Why tech billionaires want a ‘corporate dictatorship’

27:14I mean, do you as the U.S. somehow try to stop the development of this technology when elsewhere there are technology companies, smart people who are going to continue working on it? Well, I think you need a smart approach to regulation. Unfortunately, we have now is an effort to ban all regulation because these guys have captured the White House with Trump. So I think that it's hard to distinguish between the hype of AGI and the very real harms of AI, which will come in a more simple form, the bias we already see coming out of these companies and their algorithms and the way it'll be used to exacerbate existing deficiencies in our society.

27:55I think the bigger problem is that we're learning that if you give people too much money, they go kind of crazy. And some of them go crazy and decide they want to end democracy and overthrow the United States of America and live in some dystopian science fiction fantasy world. And when you have that much money, you don't just talk about it. You take steps to make it happen. And how we deal with that problem is a very serious question that I don't think anybody in politics, Democrat or Republican, wants to answer because they're so dependent on these people for campaign contributions. We need someone like an FDR to be a traitor to his class and rise up and find a way to put these billionaires back in their place.

28:39Well, back to the FDR idea here. What if this is part of the natural rhythm of American climate, that when things go too extreme in one direction, you had the Robert Barron's and all of that, the roaring 20s, and there are extremes, there needs to be or ends up being some sort of consolidation of power on the other side that swings the pendulum back. Not that those ideas are right, not that everything FDR did was completely sustainable or the way that he framed it, but what if it was just necessary because of the excesses of the rich that built up on that side? And now what these guys and their crazy ideas represent is merely a pendulum swing in the other direction.

29:28I think that's plausible. I think studying these guys, one thing that I find frightening is that they have studied those periods of history. They understand what happened in the Gilded Age. You know, Balaji Srinivasan name checks Ida Tarbell as a major enemy. He's still mad about what she did to Standard Oil. And she's been dead since 1944. And so I think they're looking for a way to end the game. and they have enough wealth accruing now where we have robber barons who are richer than maybe at any other point in history, all these guys with infinite money. And now they're creating their own forms of money.

30:08So I think they're looking for a way to end the game. And that's why they're teamed up with MAGA, because here's a president who's willing to sell to the highest bidder and who's completely testing the law, the constitution, and the limitations on executive of power. And I have no doubt that if Donald Trump tomorrow declared himself the permanent leader of the United States and said democracy is over, that we would have applause and silence from almost all of Silicon Valley. That's a different look than Silicon Valley elite executives displayed 25 years ago when you and I were pretty fresh out of school and heading over there.

30:54I mean, so is this what we're seeing, kind of the expansion of Atherton? For people who aren't familiar with the Bay Area, Atherton is sort of outside of Palo Alto. A lot of CEOs and venture capitalists live there. And it's the weirdest place in the Bay Area I ever went because you go and there are these streets and like hedges that are 15 feet tall. You can barely see any houses. In some areas, you can't see any houses at all because that's the idea. You're not supposed to see anybody's house, but super rich people live there. And if they invite you and they open the gate behind the hedges, you can go in and have an experience.

31:37But they're sending their kids to private schools. They're in these houses that you can't see. They're living very wealthy lives. and mostly on the streets, you see pickup trucks from people who are coming to service the properties. That idea seems to have expanded in recent years, even beyond Atherton, where, you know, pre-25 years ago, and not to lionize this guy, but Steve Jobs was living in Palo Alto, sending his kids to public school, and local families trick-or-treated at his house. It's very different from the Atherton mindset that seems to have expanded lately, no? Definitely. I think we've had a series of crises in our society that have radicalized some of these guys, as has the tremendous expansion of wealth through things like crypto in recent years.

32:24Plus, we've had social media hit. So you had the financial crisis in 08, which showed people that everything's much shakier than we thought. We had the rise of social media and a social media president, Donald Trump, who completely disrupted politics. We had the Me Too movement, which led to a lot more public awareness and sensitivity around certain structures of oppression. And that pissed off a lot of people who felt pretty powerful and rich and without problems before that. And then we had the pandemic, which completely made us all work together for a while and created some divisions over things like vaccines and public health safety measures.

