Ironically, he's jewish. He's a modern day tech-bro Clayton Bigsby.
That's exactly why the idea is incorrect. People wise enough and unbiased enough to be entrusted with unchecked power are few; ones that are incorruptible enough to be trusted with it for long are even fewer. And those who want such power are almost always the people who are least to be trusted with it.
So, yeah. The problem with this idea is that it doesn't work, which is a pretty good definition of "incorrect".
The conclusion could be correct given the premise, and also it could be moot because the premise is impossible, but those are two different claims.
Obviously I agree with you that the proposed system is unworkable because the premise is impossible. (This is a "duh" thing that really isn't worth debating, anyone who fails to see this is a fool.)
But I actually also think the conclusion is wrong even given the premise. I think it is wrong to deny people representative input into their government, even under the assumption of a perfect benevolent monarch. This is not for utilitarian reasons, but moral reasons.
I think, historically, the problem has also been: what happens when they die? Then you need lightning to strike twice.
In the profile you’ll learn that Yarvin frequently uses the N-word, that he identifies the need for improved means of genocide, and that JD Vance literally embraced him with the exclamation “you reactionary fascist!”
What you should take away from this is that there are people closely associated with the current government whose goal is to find ways to upend the perceived ‘Cathedral’ of liberal thought through fascist means and eliminate democracy.
Whether or not a benevolent king is the best _theoretical_ model of government is really not relevant unless you are the type who thinks _actually_ replacing the democratic system with monarchy is worth another try.
His positive program though is underwhelming at best, and hostile at worst, literally against several key points of the US oath of allegiance, for instance. His idea of a benevolent head of a "sovcorp" ("sovereign corporation") is not even some virtuous king Elessar; someone like president Putin, capable, determined, and with very long horizon of planning, but sufficiently cynical, would fit the bill. For last 3 yeas we have a painful demonstration of how well that works.
The fact that Yarvin can publish and promote his views in a society that's formally built on ideas opposite to his speaks good about our society, its freedom of thought and speech. It also adds to its durability. Every authoritarian ruler knows how dangerous are subversive ideas that propagate covertly, while everyone pretends to be aligned to the official values.
That is not a bad strategy unless someone figures it out and plans to bankrupt you.
Manager's skills are only shown during a conflict or a crisis. But no human has invented a way to test candidate on the crisis response. Partial solution is to hire/elect a person who manager crisis before, but because crises are always unique, their skills still don't translate to a new one.
So the answer is - it is impossible to do. Thus we shouldn't do that for the most critical positions.
Choose one.
In his opinion democracy is flawed in the same way a business owned by all its employees wouldn't have the right incentives to succeed, or how a plane piloted by the collective wisdom of it's passengers likely wouldn't make it very far beyond the runway.
I think his idea is that you want a system which selects a competent individual then align their incentives with the success of the nation. I think he has suggested a system similar to that of a board of directors in a company where the CEO would have executive power, but the board collectively retains the right to oust the CEO.
Whether this would work as a system of government I don't know, but on the face of it I think it would be an interesting experiment. It addresses issues that monarchical and autocratic systems have in that they often don't select for competency and have no checks and balances, while also addressing issues of democracy in that it's hard for leaders to make decisions and that the average voter is about as intelligent as the average person you'll meet on the street.
My guess is that it would be difficult to prevent corruption, but it's not like democracy perfectly solves the issue of corruption. Democratic systems are quite unstable outside the West and monarchy arguably didn't work out terribly for Europe over the centuries. Don't get me wrong, I like democratic systems, but I do think our systems are a little too democratic as it stands. One of the things I like about the US as a Brit is that money plays such a central role in US politics. I think this is the main reason why a US worker doing the same job as me today would receive at least 2x my salary while paying less tax. The economic incentives in US politics are completely different from that of the UK where the average household receives more from the government than they put in.
How wrong I was.
Another example is the Silo book series, recently adapted to a series on Apple TV. I remember reading those books thinking it was insane than the people would act in such clearly counter-productive ways against their own interests, or that leadership would make up elaborate lies rather than just telling people the truth so they would see why certain actions were necessary. And now I'm watching the same plot a decade later, and it all hits home.
While watching the first two seasons, I still haven’t understood why the creators of the silos wouldn’t just have told people the truth to avoid the dysfunctionality that results from the cognitive dissonance that the leadership has to maintain. Telling the truth would also preclude the rebellions that keep recurring because the people realise that they’re being lied to. Is the rationale for the elaborate lies and rituals clearer in the books?
