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Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy
by Gil Durán
A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.
When Silicon Valley says it is ''moving fast and breaking things,'' the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.
Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.
The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley's war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco's weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world's richest men are building a new political order.
The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it's an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.
"This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration...It's an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A clear and compelling account of the threats posed by technofascism to democracies everywhere." —Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present
"Reader take note: Gil Durán is a deep, thoughtful, and expansive observer of events that shape the current and future of our American democracy." —George Lakoff, author of The All New Don't Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate
This information about The Nerd Reich was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Gil Durán was born in Tulare, California, in 1976. The grandson of Mexican immigrant farmworkers, he got his first taste of work in the fields, but took an interest in journalism after winning the local newspaper's "My Mom Is the Best" contest in the fifth grade. In the tenth grade, his family moved from California to Kentucky, where he dropped out of high school for a year, then returned and befriended an English teacher who encouraged him to apply to college. He graduated DePauw University in 1998 and started his journalism career at the San Jose Mercury News. As the newspaper industry hit turbulence, he pivoted to politics and spent ten years as an advisor to politicians including Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris. In 2018, he returned to journalism as California opinion editor of The Sacramento Bee, and then became editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner. Now an independent journalist, he publishes two newsletters: The Nerd Reich, focused on extremist tech politics, and FrameLab, focused on political language.
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