Ideas - Ditch democracy. This movement wants tech-elites to govern

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

What do you get when you take some of the classic Enlightenment values like reason, fairness, and justice, and substitute them with opinion, privilege and power: The Dark Enlightenment — a movement that is a deliberate oxymoron with a vision to dump democracy and replace it with start-up cities run by CEOs. American blogger Curtis Yarvin, also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is the founder of this movement that advocates for the return of traditional hierarchical societies and monarchy-like governance.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. I've been quite open about this around the office. I don't want this Parks Department to build any parks because I don't believe in government. I think that all government is a waste of taxpayer money. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. My dream is to have the park system privatized. This is the character Ron Swanson, director of Parks and Recreation, from the TV show of the same name.

And run entirely for profit by corporations, like Chuck E. Cheese. And this is the American software engineer, Curtis Jarvin. You could probably put any of the Fortune 500 CEOs in and say, okay, you're in charge of the executive branch, fix this. They probably do fine. They wouldn't be Hillary or Stalin. Curtis Jarvin is a blogger.

He's popular on right-wing and libertarian podcasts. He's not the only one who wants to bring down the liberal foundations of Western society, but he is loud about it. The problem is basically when people equate democracy with good government, government. Right? You know, and this is why I'm a monarchist. I believe that voting is providing this sort of almost pornographic stimulus. It sort of becomes more like supporting your football team. Donald Trump and his circle pay attention to Curtis Jarvin. This is J.D. Vance from a podcast before he became vice president of the United States. A lot of concerns that said we should

deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project, but another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes. We should fire all of the people. So where did the second highest ranking state official in the most powerful country on earth get the idea that the state itself is the problem? There's this guy, Curtis Jarvin, who's written about some of these things. Curtis Jarvin is a blogger who's been a fixture of right-wing circles around. For years, Curtis Curtis Jarvin had been writing online about political theory and relative obscurity. His ideas were pretty extreme.

Curtis Jarvin is the architect of a recent school of thought called the Dark Enlightenment, sometimes called the Neo-Reactionary Movement. Sounds a bit bizarre. It sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction book. The term dark enlightenment is a deliberate oxymor. It means taking a progressive moment in history, the moment of Diderot. and Rousseau and Immanuel Kant and saying,

no, we have something much more radical and less democratic in mind. I suppose in a nutshell, you can say it is the injection of some sort of ideology to the idea that there is an inherent techno,

intellectual elite that should run everything. What color is Elon Musk's hat? I'm not just mega. I'm dark, gothic maga. It's kind of an overlord black. He's not wearing the red one. Anti-democratic.

It's a nod to the dark enlightenment. Difficult to understand how it would really work. He's not red maga. He's dark maga. The future is going to be amazing. And that the Enlightenment project of democracy and human rights and using public goods to, support knowledge. This has all been in vain and that the West is under siege and to defend

ourselves requires some kind of absolutist monarchical system or some kind of, what do they refer to as a network state, a kind of CEO-run government. Norman Mailer said, Americans lead a double life, that their political history moves on two rivers, one visible and one underground. The visible one is usually dull, although not so much of late. And they say, we don't need them. Freedom, freedom, freedom. He's a dictator. He's a dictator. The one underground is deviant and dangerous and one short step away from fascism. This one is the dream life of America. So what happens when that dream life becomes real? It becomes the dark enlightenment. Where I get caught up,

is if tech runs the show with platforms and AI, it's a question of running the show for whom? Winnipeg contributor, Tom Jokinen. What happens to the rest of us who aren't plugged in to the Silicon Valley world? Yeah, what happens to the rest of us? I don't think they're thinking a lot about the rest of us. The Greeks have a word. Demos means the people.

From it, we get our word democracy, government by the people. Freedom. That is what our forefathers want. I'm singing a song of freedom for all people cry out to be free. There's autocracy, government by autocrats or dictators. And we certainly don't want that at any price. If the birds up in the trees can be free, I'm not sure I get why Americans, whose culture is based on intangibles like freedom and liberty,

might want to give them up so easily. But it's a high-tech world, a world made possible by code, by ones and zeros. And it's a quick jump from one to the other, from democracy to its flip side. So I think in this technological ideology, it's driven by desire to escape from what they can, considered to be the limits of humanity, the limits of democracy, the limits of kind of collective human endeavour. I think the first idea is that democracy, as we understand it, is bust. That Western democracy is slow. It doesn't allow decisions and policies to be made,

which align themselves with the possibilities that the new technologies develop. I'm Roger Burroughs, I'm professor in global inequalities at the University of Bristol in the UK and visiting honorary professor at the University of Melbourne. Why can't the kind of Disney Carnival cruise ship become an alternative form of political organization? Life gets a lot more magical when you dream a private island paradise and knowing your family will be cared for the moment. I think there's all kinds of good reasons why I can't. But I also kind of have to tip my hat to people who take that question and push it to that length.

