Revenge of the Nerds

Tech elites captured the government. What do they want?

If watching the richest man in the world gleefully dismantle American institutions as Silicon Valley freaks cheer him on has left you a bit disoriented, I think it unfortunately might be time to look to Curtis Yarvin for answers. For those lucky enough to not know Curtis Yarvin, he is one of the founders of the Dark Enlightenment movement or the Neo-Reactionary Movement (NRx). NRx basically argues that democracy (though they're a bit evasive about what they mean by democracy) is to blame for the social ills apparent in modern day America, what we actually need is to run the government like a corporation, including being led by a chief executive or monarch. As Yarvin puts it: "If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictator phobia." Yarvin was recently interviewed by the New York Times, and it does a serviceable job exposing the flimsiness of Yarvin’s devotion to the idea of an American monarch, but it really fails to grapple with some of his more deranged positions on governing, especially given his incredibly powerful friends in tech and politics.

The NYT interview very briefly nods to some of Yarvin’s more extreme positions on governing but doesn’t interrogate further. If Curtis Yarvin is going to gain mainstream popularity people should really grapple with what he actually wants, and, more importantly, who his friends are. For most of his professional life as a self-described intellectual, he has published work in relative obscurity, first under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug on his blog Unqualified Reservations, then under his government name on his Substack Gray Mirror, but he’s made fans out of important leaders in Silicon Valley. Among others, Yarvin has a close personal history with Peter Thiel and has been described as the “house political philosopher” of the Thielverse, he’s described Marc Andreessen as a friend, and he’s been name checked by Vice President JD Vance.

It’s best to start with a disclaimer. Yarvin’s writing is so incendiary it can be hard to tell what’s real. His many layered irony defense is familiar to anyone who’s engaged with any figures on the New Right. Take them at their word and risk looking very stupid and naive. Don’t take them seriously and you end up missing a movement that infiltrated the tech and Conservative elite. It’s time we start taking these guys at their word. During the NYT interview Yarvin was asked about some of this more provocative views, one in particular:

“NYT: …you have ideas that I hope are satirical about how to handle nonproductive members of society that involve basically locking them in a room forever. Has your thinking shifted?

Yarvin: No, no, no. My thinking has definitely not shifted.”

That little exchange is the only moment in the interview that hints at the bizarre future Yarvin envisions. In 2008 Yarvin (as Mencius Moldbug) published Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century, which I had the great misfortune of reading all 62 pages. Patchwork’s basic premise is that the sclerotic world governments will inevitably fail and when they do they should be replaced with this nightmarish science fiction version of company towns. The land they are sitting on is called a patch and is ruled over by corporate sovereigns called realms with an executive in charge called a delegate. As he describes it:

“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’”

You can read it yourself online, though I don’t recommend it. It definitely had me shouting “GET TO THE FUCKING POINT” many times as he applies selective history to his asinine ideas for an ideal future in his signature verbose style (get ready to look up phrases like “monotonic desideratum”). You can also listen to this guy turn it into an audiobook, commenters are saying it’s way better than any of the AI versions (again don’t recommend). You can also purchase it on Amazon, it was published as a real book with binding and everything in 2017. I’m trying to make it very clear that, from what I can tell, Curtis Yarvin has made no effort to distance himself from Patchwork, or disavow even some of the more unsavory things he’s said in it.

It seems Yarvin’s vision is less an American government run by a strongman, but rather hastening the death of the American government to make way for many, many tiny nation states run by corporations, with zero input from its citizens. Take Manhattan or San Francisco for example, they’ll now be run by profit driven corporations who will take it upon themselves to create such a desirable place to live that it attracts only the best people. It’s in the best interest of each realm to really make their city hum because every citizen has the right of exit, they can leave any time they like and try out a new patch if they so choose. This is also the mechanism in place to also keep realms from mistreating its residents. It just simply wouldn’t be profitable or in their best interest. And in a patch, profit comes before everything, except for security. So, yes, you have no say in how this nation state is run but you do get the very neat option of leaving and seeking out another one if you don’t like it. Just pack up your life and move to another patch and hope that realm is nicer. It’s possibly the most disturbing free-market, anarcho capitalist nightmare I’ve ever engaged with. It’s hard to imagine even Milton Friendman arguing for this kind of hell.

