16 ms·

Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America

289 points by bitsavers 1y ago

tptacek 1y ago
My favorite observation about this was made on Twitter, of all places, when someone said that for all Yarvin's efforts to become the heir to Ezra Pound, the true 21st Century Pound is Kanye West.
black_13 1y ago
[dead]
hexator 1y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
- JFingleton 1y ago
  Doesn't seem to work? It's the pay walled site.
twiddling 1y ago
[flagged]
- nehal3m 1y ago
  I don't think this even is their final form...
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
    I think it is. This stood out to me: > 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.
    - krapp 1y ago
      I think it will happen, but not under Trump. We've normalized certain aspects of authoritarianism now: the unitary executive, the enforcement of political ideology and removal of political dissidents, and once the US gets rid of birthright citizenship Constitutional rights become entirely arbitrary, and anyone can be sent to the camps. We've normalized political violence after Jan. 20th. Palantir will have an extensive database created from all of DOGE's data. A third of the country wants it, and they live where the votes matter most. All of the pieces will be in place. 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.
    - nehal3m 1y ago
      I agree with you, yeah. Burned and buried would be his final form then, is what I was getting at. Sorry for not communicating that clearly.
    - thrance 1y ago
      Indeed, we'll have one last neoliberal half-competent democratic leadership that will undo ~10% of the damage Trump did, and then we'll have the true final boss. The current fascist was ok, but the next fascist will be the reaaal deal. 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.
    - throwaway5752 1y ago
      No, his premises were just wrong. He's just blaming others rather than question the foundations of his belief system when they failed to be predictive. He's as simple to analyze as the people he looks down on. Nothing is worse for a dilettantish ideologue than to have their ideas put into practice and have to face reality with scrutiny.
- kragen 1y ago
  Please don't post glib dismissals here.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    It's not that glib, it's a point made in the article. > 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.
    - foobarian 1y ago
      This guy reminds me of another breed of oldschool Usenet creature, the crackpot physicist. These individuals are very smart, and often have advanced degrees, but for some reason have these crazy ideas that almost seem like their brains have gone a bit off the rails. The content is typically very verbose, hiding the weaknesses in the volume, and also seems very alluring and can attract a bit of a following. 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. :-)
    - shkkmo 1y ago
      That is not what what "glib" means. The comment is still a shallow, glib dismisal and doesn't add anything to the conversation.
  - UncleMeat 1y ago
    I’m very sorry that I don’t want to spend time making a person who wants me dead seem like a person worth taking seriously.
kragen 1y ago
https://archive.ph/zo6Vk https://archive.ph/zo6Vk
senkora 1y ago
Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out 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.
- wyager 1y ago
  Ironically, the quality of Scott's work has taken a markedly sharper nosedive in the last decade than the quality of Yarvin's work.
  - gr__or 1y ago
    I don't quite see it that way. Imo he's been to involved in anti-woke culture waring, but I still found him to be wonderfully interesting to read.
  - kiitos 1y ago
    In what universe?
  - indoordin0saur 1y ago
    He got associated with the "intellectual dark web" for occasionally having opinions outside of the mainstream. The NYTimes was even planning on writing a hit piece on him back in the day that scared him so bad he shut down his original site. I think his writing today lacks the sort of honesty or novelty it once had because he's very sensitive to being called out.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Hard to nose dive from rock bottom
- clueless 1y ago
  Precisely, I'm not sure why Curtis is kept being discussed when if you listened to him now, it's all nonsense.
Hikikomori 1y ago
The society of Snow Crash is a dystopia, not something we should want to implement.
- roughly 1y ago
  The biggest mistake the Cyberpunk authors made was making their dystopia look so cool and then assuming we’d actually read the book.
  - ceejayoz 1y ago
    https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538 https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538 > 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
    - roughly 1y ago
      I wish this weren't so evergreen. Truly this is the Era of the Torment Nexus.
  - 7373737373 1y ago
    The world needs more https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberprep https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberprep
    - roughly 1y ago
      I'm personally a fan of https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Solarpunk https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Solarpunk
- lokimedes 1y ago
  There’s an epic battle raging between Gibson’s Cyberpunks and Clarke’s Spacefarers. The former seems to be winning.
- 1y ago
antithesizer 1y ago
They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for weird right-wing gurus/boogie men these days. Nick Land where have you gone? Your house is in disarray.
- 9283409232 1y ago
  JD Vance is a Yarvin devotee and has repeatedly given credibility to his ideas. Good thing JD Vance is a nobody and doesn't have a position of power.
rubyfan 1y ago
Why are big media outlets suddenly sharing this guys ideas?
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  Because the folks in power are suddenly endorsing them?
- kragen 1y ago
  Because the Vice President of the US is a devotee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_1#%E2%80%9CNeoreactionary_allegations%E2%80%9D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_1#%E2%80... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_2#Political_Views_/philosophy_in_Lead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_2#Politi...
  - nailer 1y ago
    Can you post direct links to actual references, rather than Wikipedia talk pages?
    - kragen 1y ago
      That's a perfectly reasonable request, but I didn't have them. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-55-things-trump-vp-00167882 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-maga-movement/ 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_Vance 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-world-view-sources-00168984 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMq1ZEcyztY. And https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets 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.