If technology has already changed our whole way of organizing our economies, why can't it a little bit more change the way we organize our politics? Dreams really do come true. Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. He's Canadian and the author of Crack Up Capitalism, about how free marketeers want to end nation states and pry off what they see as the handcuffs of democracy. So there was this early 2000s idea that you needed to get out to find freedom. The idea that you needed a blank slate, clear territory to build things,

afresh the same way, you know, Hong Kong had been built on a rocky island. It's not even that democracy is bad. It's just that it's very weak. Welcome to the Dark Enlightenment. So there's this concept called the Dark Enlightenment, the Dark Enlightenment, which is a real, it's an advocacy for technocracy. Tech billionaires and fringe philosophers argue that everything the Enlightenment promised was a lie. Free private cities, charter cities, startup societies, zones of progress. The Dark Enlightenment. What looks like politics is often subculture.

What looks like a manifesto is sometimes a dare, wrapped in a joke, wrapped in a void. You know, what I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism. The idea is that we now have been governed by a despotism of democracy, human equality, and that now is what requires overturning through exposure to the light of critique and a superior form of reason. You'll essentially be in a free market for bundles of governance systems, governance structures, health, social welfare, transportation, but it will be a pure market. There will be no non-commodified state form that would be a provider of those services.

What I see the dark enlightenment and those associated with it wanting to do here is not to work within a government, but it really is we don't really care what happens to the government. In fact, if it all just blows up and goes sideways, it doesn't matter. I'm Margaret O'Mara. I'm a professor of American history at the University of Washington in Seattle. Do you think we should? Do you think we should change a democracy of our republic for the dictatorship of a regimented state? That with artificial intelligence and the tools and platforms that we're building, that this is entirely possible and this is desirable. The idea that things would be better run by a CEO or indeed even a king or a queen or a monarch of,

some sort. In this consecration of a sovereign, the customs of another age are seen to clothe beliefs that we still value, the sceptre with the cross symbol of regal power. Well, I am king. Oh, king, hey, very nice. And how'd you

get that, eh? By exploiting the workers, by hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma, which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society. If there's ever going to be any progress? When you say, to a New York Times reader, democracy is bad. They're a little bit shocked. But when you say to them

politics is bad or even populism is bad, they're like, of course, these are horrible things. I might agree with some of the problems that he identifies, such as democracy isn't really working. It's not very democratic. Like, our democracy is broken. Yeah, I agree. America isn't really a democracy. It's more an oligarchy. Yeah, I agree. But then he says the remedy is a monarchy. Well, there I don't agree. Well, I didn't vote for you. You don't vote for kings. My name is Jemima Kelly, and I'm a columnist at the Financial Times in London.

I'm Stephen Gardner. I'm the principal research advisor at political research associates in Louisville, Kentucky. The idea is that this could be a model for how all societies could be organized. Each of them, sort of run by an absolute monarch slash CEO, rather than having kind of democratic participation. people would choose which state they were going to go and live in. And if they didn't like what it was happening, they would just leave. Look around the room and basically point out everything in the room that was made by a monarchy. Because these things that, you know, these things that we call companies are actually little monarchies.

Okay. And then you're looking around yourself and you see, for example, a laptop. And that laptop was made by Apple, which is a monarchy. I first heard Curtis Jarvin on a New York Times podcast in the winter of 2025. This was, in a way, his coming out in the mainstream media. I'm sorry, I'm here in this building, and I keep forgetting to make my best argument for monarchy, which is that people trust the New York Times more than a conversation with David Marquesie. How is the New York Times managed? It is a fifth generation, hereditary absolute monarchy.

Before his New York Times appearance, and since, he's been a frequent guest on all kinds of conservative and libertarian podcasts. Podcasts like Red Scare. This is my personal problem, but I've just always been freaked out by like these kind of like liberal cultural elites. I just think they're all around. All of them are dishonest and phonies. And until, like, the burden of proof is on the one. Red Scare is hosted by Dasha Nekrazova and Anna Kachian. They live in Manhattan.

