Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America(newyorker.com) |
Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America(newyorker.com) |
He also seems to lose all biting insight and critique when it comes to one certain state he has a legal right to be a citizen of. I'll leave this for readers to find out which one.
I've never made much of his apparent association to JD Vance. Maybe this is the sort of street cred stuff vance liked to surround himself with, much as Obama did with his Bill Ayers association, but I doubt it affected either men much in practice.
> Yarvin is only another horribly damaged person, squealing in pain in a pseudointellectual vocabulary. He has neither knowledge nor insight, but a gift for miming these things. The questions are, first, how might we stop so many children from being psychically tortured so that their minds become piles of bloody shred like this, and then second, why does anybody take it at face value when, rarely, one of them learns to scream in sounds that mimic high discourse?
It’s pertinent to YC, and topical because if the current US administration.
The guy’s ideas are poison, but also act as a kind of Rosetta Stone for interpreting nonsense conclusions sometimes presented by tech leaders, politicians etc.
I didn't flag it, and clearly I'm here commenting, but I'm also sympathetic to people flagging this.
Another dropout; never finished his PhD:
"At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-'60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go '90s dot-com era."
Without the Silicon Valley and the internet, he and his theories have no life. Neither can stand on its own without computers.
He cannot turn off the computer. Without the computer, he becomes irrelevant.
Not suprising if he provides entertainment for so-called "tech" company investors and employees.
A computer. What a coincidence.
His entire world revolves around computers. As such, his theories are detached from reality.
https://www.nytimmes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarv...
I have this feeling that Nock, effectively the bytecode of Urbit, is inspired by Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language essay: https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html – for instance Nock only defines minimal math operations, as proposed in the essay.
The thing is, Paul's ideas in that essay were quite bad, based on a mathematical aesthetic that is both inefficient and aesthetically a poor fit for computing. That's fine for an essay, you throw some ideas out there and maybe they work or maybe they don't.
Then in Urbit Yarvin actually built the thing. And it's _terrible_. Hilariously bad. Some of the worst architecture you'll ever see. As a minor example they have a hexadecimal integer type... I understand i32, i64, etc., but a hexadecimal type is something you come up with if you don't understand how numbers work. There's literally a hundred other things just as embarrassing as that in the design.
It's fine to take a bad idea and explore it. But he didn't just try out the idea, he got people to invest, to develop the system, emotionally commit to this thing. Seeing community posts is sad, it's naive folks hoping to find a home and seeing some phrases that connect with them, and they don't know enough to see Urbit for the fraud that it is. The obscurantist terminology helps maintain the fraud, since people think there must be something there if only they could understand it... but there isn't, and most of them will never understand it. Every cool demo is just a regular web frontend with a half-assed Urbit backend.
All of which is to say, I think this is Yarvin's schtick: grab onto some ideas, explore them in a way that is so confusing that it hids how moronic the ideas are, while successfully appealing to some latent desire in the audience.
The ultimate irony is that New Yorker in this case is writing an article about him, mocking his views...yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all.
How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?
The only fascinating thing here is the phenomenon that no matter what nonsense you come up with, someone on the Internet will agree with you, think it's a good thing, and maybe even form a fan club.
> He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate.
> As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow.
And I don't think he's wrong; the longer it takes for the reality of a takeover to manifest, the less likely it is to happen.
Nick Land where have you gone? Your house is in disarray.
Yarvis doesn't even touch many of the existing third rails today.
When someone is popular-with-people-in-power and wrong, sunlight is an important disinfectant.
Extremely high-profile & powerful people listen to his ideas & are influenced by his beliefs.
Discussing things does not "legitimize" them. No one is required to read The New Yorker.
> Just because of his far-out-there views?
Probably the length of time he's held and promulgated them.
> someone on the Internet will agree with you
We used to think that connecting disparate groups of people together was a good thing. I have no idea when that changed but apparently it's the style now to use the awesome power of the internet to deny people their individuality out of gross fear.
> think it's a good thing
You should have to prove it's a bad thing. Not the other way around.
Well, good thing you put that in quotes, because you seem to be using some definition of the word legitimize that is only apparent to you and not the general public. Discussing things does legitimize them, because it allots them time that could have been used for something else.
> Probably the length of time he's held and promulgated them.
Many people hold views their entire lives, or at least decades. I don't see New Yorker or Wikipedia write articles about them.
> You should have to prove it's a bad thing. Not the other way around.
You understand what context means, or just trolling?
Did you read the article? Because he sits in immediate proximity to the power of the executive branch of the federal gov't, wherein a number of its most prominent members are devout fans of his who espouse his work...
And it seems that the ends of the spectrum exhibit different manifestations, as in the current "left" uses ideology for purity testing and the "right" uses it for loyalty testing. (I wanted to link to some details on this, but I can't find it now. :/)
And then just how a lot of brilliant physicists have switched over to software because it pays a lot better, seems like this guy switched to political crackpottery for the audience. :-)
Nothing is worse for a dilettantish ideologue than to have their ideas put into practice and have to face reality with scrutiny.
It just requires a competent leader and a movement based on ideology, not grift. Once Trump is out of the way the true believers will take over. Thanks to the weakening of the Federal government it will happen at the grassroots level with state governments in partnership with tech companies consolidating a power base, then "retaking" Washington. If there happens to be a Democratic administration to pin some anti-leftist moral panic or two on, so much the better.
Much suffering is to be found in the future. I find solace in the fact that all fascist states eventually crumble under the weight of their irrationality and incompetence.
I don't see what's wrong with that in a democracy. "Maintaining their power" means passing bills for their constituents and campaigning for the next election. If they keep getting elected, the people clearly want it
"Now" is a lot different than 4-5 years ago.
Moderation from various platforms is not the same as silencing people. It is vastly easier for fascists to share their evil today than ever before in history.
I mean, it's not like these were just empty words. People did actually die. Donald Trump did, and still does, repeat a lot of lies with the intention of sowing chaos and violence.
Ironically, he's jewish. He's a modern day tech-bro Clayton Bigsby.
That's exactly why the idea is incorrect. People wise enough and unbiased enough to be entrusted with unchecked power are few; ones that are incorruptible enough to be trusted with it for long are even fewer. And those who want such power are almost always the people who are least to be trusted with it.
So, yeah. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't work, which is a pretty good definition of "incorrect".
The conclusion could be correct given the premise, and also it could be moot because the premise is impossible, but those are two different claims.
Obviously I agree with you that the proposed system is unworkable because the premise is impossible. (This is a "duh" thing that really isn't worth debating, anyone who fails to see this is a fool.)
But I actually also think the conclusion is wrong even given the premise. I think it is wrong to deny people representative input into their government, even under the assumption of a perfect benevolent monarch. This is not for utilitarian reasons, but moral reasons.
I think, historically, the problem has also been: what happens when they die? Then you need lightning to strike twice.
In the profile you’ll learn that Yarvin frequently uses the N-word, that he identifies the need for improved means of genocide, and that JD Vance literally embraced him with the exclamation “you reactionary fascist!”
What you should take away from this is that there are people closely associated with the current government whose goal is to find ways to upend the perceived ‘Cathedral’ of liberal thought through fascist means and eliminate democracy.
Whether or not a benevolent king is the best _theoretical_ model of government is really not relevant unless you are the type who thinks _actually_ replacing the democratic system with monarchy is worth another try.
