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The Dark Enlightenment
PayPal founder Peter Thiel and his “investment”, current Vice President J.D. Vance, are ardent supporters of Yarvin. Both are particularly impressed by Yarvin's idea of managing the USA like a company. Thiel confessed in an essay published by the Cato Institute: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”
The Dark Enlightenment
Technocrats in the White House are pushing ahead with the project to manage the USA like a company.
The state has failed in its democratic function and must therefore be remodeled into a capitalist corporate structure, according to Curtis Yarvin, the mastermind behind the technocrats of the new US government. However, a company is not normally a democratic institution. Those who are clever and have money can buy into a company and dominate it. The close connection between the new US administration and tech billionaires like Elon Musk is therefore a cause for concern. In such a construct, citizen participation would no longer play a role. What is likely to gain influence, on the other hand, is artificial intelligence.
by Jessica Horn
[This article posted on 2/8/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-dunkle-aufklarung.]
Curtis Yarvin, an author and programmer from Silicon Valley, has long advocated an American monarchy. Between 2007 and 2016, he caused a stir with a blog he wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, which gained many followers at the time. Among them was the academic philosopher Nick Land, who coined the term “dark enlightenment” in his review of Moldbug and summarized Yarvin's concept as follows: all unofficial power structures such as lobbying, bribery, manipulation, etc. should be formalized in the corporate structure of the state.
In a state that has the structure of a capitalist company, only those who have a stake in the state should be able to have a say. The goal would be a hyper-capitalist technocracy, which has now gathered around President Donald Trump.
Not only is Musk an ardent supporter of Yarvin, but so is the new US Vice President J.D. Vance. Could Trump's shadow government threaten us with an unprecedented technocracy?
Not least through his protégé Elon Musk, it became apparent that with a government under Donald Trump, Big Tech would also be moving into the White House – something that should have become clear to everyone on Inauguration Day at the latest. Not only was Musk firmly at Trump's side, but so were many other high-profile guests from the tech industry. Among them was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who, along with Musk, was invited to a dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is now spouting a whole new tune when it comes to freedom of expression.
But above all, Trump's Vice President J.D. Vance is a crucial link to the powerful investor and visionary tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Thiel had gained prominence through his early investment in Facebook and created the company PayPal with Elon Musk before the two went their separate ways. But above all, Thiel has elevated the vice president to a political force through his investments in Vance's companies Mithril and Narya and his financing of the 2022 US Senate campaign. With Vance moving into the White House, Thiel's investment could now also indirectly pay off through political influence.
Why the movers and shakers from Silicon Valley are suddenly so eager to kneel before the new president is now also obvious: no sooner is Trump in the White House than he is already implementing what experts assumed would happen, namely the repeal of the executive order issued by Joe Biden in October 2023 regarding the “safe and trustworthy” development and use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Not least tech billionaire and developer of Mosaic, the first internationally widespread internet browser, Marc Andreessen, who was long considered a supporter of the Democrats, sought out a place at the side of the new US president with the foresight that a new wind will soon be blowing.
This is because, in the Republicans' view, the executive order would inhibit innovation – despite the fact that Musk, of all people, has already expressed concerns about the technology on several occasions and, in 2023, even called for a pause in AI development together with more than 1,000 experts from the tech industry. Trump's vice president likes to dismiss these AI concerns as an industry ploy that is ostensibly intended to usher in new regulations that would “actually make it more difficult for new entrants to create the innovations that would drive the next generation of American growth” (1).
Whether Musk ultimately sought Trump's proximity only to gain an industry advantage for himself remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that Trump has brought other aces from the tech industry on board with his “Stargate” AI initiative, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Altman is not only repeatedly in the media spotlight with statements about the development of a superintelligence, but also made the iris scan socially acceptable through his Worldcoin project. Ellison, on the other hand, already raved at a 2024 Oracle financial analyst meeting that thanks to the era of mass surveillance, police officers and citizens would always “act in their best interest” (2).
Should we be worried? Absolutely! Because behind all the internal feuding over the financing of the “Stargate” project, we should not lose sight of the fact that the technocrats in the White House all adhere to the same “house philosopher”, whose name is Curtis Yarvin.