antisthenes 1y ago
It's pretty sad that loonies like this get a platform at all. 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.
- _verandaguy 1y ago
  His views are being implemented by the sitting US government. I understand the moral dilemma of it not being good to platform and broadcast these views, but under the circumstances, I'd argue there's also a duty to inform people of this looming danger.
- runako 1y ago
  > How is this guy different Extremely high-profile & powerful people listen to his ideas & are influenced by his beliefs.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  When someone is obscure and wrong, sometimes it's better to avoid amplifying them even through refutation. When someone is popular-with-people-in-power and wrong, sunlight is an important disinfectant.
- timewizard 1y ago
  > yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all. 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.
A_D_E_P_T 1y ago
I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum. 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 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.
- runako 1y ago
  > society is beginning to burn through its seed corn 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.
  - soulofmischief 1y ago
    China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. 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.
    - cassepipe 1y ago
      They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. 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.
deleted 1y ago
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thrance 1y ago
His tenets would be at home in the mind of a 16th century european king, and yet they now make up the core of American politics. There is no way America shakes this insanity off easily, it will require a long time and (lots of) suffering.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  A 16th century king would probably be a bit more erudite at least
- throw4847285 1y ago
  It's the 17th not 16th Century, but I can't help think about the War of the Three Kingdoms. Already by that point the notion of a Divine Right of Kings was dinged enough that they could lop the head off of Charles I. And then, less than 40 years later, Parliament could trade out their king for a foreign one whom they liked better. 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.
mountainriver 1y ago
His actual answer to preventing a Hitler or Stalin arising from autocracy is that he would hopes it doesn’t happen. What an absolute joke
- kmeisthax 1y ago
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shmerl 1y ago
[flagged]
legitster 1y ago
Growing up, one of my criticisms of Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse" was how unrealistic it seemed that children could literally rise to power simply through posting theories and arguments on the internet. How wrong I was.
- agumonkey 1y ago
  It should be studied how large (world scale) populations can flip with just the right amount of social struggle, populists, wealthy owners leveraging said populists, and new found gurus serving as grandiose ideal sources for the last two groups.
  - imiric 1y ago
    The effectiveness of propaganda has been known for a long time. The advertising industry is built on the foundations laid by Edward Bernays a century ago, who applied the same psychological manipulation tactics of propaganda to advertising, which turned it into the trillion dollar meta-industry we know today. The same technology built for advertising is used for any other kind of psyop. Considering most people in industrialized nations carry a personal device with them at all times that can feed them content engineered to be as addicting as possible, with an agenda to influence their thoughts and behavior, it shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing sociopolitical instability in many countries, and megalomaniacs taking advantage of this opportunity to grasp power, inflate their wealth, and establish autocracies. 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. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo
    - agumonkey 1y ago
      Yeah I've seen the interview. Still there's a little lesson here. 20th century made people thinking they were educated and advanced. But in fact it doesn't matter much...
cempaka 1y ago
From a 2014 email from Yarvin to Thiel: “One of our hidden advantages is that these people 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).” On that, he's not wrong!
skrebbel 1y ago
I'll never understand why this man gets so much attention.
- throwaway4736 1y ago
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- thrance 1y ago
  He found patronage in the American oligarchy (look up his ties with Peter Thiel, for example) and as a result, his ideas are now directly implemented by the current administration, that is 100% subservient to capital.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - skrebbel 1y ago
    To be fair I don't follow at all. Are you saying that it's more likely for the US under Trump to become a Yarvin-style ultracapitalist monarchy than, say, an Orban-style just-about-dictatorship? Despite the fact that the first is one crackpot's weird idea on the internet and the latter is a model with a playbook that's demonstrated to work extremely well in practice? (if your goal is to stay in power as long as you can) It just seems.. well unlikely at least? 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.
exizt88 1y ago
One of my favorite things about Curtis Yarvin is that one of his main ideas is laughably easy to prove wrong. He says that whenever we go into the past, the previous generation seems to be more "right-wing" than the current one. Which is almost comically wrong. For example, you get Victorian Era being much more conservative than its predecessor, Georgian Era. Same goes for Christian Roman Empire vs Pagan Roman Empire, Nazi Germany vs Weimar Germany, etc etc. There are literally dozens of examples. It seems that Yarvin genuinely doesn't know any of these high school-level facts.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I actually don’t even know what this means, in the sense that “right wing” and “left wing” are sort of… relative and semi-modern concepts. Like, more right wing as in more conservative? More religious? More monarchist? Something about seating arrangements in France?
- cjbgkagh 1y ago
  I'm pretty sure he gives those as examples of 'restorations' as exceptions to the general trend of society trending left.
- coldtea 1y ago
  Well, it's not about being monotonically the case year-over-year, but the overal "weighted average" direction of the vector pointing towards less right-wing. 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).
