Silicon Valley fascism is waging war on democracy

analysis

Silicon Valley's entrepreneurialism has a dark side. (ABC News: Graphic by Jarrod Fankhauser)

"Billionaires have become radicalised against democracy," the American independent journalist Gil Durán tells the ABC.

"We have to realise how much power we have, and to stop being tuned out from the very real threat we face from a billionaire class that has gone off the edge of sanity into an altered reality.

The Nerd Reich (2026) has debuted as an instant New York Times bestseller.

"But we also need to realise where we're at, how we got here, and who's paying for it all.

"It's not just Trump anymore. It's a regime. And it's a regime that is funded and supported and strengthened by the oligarchs of Silicon Valley."

That is Durán's warning to Australians.

He was speaking to the ABC about his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.

It describes how tech billionaires and venture capitalists in the US have cultivated a virulently anti-democratic ideology for decades and how they're using technology to remake today's world, with consequences for everybody.

Independent journalist and author Gil Durán. (Supplied: David Fenton)

And it is resonating with American readers, debuting as an instant New York Times bestseller after its release on August 18.

"America has been revealed as highly vulnerable to destruction," the book explains.

"Pushing it to the brink wasn't particularly difficult. It required only enough wealthy and influential people who were willing to fund it, or at least go along with it quietly.

"Democracy's enemies specialise in long-term strategies, and they have enough money to operate in perpetuity; they are scheming for global control.

Replace democracy with corporate dictatorship

We're all short of time.

We appreciate books that help us quickly understand the ideas driving contemporary politics and the technological future of countries like the United States and Australia.

And this book is one of them.

It tells the story of how anti-democratic, anti-government, and aggressively anti-tax ideas were fused and incubated in Silicon Valley in the 1980s and 1990s, and how strange books like The Sovereign Individual (1997) inspired a generation of new tech entrepreneurs to build the technology to start undermining national governments and their currencies.

It reveals how decades ago, influential figures in Silicon Valley began describing democracy as a flawed operating system that had to be replaced by a corporate dictatorship.

It explains how, back in 1999, Peter Thiel (the co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) was predicting that official Washington DC would be too dumb to understand the encryption technology that was emerging out of Silicon Valley at the dawn of the millennium, and that "incredible technological forces" were pushing the world in the direction of digital currency and limited government.

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It records how some female journalists, like Paulina Borsook, sounded the alarm early about the toxic culture emerging from Silicon Valley's chatrooms in the 1990s, but the mainstream US tech press dismissed and ridiculed them.

Borsook's book Cyberselfish (2000), which fell out of print, is now being called "prophetic" and is being republished this month, after 26 years.

And it details how Silicon Valley billionaires want to carve up the world into thousands of tax-free "economic zones" and create their own sovereign jurisdictions.

Foreign Correspondent's recent story on Próspera, the "libertarian utopia" on a Caribbean island off the coast of Honduras, is part of the same story of Silicon Valley's yearning to "exit" the world we live in.

A philosophy of 'exit'

Ultimately, Durán's book describes how a lot of the behaviour and investment decisions of Silicon Valley's influential venture capitalists in recent decades can be explained by their philosophy of "exit".

That is, it explains how they want to "exit" (i.e. abandon) democracy, with its laws and regulations and fiat currencies, and create new forms of government and new jurisdictions (in space, the ocean, on land, and in the cyber world) that use digital currencies.

It might sound like something out of a Reddit thread — a Caribbean island where libertarians, biohackers and crypto bros are building an experimental city. In Honduras, it's real.

"It doesn't make sense for these billionaires, the most successful and wealthy people in our society … to be investing in this massive disruption like this unless they are zealots who believe it's time to completely collapse the world order," Durán told the ABC.

"In my book, I tell the story of this idea, that that's exactly what they see as necessary and inevitable."

And the same names keep popping up in the book.

Names like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Balaji Srinivasan, Sam Altman, and JD Vance, among others, many of whom spent years in Silicon Valley's cauldron.

They would create culturally potent companies like PayPal, Palantir, LinkedIn, Tesla, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon, and technologies like Bitcoin and Coinbase.

"In 2025, the tech industry revealed its true face," Durán writes.

"Devoid of any moral scruples or loyalty to democratic principles, many of Silicon Valley's most well-known figures chose to openly ally themselves with a president who would soon, with their help, check every box in the authoritarian playbook.

"Instead of filing lawsuits against the administration, tech giants lavished him with money and support.

"As his administration carried out a shock-and-awe effort to destroy the pillars of American democracy, the most powerful and prominent figures in tech stood behind him," he writes.

An open enemy of democracy

Durán writes simply and clearly.

He is a former opinion editor for The Sacramento Bee and editorial page editor for The San Francisco Examiner.

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He is an independent journalist who runs The Nerd Reich, a newsletter about "tech authoritarianism, billionaire extremism, the Network State and the meta politics of California".

Politically, he used to work as a press secretary for California's Democratic governor Jerry Brown and he served as Kamala Harris's communications director when she was California attorney-general.

But he does not hold back criticism of US Democrats.

"Democratic leaders continue to operate as if the tech sector has not become an open enemy of democracy itself," he writes in the book.

"They speak of AI and billionaires and crypto in flattering and friendly terms, no doubt hoping to remain beneficiaries of campaign checks from tech billionaires.

"While the champions of tech fascism see the Republican Party as the best vehicle for its hopes, they also understand the inherent corruptibility of the Democratic Party, which also serves its wealthy donors more than it serves anyone else."

We can have billionaires or democracy

The final chapter of his book is a call to arms.

Redistribution or repression? Which one will be the response to AI and automation?

"We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both," he writes.

And he tells the ABC that the growing backlash in the United States against data centres and AI shows people do not like the future tech billionaires have been forcing on everyone.

He said normally in US politics new technology would be promoted in terms of how many jobs it would create, not destroy, but that wasn't the story that these tech companies had been telling investors.

"The oligarchs of Silicon Valley have done their best to terrify everybody, and so what's happening right now is absolutely logical and rational and reasonable," he said.

"The data centres are viewed, I think, as a physical manifestation of billionaire power on the land that's become this bogeyman, this monster, this alien invasion that arrives in your community to suck up your water and pollute your air and eat up your land, all for the promise that it will fuel a technology that will kill your job and possibly wipe humanity off the face of the planet.

"What's not to love?" he jokes grimly.

And he said data centre protests in the US had become a focal point for regular people from all walks of life to come together as a community to fight billionaire power and learn what was happening in neighbouring counties.

"The billionaire city in Solano County, for instance, Republicans are even more opposed to it than Democrats are," he said.

"Similarly for crypto. Some of Trump's most fervent supporters got completely robbed by putting money into these crypto schemes, so on a very personal level they know that this is bad.

"We're seeing movements like "Purge Palantir" to get Palantir out of our government, our cities, our hospitals and stores.

"And then there's "DeFlock", which is pushing back against "Flock" cameras [automated licence plate readers] and the new surveillance state where everything will somehow be safe and secure by all of us being under surveillance.

"People are waking up.

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