Trump’s reign fits Curtis Yarvin’s blueprint of a CEO-led American monarchy. What is technological fascism?
- Written by Luke Munn, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland
The plan was simple. It started by retiring all government employees by offering them incentives to leave and never return. To avoid anarchy and keep authority, the police and military would be retained.
Government funds would be seized and the money redirected to more worthwhile pursuits. Court orders pushing back against these measures as “unconstitutional” should be summarily ignored. The press should be massaged and censored as necessary. Finally, universities, scientific institutions, and NGOs should also be snapped off, their funding terminated.
These moves resemble many made (or attempted) in the first 100 days of the second Trump administration. But they were all laid out in 2012 by a single person: Curtis Yarvin.
In the past five years, Yarvin’s reactionary blueprints for governance have found powerful backers in both Silicon Valley and Washington circles.
His ideas have been taken up and repeated in various ways by Peter Thiel (PayPal), Elon Musk (X, Tesla), Alexander Karp (Palantir) and other founders, CEOs and thought-leaders within the broader tech industry. He was a guest at Trump’s Coronation Ball in January.
Perhaps most directly, vice president JD Vance has praised him by name and echoed his ideas, asserting the need for a “de-wokification programme” that “strikes at the heart of the beast”.
Yarvin’s current newsletter, Grey Room, now boasts 57,000 subscribers. “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe,” cautioned a recent article, “Now They’re Coursing Through Trump’s Washington.”
Rebooting the state
Yarvin, a 51-year old computer engineer, has been publishing his thoughts on politics for close to 20 years. His original blog, launched in 2007, introduced his potent blend of “the modern engineering mentality, and the great historical legacy of antique, classical and Victorian pre-democratic thought”. Last week, The Washington Post called it “required reading for the extremely online right”.
Democracy was dead and doomed from the beginning, Yarvin argued in his blog, in quippy, Reddit-style prose. Governance should look to other mechanisms (tech) and modes (monarchism) for inspiration.
The state needs a “hard reboot,” asserted Yarvin. “Democratic elections are entirely superfluous to the mechanism of government” he argued. “A vote for democratic or republican matters a little bit,” he admitted, but “basically if the whole electoral system disappeared, Washington would go on running in exactly the same ways”.
For Yarvin, then, it is not just the government that must change – a superficial swap of parties and politicians – but something far more fundamental: the form of government. Democracy was beta tested and failed to deliver. The political operating system must be ripped out and replaced.
While elements (like the term “red pill”) travelled far beyond its pages, Yarvin’s ideas remained on the fringes until recently, with their growing popularity pushing him into the limelight. Last week he hit the headlines due to his debate at Harvard, a place that has become a “symbol of resistance to Trump”, with political theorist Danielle Allen, a democracy advocate.
Allen, who debated Yarvin to provide students with “help thinking about intellectual material”, wrote after the debate that he correctly diagnoses a problem, but not its causes or solutions:
He is right that our political institutions are failing. He is also right that their members have failed to see the depth of our governance problems and their own contributions to them through technocracy and political correctness. […] But Mr. Yarvin leads them astray with his vision of absolute monarchy and racial cleansing.
A technological republic
For Yarvin and others like him, democracy’s fatal flaw is the demos (or, people) itself. Trusting the agency and ability of citizens to govern through representation is naive, Yarvin believes. Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir, a firm that provides military and intelligence agencies with big data “intelligence”, agrees.
“Why must we always defer to the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to allocating scarce capital in a market economy?” Karp asked in his recent bestseller, The Technological Republic.
For Yarvin, Karp, Thiel and the other elites that embrace these ideas, the people are idiots. A favourite quote (likely apocryphal) is from Churchill, stating the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Alexander Karp at Davos in 2023.
Gian Ehrenzeller/AAP
If a legacy republic was one by the people and for the people, Karp argues a technological republic will “require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government”.
In this vision, the state shapeshifts into something sleeker, more successful, more like a startup: the corporation. “A government is just a corporation that owns a country,” Yarvin stresses. Musk has echoed this line: “the government is simply the largest corporation”.
But if this is true, it is a pathetic one, according to its hyper-capitalist detractors: bloated with waste, saddled with debt and slowed by regulation. The state is a dinosaur which makes incremental change and must tread with caution, bending to the needs of its constituents. Founders dictate their commands and impose their will.
Dark enlightenment
“Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO,” explains philosopher Nick Land.
“As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value.” In this model, the president becomes the CEO king; the citizen becomes the customer or user.
Land, more than any other, has provided the philosophical cachet around this movement, taking Yarvin’s quippy but fuzzy prose and formalising it into the political and philosophical formation known as neoreaction or the “Dark Enlightenment”, with a sprawling 2014 essay that moves from the death of the west to racial terror, the limits of freedom and the next stage of human evolution.
Nick Land.
GoodReads
Land, variously regarded as a cybernetic prophet or scientific racist, has long held anti-humanist and anti-democratic views. “Voice”, or representation – the key tenet of liberal democracy – has been tried and failed, Land argues. The only viable alternative is “exit”: flight from failed governance altogether, into a post-political and post-human future.
To simplify drastically: democracy’s naive belief in equality for all – propped up and policed by the array of humanitarian organisations, government agencies and woke culture warriors that Yarvin sneeringly dubs “The Cathedral” – has held capitalism back from its true potential.
Technological fascism
For Land, Yarvin and others, optimal rule would be both hypercapitalist and hyperconservative: a hybrid political order I’ve begun to research and conceptualise as technological fascism.
Technological fascism gazes to the future and past for inspiration. It couples, in the words of writer Jacob Siegel:
the classic anti-modern, anti-democratic worldview of 18th-century reactionaries to a post-libertarian ethos that embraced technological capitalism as the proper means for administering society.
In this vision, the best form of governance marries reaction and information, Machiavelli and machine learning, aristocracy and artificial intelligence, authoritarianism and technosolutionism.
To revive the glorious traditions of the past, its champions believe, we must leverage the bleeding-edge innovations of tomorrow.
Governing like a monarch
This culture is already infiltrating Washington. Trump is governing like a monarch, making unilateral decisions via hundreds of executive orders, bulldozing through opposition and legislation.
Musk and his DOGE minions stress they need to “delete entire agencies”, commandeering offices and allegedly stealing data under the pretext of eliminating “waste”.
A recent study of over 500 political scientists found “the vast majority think the US is moving swiftly away from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism”.
In the vision laid out by Yarvin – and taken up more and more by a growing political vanguard – government is either a political inconvenience or a technical problem. Increasingly, the authoritarian imperative to impose absolute rule and the Silicon Valley mantra of “moving fast and breaking stuff” dovetail into a disturbing single directive.
Authors: Luke Munn, Research Fellow, Digital Cultures & Societies, The University of Queensland