defen 1y ago
Question for 'dang - is it possible to dig up the oldest post on this website that links to somewhere on "unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com" and has some amount of comments? It would be interesting to see how people were reacting to his ideas when he first posted them.
- n2d4 1y ago
  There's a filter for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com&kind=story&next=81823 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unqualified-reservati... You can also use https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com to find it.
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    This one is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533. Submitted by pg!
    - Hikikomori 1y ago
      Many tech billionaires are buying his shit.
      - sanderjd 1y ago
        That was submitted almost two decades ago. It would be interesting to know what pg thinks about this stuff today, but based on his recent writing I'd bet that he is not buying it. (Also, submitting articles does not imply agreeing with them.)
        Hikikomori 1y ago
        Don't know about pg, but Yarvin was popular in silicon valley and investor circles. From what I know at least the people below are connected to Yarvin/Thiel and 'network states'. Likely more billionaires that hide it. Thiel, Musk, Brian Armstrong, Marc Andressen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks.
ivraatiems 1y ago
The key driver behind Yarvin's ideology seems to be arrogance, covering perceived self-weakness. I think that's what makes it appealing to so many Silicon Valley "nerd king" type figures, and also why it has the form it does. 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.
- archagon 1y ago
  So many historical atrocities could have been curtailed with just a bit of therapy.
- emporas 1y ago
  Urbit is also written in PHP. A clone of Urbit is written in Rust, i was reading it's source some years back, i don't even remember it's name, but i had this feeling of "Ok, what is that thing doing". 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.
- bitwize 1y ago
  Lol, I said that about Urbit 10 years ago, back when Hackernews was still glazing it (and him). That it's a shellgame he plays to seem smart and innovative, without actually breaking new conceptual ground, and that it has that in common with his Moldbug stuff. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409837
DueDilligence 1y ago
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archagon 1y ago
On the subject of Yarvin, I really appreciate FrankWilhoit's take[1]: > 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? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459055
- deleted 1y ago
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- bitwize 1y ago
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- kiitos 1y ago
  Extraordinarily good stuff! Thanks for sharing, I haven't seen it before.
eikenberry 1y ago
Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system that did this reliably and I didn't see any indication that he had solved this problem. How do you ensure you get a Sun King and not.. something else.
- foldU 1y ago
  he addresses this, you simply get airline pilots to pick them
- BobbyJo 1y ago
  > The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? I think, historically, the problem has also been: what happens when they die? Then you need lightning to strike twice.
  - eikenberry 1y ago
    Not just twice, but over and over and over...
  - Digory 1y ago
    In our lifetimes, I predict some of us will choose to be governed (at least in part) by Sam Altman's benevolent, everlasting machine.
    - pixelready 1y ago
      I fear you are right, but just in case this comment is being scraped into my centralized Palantir profile: 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
mmustapic 1y ago
The most amazing thing about Yarvis ideas, and the article itself, is that they clearly say that CEOs are antidemocratic autocrats. Why should this be accepted in a democratic society?
- goatlover 1y ago
  It should not. It's crazy that we even need to have this conversation, but here we are. Big question is whether Trump is what holds all this together, and whether it falls apart when he's gone.
- rendang 1y ago
  Couldn't you say the same thing about parents?
  - mmustapic 1y ago
    No. In most countries there are laws restricting what parents can do. On the other hand, nobody is proposing a father figure running a country, so I don't see the connection here.
    - rendang 1y ago
      You're saying that CEOs shouldn't be accepted in a democratic society? Because CEOs also have laws restricting what they can do
    - coldtea 1y ago
      >nobody is proposing a father figure running a country Nobody? Isn't that one of the oldest job descriptions or similes for a ruler? Hell, even Stalin was addressed as "loving father".
- cowboylowrez 1y ago
  I always understood yarvin to view democracy in an unfavorable light.
absurdo 1y ago
[flagged]
- hansjorg 1y ago
  Why are all the fascist tough guys so afraid of criticism, or even just of internet downvotes? This is a central insight into their mindset. They are so incredibly mentally weak.
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  You are welcome to defend rising fascism if you want. People will justly criticize you, of course. What happened to intellectual seriousness? Why should you be so frightened of people criticizing you? This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.
  - freedomben 1y ago
    I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won't be viewed or engaged by anyone. I do think we on HN have gotten way too reflexively downvoting of opinions we disagree with. IMHO downvoting should be used like a moderation tool to downrank low effort/spammy or factually/objectively incorrect posts that don't contribute anything interesting to the discussion, not as a lazy way of expressing our disagreement. > This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull. You could dismiss almost any political ideology with this. Certainly there's a lot of people who experienced this in the USSR, North Korea, China, and more, and those are/were hardly fascist governments.
    - 1y ago
tehjoker 1y ago
It's crazy how insane right wingers get so much puff from the media, and socialists get very very little despite having pro-social ideas instead of anti-social ones.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Apocryphon 1y ago
How far we've come since a dozen years ago, when TechCrunch was the first mainstream outlet to observe Moldbug and his ideological currents: Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries (techcrunch.com) 54 points by davidgerard on Nov 23, 2013 | 109 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6785801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6785801
