Apocalypse now

There is, as previously noted, a subgenre of current publishing dedicated to dissecting Silicon Valley’s hard turn to the right. In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, San Francisco journalist Gil Durán argues that destabilizing democracy is not a by-product but the point. The book builds on Durán’s blog and podcast by the same name. Durán’s attention was drawn in 2021-2022 by four acrimonious, right wing-funded recall elections, first governor Gavin Newsom, then two school board members and the district attorney. He began investigating the radicalization of venture capital, starting with four articles at The New Republic. The Nerd Reich follows the spread of ideas from a little-regarded book from 1997: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob, the former MP briefly famous for reclining on a Parliamentary bench during a debate on Brexit. The…