Mark Carney has earmarked a billion dollars in the new federal budget to build a “sovereign” AI cloud and made-in-Canada quantum computing. The goal, he says, is to retain the ability for Canadians to regulate our own digital realm and protect our privacies.

The prime minister makes it sound as if we can insulate ourselves from the mindsets of Silicon Valley tycoons who genuflect to Donald Trump and serve his authoritarian aims. But how realistic is that as Big Tech hungers for our country’s energy and brains, and the key client for our supercomputers will be the U.S. military?

Silicon Valley’s leadership, once hailed as liberatory and sort of Canadian-like for its progressive leanings, is host to rising “techno-fascism.” And it’s contagious. No border wall impedes the propaganda of Elon Musk, who bills the Pentagon billions while promoting white nationalists on his X platform. Or the even more bizarre, farther-right views of Peter Thiel, who makes his surveillance software firm Palantir lucratively useful to Trump’s administration while giving speeches against the woke “Antichrist.”

If you listen to Gil Duran, an expert on Silicon Valley politics, you might find yourself wishing our prime minister had instead invested a billion dollars in some kind of tech-bro vaccine to inoculate us against the killer virus that infects some of America’s darkest chat rooms and highest boardrooms.

Based in San Francisco, the U.S. journalist served as a press aide for California Gov. Jerry Brown, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris when she was California’s attorney general. Later, he was the editorial page editor for the San Francisco Examiner.

Duran is also the author of the forthcoming non-fiction book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. Pieces of his argument have appeared in his popular newsletter of the same name, which focuses on tech authoritarianism, billionaire extremism and metapolitics.

“We are witnessing a big shift as tech billionaires make a push to buy local power, create polarization and moral panic, and push the traditionally liberal/progressive Bay Area toward Republican-style policies,” Duran wrote in his newsletter’s introductory post, 19 months ago.

In President Donald Trump’s second term, these ideas have gone countrywide and are quickly seeping across borders. Tech billionaires are increasingly brazen in their efforts to remake, or maybe unmake, democracy. It’s hard to make complete sense of their plan. Although Duran tries.

“I think that, in the paranoid billionaire mindset, everything’s coming to some kind of end,” Duran offered in a wide-ranging conversation with The Tyee, “and they’re gonna decide what that is. They view everything right now as ripe for disruption and they want to make sure to disrupt it in their favour.”

But can they pull it off?

“When I take a walk and look around, there’s millions and millions and millions of people who have a big investment in this country and in this system. A lot of us have relatives who have fought and died for this country, and I don’t think people are just gonna be like, OK, it’s all over with, we give up.”

“I don’t think people have been pushed to the point of resisting with maximum force. But I think that will come if the authoritarian project continues to escalate as it has.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Thanks for doing this. Let’s talk about your book, which has a very fun title: The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. Content-wise, it sounds less fun. Chilling, mostly. But maybe it’s light and delightful? So what’s it about?

Gil Duran: The book is about how this pernicious, anti-democracy ideology bubbled up out of Silicon Valley over the last 20 years, and how these crazy ideas that were for a long time considered too ridiculous to pay attention to have suddenly come into focus in the second Trump administration, where there is a deep interest in finding ways to use the levers of democracy to undo democracy.

Light and delightful!

In San Francisco, these tech venture capitalists were pouring a lot of money into elections and becoming very loud voices, positioning themselves as the new political bosses of the city. Demanding things like a return to mass incarceration policies, which hadn’t worked for years. They seemed blissfully unaware of the entire history of these policies, and why California has the position it has now. And these tech bros were using words like “accelerationism” and “the network state.”

I ended up writing a five-part series for the New Republic last year about this stuff. And I thought this is a warning for four or five years from now, maybe 10 years from now, that the tactics they used to polarize and toxify San Francisco politics were a template for what they could do on the national level, since they have so much money.

Unfortunately, what happened is these ideas, which come from a guy named Curtis Yarvin and others like him, melded with the Trump administration when JD Vance got on the ticket. JD Vance is largely a creation of Peter Thiel, a longtime supporter of Curtis Yarvin. And the stuff that I was writing about last year, when it seemed like a conspiracy theory, this plan to purge the federal government, it all ended up happening, with Elon Musk as the head of it.

I’m always a little bit behind when it comes to the figures that these guys are lionizing. Like, I know about Ayn Rand and Hitler and the pigs from Animal Farm. But Curtis Yarvin is new. Who is he and why does he matter?

