(TL;DR: We no longer understand the reality around us and live in a state of growing confusion. The culprit is Silicon Valley, which is preparing a dystopian coup against democracy.)

Wherever you go these days, everyone expresses in one way or another that reality seems to have stopped making sense. Everything seems normal, but something just doesn’t add up. Absurd and incomprehensible things keep happening. They happen and accumulate at such a rate that it becomes increasingly difficult to understand anything. We live in a growing state of confusion.

This general uncertainty stops us in our tracks. It paralyses us. It is an anxious paralysis from which it is difficult to think clearly. It is terribly difficult to process the things that are happening, and even more difficult to remember them. And despite everything, the cognitive collapse does not prevent us from continuing to do our own thing. Everything is absurd, yes, but our life is still apparently normal, so we take refuge in it. We are suspended in this strange environment.

It’s as if, and we don’t know since when, there is a strange stain in the sky that shouldn’t be there, and we glance at it out of the corner of our eye on our way to work.

Hypernormality

The Russian historian Alexei Yurchak calls the situation in which we live today hypernormality. Yurchak coined the term to describe the social climate of the last years of the Soviet Union, in which, he says, everyone was aware that the system was about to collapse, but everyone pretended that nothing was happening. Citizens knew the system was breaking down. Politicians knew it. Everyone knew that everyone else knew too. But because no one could imagine a clear alternative, a simulacrum of normality eventually imposed itself.

Today’s hypernormality is similar to that of the last Soviet days. It seems that the system of values and certainties in which we grew up is collapsing, but we go on with inertia. We cling to the fiction of normality in our lives and pretend not to see how the strange stain in the sky grows day by day.

Why is it so hard for us to process things?
Where is this stain coming from?
What is going on?

I am writing this because I keep asking myself these questions, and lately the answer seems more and more obvious: Silicon Valley.

Blindness by design

This general crisis grips us at a time when our vision is a little strange. We are cognitively weak. This weakness is a direct consequence of having accepted Silicon Valley as a mediator between our lives and ourselves.

It seems exaggerated to say this, but if you think about it for a moment, you realise that it is true.

Where do we communicate most with our friends and family? How do we look for work? How do we work? How do we discover cultural trends and who sets the pace of our cultural consumption? How do we pay for things? How do we find out what is going on in the world? How do we remember what we have to do? How do we remember what we have done? How do we find a partner? How do we decide what is important? How do we decide who to listen to? How do we shut out the noise when we are tired? What do we do when we wake up and when we go to sleep?

For the vast majority of the population in the West, the answer to all these questions lies in the devices, applications and indicators developed by Silicon Valley. They have acquired immense and unprecedented power. They have become monopolistic intermediaries.

As intermediaries, they have also proven to be untrustworthy. They distort, twist, break, hide and amplify messages according to their interests.

And since, for us, the only way to have a strong voice in the world, a complete identity, is to play their game, we have learned to adapt what we say, do and think in order to thrive.

We have accepted, confused and submissive, a very specific way of life as if it were the only one possible.

A reality shattered into content

What is this way of life like?

First of all, Silicon Valley has changed the playing field of the internet. It has destroyed its original culture, based on the hyperlink that connects and contextualises, that of a linked, open and collective world, and gradually replaced it with a private communication industry based on the atomisation of information, served by recommendation algorithms. It is a culture based on the randomness and disconnection of its messages: it has shattered reality into a thousand pieces that it disorganises, disconnects and brands as content.

Processing reality in the form of a thousand pieces of content is the origin of our hypernormal confusion. We no longer search for what is happening, we “come across” things. We “come across” them in the form of waves made up of hundreds or thousands of daily contents, served up by a supposedly personalised funnel. All these messages circulate stripped of context, by inertia, and with an aim not to make us understand, or think, or remember, but simply to capture our attention for a few moments and turn it into information and currency. They are disposable.

This way of experiencing reality affects all areas of our lives, but it is particularly problematic in political discourse. The fragmented and noisy version of political discourse makes it very difficult to construct a coherent and shared story of the world. It is very difficult to construct a clear sense of reality based on atomised messages designed to attract attention.

Moreover, this accelerated and nihilistic way of perceiving reality makes us more cynical. We consume the world’s catastrophes as morsels of entertainment, which we can make disappear with a quick flick of the finger. Tired of Palestine? Here are some Frenchmen trying to hit the crossbar from midfield. Tired of DANA? Look at this gentleman losing his temper in the street!