“The Dark Enlightenment”
In his disturbing dystopia, published by the highly intelligent programmer Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldburg, he describes tomorrow's San Francisco as follows: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry ID cards with RFID chips. Everyone's DNA and retinas are scanned. Public places and transit systems track everyone. Security cameras are everywhere. Every car knows where it is and who is in it, and reports both to the authorities” (3).
Yarvin's dystopia, as crazy as it may sound, did not only attract supporters from the tech industry at the time. The academic philosopher Nick Land also took up Yarvin's ideas and, in one of his reviews, first coined the term “dark enlightenment”, a theory based on Yarvin's interpretation of the evolutionary biologist and champion of the Enlightenment, Richard Dawkins. With the term “meme”, Dawkins established a social-theoretical equivalent to the gene in evolutionary biology and used it to describe the code for social practices. Any social behavior that cannot be traced back to evolutionary biology can be explained by a meme. According to Dawkins, religious practices would fall under this category, since they act against rational and biologically logical behavior and are only able to prevail over evolution because they instill a delusion in humans and are structured in a parasitic way (4).
Yarvin transferred this parasitic structure to the irrational moral concepts of liberal democracies. In his opinion, these also exhibit parasitic characteristics. Among other things, he cites universalism as the dominant moral concept of liberal democracies, which would cause people to believe certain things, such as that all people are equal.
In a kind of second, “dark” Enlightenment, it is important to free oneself from this superstition of the “cathedral” – as Yarvin christened the institutional network – because the initial promise of the Enlightenment, namely the separation between the rational and the irrational, had failed.
“Dark Enlightenment” thus implies the abolition of democracy in favor of a CEO, since, according to Yarvin, a government is nothing more than a corporation that manages the country. Since the US is being managed rather poorly, the state should be treated like ailing company and dissolved in favor of a ‘national CEO’.
The house philosopher of the tech giants
Above all, PayPal founder Peter Thiel and his “investment”, current Vice President J.D. Vance, are ardent supporters of Yarvin. Both are particularly impressed by Yarvin's idea of managing the USA like a company. Thiel confessed in an essay published by the Cato Institute: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” (5). As early as 2014, The Baffler was already warning of a “Silicon Empire”. The starting point for this was the petition on the White House website by Google engineer Justine Tunney, which proposed a referendum to transfer governance to the technology industry. In doing so, she explicitly referred to Mencius Moldbug to her Twitter followers.
Incidentally, Vance also suggested the same thing, albeit with some delay and in different words. In 2021, he called on Donald Trump to implement the vision of the “dark enlightenment” after his re-election by ripping out the current American ruling class like a tumor and then establishing a kind of American political religion (6).
Although the aim of the “dark enlightenment” is arguably self-contradictory in the creation of a new superstition in an American political religion, it is still worth asking whether multi-billionaires should be allowed to interfere in politics through their financial contributions in a democracy.
Especially if their aim is to “properly” administer state power by aligning the state with the structures of a capitalist enterprise. For all the freedoms that exist in Yarvin's “libertarian” ideas in his state construct would then be his very own liberal products, which he generously grants to his citizens/consumers.
It is alarming when Yarvin's ideas are not only seen as limited to the USA. With a view to this year's “AI Action Summit”, which is taking place in Paris from February 10 to 11, French President Macron has already announced “a new Paris of Enlightenment”. With the kind support of the “Artificial Intelligence World Society” (AIWS) – a self-proclaimed AI world government – the summit will address, among other things, the question of how artificial intelligence can change governance for the better. Yarvin's ideas are at least touched on here.
Sources and notes:
(1) https://time.com/7174210/what-donald-trump-win-means-for-ai/
(2) https://tarnkappe.info/artikel/kuenstliche-intelligenz/larry-ellison-oracle-cto-traeumt-vom-perfekten-ki-ueberwachungsstaat-301576.html
(3) https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Trumps-Milliardaere-traeumen-von-rechter-Tech-Diktatur-article25286466.html
(4) Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene. Basic Books, New York 1976. For the history of the concept, see Jeremy Burman: “The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999”, in: Perspectives on Science 1/20 (2012), pp. 75–104.
(5) https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
(6) https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Trumps-Milliardaere-traeumen-von-rechter-Tech-Diktatur-article25286466.html
Jessica Horn, born in 1983, worked for many years as a German and history teacher at grammar schools, including abroad, and completed a training course at the Freie Journalistenschule in Berlin. She has been working as a freelance journalist since 2021.
