Tech Won't Save Us - The “Dark Elf” Leading Tech’s Extreme Right w/ Julia Black

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Julia Black to discuss who Curtis Yarvin is and how his anti-democratic, far-right writings have influenced the politics of Silicon Valley and the wider American extreme right.Julia Black is a features reporter on The Information’s Weekend Team.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Julia wrote about Curtis Yarvin and his ideas for The Information. She also wrote about the Musk-aligned tech CEOs trying to shape how we think about the future.Paris wrote about Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto.The Dark Enlightenment is an anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian political project.Gil Duran wrote about the Reboot Conference and how it put the connections between the tech industry and the Heritage Foundation on display.The Heritage Foundation is flooding federal agencies with thousands of information requests to identify government employees to be purged under a second Trump administration.Peter Thiel wanted Balaji Srinivasan to become head of the Federal Drug Administration under the Trump presidency.According to Nick Land, hyperstition refers to ideas that bring themselves into being.Support the show

there is kind of this magic process by which like your words eventually do become real. And like, it's why I think so many people are trying to push these limits of free speech because, you know, like if you can imagine it, it can happen. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Julia Black. Julia is a features reporter at the Informations Weekend team, and she's been on the show in the past to talk about pronatalism, and of course she's also on our new series, Data Vampires. Julia does a lot of really fascinating reporting on the increasingly concerning ideologies and worldviews of people in Silicon Valley and how

they are becoming much more prominent. And one of the important figures for the dissemination of these types of ideas is Curtis Yarvin. Now, he hasn't come out of nowhere. He's been around and there have been people in the tech industry who have been interested in his ideas and who have been espousing them for quite some time now. And by that, I mean not years, but decades. But it seems like in the past few years, and in particular, in this electoral cycle in the United States, these ideas that Yarvin has been writing about for many years now are really coming to the fore and really do seem to be reaching this level of dominance in at least a certain section of, you know, the tech billionaires that we often talk

about. And those ideas, of course, are things like an opposition to democracy, eliminating the deep state, you know, something that we hear these right-wingers talking about quite a lot, but also things like getting rid of the free press and replacing it with a state media. Also, you know, the state can supposedly move at the speed of a startup and do what these tech people want it to do. But I wanted to talk to Julia because Curtis Yarvin is a really weird figure, and I wanted to explore that with her to try to understand how this guy who used to just write a weird blog has now become one of these like intellectuals of the tech right to such a degree that as they have risen, his ideas have risen with them and are now shaping aspects of right-wing politics more generally, especially as you see

someone like J.D. Vance being the vice presidential candidate alongside Donald Trump for the Republican ticket. Curtis Yarvin shows how these ideas are not wholly new in the tech industry. You know, someone like Peter Thiel has been listening to Yarvin and restating his ideas for quite a long time, but he also shows how much these ideas have grown and how many more of these billionaires are open to considering these things or even embracing them. And that should have us all kind of concerned as these people are trying to flex their muscle and ensure that their ideas for how the world should work should be pushed on the rest of us. And we should have very little authority to push back on that or to challenge it. So I really enjoyed having Julia on the show to dig into all of this. I think that you're going to enjoy this conversation. It's concerning, but you know, I'm sure we'll give you quite a lot to think about as well. And even more reason to want to oppose what these tech billionaires are doing. So if you do like it, make sure to leave a five star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends

or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week, so we can keep having these in-depth conversations, so we can keep making series like Data Vampires, which is being published right now, you can join supporters like Susan in North Vancouver, or Jared from Memphis, Tennessee, by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Julia, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. You know, I love being here.

Absolutely. It's always great to chat with you. You know, you are doing such fascinating reporting on these angles of the tech industry that I always find really interesting. So it's always great to have you back on the show to discuss all of it. This time, we're talking about something that's probably a little bit out there, someone who people might not have heard about. Of all the people you could potentially profile and all the stories you could potentially dig into, why did you choose to look into Curtis Yarvin of all people? It's a good question. He had been on my radar for a couple of years and was the kind of person who felt like he was existing on the periphery of a lot of my stories, but I was never quite convinced that he was important enough to get his own story. This year, that started to change quite notably with the political ascent of J.D. Vance,

who is someone who is connected to Curtis Yarvin and his philosophies. But also, I think I just started to see more and more of the ideologies that this man kind of came up with appearing in different places online and in the Silicon Valley sphere. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And, you know, as we talk about some of those ideas, I think listeners will, you know, start to hear some resonances there with the types of things that we've been hearing more commonly from these powerful and influential figures in the tech industry. But for someone who has never heard of Curtis Yarvin before, as I imagine a lot of listeners who are even critical of the tech industry probably haven't, how would you describe him and his political views? Yeah. So he is not single-handedly, but very largely responsible for a movement that is called

