The Nerds Take Washington
About two days before Trump’s second inauguration, VP-elect JD Vance attended a party at Peter Thiel’s place in Washington. Vance scanned the room; he saw a familiar face and yelled: “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist!” Curtis Yarvin replied: “Thank you, Mr. Vice President, I’m glad I didn’t stop you from getting elected.”
If you haven’t heard of Yarvin, I envy you. Curtis Yarvin is a computer programmer and blogger. He has been writing under a pseudonym for years, and what he hates most is literally democracy. He states this bluntly in his writing. He wants to replace democracy with a corporate monarchical system.
Yarvin is one of the intellectual spokespersons for a movement that can now claim with a sense of victory that they have the vice president of the United States in their pocket. And it is more than likely that Vance’s address to Yarvin was meant to be interpreted with a sense of friendly irony, as a cynical parody, an impersonation of their common enemies. This encounter is in some sense a representative nucleus of Gil Durán’s book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, and an overture to the book’s central message.
For the last several decades, America’s billionaire class has been cultivating an explicitly anti-democratic ideology in Silicon Valley. An openly authoritarian system of thought dispersed through obscure blogs and private salons, an ideology that is currently comfortably lodged inside the White House.
Needless to say, I was struck by the title of Durán’s book. Not the shock of it, but the accuracy. My own work sits at the intersection of AI, ancient Christian pastoralism, and Critical Theory. In 2024, Becoming Press published my book: Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence; its manifesto version will soon be published as The Biopolitics of Artificial Intelligence. In the book, I try to trace a genealogy of Christian monasticism relying on Foucault’s fourth volume of the History of Sexuality, and I attempt to draw parallels between the contemporary dystopian visions and utopian promises around AI and Christian eschatological narratives. Needless to say, I am not a fan of either. And through The Nerd Reich, I have once again encountered both as the leading paradigms of power.
Technology as Politics
One of Foucault’s classical theoretical moves was to take the famous expression by the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz and reverse it. Clausewitz is known for the statement: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In a series of lectures called Society Must be Defended, Foucault reinterprets the saying and argues instead that politics is in fact the continuation of war by other means.
The implication is that times of peace and prosperity are only a surface appearance of what is really a matrix of power relations. A system of management that ensures the dominion of the victor. Power does not cease to operate when the battle is over; it only becomes less concentrated, more diffuse, and relocates itself into norms, institutions, and the everyday policing of life.
Foucault’s insight is particularly useful in understanding how modern-day tech-oligarchs have learned to bypass democratic institutions and pretty much do whatever the hell they want.
Luckily for us, post-modern authoritarian capitalism seems to be very literal about its views, goals, and aspirations. There are no attempts to hide or embellish anything. Everything remains on the surface; we only have to watch and listen while the tech nerds share directly and confidently their most bizarre and outrageous ideas with the rest of the world.
Peter Thiel, for example, stated quite bluntly during a 2010 conference, with a great sense of pride too, that technology offers “an incredible alternative to politics.” Not sure what he was thinking, or how he thought it would come off, but I do think most of us got the real message here.
What Thiel actually says is that technology allows the powerful and the wealthy to “unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people.” Through technology, they can overturn the monetary system, dismantle regulatory bodies, and restructure entire branches of government without submitting themselves to any kind of oversight. They can reorganize the conditions of collective life without securing the consent of those subject to them. Relocating, in effect, political agency from the democratic public to individuals capable of exercising private power at scale.
As I read Thiel’s statement, I immediately thought of extending the Foucauldian diagram further, to a third statement. Where war is politics pursued by other means (Clausewitz), where politics is war pursued by other means (Foucault), it seems now that technology is politics pursued by other means. So this final formulation is here the central thesis I want to look into:
Technology is politics by other means: contemporary tech-fascism does not seek to escape government but to replace democratic mediation with privately controlled technical systems.
This is a question of how Silicon Valley oligarchs have found a new way to wage war on civil society, through the use of tech, capital, and authoritarian narratives. Technology has a way of weaving itself into human forms of life in a way that seems natural, inevitable, and neutral. “It’s just a tool,” we hear them say as our lives get throttled through infrastructure.
Governance conceals itself as engineering; power presents itself as efficiency and optimization. Political problems are made artificially machinic and relegated to systems that make the decisions for us. When ethico-political problems turn into technical problems, they are effectively colonized by apparatuses, and by those who claim privileged access to these apparatuses. Instrumental rationality thereby paves the way for fascist elitism.