Technocrats in the White House are pushing ahead with the project to manage the USA like a company.
The state has failed in its democratic function and must therefore be remodeled into a capitalist corporate structure, according to Curtis Yarvin, the mastermind behind the technocrats of the new US government. However, a company is not normally a democratic institution. Those who are clever and have money can buy into a company and dominate it. The close connection between the new US administration and tech billionaires like Elon Musk is therefore a cause for concern. In such a construct, citizen participation would no longer play a role. What is likely to gain influence, on the other hand, is artificial intelligence.
by Jessica Horn
[This article posted on 2/8/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/die-dunkle-aufklarung.]
Curtis Yarvin, an author and programmer from Silicon Valley, has long advocated an American monarchy. Between 2007 and 2016, he caused a stir with a blog he wrote under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, which gained many followers at the time. Among them was the academic philosopher Nick Land, who coined the term “dark enlightenment” in his review of Moldbug and summarized Yarvin's concept as follows: all unofficial power structures such as lobbying, bribery, manipulation, etc. should be formalized in the corporate structure of the state.
In a state that has the structure of a capitalist company, only those who have a stake in the state should be able to have a say. The goal would be a hyper-capitalist technocracy, which has now gathered around President Donald Trump.
Not only is Musk an ardent supporter of Yarvin, but so is the new US Vice President J.D. Vance. Could Trump's shadow government threaten us with an unprecedented technocracy?
Not least through his protégé Elon Musk, it became apparent that with a government under Donald Trump, Big Tech would also be moving into the White House – something that should have become clear to everyone on Inauguration Day at the latest. Not only was Musk firmly at Trump's side, but so were many other high-profile guests from the tech industry. Among them was Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who, along with Musk, was invited to a dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is now spouting a whole new tune when it comes to freedom of expression.
But above all, Trump's Vice President J.D. Vance is a crucial link to the powerful investor and visionary tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Thiel had gained prominence through his early investment in Facebook and created the company PayPal with Elon Musk before the two went their separate ways. But above all, Thiel has elevated the vice president to a political force through his investments in Vance's companies Mithril and Narya and his financing of the 2022 US Senate campaign. With Vance moving into the White House, Thiel's investment could now also indirectly pay off through political influence.
Why the movers and shakers from Silicon Valley are suddenly so eager to kneel before the new president is now also obvious: no sooner is Trump in the White House than he is already implementing what experts assumed would happen, namely the repeal of the executive order issued by Joe Biden in October 2023 regarding the “safe and trustworthy” development and use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Not least tech billionaire and developer of Mosaic, the first internationally widespread internet browser, Marc Andreessen, who was long considered a supporter of the Democrats, sought out a place at the side of the new US president with the foresight that a new wind will soon be blowing.
This is because, in the Republicans' view, the executive order would inhibit innovation – despite the fact that Musk, of all people, has already expressed concerns about the technology on several occasions and, in 2023, even called for a pause in AI development together with more than 1,000 experts from the tech industry. Trump's vice president likes to dismiss these AI concerns as an industry ploy that is ostensibly intended to usher in new regulations that would “actually make it more difficult for new entrants to create the innovations that would drive the next generation of American growth” (1).
Whether Musk ultimately sought Trump's proximity only to gain an industry advantage for himself remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that Trump has brought other aces from the tech industry on board with his “Stargate” AI initiative, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Altman is not only repeatedly in the media spotlight with statements about the development of a superintelligence, but also made the iris scan socially acceptable through his Worldcoin project. Ellison, on the other hand, already raved at a 2024 Oracle financial analyst meeting that thanks to the era of mass surveillance, police officers and citizens would always “act in their best interest” (2).
Should we be worried? Absolutely! Because behind all the internal feuding over the financing of the “Stargate” project, we should not lose sight of the fact that the technocrats in the White House all adhere to the same “house philosopher”, whose name is Curtis Yarvin.
“The Dark Enlightenment”
In his disturbing dystopia, published by the highly intelligent programmer Yarvin under the pseudonym Mencius Moldburg, he describes tomorrow's San Francisco as follows: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry ID cards with RFID chips. Everyone's DNA and retinas are scanned. Public places and transit systems track everyone. Security cameras are everywhere. Every car knows where it is and who is in it, and reports both to the authorities” (3).