monksy 1y ago
This is amazing how this guy became a challenging individual to a poltical bias in tech to a evil guy on a national scale pretty quickly.
indoordin0saur 1y ago
For what it's worth his writing is very thought provoking and novel. I'd recommend anyone bored of mainstream groupthink take a look at it.
- declan_roberts 1y ago
  It's been difficult since ~2020 to truly read pieces that are heterodox. Everyone who was painting outside the lines was effectively erased from the polite society of the online squares. Yarvis doesn't even touch many of the existing third rails today.
  - indoordin0saur 1y ago
    Yes. It's quite bad, but even if you're a die-hard left liberal, or libertarian or whatever, Yarvin's ideas are a great exercise. He points out all sorts of failure modes in Democratic society that don't seem to get talked about by other political theorists. For example, the way in which power is so widely distributed means that anyone who manages to come to a powerful position is strongly incentivized to spend all their efforts simply maintaining their power lest they quickly get removed and replaced by someone more power hungry. This just seems like a feature of a representative democracy and one, that in order avoid, we would need to think very hard about.
    - trealira 1y ago
      >For example, the way in which power is so widely distributed means that anyone who manages to come to a powerful position is strongly incentivized to spend all their efforts simply maintaining their power lest they quickly get removed and replaced by someone more power hungry. 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
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    lol, this is the opposite of the case. It has never ever been easier to consume content (text, audio, video, whatever) outside the mainstream.
2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
What a surprise, the guy who thinks CEOs should rule the country is popular among CEOs.
TSiege 1y ago
Why is this post being flagged?
- sanderjd 1y ago
  Presumably because it's mostly political in nature and people here are generally tired of the whole Curtis Yarvin thing. We've had like an extra ten to fifteen years of hearing about this guy than most people... I didn't flag it, and clearly I'm here commenting, but I'm also sympathetic to people flagging this.
  - TSiege 1y ago
    Given his salience atm and his presence here that you mentioned, I believe flagging this post reflects poorly on hackernews
    - sanderjd 1y ago
      I don't really disagree. I just think "ugh, so sick of this guy" is an understandable gut reaction for people to have.
- rukuu001 1y ago
  Yeah it’s annoying isn’t it. 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.
AnimalMuppet 1y ago
1. Yarvin's system may work well if you put perfect people in place, and keep perfect people in place. Well, that's true of a lot of systems. Yarvin finds flaws in democracy with imperfect people, but his system needs perfect people in order to work. That's... not an improvement. 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.
- cowboylowrez 1y ago
  the courts, legislature and executive could be a nice check on the imperfections of our elected officials, but unfortunately, they don't provide any check on the voters which is obviously unavoidable in any sort of elected democracy. In the US for instance, a full one third of the population are on board with crime sprees, and one third is enough when voter participation gets low.
esseph 1y ago
Flagged, get the fuck out of here. 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.
- puzzlingcaptcha 1y ago
  At least cockatoos drinking from water fountains is still on the front page.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-pr... 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You're looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy." 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-yarvin-monarchy.html https://www.nytimmes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarv...
rukuu001 1y ago
From a recent submission[1]: > The term itself [stupidity], he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112265
ianbicking 1y ago
Seeing him back in the news made me think more about Urbit, his decentralized computing project. For a bit of a discussion of the technical parts of Urbit this is decent: https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/ https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/ 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 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.
arp242 1y ago
> The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. 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).
LAC-Tech 1y ago
I always thought Yarvin was an interesting writer. Like a lot of people on the political fringe (and I've seen this from libertarians and socialists as well) he's fantastic and diagnosing problems and making us look at our own system with new eyes, but rather fumbles when it comes to workable solutions. 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.
disambiguation 1y ago
I've never read moldbug but I know people who know people in certain circles - and I can't tell if his ideas genuinely captivate the imagination of the elite, or if he's a kind of Judas goat, because the non-elite are definitely captivated by his ideas. I feel like his work came at a time when the Right lost its core conservative values. Libertarianism was poised as the successor but was defeated, leaving a vacuum for something new. I think yarvin's ideas also satisfies the right's need for something intellectual to stand up to left wing ideology, but there's the possibility that its simply an intellectual trap - consistent and elaborate, but untrue due to false assumptions. Strange times.
- pas 1y ago
  ideologies usually perform better if they are inconsistent (or "not even wrong" and vague), so they can serve the emotional/rhetorical needs of the group promulgating them, no?
  - disambiguation 1y ago
    Yeah rhetorical flexibility is probably an important ingredient for an effective social order (not necessarily a moral one) but you have to consider what it takes to embrace an idea. My sense is that ideologies usually emerge bottom up from individual values - anything top down runs the risk of being misaligned, and therefore incompatible and won't be accepted. Further, if its too inconsistent or incorrect then its vulnerable to opposition and is no longer "the least bad choice in the room."
    - pas 1y ago
      It seems that these populist ideologies are built on the shared values of chauvinism, revanchism, and various maladaptive psychological copings to the usual problems and hardships of (modern) life. 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. :/)

