Silicon Valley Fascism & Fascist Biopolitics: My Convo w/Tech Journalist Gil Durán
Plus my essays on technofascists in history
It’s important to understand the ideas and protagonists of what tech journalist Gil Durán calls Silicon Valley fascism. So I am making available to everyone the video of my conversation with Gil, who writes The Nerd Reich newsletter which focuses on extremist tech politics, and is writing the book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy.
I am also including a roundup of my writings on Fascist biopolitics and on Musk and DOGE’s danger to democracy. I believe that knowledge of history and, in my case, how autocrats think and act, allows you to separate the signals from the noise while things are unfolding in the present. I have found it also helps me to forecast what may develop in the future. I feel it is important to “show my work” and document my early intuitions and thoughts about what we could expect from the Trump administration.
Being prepared mentally is important to effective resistance efforts, and Lucid aims to help with that.
Here is the video:
Fascist Biopolitics and Population Engineering
Gil and I spoke about the obsession of Peter Thiel and Musk with population (re)engineering and the creation of White ethno-states. My 2021 essay on the original Fascist biopolitics may be helpful as background, since it links population redesign to state repression.
The “civilizational emergency” rhetoric in the White House National Security document, which has long been aired by Vance, Miller, and others of this administration, has a Fascist history we all need to be aware of.
Tracking Musk and the DOGE Danger to Democracy
I wrote this warning piece in December 2024 about Musk. Here are a few excerpts:
Although his companies have been the subject of at least 20 recent investigations, Musk will likely neither go through any formal confirmation process nor be vetted by anyone as he ascends to the highest levels of authority. He has already been intervening heavily in Republican politics as a funder, enforcer, diplomat, and de facto policymaker.
Musk seems fully invested in enabling a new world order favorable to autocracy. That means helping the Kremlin help the world’s democracies to decline precipitously, starting with the United States…The “Department of Government Efficiency” will be an Orwellian test case for disrupting society through economic “shock events” that paralyze governance and create mass misery.
And so it has been, with DOGE the vehicle created to infiltrate the financial and other systems of a sovereign power in a way that has never been done before. Gil and I spoke about DOGE, which I called “a new kind of coup” two weeks after Trump’s inauguration. I knew we were living through something unprecedented, and an aim of Lucid has been to find the language to describe it. What we call things matters a lot.
And here is a June “progress report” or better, democracy devolution update, on DOGE as key to the United States becoming a laboratory of innovation to the autocratic playbook. Other than the heroic WIRED, most of the media had lost interest in DOGE, which allowed it to perpetrate its data heists and other nefarious agendas in even more secrecy.
Finally, my December essay, originally written for Project Syndicate, on the multiple ways Trump has updated autocratic formulas, with an end-of-year look at the damage DOGE and Musk and other technofascists have done to America. I re-upped the TIME cover image of Musk as co-President because this can be read a sign of Trump’s weakness from the start.
It has been quite a year and I am so grateful to all of you who read Lucid and support my work.
So glad you are doing this. He is terrific, and so are you. Thanks Ruth.
I loved the climate crisis film, "Don't Look Up," but a lot of people thought it was too over the top, especially the subplot about the billionaire who wanted to found a new colony of humans on another planet. I think McKay & Sirota were spot on and that part of the film has far more (and more sinister, if possible) meaning now.