Review of The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán: One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is its description of a milieu that takes on the character of a religious doomsday cult. Drawing on research on fascism, the author highlights the alliance between economic elites and an authoritarian mass movement, the contempt for the limitations of democracy, and the notion that society must be saved from internal enemies.

We thought they were happy, freedom-loving hippies. Eccentric nerds who had brought the 1960s’ dreams of a better world into the computer age. They wanted to connect us, give everyone a voice and free us from dusty institutions. Who could object to that?

And all of a sudden, there was Elon Musk making a gesture that looked like a Nazi salute, while Peter Thiel was on the lecture circuit talking about the Antichrist. How did we get from peace, love and personal computers to MAGA and the Book of Revelation?

That is what the American journalist Gil Durán tries to explain in The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. It is a highly readable book that explains how a powerful section of the tech industry has developed a strained relationship with democracy, to put it mildly. Along the way, it also becomes clear that the story of the innocent hippies was probably, above all, something the rest of us needed to believe.

Strip it down to its essentials, and this is a book about a book and a man. The book is The Sovereign Individual, published in 1997. The man is Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Durán tells the story of how the book influenced the man, and how the man then used his fortune to influence the world. The supporting cast includes the blogger Curtis Yarvin, the politician JD Vance and the tech investor Balaji Srinivasan.

The Sovereign Individual was written by the investor James Dale Davidson and the British newspaperman William Rees-Mogg. Their thesis was that the information society would undermine the nation state. The state had been able to tax and control people because their work and property were tied to a territory. But how do you tax assets that can be moved through a digital network? And what happens to state power when money becomes encrypted information?

Their answer was that welfare states would lose their economic foundations. Jobs would disappear, inequality would grow, and societies would be plunged into violence and disintegration. But a small, technologically gifted elite would do very nicely. They could move their money and choose between jurisdictions as others choose mobile phone contracts. Security and other public services could be bought privately. Left behind would be those who had neither the money nor the means to leave.

In other words, it was an investment guide to the end of the world. And its flattering message to the reader was that he himself probably belonged to the elite that would emerge stronger on the other side.

The young Peter Thiel loved it. So much so that he later wrote a foreword to the book. In a 2009 essay, he spelt out the political implication himself: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ It is worth reading that sentence slowly. If freedom is to be saved and democracy stands in the way, it is not hard to work out what must be sacrificed.

Nor did Thiel stop at reading. In the same essay, he described PayPal’s original ambition to create a currency beyond state control. He pointed to the internet, outer space and the sea as places where one might escape the existing political order. Durán’s central argument is that, for Thiel, The Sovereign Individual became a programme that investments and political alliances could help to put into practice.

The far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin supplies some of the most radical ideas for this programme. He imagines countries run like businesses, with a chief executive at the top and residents who can move away if they are dissatisfied. The tech entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan develops the dream of a network state, in which a community first organises itself online and then acquires land and political independence. Citizens’ influence shifts from the ballot box to their ability to opt out.

The consequences become very tangible when the money meets the American electoral system. Thiel backed Trump as early as 2016 and later helped JD Vance advance as both an investor and a politician. After the 2024 election, Vance was vice-president. The network Durán describes had gained access to power in Washington. Ideas that had previously circulated on blogs and among investors were now close to the world’s most powerful state apparatus.

The same goes for the attack on the US administration. Yarvin had long proposed a purge under the label RAGE: ‘Retire All Government Employees’. Durán sees Musk’s DOGE, the mass sackings and the dismantling of agencies such as USAID as extensions of that vision. The direct line from Yarvin’s writings to government decisions is not always documented, but the resemblance between the idea of a wholesale administrative ‘reboot’ and the political project is hard to miss.

This also brings out one of the book’s most interesting contradictions. The state has not simply disappeared, as The Sovereign Individual predicted. It has become a market and an instrument of power for those who own the technology. Palantir sells technology to the authorities responsible for surveillance, control and waging war. The tech elite can both demand less state interference in their own businesses and profit from making the state more powerful in its dealings with everyone else.

The dream of escape lives on, however. Thiel is a major supporter of, and investor in, seasteading: the idea of building communities at sea beyond the control of existing states. These floating islands of freedom have struggled to become a reality, but related projects have turned to dry land. Próspera in Honduras is one example of an attempt to create a privately run zone with far-reaching special rules.

And then Greenland enters the picture. Durán connects Trump’s wish to take over the island with the tech world’s interest in new ‘freedom cities’. In April 2025, Reuters documented discussions about such a city in Greenland. Praxis founder Dryden Brown had visited the island, and Ken Howery, Thiel’s former business partner and Trump’s nominee at the time to be ambassador to Denmark, had taken the idea seriously, according to Reuters’ sources.

Why, then, does Durán call all this Nerd Reich? Because he argues that we are facing a new fascist movement. Drawing on research into fascism, he points to the alliance between economic elites and an authoritarian mass movement, contempt for the limits imposed by democracy, and the idea that society must be saved from internal enemies. The media, universities and the civil service become obstacles to be cleared out of the way. Power is concentrated in the hands of those who believe themselves particularly suited to exercising it.

This technological variant of fascism adds a dream of the future to the familiar story of national greatness. A chosen elite is to lead us towards a society of abundance, artificial intelligence and perhaps eternal life. In that story, democratic disagreement can easily become a bug in the system that someone ought to fix.

And yet, as I read, I found myself thinking that perhaps the book should have been called Nerd Church.

For one of the most fascinating things in the book is its description of a milieu that starts to look like a religious doomsday cult. Here we find prophecies of the old world’s collapse, a chosen few who will survive the catastrophe, and a promise to overcome humanity’s biological limitations. The new world awaits in private enclaves, in space or on the other side of a technological revolution.

The life-extension entrepreneur Bryan Johnson makes these ambitions almost comically explicit: he wants to found a country and a religion, avoid dying and become God. Whatever you make of the project, you cannot fault the ambition.

Thiel’s Christianity is something different from the dream of building a god out of computers. Yet for him, too, technology and politics take on religious significance. He imagines that fear of catastrophes, including dangerous AI, can be used to create a totalitarian world government. In his theological narrative, this is the Antichrist’s opportunity. The power that promises to protect us from the end of the world may itself become the greatest threat.

The fight against regulation can thus be elevated into a struggle for humanity’s salvation. And that is a rather convenient position for a billionaire whose companies might otherwise be subject to that regulation. When your opponents are on the Antichrist’s side, there is not much room left for ordinary political compromise.

The biggest problem with Nerd Reich is its very strong point of view – some might call it bias. I would have liked a little more curiosity about how the ‘villains’ themselves see things. There is, for instance, a difference between frustration with institutions that do not work and a desire to abolish democracy. At times, I wanted a more thorough examination of the transition between the two. That would make it easier to understand why these ideas appeal to people beyond the small circle who themselves stand to become sovereign billionaires.

That does not change the fact that The Nerd Reich is well worth reading. It makes it hard to go on viewing the tech barons’ political engagement as a passing diversion. And it takes us back to the question we should have asked even when they still looked like freedom-loving hippies: who, exactly, is supposed to be free?

For if they want to free us from the state, who will free us from them?