Trudeau is such a spiritual female. No, yeah, yeah. Can you imagine having that guy as your dictator? That sucks. They used to be Bernie Sanders supporters. Now they're part of the new right, the fashionable right, in what's called Dimes Square in New York, a neighborhood of hipster art.

artists who write poetry and support Donald Trump. Their style is deep irony and heavy vocal fry. But then they also said, according to Reuters in CBC, Canada's federal government and the provinces of Sass-Kauchion, Quebec have all relaxed COVID restrictions. These kind of podcasts can go on for three hours. Curtis Jarvin, the architect of the Dark Enlightenment, loves them. He likes to talk. Did you see that interview with the BBC by the Lukashenko? Lukashenko's a strong. He's been in power since 94.

He has complete control. He has total control over the media as well as all of the bodies of government as well. Right. He shows really no. Dasha, how do you feel about the Grand Duchy of Lithuan? I'd like to see it restored. He likes to talk about British and Chinese history, the history of mercantilism, the writings of Thomas Carlyle, almost anything other than answer the questions he's actually asked. Can you answer that question?

Number one, I think that having an effective government and an efficient government is better for people's lives. And this was very much the vision of the early progressives, by the way. The early progressives, even like the pre-World War I progressives, you know, you go back to, you know, a book like, you know, Drift and Mastery, you know, are very... I have to say, I find the depth of background information to be obfuscating rather than illuminating. How can I change that? How can I make that? By answering the questions more directly and succinctly, I think it would be the simple reply. I know. Curtis Arvin is 51.

He went to an Ivy League University, Brown. He studied computer science at University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to join a tech company. He's not an academic philosopher. He's a coder. He has a substack called Gray Matter and writes under the pen name Menchus Moldbug. Even though monarchy is the most common political form in history, it is invisible from within our present historical bubble. It does not fit in our Overton window. Menchus, for the record, was a Chinese Confucian philosopher of 300 BC who wrote that people should have the power to overthrow a ruler who doesn't rule fairly.

But now I'm sounding like Curtis Jarvan. So, is the problem with the thing or with the window? Curtis Jarvin has been writing about the dark enlightenment for years. If you want to call it a philosophy, it's one that's been shared with people like Nick Land from the UK, who popularized the idea of accelerationism, an ideology that calls for capitalism and technology to bring on radical social change and to do it very quickly. Curtis and Nick are a tag team. Curtis Yarvin is the frontman working the podcast and debate circuit.

And Nick Land is the mystic, the hermit. I'm going to assume people here are thick-skinned enough to take it. You all have a t-shirt, right? He wrote an influential paper. The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land. And of course it's online where you can find this version. Narrated by an artificial intelligence based on the voice of Orson Wells. I have this recurring nightmare that someday all books will be narrated by an AI

Orson Wells. For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed. It is doom itself. Bleying it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobesian, a coherent, dark and light. devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. The Dark Enlightenment would signal a new society led by a strong man, a CEO, a king, or what its proponents call a GovCorps. GovCore would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit. Although the full neocameralist approach, has never been tried, its closest historical equivalents to this approach

are the 18th century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by Frederick the Great, and the 21st century non-democratic tradition as seen in lost fragments of the British Empire, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai. This new society, or at least one part of it, would be run by Chuck E. Cheese, as Ron Swanson once dreamed, just one of many hundreds or thousands of other Gov Corps.

where the only human right, for you and me, is to exit. No voice. Free exit. No voice. No voice. The right to leave and go somewhere else if we don't like it. The participants within those Gov Corps in what we used to call states would have no democratic voice, but there would be architectures which would allow them to exit, and it would be that system of exit, essentially a system where people vote with their feet,

which would lead to these kind of competitions between different governance structures. The Democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, francing cannibalism until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten. I also have concerns about democracy. If everyone just gets to vote on everything, that's just rampant majoritarianism. Peter Thiel, the multi-billionaire venture capitalists who founded the software firm Palantir,

which runs surveillance for the U.S. government and military, was an early investor in Curtis Yarvon's software startup called Erbitt. And there obviously are all sorts of ways that minority rights get oppressed or, you know, the libertarian version is that wealthy people probably just have their property voted away from them. So, you know, I respect property rights. The other lens on this that I think about a lot is Curtis Yarbon. It was also a good friend of mine.

