On Gil Durán's The Nerd Reich, the democracy we're being asked to grieve, and the exit Art of FACELESS is actually proposing
By Lloyd Lewis, founder of Art of FACELESS and Awen Null, author of The Hollow Circuit®
Gil Durán's interview in the Guardian — trailing his book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, out 18 August — is one of the better pieces of journalism to come out of this beat in a while, and it deserves to be read in full before anyone, including us, argues with it (Steve Rose, the Guardian). Durán does the unglamorous work: he traces Peter Thiel's fascination with James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg's 1997 book The Sovereign Individual through to Balaji Srinivasan's "network states," follows Curtis Yarvin's pseudonymous "dark enlightenment" blogging into JD Vance's mouth almost word for word, and lines up the receipts: Thiel's 2009 essay declaring freedom and democracy incompatible, Marc Andreessen paraphrasing Mussolini's co-author in a "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," the tech CEOs standing behind Trump at his second inauguration, Musk's DOGE taking a chainsaw to the federal government that built him. It is a genuinely useful map of how a handful of Bay Area men decided that the future should be theirs, alone, and then spent two decades building the infrastructure to make that decision stick.
We are not here to relitigate whether that map is accurate. It largely is. We're here because we read it as writers who have spent fourteen years building a transmedia project — The Hollow Circuit® — whose entire premise is that unaccountable power doesn't announce itself with a swastika, it announces itself with a manifesto, a keynote, and a very good PR team. Durán's reporting is our genre. Which is exactly why we think the piece — and the frame around it — has a hole in the middle, and why we think that hole matters more than anything Durán actually got wrong.
The article's central emotional register is loss. Durán talks about the "war on democracy," about Silicon Valley abandoning "our friend," about a country sliding towards a future where, in his own words, "we don't have democracy, we don't have an economy and we don't have a future." The implicit timeline is: democracy was functioning, then Thiel and Yarvin and Musk showed up and broke it.
That timeline doesn't survive contact with the historical record.
In August 1971, a corporate lawyer named Lewis Powell — two months before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court — wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled "Attack on American Free Enterprise System." It called for business to systematically capture the courts, the universities, the media, and the legislature to defend capital against the "broad attack" of consumer, labour, and environmental movements (Washington and Lee University Powell Memorandum archive; Greenpeace USA's analysis). That memo is widely credited as the founding document of the modern think-tank, PAC, and corporate-lobbying infrastructure that now runs through Washington — and it predates Thiel's birth by four years.
In 2010, the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling stripped away a century of restrictions on corporate political spending, formally fusing private wealth and electoral power in a way even the majority's critics conceded was a rupture point (Brennan Center for Justice; Wikipedia summary of the case). Fifteen years before a single tech founder took a MAGA stage, the legal architecture for buying a government outright was already built and case-law-approved.
And in 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page ran the numbers on 1,779 actual U.S. policy decisions and found something blunter than either of those stories: "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy," while economic elites and organised business interests moved outcomes on their own (Gilens and Page, Perspectives on Politics, summarised by Physicians for a National Health Program). That finding is over a decade old and it predates the current tech-oligarch moment entirely. It describes American democracy as it already was, before anyone had heard of a "network state."
We're not saying this to score a pedantic point. We're saying it because "losing democracy" is a framing that assumes a fall from grace, and the fall from grace had already happened, quietly, through lobbying, campaign finance law, and a captured regulatory state, decades before Silicon Valley's money showed up to finish the job in public. Thiel, Yarvin, and Musk didn't invent the mechanism. They inherited a fully operational one, built by an older generation of corporate lawyers and lobbyists who never needed a "dark enlightenment" blog to get what they wanted — because the system Powell designed already gave it to them, legally, quietly, and with bipartisan cooperation. Capitalism's insidious, decades-long capture of policymaking is the actual precondition for the "tech fascism" Durán describes. What's new isn't the capture. What's new is that the capturers have stopped pretending to be embarrassed about it.
This is where the piece's implicit counter-argument gets shakier, and to be fair to Durán, he half-notices it himself. He tells the Guardian that the Democratic Party has "failed tremendously to stand up to billionaire power because the only people as addicted to billionaire money in American politics as the Republicans are the Democrats." He singles out California governor Gavin Newsom — a "Silicon Valley Democrat" — as someone who will criticise Trump and Vance by name but never Thiel.
