gjm on Nostr: This may well be an important and very correct and necessary book, but I really ...

This may well be an important and very correct and necessary book, but I really really dislike the title.

By and large, the actual nerds of Silicon Valley -- the engineers and programmers and whatnot -- aren't fascist or authoritarian at all. (Even, I _think_, the ones who work for the most blatantly evil tech companies: even a lot of employees at bloody _Palantir_ turn out to have been worried by its embracing of fascism.)

The people who are disproportionately fascist (or fascist-adjacent, or out past fascism and on the other side, or otherwise anti-democratic and generally awful) are not the nerds but the venture capitalists and big-tech-company CEOs. Some of them _started out_ as nerdy engineering types, but that's not what they are any more. (And most of them seem to have been idealistic liberals back when they were nerds. They became fascists when they _stopped_ being nerds and started being Masters of the Universe.)

It's a conspiracy of billionaires and their hangers-on, not of nerds. Nerds get enough hate and contempt without encouraging people to blur the lines between them and the bastards who own the companies some of them work for.

For the avoidance of doubt: yes, some individual nerds (e.g., Curtis Yarvin) are appalling authoritarians; yes, lots of nerds are working for companies that do evil and you can make a good case that that makes them complicit. But the people who deserve that word "Reich" attached to them are not generally the nerds.

(Declaration of interest: I am myself by any reasonable definition a nerd, I have never worked in Silicon Valley, I despise authoritarianism, and part of what bothers me is seeing People Like Me unfairly associated with fascism.)