Why tech billionaires want a ‘corporate dictatorship’

Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is John Fort, CMBC journalist, co-host of Closing Bell Overtime, and creator of the Fort Knox streaming series on LinkedIn. I'm guest hosting for a couple more episodes of Decoder this summer while Neilai is out on parental leave. Today I'm talking with a very special guest, Gil Duran, an old friend, journalist, and author of The Nerd Reich, a newsletter and forthcoming book about the shifting politics of Silicon Valley and the rise of tech authority. I've known Gill for a very long time.

We met at the end of high school and went to college together, and we were also colleagues at the San Jose Mercury News. Gill has had a fascinating career that spans both media and politics. He's worked as press secretary and comms director for high-profile California politicians like Governor Jerry Brown and Senator Diane Feinstein. And he also advised Kamala Harris when she served as California's attorney general. Now, writing The Nerd Reich, Gill is focused on a new type of story, one he says has gone woefully undercovered by mainstream media.

That story is the influence of not just big money, but specifically tech money on politics and and society at large, and the disturbing philosophical undercurrents that are driving it. The Nerd Reich, as Gill sees it, is a web of powerful, ultra-wealthy tech billionaires, people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, and others, whose politics and influence now sees them pushing the country further and further away from democracy and towards something resembling a kind of cross between unrestrained capitalism and monarchy. This idea has been kicking around for quite a while now. You'll hear Gill refer to it as the Dark Enlightenment, or as some refer to it, the neo-reactionary movement.

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