Durán’s The Nerd Reich offers a thorough journalistic account of how that transformation took place. The book ends by highlighting important structural solutions: abolish billionaires, enforce antitrust laws, protect civil services. But I think the epistemic and theoretical dimension is underaddressed, so what I want to do here is offer a theoretical frame that could tie some things together and shed new light on what is, essentially, a problem of truth and power.
The Billionaire Exit Plan
At the center of the Nerd Reich’s aspirations to world domination lies a book. A book that is neither well-written nor well-supported, fundamentally an instance of bad science-fiction. The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, written by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg. The book’s central claim is that digital technology and private currencies will undermine nation-states and enable a so-called cognitive elite to come to power through tax evasion and the refusal of any democratic accountability. The cognitive elite will then proceed to sort individuals into sovereign individuals on one hand and the superfluous remainder on the other.
The book was not exactly a success; it had modest sales and somewhat dismal intellectual credentials. The arguments were badly sourced, racist bigotries were barely disguised, and its most dramatic predictions were demonstrably wrong. Rees–Mogg and Davidson were catastrophist newsletter writers; they have spent years predicting endless economic collapses and promoting conspiracy theories with little to show for it. Some things they did get right. They were able to foresee the political implications of the technological developments taking place in the late 90s. Private currencies, encryption software, the internet as such; these were not just commercial tools. They would soon become one of the most powerful political weapons of the 21st century.
Peter Thiel fell in love with this book. He read it in 1997. He cofounded PayPal shortly after. And he had the specific goal in mind to create the digital currency described in The Sovereign Individual. Thiel wrote the preface to the new 2020 edition of the book and continued to cite it as one of his primary inspirations, as one of the most formative texts of his political imagination. Durán shows how this garbage of a book became the sole inspiration for Thiel’s investment programs from Bitcoin to Palantir. Thiel continued to fund like-minded eccentric, narcissistic fascists with a similar taste in both literature and politics: Balaji Srinivasan, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, and JD Vance.
Srinivasan took the ideas of both Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and repackaged them into a more humane, libertarian-facing facade that could appeal to a wider and less radical (that is, less overtly racist and fascist) audience in Silicon Valley. He introduced the idea of a Network State. A Network State is an online community that with time and effort begins to grow in size, recruit members, set its own rules, and eventually acquire its own land, its own legislature, and even its own private police-force. A Network State is effectively a transitional phase that allows for the creation of an alternative sovereign nation. This is one of the instances of the “Exit” strategy. A way of side-stepping the existing regulations of nation-states in order to found a “frictionless”, fully privatized island-utopia.
This is a classical instance of what Foucault calls the Outside. Specifically, a primitive and misunderstood attempt of trying to step “outside” of power. Clearly, the problem was never the oppressive regulations of the “evil” government of the nation-state; the problem for the Nerd Reich is just the fact that it is not they who are in power. A problem that is easily ameliorated through the Exit Plan, as it stands for just a different, privatized and obviously much more total instance of authoritarian rule. It is beyond obvious that the Network State will have its own hierarchy that is dictated entirely by capital with some bullshit Herrnsteinian Bell-Curve eugenics added for good measure.
Flipping the Cathedral
Curtis Yarvin has his own paranoid account of what he thinks are the machinations of power. Yarvin’s particular form of authoritarianism centers around his notion of the Cathedral. Yarvin defines the Cathedral as a sprawling meta-institution, specifically: universities, mainstream media, nonprofits, and government bureaucracies, as a network of epistemic authority that collectively determines the conditions of truth and falsity. Yarvin claims that this apparatus somehow exercises an invisible and total control over the public sphere by shaping the frameworks of acceptable discourse by engineering the paradigms of meaning.
Something like this could resonate with Foucault, of course. Foucault has a notion called régime de vérité, a “regime of truth”. Societies do in fact operate through such regimes, through various discursive formations that constitute the episteme of a given epoch; these are discourses, institutions, various forms and techniques that decide which statements can circulate as legitimate knowledge, who gets to speak and which questions may be posed.
The Cathedral is not a very apt metaphor, however, given that these discourses are not as unified as Yarvin claims, they are for the most part rather localized and dispersed. The rules do not apply as uniformly as they would in the mind of a paranoiac. And overgeneralizations aside, even if it were true that liberal consensus integrates authority, naturalizes hierarchy, and presents its contingent arrangements as some eternal necessities (it does at times), what exactly is Yarvin’s solution to this?
He wants to replace it, with what? A corporate dictatorship of a CEO-monarch. We see fundamentally the same aspiration as the one driving the “Exit Plan”. The problem is not hierarchy or the usurpation of power; the problem is who gets to be at the top.