Admittedly, his design for the future might feel a little atavistic, “it is only natural that a reactionary design for future government will have a somewhat feudal feel.” In Yarvin’s view, the periods where human civilization has progressed or flourished most rapidly were times of heightened political division: Ancient Greece, medieval Italy, Europe until 1914. He makes no mention of the great suffering that characterized life for the majority of populations (excluding a handful of elites) during these periods, but briefly does make mention of the instability. In order to address instability and ever present violence of these previous periods, Yarvin has devised a strong security design. Security is of the utmost importance in each realm, though to a worrying degree. The whole thing reads like a terrifying sci-fi police state: “There is no such thing as ‘too secure.’ An encryption algorithm cannot be too strong, a fence cannot be too high, a bullet cannot be too lethal.” Yarvin shows us what that security design could look like practically in San Francisco's fictional future patch ruled over by Friscorp (San Francisco’s fictional ruling corp):

“All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both. Residents cannot use this data to snoop into each others’ lives, but Friscorp can use it to monitor society at an almost arbitrarily detailed level.”

Reading Yarvin reminds me of every guy I’ve ever met who’s afraid of the Big City. You can tell that living in San Francisco has taken a real toll on him. He doesn’t understand why he and his tech elite milieu should ever have to see a homeless person, graffiti, or extremely specifically “millions of random people who were not even authorized to be in the country wandering around, driving gigantic SUVs at triple-digit speeds after ten or fifteen drinks.” What Yarvin really wants is to live in a world of complete and total security. He’s a baby. With Yarvin’s ridiculous vision for the future we can make sure nothing bad ever happens again. All it takes is living in a maximum security, city sized prison run by a ruthless, profit over everything joint stock corporations.

If that’s appealing to you, you might be wondering who gets to live in futuristic San Francisco. Well, basically anyone! As long as you’re not dangerous to others, can afford to live in SF, and speak English. Yarvin is not one to shy away from good ideas across time and space, letting readers know that menial laborers would be imported in the same way they are in Dubai. So we’ve solved who gets to live there and where we’ll get all of our cheap labor that societies have always relied on, but that leaves us with just one major problem, and what the NYT interview was hinting at: undesirables. I’m going to leave a couple of long passages here because I really think people should read just what Yarvin thinks of people he deems unproductive, unprofitable, and/or undesirable (bold for emphasis is mine, not his).

“Here we face a slight predicament. There are quite a few people presently in San Francisco who do not meet the second constraint, are pretty iffy on the first as well, and have no labor skills to speak of. What do we do with them? Sell their slums out from under them, obviously; demo everything, spray for roaches, rodents and pit bulls, smooth the rubble out with a bulldozer or two, and possibly a little aerial bombing; erect new residential districts suitable for Russian oligarchs. Next question?

But where do they go? Since their customer-service contract gives them the right of exit, these people—call them bezonians—can of course emigrate to any other realm in the Patchwork. This presumes, however, that said realm is willing to accept them. And why would it be? If our design does not provide for the existence of a large number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality.”

Yes, he really talks like that. Undesirables can try their luck in other realms but chances aren’t great that other realms will want to take them on. So what do we do with them?

“The problem of adults who are not productive members of society. In our little Newspeak we call them wards of the realm. A ward is any resident who is not capable of earning a living, is not accepted as a dependent by any guardian, and is not wanted by any other patch.

The initial conversion of our present, democratic, and of course completely dysfunctional San Francisco into the realm of Friscorp will produce quite a few wards. At least relative to the number we would expect to emerge in a healthy society. But there will always be black sheep, and there will always be wards.

As Delegate of San Francisco, what should you do with these people? I think the answer is clear: alternative energy. Since wards are liabilities, there is no business case for retaining them in their present, ambulatory form. Therefore, the most profitable disposition for this dubious form of capital is to convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.

Okay, just kidding. This is the sort of naive Randian thinking which appeals instantly to a geek like me, but of course has nothing to do with real life. The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass.

However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. Perfection cannot be achieved on both these counts, but we can get closer than most might think.

The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.6

The virtual worlds of today are already exciting enough to distract many away from their real lives. They will only get better. Nor is productive employment precluded in this scenario—for example, wards can perform manual labor through telepresence. As members of society, however, they might as well not exist. And because cells are sealed and need no guards, virtualization should be much cheaper than present-day imprisonment.”