289 points by bitsavers 1y ago

My favorite observation about this was made on Twitter, of all places, when someone said that for all Yarvin's efforts to become the heir to Ezra Pound, the true 21st Century Pound is Kanye West.

black_13 1y ago

[dead]

hexator 1y ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.newyorker.com/maga...

JFingleton 1y ago
Doesn't seem to work? It's the pay walled site.

twiddling 1y ago

[flagged]

nehal3m 1y ago
I don't think this even is their final form...
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1y ago
  I think it is. This stood out to me: > 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.
  - krapp 1y ago
    I think it will happen, but not under Trump. We've normalized certain aspects of authoritarianism now: the unitary executive, the enforcement of political ideology and removal of political dissidents, and once the US gets rid of birthright citizenship Constitutional rights become entirely arbitrary, and anyone can be sent to the camps. We've normalized political violence after Jan. 20th. Palantir will have an extensive database created from all of DOGE's data. A third of the country wants it, and they live where the votes matter most. All of the pieces will be in place. 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.
  - nehal3m 1y ago
    I agree with you, yeah. Burned and buried would be his final form then, is what I was getting at. Sorry for not communicating that clearly.
  - thrance 1y ago
    Indeed, we'll have one last neoliberal half-competent democratic leadership that will undo ~10% of the damage Trump did, and then we'll have the true final boss. The current fascist was ok, but the next fascist will be the reaaal deal. 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.
  - throwaway5752 1y ago
    No, his premises were just wrong. He's just blaming others rather than question the foundations of his belief system when they failed to be predictive. He's as simple to analyze as the people he looks down on. Nothing is worse for a dilettantish ideologue than to have their ideas put into practice and have to face reality with scrutiny.
kragen 1y ago
Please don't post glib dismissals here.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  It's not that glib, it's a point made in the article. > 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.
  - foobarian 1y ago
    This guy reminds me of another breed of oldschool Usenet creature, the crackpot physicist. These individuals are very smart, and often have advanced degrees, but for some reason have these crazy ideas that almost seem like their brains have gone a bit off the rails. The content is typically very verbose, hiding the weaknesses in the volume, and also seems very alluring and can attract a bit of a following. 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. :-)
  - shkkmo 1y ago
    That is not what what "glib" means. The comment is still a shallow, glib dismisal and doesn't add anything to the conversation.
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  I’m very sorry that I don’t want to spend time making a person who wants me dead seem like a person worth taking seriously.

kragen 1y ago

https://archive.ph/zo6Vk https://archive.ph/zo6Vk

senkora 1y ago

Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out 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.

wyager 1y ago
Ironically, the quality of Scott's work has taken a markedly sharper nosedive in the last decade than the quality of Yarvin's work.
- gr__or 1y ago
  I don't quite see it that way. Imo he's been to involved in anti-woke culture waring, but I still found him to be wonderfully interesting to read.
- kiitos 1y ago
  In what universe?
- indoordin0saur 1y ago
  He got associated with the "intellectual dark web" for occasionally having opinions outside of the mainstream. The NYTimes was even planning on writing a hit piece on him back in the day that scared him so bad he shut down his original site. I think his writing today lacks the sort of honesty or novelty it once had because he's very sensitive to being called out.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Hard to nose dive from rock bottom
clueless 1y ago
Precisely, I'm not sure why Curtis is kept being discussed when if you listened to him now, it's all nonsense.

Hikikomori 1y ago

The society of Snow Crash is a dystopia, not something we should want to implement.

roughly 1y ago
The biggest mistake the Cyberpunk authors made was making their dystopia look so cool and then assuming we’d actually read the book.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
  https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538 https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538 > 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
  - roughly 1y ago
    I wish this weren't so evergreen. Truly this is the Era of the Torment Nexus.
- 7373737373 1y ago
  The world needs more https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberprep https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Cyberprep
  - roughly 1y ago
    I'm personally a fan of https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Solarpunk https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Solarpunk
lokimedes 1y ago
There’s an epic battle raging between Gibson’s Cyberpunks and Clarke’s Spacefarers. The former seems to be winning.
1y ago

antithesizer 1y ago

They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for weird right-wing gurus/boogie men these days. Nick Land where have you gone? Your house is in disarray.

9283409232 1y ago
JD Vance is a Yarvin devotee and has repeatedly given credibility to his ideas. Good thing JD Vance is a nobody and doesn't have a position of power.

rubyfan 1y ago

Why are big media outlets suddenly sharing this guys ideas?

ceejayoz 1y ago
Because the folks in power are suddenly endorsing them?
kragen 1y ago
Because the Vice President of the US is a devotee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_1#%E2%80%9CNeoreactionary_allegations%E2%80%9D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_1#%E2%80... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_2#Political_Views_/philosophy_in_Lead https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_2#Politi...
- nailer 1y ago
  Can you post direct links to actual references, rather than Wikipedia talk pages?
  - kragen 1y ago
    That's a perfectly reasonable request, but I didn't have them. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/15/jd-vance-55-things-trump-vp-00167882 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-maga-movement/ 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_Vance 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-world-view-sources-00168984 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMq1ZEcyztY. And https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets 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.

antisthenes 1y ago

It's pretty sad that loonies like this get a platform at all. 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.

_verandaguy 1y ago
His views are being implemented by the sitting US government. I understand the moral dilemma of it not being good to platform and broadcast these views, but under the circumstances, I'd argue there's also a duty to inform people of this looming danger.
runako 1y ago
> How is this guy different Extremely high-profile & powerful people listen to his ideas & are influenced by his beliefs.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
When someone is obscure and wrong, sometimes it's better to avoid amplifying them even through refutation. When someone is popular-with-people-in-power and wrong, sunlight is an important disinfectant.
timewizard 1y ago
> yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all. 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.

