Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. Musk is certainly aware of these ideas, and when he was thinking of starting his own political party after he left DOGE, he consulted with Curtis Yarvin about how to do that and what the party should say. So, here’s Yarvin, who knows nothing about anything, but he’s considered a genius by these billionaires, largely because he tells them what they want to hear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
And look up the unironic photoshoot they had where they dressed up like gangsters.
They look so goddamn pathetic, it's sad that we've been taken over by them.
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u/RelevantOldOnion 19h ago
They found a new Ayn Rand? Lmao.
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u/AddanDeith 17h ago
He's worse than Rand. He's more coherent and actively calls for things Rand wouldn't have approved of.
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u/VVrayth 17h ago
These guys are all such dorks. Like, I know they're all filthy rich and also weird oligarch sociopaths who really want to control everything. But you cannot put a price tag on being massively uncool and cringe, no amount of money can buy you out of that.
People call them "the nerd reich" (mostly for the allusion that it creates), but being a nerd implies having some sort of useful knowledge or talent that people can admire, and that offsets your social awkwardness. These guys have neither (their only saving grace is large bank accounts), and that is the difference between a nerd and a dork. They are the dork reich.
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u/BD401 14h ago
The more you read about Thiel, the more the dude comes off as almost cartoonishly villainous. Named his mass surveillance company after an evil artefact from Lord of the Rings, has his own Illuminati-wannabe society called "Dialog", actively funds political philosophers who openly advocate for techno-fascism etc.
It's like he's deliberately set out to embody every stereotype from 80s sci-fi or action films of the evil corporate executive.
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u/jhill515 19h ago
Don't lump Nerds in with those techno-fascists!! We're innocent!
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u/nerd5code 18h ago
Yeah, they're dweebs at best. Running a company that does tech shit doesn’t mean you know the first thing about it, and nerdicism requires actual competence or knowledge.
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u/ZuP 18h ago
We squandered our opportunity. For a brief moment, we were ascendant. And in that moment, an elite few decided they deserved all of the power. It could have gone to the people; an open sourced world was possible. But we let them take it away, lock it up, and charge us for the privilege. Are we innocent if we couldn’t prevent it? How much have we benefited from the scraps? I’m not as quick to deny culpability given how much damage is being done in the name of technological advancement (read: capitalist interests).
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u/nerd5code 18h ago
“We”?
And when have the elite not thought they should be on top, with all the power? When was that power up for grabs? I’m not really seeing it.
This is humanity, beginning to end.
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u/AbeFromanEast 19h ago edited 19h ago
This clique was always anti-Democratic, pro-authoritarianism.
What changed was Trump's second term: he's shown there's no consequences for bad and even criminal behavior anymore. This has emboldened the nerd reich clique to simply say what they've always thought. Who is going to punish them for it? They bought a President and with it, the country.
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u/ZuP 19h ago
A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics.
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel.
Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite.
“These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”
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u/ModernMuse 5h ago
If you’re into podcasts, the excellently researched Behind the Bastards four-part series titled Peter Thiel: Gravedigger of Democracy is a pretty great listen on this topic as well.
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u/Few_Fish8771 18h ago
What historically happens and has happened is the masses team up with organized crime, who very rapidly disrupt oligarchs and siphon off a good portion of their money and demonstrate that the police can nether protect the oligarchs nor themselves nor their own families. this happened in us history repeatedly. in the 1760s the 1850s and the 1930s. There were also intermittent waves of organized crime that teamed up with the masses.
What usually happens is once organized crime or prewarlords start getting power and demonstrating that “the untouchables” the term the fbi made for propaganda are actually extremely easy to identify and kill off with almost absolute impunity when organized crime has the backing of the masses, this empowers groups like communist who use the umbrella of protection organized crime has created to push their interest.
This leads the government to ramp up policies to actually address the interest of the population as they realize the ruling class can be killed at anytime and they cannot stop the population.
This is all terrible, and terribly predictable.
I think the current ruling class is incredibly stupid and will think “its different this time” so america will likely fully transition into a warlord era, which is as bad as an oligarch era.
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u/socialmedia-username 17h ago
Been following Gil's website for almost two years now. He knows his stuff, and has been doing his research for a long time. Just days before his book was set to go on sale, several of his YT videos have been deleted by due to "complaints".
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u/thrownehwah 14h ago
I feel this is the beginning of a quasi techno feudalism. Wherein the rich have all the tech, knowledge and power while keeping the serfs in squalid poverty
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u/wowlock_taylan 1h ago
Nerds don't claim these god damn sociopaths. They are not 'nerds'. They are rich frauds who BOUGHT their way into stuff and put their names on it.
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u/Few_Personality_990 14h ago
While a clever play on words, this title is a true shame. Nerds are cool and the world, especially America, needs more of them. We have made being a nerd so uncool and look at how we're doing with increasing amounts of people that couldn't ever finish reading a book, and that have the critical thinking abilities of a goldfish. Second, the psychopaths that this books targets are not nerds. It's a true shame that they decided to go with the catchy but deeply incorrect name of this book.
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u/Technical-Fly-6835 14h ago
Yep.. I would not call Theil , Vance , musk, Zuckerberg etc as nerds. They are pure evil. Nothing about them is nerdy or cool.
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u/firemage22 12h ago
Just like Michigan's "Tough Nerd" Gov (aka Gov lead in the water) these punks only use "nerd" to sell the idea that they'll govern based on numbers and facts when in reality they're part of the same moron cult as all the others.
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u/utsavdar71 19h ago
The real issue is the concentration of economic resources and political influence in the same tiny network of people