Tech-bro fantasies are no longer sci-fi fringe —thanks to Trump

President Donald Trump has made it possible for out-of-touch tech bros to bring their most obviously impossible schemes to the inner halls of power, according to a recent report.

“You could not ask for a more complete and hair-raising compendium of the insane things that Silicon Valley moguls have said and advocated for than journalist Gil Durán’s new book, The Nerd Reich,” wrote Slate's Laura Miller on Sunday. “The book, based on a fiery newsletter Durán publishes about technology and the San Francisco Bay Area, identifies such billionaires as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel as the spiders at the center of a web of ‘philosophers,’ tech evangelists, start-up founders, and—most disturbingly—politicians who subscribe to a set of authoritarian ideas and plans for the future based on half-baked theories and an incomplete understanding of how the world works.”

From invading Greenland to preparing for the supposed impending arrival of the Antichrist (at least as defined by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel), these tech bro far right extremists have been able to implement much of their agenda during Trump’s second term.

“A key element of what Durán refers to as TESCREALism—after an acronym coined by computer scientist Timnit Gebru and philosopher Émile P. Torres—is a plan to set up ‘network cities,’ independent and regulation-free polities in which the supermen of Big Tech will be allowed to do whatever they like,” Miller pointed out. “Several such projects are currently in the works in locations ranging from Honduras to Sonoma County, though they have mostly encountered the strenuous opposition of the locals. Many advocates of network cities have their eye on Greenland, with its rich lodes of minerals and rare earth materials, as a potential site.”

Miller added that “by Durán’s account, most of these elites already seem to believe that any action of theirs can be justified by their superior intelligence. Balaji Srinivasan, an entrepreneur and investor who is a major proponent of the network state concept, made a speech at a conference in 2023 in which he described a San Francisco divided into tribes: blue and red, according to our current monikers for Democrats and Republicans, but also ‘grays,’ tech workers who must team up with the reds to crush the blues and take over such cities as San Francisco, creating tech-controlled gray ‘zones’ where blues would be banned.”

Yet despite their ability to claim more and more power, Miller noted that their ideas are usually impossible.

“As Durán points out, this mishmash of ideas tends to collapse under scrutiny,” Miller said. “(He quotes an astrophysicist dismissing Elon Musk’s cosmist fantasy of a Mars settlement by remarking ‘There’s no air—and the dirt is made of poison. You would just die.’)”

She concluded people became “this stupid” by “alorizing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs over several decades, exalting them as epochal geniuses. Sequestered in an enclave—complete with its own deeply complicit university—the tech sector held a flattering mirror up to itself, compounding its own myopia. The American propensity for worshipping the rich and equating their wealth with both intelligence and virtue supplied plenty of reinforcement for their hubris.”