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“The game for all the marbles is the creation of a new, hitherto never existed before global economy... For those that have access to the permissioned rights to the ledgers upon which all this financial activity will take place, it just gives them total control of everything. Total control of everything.” —Iain Davis
What are NEONERDS?
Author and investigative journalist Iain Davis recently published his latest book “The Technocratic Dark State: Trump, AI, and Digital Dictatorship.”
Davis invented the word “NEONERDS” for the world’s tech billionaires - people like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen. They are not believers in the free market, he says. Nor are they libertarians. They don’t care much about individual freedom and human flourishing at all - except their own.
Instead, they are building out monopolies of control (like Palantir) that feed off surveillance technologies and AI-driven control systems.
TechnoKings Arise out of Demosclerosis Like Phoenix out of Ashes
Dark Enlightenment thinkers Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin correctly point out how representative democracies have become utterly corrupt and how they are in the process of decay. They call it demosclerosis.
However, Land’s and Yarvin’s solutions to fix demosclerosis are utterly inhumane and dystopian. They are in favor of creating a whole suite of CEO-run dictatorships in so-called network states or neo-states. The CEO as the absolute emperor. The concept of citizens disappears together with the concept of nation state. Wealthy individuals will be invited to become customers of the neo-state but there is no role for non-wealthy people.
Many of the tech billionaires around the world have taken a deep liking to these ideas. Peter Thiel in particular developed a close relationship with Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin doesn’t have much patience with the billions of hoi polloi - humanity’s “wards” as he calls them. It’s so many! Way too many. And most of them completely useless, he believes. What’s to be done? Yarvin suggested, half-jokingly perhaps or perhaps not, “a humane alternative to genocide.”
Old Oligarchs vs. New Oligarchs
The dynastic oligarchs are ancient financial families like the Rothschilds, Mellons, Rockefellers and Desmarais. For centuries, these old guards controlled the creation of money through private ownership of central and commercial banks. They are in the business of creating money out of nothing and there is no more lucrative business in the world.
The new oligarchs want the same kind of power. They might be newly rich - but so what? They’re the new super rich, unfathomably wealthy. Shouldn’t they be as powerful as the old super rich? Shouldn’t they be able to create money out of nothing too?
But they want to create not just any old money. No: they want a programmable money - like stablecoins. A smart money that will make it much easier to control people.
NEONERDS Invited the Second Trump Administration on Board
Davis argues that the new tech oligarchs invited the second Trump administration on board of their train and are now seeking the one thing they lack: the sovereign power to issue currency.
How come, I asked Davis, that these super wealthy tech parvenues have become so influential with the old oligarchs, the ancient dynastic European banking families? Don’t they represent a threat to their power?
Turns out, they don’t - unfortunately. More often than not, they need each other and they complement each other. Epstein was one of those who are tirelessly networking to connect them with each other.
CBDCs, Stablecoins, and the Genius Act
In the same executive order in which Donald Trump banned Central Bank Digital Currencies, the regulatory framework for stablecoins was introduced. A Central Bank Digital Currency is legally problematic in the United States since the American constitution puts the power “to coin money” with the American people via Congress. This framework was later codified in the Genius Act.
However, stablecoin currencies are every bit as programmable as CBDCs. Stablecoins like the Trump family’s USD1 give control over every transaction and thereby control over people’s behavior.
In the Genius Act, stablecoins are declared “not a national currency,” even though they are backed 1:1 by the dollar, usable everywhere, and functionally identical to the dollar in digital form. In other words, they could become a national currency while “not a national currency.” Quite ingenious, right? No wonder it’s called the Genius Act.
By the way, who are the people providing the liquidity backbone for the stablecoin system? It’s Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen. They set up Erebor Bank for exactly this purpose.
You Will Be Tokenized
But it gets way more ‘wild and wacky,’ Davis says.
The name for the much wilder game is tokenization. The idea is to turn everything physical into digital tokens: real estate, commodities, forests, mountains, water systems, even human labor. Maybe they’ll turn the moon into a token too. And Musk might tokenize Mars, his favorite planet.
These tokens will live on a permissioned blockchain, NOT on a permissionless blockchain. A permissioned blockchain restricts access to pre-approved participants, and is governed by a central authority. This authority decides who can read the ledger and who can submit transactions.
What’s the purpose of this grand tokenization? Well, it’s urgently needed to bail out the entire world since global debt vastly exceeds global assets. There aren’t nearly enough assets given the gargantuan debt. That’s why the new and old oligarchs want to play God on a new level and get creative the way they never dared before.
Through the tokenization of nature, massive new asset classes will be sprung into existence by fiat. Their worth is estimated around 4 to 5 quadrillion dollars. One quadrillion, in case you’re not accustomed to thinking in terms of quadrillions yet, is one thousand trillions.
But these tokens are so much better than old-fashioned paper dollars for our power hungry NEONERD class as well as for the ancient oligarch class: every single tokenized transaction, since it lives on a permissioned blockchain, can be programmed with AI-enforced conditions. Those who control the permissioned ledger will have the power to control everything. For example: where you go, how you go, when you go, whether you go; what you eat, how much you eat, when you eat, where you eat; where you die, how you die, when you die, whether you die.