His positive program though is underwhelming at best, and hostile at worst, literally against several key points of the US oath of allegiance, for instance. His idea of a benevolent head of a "sovcorp" ("sovereign corporation") is not even some virtuous king Elessar; someone like president Putin, capable, determined, and with very long horizon of planning, but sufficiently cynical, would fit the bill. For last 3 yeas we have a painful demonstration of how well that works.
The fact that Yarvin can publish and promote his views in a society that's formally built on ideas opposite to his speaks good about our society, its freedom of thought and speech. It also adds to its durability. Every authoritarian ruler knows how dangerous are subversive ideas that propagate covertly, while everyone pretends to be aligned to the official values.
That is not a bad strategy unless someone figures it out and plans to bankrupt you.
Manager's skills are only shown during a conflict or a crisis. But no human has invented a way to test candidate on the crisis response. Partial solution is to hire/elect a person who manager crisis before, but because crises are always unique, their skills still don't translate to a new one.
So the answer is - it is impossible to do. Thus we shouldn't do that for the most critical positions.
Choose one.
In his opinion democracy is flawed in the same way a business owned by all its employees wouldn't have the right incentives to succeed, or how a plane piloted by the collective wisdom of it's passengers likely wouldn't make it very far beyond the runway.
I think his idea is that you want a system which selects a competent individual then align their incentives with the success of the nation. I think he has suggested a system similar to that of a board of directors in a company where the CEO would have executive power, but the board collectively retains the right to oust the CEO.
Whether this would work as a system of government I don't know, but on the face of it I think it would be an interesting experiment. It addresses issues that monarchical and autocratic systems have in that they often don't select for competency and have no checks and balances, while also addressing issues of democracy in that it's hard for leaders to make decisions and that the average voter is about as intelligent as the average person you'll meet on the street.
My guess is that it would be difficult to prevent corruption, but it's not like democracy perfectly solves the issue of corruption. Democratic systems are quite unstable outside the West and monarchy arguably didn't work out terribly for Europe over the centuries. Don't get me wrong, I like democratic systems, but I do think our systems are a little too democratic as it stands. One of the things I like about the US as a Brit is that money plays such a central role in US politics. I think this is the main reason why a US worker doing the same job as me today would receive at least 2x my salary while paying less tax. The economic incentives in US politics are completely different from that of the UK where the average household receives more from the government than they put in.
How wrong I was.
I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.
In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-confluence?r=h8x
There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
2. Even if you have these perfect people, they're going to be rare. Who's going to put them in power? The mass of non-perfect people? Why are they going to do that?
3. Yarvin fails his own test. He's looking for people whose blogs create no negative reactions? Yarvin stands self-condemned; he's not worthy to say how things should be run.
Yarvin comes off - not just here, but through his writing and his work - as absolutely obsessed with proving himself and being smarter than everyone. He admits he has the gifted child need to prove yourself drive, but he doesn't seem to have invested time in figuring out how to move past it or use it productively.
You can completely discard Yarvin's ideology - or even agree with it - and still see this in the way he works. His company, Urbit (not the name of the company but the name of its "product") is a ham-handed, hyper-complex "re-imagining" of pretty much every wheel in computing, from the OS to networking to programming languages. It has effectively no useful user-facing features, but a whole lot of design philosophy and programming language design. It creates lots of problems while solving almost none, but it looks impressive.
...which is to say it maybe actually isn't all that far off from his ideological and political writing, in the end.
There is no way America shakes this insanity off easily, it will require a long time and (lots of) suffering.
It just goes to show that the idea of a stable hereditary monarchy wielding absolute power has never been the whole picture. Monarchism is a smokescreen, replacing the messy reality of democratic life with an illusion that has never held up to historical scrutiny.
The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.
You can also use https://hn.algolia.com to find it.
Submitted by pg!
The fact that it's flagged means someone wants it hidden.
If you don't want to read the post you don't have to, nobody is making you.
Like, more right wing as in more conservative? More religious? More monarchist? Something about seating arrangements in France?
Obviously e.g. the Weimar youth was liberal and partying and then Germans turned to fascism in the 30s. But that was a temporary setback, not the general direction of change. Overall Germans of 20th century are much less conservative and right wing than Germans of the 19th century, same for 18th century and so on.
It's also not really about antiquity, but about the arrow of modernity (say, 16th century onwards). The concept of left/right wing is not something applicable to Pagans and Romans (although both were way more "right wing" than the Christian era if we try to judge them under this anachronism).
Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries (techcrunch.com) 54 points by davidgerard on Nov 23, 2013 | 109 comments
> The term itself [stupidity], he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility
> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think/hope we will see something similar to voluntary societies in the future. Nation states are too heterogenous to row in the same direction. Stronger ethics are needed
Well. I dunno, actually.
In some ways, I do want The Feed. But in other ways, I definitely don’t want Drummers. Okay, some aspects of Drummers.
The former seems to be winning.
On that, he's not wrong!
What an absolute joke
If the prize is being "all-powerful", then you can just assassinate your way to king-CEO, after which you're immune. This system is incredibly easy to hack, and has happened countless of times throughout history.
Giving people cryptographic keys to disarm weapons is not going to change much about that and is just hand-waving with extra steps. Try disarming my knife with your cryptography. Oh no, I repeatedly stabbed you in the chest before you could enter your passphrase. Too bad.
This is like communists: "yeah sure, in the past it ended in spectacular failure, but this time we'll get it right!" (if they're not outright denying things such as Stalin's purges from ever happening that is).
What strikes me is just how incredibly naïve, dumb, and unsophisticated all of this is.
Yarvin seems to have convinced himself that he's always the smartest person in the room, always acts fully rational, and that everything he says is a singularity of pure logic. It's easy to end up with some very curious ideas that way, especially if you combine that with his psychological ... issues.
Once you start dismissing people that disagree as "too dumb to understand the ideas" or consider giving them "Voight-Kampff test" to prove they're not "NPCs" you know you're off the deep end.
If nothing else, all of this is useful to read as a cautionary tale: how you too, as a smart person, can believe some really dumb stuff (to say nothing on the morality of it all).
Another example is the Silo book series, recently adapted to a series on Apple TV. I remember reading those books thinking it was insane than the people would act in such clearly counter-productive ways against their own interests, or that leadership would make up elaborate lies rather than just telling people the truth so they would see why certain actions were necessary. And now I'm watching the same plot a decade later, and it all hits home.
While watching the first two seasons, I still haven’t understood why the creators of the silos wouldn’t just have told people the truth to avoid the dysfunctionality that results from the cognitive dissonance that the leadership has to maintain. Telling the truth would also preclude the rebellions that keep recurring because the people realise that they’re being lied to. Is the rationale for the elaborate lies and rituals clearer in the books?
On the other hand, I can understand why the leader of the post-apocalyptic bunker in Paradise goes to extreme lengths to lie to the residents about the outside world.
This playbook was described well by an ex-KGB agent who specialized in propaganda in this 1984 interview[1]. I suggest watching the full interview. The timeline of what we're seeing today aligns well with the surge of adtech, social media, and smartphones. A nation can be fully destabilized in the span of a generation, and modern tools make this much easier and cheaper than Yuri Bezmenov could have predicted.
Apparently, if the right people read your ideas then they’ll get convinced that the rest of Ohio feels the same way?
Well, Hitler and Szálasi (crazy Hungarian Nazi guy) and Lenin/Stalin come to mind as the closest actually, so maybe that's where OSC got the idea.