Yarvin's dystopia, as crazy as it may sound, did not only attract supporters from the tech industry at the time. The academic philosopher Nick Land also took up Yarvin's ideas and, in one of his reviews, first coined the term “dark enlightenment”, a theory based on Yarvin's interpretation of the evolutionary biologist and champion of the Enlightenment, Richard Dawkins. With the term “meme”, Dawkins established a social-theoretical equivalent to the gene in evolutionary biology and used it to describe the code for social practices. Any social behavior that cannot be traced back to evolutionary biology can be explained by a meme. According to Dawkins, religious practices would fall under this category, since they act against rational and biologically logical behavior and are only able to prevail over evolution because they instill a delusion in humans and are structured in a parasitic way (4).
Yarvin transferred this parasitic structure to the irrational moral concepts of liberal democracies. In his opinion, these also exhibit parasitic characteristics. Among other things, he cites universalism as the dominant moral concept of liberal democracies, which would cause people to believe certain things, such as that all people are equal.
In a kind of second, “dark” Enlightenment, it is important to free oneself from this superstition of the “cathedral” – as Yarvin christened the institutional network – because the initial promise of the Enlightenment, namely the separation between the rational and the irrational, had failed.
“Dark Enlightenment” thus implies the abolition of democracy in favor of a CEO, since, according to Yarvin, a government is nothing more than a corporation that manages the country. Since the US is being managed rather poorly, the state should be treated like ailing company and dissolved in favor of a ‘national CEO’.
The house philosopher of the tech giants
Above all, PayPal founder Peter Thiel and his “investment”, current Vice President J.D. Vance, are ardent supporters of Yarvin. Both are particularly impressed by Yarvin's idea of managing the USA like a company. Thiel confessed in an essay published by the Cato Institute: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” (5). As early as 2014, The Baffler was already warning of a “Silicon Empire”. The starting point for this was the petition on the White House website by Google engineer Justine Tunney, which proposed a referendum to transfer governance to the technology industry. In doing so, she explicitly referred to Mencius Moldbug to her Twitter followers.
Incidentally, Vance also suggested the same thing, albeit with some delay and in different words. In 2021, he called on Donald Trump to implement the vision of the “dark enlightenment” after his re-election by ripping out the current American ruling class like a tumor and then establishing a kind of American political religion (6).
Although the aim of the “dark enlightenment” is arguably self-contradictory in the creation of a new superstition in an American political religion, it is still worth asking whether multi-billionaires should be allowed to interfere in politics through their financial contributions in a democracy.
Especially if their aim is to “properly” administer state power by aligning the state with the structures of a capitalist enterprise. For all the freedoms that exist in Yarvin's “libertarian” ideas in his state construct would then be his very own liberal products, which he generously grants to his citizens/consumers.
It is alarming when Yarvin's ideas are not only seen as limited to the USA. With a view to this year's “AI Action Summit”, which is taking place in Paris from February 10 to 11, French President Macron has already announced “a new Paris of Enlightenment”. With the kind support of the “Artificial Intelligence World Society” (AIWS) – a self-proclaimed AI world government – the summit will address, among other things, the question of how artificial intelligence can change governance for the better. Yarvin's ideas are at least touched on here.
Sources and notes:
(1) https://time.com/7174210/what-donald-trump-win-means-for-ai/
(2) https://tarnkappe.info/artikel/kuenstliche-intelligenz/larry-ellison-oracle-cto-traeumt-vom-perfekten-ki-ueberwachungsstaat-301576.html
(3) https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Trumps-Milliardaere-traeumen-von-rechter-Tech-Diktatur-article25286466.html
(4) Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene. Basic Books, New York 1976. For the history of the concept, see Jeremy Burman: “The Misunderstanding of Memes: Biography of an Unscientific Object, 1976–1999”, in: Perspectives on Science 1/20 (2012), pp. 75–104.
(5) https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
(6) https://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Trumps-Milliardaere-traeumen-von-rechter-Tech-Diktatur-article25286466.html
Jessica Horn, born in 1983, worked for many years as a German and history teacher at grammar schools, including abroad, and completed a training course at the Freie Journalistenschule in Berlin. She has been working as a freelance journalist since 2021.
For more information:
http://www.freetranslations.foundation
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