A_D_E_P_T 1y ago

I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum. 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 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.

runako 1y ago
> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn 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.
- soulofmischief 1y ago
  China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100. They're well on their way to a massive population shock if they don't thread the needle carefully. 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.
  - cassepipe 1y ago
    They have invested a lot into their energy sources whether it's nuclear or renewables + batteries or hydro. They also have industrial capacity. 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

thrance 1y ago

His tenets would be at home in the mind of a 16th century european king, and yet they now make up the core of American politics. There is no way America shakes this insanity off easily, it will require a long time and (lots of) suffering.

suddenlybananas 1y ago
A 16th century king would probably be a bit more erudite at least
throw4847285 1y ago
It's the 17th not 16th Century, but I can't help think about the War of the Three Kingdoms. Already by that point the notion of a Divine Right of Kings was dinged enough that they could lop the head off of Charles I. And then, less than 40 years later, Parliament could trade out their king for a foreign one whom they liked better. 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.

mountainriver 1y ago

His actual answer to preventing a Hitler or Stalin arising from autocracy is that he would hopes it doesn’t happen. What an absolute joke

kmeisthax 1y ago
[dead]

shmerl 1y ago

[flagged]

legitster 1y ago

Growing up, one of my criticisms of Orson Scott Card's "Enderverse" was how unrealistic it seemed that children could literally rise to power simply through posting theories and arguments on the internet. How wrong I was.

agumonkey 1y ago
It should be studied how large (world scale) populations can flip with just the right amount of social struggle, populists, wealthy owners leveraging said populists, and new found gurus serving as grandiose ideal sources for the last two groups.
- imiric 1y ago
  The effectiveness of propaganda has been known for a long time. The advertising industry is built on the foundations laid by Edward Bernays a century ago, who applied the same psychological manipulation tactics of propaganda to advertising, which turned it into the trillion dollar meta-industry we know today. The same technology built for advertising is used for any other kind of psyop. Considering most people in industrialized nations carry a personal device with them at all times that can feed them content engineered to be as addicting as possible, with an agenda to influence their thoughts and behavior, it shouldn't be surprising that we're seeing sociopolitical instability in many countries, and megalomaniacs taking advantage of this opportunity to grasp power, inflate their wealth, and establish autocracies. 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. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hr5sTGxMUdo
  - agumonkey 1y ago
    Yeah I've seen the interview. Still there's a little lesson here. 20th century made people thinking they were educated and advanced. But in fact it doesn't matter much...

cempaka 1y ago

From a 2014 email from Yarvin to Thiel: “One of our hidden advantages is that these people 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).” On that, he's not wrong!

skrebbel 1y ago

I'll never understand why this man gets so much attention.

throwaway4736 1y ago
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thrance 1y ago
He found patronage in the American oligarchy (look up his ties with Peter Thiel, for example) and as a result, his ideas are now directly implemented by the current administration, that is 100% subservient to capital.
- deleted 1y ago
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- skrebbel 1y ago
  To be fair I don't follow at all. Are you saying that it's more likely for the US under Trump to become a Yarvin-style ultracapitalist monarchy than, say, an Orban-style just-about-dictatorship? Despite the fact that the first is one crackpot's weird idea on the internet and the latter is a model with a playbook that's demonstrated to work extremely well in practice? (if your goal is to stay in power as long as you can) It just seems.. well unlikely at least? 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.

exizt88 1y ago

One of my favorite things about Curtis Yarvin is that one of his main ideas is laughably easy to prove wrong. He says that whenever we go into the past, the previous generation seems to be more "right-wing" than the current one. Which is almost comically wrong. For example, you get Victorian Era being much more conservative than its predecessor, Georgian Era. Same goes for Christian Roman Empire vs Pagan Roman Empire, Nazi Germany vs Weimar Germany, etc etc. There are literally dozens of examples. It seems that Yarvin genuinely doesn't know any of these high school-level facts.

bee_rider 1y ago
I actually don’t even know what this means, in the sense that “right wing” and “left wing” are sort of… relative and semi-modern concepts. Like, more right wing as in more conservative? More religious? More monarchist? Something about seating arrangements in France?
cjbgkagh 1y ago
I'm pretty sure he gives those as examples of 'restorations' as exceptions to the general trend of society trending left.
coldtea 1y ago
Well, it's not about being monotonically the case year-over-year, but the overal "weighted average" direction of the vector pointing towards less right-wing. 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).

defen 1y ago

Question for 'dang - is it possible to dig up the oldest post on this website that links to somewhere on "unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com" and has some amount of comments? It would be interesting to see how people were reacting to his ideas when he first posted them.