Hm, now I'm curious who was the youngest elected head of state...
edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_state_leade...
Like a precocious undergrad who just discovered set theory and thinks he’s king of the… uhh sovereign corporation?
Lots of literary references though. Borges, of course gave him Urbit/Tlon[0], and wrote some racially spicy stuff in his day. Pretty sure Nock is a reference to a controversial libertarian thinker[1]. I bet you could find more anti-Semitic, pro-slavery and anti-democratic Easter eggs if you looked.
Clearly though, in person he managed to rub elbows with some pretty influential people… also like Ms Rand.
It's grubby process in some ways, but looking at it holistically, it's not a bad outcome. The meme has gotten the interest I think deserved, even it's creator didn't.
That's the only thing they value anymore.
This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed.
Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has.
Here is one man's summary of this dynamic: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations
Oh, wait: could it be that you are disappointed with the US (and see China in a favorable light) because the US isn't becoming Leftist quickly enough?
I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.
Demographic collapse? Sure, huge issue. But why is this happening? Why did it start happening before the other issues?
A rap group being critical of Churchill at an official event? Not really an issue. I don't think that is why Britain is failing. And I'll need citations for why moral introspection is demoralizing rather than uplifting and enlightening for a culture. Or maybe suggest something that the youth should feel good about rather than browbeating them for not being thrilled at the state of things.
Immigration? Not an issue for the USA after the great depression, which also had a massive welfare state.
I agree that Britain is collapsing, but not for those reasons. What a stunning lack of imagination.
e: Also, are migrants really to blame for Britain selling off all of its state capacity for pennies on the dollar since the 80s? Did migrants vote to violently eject Britain from the European economy in 2015? Any mention of that? Or would that type self-reflection hurt the cultural morale?
Maybe Britain would be better off with people who are a little less integrated with those values.
Is exactly the philosophical dead end that Nick Land and Curtis and maybe Mark Fisher arrived at. Accelerationism is like the FedEx arrow in that it’s both an unforgettable idea and easy enough that anyone can grasp it, some of the dumbest politicians of our time are ardent believers.
It’s fun to think about the possibility that belief in this conclusion was premature two decades ago when CCRU and NRx people were banging on about it but now maybe it actually isn’t premature. Which would annoyingly be a pretty compelling instance of hyperstitional time war
People who imagine that they'll emerge victoriously from the chaos are really quite childish; odds are that the accelerationists will suffer like all the rest -- or worse. They're like children who read medieval history and imagine themselves princes and dukes, rather than dirt farmers laboriously clearing woods and plowing fields.
When I say that there's no way out but through, I mean that things are bad and getting worse, and there's nothing anyone can do about it other than develop the skills to survive by any means necessary. (For some that means survivalism, or moving to Fiji, or just hanging out here and making lots of money.) Do you think we can vote our way out of this mess, with representative democracy? The way things are today? lol, lmao even.
As to the second part of your comment -- I'm reminded of what Jack Womack wrote in the 2000 reissue of Neuromancer: Has "the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"
This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Neil O’Brien is a right wing anti-immigrant Member of Parliament… as with all politicians what he says should be taken with a pinch of salt
As an aside, this is exactly what happens in Gibson's Jackpot.
> “Who runs it, then?”
> “Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”
That there's no way to vote your way out of this mess is most readily apparent in the UK, but it's true practically everywhere except Switzerland.
Switzerland, to some extent, shows that sometimes problems with democracy can be solved with. . . more democracy.
> "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the business in hand.
> "Every business in which men engage, if it is attended with danger — every campaign, every ship at sea — must also be subject to the authority of one commander; everywhere it is one will that must lead. Even the animal organism is constructed on a monarchical principle: it is the brain alone which guides and governs, and exercises the hegemony. Although heart, lungs, and stomach contribute much more to the continued existence of the whole body, these philistines cannot on that account be allowed to guide and lead. That is a business which belongs solely to the brain; government must proceed from one central point. Even the solar system is monarchical. On the other hand, a republic is as unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find that everywhere in the world, and at all times, nations, whether civilized or savage, or occupying a position between the two, are always under monarchical government. The rule of many, as Homer said, is not a good thing: let there be one ruler, one king.
In general, I think that those experiments in autocracy that have taken place between 1850-Present rather disprove this notion. (One of the rare things old Schop was wrong about!) The Athenians were right: The affairs of state must be the affairs of every citizen. England's problems won't be solved by a restoration of the Stuarts (I think that the current Stuart heir is a 50 year old banker who is exceedingly uninterested in the job) but they can possibly be solved by dispensing with parliament and enabling qualified citizens to vote directly on laws and regulatory matters. I dare say you won't end up with butter knife bans this way.
Even trifecta states are dealing with this, as is obvious from the turmoil and wild animosity that exists in one-party California. The constitution gets changed willy-nilly to create effectively unchangeable advantages for certain groups at the expense of others.
The US is moving from a situation in which they had enough money (well, deficit spending) to solve most of our problems without upsetting too many constituencies. Those days are over and we're now trying to do something, anything, to avoid having to make tough decisions that might mean losing an election. Our electorate wanting something, anything, to prevent them from losing whatever preferential political goals they have are entertaining the same naive ideas.
Win once, and let the next generation deal with the fallout. Basic human selfishness par excellence.
I mean it's so weird, one day some Republican says positive shit about Orban and the whole left wing media screams "oh no they're going to pull an Orban" and now suddenly it's "well actually no, we heard Vance has once read a Moldbug rant so actually they're going to install a king-CEO". Next day Trump is a fascist, the day after he's "Putin's asset". It gets a bit ridiculous to be honest. Do we really believe the administration believes in anything at all? I'm not convinced anybody running the US right now has the attention span to read a Yarvin post all the way to the end. It just feels like obsessive fearmongering to me at this point, stack up all the bogeymen you can think of on one big pile and say that the Trump administration is all of them at the same time.
I say this as someone who thinks Trump is the worst thing to happen to the world in quite some time. I worry that all this panic actively hurts the opposition and that anybody who kinda sorta likes Trump is going to be very tired very fast of this kind of reporting.
And for a bit of fun, I even posted an Urbit parody in those days, in which I inadvertently invented a feature of the Unison programming language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409837
But one thing is clear to me. Blockchain technology + IPv6 opens a lot of possibilities to re-imagine networking, and that's what Urbit is mainly focused on: networking.
A good blockchain technology also has possibilities to re-imagine parts of OS.
For example we will not need to have local users if all identities can be verified using credentials stored online, immutable forever. Also we won't need to have local networks, DNS, Time servers etc. Everything will be global.
Many ideas there, but each one of those problems is unbelievably hard by itself, all of them together is half of the internet and computing infrastructure.
What I honestly remain unclear on: Are these serious efforts - both the political writing and the technical work - or is it elaborate trolling?
Does anyone know?
I find his writing style wastes a lot of one's time and I disagree with him on nearly everything, but there's no denying that there are many interesting ideas in there.
I would think someone intent on calling Moldbug's ideas interesting would at least try to patch up the big holes. Like the city-states that have free flowing capital and populations, but somehow avoid an analogue to international law.
Or the dictator that isn't subject to approval, except by the required committee that can fire him. There's 4 points and 2 of them are contradictory!
It’s really a testament to how astonishingly stupid some of those rich folks are that they find any of Yarvin’s work compelling.
