"It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen." --Muhammad Ali

The Nerd Reich | Book by Gil Durán | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster #book #society

A fearless and urgent chronicle of the tech-authoritarian movement from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering a road map to resistance.

When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.

Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.

The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.

The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now.

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EU Council Approves New “Chat Control” Mandate Pushing Mass Surveillance #privacy

Former MEP Patrick Breyer, a long-standing defender of digital freedom and one of the most vocal opponents of the plan, said the deal “paves the way for a permanent infrastructure of mass surveillance.”

According to him, the Council’s text replaces legal compulsion with financial and regulatory incentives that push major US technology firms toward indiscriminate scanning.

He warned that the framework also brings “anonymity-breaking age checks” that will turn ordinary online use into an exercise in identity verification.

The new proposal, brokered largely through Danish mediation, comes months after the original “Chat Control 1.0” regulation appeared to have been shelved following widespread backlash.

Europe's new war on privacy - UnHerd #privacy

In theory, Chat Control should have been buried last month. The EU’s ominous plan to mass-scan citizens’ private messages was met with overwhelming public resistance in Germany, with the country’s government refusing to approve it. But Brussels rarely retreats merely because the public demands it. And so, true to form, a reworked version of the text is already being pushed forward — this time out of sight, behind closed doors. 

Chat Control, formally known as the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, was first proposed by the European Commission in 2022. The original plan would have made it mandatory for email and messenger providers to scan private, even encrypted, communications — with the purported aim of detecting child sexual abuse material. 

The tool was sold as a noble crusade against some of the world’s most horrific crimes. But critics argued that the tool risked becoming a blueprint for generalised surveillance, by essentially giving states and EU institutions the ability to scan every private message. Indeed, a public consultation preceding the proposal revealed that a majority of respondents opposed such obligations, with over 80% explicitly rejecting its application to end-to-end encrypted communications.

Bringing Sexy Back - Lux Magazine #society #psychology #sexuality #longread

A situational eroticism is what is needed now, in our literalist times. It’s exhausting, how everything is so readily defined by types, acts, traumas, kinks, fetishes, pathology, and aesthetics. To me, our predilection for determinism is an expected psychological response to excessive surveillance. A situational eroticism decouples sensation from narrative and typology. It allows us to feel without excuse and to relate our feelings to our immediate embodied moment, grounded in a fundamental sense of personal privacy. While it is admirable to try and understand ourselves and important to protect ourselves from harm and investigate critically the ways in which what we want may put us at risk of that harm — or at risk of doing harm to others — sometimes desires just are, and they are not that way for long. Arousal is a matter of the self, which takes place within the body, a space no one can see into. It is often a mystery, a surprise, a discovery. It can happen at a small scale, say, the frisson of two sets of fingers in one’s hair at once. It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us. Maybe what it means doesn’t matter. Maybe we don’t have to justify it even to ourselves. 

But in order to facilitate a return to situational eroticism, we need to kill the panopticon in our heads. That means first killing the panopticon we’ve built for others. There is no purpose in vindictive or thoughtless exposure. Not everything needs to be subjected to public opinion, not every anecdote is worth sharing, not every debate needs engagement, especially those debates which have no material basis to them, no ask, no funnel for all that energy. We need to stop confusing vigilantism with justice and posting with politics. That does not mean we stop the work that #MeToo started, but that revenge is a weapon best utilized collectively against the enemies of liberation. We need to protect the vulnerable from exploitative technologies and practices, repeatedly denounce their use, and work towards a world without sexual coercion, digital or otherwise.

GrapheneOS migrates server infrastructure from France amid police intimidation claims #privacy

The GrapheneOS project has announced on X that they are ceasing all operations in France, asserting that the country is no longer safe for "open source privacy projects".

While the operating system will still be available to French users, all website and discussion servers are being relocated abroad.

Until now, the project relied on OVH Bearharnois, a French hosting provider, for its core website and social media services. The migration plan moves the Mastodon, Discourse, and Matrix instances to a combination of local and shared servers in Toronto. Critical website infrastructure will be hosted by Netcup, a German‑based company.

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