Dark Enlightenment: Dismantling the Nation States
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone of oligarchy. This is a guided tour of the radical ideas that have been circulating among the technocratic elite of Silicon Valley and around the world for decades, festering in fringe spaces far removed from normal everyday Americans. You will meet the men of the Dark Enlightenment, a rogues gallery of lunatics who came to power with the big tech boom and cryptocurrencies. Except these tech radicals are no longer fringe: they are having table talks in the White House, running various sectors of global financial markets, staying at Mar-a-Lago, and performing tributes of loyalty to their appointed monarch. These men are twisted in ways that might make the traditional hard right state actors seem in touch with reality. For example, followers of this technocratic dark philosophy sincerely believe they have the technology to become royalty and create their own kingdoms on Earth and in outer space—at the expense of everyone else, because many of them believe the rest of us are all collectively biowaste. They aren’t interested in preserving ideas like sovereignty and statehood, human rights, or even our history. They are plotting to make serfs of everyone, from Miami to Toronto, from South America to the Caspian Sea, and anywhere else they can get their hands on.
In 2020, I began an investigation into the world of accelerationism, cyber gangs, and cryptocurrencies used to finance radical right-wing movements. I was bored, terminally online, and unable to do much of anything else due to a pandemic that shut down the finer parts of civilization for a year. On a particularly boring day while browsing a literary forum, I remember laughing at a meme that said “Darth Mencius Moldbug” over a strange man’s face terribly edited onto Darth Vader.
It looked something like this:
After a few minutes of research, I discovered a book called The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land, which opens with a chapter introducing Mencius Moldbug’s vision for destroying democracy. I laughed again, not because I thought destroying democracy is funny, but because this idea was delivered with such an absurd presentation. You can buy the book at Target by the way.
Following one lead after another brought me to the discovery of Mencius Moldbug’s real name, Curtis Yarvin—a recipient of multibillionaire Peter Thiel’s venture capital investments. You can read some of his writings at Unqualified Reservations, which contains nearly two decade’s worth of essays for the modern Dark Enlightenment movement.
Going further down the rabbit hole led me through a trail of social media influencers like @BronzeAgePervert and crypto cults that were gaining followings from hundreds of thousands of people. Around this time, I discovered crypto financed Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) cults beholden to bizarre conspiracies and space-age beliefs of multidimensional computer gods. Not at all out of step with some of Elon Musk’s transhuman beliefs.
Remilia Corp, known for their non-fungible tokens (NFTs) called Milady, included violent extremist internet celebrities like Charlotte Fang, real name Krishna Okhandiar, hiding behind adorable chibi-styled avatars. An ecosystem of Twitter drama revealed endless legal chaos, including the leader’s bizarre Esoteric Hitlerist and Dark Enlightenment inspired beliefs, allegations of grooming teenage girls, and ritualistic self mutilation. Nonetheless, Milady became so popular that it even gained the attention of Elon Musk. Remilia is just one example of how a relatively unknown fringe philosopher like Curtis Yarvin was fostering a new generation of radicals within Gen Z. Despite the bad publicity, the neo-reactionary group was able to raise millions through their NFT cult.
By 2021, as crypto boomed, I realized that this had blown completely open on a culturally shifting scale, exactly as the writer Nick Land predicted it would with an accelerationist theory he calls hyperstition. In other words, concepts start with fictional or theoretical sparks before breaking into reality by adopting technology and cultural engineering. For example, Bitcoin and decentralized finance began as fringe ideas circulating among online nerds, around 2016 crypto expanded into a meme currency, and by 2021 names like Coinbase and Crypto.com were everywhere.
Radicals have manifested a dark new reality by seizing control of new forms of wealth that resulted from the advancements of the 21st century. The shift started in the 2000s, when Elon Musk and his business partner, Peter Thiel, began to accumulate wealth with PayPal. Thiel formed a following among wild libertarians, who saw democracy as a threat to their security. Libertarians, if true to their ethos, wouldn’t have advocated for a monarchy, but these techno libertarians wanted a monarchy, as long as they got to become royalty.
Curtis Yarvin, who benefited greatly from the investments of Peter Thiel, brought focus to their neo-monarchist vision. Throughout the 2010s, they evolved their network and captured the minds of crypto financiers, eccentric far-right social media influencers, and even J.D. Vance. They see everyday people as serfs in a dark techno fantasy, and they have the power and capital to make it a dark techno reality. In fact, Elon Musk has even hitched the Dark Enlightenment to MAGA, creating his Dark MAGA brand.
Nick Land says that the consequences of rapidly evolving technological industry will inevitably lead to accelerationism and the deterritorialization of nations. The brains behind this neo-monarchist takeover are already theorizing ways to completely eliminate states and reimagine them as vast holdings of oligarchal overlords. They are pulling the funding from our communities and hoping this will make them more profits for their space rockets and AI. They have moved on to the next stage of their Dark Enlightenment with concepts like the Network State, a state inspired first by a number of internet crowdfunders, governed by exclusive online clubs. They are taking what they learned from DAO and manifesting that into statehood. The idea has come so far in development that they’ve already raised half a billion dollars for their first city, called Praxis.
Balaji Srinivasan, the author of The Network State and former CTO of Coinbase, has openly stated that the idea of the network state is to do battle with the U.S. federal government. It almost sounds like sedition, an insurgency, or treason. But DOGE’s AI powered dismantling of the government is the embodiment of Srinivasan’s idea of a “giant robot” tearing down the federal government. These are the men funding Trump’s populist movement now, and J.D. Vance is their guy. Their people are in the White House, and they are liquidating our government right now.
Five years after I laughed at a Curtis Yarvin meme; now he is in the New York Times calling for the death of democracy, and all the pawns are in place to launch their siege.
But it’s not too late to turn against this tide of billionaire edgelords who have captivated status seeking politicians and others obsessed with the scraps of wealth around Elon Musk. If Musk wants to live by some hyperstitional theory that we are all biowaste that can one day be fed to a giant digital superintelligence, then eventually America will catch on—because we are going to inform hundreds of millions of people. We are going to start in our circles, we are going to get the word out, and then our neighbors will find out and then they will, one by one, realize that we haven’t been overreacting.
While Musk’s siege has just begun, Boston has been under siege once before by an Empire that believed they had divine right to rule over the world. Bostonians managed to endure that siege by building networks and trust within our communities. Regular everyday people talked about ideas like divine rights that came directly to everyday people born equal, not divine rights of kings or mandates from a cult of personality. Modern technology has isolated people from the bars, parks, and real town squares where we built a revolution. Go to the bar and tell them that Curtis Yarvin, J.D. Vance’s mentor, calls for the return of slavery and dictatorship. Go to the library and tell your coworkers that the grand plan is to turn us all into private prison labor camp slaves with no national identity and no rights, and that’s why Donald Trump wants to remove citizenship rights for people naturally born here. As the Trump administration leaks information like a broken sink pipe, the American people will see the mold-festered cabinet and together we’ll find a solution.
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