33:00So I think we've lived through a period where our tech CEOs and billionaires no longer feel comfortable just being a part of the system and trying to find a way to work within it. They've decided that everything is ripe for disruption, including the United States of America, including liberal democracy, and that it is their destiny to overthrow it or change it and create a system that answers to them. And so I think that's what the problem is. I do remember that 20 years ago, living in San Francisco, some people who had been there a while really were disdainful of the techies and saw them as a threat, as this thing that was going to bring bad ideas and change to the town.

33:43And I thought they were exaggerating. I didn't think it was that bad. It turns out, actually, it kind of is that bad. Interesting. Let's visit that for a moment because the national popular image of San Francisco is a place where needles are being passed out and homeless encampments are spreading throughout the city and there's little attention to the actual mechanics of day-to-day life. At the same time, the way I've experienced San Francisco over the past 20 plus years is there's been this enormous investment in office space and in the downtown to the exclusion of livability of actual individuals, families, to the point where when the pandemic hit and companies shut down, went to work from home, San Francisco became kind of a ghost town because there had been so much emphasis placed on office space.

34:40versus people actually living there. What do you think is the truth of what San Francisco is now, what it has become, and who it's serving? Well, San Francisco is the best and most beautiful city in the United States. I mean, it's an amazing place. There's all kinds of things happening. And, you know, there are areas of town that are bad. I don't know if a lot of people, if you didn't grow up in the United States, you may not know that there's always a bad part of town in this country because there's poor people. And you tend to put them all in one neighborhood. I grew up in a poor neighborhood, so I know.

35:14If you go to my hometown, Tulare, there's a nice part where people have swimming pools and big lawns. And there's the part I'm from, which is not a place you wanna go hanging around at night. So that's normal. This is a few blocks in San Francisco where the homelessness and the open drug addiction have gotten out of hand. And that's a problem that needs to be dealt with, hopefully in a rational, evidence-based way. But what's happened is that there's been this sort of Fox driven slander campaign to make it seem like that's all of San Francisco. When you can walk three blocks from the epicenter of this zone and get like a$20 Japanese style cocktail, right?

35:50So it's really the haves and the have nots. It's a tale of two cities. And most of the city is expensive, beautiful, wonderful, glorious, full of culture and food, et cetera. So that part of the story is very fictional, but people have been priced out. And that's a story all across California and all across many parts of the nation. Wages aren't keeping up in a way that allow people to continue to live in this country. A recent study showed that 60 % of Americans have trouble making ends meet and affording the basics. That's the problem we got to solve. So these tech billionaires always want to screech about a few blocks in San Francisco where there's fentanyl addiction.

36:32Well, guess what's fueling the fentanyl trade more than anything. Crypto. So let's ban crypto as a first step toward solving the drug crisis. But they don't want to do that. So they really are good at directing attention at a scapegoat and away from the core problem, which is that we have an increasing number of billionaires and an increasing number of people living in tents and a society that is so vastly unequal that it is headed toward a collapse one way or another. But that'll just mean a reckoning. And I think it's going to be a reckoning with the role that these billionaires play in our society and with the role that tech and Silicon Valley play in our society.

37:10Downtown San Francisco is empty because of Zoom, because you can work from home now. I worked in the financial district for 10 years, and that's not where you see homelessness and drug addiction. There's a few homeless people, but that's about a mile away. The problem in downtown is that people can work from home now. And so all the restaurants that were there for years serving lunch, gone. And the offices are empty and it's dead. But if you go to the neighborhoods where people are now working, where they live, everything's booming because that's where things have moved to. So we've seen this migration out of office space.

37:44It turns out we didn't need it because technology disrupted it and people would rather not go to the office every day. But you find a way to, the stories make it seem like The reason downtown is empty is because of the homeless people, and that's a completely fabricated disinformation propaganda narrative, right? Those are two separate problems within a few miles of each other. But the way they get conflated by many in Silicon Valley and by Fox and Newsmax, et cetera, and by the president of the United States gives people a false impression of what's happening. So we might just be in this transition period, going back to this idea of climate versus weather, where the cities were designed for a 1980s, 1990s reality in how people go throughout their day, work, play, live.

