The Nerd Reich and the War on Democracy with Gil Durán

I want to start off with the title, The Nerd Reich.

What are some of the similarities you see between the Third Reich and the Nerd Reich and this Silicon Valley fascism with 1940s Germany?

That's a good one because there's a few items on that list.

One of the most important things they have in common is an obsession with hierarchy, with the way society should be structured hierarchically with wealthy white men on the top of everybody else.

Essentially, I believe that's the correct moral order of the universe.

There's a lot of basis rooted in, there's a lot of roots in eugenics in both Nazism and in the tech fascist movement.

Also an obsession with technology.

Technology as a means to establish dominance through aggression by being able to leap ahead.

It wasn't just Elon Musk, who is good with rockets and cars.

The Nazis also had an obsession, a fixation, and an expertise with rockets and cars.

And at the heart of fascism in the early 20th century, there's this obsession with technology as a means of acceleration.

That is the way we transcend and break through and destroy our enemies.

So if you can get ahead of a technology before everyone else does, you can try to dominate the world with that technology.

And that's another similarity there.

At the same time, the Nazi movement was also apocalyptic in that it sought to demonize its enemies and purge them from the earth in order to establish this thousand-year Reich, a sort of... paradisical land, a world where they would rule peaceably for years, kind of based on the Bible.

Similarly, with the tech fascists, they promised this sort of era of superabundance through AI transcendence that will lead to this era of eternal life, multi-planetary travel, and superabundance.

So a lot of similarities, also with Christian eschatology as well.

In this era of Silicon Valley fascism and the tech industrial complex, what exactly does that mean?

The tech industrial complex was a term that Biden used in his last speech as president.

He warned, and a lot of people forgot this, it didn't seem to get much coverage, that democracy was in grave danger from a tech industrial complex, a handful of super wealthy men who were now poised to exercise unprecedented power.

in our country and society.

And he borrowed that term from the military industrial complex, the idea that there's this political force that was born out of the Cold War of these military contractors who then exerted great power and influence in our politics.

So the people who are supposed to be the government contractors actually become the power behind the throne.

And Biden was drawing that similarity.

It's not clear why he waited until his last speech as president to warn everybody about this.