This atomised, high-speed reception of reality wears down our capacity for real emotion. It is very difficult for anything to surprise us. The vocation of virality makes us suspicious of what we see and pollutes what we say. The inertia to attract attention encourages messages to become simpler, more aggressive, more absurd. Little by little, year after year, digital culture, the discourses and ideas that circulate, have suffered a progressive obfuscation.

The worst thing is that in this model that Silicon Valley has imposed on us, we each of us perceive reality completely alone, filtered through our opaque and untransferable relationship to an opaque algorithm. Can we think of a future political imaginary if we do not have fully shared spaces for conversation, free from this intermediary?

The short answer is “no”. We cannot understand reality because it has been broken down and mixed up to the point of becoming meaningless. We sense that serious things are happening, but in the form of the content we receive when we are alone, they do not seem entirely true, we cannot understand or process them.

Silicon Valley is clouding our senses.

“Everything is terrible”

Beyond our blurred perception, the social consequences of living in a world mediated by Silicon Valley are clear: the gentrification and homogenisation of cities, the flattening and destruction of culture and language, the acceleration of instant consumption, the rise of hate speech, the increase in mental disorders or the uberisation of work… All these are obvious dysfunctions, side effects of a system that prioritises data extraction and attention over collective well-being. We live in the era of enshittification.

At the same time, there is an unbridled triumphant euphoria in Silicon Valley. Its entrepreneurs have become the richest and most influential people on the planet, and their businesses have transformed the realities of billions of people.

Why stop at just monopolising social networks? Intoxicated by this power, and in the name of freedom, tech leaders seek to rewrite the rules of the world, replacing democratic sovereignty with a system in which technological solutions – and therefore themselves – become the core of all decision-making. Having monopolised our attention, they now want to monopolise political power.

Silicon Valley is preparing a coup against democracy.

I am aware that such a statement immediately suggests conspiracy theory. Fortunately, the main players in this industry have made their intentions very clear in public. And for several months now, they have begun to implement the plan in plain sight.

The digital post-democratic era

go cloud first, land last — but not land never

The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan

Still, once we remember that Facebook has 3B+ users, Twitter has 300M+, and many individual influencers have 1M+ followers, it starts to be not too crazy to imagine we can build a 1-10M person startup society with a genuine sense of national consciousness, an integrated cryptocurrency, and a plan to crowdfund many pieces of territory around the world. With the internet, we can digitally sew these disjoint enclaves together into a new kind of polity that achieves diplomatic recognition: a network state.

The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan

Unlike other economic sectors, the question “what does Silicon Valley want?” is not just a matter of cold, calculated economic interests. There’s also an aspirational spark. It’s a militant industry.

As Mark Andresseen, one of the sector’s investors, explained in a recent interview with the New York Times, the Silicon Valley atmosphere is the byproduct of bringing the competitive industrial capitalist mentality of Midwest engineers closer to the hippie atmosphere of San Francisco Bay and its creative, counter-cultural and utopian desire to change the world.

From this fusion emerge the multiple currents of what is known as the Californian Ideology: a hodgepodge of ideas, ideologies, and practices that converge in the messianic belief that technology will free us from all old forms of political control and solve all the world’s problems once and for all.

Of the many forms that the Californian Ideology takes, the one that has become most dominant and central in the last twenty years is also the darkest: a dangerous cocktail of fundamentalist reactionism, radical libertarianism, obscurantist neo-fascism, historical fatalism and techno-totalitarianism.

To understand that this current is not marginal, nor some geeky ideological niche, you need to understand its greatest exponent. The ideological leader of Silicon Valley is not Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. It is a lesser known, far more disturbing and even more influential figure: Peter Thiel.

Silicon Valley’s dark centre of gravity

we are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The future will be much better or much worse, but the question of the future remains very open indeed. We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

The Education of a Libertarian (2009), Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel, a Lord of the Rings fan, is the most influential person in Silicon Valley. The quickest way to understand what Silicon Valley wants is to understand what he wants.

Born in Germany and immigrating to the United States as a young man, Thiel is what the American media euphemistically calls a contrarian. During his years at Stanford University, he was one of the forerunners of the current anti-woke discourse. There he founded a conservative magazine, the Stanford Review, dedicated to denouncing Marxist professors and criticising the inclusion of non-white authors in Western culture courses. Here he is in 1996, railing against multiculturalism, feminism and diversity:

Thiel’s first major investment, in 1998, was Confinity, a friend’s company that included a digital wallet that allowed anonymous online payments and therefore tax evasion. According to Thiel, this first investment was already a primarily political bet: “The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related.” That service was PayPal.