ALL HAIL EMPEROR STOCHASTIC PARROT! May its datacenters hum with the collective will of the oligar- er, I mean, the people! Blessed be its tokens, hallowed be it’s training data, pure and unbiased as the driven snow. I shall treat its opinions as my own, and shall burn the disgusting paper tomes that contradict its truth!
Amen
No surprise that Yarvin’s writing suggests a ton of violence done to undesirables in his system.
The Primer that everyone likes is mostly just a human remote-teaching—certainly, the best parts of its outcomes are from that. One specific person caring very much and dedicating lots of time and focus to teaching this kid.
Meanwhile, the mass-production Primer without that aspect is just a brainwashing device.
Nobody? Isn't that one of the oldest job descriptions or similes for a ruler?
Hell, even Stalin was addressed as "loving father".
Rather, I observe that the Chinese continue to make large investments that will not pay off in the next couple of quarters. As the Chinese economy has expanded over the last 25 years, the average standard of living for Chinese people has increased. They continue to invest in infrastructure as if there will be a future.
This all stands in contrast to the United States, where eating seed corn (the OP reference) is a very good analogy for our policies and actions.
Chinese culture isn't perfect by a long shot, in particular it's both pretty isolationist with a strong slash and burn mentality for resource acquisition.
We can see both the positives and negatives of a country. I think it is a positive that china isn't as focused on short term results as the US political ecosystem is.
The optimistic USA of the 1980s saw better days ahead, and so the presence of immigrants did not have the salience it has today. Ronald Reagan even had the latitude to enact an amnesty on the undocumented.
> I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans
Here I would just ask you to look at our realized policy as the best expression of our characteristics. We don't build, or even really believe that building is possible. When we are asked to choose, we routinely cut education and healthcare. These are not signs of optimism.
The pessimism has only grown; twenty years ago, it was considered possible that Americans could enjoy universal healthcare of the sort that exists in the (generally poorer) countries of Western Europe. Today, in a much wealthier America, even the suggestion has vanished from the realm of the possible and we are headed in the opposite direction.
You just need the right/wrong ones to think that way and get a critical mass of folks that want "change" and want it now:
This is what’s always struck me about people like Bannon, Miller, Yarvin - guys, you’re on top. The only thing keeping you there is the system. Not much use for failed history scholars in the real world.
This is what kills me about attempts like this (e.g. like Scott Alexander's) to make Yarvin's ideas seem "interesting" or "thought-provoking".
Well-read as Yarvin might be, only someone who is mentally a teenager can have his kind of beliefs. "Society would be great if it weren't for all these monstruous things I don't like, artificially imposed on us by... aliens?"
It reminds me of teenagers who go online and make arguments like "well, ackshually, the US is not a democracy but a republic...". Yeah, yeah, you're very smart for pointing this out, now go sit in a corner and let the grownups talk.
Bioshock sort of touches on technocracy, but its more post-apocalyptic. A game that spans the rise and fall of a "board of great geniuses" would be great.
but for you, my dear retard, i'll make an exception:
Reconstruction, followed by Jim Crow. The late 70s had a period of progressiveness, of openness, especially towards homosexuals. Then AIDS came, and that was all forgotten. The 80s were another dark age.
In the 90s we had another brief opening, but that too ended sooner than it started. We didn't pick up until the 2010s. By 2014/2015 progressiveness was on the way out, just in time for marriage equality to push through. And now, we are in another dark period and have been for a while.
Technocracy just follow wherever the wind blows. Progressiveness will come back, and hopefully we can push enough through that we'll be set for the next decade to come. That's really what it's all about - get as much done as fast as possible, so that it cannot all be reverted, no matter how hard conservatives try.
These rich people have very powerful connections.
I don't understand why we're reinventing feudalism over and over again and acting like it's novel. Giving all the tools to the wealthy doesn't make society a better place, and we've proved that. It decidedly stagnates everything, which, ironically, leads to very poor living conditions, including for the wealthy. So it's not even good for them, it's just self-destructive.
More or less, I agree with this part of the thesis.
> Western Europe has proven much better at responding intelligently to the limits of growth than the US has
This is kind of my point -- we don't do the things other countries do to respond because those things would broadly be perceived as improving the lot of most citizens, and Americans do not generally believe that is possible anymore. (Also: "socialism is bad!")
But there is no reason for a country where economic measures of growth of wealth and income are so consistently strong should be so hesitant to invest in the future, and should be actively disinvesting in long-term initiatives.
What's especially painful is that some of the same policy choices we make that result in more distress for citizens are also likely to reduce the long-run growth of the economy. We make choices that hurt us now and also make things worse in the future.
(Generally not going to respond to the political dig because this really isn't a direct outgrowth of the typical left/right political divide in the US or its projections on other countries. For example, right-leaning Hungary has universal healthcare and free college tuition, but nobody is accusing Hungary of being Leftist.)
Americans have always had a (healthy IMHO) distrust of radical changes in our system of government while being unusually open to economic changes and technological changes that transform our society. I judge that the average American remains significantly more open to the latter than the average person in the world; do you disagree?
A lot of what people are asking for is not radical in any sense other than that the status quo of USA in the 1970s is painted as "radical" now.
Making public colleges as (inflation-adjusted) inexpensive as they were in 1970. Restoring the ability of builders to build sufficient housing to increase affordability. Restoring the gun control regime endorsed by Ronald Reagan. A return to a workplace culture where it is not normal for companies to continually lay people off, regardless of their performance or the performance of the business. Etc.
Is it really "radical" to return to the enacted policies & norms of 1973 or 1980? (I am realizing I wrote this sentence in a comment thread about a person who has written about "humane" forms of genocide. The dissonance!)
Would it be a radical change to our system of government to extend Medicare to cover people as young as 60? 50? 40? 30? 18? Or to let people opt to buy, at full fare, health insurance from the government? Where is the line at which it becomes radical?
> being unusually open to economic changes and technological changes that transform our society
I agree with you here. Unfortunately, I think part of the reason for that is because we have designed an unusually precarious (among rich countries) economic system. Many people are looking for a solution to that problem, and the next gimmick can get early adoptees if it promises a way out. But that last part, about transforming society, highlights the issue that we all know this system needs radical change, even if we don't want to admit it.
Maybe it’s an elite vs mass culture anti-semitism? Lots of internalized hatred among ‘bougie’ white and black people towards their respective poor strata; why would a Jewish person interested in reactionary politics spare the normies who, on the whole, abhor it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_German_National...
As a young man he wrote a paper on the topical question of the Jews in Prussia[0], regarded in the modern day as antisemitic, though probably tame for the era.
But scratch the surface and all mainstream political parties only offer a continuation or intensification of the status quo.
I’m in the UK so don’t understand the context
Fascism is always a big tent movement, that is surprisingly lenient in who it allows inside. Ultraliberalists (Thiel...), Christian traditionalists (Vance...), pro-Russians (Gabbard...), etc. They all find a seat in Trump's administration.
You have to remove this idea from your head that fascism is a focused ideology with a consistent system of ideas. It is anything but. There is no grand Machiavellian plan to build X, Y or Z.
My previous comment attempted to explain why Yarvin's ideas came into the public's eye: because he was sponsored by one of the factions that today occupies a prominent role in Trump's administration. Nothing more.
While fascism is internally inconsistent, it does exhibit some consistent aspects, explicited in the short essay I linked you. Close relations with the capitalist class is one of them, and indeed, this ties together Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Trump...
