The Nerd Reich

As you may be aware, I have just completed a book about the “tech right,” which will come out next year. I don’t lack competition when it comes to this topic, and a few months back, I attempted to get ahead of it with a review of several related titles. One of the books I considered there was Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich, which came out in August. I didn’t say so in so many words, but it was the worst of the books I discussed, by a long shot.

Durán’s polemical flair comes at the expense of analytical precision when he tries to characterize the ideology of Trump-aligned tech leaders. Mussolini, he explains, “sought to bundle every institution of Italian society under unified state authority”—hence the term “fascism,” from fascio, meaning “bundle”; comparably, he declares, “tech fascism bundles powerful technologies … toward authoritarian goals.” Of the many attempts to apply the f-word to Trump and adjacent figures, this etymological red herring is particularly unconvincing. Is the defining feature of fascism really “bundling” different things together?