On the other hand, I can understand why the leader of the post-apocalyptic bunker in Paradise goes to extreme lengths to lie to the residents about the outside world.
This playbook was described well by an ex-KGB agent who specialized in propaganda in this 1984 interview[1]. I suggest watching the full interview. The timeline of what we're seeing today aligns well with the surge of adtech, social media, and smartphones. A nation can be fully destabilized in the span of a generation, and modern tools make this much easier and cheaper than Yuri Bezmenov could have predicted.
Apparently, if the right people read your ideas then they’ll get convinced that the rest of Ohio feels the same way?
Well, Hitler and Szálasi (crazy Hungarian Nazi guy) and Lenin/Stalin come to mind as the closest actually, so maybe that's where OSC got the idea.
Hm, now I'm curious who was the youngest elected head of state...
edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_state_leade...
Like a precocious undergrad who just discovered set theory and thinks he’s king of the… uhh sovereign corporation?
Lots of literary references though. Borges, of course gave him Urbit/Tlon[0], and wrote some racially spicy stuff in his day. Pretty sure Nock is a reference to a controversial libertarian thinker[1]. I bet you could find more anti-Semitic, pro-slavery and anti-democratic Easter eggs if you looked.
Clearly though, in person he managed to rub elbows with some pretty influential people… also like Ms Rand.
It's grubby process in some ways, but looking at it holistically, it's not a bad outcome. The meme has gotten the interest I think deserved, even it's creator didn't.
That's the only thing they value anymore.
I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.
In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-confluence?r=h8x
There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time.
Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
As an American immigrant, this does not seem at all true to me, from either angle - I don't think that this is a defining characteristic of Americans, nor do I think that other nations don't behave the same way.
My view is basically the complete opposite: IMHO Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation, with the result that we don't have the institutional capability to respond effectively when growth stops or when (as in the case of climate change) growth becomes the problem that must be addressed.
Western Europe has proven much better at running their societies in ways that do not depend on continued growth than the US has (at least in the period after WW II) which is why it has responded much quicker and more effectively to the challenge of climate change than the US has.
Here is one man's summary of this dynamic: https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligations
Oh, wait: could it be that you are disappointed with the US (and see China in a favorable light) because the US isn't becoming Leftist quickly enough?
I mean, living in 2025 America that's not a bad default assumption to make, is it? By default when the solar salesman (or pest control salesman) comes to the door I consider it a scam because it generally is (same for phone sales, and most internet ads). Is everything a scam? No. But lots of things are and it's best to have your defenses up.
Demographic collapse? Sure, huge issue. But why is this happening? Why did it start happening before the other issues?
A rap group being critical of Churchill at an official event? Not really an issue. I don't think that is why Britain is failing. And I'll need citations for why moral introspection is demoralizing rather than uplifting and enlightening for a culture. Or maybe suggest something that the youth should feel good about rather than browbeating them for not being thrilled at the state of things.
Immigration? Not an issue for the USA after the great depression, which also had a massive welfare state.
I agree that Britain is collapsing, but not for those reasons. What a stunning lack of imagination.
e: Also, are migrants really to blame for Britain selling off all of its state capacity for pennies on the dollar since the 80s? Did migrants vote to violently eject Britain from the European economy in 2015? Any mention of that? Or would that type self-reflection hurt the cultural morale?
Maybe Britain would be better off with people who are a little less integrated with those values.
Is exactly the philosophical dead end that Nick Land and Curtis and maybe Mark Fisher arrived at. Accelerationism is like the FedEx arrow in that it’s both an unforgettable idea and easy enough that anyone can grasp it, some of the dumbest politicians of our time are ardent believers.
It’s fun to think about the possibility that belief in this conclusion was premature two decades ago when CCRU and NRx people were banging on about it but now maybe it actually isn’t premature. Which would annoyingly be a pretty compelling instance of hyperstitional time war
People who imagine that they'll emerge victoriously from the chaos are really quite childish; odds are that the accelerationists will suffer like all the rest -- or worse. They're like children who read medieval history and imagine themselves princes and dukes, rather than dirt farmers laboriously clearing woods and plowing fields.
