What Is Silicon Valley's 'Nerd Reich,' and Is It Taking Over the US Government?

Sixty percent of surveyed American adults said they had an unfavorable view of Elon Musk — the billionaire Tesla CEO, who has been intimately involved with the federal government for months through his leadership of the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency.

Since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Musk’s DOGE has slashed large swaths of federal jobs and cut funding to programs as varied as the U.S. Agency for International Development to energy-saving initiatives for low-income families. And this March poll of 1,000 people by the Marquette Law School is just one indicator that some Americans are tired of wealthy tech figures being involved in the nation’s politics.

“We’re learning a big lesson here, which is that we can have democracy or we can have billionaires, but we can’t have both,” San Francisco journalist Gil Duran said.

KQED Forum’s Mina Kim spoke to Duran, who formerly worked for California politicians like Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, about the “Silicon Valley tech billionaire politics” that are the focus of his newsletter, The Nerd Reich — and what he thinks tech elites might want next.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Before DOGE, there was RAGE

Gil Duran: Curtis Yarvin is a San Francisco software programmer who, in the early 2000s, started blogging under the name “Mencius Moldbug.” And in his blog posts — very internet troll stuff — he laid out these ideas for replacing democracy with tech-controlled dictatorships.

He specifically focused on San Francisco, which he said in his corporate tech dictatorship would be renamed “Frisk Corp.” In Frisk Corp, you would have to swipe in with RFID chips and be under total surveillance, and give up all of your freedom in exchange for security.

The important thing to understand about Curtis Yarvin is that he became a favorite thinker of Peter Thiel, the PayPal Mafia billionaire who founded Palantir and got even richer off of government surveillance. Some people call him Peter Thiel’s house philosopher.

In 2012, [Yarvin] gave a speech in which he said that the government needed to be reformed with something he called RAGE — Retire All Government Employees. And that entailed taking over the federal government, purging the bureaucracy of anybody who’s a Democrat or who believes in democracy, and replacing all federal employees with people who would answer to a CEO-dictator-type of person. Very much mirroring what Elon Musk is doing with DOGE at this current time.

If it weren’t for these billionaires, [Yarvin would] be just an anonymous internet troll. The whole reason this has gone national is because of JD Vance. [And] to understand JD Vance, you have to understand that he is largely a creation of Peter Thiel. At every step of JD’s career, Peter Thiel has been there, funding him.

Predicting the ‘cognitive elite’

Yarvin is largely deriving his ideas from other places.

To really understand this, you have to go back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual,  which basically was one of these dark, apocalyptic-style books, and it predicted that in the 21st century, the information age would undermine the existing economy and existing nation-states. That the Information Age would kill lots of jobs and result in a lot of violence and chaos, and also lead to the rise of a so-called “cognitive elite”: people who are able to become wealthy off of technology and don’t need traditional jobs to survive.

It would be their mission to escape from existing countries using something called cyber currency — basically crypto,  which would allow them to evade taxation and evade government authority, and create their own nations that they would rule over in this post-democracy order brought about by the information age.

These ideas sound crazy when you first hear them. They sounded very unhinged to me, and I didn’t pay attention to them at first.

However, you have to understand that these are very wealthy men with very strange and scary ideas. And they seriously believe in them.

The GOP vs. the ‘broligarchs’?

I think Trump has, for the most, part right now, been bought off. Trump’s in it for the money — and these guys have plenty of it.

He may not have the ideology, but as long as Elon and these guys are going to spend billions of dollars and create all of these business opportunities for his family, I think he’s all in.

There is a problem, though, because this is becoming very unpopular very quickly. The polls are diving. Elon Musk is becoming one of the most despised men in the country. He’s threatening Social Security. He’s firing veterans. You’ve got Republicans showing up to town halls to yell at their absentee representatives in early 2025.

This is a political disaster in many ways, so I think there will be some political tension between the Republican establishment and these “tech-broligarchs” — because they’re breaking all the rules of politics and don’t really seem to care about the future. And in politics, you’ve really got to care about the next election and the election after. That’s the name of the game.

Silicon Valley’s ‘right wing strain’

I compare it to: this tech authoritarianism is the parasite and MAGA is the host.

[Tech leaders] saw an opportunity, right? It’s a very opportunistic play — and an opportunity to go as far as they can with a candidate who has been able to openly violate the law, and not pay any political consequence for it.

This is not an ideology where the world is a better place for the majority of people. It’s a place where the world is a place for tech billionaires. You don’t make the world a better place by getting rid of Social Security, which is crucial to the survival of millions of Americans.

Malcolm Harris’s [book] Palo Alto talks about the right-wing strain through Silicon Valley. There was this idea during the nineties and part of the eighties and 2000s that tech was kind of fun: was going to make our life cool, all these nice products, connecting us, allowing us to buy stuff online.

And for a long time, it seemed nonthreatening. Remember, Google had the “Don’t be evil” slogan and they were kind of paddling around in their Crocs, building playgrounds for their employees and bespoke lunches and free kombucha on tap. There was the harmless vibe that seemed to be from Silicon Valley.

But I think there has always been a certain anti-government lean to a lot of the Silicon Valley movement — this idea that “we’re going to create structures outside of government.” The idea of getting out of authoritarian society, evading bad governments in the future: there were times when these ideas seemed like something people on the left could be into.

However, what’s happened is: these guys became super rich. And as they’ve become super super super rich, they’ve gone far, far, far to the right — and they’re pulling others now with them.

‘Freedom cities’ and governance by tech

All the way back in 2013, [Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase] gave a speech at Y Combinator in which he basically called for Silicon Valley to secede from the United States and to go start their own country and take all of their wealth and all of the brain power.

He continue[d] to develop these ideas over the next decade, and in 2022, released a book called The Network State — how to start a new country. This book lays out all the reasons why American democracy is an outdated system and why it needs to be replaced by new tech forms of governance. And there are two ways to do that: one is to leave the country by a territory and create your own sovereign state or city. You can do that within a country or by leaving a country. And the other way is to take over existing governments and convert them into tech-controlled governments.

My interest in this ideology started with SF politics — this effort by tech bros to take over City Hall, but also by the California Forever Project.

It wasn’t until I read a book by a historian named Quinn Slobodian called, Crack Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, that I understood the idea there … for wealthy people to find a way to exit society and create their own sort of utopian countries that they control.

In 2024, Trump had a plan for something he calls the so-called “freedom cities,” which are these 10 new charter cities that would be built on federal land all around the United States. The newspapers have mentioned that Trump plans to “build freedom cities,” but no one has explained what that means: where the idea comes from or why we need them.

I think the “freedom cities” are really anti-freedom cities — a very Orwellian name for what would essentially be a corporate-controlled city.

How does this all end?

A lot of people stayed home [and didn’t vote in the 2024 election.] And I think this is going to wake [Americans] up to the fact that you can’t stay home. We have to realize that there is a group of people who are avidly working against the public good and against the welfare and well-being of the majority.

I don’t think these [tech] guys have fully thought this out. I don’t think they realize — having been in politics myself — what it’s gonna feel like when you see that the majority of people are against you. I do think this ends with tens of millions of Americans taking to the streets on a regular basis to stand against what is an increasingly authoritarian regime in Washington. And I think that it also ends with a bunch of billionaires getting on planes to Moscow at midnight.

I think it’s important to understand it, to learn about it, and to tell others about it … Word of mouth is very important. People listen to their peers, to their friends, to their family members. That’s where a lot of people get their main political knowledge from.