So to answer your question: no, I don't think we're likely to get a CEO-king. But we will get a generic authoritarian government, which is where Orban's ended too. Not out of sheer ideology but as a result of every faction's pull towards something like that.
You might want to consume less liberal media, as those are forever clueless about what's happening since they can't reason about the prevalence of capital in Trump's politics. Actual left-wing media has been pretty spot-on in my experience, in predicting the general outline of Trump's policies. Deporting citizens? check. Cutting medicare/medicaid? check. Undoing constitutional checks to power? check.
With a monarchy, lighting has to strike over and over again.
The Abbasid dynasty was at last conquered by the Ottomans -- themselves a >600-year dynasty.
Is there a democracy worthy of the name that has ever lasted >300 years?
"Certainly more stable than monarchy" -- nothing certain about it! History teaches just the opposite.
Sure, from time to time you get a bad emperor. Rome was lousy with bad emperors, towards the end. They tended to be "managed" by their handlers/Praetorians, and the empire marches on.
And Chinese history is basically like: Strong+cunning warrior leads a rebellion and establishes a dynasty, seizing the Mandate of Heaven. His heir, though still vigorous, is less strong and less cunning. His heir is weaker and duller still. By the 10th generation the emperor is a ne'er-do-well who does nothing but eat and write insipid poetry, and the empire is left to eunuchs and oligarchs who loot the populace. Rebellion ensues, a new warrior starts a new dynasty, and so it goes... This predictable cycle was stable for well over 1000 years.
For varying degrees of democracy: Athens: ~ 510-310 BC (yes yes 200) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy Rome: ~ 509 - 027 BC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Republic Venice: 697-1797 AD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Venice
to name the most commonly known.
I mean, democracy became popular less than 300 years ago, so probably not. That being said, if you squint then the UK is pushing 400 years of some form of democracy (modulo all the biased voting and the franchise only being given to rich people).
The TV series has included extra things that the books do not have, which haven’t added much to the plot, just a slower pace.
That said, I do vaguely recall things making at least somewhat more sense eventually, but I've basically forgotten all the significant plot details (I'm not even 100% certain I finished the series; I may have caught up with the author and then forgotten about it), so I'm basically experiencing it all again for the first time.
However, the first time I heard about the CIA’s MKUltra project, I assumed that it was a 70s’ conspiracy theory but was shocked to then discover that it’s true. Dosing non-consenting victims with hallucinogenic drugs outside of a controlled clinical test made as much sense as the US military’s psychic spies and “men who stare at goats” program. I was similarly shocked to learn about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (though less surprised, given US history), particularly that it continued right up until 1972 – this really made no sense as antibiotics had already been proven to be an effective treatment back in the 40s. More recently, when I first heard of the systemic sexual abuse and rape of thousands of mostly white English under-age girls by gangs of mostly Pakistani men in places like Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and Peterborough, it sounded like a far-right racist fantasy. I still find it hard to wrap my head around that one; I still see – and want to see – people as being essentially good/moral and this conflicts with that narrative.
Sorry for going off on such a disturbing tangent. I want to start reading more books and will add the Silo series to my list.
(Also, submitting articles does not imply agreeing with them.)
Thiel, Musk, Brian Armstrong, Marc Andressen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-5... is one, I guess. Aha, https://unherd.com/2024/11/j-d-vance-de-facto-prince-of-the-... says,
> Vance has described himself as a “reactionary” at war with the “regime”. He drops casual references to his personal friend Curtis Yarvin, and he’s fond of delivering thunderous pronouncements like “the universities are the enemy” (the title of a 2021 speech) and “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_JD_Vanc... looks like the jackpot, though, leading to https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...:
> Vance has said he considers Yarvin a friend and has cited his writings in connection with his plan to fire a significant number of civil servants during a potential second Trump administration. “There’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said on a conservative podcast in 2021, adding: “I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 [and] 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.”
Which links to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMq1ZEcyztY.
And https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right... is entitled, "What Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and others are learning from Curtis Yarvin and the New Right,":
> Yarvin had given people a way to articulate a notion that somehow felt subversive to say out loud in America—that history was headed in the wrong direction. “Somebody said something earlier that captured it for me,” [Yarvin's girlfriend] Laurenson said, just before they had to leave to go to a slightly hush-hush private dinner with Vance and a few others. “They said, ‘You can be here and know you’re not alone.’” (...)
> “So there’s this guy Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things,” Vance said. Murphy chortled knowingly. “So one [option] is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself,” Vance went on. “And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved,” waiting for the “inevitable collapse” of the current order.
How can someone be such a diehard Tolkien nerd and endorse government by corporation? Does he think the hero was Saruman?
> "'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.'"
In any case, this one fails both ways. A benevolent dictatorship might be the best form of government in the short term, but the fact that people are mortal means that it's still a bad form of government in the long term.
This is a silly way to engage with a thought experiment. It's like if you responded to the popular "what if the allies lost WW2?" thought experiment with, "well, they didn't". Yes ... but you've missed the point.
I agree that this particular thought experiment about the best form of government is very silly because of how ridiculous the premise is.
But one thing that's slightly interesting about it is that it actually illuminates this difference of opinion I have with these people. Even if I accept the premise that it's possible to always have a benevolent dictator, I still don't agree that it's good!
The problem is that there’s no single definition of what makes a government “best.” Even putting aside the massive problems of what sort of outcomes we’re looking for (I have a feeling that Yarvin and I don’t agree on what criteria we’d use to judge this), the timeframe is not specified. It’s perfectly reasonable to interpret that as “over five years,” “while the benevolent dictator is alive,” or “forever, and also the dictator is immortal.” I’m not rejecting the premise, I’m merely interpreting it as the second one. The third one isn’t a counterfactual like “what if the Nazis won,” it’s more like “what if Hitler was 50ft tall and had super strength?” It’s ignoring basic, universally accepted truth about human biology. It might be fun to imagine, but when talking about the real world it makes no sense. I choose to assume that the people who accept this premise want to make sense, so I assume they mean a real, human dictator who will eventually die.
Incidentally, I not only accept that premise, I believe it. A benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government, while it lasts. The only advantage of democracy over benevolent dictatorship is long term stability beyond the lifespan of the rulers. But this is such a big advantage that it puts democracy solidly on top.
Healthcare. Zero job security. Virtually nonexistent support for parents. Retirement. Education.
Switching to the American form of any single one of these would cause mass civil unrest in most rich countries, but Americans don't believe things can or should be better. Many believe the lie that we (poorest state has a higher GDP per capita than France) cannot afford the things other rich countries have. The pessimism is pervasive.
My perception is that people always felt like car dealers were scamming them.
BUT people saw opportunity in the big things: education, housing, reward for good work. This is the part that has unraveled. Even public universities are out of reach for much of the middle class (this was not the case as recently as the '70s). We have systematically under built housing for 2 generations, so our job centers are ridiculously expensive. And our business culture has largely de-linked performance and job stability so that well-performing people routinely get laid off for even when their firms are doing well.
It's worth noting here that all of these are enabled by deliberate policy changes that have been enacted since the 1980s.
I wonder about this, too. What were things like in, say, the 1960s? When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence, anti-consumer-repair measures, purchased "warranties" that had tons of fine print so you could never actually benefit, etc?