n2d4 1y ago
There's a filter for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com&kind=story&next=81823 https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=unqualified-reservati... You can also use https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com to find it.
- sanderjd 1y ago
  This one is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533. Submitted by pg!
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    Many tech billionaires are buying his shit.
    - sanderjd 1y ago
      That was submitted almost two decades ago. It would be interesting to know what pg thinks about this stuff today, but based on his recent writing I'd bet that he is not buying it. (Also, submitting articles does not imply agreeing with them.)
      - Hikikomori 1y ago
        Don't know about pg, but Yarvin was popular in silicon valley and investor circles. From what I know at least the people below are connected to Yarvin/Thiel and 'network states'. Likely more billionaires that hide it. Thiel, Musk, Brian Armstrong, Marc Andressen, Ben Horowitz, David Sacks.

ivraatiems 1y ago

The key driver behind Yarvin's ideology seems to be arrogance, covering perceived self-weakness. I think that's what makes it appealing to so many Silicon Valley "nerd king" type figures, and also why it has the form it does. 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.

archagon 1y ago
So many historical atrocities could have been curtailed with just a bit of therapy.
emporas 1y ago
Urbit is also written in PHP. A clone of Urbit is written in Rust, i was reading it's source some years back, i don't even remember it's name, but i had this feeling of "Ok, what is that thing doing". 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.
bitwize 1y ago
Lol, I said that about Urbit 10 years ago, back when Hackernews was still glazing it (and him). That it's a shellgame he plays to seem smart and innovative, without actually breaking new conceptual ground, and that it has that in common with his Moldbug stuff. 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409837

DueDilligence 1y ago

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archagon 1y ago

On the subject of Yarvin, I really appreciate FrankWilhoit's take[1]: > 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? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459055

deleted 1y ago
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bitwize 1y ago
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kiitos 1y ago
Extraordinarily good stuff! Thanks for sharing, I haven't seen it before.

eikenberry 1y ago

Didn't have time to make it through the entire (long winded) article, but is it wrong to boil down his thinking to the simple idea that a benevolent, competent dictator is the best form of government? I ask as this seems like a very simplistic and obvious idea. The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? History has shown that we have never discovered a system that did this reliably and I didn't see any indication that he had solved this problem. How do you ensure you get a Sun King and not.. something else.

foldU 1y ago
he addresses this, you simply get airline pilots to pick them
BobbyJo 1y ago
> The problem isn't that this is necessarily incorrect, it is how do you find this mythical figurehead? I think, historically, the problem has also been: what happens when they die? Then you need lightning to strike twice.
- eikenberry 1y ago
  Not just twice, but over and over and over...
- Digory 1y ago
  In our lifetimes, I predict some of us will choose to be governed (at least in part) by Sam Altman's benevolent, everlasting machine.
  - pixelready 1y ago
    I fear you are right, but just in case this comment is being scraped into my centralized Palantir profile: 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

mmustapic 1y ago

The most amazing thing about Yarvis ideas, and the article itself, is that they clearly say that CEOs are antidemocratic autocrats. Why should this be accepted in a democratic society?

goatlover 1y ago
It should not. It's crazy that we even need to have this conversation, but here we are. Big question is whether Trump is what holds all this together, and whether it falls apart when he's gone.
rendang 1y ago
Couldn't you say the same thing about parents?
- mmustapic 1y ago
  No. In most countries there are laws restricting what parents can do. On the other hand, nobody is proposing a father figure running a country, so I don't see the connection here.
  - rendang 1y ago
    You're saying that CEOs shouldn't be accepted in a democratic society? Because CEOs also have laws restricting what they can do
  - coldtea 1y ago
    >nobody is proposing a father figure running a country Nobody? Isn't that one of the oldest job descriptions or similes for a ruler? Hell, even Stalin was addressed as "loving father".
cowboylowrez 1y ago
I always understood yarvin to view democracy in an unfavorable light.

absurdo 1y ago

[flagged]

hansjorg 1y ago
Why are all the fascist tough guys so afraid of criticism, or even just of internet downvotes? This is a central insight into their mindset. They are so incredibly mentally weak.
UncleMeat 1y ago
You are welcome to defend rising fascism if you want. People will justly criticize you, of course. What happened to intellectual seriousness? Why should you be so frightened of people criticizing you? This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.
- freedomben 1y ago
  I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won't be viewed or engaged by anyone. I do think we on HN have gotten way too reflexively downvoting of opinions we disagree with. IMHO downvoting should be used like a moderation tool to downrank low effort/spammy or factually/objectively incorrect posts that don't contribute anything interesting to the discussion, not as a lazy way of expressing our disagreement. > This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull. You could dismiss almost any political ideology with this. Certainly there's a lot of people who experienced this in the USSR, North Korea, China, and more, and those are/were hardly fascist governments.
  - 1y ago

tehjoker 1y ago

It's crazy how insane right wingers get so much puff from the media, and socialists get very very little despite having pro-social ideas instead of anti-social ones.

deleted 1y ago

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Apocryphon 1y ago

How far we've come since a dozen years ago, when TechCrunch was the first mainstream outlet to observe Moldbug and his ideological currents: Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries (techcrunch.com) 54 points by davidgerard on Nov 23, 2013 | 109 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6785801 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6785801

monksy 1y ago

This is amazing how this guy became a challenging individual to a poltical bias in tech to a evil guy on a national scale pretty quickly.

indoordin0saur 1y ago

For what it's worth his writing is very thought provoking and novel. I'd recommend anyone bored of mainstream groupthink take a look at it.