sometimes the dark enlightenment and sometimes neo-reactionary thinking. And basically what it boils down to is fundamental, like anti-democracy thinking, anti-egalitarian thinking, and just this idea that like society is meant to be run by elites. Some people are better than others and we should embrace that. Yeah. You can very clearly see why certain people would find that an appealing worldview, unfortunately. So where does this guy come from? Right. Because, you know, obviously we're talking about him now and you're talking about how it feels like his ideas have become even more relevant or, you know, are becoming more commonly heard. But where does this guy get his start and where does his influence really start to grow

when we look back? Yeah. So in a lot of ways, he kind of came out of nowhere. He was a pretty obscure computer programmer living in Berkeley in the nineties. He dropped out of a PhD program, but was working at a couple of dot-com companies, had some success. At some point, came out of one of these jobs with sort of enough capital to self-fund like an intellectual sabbatical for himself. So he basically goes home, starts reading all of these kind of fascist philosophers and interprets their thinking into his own kind of idea he calls formalism. And this is where the roots of this anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, dark enlightenment stuff comes from. And then he kind of started to come out of his sabbatical, his like reading and

blogging period, but with some fame because certain people in the tech world had kind of come to be aware of his blog, which was called Unqualified Reservations. Just on these like Silicon Valley message boards, he kind of had this niche fame amongst a certain group of people who, you know, there's a lot of overlap with people who are becoming now big names in the tech world. But yeah, this was kind of like early days for all of them. So they were just becoming kind of fans of his writing. That said, he was relatively obscure. So around the same time, he also founded a company along with a Thiel fellow. So someone who did Peter Thiel's fellowship for kids who decide not to go to college and instead to pursue some kind of work in tech, founding their own

companies. So with this Thiel fellow, he founded a company called Urbit, which is really hard to describe. Honestly, even after writing an entire feature about this guy, it's just very hard to kind of put into words. But I guess what I would call it is like, did you watch the show Silicon Valley on HBO? Yeah, certainly. In a weird way, it has a lot in common with the company that Richard on that show was spent the entire series founding and this idea of like a new internet that would replace the internet. And what's kind of odd is that on Silicon Valley, it's portrayed as this like super idealistic thing, like an escape from corporations. And Urbit does in many ways present itself as that, but there's also this like darker side of

it, which is kind of like an internet operated on feudal principles. So in the way that like a feudal society would have landowners and serfs, like the same organizational structures on the internet. So there's a whole like dictionary of urban terminology talks about like stars and galaxies. And so the people who own the galaxies are kind of all powerful in this internet. So one crucial thing that happened at this point is that Mark Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz invested in this seed round for this company. So the Peter Thiel connection and the Mark Andreessen connection that happened pretty early on would prove to be really key for, you know, what's happening now in terms of his

ideas, mainstreaming. Yeah. And just to situate this for listeners, I believe the blog is started around 2007, if I remember correctly. And then the company is like, I believe in the early 2010s is around when that's sort of happening. So just, you know, to, to kind of orient that, I feel like taking an intellectual sabbatical sounds like a really interesting thing and something that anyone would kind of enjoy, at least that, you know, the type of people that we are. I don't think reading a bunch of fascist books would be my first choice, though. No, but it is something that's interesting about him because he is this like nerd philosopher king who in so many ways, like is of this world of like academia and, you know, like the intellectual

class that he also hates so much. So I do think that that's something kind of fascinating about him as a character. Is it like a bit of self-hatred or would he not see himself as like part of that milieu really? You know, it's interesting. Another element I would add is that his father was very much like a member of this deep state that he often rails against. His father served in the foreign services and like his childhood was kind of spent hopping around to his dad's various placements around the world. So yeah, like if you want to get into some Freudian analysis, it's definitely, there's definitely something there. Yeah, that's really interesting. You were talking about the link to Peter Thiel, right? Obviously with Andreessen,

it comes with the funding of this company. He's probably already kind of familiar to a certain degree with some of the writings that Yarvin was doing. But in your piece, you talk about how we don't know exactly when this connection between Yarvin and Peter Thiel starts, but it seems like it's very early in Peter Thiel's kind of growing influence in the Valley, but also early in Yarvin's writing. You know, his blog is around 2007. And I believe in the story, you talk about around 2009, when we really start to initially see Thiel kind of referencing things that Yarvin has been writing and Yarvin, I believe, even linking back to some of, you know, the things that Thiel has been kind

of talking about that are related to what Yarvin has been writing. How does that start to influence the type of things that Peter Thiel is talking about in that moment and this kind of right wing politics that begins to emerge in the tech industry at that time? You know, obviously, we see a lot more of it today, but even then, Peter Thiel always seemed to be a leading figure of this right wing movement in the Valley. Yeah, I mean, the overlap between their ideas, as you say, since this kind of vague amorphous time in the 2000s. It's very obvious that there's a link there. I've even talked to people who know them both pretty well, who like, don't quite know exactly how they met, but yeah, you, you definitely started to see Peter Thiel questioning whether democracy was a form of government that we should embrace comments about like questioning whether women should have gotten suffrage. Like there are

