Silicon Valley’s most dangerous innovation

This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is published here with permission.

Silicon Valley has spawned many innovations with destructive potential: social media, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence. In a new book, author and journalist Gil Durán argues that another, less understood Silicon Valley innovation may be the most dangerous of all — tech fascism. This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán. 

Whether sowing disinformation, spending obscene sums to sway elections, striving to dismantle the federal government or rushing to create a technology that could plunge American workers into permanent unemployment, tech billionaires are rapidly reshaping America’s economy, culture and government. In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Durán presents a sharp indictment of the people and ideas driving the anti-democratic agenda of Silicon Valley into mainstream politics.  

Capital & Main spoke with Durán about his book, the hard right turn of Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence and American workers, and the threat that billionaires pose to democracy.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Capital & Main: Could you define “tech fascism” and explain why those terms make sense together?

Gil Durán: We’re seeing the rise of a cult of Silicon Valley billionaires who believe that technology is going to make democracy obsolete in the 21st century. It’s fascist because it has aligned with Donald Trump’s fascist MAGA cult, which checks every box of classic fascism, especially now that he’s got armed, masked goon squads rolling around terrorizing the populace. These guys are funding Trump. They’re paying him billions of dollars in crypto, and his family is now going into tech investment and AI and crypto. So you get this merging where Silicon Valley executives are going into the Trump administration. Meanwhile, the Trump family is going into the tech business.

Fascism is generally a cult of grievance and self-victimization that promises a return to greatness through the purging and persecution of enemy groups. What tech fascism adds is that instead of only promising a return to some greater period in the past, it also promises this great, glorious future that will be achieved if only we eliminate the obstacles in our way, including regulation, law, democracy and anybody who opposes this acceleration of technology.

Silicon Valley used to define itself more as a libertarian place, skeptical of government. But today there’s a huge degree of interconnection between tech and government. What happened?

Libertarianism doesn’t really exist. It never did. Libertarianism is an adolescent fantasy embraced by grown men who never achieved a certain level of political or adult maturity. I think the libertarian pose went away the moment that these guys saw that they could have access to the federal budget and to government contracts.

Peter Thiel is often described as a libertarian by idiotic journalists who don’t understand that you can’t be a libertarian and a government military-industrial complex intelligence contractor.

What role does AI play in all of this? How do you think about distinguishing hype from reality with AI?

AI is now being marketed as this terrifyingly disruptive invention that will fundamentally transform every aspect of our lives very quickly, without giving us a choice. I don’t fully buy into the fantasy of godlike super AI that eats the world. A lot of that is marketing hype, because they have to find a way to convince investors to pour trillions and trillions of dollars into this thing.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s completely useless or harmless. It is already having an effect on our lives. But it’s been set up by the AI industry itself as an existential threat to all of humanity, and the biggest job killer ever created in the history of mankind. And we’re seeing a backlash. It’s waking people up to the fact that these are not normal people who want to do this to us.

The message from Sam Altman and others has been: “Don’t worry, we’re going to kill all the jobs, and you’re going to have nothing to do. And if we don’t do this right, everybody might die.” They’re also promising that it’s going to create super abundance. It’s an obviously false promise. We already have abundance. It’s just not rationally, fairly or evenly distributed in any way. I think that Silicon Valley has made a catastrophic error with the marketing of AI, and this is the best chance we have for people to wake up to how insane and dangerous these people have become.

Do you have a prediction about the way AI is likely to impact American workers in the next few years?

It depends on what American workers do to impact AI. AI is promising the greatest economic depression we’ve ever seen, except for the billionaires who will somehow become trillionaires. But I don’t know what they’re going to do, or what their money will be worth, if everything else is collapsing.

People are going to have to rebel against the forced acceptance of these technologies, which are actually not as useful as marketers say.

Why do you think that the rise of tech fascism has not attracted more attention? 

We are taught to revere wealthy people. If you’re wealthy, it means you’re morally better. It means you’re a superior intellect, and you’re important, and people should be in awe of you. I think that people get this idea in our country that somehow people become billionaires because they’re smart and disciplined and visionary, which is actually not the case at all. And unfortunately billionaires also buy into this myth of their own greatness.

On the consumer level, we’re all participants in this economy. We like the products. We like being able to video chat or to stream music. But people are starting to realize the price of this convenience. They’re taking all of our data, and everything gets shitified at a certain point. Everything gets harder to use or more expensive. There’s nothing free on the internet in reality.

These technologies create a tremendous amount of wealth and buy-in from consumers. But so does food. Why aren’t the farmers now trying to say, “Hey, nobody gets to eat unless we have all the power, and we get to decide all the regulations”? What if the garbagemen all said, “You’re all going to rot in piles of trash, unless we get all the power.” There are a lot of essential things we have in society; it’s only the Silicon Valley billionaires who have decided they should have the power to destroy everything, and no one has a right to stop them. That’s what my book is about: the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires into the most dangerous anti-democratic force the country has ever faced.

So what do you think groups or individuals can do about this? 

We have to reckon with the billionaire threat. There’s no way around it. We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both, because the billionaires have declared war on democracy. We have to imagine a world without billionaires because the billionaires are imagining a world without us.

Even the bravest champions of the Democratic Party, like Gavin Newsom, really won’t say much about the Silicon Valley billionaires. They are completely directing their fire at Trump, this sleepy old man who won’t even be around in a few years. We need leaders who speak directly to the threat of billionaire power and refuse to take crypto and refuse to be afraid of crypto’s political spending.

Any politician who is not speaking about the role of Silicon Valley fascism in the destruction of our democracy is not someone who can be trusted.

Given our lax campaign finance law in America, tech lobbying money does sway elections. Many Democrats would say they have good reason to be scared of taking on crypto and the billionaires.

The Democrats are scared because they’re cowardly and idiotic, and they lack imagination. There are politicians speaking out: Bernie Sanders, James Talarico, Ro Khanna, Chris Murphy, Ron Wyden, Elizabeth Warren, AOC. They are all politicians more visible and popular than most of these milquetoast Democrats who think they can speak to both sides of the issue and get somewhere. 

People don’t trust billionaires, and so we need politicians who increase that distrust and hatred of the billionaire class to the point that the more money the billionaire spends, the more it helps those politicians.

I’m guessing you support the proposed 5% tax on billionaire wealth on the California ballot this fall?

Of course. It doesn’t go far enough, but it’s a good start.