declan_roberts 1y ago
It's been difficult since ~2020 to truly read pieces that are heterodox. Everyone who was painting outside the lines was effectively erased from the polite society of the online squares. Yarvis doesn't even touch many of the existing third rails today.
- indoordin0saur 1y ago
  Yes. It's quite bad, but even if you're a die-hard left liberal, or libertarian or whatever, Yarvin's ideas are a great exercise. He points out all sorts of failure modes in Democratic society that don't seem to get talked about by other political theorists. For example, the way in which power is so widely distributed means that anyone who manages to come to a powerful position is strongly incentivized to spend all their efforts simply maintaining their power lest they quickly get removed and replaced by someone more power hungry. This just seems like a feature of a representative democracy and one, that in order avoid, we would need to think very hard about.
  - trealira 1y ago
    >For example, the way in which power is so widely distributed means that anyone who manages to come to a powerful position is strongly incentivized to spend all their efforts simply maintaining their power lest they quickly get removed and replaced by someone more power hungry. 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
- sanderjd 1y ago
  lol, this is the opposite of the case. It has never ever been easier to consume content (text, audio, video, whatever) outside the mainstream.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago

What a surprise, the guy who thinks CEOs should rule the country is popular among CEOs.

TSiege 1y ago

Why is this post being flagged?

sanderjd 1y ago
Presumably because it's mostly political in nature and people here are generally tired of the whole Curtis Yarvin thing. We've had like an extra ten to fifteen years of hearing about this guy than most people... I didn't flag it, and clearly I'm here commenting, but I'm also sympathetic to people flagging this.
- TSiege 1y ago
  Given his salience atm and his presence here that you mentioned, I believe flagging this post reflects poorly on hackernews
  - sanderjd 1y ago
    I don't really disagree. I just think "ugh, so sick of this guy" is an understandable gut reaction for people to have.
rukuu001 1y ago
Yeah it’s annoying isn’t it. 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.

AnimalMuppet 1y ago

1. Yarvin's system may work well if you put perfect people in place, and keep perfect people in place. Well, that's true of a lot of systems. Yarvin finds flaws in democracy with imperfect people, but his system needs perfect people in order to work. That's... not an improvement. 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.

cowboylowrez 1y ago
the courts, legislature and executive could be a nice check on the imperfections of our elected officials, but unfortunately, they don't provide any check on the voters which is obviously unavoidable in any sort of elected democracy. In the US for instance, a full one third of the population are on board with crime sprees, and one third is enough when voter participation gets low.

esseph 1y ago

Flagged, get the fuck out of here. 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.

puzzlingcaptcha 1y ago
At least cockatoos drinking from water fountains is still on the front page.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-prince-curtis-yarvin https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/red-pill-pr... 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.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"When I ask people to answer that question, I ask them to look around the room and point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy, because these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies. You're looking around, and you see, for example, a laptop, and that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy." 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-yarvin-monarchy.html https://www.nytimmes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarv...

rukuu001 1y ago

From a recent submission[1]: > The term itself [stupidity], he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112265

ianbicking 1y ago

Seeing him back in the news made me think more about Urbit, his decentralized computing project. For a bit of a discussion of the technical parts of Urbit this is decent: https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/ https://wejn.org/2021/02/urbit-good-bad-insane/ 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 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.

arp242 1y ago

> The eternal political problems of legitimacy, accountability, and succession would be solved by a secret board with the power to select and recall the otherwise all-powerful C.E.O. of each sovereign corporation, or SovCorp. 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).

LAC-Tech 1y ago

I always thought Yarvin was an interesting writer. Like a lot of people on the political fringe (and I've seen this from libertarians and socialists as well) he's fantastic and diagnosing problems and making us look at our own system with new eyes, but rather fumbles when it comes to workable solutions. 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.

disambiguation 1y ago

I've never read moldbug but I know people who know people in certain circles - and I can't tell if his ideas genuinely captivate the imagination of the elite, or if he's a kind of Judas goat, because the non-elite are definitely captivated by his ideas. I feel like his work came at a time when the Right lost its core conservative values. Libertarianism was poised as the successor but was defeated, leaving a vacuum for something new. I think yarvin's ideas also satisfies the right's need for something intellectual to stand up to left wing ideology, but there's the possibility that its simply an intellectual trap - consistent and elaborate, but untrue due to false assumptions. Strange times.

pas 1y ago
ideologies usually perform better if they are inconsistent (or "not even wrong" and vague), so they can serve the emotional/rhetorical needs of the group promulgating them, no?
- disambiguation 1y ago
  Yeah rhetorical flexibility is probably an important ingredient for an effective social order (not necessarily a moral one) but you have to consider what it takes to embrace an idea. My sense is that ideologies usually emerge bottom up from individual values - anything top down runs the risk of being misaligned, and therefore incompatible and won't be accepted. Further, if its too inconsistent or incorrect then its vulnerable to opposition and is no longer "the least bad choice in the room."
  - pas 1y ago
    It seems that these populist ideologies are built on the shared values of chauvinism, revanchism, and various maladaptive psychological copings to the usual problems and hardships of (modern) life. 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. :/)