That’s a lot to take in. I’ve read enough of Mencius Moldbug to understand that Yarvin tends to be incendiary and that he likes to fancy himself a provocateur. If pressed on these passages I imagine he would laugh it off the same way he laughed off the NYT interviewer reading back some of his more distasteful quotes about white nationalism, slaves, or Nelson Mandela, but he clearly holds deeply disturbing beliefs about people he deems unproductive and unprofitable. They present a problem with which a solution is needed. He may be joking about the biodiesel thing, he is kind of into the virtualizing thing if feasible, and, at the very least, he is advocating for wardship over anyone a realm deems unfit as a citizen. He’d have a hard time convincing me he wouldn’t really advocate for a “humane alternative to genocide.”

Alarmingly, Yarvin’s sentiments are not aberrational among the Silicon Valley elite he’s so deeply connected with. His frustrations regarding undesirables are echoed in his friend Marc Andreessen’s quote “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet,” referring to the people he left behind from his upbringing in rural Wisconsin. More worrisome though, is that Yarvin’s techno feudalist ideas seem to be less one mad man’s vision but rather embedded deep at the core of Silicon Valley. Literal egg-headed Andreesen has put out his own the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a garbled scribe with sections titled “the Meaning of Life,” “Becoming Technological Supermen,” and “The Enemy” which includes such enemies as “socialism,” “tech ethics,” “trust and safety,” “risk management,” “collectivism,” and “regulatory capture.” Peter Thiel, who, through the Founders Fund, is a benefactor of Yarvin’s early tech venture Urbit, declared freedom and democracy incompatible in his own manifesto. He also parroted some of Yarvin’s wildest fantasies when he urged the importance of “settling the oceans,” with autonomous cities floating on the surface free from taxes or laws of nation states, and even went as far as founding the Seasteading Institute with Milton Friedman’s grandson Patri Friedman at the helm (you cannot make this stuff up). The Seasteading Institute’s mission feels eerily similar to Yarvin’s Patchwork.

Another man who shares a zeal for a network of futuristic nation states is, tech entrepreneur and former Partner at Marc Andreessen’s firm a16z, Balaji Srinivasan. He released his own book on the subject, The Network State, where he takes a more palatable approach for something spiritually connected to Patchwork. In his book and presentations he’s given, Balaji details how to go from building an online community to a full blown physical nation state that would of course feature maximum security, advanced technology, and be diplomatically recognized. Much like Yarvin, Balaji also has deep Silicon Valley ties- after his stint at a16z, he served as CTO of Coinbase, and Thiel even recommended Srinivasan to Trump for FDA Commissioner during his first administration (Trump ignored this recommendation).

Due to their outlandish nature, these ideas have been easy to dismiss as the fantastical ideation of antisocial freaks on the fringe of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately that might have kind of been the point, “Thiel told a room full of believers at an institute conference in 2009 that most people don’t think seasteading is possible and will therefore not interfere until it’s too late.” While normies were ignoring these ideas, Thiel, Andreesen, Srinivasan, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have been using their fund Pronomos Capital to invest in early stage network states like Praxis. You can apply for citizenship to Praxis right now and help “reclaim the west” as the website urges. The website is covered in language that sounds straight from Patchwork:

“The modern global system, once the greatest power in the history of man, has become a brittle, jerry-rigged contraption incapable of carrying out the most basic functions. Against a rising tide of crises, Nation States’s managers are scrambling to hold their system together. As these governing institutions continue to degrade, people will come to realize that no one is truly on their side, that they are abandoned by the very systems meant to serve them. In this moment of recognition, they will understand that their survival and prosperity depend not on existing structures, but on banding together with others in an increasingly fractured world. Simultaneously, the internet's tools for alignment, coordination, and funding are only getting more powerful. As Nation States falter, Sovereign Networks become inevitable.”

Praxis is just one of many network states that Pronomis is currently funding. There is Prospera in Honduras, boasting a “startup city with a regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.” Afropolitan which is currently seeking “the most dedicated and ambitious people to join our growing Network.” Itana is trying to become the ‘global jurisdiction of choice’ on the African continent for the Internet citizens of the world.” You have your pick of which network state works best for you, just as Yarvin dreamed it.