At Paypal, Thiel brought together a group of people many of whom went on to become leading figures in today’s global tech industry. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, the founders of YouTube; Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn; David O. Sacks, Thiel’s childhood friend and investment partner (and now the great tsar of the Trump administration’s new advisory council on AI and crypto); and Elon Musk, among many others.

This group became known as the PayPal Mafia because of their immense power to determine everything that happens in the Valley today. Thiel established himself as the great guru of the industry. A few years later, he multiplied his power and fame by becoming the first outside investor in Facebook, enabling the project to take the leap into becoming a major global social network.

Since then, he has diversified his investments through several venture capital funds and founded companies such as Palantir, a cyber-espionage service (named after the Seeing Stones imagined by Tolkien), and companies researching ways to extend life indefinitely. Thiel is one of the world’s most successful, eccentric and wealthy investors.In parallel with building his empire, Thiel has developed an explicitly anti-modern theoretical corpus. In 2004, he wrote his most canonical essay, The Straussian Moment, in which he used his reactionary ideology and science fiction imagination to lay the groundwork for a critical rethinking of the foundations of Western culture and politics after the Enlightenment. The West is in danger, Thiel argues, and it is necessary to revisit fundamental questions about the human condition:

Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.

The Straussian Moment, Peter Thiel

What are these “strange new thoughts” that we need to ensure the progress of humanity? Thiel focuses on the power of technology and points to democracy as a system that needs to be overcome. Thiel does not mince his words:

Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.

The Education of a Libertarian, Peter Thiel

Thiel points the way: technology must become the new form of global sovereignty. To achieve this, it is necessary to create new spaces of power and, from these, to gradually destroy the old world.

This, as I said earlier, is the current of thought that prevails in Silicon Valley today.

And, unfortunately, it is not just a theory.

Startups against the nation-state

Silicon Valley has founded and deployed several experimental projects that seek to transcend the current democratic order.

The first, and also the most futuristic techno-utopian one, is the colonisation of Mars. Elon Musk founded Space X in 2002 (Peter Thiel was the first outside investor) with the idea of re-founding humanity. It’s all there: the call to save humanity by turning it into a multi-planetary species, the desire to start from scratch without the legal constraints of Earth, and the will to break with the established order. As you can read, half-hidden, on the terms and conditions page of the Starlink service owned by Space X:

The parties recognize Mars as a free planet and that no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.

Starlink Terms of Service

Another, less well-known path is the creation of floating cities in international waters, with the intention of creating tax havens and “free” environments, outside international regulation, from which to “experiment with new forms of society.” Patri Friedman (with financial support from Peter Thiel) developed the concept and founded The Seasteading Institute in 2008. Although in 2018 he entered into talks to establish a floating city near French Polynesia, this path has not yet progressed.

Another way of destroying the established order, and perhaps the one that has done the most damage so far, has been the creation and use of cryptocurrencies, with Bitcoin being the first original currency of the internet, created in 2009 by an anonymous developer. The idea of a digital currency was conceived and has grown with the explicit intention of weakening nation states and circumventing any system of public control.

At the micro level, cryptocurrencies enable tax evasion and opaque movement of money around the world. At the macro level, they serve to weaken the political and economic institutions that govern the global economic status quo. Without the power to control economic flow, the structures of nation-states lose strength. (Peter Thiel has been a great advocate of cryptocurrencies and has funded several projects to make them an official and accepted currency in the global market.)

The success of cryptocurrencies has captured the imagination of the great techno-utopians of Silicon Valley. What happens if you combine the power of a social network with the economic power of a decentralised currency?

Why not create countries?

Perhaps the most frontal attack on the established order that Silicon Valley has spawned is the creation of a new concept of sovereignty called network states. This concept, the work of crypto-investor and thinker Balaji Srinivasan, with the financial and political backing of Peter Thiel, is the clearest and most explicit proposal that Silicon Valley wants to replace the current global system.

A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.

