Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Jon Fortt, CNBC journalist, cohost of Closing Bell: Overtime, and creator of the Fortt Knox streaming series on LinkedIn. I’m guest-hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, I’m talking with a very special guest: Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authoritarianism.
I’ve known Gil for a long time. We met at the end of high school and went to college together, and we were also colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News. Gil has had a fascinating career that spans both media and politics: he’s worked as press secretary and comms director for high-profile California politicians like Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and he also advised Kamala Harris when she served as California’s attorney general.
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Now, writing The Nerd Reich, Gil is focused on a new type of story, one he says has gone woefully under-covered by mainstream media. That story is the influence of tech money on politics and society at large, and the disturbing philosophical undercurrents that are driving it.
The “Nerd Reich,” as Gil sees it, is a web of powerful, ultrawealthy tech billionaires. People like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and others, whose politics and influence now see them pushing the country further and further away from democracy and toward something resembling a kind of cross between unrestrained capitalism and monarchy.
This idea has been kicking around for quite a while now. You’ll hear Gil refer to it as the Dark Enlightenment, or as some refer to it, the neo-reactionary movement. Some central characters here include Curtis Yarvin — an influential, anti-democracy blogger whose ideas once stood far outside mainstream acceptability, but who recently has captured the attention of politicians like Vice President JD Vance.
And that’s Gil’s central thesis: while these ideas are not new, their embrace by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet is a relatively recent phenomenon — one that’s been supercharged by President Donald Trump’s reelection.
Now that these ideas have entered the White House by way of the MAGA movement, Gil argues that it has created a dangerous coalition between the far right and the stewards of the biggest, most popular tech platforms and products. After all, as we’ve seen with Elon Musk and DOGE, these tech billionaires aren’t just sitting in the shadows; they want to tear down and rebuild the government from the ground up.
Gil is one of the sharpest thinkers on this subject, and he never shies away from saying what he really thinks. So I think you’ll find this conversation very illuminating; I know I did.
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