Mark Andreessen was the co-founder of Netscape and is widely seen as one of the major tech bros. And the way he describes the American system that's running the people, the way he describes it is we are living under FDR's personal monarchy. He used to vote Democrat, but since 24, he's been an advisor to Donald Trump. FDR dramatically, you know, orders of magnitude increase the size of scope of the federal government. Well, it's a lot of the figures who are core supporters of neoreactionary ideas come out of Silicon Valley or adjacent spaces that are technology focused. These are not necessarily to keep it in focus. Some of the folks on that shortlist, you know, they are computer engineers, but many of them are basically venture capitalists,

financial capitalists who early on invested in the beginnings of the internet. I think the dark enlightenment is one strand, and I would say an extreme strand of this broader anti-authoritarian, let's call it, techno-libertarian, anti-bureaucratic impulse in the valley, that really doesn't conform to a particular place on the political spectrum right or left, although the dark enlightenment is now certainly associated with the political right. But I think the thing that all of this is sort of Silicon Valley ethos has in common, I would, you know, whether you're a supporter of a Democrat like Barack Obama or a Republican like Donald Trump, It is this belief in technology as a good, and that technology can fix all sorts of problems.

There's an essential techno-optimism that drives all of this, even the dark enlightenment. Finally, there's what Curtis Yarven calls the cathedral. Progressives are being articulated as being the group who, in Gertes Yav in Nick Lamb's language, are really the blue pillars. The people who produce radio shows, university courses, which is simply designed to prevent acceleration's tendencies from taking control. In short, that's all the universities and institutions that don't care much at all for the Dark Enlightenment, including me, including the CBC.

And me, Nala Ayed, and ideas. And in fact, this episode about the Dark Enlightenment, by Winnipeg contributor Tom Jokinen. This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCTScan. Book at Spexavers.cavers.cairists. Prices are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.com. Ladies and gentlemen, one of the great Canadians. Just to be here. Oh, here you are. here and we're here.

No matter what race you were, what color you were, what religion you were, what language you spoke, you watched Mr. Dressup. The tickle trunk was this magical like Pandora's box. I'm talking about Captain Dressup. Mr. Dressup, the magic of make-believe. You've made me what I am today. You know that. Watch free on CBC Gem.

At a glance, the term dark enlightenment looks like a contradiction in terms. But it's really an oxymoron meant to signal hostility towards conventional enlightenment values like liberty, equality, and fairness. So why now what's happened? I think the best way that I think about understanding what's happened is the analogy with the Italian art movement, the Italian futurists.

The movement futurist Italian attira the tension of the world. My name is Benjamin Noyes. I teach at the University of Chichester in the UK, and I write on culture and philosophy. The Italian futurists were an early 20th century cultural movement that celebrated technology and speed. They celebrated war, which they called the world's only hygiene. Celebrated violence, celebrated the masculine body, kind of phallic, hard body.

This is from the 1909 Futurist Manifesto. Let's break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride ripen fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind. Let's give ourselves utterly to the unknown, Not in desperation, but only to replenish the deep wells of the absurd. The man at the head of the Italian futurist movement was Felipe Marinetti. He believed in building the superior man through eugenics and technology. He believed in noise and machinery and was obsessed with cards.

We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed. a racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes like serpents of explosive breath. This is Elon Musk in Austin, Texas, November 2023. We have a car here that experts said was impossible, that experts said would never be made. I think it's our best product. I think it's the most unique thing on the road. With or without serpents of explosive breath, this is the launch of the Tesla cyber truck. And finally, the future will look like the future. Speaking of the future, Elon Musk has engineered his own family,

14 children, 10 of whom were born boys, some conceived through IVF. The dark and light. Enlightenment imagines an elite of self-replicants, just like the futurists of 1909. We stand at the promontory of the centuries. Why should we look back when what we want to do is break down the mysterious doors of the impossible? The future will look like the future. It is all around us. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

People like Curtis Jarvin started using the term of the red pill borrowed from the Matrix, meaning that we have been seduced and in some ways tranquilized into a way of thinking about our relation to one another and especially a relationship to our governments that now required undoing. and his work was going to serve the function that the red pill does in the Matrix. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Making us realize that everything we thought was right was actually wrong, and all these things long considered taboo, like a return of the principle of monarchy, a return of race science, a turn of gender hierarchy,

and the rule of the many by the few, were actually now, the things of a new form of enlightenment, which we all needed to expose ourselves to. Certain races are better at certain things than others. Do you not necessarily believe, then, that certain races would be better at governing a country than others? Oh. This is Curtis Yarven on CNN. Again, you know, governing a country is just a skill. And, you know, it's like the British in India would basically say, oh, this race is a governing race.