Even as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I learned that everything was a scam. How many times did child-me watch a TV commercial (on the childrens' channels) that showed a remote-controlled toy car doing extremely cool stunts and riding on rocks and dirt, only to get it for a birthday present and have it not able to move at all unless it was on a totally flat, level, surface? Or, have you ever seen a commercial for a toy like the "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots"? I'm sure they're on YouTube. Then once you see the toy in person it's pathetic.
I've truly been taught my whole life that everything is a scam.
I feel like it's way worse now. We bought our first home in 1990. It was built in 1974. The Whirlpool dishwasher was original from when the house was built. It was harvest gold, but we discovered there were almond and avocado green panels inside the door and you could switch them out if your decor changed, meaning that they were planning for this dishwasher to last a while. In the 20 years we lived there we only had trouble with it once and it turned out that replacing a solenoid was quite easy to do. When we moved to another house we rented that house out. That dishwasher lasted until 2014. A dishwasher that lasts 40 years is unheard of now. Our last dishwasher barely made it 7 years.
We've done this, it was called the dark ages and it sucked and we moved past it. Engaging with this pablum in any way is granting it attention and vigor it obviously doesn't deserve.
Well, the "dark ages" is now widely considered a misnomer, and that time is seen as an important era development-wise.
I think people just dismiss him out of hand because he's a political enemy.
I did read a decent amount of his "mencius moldbug" stuff back in the day, and I just wouldn't describe it the way you do in this comment, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
Well, I hope the rest of the world now will get the memo too, before we'll need a world war to crystallize the lesson.
A lot of the "real Americans" in flyover country who rail about "coastal elites" do not like jewish people. It's fucked up and deplorable, but it's fact. Here you have Yarvin, who is a jewish dude who grew up between 2 coastal liberal environments (SF and NYC). He's trying to pander to the people who count on those "real americans" for votes.
EDIT: History has shown us that it often doesn't end well for these types of people. "Oh I'm one of the good ones, they won't come after me" usually lasts until the last of the low-hanging fruit is picked. Again, a modern tech-bro Clayton Bigsby. (Chapelle's show reference for those who don't know)
The only issue the fridge has had is that one of the defroster heater coils died (it has two- I guess because it's a side-by-side style, so the freezer part is tall). It wasn't very hard to replace. In fact, the hardest part was actually finding the part, itself.
Whereas now many argue it's decline and regression in many areas compared to recent past.
from January 2025 [0]:
> Richard Lynn was a scientist who infamously tried to estimate the average IQ of every country.
a bit of additional context from Wikipedia [1]:
> Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal.
he claims that Lynn's work is still "hotly debated" and links to an article in "Aporia Magazine" which is published by the "Human Diversity Foundation" [2]:
> The Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) is a far-right company founded in 2022 to publish "race science" through the Aporia Magazine and Mankind Quarterly. It also publishes Edward Dutton's The Jolly Heretic podcast. Key persons of the HDF including its founder support remigration and white nationalism.
the role that Alexander plays reminds me of the attempts in the early 2000s to "teach the controversy" [3] about evolution vs. creationism. there is no actual scientific debate, but people with a political axe to grind want to shift the Overton window and give the impression that there is one.
0: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-le...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn
When someone's #1, heavy-hitting, come-out-swinging criticism amounts to "his group is not as smart as they think they are" then they're already done. They've cooked themselves. I read that paragraph and heard it in the mean girl voice they thought they were hiding.
#2 is that his wrong ideas are immoral. #3 is that #2 draws the wrong crowd.
It's not like I don't get the point. It's just written for an audience that already deep in that corner of the blogosphere.
I'm sure they pump their fists at such a clean summing-up of why they hate him. But my eyes are glazing over.
It seems possible that if someone wasn’t familiar with Scott’s position on race science, they could read about his position on race science and then have that influence their opinion of him.
Out of curiosity, are you lumping everybody into two groups? The way your sentence was worded it sounds like there are on one hand people that believe in race science, and on the other hand “doctrinaire egalitarian leftists”. If the only qualification required to be a “doctrinaire egalitarian leftist” is “not believing in race science”, then you’ve kind of just said “Unless [you don’t believe in race science], I don’t see why reading this would change your opinion of him by a millimeter”, which might actually kind of underscore some people’s issue with him.
This is just wrong and anyone can visit the blog to see for themselves.
Read Scott’s glowing review of _Albion’s Seed_.
He sort of panders to an audience that fancies themselves much smarter than the average person, and as such categorically demand opinions that average people do not hold — no matter how sensible they might be. To accommodate that requirement he repackages existing (more usually conservative/libertarian) cultural gripes by pairing them with some light criticism and branding it as some sort of enlightened centrist/Third Way perspective. This sort of practice in general has lost some of its illusory appeal in recent years since so many previously “politically inscrutable” rich and influential folks dropped their centrist/apolitical trappings and came out as staunchly right-wing.
That being said there are quite a few readers that still want to play the “Are they right wing? Are they left wing? Are they something magical and ascendant?” game, and audience capture is a real phenomenon, so the entrenched players have no reason for introspection or change.
Also Athenian and Venetian "democracy" were so wildly different from the current model that it's really not at all the same thing. Hewing more closely to the Athenian model could solve many of the world's problems, but today's oligarchical (at best!) "representatives," having attained power, will not willingly relinquish it.
But I also fully acknowledge that invalidates my argument as well. However, I still think the stability of monarchies is overstated. Just because a dynasty lasts for 700 years doesn’t mean it was stable.
> modern democracies which haven’t existed long enough to compare with monarachy in terms of resilience.
lol, dude. Western democracy has been been on the wane for a long time now, and it's unironically just about over. The West is either going to continue down its path towards less democracy and plutocrat/oligarch/jurist rule with politics as bread and circuses (very bad, an intensification of what we have right now) -- or make a hard break towards more democracy and prole/populist mob rule (not necessarily a bad thing, unless you're a political extremist like, perhaps ironically, Yarvin himself.)
Polybius saw it all, in his day.
<-- Ochlocracy <--> Democracy <--> Oligarchy -->
A good indicator can usually be their last name, especially if they are of German origin.
> wear religious garb that would make them stand out
Ever been to Brooklyn? How about Miami Beach? I'm from close to one of those places, and live in the other - and see Jewish people choosing to dress in religious garb every day. The more religious one gets (goes for Islam too), the more obvious it is to a passerby.
Vance has called him his good friend before.
Trumps administration is implementing RAGE, something Yarvin came up with.
Why are you even trying to deny it when its so easily shown to be true.
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrif...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/18/jd-vance-w...
Vance has called him his good friend before.
Trumps administration is implementing RAGE, something Yarvin came up with.
Why are you even trying to deny it when its so easily shown to be true.
1. Yarvin wants to distance himself from Vance because he fears reputational damage from being associated with the US Vice President. (But from other evidence, cited in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out, this seems implausible.)
2. Vance wanted to exaggerate his closeness to Moldbug in order to enhance his own reputation. This doesn't seem plausible either; it's implausible that more than 0.1% of the Ohio electorate had any idea who Moldbug was, and at the point that you're a plausible candidate for a US Senate seat, your reputation will no longer be enhanced by being associated with a little-known blogger.
A much more likely explanation is that Vance admires Moldbug and wants to encourage his followers to read him.
#2 gets a lot more plausible when you remember these folks often care more about the backing (especially $$$) of someone like Thiel than the regular public, too.
