Publishers Weekly
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This transfixing debut from journalist Durán investigates the antidemocratic ideologies espoused by tech billionaires linked to the second Trump administration. In 2025, Durán notes, many observers were surprised to see the leaders of Silicon Valley, previously presumed to be “a quirky... bastion of liberal ideas,” aligning themselves with Trump. Some, like Elon Musk, served in his administration; others, like Peter Thiel, closely associated with Vice President Vance. However, the author argues that “tech’s authoritarian turn has been years in the making,” starting with Thiel’s late-’90s obsession with James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s treatise The Sovereign Individual, which depicts “a coming... revolution—fueled by technology—that would enable wealthy entrepreneurs and investors to overthrow... governments.” From there, Durán tracks tech leaders’ increasing attacks on liberal democracy, along the way delineating the ideological and personal quirks of their primary thinkers, among them blogger Curtis Yarvin, who advocates for “corporate dictatorship”—and who has a habit of hiding “in a closet with the lights off and think of what an asshole he ” after psychedelic-fueled online trolling binges. Many of the theories Durán covers are unsettlingly divorced from reality—such as former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan’s vision of future Americans wearing “shirts emblazoned with corporate logos to signify their tech affiliations,” or Thiel’s ideas about a tech-driven Antichrist. It’s an ominous look at an insular elite arrayed against American democracy. (Aug.)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A report from the trenches on Silicon Valley’s totalitarian yearnings. No one elected Elon Musk. The Constitution forbids him from becoming president. Yet, writes longtime San Francisco tech reporter Durán, he “found a workaround,” contributing almost $300 million to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign to “buy himself a kind of co-presidency.” The effects of his DOGE rampage were immediate, dismantling regulatory agencies that monitored Musk and his fortunes—as well as those of Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and other exponents of a kind of libertarianism that has morphed, Durán writes, into “tech fascism.” The first tenet, as Thiel—the sponsor of JD Vance and many other Trump lieutenants—once proclaimed, is that democracy is the enemy of freedom, which is to say, the kind of unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism that Silicon Valley’s oligarchs wish to enshrine. The oligarchs have a theoretician in Curtis Yarvin, who proposes that the president be replaced by a monarchical CEO (with a tech pedigree)—just one of his “radically unhinged ideas [that] evolved from a blogger’s musings into a serious effort to undo democracy that would be adopted by a presidential administration.” Other antidemocratic projects include Balaji Srinivasan’s exhortation that those with the means “‘exit’ American democracy for life in privatized micro-nations called network states,” an idea that aligns with efforts to create “freedom cities” in easily bought-off countries, such as Honduras. Other gains in the second Trump administration are the direct results of Silicon Valley’s right-wing radicalization, thanks to big-ticket players “who had used crypto to capture the election, AI to seize government.” In doing so, they have gained immense power without any checks. Durán closes by proposing reforms that include ending the reign of the billionaires by expropriating their wealth through taxation: “We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy.” A detailed guidebook for understanding why Big Tech now seeks not just wealth but political domination. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.