This race is not a governing race based on culture, based on tradition. So you're saying, yes, certain races would be better at running governments and others. Would be better at doing anything, but those are only averages. So less the philosopher and more a shit poster then? No, I wouldn't go that far. I mean, I think lots of philosophers also don't see direct application of their ideas. I think he actually has reflected, especially, you know, 10 years ago. Now I think he's, as would be inevitable to happen, all the visibility and celebrity is

going to his head a bit, and now I think it is fun to engage in these cycles of provocation. But if you look at the work he was doing in the late 2000s, he's writing hundreds and hundreds of page, kind of, you know, often very disturbing, but not incoherent and not totally governed by the logic of trolling, ideas of how you could introduce what he called kind of neocameralism. So bringing back the model of absolutism, but now with the affordances of the internet. with the understanding of the conduct of a tech CEO or a venture capitalist. So the thing is when you basically want to be anti, you know, say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government.

And then you'll be like, yes, of course. Like actually, you know, policy and, you know, and law should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors and so forth, then you'll realize that what you're actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy. Even if you take someone like Machiavelli or Hobbes, you know, we don't really study them necessarily because of the role that they played in writing constitutions or writing out like the handbook that was deployed in real time, but because they capture a certain moment. One model for running a new society

is something that comes straight out of Silicon Valley, the startup. There are now startup cities, sometimes called charter cities, like Prospera in the Honduras. Prospera is building the fastest growing private city project in the world, elevating human potential through a radically decentralized private governance framework. The more you study charter cities, the more you hear things like radical human potential, yoga and wellness, and the evils of seed oils. And of course, Bitcoin or FinTech. Prospera is home to some of the world's most innovative new companies.

Pioneering innovations in fintech, gene therapy, robotic construction, and more. If this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Dozens of these kinds of private cities have been in development over the years, often in poor countries like Zambia and Papua New Guinea. These kinds of cities, private companies declaring ownership of land in Africa or the Pacific, is usually called colonialism. These private city enthusiasts now have a friend in the White House.

We should hold a contest to charter up to 10 new cities and award them to the best proposals for development. In other words, we'll actually build new cities in our country again. The Charter City, one of the Dark Enlightenment's pet projects, is anything but a pipe dream. Alphabet, an umbrella company that includes Google and sidewalk labs, is now creating the world's first smart city in Toronto, Canada. It seeks to provide technological solutions to improve citizens' lives. There will be two key areas. Toronto's portlands are in the east end on the waterfront.

In 2017, Google pitched a so-called smart city plan for the portlands that would be developed privately, and of course wired to the hilt with Google technology. Quayside, which is along the shorelines of Lake Ontario and features houses. It didn't go well. After two and a half years of controversy, plans to build a high-tech neighborhood along Toronto's waterfront have now been canceled. It's unfortunate the company sidewalk had to pull out. Citing COVID-19 and uncertain economic times.

But there's endless opportunities for other people that come in there and do something again, spectacular for the waterfront of Toronto. The sticking point for local people was surveillance. The company couldn't guarantee the privacy of people using the neighborhood. Little wonder, Sidewalk Labs was going to be full of surveillance tech to generate data for commercial use or otherwise. And there's got to be a problem when podcaster Joe Rogan thinks your startup city proposal goes too far. You know what's going on in Toronto? No.

With Alphabet, the parent company of Google? No. It's a very disturbing thing to a lot of people where they're essentially setting up blocks and they're putting cameras. and they're putting cameras in these places and they're gathering data and information and they're trying to engineer a utopian city. So the plug got pulled on sidewalk labs, but there are others.

Texas is adding a new city, and this one is out of this world, kind of. Starbase, the headquarters for Elon Musk, SpaceX, is now officially being recognized as a city in Cameron County. There's a giant bust of Elon Musk in the city of Starbase. It looks like Chairman Mao. Company executives say city status will help SpaceX keep pace with its rapidly growing workforce.