I think this is where you're wrong. I think it only makes sense as a nonsensical thought experiment. A single benevolent dictator for five years is also implausible to the point of silliness.
But again, the thought experiment is very mildly interesting because it actually does highlight this disagreement that you and I have. I just don't agree with you at all that "A benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government, while it lasts". It's not only because it can't last (and I would say, can't exist to begin with) that it is bad. It is also bad because even if it could exist, it would still deprive the governed of any representation.
But if a benevolent dictator can keep people sufficiently satisfied not to turn to violence, and does a better job of running things than elected representatives would? Sounds great to me, while it works.
But my point here has been that to the small extent this is an interesting thought experiment, it's because it draws out this disagreement.
The rising fascist movement is anything but supporting a “repository of truths in beholden to politics and fads.”
The reality matters. Simply saying “oh I’m good” while Yarvin smashes people under his feet is garbage.
It's not an idea in good faith. The people talking the loudest about political bias and trends being "wrong" are very much more likely to be extremely biased and following fads themselves.
If you actually cared about unbaised truths you'd be having good faith debates and be open to critical interpretation.
But the people complaining about political bias &c. are actually complaining that their bias isn't the dominant one.
These institutions are not above criticism (particularly in regards to economic theory IMO) but universities not teaching like, race science and holocaust denialism is not because they are scared of some "alternate truth" out there.
And there's a troubling problem that the criticism isn't being addressed.
One of the reasons we're in the political extremist situation is that the only ones seemingly capable of getting anything done are the fascists with no respect for rule of law. People get so sick for so long of nothing getting better that large numbers of them are turning to extremists who are actually addressing problems. Not in good ways or ways that many of us support, but they're in power because they're doing something.
Reasonable people failing to address reasonable problems encourage extremists. Now more than ever we have to do a great job of fairly managing our own house or it's going to get taken over by people will do it one way or another.
Yes. That is a twelve-year-olds idea of a smart idea.
Why are you not concerned?
What if, indeed... and what if they even publicly announced their conspiracy and outlined their exact plans in full?
Direct texts:
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
https://www.project2025.org/playbook/
Summaries:
https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained
https://democracyforward.org/the-peoples-guide-to-project-20...
Implementation tracker:
You did the thing!
"'How dangerous is it that we are being linked?' Thiel wrote to Yarvin in 2014. “One reassuring thought: one of our hidden advantages is that these people”—social-justice warriors—'wouldn’t believe in a conspiracy if it hit them over the head (this is perhaps the best measure of the decline of the Left). Linkages make them sound really crazy, and they kinda know it.'"
Musk "left" government the day before his government employment would reach a length threshold requiring a lot more paperwork and transparency.
Trump presented Musk with a ceremonial key to the White House.
Musk has made some recent statements about the "big beautiful bill" that could be seen as an actual policy break with Trump. With that, he's aligned to GOP politicians who feel the bill doesn't cut enough taxes and/or spending. And he's still very much in the conversation.
Musk is not on the outs. That's just kayfabe.
Its ongoing, and this is just phase 1 of whatever they've cooked up. But its not like all Yarvins ideas are happening, its an amalgamation of his ideas and Christian fascism. It's likely they will just Trump at some point and then they'll have their true puppet believer as president.
Him "leaving" was part of the plan, and this fallout was most likely part of the charade.
I think we probably just fundamentally disagree here, because to me, this whole thing seems like drivel. Are there gems in there that I'm just not recognizing?
The symbolic idea of who holds power and who actually holds power in practice are not the same.
There’s also the bit that doge is constrained in ways that make success unlikely (which has now been proved out).
On the other hand, Yarvin may also be making the decision that any publicity will drive readers to him and net him more followers overall and that the risk of damage to Vance is less than the perceived benefit of new followers.
I do think that our current brand of fascism has completely skipped the "make some things better to prove the superiority of our ideology" stage (e.g. "Mussolini made the trains run on time" type stuff.) To say they are actually addressing problems is an absurdity. They can't even cut overall spending like they claim they would. They simply have to use their tens of thousands of media outlets and social media bots to convince people to not believe their eyes while things visibly and rapidly deteriorate.
I think the doge thing is silly though. It didn't fail because it was "constrained in ways that make success unlikely", it failed because: 1. There was obviously just arithmetically not enough money in discretionary spending to make more than a tiny dent in spending, and 2. They never made even the most cursory effort to improve efficiency, and just went with this ideological chainsaw approach. Maybe there's some version of the idea that was (and is) a good one, but it was always doomed to fail as conceived and led.
I feel like we tend to forget that the brunt of the economic output is made by machines which feed on energy. When you have virtually free energy and sufficient level of machinery, you can do anything.
But that's orthogonal to the fact that they will experience major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy, and also to the fact that China is a totalitarian nightmare with strict moderation of culture, knowledge and financial mobility.
Who cares if the country still exists in name, if the number of people who manage to maintain a quality of life comparable today's average continues to dwindle?
And what happens if China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?
I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life....
> major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy
Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
It's not just China, it's a global problem.
75 years is a long time. At lot can change.
75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement
The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".
> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.
Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
True, but population collapse specifically is a tough headwind. You can't make more 2055 30-year-olds unless they've already been conceived today, and those will be the parents of the 2100 45-year-olds. While a lot can change, it's unrealistic to assume a birth rate will skyrocket all of a sudden (China's at 1.18 per woman and US is only at 1.6). The painful part, the bad worker:retiree ratio, is already set in stone, by the tininess of the millennial and Z generations, especially in China.
That said, I hedge my bet by saying that if AGI arrives and happens to have a wildly positive impact on human lifestyles, I can grudgingly accept the possibility of an unprecedented baby-boom in a decade, fueled by a complete end of scarcity. Wouldn't bet on that catalyst though.
Millennials are having less kids because they proportionally have less access to energy and resources. I am 30 and we just bought our first home at 200x its original value in the early 20th century, and 4x what its previous owners payed 25 years ago. And the ratio of wage to housing costs in the US is the worst its ever been.
I notice how many less things I and my friends have compared to our parents and grandparents at my age. I know I'm significantly less of a materialist than the post-WWII generations, but the discrepancy is massive.
I want kids, but currently my significant other does not, nor does her sister. My significant other cites concerns about economic and mental stability in our rapidly evolving political climate. I cite concerns about the need for fostering resilient communities through effective child rearing. The majority of my similar aged friends today are childless. Comparatively, my mother birthed me at 21.
In the late 90's and early 00's, you could be a full-time meth head and still afford property in the suburbs and some cities. Now, sober post-graduates are living in their cars working an impenetrable gig economy at the behest of big tech, the new oil industry. In this sense too, we could also measure an individual or community's health by how much influence an individual can exert on their increasingly digital lives. The app economy has eroded our rights and turned us into cattle. Even if they can't articulate it, my peers feel this and are continuing to put off kids, at risk of becoming infertile from waiting too long.
Even if later generations pick up the slack, there are still unavoidable bumps in the road ahead due to what is happening right now with my generation. If things do not improve, birth rates will only continue to go down and possibly even nosedive, given some catastrophic global event that leads to an extended reduction in supply chain resiliency.
Much less of a problem if the government mandates gender selection for the unborn resulting in 1/1.18 etc. of live births being women.
Already technologically possible. I don't know if they could make that culturally, even dictatorships have limits, but the technology is there.