The Silicon Valley elite has been telling us what their vision for the future looks like. Just because we decided it was too ridiculous, cruel, or exclusionary to take seriously doesn't mean that they didn’t start building it. In 2017 a company called Flannery Associates began stealthily buying up large tracts of land in Solano County. For years they quietly amassed over $900 million worth of land on the outskirts of the Bay Area, until residents started resisting their way above market rate offers prompting Flannery Associates to file suit against the landowners for their “endless greed.” The New York Times confirmed Flannery Associates was a front fund backed by Silicon Valley leaders like billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Marc Andreessen. Their aim was to build California Forever, a proto network state, but right now they're locked in a legal battle with residents and environmentalists that has the future of the project in doubt. We might not be ready for network states, but Silicon Valley is, and they’re already trying to bring them into the physical world.

In a 2009 speech Thiel said, “If we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries.” But what does Thiel’s idea of freedom look like? Freedom from taxation, laws he doesn’t like, consumer protections, or regulatory schemes that might temper his or his friends’ “innovations.” Some lawmakers have already lined up to let tech companies build their own quasi-nation states in an effort to make Thiel’s dream a reality. In 2021 Nevada Governor Steve Sisolak proposed a bill that would create “innovation zones,” where companies who make innovative technologies and own at least 50,000 acres of undeveloped land can become independent political subdivisions within the state. It became clear that Sisolak was paving the way for Blockchains LLC to have complete control over the 67,000 acres of land they had purchased in Storey County for $170,000,000 in 2018. Storey County residents and commissioners decided they didn’t want to “cede control over local decision-making to Blockchains LLC” and passed a resolution barring the building of an innovation zone in their county. The governor ended up pulling the controversial bill, but allowing it to move forward as a study.

We’re going to have more and more people from Yarvin’s circle of influence selling us a more palatable version of his nightmare. Unfortunately we’re already seeing some of his influence at the federal level. Yarvin’s proposed policies designed to hasten inevitable collapse are being carried out right now. Vice President and complete Thiel construction¹, JD Vance has even unapologetically name checked Yarvin. During a 2021 interview with Jack Murphy, Vance told Murphy "There's this guy Curtis Yarvin who's written about some of these things.” He went on to say “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Vance’s plan to fire these “midlevel bureaucrats” (which we’re currently watching play out as Elon Musk’s rogue quasi governmental agency takes a wrecking ball to American institutions) sounds awfully similar to Yarvin’s infamous RAGE (he’s not one for a soft sell) plan. RAGE stands for Retire All Government Employees. It was laid out in a 2012 speech he gave called How to Reboot the US Government.

As we watch to see if the Trump Administration will ignore the court orders holding together the fabric of American institutions, it’s important we know what kind of people have captured the American government. Ordinary Americans have long contended with the corporate desire to rule, but this feels like something new. Its incompatibility with an optimistic future so many people envision can make it difficult to even grasp. I’m guilty of meeting these ideas with dismissal. It’s impossible to read some of this stuff and not do the Selina Meyer and remind yourself to spend less time in the Bay Area, but it’s time to start taking the tech elite at their word. Going forward when Sam Altman suggests that his technology may require “changes to the social contract” I’m going to believe him. According to Altman, "The entire structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration,” and I think we deserve a say, lest we end up living in a rebooted post-democratic company town, or worse- biofuel for the muni buses.

1. *Thiel is heavily linked to Vice President JD Vance. It’s hard to overstate Thiel’s role in Vance’s rise to second in command. JD Vance first came into contact with Thiel through when Thiel gave a talk at Yale Law School where Vance was a law student. Vance cited this as the most important moment for him during his time at Yale Law School. This kicked off a mentorship relationship where Vance’s professional life was wrapped up in Thiel’s orbit. When Vance wanted to transition away from law, he joined the Thiel founded Mithril Capital. When he left to start his own VC firm Narya Capital he did so with Thiel backing (among other billionaire investors like Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt). And when Vance made a Senate run in 2022, Thiel was there with a record breaking $15 million donation (the largest ever given to a single Senate candidate). It’s even reported that Thiel was the one who brought Vance down to Mar-a-Lago to patch up his relationship with Trump (real JD Vance heads will remember he called Trump an idiot, reprehensible, and privately compared him to Hitler).