Curtis Yarvin is a computer software programmer who went to college at the age of 14 and was in a PhD program in Berkeley that he dropped out of in the early ’90s. A guy with a high aptitude for mathematics and computer science. He started reading at the age of two. And he decides that, after making a little bit of money in Silicon Valley after cashing out of some company that he just needs to create, recreate the entire ideology of the world.

As one does.

Well, he sets about doing it, largely, according to him, while living off of his mother and his then-wife, and ends up writing this blog under the name of Mencius Moldbug, starting in 2007. He basically starts it by saying: The other day, I was in my garage and I decided to create a new ideology. And what he creates is this argument against democracy for, basically, a corporate-inflected authoritarianism or monarchy.

If you hear him talk about himself, you know, going to college so young, he was treated as an alien, didn’t have friends, didn’t have a social life. He says somewhere that he didn’t even get invited to in-person Dungeons & Dragons games he had put online, right?

A true supervillain origin story.

So this misanthropic character decides to create an entirely anti-social, anti-human, anti-democracy ideology. And there is no reason why anybody should have ever heard of this guy, except that it kind of takes off in Silicon Valley, and it draws the attention of Peter Thiel and others who take an interest and form a friendship with Yarvin.

I have a hard time believing these guys weren’t always like this. But you and other people who know more seem to think that they all kind of red-pilled themselves at some point, or were radicalized by their flashy super-friends.

I think they got especially radicalized by getting rich. Remember, these guys would not matter at all if they didn’t have hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. And that also gave them the power to go beyond just thinking about these ideas.

Gil Duran, author of The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy: ‘Some of the traditional extremist right is very suspicious and even opposed to the tech people having any power. JD Vance is sort of a bridge.’ Photo via PBS Frontline.

Peter Thiel has been very open about the fact that he was deeply inspired by a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, which predicts that in the 21st century, technology would transform everything. It would result in the collapse of the nation-state, because automation — basically AI — would take away jobs, and nothing would work the way it had anymore. And as this was all collapsing, certain individuals, “cognitive elites,” would be able to use something called cybercurrency to somehow evade the worst of it and form their own technocratic fortress societies.

That was the basic thesis. There’s more. It’s a book that starts off kind of calmly, and by the end, you’re into total conspiracy theories, the Clintons, the mafia, all this weird stuff. But it had such a profound effect on Peter Thiel that he named it as one of the reasons he co-founded PayPal, because he wanted it to be ahead of the curve on the digital currency thing. And in 2020 when this crazy book was reissued, he wrote the preface for it.

I’m trying to think of a less appealing phrase than ‘foreword by Peter Thiel.’

Another thing to keep in mind is that The Sovereign Individual was sort of the Temu version of a lot of cyber-libertarian thought that had been forming over the previous few decades. So there were already people talking about technology ending the nation-state, about the rise of digital currency and how that would undermine government power. And you had this movement called accelerationism that thought, We’ve got to just accelerate the destruction of the current world and merge with computers.

And so, while that [book] provided the basis for this sort of apocalyptic future, what Yarvin does is provide a blueprint for how to take advantage of it, and install a new operating system for government, this sort of corporate autocracy that will rise after the decline of the nation-state.

Sometimes it felt like the first Trump administration was winging it. What I’m hearing is that this time there’s a plan, and that plan is to use MAGA as a conduit to rebrand and re-engineer some of the worst ideas in all of human history, but with computers this time.

Yeah. They’re only repackaging old ideas that have already failed. But what seems to have happened in the last year or two, or it could be longer than that, is that they realize the power of the tech right, because of all the money.

But what do the givers want for their money? I think a lot of us think tech billionaires are just pushing American politics to the right for tax breaks and wealth accumulation, and that the MAGA movement is just a useful tool. But you’re saying it’s basically John Carpenter’s The Thing, where the Trump administration is a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism.

Elon is going to come and drop, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in your campaign and use Twitter to push your campaign. So they’ve had to make this sort of uncomfortable alliance, because while the MAGA people do have certain things in common with the tech right, like this desire for dictatorship and total power, they have some key differences as well. The tech guys are kind of weird and godless. They’re into things like transhumanism that are, I think, confusing to the MAGA base. They’re also pushing AI, which scares a lot of people, because you’re telling people that it’s good you’re going to take away all their jobs, and create this godlike technology that only might result in the destruction of all of humanity.

So there’s this rising tension where some of the traditional extremist right is very suspicious and even opposed to the tech people having any power. JD Vance is sort of a bridge between these two camps, trying to, sort of, create this coalition. So we increasingly see the use of religious language coming out of people in Silicon Valley, describing a battle between good and evil, which I see as an awkward attempt to find common ground with the right wing, and blend in. “Hello, fellow religious zealots.”