Another one is called Woveon City designed by Toyota and is located at the base of Mount Fuji. Toyota has been busy buying sponsored programming to promote it on US TV news shows. Well, imagine living in a brand new city that is a test course. Imagine living in a brand new city that's a test course for mobility inventors who share a brand new city that is a test course for mobility innovators who share a commitment to working for someone other than themselves. Well, we ask Brittany Weiner. You know, it's interesting because in some ways, this is where, you know, close to half a century of neoliberalism and Silicon Valley thinking collide a bit. In a way, these cities are another, perhaps more extreme iteration of

special economic zones that were pioneered by Xinjiang and China in 1979. And that have been, you know, an idea, sort of enterprise zones, empowerment zones, special zones where the normal rules don't apply. But also a kind of sense of fantasy. I mean, I'm really interested in the myth of the American West and the myth of conquering frontier as if nobody had been there before. And, you know, it was in the late 19th century where historians announced that the frontier was over.

And so America found other frontiers, economic, global, you know, escapades beyond their borders into space even and so on. Is this a kind of new American frontier of starting these dream projects from scratch in existing places and starting new societies kind of the same? Like only in America can these things happen because that is the dream. You've talked to so many people in Silicon Valley. Can you see their eyes light up on that kind of concept? Yeah, I think a lot of people are very excited.

about their idea. And not incidentally, these are also people who spent their formative years, childhood and adolescence and adulthood immersed in science fiction. High on a mountain top, an army of scientists worked desperately to build this giant rocket, this modern Noah's Ark to carry a few picked survivors of our doomed civilization to a new life on another world, reaching the heights of self-sacrifice, the depths of the animal lust. Science fiction is a huge, huge influence on so much of this stuff, which is fiction and also incorporates this mythos of the American West, of a tabula rasa, of new frontiers going where no man has gone before. Yes, you'll be out of this world through every stirring moment of conquest of space. You'll live the strange, topsy-turvy life of men who live as no other men have lived before.

Students of Dark Enlightenment cite the 1992 novel Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson as an influence on the movement's ideology. Follow the low glow outward to where the growth is unfolded into the valleys and the canyons, and you find the land of the refugees. Snow Crash is a kind of cargo-cult mythological ur-text that prefigured the meholt. metaverse, and charter cities, and the explosion of private security firms superseding public police forces. They have fled from the true America, the America of atomic bombs, scalpings, hip-hop, chaos theory, cement overshoes, snake handlers, spree killers, spacewalks, buffalo jumps, drive-bys, cruise missiles, Sherman's March, gridlock,

motorcycle gangs, and bungee jumping. The novel is set in the California of the future, where private cities are called franchises, and burb claves. They have parallel parked their bimbo boxes and identical computer-designed burbclaves street patterns, and secreted themselves in symmetrical sheetrock shitholes with vinyl floors and ill-fitting woodwork and no sidewalks, vast house farms out in the low-glow wilderness, a culture medium for a medium culture.

The accelerationists use the term hyperstition, something imagined in fiction or art or in software that comes true later through some cosmic magic or innovation, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Snow Crash is a superstition of the Dark Enlightenment. The democratic state in the novel is just one rather failing actor amongst a number of competing providers of services. The model in Snow Crash begins with this kind of competition between a whole series of gated communities,

over which people are free to exit, but they have no say within those communities. And the whole of North Cal and South Cal has become a competition between these little kind of micro-states, these kind of patchworks of competing berbs, which are technologically advanced, but democratically defunct. Another superstition is the video game, Bioshock. Bioshock, which came out in 2007, it's a very... very, very popular video game. It essentially shows a huge underwater city that was built by Anne Rand enthusiasts. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? That's right. I'm opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, let's say fair, free, unregulated economy.

My soul is rapture. My name is Holly Baxter. I'm a senior reporter with the independent in New York City. It was intended as a sort of libertarian utopia, but the point at which you become a character in Bioshock is after all of this has fallen apart, and the utopia has very much turned into a dystopia. The libertarian paradise promised didn't come to be. Everything was very chaotic.

It created different, classes of people who all essentially went to war with each other, and then you are trying to navigate this dystopian hell that happened after it. It came out just before, a year before the Seasteading Institute became a thing. The Seasteading Institute, formed in 2008, proposed a network of charter cities or startup societies on the ocean. They pictured Lego-style block buildings floating on water like a giant cruise ship or an oil rig. It's a play on the word homesteading. Peter Thiel put half a million dollars into it.

Patry Friedman, whose free market economist Milton Friedman's grandson, was an early promoter of seesteading. So this is how we come to seesteading, to homesteading the high seas, because we need a place for these political experiments. And the best place is the frontier. Here's Patry Friedman speaking at Moses Snymer's Idea City in 2018. The frontier, because it's empty, because people choose to go there and it doesn't have existing systems, people used to doing things a certain way, is the best place for startup countries. And the next frontier for humanity is the ocean.