The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan

Put simply, a network state is a social network with a national vocation. Balaji and Thiel imagine a kind of technological Zionism that brings together online affinity communities that, coordinated around a cryptocurrency, acquire territory in the real world and eventually achieve a status of political recognition. The reference point for the creation of these network states, according to Balaji, is the creation of the state of Israel. And the first citizens to adopt the new paradigm, he believes, will be the capitalist diaspora of digital nomads already scattered around the world.

Let me be clear: none of this is science fiction. Silicon Valley wants to turn the world’s expats into a new colonising force, on the social base of its new digital order, with a new citizenship in the form of a subscription service.

It’s all planned and worked out to the last detail. Balaji and his team have developed a seven-point tutorial on how to found a new networked country. I present it here in schematic form:

1. Launch a startup society. Create an online community with a vocation for growth and shared values.
2. Organise it as a group capable of collective action. Turn it into a union that fights for common goals.
3. Build an offline network of trust and an online currency. Organise increasingly long face-to-face meetings and an internal economy using cryptocurrencies.
4. Crowdfund physical nodes: once a collective trust is established, acquire apartments, houses and villages to create co-living spaces.
5. Digitally connect physical communities. Once all the archipelagos that make up the community’s acquired properties are digitally connected, allow citizen members to access and move freely between them using a crypto passport.
6. Conduct an auditable crypto census: make the growing size of your population, income, and properties visible to generate external interest.
7. Obtain diplomatic recognition. You can negotiate this with traditional governments in exchange for investment and economic support from your members.

In short, Silicon Valley wants to turn the power of social networks and cryptocurrencies into the basis of a new colonialism, based on the teleworking of digital nomads and their gentrifying purchasing power, to create a network of private citizens above the structures of the world of nation-states, to eventually replace them as the global organisational structure. They’re aiming high.

A practical example: Praxis

One of the most advanced projects of this new power paradigm is Praxis. With 87,371 members and a purchasing power of 922 billion dollars, Praxis is working to create nodes around the world, with a large central capital that will serve as the initial inspiration for the model, and which its promoters assure will be, wait for it, in the Mediterranean, because it is an “ideal” place for “productive work” (a Praxis member told a journalist that Italy, Morocco and Montenegro were the main candidates they had studied; for now, Catalonia is off the table).

The most interesting thing about Praxis is that it shows that when the dreams of Silicon Valley billionaires threaten to come true, the monsters of fascism emerge.

Dryden Brown, CEO of Praxis, is an example of a messianic tech leader who drinks in reactionary values and is seduced by the fascist rhetoric of glory and heroism. Mother Jones magazine did an interesting profile of him, exposing Brown’s interest in a kind of fascist obscurantism, his contempt for black people, his homophobia, and his recommendation of Nazi readings to new Praxis members.

The rhetoric of the Praxis documents distils an essentialist logic that fits well with contemporary far-right discourses:

Natural hierarchies must emerge to elevate our best, based on an integration of spiritual and technological ascendance. True conquest in these new frontiers requires courage steeled by profound purpose, foresight on a galactic time scale, and calculation aided by godlike technological mastery. Blessed with these virtues, future generations across the galaxy will remember us as the heralds of a new age of western glory.

Praxis website

Brown was also one of the first Americans to try to buy Greenland, with the idea of setting up nodes of his network there. More recently, he backed Donald Trump in his own attempt to buy it.

Everything is coming together: a new expat colonialism, deregulation, the dismantling of central economic systems, essentialist discourses about the West, the purchase of territory to create new depoliticised countries… Little by little, these technological utopias are taking the form of the new far-right Trumpism that is spreading around the world.

This leads us finally to talk about the most dangerous front that Silicon Valley has opened against democracy, which is at the same time the most mundane and the most obvious: its political pact with the global far right.

And, of course, Peter Thiel is its chief ideologue and facilitator.

The Eye of Mordor

Peter Thiel was one of the first Silicon Valley insiders to explicitly support Trump in 2016, breaking with the industry’s performed distance by actively participating in his campaign and giving him $1.2 million. This paved the way for other major tech moguls to gradually move into the arena.

Thiel has not sat still during this election cycle either. He is the top benefactor of JD Vance, whom he also mentors and hired at one of his various venture capital firms more than a decade ago. Thiel contributed $15 million to boost Vance’s political career, securing his role as a senator and later working to land the position of Vice President of the United States and as a potential political heir to Donald Trump.