Sit with that for a second, because it's the whole argument of this section in one quote from Durán's own mouth: the two-party liberal-democratic system he's implicitly asking us to defend is already billionaire-financed on both sides. That's not a Silicon Valley innovation either — it's the Citizens United and Powell Memo architecture doing exactly what it was built to do, across the entire spectrum, not just the MAGA-aligned half of it. Positioning "Western democracy," and specifically the American variant, as the thing under existential threat treats a system that Gilens and Page already measured as functionally unresponsive to ordinary people as though it were the healthy baseline we're trying to protect. It isn't. It's the substrate the oligarchy grew out of. You cannot credibly offer "more of the system that produced Peter Thiel" as the antidote to Peter Thiel.
We want to be precise here, in line with our own editorial standards: this is not an argument that authoritarianism is preferable to liberal democracy, or that Trump, Musk, and Thiel's project is somehow equivalent to the flawed system it's replacing. It's an argument that the piece — like most mainstream coverage of this beat — reaches for "restore accountable democratic governance" as the counter-vision without asking whether the specific, Western, campaign-finance-soaked model of democracy on offer was ever actually built to be accountable to the people currently being asked to rally behind saving it. A cage with slightly wider bars is still a cage. The honest position is that both the current oligarchic acceleration and the version of democracy it's replacing were captured by concentrated capital — just at different speeds, with different aesthetics, and different levels of shame about it.
This isn't only an American story, and it would be a mistake for a UK-based collective to spend several thousand words on Silicon Valley's capture of Washington without naming what our own government has been doing in the same window, because it's the same mechanism, just quieter and delivered in the register of a civil-service press release rather than a keynote. In September 2024, the UK government designated data centres as Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) — the same legal category as energy and water supply — putting the buildings that run AI models on a par, legally, with the systems that keep the country alive (gov.uk). Since then, the reforms have moved in one direction only. The Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 scrapped the statutory requirement for pre-application consultation on Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, a category now open to data centres, specifically in order to cut roughly a year off the approval process and let developers bypass much of local council planning altogether (the Register). The government's own "AI Growth Zones" programme goes further still, promising to unlock up to £100 billion of investment and cut time-to-power by up to five years for qualifying data centres by removing what it calls "the biggest barriers to investment" — which, read plainly, means planning scrutiny and grid oversight (gov.uk, Delivering AI Growth Zones).
None of that policy programme binds a single one of those projects to account for water. A government-commissioned report on water use in AI and data centres admits as much itself, in language unusually blunt for a civil-service document: current UK water resource planning "does not account for the water needs of novel infrastructure or data centres," which it calls "a systemic planning failure" reflecting "a disconnect between the nation's digital economy growth ambitions and its fundamental resource management strategies" (UK government, Water Use in AI and Data Centres). That sentence was written by the government's own commissioned researchers, about the government's own growth strategy, in the same year much of England was living under hosepipe restrictions (the detail is below). This is what abandoning a duty of care looks like when nobody has to shout it from a stage: not a manifesto, not a salute, just a planning act quietly removing the requirement to ask the question, and a report quietly confirming that nobody answered it anyway.
This matters to the argument we're making about Durán's piece, not as a detour from it. The "war on democracy" he describes is framed as something happening to America, done by American tech billionaires, resisted or not by American politicians. Fair enough — that's his book's brief. But the underlying mechanism — regulatory capture dressed up as growth strategy, environmental and consultation safeguards stripped out in the name of a compute race nobody voted on directly — is operating in Westminster too, under a government of a different party, in a country with no Curtis Yarvin and no Peter Thiel anywhere near the room. Which is, again, the whole point of the earlier section: this isn't a Silicon Valley invention being exported. It's the same capture logic, arrived at independently by any government structure that lets concentrated capital write the growth strategy it will later be asked to regulate.
The piece is a profile, not a policy paper, and we're not holding Durán to a standard the format wasn't designed for. But it's worth naming plainly what the Guardian piece actually offers by way of a way out, because it's almost nothing. Durán's own closing lines are: "the question now is how we turn the momentum in our favour," that fighting billionaire power could be "a radicalising moment," that "every moment is an important opportunity to wake people up." That's a call to feeling, not a plan. It names the enemy in exhaustive, well-sourced detail and then gestures at "fighting back" without specifying what fighting back is actually built out of, beyond electing better Democrats — the same Democrats he's just told us are addicted to the same donor class.
We think that gap is structural, not a failure of Durán's as a writer. A piece written for, and largely consumed on, the same platforms and attention economy it's diagnosing has very little room to propose an exit from that economy, because the proposal would implicate the delivery mechanism itself. That brings us to the part of this where we have something concrete to say.