But the seesteading idea petered out. Too many complicated logistics. And Patrie Friedman has since moved on, or should I say back, into the world of the Italian futurist where man and machine come together. I have an implant that will let me open my Tesla with my hand, and also you'll be able to bump your phone and get my contact card. What happens when you get a new Tesla? So the way it works is that you read, this is a passive device with an ID,

and you add that ID to the access control list for the car. So that's not an issue. So for now, C-steading on a grand scale is on hold. But there are side projects, including something called ephemeral, an annual week-long gathering in the Sacramento Delta on the West Coast. And that is essentially a tiny little, quote-unquote, sea stead, because really it's just a bunch of houseboats that come together off the coast in California every year.

And it's more of a festival, essentially. It's kind of like a burning man. What's up, y'all? I'm Owen, aka Whitworth. I'm Clint, aka Clint. and I'm on a journey across America with an upright piano on the back of a school bus and living out of the school bus and writing music.

It advertises itself as having no governance in terms of safety officers or anything like that. You just come along with your houseboat, you lash it to the rest of the other things, and you hang out. For the record, this is another hyperstition from the novel Snow Crash. Down below, we see the first beginnings of the raft

a relatively small collection of a few hundred boats. The raft is a media event, but in a much more profound general sense than you can possibly imagine. It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it was here. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow movies and news reports. Where are you right now? Where are we right now? We are at ephemeral.

Yes. Is that how to say it? Ephemiral. Ephemiral. Femirile. Oh, my God. It's good. 2025.

Incredible vibes. Our friend Kieran is somewhere here with a kayak. Oh, there's our first. Look, Silicon Valley has always been extremely good at storytelling. Whether Steve Jobs talking about a personal computer that's a bicycle for the mind at the turn of the 1980s, or it's all of the various hype cycles that have accompanied the commercial internet and now AI, the storytelling is good and it's powerful and they're effective. it. That doesn't mean that this is a story that necessarily can or should come true. Google it. A guy named Curtis Yavin around 2010 created a political movement called Dark Enlightenment, which basically states equality and progress are the ills of society.

We need to eradicate democracy. Constitution and the rule of law. Where I get caught up is if tech runs the show with platforms and AI, it's a question of running the show for whom. What happens to the rest of us who aren't plugged in to the Silicon Valley world? Yeah, what happens to the rest of us? I don't think they're thinking a lot about the rest of us. But the problem is, it's entirely constructed for and by rich white male supremacists who also seem pretty sociopathic. It's as if it's a secret between them and current corridors of power. So, you know, a social contract has, there's a sense that there is some involvement of, in a democracy, that there's some involvement of everybody in discussing, debating these ideas.

The sense you get from Silicon Valley is, we're doing this for your own good or our own good, and you don't need to know about it. Well, yeah. I mean, I don't, the difference between this and, what is being proposed from Silicon Valley and what we would think of as politics since, you know, the French Revolution or the American Revolution is it's actually not mass politics. Right. I mean, this is not actually a proposal for the entire residential community of the United States that,

you know, like, hey, come join us all in this new digitally mediated utopia somewhere in the world. Not at all. No, no, no. It's a minoritarian. I mean, the very point is, you take out the select few and leave behind the dead wood, right? It's deliberately a reneging on the social contract as understood in something like we the people as a group of birthright citizens, legacy citizens who all have some kind of nominal equality. No, no, no. It's exactly about undoing that. Right. And as a member of what they would call the cathedral, the woke media, That's me. I would guess I'd be considered the dead wood. So what happens to the dead wood?

The question of what happens to all the people who are the dead wood who get left behind is simply not something that the sovereign individuals have to bother themselves with. I think the assumption is that they will, kind of a social Darwinist, Malthusian struggle will kick in that will unplugged from the survival valves of the welfare state will lead to pretty quickly mass violence and presumably mass death, winnowing out of the surplus population, down to people with the resources and the ability to survive. And then presumably the sovereign individual class, which is understood as this kind of itinerant, privately provisioned class of high IQ millionaires, will somehow be able to make deal with, I guess, like the warlords who

still govern the hinterlands to get access to whatever kind of resources they need, right? I mean, if you have a 0.1% of the world who's like this jet set, the desire of a small number of people to not have to worry about most other people in a permanent kind of arrangement. One prediction of the Dark Enlightenment is that its adherence will return to a monarchical society after the one we have now collapses. In other words, heavy on the dark. Nineteen states have succeeded. The United States Army ramps up activity. Another view is that it's a misdirection. A lot of science fiction rhetoric to warm us up for something else entirely. a technological coup of the existing system

and that Curtis Yarvin, the architect of the Dark Enlightenment, is more about fashion and podcast chatter and East Coast trends than he is about politics in the real world. I don't know if you're familiar with the place they call Dime Square in New York. Oh God, yeah, yeah, yeah. That there's a similar sort of thing going on, but that's kind of presented in the mainstream press anyway as a fashion more than an ideology.

