When I first started seeing coverage of what seemed like a deranged plan from the Trump administration to take over Greenland, I felt like I was losing my mind. Not because I didn’t understand the plot, but because none of the coverage of it seemed to grasp what was really going on. How had every large media outlet somehow missed the very public way in which the “PayPal mafia”—a crew of Silicon Valley founders and investors that orbits around Peter Thiel and Elon Musk—had been talking about buying Greenland in the years leading up to Trump’s second term?
Or the celebration from Dryden Brown, founder of the Thiel-backed company Praxis, on X when Trump appointed PayPal co-founder Ken Howery as his ambassador to Denmark? Praxis had tried to “buy Greenland” just a year or so prior and was still planning to build a techno-utopian, deregulated city there. According to plan. https://t.co/qB8fg5aMiG — Praxis (@praxisnation) December 22, 2024 Yes, there are critical minerals in Greenland, and yes, it is strategically important in a melting world, but equally as important, it has been a touchstone for the “Network State” movement for years.
And no one was mentioning it! Which is why I was so relieved to come across Gil Durán’s “The Nerd Reich” newsletter and corresponding series in The New Republic. Durán had been writing for a year about the Network State—the idea that democracy has run its course and that we’d all be better off living in “special economic zones,” little fiefdoms ruled by tech CEOs.
Disrupt democracy with feudalism! He had also written about the role Silicon Valley had played in warping the information ecosystem, a story central to the book I was working on. So I reached out to him to talk about it and we’ve traded messages ever since.
I was thrilled to see the announcement of his book by the same (great) name, The Nerd Reich, announced last year and even more thrilled to see it become a bestseller this year. Suddenly, even mainstream media seems to be waking up to the fact that the tech billionaires might not be the good guys. While Gil’s book tells the story of the Nerd Reich’s ideology and approach to amassing political capital, my book, Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, looks at how they’ve warped and weaponized the information ecosystem to accomplish their goals, using many of the same tactics other industries have used over the past century.
It felt like a good time to talk about where the two intersect. Here is a snapshot of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. Amy Westervelt: Let’s talk about this weird little book, The Sovereign Individual, that shaped so much of Peter Thiel’s thinking.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