Here is the quiet contradiction running through almost the entire "resist the tech oligarchs" media genre, Durán's book tour included, and we say this as an observation about a format, not an accusation against any individual: the fight against X, Meta, and Google's concentration of power is being conducted, overwhelmingly, inside X, Meta, and Google. The banned tweet that opens the Guardian profile — Durán's "TLDR: Fascism" reply to Palantir — was, for the period it was live, ad-supported engagement inventory on Musk's own platform, sold against Musk's own ad stack, feeding Musk's own recommendation algorithm, before it got him banned. The book will be promoted through Instagram carousels, YouTube clips, and Google-indexed reviews. The Guardian's own reach depends substantially on the same platforms and the same Google Search index that its reporting critiques.
We've made this argument before, in narrower form, in our own position on AI scraping, Don't Feed the Machine, published on artoffaceless.com: you cannot credibly complain that a system is extracting and monetising you while handing it your labour in bulk, for free, on the exact rails it profits from. The same logic applies one level up, to the entire "hold Silicon Valley accountable" media ecosystem. Outrage about Thiel, posted into Meta's or X's feed, doesn't starve the platform. It feeds it a highly engaged, highly monetisable emotion — outrage is, after all, the best-performing content category on ad-supported feeds precisely because it drives the compulsive re-checking behaviour those feeds are engineered to produce. Every furious thread about tech oligarchy that stays on X instead of migrating away is, mechanically, revenue and engagement data handed to the company being condemned in the thread. That's not resistance. That's a very well-lit form of compliance.
We don't say this to be smug about it, because we haven't fully solved it either — more on that below. We say it because until "we must fight the platforms" stops being delivered through the platforms, at scale, it will keep losing, structurally, no matter how good the reporting is. Durán is right that the oligarchs "have a plan to win." Part of that plan is that the infrastructure used to organise against them is infrastructure they own.
Art of FACELESS has run for fourteen years on a set of policies that were built, mostly the hard way, in direct response to exactly this contradiction. We're publishing them here in full, not as a boast, but because "here's what we propose instead" only means something if it's checkable against something we already do, on the record, before this piece existed:
None of that is offered as a finished solution. It's offered as fourteen years of evidence that a project can build real, IP-protected, trademarked, revenue-generating work entirely outside the attention economy the Guardian piece rightly diagnoses as captured — without needing the version of "democracy" or "accountability" that produced the capture in the first place.
Here's where we go further than critique. We think the effective response to platform-owned oligarchy was never going to be better content posted on the oligarchs' platforms. It's mass departure, followed by re-connection through infrastructure nobody owns.
This has precedent, and it has already happened once, partially, at real scale. When Elon Musk took over Twitter and aligned the platform with Trump, thousands of users left in documented waves — 2.7 million active US users gone from X in two months at one point, Bluesky adding roughly 2.5 million in the same window, then over a million more in a single week around Trump's second inauguration, French researchers running an automated tool called HelloQuitX specifically to help people rebuild their networks elsewhere (the Guardian; Malay Mail on HelloQuitX). That proves the "leave en masse" half of the proposal is not a fantasy. People will move, in the millions, when a platform's ownership becomes intolerable enough.
But it proves the limits of that first move, too. Bluesky is still a venture-funded company, Threads is still Meta, and both still run on algorithmic feeds designed to maximise time-on-platform. Migrating from one attention-extraction machine to a nicer-looking attention-extraction machine is progress, not the destination. The actual second half of the proposal — the half almost nobody completes — is what the open web already solved once, before social platforms convinced everyone that visibility required surrender: blogrolls and webrings. Hand-curated, reciprocal links between independently owned sites, run by no algorithm, no engagement score, no ad auction, letting readers move from one person's owned space to another's by direct recommendation rather than by whatever a ranking system decided to surface that day (Wikipedia on webrings). The IndieWeb movement has kept this alive for years, not as nostalgia, but as working infrastructure — the IndieWebRing currently links independently run sites the same way webrings did in 1999, and a small but real "small web" movement has grown up around exactly this premise: your site, your domain, your feed, your rules (IndieWeb.org; IndieWeb small web).
Our proposal, plainly stated: the most effective act of resistance available to any creator, journalist, or reader currently doomscrolling coverage of the "tech fascists" is to leave the platforms those fascists own, en masse, and reconnect through RSS feeds, blogrolls, newsletters, and owned domains instead. Not because it will be as convenient. Because convenience is the product being sold, and the price of that convenience is exactly the concentration of power Durán's book documents. We are actively building our own corner of this — an Art of FACELESS blogroll and webring, open to independent authors, musicians, and game developers who want to be found without being harvested — and we'd rather be one node among many than the only one doing it.