When I say that there's no way out but through, I mean that things are bad and getting worse, and there's nothing anyone can do about it other than develop the skills to survive by any means necessary. (For some that means survivalism, or moving to Fiji, or just hanging out here and making lots of money.) Do you think we can vote our way out of this mess, with representative democracy? The way things are today? lol, lmao even.
As to the second part of your comment -- I'm reminded of what Jack Womack wrote in the 2000 reissue of Neuromancer: Has "the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?"
This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Neil O’Brien is a right wing anti-immigrant Member of Parliament… as with all politicians what he says should be taken with a pinch of salt
As an aside, this is exactly what happens in Gibson's Jackpot.
> “Who runs it, then?”
> “Oligarchs, corporations, neomonarchists. Hereditary monarchies provided conveniently familiar armatures. Essentially feudal, according to its critics. Such as they are.”
That there's no way to vote your way out of this mess is most readily apparent in the UK, but it's true practically everywhere except Switzerland.
Switzerland, to some extent, shows that sometimes problems with democracy can be solved with. . . more democracy.
> "In general, the monarchical form of government is that which is natural to man; just as it is natural to bees and ants, to a flight of cranes, a herd of wandering elephants, a pack of wolves seeking prey in common, and many other animals, all of which place one of their number at the head of the business in hand.
> "Every business in which men engage, if it is attended with danger — every campaign, every ship at sea — must also be subject to the authority of one commander; everywhere it is one will that must lead. Even the animal organism is constructed on a monarchical principle: it is the brain alone which guides and governs, and exercises the hegemony. Although heart, lungs, and stomach contribute much more to the continued existence of the whole body, these philistines cannot on that account be allowed to guide and lead. That is a business which belongs solely to the brain; government must proceed from one central point. Even the solar system is monarchical. On the other hand, a republic is as unnatural as it is unfavourable to the higher intellectual life and the arts and sciences. Accordingly we find that everywhere in the world, and at all times, nations, whether civilized or savage, or occupying a position between the two, are always under monarchical government. The rule of many, as Homer said, is not a good thing: let there be one ruler, one king.
In general, I think that those experiments in autocracy that have taken place between 1850-Present rather disprove this notion. (One of the rare things old Schop was wrong about!) The Athenians were right: The affairs of state must be the affairs of every citizen. England's problems won't be solved by a restoration of the Stuarts (I think that the current Stuart heir is a 50 year old banker who is exceedingly uninterested in the job) but they can possibly be solved by dispensing with parliament and enabling qualified citizens to vote directly on laws and regulatory matters. I dare say you won't end up with butter knife bans this way.
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.
Even trifecta states are dealing with this, as is obvious from the turmoil and wild animosity that exists in one-party California. The constitution gets changed willy-nilly to create effectively unchangeable advantages for certain groups at the expense of others.
The US is moving from a situation in which they had enough money (well, deficit spending) to solve most of our problems without upsetting too many constituencies. Those days are over and we're now trying to do something, anything, to avoid having to make tough decisions that might mean losing an election. Our electorate wanting something, anything, to prevent them from losing whatever preferential political goals they have are entertaining the same naive ideas.
Win once, and let the next generation deal with the fallout. Basic human selfishness par excellence.
I mean it's so weird, one day some Republican says positive shit about Orban and the whole left wing media screams "oh no they're going to pull an Orban" and now suddenly it's "well actually no, we heard Vance has once read a Moldbug rant so actually they're going to install a king-CEO". Next day Trump is a fascist, the day after he's "Putin's asset". It gets a bit ridiculous to be honest. Do we really believe the administration believes in anything at all? I'm not convinced anybody running the US right now has the attention span to read a Yarvin post all the way to the end. It just feels like obsessive fearmongering to me at this point, stack up all the bogeymen you can think of on one big pile and say that the Trump administration is all of them at the same time.
I say this as someone who thinks Trump is the worst thing to happen to the world in quite some time. I worry that all this panic actively hurts the opposition and that anybody who kinda sorta likes Trump is going to be very tired very fast of this kind of reporting.
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.
And for a bit of fun, I even posted an Urbit parody in those days, in which I inadvertently invented a feature of the Unison programming language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409837
But one thing is clear to me. Blockchain technology + IPv6 opens a lot of possibilities to re-imagine networking, and that's what Urbit is mainly focused on: networking.
A good blockchain technology also has possibilities to re-imagine parts of OS.