38:31But some of the fundamental mechanics of that have changed because the technology that we have and people are going to work, play, live differently. And that means we've got a bunch of infrastructure sitting in various places that just isn't as necessary as it used to be. And then, you know, you end up with problems when you've got setups like that. No? Definitely. It's, you know, for thousands and thousands of years, human beings have figured out a way to shelter themselves. It's amazing that we can't figure out a way to provide shelter for the people we have here. Part of the problem in downtown San Francisco is that it's not so easy to convert all of these office buildings into housing.

39:07So it would be expensive to have to tear them down or convert them or completely reconfigure them. And there are some office buildings that are being reconfigured into housing. But, of course, that's probably going to be housing not for poor people but for wealthier people who can afford to live in a redone old office building. So I do think we're at a point where we have to figure out with all the technologies we have and all of the future that we see right in our face, why can't we solve the basic old problems? And unfortunately, there's a political disconnect there where the people who want to say they want to solve these problems only want to solve them in a certain way, right?

39:47And then there's the political disagreement. For instance, there's this book Abundance that came out that everybody's fighting about all the time. Oh, sure. Abundance sounds great. It's a good word. We should have abundance. When you get down into details, though, there's no rational policy you can propose where everybody's just going to agree because it's rational. Politics is not based on rationality. It's based on all of these other factors, emotion, identity, morality. And so even if we had housing for everybody, someone would object because you have to work to get into the house. Actually, here in San Francisco, there's been a movement to keep people from getting housing if they don't stop doing drugs first.

40:23Well, the evidence and the data show that you want to get people into the housing and not create more barriers and then try to get them off of the drugs. But some people have a moral block against allowing people to get something while they're doing drugs. It's completely unscientific. The data proves it conclusively that it's wrong. But all these tech CEOs here are pro, you know, you have to get the treatment or you don't get the housing. What if you couldn't get government contracts if you were on drugs? That would be interesting. Oh, yeah. Well, the rules only apply to some people. Drug tests are for the little people.

41:04Are we in a situation where technology and democracy are fundamentally at odds? Are we in a cotton gin moment in a way? Because every new technology, somebody tries to frame it like this is the solution to inequality, right? The digital divide, we're going to solve that. We didn't solve the digital divide, right? As we saw during COVID, kids who had means and were home from school actually tended to do better in isolation. Kids who were in even really high-powered charter school-type programs like KIPP did far worse. And it sort of debunked the argument that these charter school programs like KIPP are cherry-picking the most promising kids out of the inner city.

41:55And the reason why they do well is because they would have done well anyway, because a lot of those kids really had a lot of trouble when they were disconnected from that structured environment, intense attention from teachers, academic preparedness, et cetera, et cetera. But it's happening again now with AI. And so I really wonder if we're in this march of technological progress, but technology and democracy, fairness, economic opportunity are fundamentally at odds. Is there any way to shift that equation that you see? Well, social justice and economic justice would be considered woke now by this new generation of CEOs, right?

42:36And they think they just defeated all of those ideas. And now we can go into a meritocracy future where you only get things if you can compete at a very high level, according to rules created by these Silicon Valley guys. I think that a big part of the problem is who is creating this technology and who are they creating it for? I don't necessarily buy the hype on AGI and AI, but the CEOs are pushing this idea that they're about to massively transform and disrupt the world in a way that sounds like it's going to harm maybe the majority of people to benefit a small number of people. Why is that the case?

43:16Why are they designing it in that way? Why aren't they trying to find ways to create technologies that can solve the problems we have rather than create new, worse problems? So I think a fundamental problem is that these technologies are now being designed by people in the private sector with nothing more than a profit motive. Whereas in the past, some of the biggest, most transformative technologies we have came out of government for the public good, for national security, for some other incentive, trying to solve the problem in a different way. And so I don't know how you can fix that problem as long as we're going to let a handful of extremely wealthy megalomaniacs guide the progress.

44:02But you don't think that the mindset of this handful of people who you've highlighted as being part of the nerd-rike idea is the dominant mindset in Silicon Valley. There seems to be a range. I talked to a lot of people in the Valley, a lot of CEOs, founders, and very few of them seem to be strongly aligned with this libertarian objectivist group. Some are sort of like, oh, this will pass. I kind of didn't like the Biden policies. And so maybe this is a bit better. Some are actively anti the direction that this administration, this government is going, but hey, they got a business to run, so they're trying to keep their heads down.

