Hello. In 3 hours at 3pm ET, we're going to chat one last time about The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán. This week we read chapters 7 ("Antichrist") and 8 ("The Future"), so we'll probably talk more about those chapters, but if you have other thoughts about the book as a whole, this is your chance to discuss them.

My overriding thought through chapter 7 is less about the global crises which Thiel, Tan, and others seem to be determined on hastening (but I really cannot get past that either), and more about the bewildering fact that these billionaires can write "rambling lectures" and just go around the world both torturously lecturing people about this garbage.

In a way, it feels like salt on the wound of the reality that billionaire-underwritten tech companies can relentlessly push chatbot keychains¹ and other crap on us for years; before that it was NFTs; before that it was virtual reality or something, idk. Completely independent of the merit (or lack of merit) of these ideas, the world is forced to endure the ripple effects of corrosive billionaires' ideas about how to organize society. To use collective market power to discourage this kind of stuff by boycotting these technologies seems insufficient to influence a guy worth 25 billion dollars (a sum of money that none of us can realistically comprehend; hell, if that much money was split up between all of us in this group, even our shares of that would be difficult to comprehend).

... Which leads me to the last chapter. I think if you have a limited amount of time before the reading group today, you should read the last chapter for some of Durán's thoughts about how to move forward. Facing this as a political assault and not narrowly as a technical advance, challenging ourselves to develop our capacity for imagination, to imagine realities that seem (or indeed currently are) impossible - a world without billionaires in the first place.

Today I'd love to chat about imaginations, and about what we can do to make today's outlandish dream a possible future soon.

When you're ready to join at 3p ET, you can click on this link or you can go here:

https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom

See you then.