For example we will not need to have local users if all identities can be verified using credentials stored online, immutable forever. Also we won't need to have local networks, DNS, Time servers etc. Everything will be global.
Many ideas there, but each one of those problems is unbelievably hard by itself, all of them together is half of the internet and computing infrastructure.
What I honestly remain unclear on: Are these serious efforts - both the political writing and the technical work - or is it elaborate trolling?
Does anyone know?
There is no way America shakes this insanity off easily, it will require a long time and (lots of) suffering.
It just goes to show that the idea of a stable hereditary monarchy wielding absolute power has never been the whole picture. Monarchism is a smokescreen, replacing the messy reality of democratic life with an illusion that has never held up to historical scrutiny.
The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.
I find his writing style wastes a lot of one's time and I disagree with him on nearly everything, but there's no denying that there are many interesting ideas in there.
I would think someone intent on calling Moldbug's ideas interesting would at least try to patch up the big holes. Like the city-states that have free flowing capital and populations, but somehow avoid an analogue to international law.
Or the dictator that isn't subject to approval, except by the required committee that can fire him. There's 4 points and 2 of them are contradictory!
It’s really a testament to how astonishingly stupid some of those rich folks are that they find any of Yarvin’s work compelling.
You can also use https://hn.algolia.com to find it.
Submitted by pg!
The fact that it's flagged means someone wants it hidden.
If you don't want to read the post you don't have to, nobody is making you.
Like, more right wing as in more conservative? More religious? More monarchist? Something about seating arrangements in France?
Obviously e.g. the Weimar youth was liberal and partying and then Germans turned to fascism in the 30s. But that was a temporary setback, not the general direction of change. Overall Germans of 20th century are much less conservative and right wing than Germans of the 19th century, same for 18th century and so on.
It's also not really about antiquity, but about the arrow of modernity (say, 16th century onwards). The concept of left/right wing is not something applicable to Pagans and Romans (although both were way more "right wing" than the Christian era if we try to judge them under this anachronism).
Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries (techcrunch.com) 54 points by davidgerard on Nov 23, 2013 | 109 comments
> The term itself [stupidity], he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility
> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
I think/hope we will see something similar to voluntary societies in the future. Nation states are too heterogenous to row in the same direction. Stronger ethics are needed
Well. I dunno, actually.
In some ways, I do want The Feed. But in other ways, I definitely don’t want Drummers. Okay, some aspects of Drummers.
The former seems to be winning.
On that, he's not wrong!
What an absolute joke
If the prize is being "all-powerful", then you can just assassinate your way to king-CEO, after which you're immune. This system is incredibly easy to hack, and has happened countless of times throughout history.
Giving people cryptographic keys to disarm weapons is not going to change much about that and is just hand-waving with extra steps. Try disarming my knife with your cryptography. Oh no, I repeatedly stabbed you in the chest before you could enter your passphrase. Too bad.
This is like communists: "yeah sure, in the past it ended in spectacular failure, but this time we'll get it right!" (if they're not outright denying things such as Stalin's purges from ever happening that is).
What strikes me is just how incredibly naïve, dumb, and unsophisticated all of this is.
Yarvin seems to have convinced himself that he's always the smartest person in the room, always acts fully rational, and that everything he says is a singularity of pure logic. It's easy to end up with some very curious ideas that way, especially if you combine that with his psychological ... issues.
Once you start dismissing people that disagree as "too dumb to understand the ideas" or consider giving them "Voight-Kampff test" to prove they're not "NPCs" you know you're off the deep end.
If nothing else, all of this is useful to read as a cautionary tale: how you too, as a smart person, can believe some really dumb stuff (to say nothing on the morality of it all).
He also seems to lose all biting insight and critique when it comes to one certain state he has a legal right to be a citizen of. I'll leave this for readers to find out which one.
I've never made much of his apparent association to JD Vance. Maybe this is the sort of street cred stuff vance liked to surround himself with, much as Obama did with his Bill Ayers association, but I doubt it affected either men much in practice.
> Yarvin is only another horribly damaged person, squealing in pain in a pseudointellectual vocabulary. He has neither knowledge nor insight, but a gift for miming these things. The questions are, first, how might we stop so many children from being psychically tortured so that their minds become piles of bloody shred like this, and then second, why does anybody take it at face value when, rarely, one of them learns to scream in sounds that mimic high discourse?
It’s pertinent to YC, and topical because if the current US administration.