You’ve written recently about the turn towards Christian nationalism. As someone who grew up during the Satanic Panic (and was brought up by panickers), my sense is that this particular ideology has always been a vehicle for terrible, oppressive ideas. I’m sure the Christians think they’re winning souls, but are they? Or is the tech right just recognizing the utility of this apocalyptic language?

Apocalyptic language has long been a technology for political power. It motivates people on a deep psychological level, against death, against evil, in an existential struggle that will be “the final battle.” And if you look back thousands of years, this has always been true.

There’s a book that had a great impact on me about 20 years ago called The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn. It showed the degree to which this idea that the world’s about to end has been used to foment revolutions and uprisings all through European history. People were thinking this back in the Middle Ages. And here we are in the 21st century, still having this framework applied. Peter Thiel has been giving these speeches on the Antichrist.

Oh goody, the Antichrist is back! I can’t wait for the rebranded Left Behind series, with cellphones, computers and, of course: foreword by Peter Thiel.

He’s done these lectures at Oxford, Harvard, University of Austin so far, and now he’s giving one in San Francisco. He directly ties his interest in the Antichrist to Carl Schmitt, a Nazi political theorist who was mostly focused on how politics is a game of defining an enemy and defeating that enemy in an existential battle, right? And he’s packing rooms with influential people who keep what he says a secret. But that seems to be the fixation, the idea that apocalyptic language is often a political weapon to use against your enemies, and that it’s a powerful and timeless one, and that it’s a cycle we tend to be trapped in.

Sounds like he’s really saying the quiet part loud here.

He doesn’t quite say what we should do about it. He sort of suggests that it’s a bad thing. But then we’ve seen him in the New York Times say that Greta Thunberg might be the Antichrist, or that, you know, leftism in general might be the Antichrist. In one speech, he said communism was the Antichrist of the 20th century, and it was defeated by an anti-communist movement. He also says you can take this literally without taking it seriously.

Peter Thiel, left, and Elon Musk, right, made early fortunes as co-founders of PayPal, the online payment system. They’ve poured millions into Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda and hold weirdly anti-democratic views, says Gil Duran. Photo via Democracy Now!

I think Thiel is outlining a political argument, and I think the fact that he was willing to name-check Greta Thunberg, a 22-year-old climate activist, shows the direction in which this is heading.

It’s been clear my whole life that the Antichrist is a very useful bogeyman to tarnish any progressives who seem to be gaining momentum. Reading through your recent piece, I felt like Thiel is simply trying to keep the IP alive. Like, we need to make sure the Antichrist is in the mix, so that when, say, Zohran Mamdani gets [elected], we can say ‘That guy’s the Antichrist!’ without having to completely reintroduce the concept.

I was also raised in apocalyptic religion. I remember being a kid worried to death that any day now, the end of the world is going to happen.

My biggest fear was not getting raptured. It’s the Christian kid version of dying alone.

I came out of that, obviously, thankfully, when I was young, so it’s weird to have to deal with this stuff again. And think about it: the Antichrist barely appears in the Bible, and has been conflated with the beast of Revelation, with the man of lawlessness from the letters of Paul, and they’ve created this one character out of, actually, what might be different characters that appear in the Bible. The beast in Revelation was pretty well understood to be the kingdoms that were there then: Rome and the persecutors of Christians. So to say that the beast is still coming is weird, because you’re really interpreting this to your preference at that point.

I did an interview recently with Robert Fuller, who’s a religion and history professor who wrote a book in 1995 called Naming the Antichrist. Basically, the upshot is that all through U.S. history, there’s been a constant tradition of naming the Antichrist.

I was told Barack Obama was the Antichrist.

The Native Americans were depicted as agents of the Antichrist. King George, during the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. FDR, JFK, alcohol, feminism, you name it, Saddam Hussein, there’s always an Antichrist. And even into recent years. QAnon conspiracy theorists believe that they’re up against a cabal of flesh-eating Satanists, right, and Jan. 6 was all imbued with this demonic energy — we’re up against demons! But it’s generally been this one extreme subset of the right-wing, Republican party in recent years. What I see lately is this sort of expansion. A couple weeks ago, Nicole Shanahan, a tech billionaire, ex-wife of the Google co-founder, said that Burning Man was demonic.

I remember that exact argument from growing up, right? I had no idea what Burning Man was. Just that it was demonic. It’s fascinating that we’re just coming back around to the same conversation. We’re really just going to do it again?