We coined the phrase "the Oligarchy of Light" in an earlier piece to describe something narrower than what Durán is writing about: the people, platforms, and capital pools — overwhelmingly concentrated in the Bay Area — who get to decide what counts as illuminated, fundable, and worth covering, while everyone else works in the unlit part of the frame. We meant it as a structural description, not fiction.
But it is also, deliberately, the name of the antagonist force in The Hollow Circuit® — and it's worth explaining why we let those two meanings collide on purpose, because this is where our fiction and our reporting are doing the same work. In the novel, the Oligarchy of Light are not human anymore. Two millennia of accumulated power let them evolve past the biological water-dependency that defines every other living thing on their world; they no longer need the water mass that keeps ordinary bodies alive, and they've replaced it with desiccants instead. And because they no longer need it, they ration it — control of a resource they've personally outgrown becomes one more lever of power over everyone who hasn't.
We wrote that years before this summer. Then England spent July 2026 under hosepipe bans covering more than 23 million people, Thames Water alone restricting 10 million customers as reservoirs sat at 77% of their normal seasonal level, while Water UK warned that the country's more than 450 AI data centres — heavily concentrated in the same drought-hit southern and eastern regions now under restriction — are drawing up to 6.6 million litres of drinking-quality water a day between them, a figure Water UK expects to nearly triple to 19.8 million litres daily by 2030 if the government's plan to triple data-centre capacity goes ahead, against a House of Lords warning of a 5-billion-litre-a-day shortfall in England by 2055 (the Guardian on the UK datacentre water warning; the Guardian on the hosepipe ban and AI). In Memphis, residents living near Musk's Colossus supercomputer site are already suing over gas-turbine noise and a promised water-recycling plant that still hasn't been built, while their own water and electricity bills rise (CNBC).
We're not claiming prophecy. We're pointing at a hyperstition loop we deliberately built into this project from the start — the premise, formalised as our registered trademark Hyperstition Architecture® that fiction and reportage can be made to run on the same track, each sharpening the other. The Oligarchy of Light doesn't need to be non-humanoid or two thousand years old for the metaphor to already be operative: a small, concentrated set of interests is already drawing down a resource ordinary households are being rationed on, to power infrastructure most of those households never asked for and don't control. That is not a distant, speculative future. It's the summer we just had.
We're publishing this as a long read on purpose, not a hot take. This piece — the historical case against "losing democracy" as a frame, the hypocrisy of platform-hosted platform criticism, the AOF policy stack, the open-web exit proposal, and the collision between our real-world coinage of the Oligarchy of Light and its fictional counterpart — is the shape of the book we intend to build and sell through our own storefront, not someone else's. Durán's The Nerd Reich will be reviewed and sold through the usual channels, and it should be — read it, it's good, and buy it somewhere that isn't Amazon if you can help it. Ours will be reviewed and sold the way everything else at Art of FACELESS is: built without a grant, promoted as a billboard pointing somewhere we own, and archived where nobody can scrape, ration, or gatekeep it out of existence.
We're not asking to be let into the Oligarchy of Light, real or fictional. We're building the thing it was never going to let us build inside its walls.
— Lloyd Lewis / Awen Null
Nature of this piece. This is editorial analysis and opinion commentary, not investigative reporting or a formal academic finding, unless explicitly labelled as a working paper with stated methodology. Where it draws on published reporting, primary documents, or public statements, each factual claim is sourced and linked at the point it's made. Where it offers interpretation, critique, or structural argument, that is presented as the author's analysis, clearly distinguished from sourced fact.
No allegation against named individuals. Nothing in this piece alleges bad faith, malicious intent, or specific wrongdoing by any named person, including Gil Durán, whose reporting we largely endorse and are critiquing at the level of frame, not integrity. Critiques of media format, funding structure, and the attention economy are directed at systems and structures, not at the character or motives of any individual journalist, author, or organisation.
Standing and positionality. The author, Lloyd Lewis, writes as the UK-based founder of Art of FACELESS and author of The Hollow Circuit® under the pen name Awen Null, with fourteen years of continuous, self-funded work on the themes discussed here. That standing is disclosed, not hidden, and is offered as relevant context for readers assessing the piece's perspective — not as a claim of neutrality.
Independence. Art of FACELESS is not affiliated with, funded by, or endorsed by Gil Durán, Simon & Schuster, the Guardian, or any organisation or individual named or discussed in this piece. No compensation has been received in connection with this piece.
Corrections and right of reply. If any factual claim in this piece is inaccurate, or if any person or organisation named here wishes to respond, contact artoffaceless.com directly. Verified corrections will be made promptly and transparently, with a visible correction note.
Sourcing standard. Every factual claim in this piece links to a public, dated, primary or independently reported source at the point it's made. A full reference list appears above.
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