44:50Isn't there the idea that some of these people actually could do or try or support something different? Well, it depends on who wins. Silence is complicity. And people sometimes get mad because they say, don't say all tech, don't say all Silicon Valley. Well, where are all the techies and Silicon Valley CEOs speaking out against this stuff? Where are the people standing up and say, you know what? I'm going to put my money against this. This is morally wrong. This is repugnant. We should do it another way. Silicon Valley per capita, I think, has the highest collection of cowardly CEOs in the world.

45:26They all want to hide under a rock and be on whatever side wins. And that's what I see. I don't see one really speaking out. That's a frequent criticism in this administration of the likes of Jeff Bezos and that Washington, owner of the Washington Post, and that Washington Post slogan, democracy dies in darkness. Now it's, I wonder, is that a prophecy or was it a warning? Was it a prediction? He seems to have taken a different slant on trying to not be in direct opposition to the Trump administration, no? Well, definitely. He wants to keep all of his government contracts. And, you know, he's gutted an editorial board that would have been a big voice in a time like this, right?

46:14Speaking as a conscience of the nation. And he has some childish idea that he can just be for freedom and economic markets without those meaning things that are political. You know, he I think Bezos is totally going for self-interest. And like I said, I think if Trump declared that democracy was over, you wouldn't hear a peep from the Washington Post or from Jeff Bezos. They just want to be on the side that's winning, to steal a phrase from Bob Dylan. And that to me is part of the most scary thing about it all. Growing up in this country, I grew up in a very conservative place. I think when I was really young, I sort of had some Republican leanings just because of what I was surrounded by.

46:54And it was a very patriotic town. And a lot of people in my family enlisted in the military for no particular reason. And it was considered a thing to do. You serve your country. And it's amazing to grow up and to realize, you know, as I head toward 50, that so many people just don't believe in anything and don't believe in this country and don't really care what happens to it as long as they get theirs. And that is just not the way I ever thought it would be. That's been a bit of a surprise to me. And if you can't have a little bit of courage when you have billions and billions of dollars, I think, you know, the value of that money is suspect.

47:30And I think it's going to take millions of Americans who are not billionaires to save this country. And then we're going to have a lot of questions for all these rich people who sat around just watching it burn. We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.

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49:50We're back with the NerdRike author Gil Duran talking about the collapse of trust in institutions like the media that may have created a vacuum for anti-democracy ideas to flourish. As you're talking and we've talked about the collapse or weakening of many institutions, you've worked for big media companies. You've worked for California politicians. And now you're independent. So in a way, perhaps, the disillusionment with institutions and their ability to execute on truth or moving the needle, maybe you're living that out now, no? Well, I'd say it's more a situation where billionaires in technology have killed journalism jobs.

50:34Oh, I would have definitely been at a publication if there had been one. It was a hard struggle last year to find a way to make ends meet and still write the stories I wrote for the New Republic. I don't know if people know what freelance pays these days, but I wrote five major stories, and it got me about a month's worth of rent in San Francisco. So you don't make your money off the writing. You write on the side, and you find other ways to survive. And I think that we were talking earlier about technology taking jobs. Do you remember the Mercury News in 1998 compared to now? I do. So there was a bit of a decimation.

51:07So I would – I think the bigger problem, there's the economics of it where any place you go – I was at the B. I was at the Examiner. It's just layoffs all the time. It gets a bit depressing, and then the rules get tighter and tighter, and there's just constant panic and trying to remake whatever the publication is to meet some target that some new person has because the last person failed. And, you know, I was actually going to leave journalism, but I found this story and I felt like I got to tell the story. Maybe that's the last story I'll tell as a journalist. So I did it. But fortunately, I mean, there are positive parts of technology.

51:42It doesn't all have to be controlled by a handful of fascists. Right. And we deserve technology as well. We deserve technology that doesn't come with the threat of losing our freedom, of losing our identity, of losing our way of life. And ironically, technology has created this system now where I can have direct subscribers and do my work and reach people on podcasts on YouTube, etc. So we're all sort of in this soup. And my argument is not that technology is bad. I'm an early adopter of everything. I just got a new e-bike. It's that we don't have to live under the boot of these people because they're at some company that creates something.