The guy’s ideas are poison, but also act as a kind of Rosetta Stone for interpreting nonsense conclusions sometimes presented by tech leaders, politicians etc.
I didn't flag it, and clearly I'm here commenting, but I'm also sympathetic to people flagging this.
Another dropout; never finished his PhD:
"At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-'60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go '90s dot-com era."
Without the Silicon Valley and the internet, he and his theories have no life. Neither can stand on its own without computers.
He cannot turn off the computer. Without the computer, he becomes irrelevant.
Not suprising if he provides entertainment for so-called "tech" company investors and employees.
A computer. What a coincidence.
His entire world revolves around computers. As such, his theories are detached from reality.
https://www.nytimmes.com/2025/01/22/opinion/trump-vance-yarv...
I have this feeling that Nock, effectively the bytecode of Urbit, is inspired by Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language essay: https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html – for instance Nock only defines minimal math operations, as proposed in the essay.
The thing is, Paul's ideas in that essay were quite bad, based on a mathematical aesthetic that is both inefficient and aesthetically a poor fit for computing. That's fine for an essay, you throw some ideas out there and maybe they work or maybe they don't.
Then in Urbit Yarvin actually built the thing. And it's _terrible_. Hilariously bad. Some of the worst architecture you'll ever see. As a minor example they have a hexadecimal integer type... I understand i32, i64, etc., but a hexadecimal type is something you come up with if you don't understand how numbers work. There's literally a hundred other things just as embarrassing as that in the design.
It's fine to take a bad idea and explore it. But he didn't just try out the idea, he got people to invest, to develop the system, emotionally commit to this thing. Seeing community posts is sad, it's naive folks hoping to find a home and seeing some phrases that connect with them, and they don't know enough to see Urbit for the fraud that it is. The obscurantist terminology helps maintain the fraud, since people think there must be something there if only they could understand it... but there isn't, and most of them will never understand it. Every cool demo is just a regular web frontend with a half-assed Urbit backend.
All of which is to say, I think this is Yarvin's schtick: grab onto some ideas, explore them in a way that is so confusing that it hids how moronic the ideas are, while successfully appealing to some latent desire in the audience.
The ultimate irony is that New Yorker in this case is writing an article about him, mocking his views...yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all.
How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?
The only fascinating thing here is the phenomenon that no matter what nonsense you come up with, someone on the Internet will agree with you, think it's a good thing, and maybe even form a fan club.
When someone is popular-with-people-in-power and wrong, sunlight is an important disinfectant.
Extremely high-profile & powerful people listen to his ideas & are influenced by his beliefs.
Discussing things does not "legitimize" them. No one is required to read The New Yorker.
> Just because of his far-out-there views?
Probably the length of time he's held and promulgated them.
> someone on the Internet will agree with you
We used to think that connecting disparate groups of people together was a good thing. I have no idea when that changed but apparently it's the style now to use the awesome power of the internet to deny people their individuality out of gross fear.
> think it's a good thing
You should have to prove it's a bad thing. Not the other way around.
Well, good thing you put that in quotes, because you seem to be using some definition of the word legitimize that is only apparent to you and not the general public. Discussing things does legitimize them, because it allots them time that could have been used for something else.
> Probably the length of time he's held and promulgated them.
Many people hold views their entire lives, or at least decades. I don't see New Yorker or Wikipedia write articles about them.
> You should have to prove it's a bad thing. Not the other way around.
You understand what context means, or just trolling?
Did you read the article? Because he sits in immediate proximity to the power of the executive branch of the federal gov't, wherein a number of its most prominent members are devout fans of his who espouse his work...
> He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate.
> As his ideas have been surrealized in DOGE and Trump has taken to self-identifying as a king, one might expect to find Yarvin in an exultant mood. In fact, he has spent the past few months fretting that the moment will go to waste. “If you have a Trump boner right now, enjoy it,” he wrote two days after the election. “It’s as hard as you’ll ever get.” What many see as the most dangerous assault on American democracy in the nation’s history Yarvin dismisses as woefully insufficient—a “vibes coup.” Without a full-blown autocratic takeover, he believes, a backlash is sure to follow.
And I don't think he's wrong; the longer it takes for the reality of a takeover to manifest, the less likely it is to happen.
Nick Land where have you gone? Your house is in disarray.
Yarvis doesn't even touch many of the existing third rails today.