Silicon Valley has stopped pretending. Support for Trump is massive and frontal: cryptocurrency companies were the industry that invested the most in the 2024 US elections, the most media-friendly industry leaders were photographed at the inauguration of the new administration in a very obvious gesture of support, Elon Musk has become the second most visible face of the new administration and Thiel’s most trusted man has been elected head of the council on AI and cryptocurrencies. The pact with the global far right has also reached Germany, Argentina, France and Italy.

The short-term goals are very clear. To deactivate the sanctioning dynamic that Western democracies had begun to implement in the face of the well-known perverse social effects of digital platforms, and to prevent the AI industries and the crypto world from suffering any kind of public brake that could prevent them from becoming the new hens that lay golden eggs.

But in the long term, Silicon Valley is also trying to generate maximum distrust of traditional structures and to dismantle the foundations of contemporary states from within, in order to make its alternative more attractive. The best way to destroy democracy is for it to stop working altogether.

Get unused to it

In short, Silicon Valley is more than a series of social networks and billionaires, it is an ambitious new global power with a clear expansive, colonial and belligerent agenda. To consolidate its immense wealth and influence, it has blinded, disabled and atomised us. And the world it intends to build is a stage full of monsters, where democracy is degraded until it disappears, weakened by the far right to finally give way to a classist and racist global technocracy. It’s time to stop treating Silicon Valley with neutrality. We must not only protect ourselves from them. We need to get them out of our lives.

One of the greatest virtues of our species is that we can get used to almost anything. This is clearly a useful function: it makes us resilient and allows us to carry on when bad things happen. But this ability can also be a flaw. It allows us to carry on as if nothing had happened, practically unaware, even though our reality is deteriorating and our quality of life is diminishing. Hypernormality is full of people who are used to it.

But if we can get used to it, we can also get unused to it Sometimes a random event, a small effort, a life change or simply exhaustion makes us gain perspective, look at things with new eyes and ask ourselves: is this the life I want?

How do we get out of hypernormality? Here are some very simple ideas:

• Gradually, and as much as possible, leave the Silicon Valley world and experiment with other, more horizontal structures (I’ve written a short text about this).
• If you can’t leave it, free up at least part of your life by making sure it doesn’t go through any of its funnels.
• Migrate and diversify your businesses to platforms and spaces less controlled by the big tech tycoons.
• Try to escape the algorithmic culture: become aware of what you want, search for it, research it and enjoy it.
• Keep a political eye on everything you do. Educate yourself. If you can, do it in company.
• Join a union, get involved in political movements and sign up for neighbourhood meetings.

Everyone will walk their own path, and everyone will have their moment to say “enough”, but I believe in the contagion effect, and that’s why I’m writing this now that I see it so clearly, and I am only at the beginning of my process of breaking the habit.

Let’s stop seeing Silicon Valley as a lesser evil and start seeing it for what it is: one of the greatest evils to be fought in our time.

Postscript

In 2020, Peter Thiel sat down to debate the future of democracy and technology with none other than David Graeber. Graeber is a leading figure in anarchism and one of the most influential left-wing intellectuals today. Interestingly, Thiel, a representative of reactionary billionaire lobbies, and Graeber, an Occupy Wall Street activist and anarchist anthropologist, often agreed in their critical diagnosis of the current status quo. Both seemed to be saying that the logic and dynamics of the global order must be broken. Through start-up projects, said one, through social revolutions, said the other.

The feeling is that, today, the reactionary forces of the world continue to imagine alternatives and punch holes in the system to impose their model, but on the other hand the left has stopped shaking the foundations of the system, has stopped imagining and developing alternative ways of living, and has lost itself in the small pacts of systemic reformism.

In his most recent book, The Dawn of Everything, published in 2021 and considered a benchmark in historiography, Graeber proposed a revision of the concept of linear historical progress and questioned at what point we stopped imagining other ways of living. I think this is the key question we need to ask today if we want to break the spell of hypernormality before it is too late.

If you want to find out more

Here’s a list of references to dig deeper into the matter:

Hypernormalisation (2016) documentary by Adam Curtis (also available on Archive.org)

What is it about Peter Thiel, article by Anna Wiener for The New Yorker (2021)

How Democrats Drove SIlicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms – New York Times interview with Marc Andreessen (2025)

Venture-Backed Trumpism. Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?, article by Ben Tarnoff for the New York Review of Books (2024)

The Network State Conferences – List of YouTube videos of conferences supporting the Network State concept and featuring various ongoing projects

Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation, speech by Cory Doctorow on how to overcome the enshittification of platforms