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EuropeanPowell (@europeanpowell)
The Guardian interviewed Gil Duran this week about The Nerd Reich, his book on Silicon Valley fascism and the war on democracy. It is an important book and a good interview. Duran names the ideology correctly: Thiel, Yarvin, Andreessen, the neoreactionary conviction that democratic friction is an engineering defect to be routed around, that cities and nations should be run as corporations, that the CEO model of governance is superior to electoral accountability. What the interview does not mention, even once, is the deregulated free zone model currently reshaping Britain. It does not mention that the UK has rolled out 12 freeports, 74 Special Economic Zones, and a growing number of AI Growth Zones under secondary legislation, with zero parliamentary debate, zero public consultation, and zero press notification. It does not mention that the same ideology Duran documents in Silicon Valley, democratic friction removed, planning powers transferred to unelected development corporations, residents reclassified as revenue sources, is the operating logic of the UK's post-Brexit zone architecture, implemented with equal enthusiasm by the Conservatives and Labour. It does not mention that Palantir, whose manifesto Duran discusses, holds NHS data contracts and UK defence contracts. It does not mention that Peter Thiel's network state philosophy is the intellectual scaffolding of the Forest City 1 prototype in the UK. It does not mention that Burnham's AI Growth Zone programme is the domestic implementation of exactly the Silicon Valley land grab Duran is documenting in the United States. Gil Duran actually asked me about Forest City 1 for his book. The connection between the US and UK versions of this story is documented and explicit. The Guardian's interview treats it as if it doesn't exist. Duran’s book does what it sets out to do. My criticism here is of a newspaper that has spent three years publishing profiles of American technofascism while failing to report the British version being built in plain sight through statutory instruments that Parliament rubber-stamps without debate. The mechanism Duran describes is not American. It is operating in Manchester, in Teesside, in Birmingham, in Aberdeen, in every zone-designated community in England, Scotland, and Wales. The Digital Enclosure piecedocuments the UK version in full: https://europeanpowell.substack.com/p/the-zone-builder-how-andy-burnham?r=2w9sq7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true The Zone Builder piece documents how Burnham built the Manchester proof of concept: https://europeanpowell.substack.com/p/the-digital-enclosure-how-data-centre?r=2w9sq7&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer The Guardian had the whole story in front of it. It was looking at the wrong country.
