American Conversations: Technology Reporter Gil Duran
Historian Heather Cox Richardson speaks with Gil Duran, one of the earliest voices to sound the alarm about the tech elite’s dystopian vision for society. In this conversation, Duran discusses the troubling influence of blogger Curtis Yarvin, explores the concept of the ‘network state,’ and unpacks what some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures envision for our future.
Timeline
00:00 – Start
00:40 – Welcome
01:09 – Who is Curtis Yarvin?
02:32 – What is “Dark Enlightenment”? How do people like Yarvin think about American politics and American society?
04:20 – “The Sovereign Individual,” Peter Thiel
06:11 – A new kind of society where tech bros rule
07:00 – Where did Yarvin come from?
08:22 – The Neo-Reactionary movement/Dark Enlightenment
09:40 – Undermining existing institutions to establish new
10:10 – Interface between religion and Neo-Reactionary systems, “tech theocracy”
15:05 – Network states
19:30 – Using democracy for arguing against it
22:27 – So what do we do?