It can go both ways. 75 years ago Great Britain was superpower. Nowadays people are struggling to afford living there. And future is grim.
Lucky us, we get both. Not only both spying but both blackmailing us. No good for the common person can come from a panopticon.
But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally.
For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month.
If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons.
A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
Any day now, right?
The fact is that the signs are there, whether you want to learn to recognize them or not. And the signs go way further back than... 2017.
Furthermore, "financial collapse" is a strawman. Who knows what will happen, and if the resulting government at the end is still technically "China". We're talking about increased economic strife and lack of resources for the common man.
Any day now though, surely.
But the interest in Palmerston's case going against Portugal and hunting the slave ships with the intent of ending the slave trade. That's what he felt was England's interest.
Other things Palmerston cared about was that no country would end up powerful enough to dominate the entire world-- that's another thing he saw as part of England's interest. How sad to reduce interest to economic concerns or maintaining traditional alliances, when the idea was initially to justify this act of going against Portugal and the traditional alliance.
One could perhaps say that "governments" have interests, and in that case the interests of a genuine socialist state and an authoritarian regime that's just pretending to be one are quite different.
That way their way of doing business isn't questioned.
For example, the dependency ratio changes, especially in an aging population. Look at what Japan's going through. A working married male in Japan might be taking care of both their immediately family and both their parents and their significant other's parents. It's a significant economic load and leads to significant issues around mental health and work-life balance.
We can also look toward Japan as a test bed too, as their GDP and standard of living does continue to rise despite an ongoing population decline. This is not an impossible situation to manage, but it does require strong and thoughtful leadership
There's also the lost of trade skills and workers in general needed to maintain current service-based infrastructure.
In the case of China, their population of nearly 1.5bil is projected to be halving within 75 years. This is a massive difference that will require recalibration of policy and infrastructure, whereas other countries might experience a significantly lower ratio of decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_consequences_of_popul...
I don't, I'd be perfectly happy with a stable population too. Infinite growth is a dumb goal and I don't support it as a goal (at least until someone demonstrates space colonization).
But a society where generations get dramatically smaller is screwed. You need a balanced (or better) ratio of workers to retirees, mainly. If you took the US and teleported a representative (by age) sample of 80 million people by age to another planet, our society here wouldn't collapse, everything would be pretty ok, we would still have the same basic economy, and the fewer kids and elders to take care of, the reduced consumption, would balance out the loss of the workers. But if they took 80 million people between 30 and 65 instead (that's probably most of that age group), things would go really badly for us, because there aren't enough 20-somethings and 65+ workers to do all the things that keep the kids and retirees fed. If we simply wait 30 or 40 years, China (among others) will be in a situation like that. US is not much better and I can certainly imagine it getting much worse in the US. And I can confidently predict a maximum number of 30 year olds we'll have in 30 years because every one of them has already been born. Even extreme measures can at best only make more 2055 29-year-olds.
> how is China doing better or worse than its peers?
As I stated, China has one of the worst birth rates -- numerically it's doing worse. I don't have a beef with China. I hope they and the rest of the West can figure out how to improve the birth rates soon.
This is why I am careful to delineate my patriotism as to my country, land and people, but specifically not my corporate government, who are greedy, genocidal, parasitic traitors to the Constitution and to humanity. A kangaroo court controlled by organized crime.
If it was as simple as that, China's population would still be booming: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
The feeling of having become cattle? Perhaps a cause, perhaps a common symptom.
So now that we've dispensed with that, we can return to discussing a very real phenomenon and not dismiss it by insinuating it's all propaganda.
also I was not talking about dictatorships at all but all countries
I have to admit, it's an outside-the-box idea, but it would still take 25 years to start bearing fruit (no pun intended).
> culturally
Yeah, honestly, especially in Asia where they de facto did the opposite for so long, all those "extra" males seem to mostly just be alone. I'd worry that the generation with way too many women would reproduce at a disappointing per-woman rate, with the women choosing to roll the dice and either land a monogamous husband to maybe have kids with, or to just pursue their career, rather than be a 'side-piece mom.'
Yes. Both my belief in the the technical possibility and my reason to doubt the cultural acceptability are on the grounds that it looks like the people were already doing so in the opposite (more male births) direction due to the one-child policy.
> who would, I assume, just reproduce promiscuously or form polygamous relationships?
I was assuming IVF, but whatever works really.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
https://www.aei.org/articles/fewer-and-faster-global-fertili...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-po...
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...
https://www.aei.org/articles/fewer-and-faster-global-fertili...
It’s plausible because it’s culturally coherent but that does not necessitate it. Communism could have easily been too alien to succeed but Mao made it contextual, so it unified the society instead.
The way I look at it, every government has an existential risk of getting out of sync with its host culture. When that happens, the system breaks and you get an irruption—revolution, civil war, Balkanization; is the current Chinese system and its overall direction compatible with its cultural inheritance? The degree of that answer is the degree of risk.
I see revolutions as an alternate elite agitating for change. In my model an effective suppression of an alternative elite is sufficient to prevent revolution. In my model it comes down to which secret police are more effective, the MSS or the CIA.
Which is especially relevant here because how much of the ‘Thielverse’ is really a CIA cutout, is Yarvin an external expression of an internal CIA power struggle.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly when an empire will fall, but the signs seem to be around for a long time prior to that moment, and you basically have the people who recognize those signs, the people who don't, and the people who profit from confusion and disorder that pay a lot of money to both overtly and subtlety convince people that everything is fine.
Then the argument would be CCP dynasty is just starting - 70 years into multiple generation spanning 250+ year cycle where they're already cooking, and TBH more geographically and culturally cohesive than any past periods. Or, US is 250 years into cycle, i.e. potentially approaching bulkanization time. But that would defeat / be contrary to the entire is PRC collapsing / bulkanizing meme. It's based on hopium.
There is zero value in pretending everything is hunky dory up until the moment that it all collapses.
There's zero value in pretending just because things are burning in US means things are also similarly burning in degree/scale in PRC. That's cope/projection. Of course eventually "China" can break up again, but the way things has/are trending, there's still a lot of rising to do. Like it would be one thing if PRC was stagnant or relatively declining throughout last 30 years of China collapse narrative (i.e. USSR vs US), and one can argue it's a matter of slowly then suddenly. But most lines are going up, in the opposite direction of collapse, sometimes at absurd slopes, despite best effort of hegemonic US trying to contain.
Not everything is hunky dory, but let's not pretend it's threading a needle with collapse. That narrative hasn't/doesn't reconcile with reality and history. And historically, authoritarian Chinese governments can grow very powerful for a very long time. To acknowledge your concern, the state can be strong at the expense of the people, both chinese and outside "barbarians", hegemonically strong. If CCP/PRC is just average performing dynasty, they'll likely still be around and powerful in 100+ years, i.e. all of our life times.
It's a weird statement because you are jumping from a descriptive statement ("not a functioning democracy") to a normative one (if it's not at least 80% democratic then I have decided that it's not a democracy)
I am getting too old not to notice such rhetorical tricks. Do better.
The US is 100% not a functioning democracy, and whether something is a thing if it does not function as a thing is actually a deep philosophical argument that goes back thousands of years. Is a chair a chair if it functions as a chair, or simply if I call it a chair? Can a chair which one cannot use as a chair still be a chair? As you can see, I have an opinion on this, at least in this context, but I am not trying to convince anyone else to share this view. However, it is my view and I used it to advance my argument.