Hello. In 3 hours at 3pm ET, we're going to get together and discuss the Introduction and first chapter of The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán.

I'm curious how you're all coming at this book and the topics within it - how much of Silicon Valley "history" are you aware of (let's say 1950 to 1999)? How much do people know about Peter Thiel, for instance, who was the subject of a considerable part of the first chapter this week?

After reading the introduction, I'm hoping this book gives us a much clearer understanding of the motivations and worldviews of tech billionaires who made their fortunes before the 2000s, whose ideas draw on explicitly eugenicist, fascist texts and ideologies, and if/how understanding where these people are coming from can teach us what to expect from (and how to respond to) the current crises implicating data centers, surveillance infrastructure, the rollback of bodily autonomy rights such as access to abortion, and the ongoing apartheid and accelerating genocide of Palestine by a settler-colony state.

I'm really pleased to see a couple of books that I've been variously aware of (Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto and Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture are both excellent reads), and I'm looking forward to however this book puts a lot of the 80s and 90s into focus.

Maybe this is coming across thematically, but this book is a change of pace in that it's much more historically situated, much more interested in the specific consequential actors at a particular time (mostly) in a particular place of Silicon Valley. I'm really keen to change gears and learn about this history of my "hometown", about which I regrettably have pretty flimsy critical knowledge.

PS: I don't want to leave out that I'm fascinated by Thiel's apparent decades-long obsession with currencies (probably to the chagrin of the investors whose money he lost in the 90s). I don't usually go for the observation that billionaires are generally talentless losers who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and maybe psychologically more willing to do awful things to people (mostly because it largely goes without saying, but also because the narrative trope of "this famous guy failed repeatedly until he succeeded" is so coded as inspirational that I want to be careful to make sure that we're all ridiculing billionaires like Thiel and Musk, not "admiring their determination" or something), but something about him clearly, visibly, sweatingly, being obsessive and alienating is really fascinating. Maybe because it seems like it might be politically useful to point out that one of the 3 or 4 guys pushing AI everywhere gives unsolicited lectures about the antichrist about 2x as much as he seems to talk about AI, so really he's more like a "theological crank with money" rather than a "tech billionaire with fringe philosophical views". How long can this PS get... One last thought: "Mencius Moldbug" is such a hack name that I would've thought only JK Rowling could come up with it.

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.