Or that’s what they think. Part of the reason I’m trying to raise the alarm on it is to expose what it is. It’s a framework, and there’s no reason why we need to listen to Silicon Valley billionaires telling us about the Antichrist and accusing people of being the Antichrist. One of the things you realize when you read history about the use of the Antichrist is that the Antichrist is really kind of a mirror, and a projection, and anyone who accuses others of being the Antichrist... the criteria they give can often just be reversed.

I mean, Peter Thiel says the Antichrist is trying to bring about a totalitarian, one-world government. He’s the surveillance guy who co-founded Palantir and is partnering with the Trump administration at a time when the president’s going full authoritarian.

Sometimes it feels like people don’t notice the obvious projection. It would be nice to know there will be a pushback, and it won’t be as easy as claiming up is down, until that’s just how it is.

Especially when the prices go up and when the jobs start to disappear. Even if this takes years. Part of my job is to be on the vanguard of telling people what’s going on, because the media is largely ignoring these areas. With few exceptions. There should be a full beat with multiple reporters at the major outlets.

Yeah, but who’s gonna pay for it? These guys have captured all these media outlets anyway.

A lot of them, yeah. But there’s a lot of people who could do it. Maybe one or two fewer recipes in the cooking section and put somebody over on the decline of American democracy via an attack by a wealthy and sophisticated force with a terrifying ideology. That’s a story. The decline and collapse of the United States, if that’s what’s happening, is going to be the No. 1 story in American history.

Yeah, but can you monetize it? Because these guys control the advertisers too.

We need to cover it. We need to cover it because it will be important if it succeeds, but we need to cover it because, as journalists, our job is to resist attacks on democracy. I think right now the greatest thing going in the favour of fascism is that our journalistic institutions are so cowardly, weak and/or oblivious to what’s happening. They’re still trying to cover this as a normal story and it’s not a normal story. I don’t know what they think happens to them once fascism is the law of the land. Maybe they haven’t read enough books.

Peter Thiel is not wrong about everything. I’d say that. In examining him and his “talks,” he’s giving everybody very important clues. One of the things he says is that everyone’s so hyper-specialized, looking at whatever their job or their interest is, no one’s looking at the bigger picture. And that’s what he’s doing in these Antichrist talks. He’s looking at the bigger picture.

I didn’t think you’d have anything good to say about Peter Thiel. When I hear him talk, he doesn’t sound smart, he sounds rich. But I suppose he’s right that we really aren’t looking at the big picture. So I appreciate you doing the work he claims no one is doing.

Thiel is not very articulate, and his ideas can be a bit convoluted, but he’s definitely highly intelligent, and he has something he’s trying to say. Though I disagree with what he’s saying, I pay very close attention, and I think more people need to do that. I think a problem with our politics is we don’t turn on the TV and see people talking about metapolitics — how things are being framed and why. I don’t think Thiel will be giving me an interview for my book, but it’s unfortunate because I don’t think anyone takes him more seriously than I do.

Up here, in British Columbia, we’ve worked tirelessly to attract investment and business from Silicon Valley. We courted Microsoft. We courted Amazon. We’ve really boosted the e-commerce company Shopify, whose CEOs were recently on Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State Podcast, where he suggested that Shopify has grown to have ‘a country-sized economy.’

I think, as Canadians, we think this is only happening in the States. Meanwhile, we’re working our asses off to import this problem. Can you offer any cautionary words for us, north of the line, in terms of the dangers the tech sector might pose to us up here as well?

A large part of the venture capital model is serving as a recruitment mechanism into tech fascism. You’ve got all these people with these companies who want this money from the venture capitalists, and increasingly it’s seen as sort of a litmus test of whether you’re gonna go along with these ideas. I don’t use Shopify, but I never will. The fact that after Balaji said all these crazy things about tech people wearing grey uniforms and purging democrats from San Francisco, some CEO would sit there on the podcast and act like everything is normal. It’s completely absurd. But that’s the power you have when you’ve got billions or hundreds of millions of dollars, and you’re making investments.

So the desire for people to get that wealth becomes a desire to also mimic those politics and accept the idea that we’re gonna get so rich that we no longer have a use for countries, we no longer have a need to be a part of a nation, we are bigger than a nation, we have our own sovereignty. And that is the argument that comes out of Yarvin, and also comes out of Balaji, who took Yarvin’s ideas and rebranded them as the network state.

I’ll say it, Gil. I do not like this ‘Nerd Reich.’

They have aims that will hurt the vast majority of people on Earth if they get their way.... They have a lot of bad ideas. They don’t know what they’re talking about. But they have a lot of money, and they can make people move in their direction solely based on that.