When the System Found Its Believers

Brian Merchant and Jacob Silverman on the belief system powering modern tech

I’ve written before about my admiration for Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant’s history of the Luddite movement and its eerie parallels with today’s tech culture. That book stayed with me, the way it treated resistance not as nostalgia but as a form of clarity. It led me to follow Merchant’s Substack of the same name, where he keeps tracing the human edges of automation and capital. Every so often he posts video podcasts, and it was through one of those that I found my way to Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

Silverman’s book reframes the usual story of Silicon Valley’s shift to the right into something deeper: a convergence of power, grievance, and utopian belief. It is not just about a few unruly billionaires; it is about a class that sees its own ideology as infrastructure. Merchant, with his mix of historian’s precision and quiet disbelief, teases out how that mindset formed and what it means when technology becomes a moral projec…