Durán shows how Yarvin’s wacky ideas migrated from blog posts directly into a political program. In the two years before the 2024 election, Yarvin met with Vance on multiple occasions. In 2012, he wrote a manifesto titled Retire All Government Employees or RAGE, where he documents his thoughts on how to remake the state. In time, RAGE became DOGE. The Cathedral stands stronger than ever.
This is a clear trend with neo-reactionary movements. They claim to oppose power, then they attempt to overthrow and concentrate power further by intensifying the hierarchies and extending monopolies. Freedom for the cognitive elites, serfdom for the rest of the consumers: the cognitariat.
“It’s Just a Tool” Says Man Who is Just a Tool
Returning to our claim: Technology is politics by other means. Technology is not an alternative to governance – it is its final mutation. Where democratic politics requires persuasion, compromise,institutional consent, technology can allow those with sufficient capital and technical capacity to act first and seek legitimacy afterward. It shifts political power away from institutions designed to mediate collective decisions and toward those people who are capable of building and controlling the systems through which those decisions are made.
In 2025, Palantir received a $30 million contract to build ImmigrationOS for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ImmigrationOS is a software that collects data across multiple federal databases in order to identify and track individuals who are targets for deportation. Some call this a “resource allocation tool”, funny, because it seems to many of us that ICE squads are doing something other than allocating resources. ImmigrationOS is a weapon of digital sovereignty.
The Foucauldian term here is biopolitics. Biopolitics is a modern shift within the state apparatus, where managing populations becomes a matter of administering resources. It refers to a style of governance where people are tracked, sorted, optimized, and disposed of like goods or commodities. So really, ImmigrationOS is a technology for making live or letting die. It reduces people to data points, and makes decisions at scales and speeds that no bureaucracy could dream of and no human being can keep up with. Especially those who are affected by its decisions.
Then, in 2026, Palantir received a consolidated Army contract of up to $10 billion and a separate agreement with the Department of Homeland Security worth another $1 billion. Palantir’s AI systems are now deployed throughout the federal government.
Same thing with DOGE. In the name of “efficiency,” DOGE has eliminated over 260,000 federal positions. Entire departments responsible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, disability claims, and environmental regulations.
Neither DOGE nor Palantir are anti-government; they are literally the manifestation and intensification of the worst aspects of government.
The Woke Antichrist
Another chapter of The Nerd Reich documents Thiel’s global lecture tour in 2025, during which he repeatedly warned of the approaching threat of an absolute evil. I wish I had encountered this material before writing my Christian Eschatology of AI: the man now responsible for questions of national and homeland security is out on the lecture circuit preaching about the Antichrist. And, unsurprisingly, the forces of evil turn out to be concentrated in familiar enemies: AI regulation, climate activism, international law, and, for some reason, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez specifically.
Even the University of Innsbruck’s theology department couldn’t make much out of Thiel’s gibberish. An advisor to Pope Leo, Father Paolo Benanti, published an essay claiming Peter Thiel was a “political theologian acting at the very heart of the Silicon Valley ecosystem” hardly competent to act as a theologian. Even Benanti was able to trace Thiel’s bullshit back to The Sovereign Individual.
Bringing Foucault back into this is now almost laughable. I feel like I am wasting my “theory tokens.” But Foucault’s notion of pastoral power does spring to mind. The weight of a Foucauldian analysis of modern technology as an expression of ancient Christian pastoralism was carried precisely by the fact that the theological overtones, or the theological unconscious as I refer to it in my book, remain largely hidden. The critique is used to expose the secular pretensions of a technocratic regime. But people like Peter Thiel are not even trying to sound rational or scientific, and in a way I feel almost disarmed by their stupidity. The data overlord preaches eschatological doomsday narratives in their most primitive form, waving his finger at all opposing enemy candidates and denouncing them as manifestations of absolute evil.
The tech fascist claim to authority is thereby explicitly pastoral; it’s just plain dumb.
Look at Peter Thiel’s 2009 essay in Cato Unbound, The Education of a Libertarian. He writes: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Durán makes a profound point here. Libertarianism is essentially proto-fascism. Thiel’s critique of liberal democracy occurs from within liberal democracy. Many scholars have identified such movements as classically characteristic of neo-fascism.
It does not change the fact that neo-fascism is an offshoot of liberal democracy. It is an immanent self-critique of liberalism taken to one of its extreme limits. This really shows why capitalism is incompatible with democracy. The sovereign individual, the autonomous, self-owning, maximally free subject of liberal political philosophy does not fit with the democratic management of collective life. The freedom of one billion individuals cannot coexist with the freedom of the cognitive elite to accumulate without limit.