52:21There should be more of a public ownership of some of these things as well. Unpack some of that, because as you said, you are not a Luddite. In fact, you are embracing lots of technology in how you're distributing this nerd-rike message, newsletter, podcast. You're using some AI in how the message is formulated and distributed. Tell me about that. Well, I forbade that on the podcast. We're using Adobe now using – I use Shutterstock. I prefer real human images. There was a moment early on when I used a bit of OpenAI, the image generation. It was like a new toy, right? And I use it actually to depict the future that some of these guys won.

53:07Actually, Balaji Srinivasan had talked about this gray pride parade where all the techies would wear gray uniforms and march down Market Street in San Francisco with police and drones flying overhead. So I literally plugged in his phrase into OpenAI, into Dali, and it created this terrifying, horrific image, actually kind of like Trump's parade over the weekend. But the more I have had conversations with people and talked about this stuff, the more uncomfortable I've become with using those tools. And I think we're seeing right now this phase of an AI art aesthetic that's going to look really bad in a few years, right?

53:41Especially when you think about the amount of theft and robbery taking place to create these little toys and the idea that it boils a swing pool or something in order to degenerate it. So I have made it clear that I don't want AI in my images. Use a shutterstock. I think most people who are looking for the words anyway. And actually, I've got a NerdWrite art project underway, and I'm going to work with a real artist on it, even though people are like, just use AI. I don't think we can get to a point where we just use AI as long as it's going to enrich these guys. That's the same reason I'm not on Substack.

54:17I started on Substack, but a lot of my readers were like, how can you be on Substack? It's Andreessen Horowitz are one of the main investors in this. And at first I was hesitant, and Substack made it really easy to start a newsletter and monetize it. But there are alternatives. There's a nonprofit I use now, Ghost. And in fact, they take a smaller percentage of your pay. of your pay and I've had bigger growth on it because it really does depend on your content. You're not going to become a big sub stack writer with a crappy blog, right? If you're a good writer, you can take it elsewhere. So, you know, I think we all have to navigate these relationships.

54:51There's no way to be perfect. Just like, you know, we use fossil fuels. We eat products that might be harvested under unethical conditions, but we have to strive to be more conscious of our relationships with these technologies and to do better if we can. Sounds like farm to table technology. So, okay, there are boundaries around what you're willing to do. You axed out the AI stuff. That's kind of like being like, okay, I'm not going to import that meat from that far away and burn all those fossil fuels. You're still using, you're still podcasting. You're still using the internet, right? It's technology.

55:23What are you finding about the feedback that you're getting? What's driving the growth and the engagement on the platforms where people are hearing your thesis and the guests who you're speaking with. I think people have been looking for a way to make sense of what's happening. And this has been a missing piece of the puzzle. Right. What's happening with Silicon Valley, it's rightward turn, it's mating up with MAGA and these weird ideas that we see coming out, like the Freedom City taking Greenland and giving it to Praxis, which is a company funded by Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen.

56:00People wonder, why is all this happening? And no one's been telling a cohesive narrative in the mainstream press about why it's happening. And that's very much been my focus. And look, last year, I think to a lot of people, this seemed like conspiratorial stuff. Or like you said earlier, it seemed weird. Well, we live in weird times. And we got some conspiratorial people on the scene. And I think that the press is finally starting to catch up to what I was trying to say last year. And look, if Kamala Harris had won, it would look like I had gone down a very strange rabbit hole. And it wouldn't have been clear why, because this stuff would have been pushed back a few years.

56:35I think it still would have been relevant, but it would have been pushed back. But even I didn't expect it to accelerate this quickly. I didn't think it'd be Elon Musk in the White House doing Curtis Yarvin's retire all government employees plan. I didn't think that Trump would be pushing already to build these freedom cities and take Greenland for the purpose of doing that. This has gone much faster and much further than I expected so far. And now we've got people like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong openly talking about Bitcoin replacing the dollar as a global reserve currency, which is another thing I've been talking about for a couple of years, right, which would have some dramatic effects on this country and its standing in the world.