But that's really important. So I think that fashion part is really important. And Curtis Yavin is trying to align him. That's what I was saying earlier about, like, he really wants to be seen as cool. And I think those Red Scare girls who used to be, you know, they were kind of Bernie supporters. And, you know, there's quite a lot of people

who liked Bernie Sanders, who are now on the Aereactionary Right. Red Scare is the popular podcast with Dashanekras. with its hipster right-wing philosophy and deeply ironic vocal fry. I was like 18. I was like rocking with the Frankfurt School. I read like the Dialectic of Enlightenment, seeming like salient. People who want, who don't like mainstream anything. So they're automatically going to be drawn to people on the kind of outside of the normal Democrat area, you know.

I studied philosophy and my focus was 19th century. German, but Nietzsche specifically. But I don't think that had as much of an influence on me politically as it did aesthetically. It's all a bit anarchic and I think the fashion part is it's somehow, the right has somehow managed to be cool. And that's not something that I've personally witnessed before. Nietzsche once said that we should live life as if it were a work of art. That's philosophy as a.

aesthetics. You could say Red Scare and Dimes Square are both aesthetic projects. They're about fashion, feeling, the vibe, more than they are about workable politics. They vote for Trump because it's a stance, a pose. A lot of people are saying, maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. But it does feel very young. And I think another reason for that is a lot of people were students in COVID and they were kind of radicalized by COVID. And I've spoken to a lot of people who are very young and who are the kind of people who you'd normally think

they would just be like communists because, you know, they might be artistic and they're just the kind of stereotypical people who are like, let's have a poster of Che Guevara on my room. And those people are now reading Curtis Yavin. I believe that voting is providing this sort of almost pornographic stimulus. It sort of becomes more like supporting your football team.

The future. It's going to be amazing. Meanwhile, the sounds emanating from Silicon Valley are less about starting new countries and more about working with the one they already have, especially since there's a new sheriff in town. They like Trump, and they really like J.D. Vance. Since Trump won and now 100% since. Trump, too, we're in a different phase, right? The technological republic proposal is no longer about exit or creating new bespoke countries in the South Seas. It's about how you can take over

the U.S. state, become the new provider of all the services that the Raytheons and Lockheed Martins had once done at much lower cost with the new affordances of AI, which make it presumably much quicker and cheaper and more efficient. And you use the kind of nationalism and vision of re-industrializing America conjoined with social conservatism and pro-natalism to bring along enough voters with you that you don't have to, you know, exit the country. You can get what you need while staying here. If that's the case, if that's the goal is taking over the U.S. state, where does democracy fit in? Is that still, would they grudgingly accept that that's how things will continue or, you know, I mean, certainly there's talk of, is there actually going to be an election

in 2028 in the U.S.? Does democracy continue to be in the crosshairs for this vision? Well, if you think about someone like J.D. Vance as being kind of the perfect hybrid creation of social conservatism and tech economic thinking, then you can see how the democracy problem could potentially be solved. And I think that that's what they're hoping for is that a certain kind of populist rhetoric, a certain kind of violent nativist xenophobia, a reassuring of people that their whiteness will become revalued in a way that will redound to the profits of both them and their children, mostly I would say hasten to add, I think, false promises, which are not being at all delivered. You can join that with an agenda that is entirely designed around

fulfilling the demands of Silicon Valley tech. Then democracy isn't really as much of a problem anymore, right? I don't think in the end anarcho-capitalists want to create new nations just for the romance of it, they want to create new nations because they feel like the existing ones will never be bent sufficiently to their will. But if they can find ones that are willing to do that, then why leave? Free to sail the seven seas, free to worship as we plead. If the birds up in the trees can be free, why can't we? I'm singing a song of freedom for all people You've be free to speak and free to hear You've been listening to The Dark Enlightenment by Winnipeg contributor Tom Jokinen.

Lisa Ayusa is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Sam McNulty. The senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.A.