Abolish the Billionaire-Machine
A system that allows money to purchase influence cannot remain democratic. The myth of the autonomous, self-reliant individual is a legitimating strategy for structural inequality. This is a system that produces tech-oligarchs as a natural outcome.
I agree with Durán completely. Democracy will not survive without abolishing billionaires. If we allow individuals to amass an insane amount of wealth, it is expected that they will amass an insane amount of power by purchasing political influence. But we can take this even further. Why not analyze and try to understand the very mechanisms, in this case the market-driven mechanisms, that normalize the production of predatory profit-seeking individuals? The ones that Foucault famously refers to as homo oeconomicus: a subject that is ready to reshape and reinvent herself into whatever it takes, as long as it’s profitable.
A subject that “does not owe anything to anyone,” as the contemporary social media influencer motto has it. I think we must simultaneously interrogate the technologies of subject-formation that produce people who want to be billionaires, while we find ways to abolish existing billionaires. Why must freedom always be defined as a freedom from collective responsibility? How about freedom from work? Or freedom as access to healthcare? To housing? To free education?
Undesiring Capital
When I saw The Nerd Reich was finally out, I immediately asked the publishers for a review copy. I think the book gives a clear and concise journalistic exposition with names, dates, history, and events of how we came to be governed as we are. How we came to be governed by these specific people with names and addresses, in these specific and ridiculous ways, under these specific conditions, and how a system we thought was free and democratic turned out to be the proper feeding ground for fascism. People who posed as outsiders to politics spent years accumulating the means to colonize the state apparatus for themselves in order to redeploy it in their own interests. This is partially a review, but I also wanted to contribute to Durán’s work by offering small glimpses, here and there, of how a Foucauldian approach can strengthen our position.
The Sovereign Individual, the Network State, Yarvin’s Cathedral, Thiel’s Pastoral techno-libertarianism, Palantir, DOGE – these apparatuses are all interlinked by their shared attempt to bypass democratic mediation and accountability.
These discursive formations imagine freedom as an exit into absolute domination; their solution to the contemporary crises of legitimacy and misinformation is complete concentration of power, where collective solidarity is seen as friction, an unnecessary cost, or a bug that needs optimization.
Once again, I believe my own diagram can be used as an effective supplement to Durán’s work: Technology is politics by other means. Technical systems perform functions that are today more obviously political than ever. They classify populations, “allocate resources,” determine access, and organize labor. In short, they make major administrative decisions on behalf of others. What technology bypasses, in effect, is not bureaucracy; it is consensus.
The warning here is more than the claim that billionaires have become too powerful. It is that we have become complicit in shaping a political culture that cannot tell the difference between “more freedom” and the concentration of power through infrastructure. The sovereign individual is now the ideal subject of a system where there are individuals who are more sovereign than others, and the most sovereign individuals are those who possess enough capital, enough technical capacity to naturalize their preferences at the systemic level. To “baptize” their own interests as the interest of everyone.
According to Foucault, power is most effective when it is exercised over free subjects. Subjects who conform to and willingly assimilate the desire of the other as their own desire. Subjects who enjoy their own subjection and see their own subjection as their freedom of choice. We are faced then, I would contend, with a problem that might be more complex, but no less immediate and maybe even more realistically manageable, than the obvious problem of abolishing the billionaire class.
It is an adjacent problem of trying to understand why people would want to be billionaires in the first place. How was the “billionaire mindset” ever constituted as a state of mind to be desired? Part of the answer at least can be found in Foucault’s preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I would like to finish with a quote from the preface, as I think it most clearly shows the work that needs to be done. Foucault writes in the preface:
Last but not least, the major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism. And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Bibliography
Davidson, James Dale, and William Rees-Mogg. The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.
Durán, Gil. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2026.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey, New York: Picador, 2003.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Confessions of the Flesh, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 2021.
Foucault, Michel. Preface, in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Thiel, Peter. The Education of a Libertarian, Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.
Vachnadze, Giorgi. Christian Eschatology of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies of Cybernetic Flesh, Berlin: Becoming, 2024.
Giorgi Vachnadze is a philosopher specializing in Foucault and Wittgenstein studies. He graduated with a Master’s Degree from the University of Louvain. Former editor and peer-reviewer for the Graduate Student Journal of philosophy “The Apricot” and guest speaker at an addiction and rehabilitation centre in Tbilisi (Georgia), he now teaches English and takes part in some of the activities of the Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation, working in parallel on various topics in Media Archaeology, Game Studies, American Pragmatism, Educational Policy and the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.