57:17So unfortunately, this stuff ended up being a lot more important than it should have been. And I hope journalists at the big papers and publications with massive followings will start to tune in and tell people because what I have found is that people really want to know. And once you explain it to them, they understand it. They have the tools to understand what's happening. And a democracy, information is necessary for citizens to make the right decisions. And I don't see why people are censoring an important part of this story. And I spent my life as a journalist at establishment newspapers, working for establishment politicians.

57:58I'm a pretty solid, evidence-based guy. And I think that this generation of political editors at papers like The Washington Post and The New York Times should be known as the generation of failure for completely missing this story. And the fact that they're racing to do it now proves the point. Well, let's close on a hopeful note then. Paint for me. Get out your greens and yellows, perhaps. Paint for me the picture of how America, how society, maybe even how tech works its way out of this situation. You alluded earlier to the non-billionaires rising up and pursuing a different end. How might that happen?

58:43What does it take? Well, I think that this is going to take millions of people in the street on a regular basis. We have to get through the current crisis, right? And these tech oligarchs have to see that they're playing a very dangerous game by cozying up to Trump and facilitating his fantasies of an authoritarian transformation of this country. Over time, though, I think we have to reckon with the fact that these people have enough money to be an ongoing threat and to try this again. And so I think it's going to take an awareness of the role that billionaires play in our society and a political movement to demand leaders who are willing to address that problem.

59:23What kind of leaders? During the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement rose up and there was this move toward, I'm not going to say exactly leaderless, but decentralized approaches to movements. And if I haven't tested this out, so, you know, poke holes in it, if you will. But the Republican Party, the right, has become more centralized in Donald Trump than at any time, I would argue, in our lifetimes. Even those who don't agree with large portions, Republicans who don't agree with large portions of what he said, many of them are falling in line. And it's led to this early ability of the Trump administration to make massive progress.

1:00:11So if you're painting a picture of how things might swing the other way, is decentralization the answer or does there need to be the rise of a different kind of charismatic figure, dangerous as those might be, to help people believe? I don't think it has to be one charismatic figure. I think it has to be a movement that speaks to the real needs of people. Like I said earlier, 60 percent of Americans can't afford the basics. If the Democratic Party can't find a way to make use of that, well, then I guess it's lights out. And you've got AOC and Bernie Sanders going around drawing tens of thousands of people in traditionally conservative areas.

1:00:50People are looking for leaders who speak to their basic core values and issues. And the Democratic Party just wants to play tag along with crypto. They want to be a lighter version of the Republican Party. And I think that way lies doom. And I think especially with these younger people coming up today, they are not in the mood, especially after the next four years, for some half-baked, mealy-mouthed political party that tells them that the status quo is also the future. So one way or another, we're going to get sold a vision of that future, and it's going to be this fascist tech dystopia or it's going to be something that serves the majority of people and preserves the ideas of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law.

1:01:37And again, if the Democratic Party can't find a way to message that, then someone else will come along and do it for them. Like who? Oh, I don't know. I don't think the leader has yet appeared, but people like AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mom Donnie in New York seem to be tapping into something very powerful. And if the Democrats aren't going to do it, then someone else will. All right. Gil Doran, the podcast and newsletter is The Nerd Reich. The book, also called The Nerd Reich? The Nerd Reich, Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. Now we're early, but you're writing it. How far out should people look for this to perhaps appear?

1:02:17Well, definitely. But how far out should people look for it to appear on shelves? Oh, 2026. But if you want to keep up with the progress, it's thenerdrike.com and it's free. Oh, there's like a progress bar going across? Well, I'm giving people some updates and you can kind of see where I'm going with stuff, you know. Gil, thank you. This has been Decoder. Thank you.

1:02:42I'd like to thank Gil Duran for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed it. You can find Gil's ongoing work over at thenerdrike.com. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this show or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at decoder at the verge. They really do read every email or hit me up directly on X or LinkedIn. I'm at John Fort on all platforms. Decoder also has a TikTok and an Instagram. Check those out at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

1:03:20Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stapp. The show is edited by Urso Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time. Thank you.