Peter Thiel doesn’t want to die. He’s trying to figure out how to live forever - or at least for a very, very long time. What NEONERDS have already figured out though is an easy and efficient way to shorten the lifespans of the rest of us.
The Horizontal Dimension versus the Vertical Dimension
Davis argues that left-right political divisions are useful to keep citizens fighting each other worldwide. That’s the horizontal dimension.
The purpose of the horizontal dimension is to distract citizens from realizing what’s going on in the vertical dimension. This dimension cuts across the horizontal dimension by operating below the level of governments, at the level of governments and at levels above governments.
Neither NEONERDS nor the ancient Oligarchs asked for permission to take power: they just took it. And, Davis argues, they’ve been successful in aligning the Trump family, including President Donald Trump himself, with their agenda.
You Can’t Resist What You Don’t See
The new and old oligarchs and their henchmen count on people not being aware of the real war against them. They count on people continuing their eternal shadow fights against each other without ever looking up to see what’s really going on.
One thing that is hard to hide is the building of massive numbers of grotesquely huge, ugly, energy and water gobbling data centers whose purpose remains shrouded in mystery. China doesn’t have nearly as many nor does anyone else. There are other solutions like distributed computing instead of centralizing the compute in gigantic containers.
Such gigantic data centers, by the way, make excellent soft area targets for drones and missiles. Doesn’t seem a good military strategy to depend on compute housed in easily destroyable centers, does it? The Iran War made that abundantly clear. So what is their purpose then? Domestic surveillance? Creating the AGI God that our NEONERDS are thirsting for? Creating the necessary compute to figure out how Thiel can live forever?
What we NON-NEONERDS should figure out is how we can make use of AI to protect against the NEONERDS’ impending dictatorship, how to protect ourselves from the tokenization of everything and mass surveillance. How to break up the oligarchs’ power. That’s an excellent use for AI.
Governments won’t come to our help. The second Trump administration is the best example for that.
The Trump Clan Is Riding on the NEONERDS’ Billionaire Train
NEONERDS and ancient oligarchs don’t think in horizontal terms, they don’t care about Republican versus Democrat. But they do care about getting powerful government representatives on their train since they still need them for some things. They courted Trump, his sons, his son-in-law and many others in the Trump family’s orbit. They invited the whole clan and its powerful friends on the train, and promised them the moon. Then they took off.
According to Forbes, Donald Trump’s net worth jumped during his second administration from under $4 billion in October 2024 to $6.6 billion by May 2026. Eric Trump’s fortune increased from ~$40–50 million pre-election to an estimated $400 million; Donald Trump Jr.’s wealth increased to an estimated $300 million.
Jared Kushner became a billionaire in September 2025. His younger brother Josh Kushner, who is the founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Thrive Capital, has an estimated wealth of around $5 billion. Thrive Capital’s evaluation and Josh’s personal wealth benefited greatly from the explosion in AI investments during Trump 47.
Just last month, in April 2026, the Department of Defense awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth up to $20 billion in military equipment and systems. Josh Kushner is one of Anduril’s major funders through Thrive Capital, making him a significant financial beneficiary of the deal.
The Trump clan and its associates are thriving, to put it mildly. Americans? They are not thriving, to put it mildly. And that doesn’t bode well. If the NEONERDS think their gigantic data centers will protect them and their rich politician-enablers, they should think again.
CHAPTERS
00:05 Introduction: Privatizing Government and Replacing Citizens with Customers
02:40 Defining NEONERDS: Silicon Valley Oligarchs
06:30 Focus on the Final Chapters: Digital Finance and the Synthetic Hegemonic Currency
07:54 Neo-Nerds vs. Libertarians: Why Peter Thiel’s Ideology Is a Lie
12:52 Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, and the Philosophy of Disposable Humanity
13:37 Palantir, Gaza, and Genocide in Practice: Not Just Metaphor
18:43 The Dark Enlightenment: Why They Call the Enlightenment a Failure
26:53 The Horizontal Trap: Left vs. Right as a Tool of Distraction
32:58 Two Factions of Power: Dynastic Oligarchs vs. Silicon Valley Newcomers
39:04 Jeffrey Epstein: Linchpin of Organized Crime, Intelligence, and Global Finance
43:21 The Oligarchs’ Conundrum: Neo-Nerds Need Access to the Money Spigot
51:23 How Money Is Actually Created: Commercial Banks and Debt Out of Nothing
1:01:19 Fractional Reserve Banking and the Rialto Bridge
1:07:45 CBDCs: Programmable Money, Digital Identity, and Algorithmic Punishment
1:14:02 Stablecoins as the American CBDC Workaround
1:17:59 The GENIUS Act: Declaring Stablecoins “Not a National Currency”
1:26:54 Monetary Expansion, Boom-Bust Cycles, and Why the Oligarchs Always Win
1:27:09 Tokenizing Everything: Creating Fake Asset Value to Cover Real Debt
