Gil Duran

1 week ago | thenerdreich.com | Gil Duran

The Washington Post finally got around to discovering Curtis Yarvin, the anti-democracy San Francisco blogger who Vice President JD Vance — his #1 fan — calls a “neoreactionary fascist.”“Before gutting the federal workforce became Elon Musk’s job, it was Curtis Yarvin’s dream,” wrote Peter Jamison and Elizabeth Dwoskin in a May 8 story headlined “Curtis Yarvin helped inspire DOGE. Now he scorns it.”“Yarvin is the brain,” one unnamed source told the Post, explaining Yarvin's influence.

1 week ago | thenerdreich.com | Gil Duran

— 2 min read In this short documentary (25 minutes), Al Jazeera's Listening Post examines the historical roots of tech authoritarianism. It looks back at the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, which sought to merge the United States, Canada, Greenland and Mexico while imposing a new system of rule by tech elites. Sound familiar? Spoiler alert: Elon Musk's grandfather was a supporter of the Technocracy movement (before moving to South Africa).

1 week ago | thenerdreich.com | Gil Duran

“Billionaires building bunkers to survive an AI apocalypse, attempting to disrupt death through cryopreservation, scouting the planet for pop-up cities and network states — are not reliable stewards of the collective good.” — Dr. Ruha BenjaminI highly recommend this talk from Dr. Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In "Who Owns the Future?

1 week ago | thenerdreich.com | Gil Duran

What happens when a once-“good” billionaire buys a newspaper — then goes full MAGA? That’s the story at the Los Angeles Times, where owner and publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong, once hailed as a savior, has become a destroyer. In 2024, he banned the LAT editorial board — known for its scathing criticism of Trump — from endorsing Kamala Harris. This triggered the collapse of the paper's the Pulitzer-winning editorial board.

1 week ago | thenerdreich.com | Gil Duran

tech fascism — 23 min read Are Donald Trump and Elon Musk done? Moments like these spawn many grand theories. Some people think Musk and Trump are playing four-dimensional chess to trick everyone. Others claim it’s a plot to remove Trump and install JD Vance as president. Another camp insists it’s all a distraction wrapped in a distraction. The reality is simpler—and potentially more dangerous. Musk and Trump are volatile men with gigantic egos.