certain things that it's one has to believe were influenced by his new friend whose writings he'd been reading, who, who said these things almost like word for word. I think the other notable thing that overlapped around this period is Teal's interest in what he called seasteading. He launched the Seasteading Institute, which was based on this idea of forming floating cities and international waters or where no nation state would have governance over these free economic zones. And now you're seeing that play out in what many are calling network state ideas and this concept of exit of just like wanting to escape the nation state as the predominant form of governance and to move towards something that looks more like a corporation, which is again, like a Yarvin

original. Yarvin has talked about how our society should be run like CEO-like figures. He is a self-proclaimed monarchist. So he has at times called it monarchism, like having a king. But I think his ideal society has more in common with a corporation than like a traditional monarchy, which of course for Peter Thiel was like extremely appealing. And once you start like writing about this world and, you know, I know you're deep in this stuff too, you understand these like networks of influence and Peter Thiel's network is so broad and the influence goes so far and he has so many like mentees and people under his wing and he's a benefactor to so many people. So yeah, one other really notable example is Blake Masters, who of course has run for office a couple of times with Peter Thiel's funding and not

succeeded. But Blake Masters was in one of Peter Thiel's Stanford classes where Peter Thiel was a guest lecturer. And it's funny because he published these notes online from this course, which like were just copy pasted Curtis Yeravan ideas about like the CEO King. And yeah, after that, they wrote a book together, Zero to One, which is one of Peter Thiel's most famous works. And again, it just reflected a lot of these same ideas. So it's all connected. Yeah, you're like making the big math and connecting the strings like that meme from I forget the television. Yeah. But you know, what you're talking about there, there are a few things that I want to pick

up on. And I want to come back to the point about the larger networks in just a minute. But when we're thinking about these ideas, you know, you're talking about how he's interested in a monarchy, but that monarchy is more of like the CEO of a company than like the pageantry of, you know, the British monarchy or something like that, that we see that is like, you know, passed down through generations and whatnot. When we think about the types of things that he is writing, because you talked about how Peter Thiel was really involved in the C-setting, and we see that kind of evolving today with the network state. It does feel like within the tech industry, there has been this evolution from more of like a libertarianism to a more forceful authoritarianism, where there's this desire to like seize the power of the state itself, you know, whether that's through a Trump presidency or something in the United States, but also creating their own sovereign territories. Did you see that kind of evolution in Yarvin's work as well? Or is this just related more to the tech industry's

ability to see itself commanding the levers of power in a way that it maybe couldn't over a decade ago? I would say the authoritarian streak has always been strong with Curtis. And quite frankly, it's one reason that I really wanted to write this piece for our audience at The Information. We have a very Silicon Valley heavy audience, obviously, a lot of people who work in tech, and frankly, a lot of people who would identify as libertarians. I especially wanted to link to this one post that Curtis wrote very recently, which is effectively a step-by-step plan to turn the next president into a dictator. And some of the things in this post are just so brazen, are like truly shocking. And I almost

expected him to deny everything when I went to him for comment. And again, it was like shocking that he actually embraced it and even went a little further in some cases. So I really did want to put that in front of our audience and say like, I know that the Peter Thiel's of the world, like represent themselves as the ultimate libertarians, you know, freedom above all, but like, look at these ideas. I mean, the stuff described in this seizing assets from the wealthy intellectual class, which, you know, he makes a lot of generalizations about who he believes they are and what he believes they think, but yeah, like literally seizing their assets, doing a loyalty

test for the police, um, purging anyone who's deemed not sufficiently loyal to the regime. And then having the remainders put red armbands on that. Like, come on, I know he's doing that to push my buttons, but like, congratulations, you used Nazi imagery and you pushed my buttons. Just, he goes item by item, dismantling the free press effectively. And it's like, is that freedom? I just, I cannot really wrap my head around how anyone would look at these principles, would look at these proposals, which by the way, many of which are reflected quite literally in Project 2025 and call it freedom. It's just, to me, it's a gross distortion of the ideas that people are actually proposing.

Yeah, we'll get to that point around Project 2025. But, you know, it really brings to mind this question of like freedom for whom? They talk about freedom, but who are the types of people that you're actually trying to promote freedom for? Is it like freedom for everybody to, you know, live their lives or whatnot? Or is it freedom for, you know, the types of people you're associated with, you know, the tech billionaires, the powerful people in society to be able to do what they want? And it feels much more like the latter than the former, right? Definitely in almost every case, except that's what was kind of crazy about this piece in particular. He's talking about seizing assets from billionaires. Like it's like that old saying, like they came for this group, they came for that group. And then eventually they came for me,

but there was no one. It's like, I don't know. Once you institute these principles, no one's safe. You know, and that's something I would be kind of more supportive of, right? Through the state, you know, through taxation, through legal means, but still, you know, to provide services for people and whatnot. But like, as you're saying, some of these ideas are really out there. Like, you know, we hear some of the things that these people on the extreme right are talking about these days. But even then, when you look into some of the things that Curtis Yarvin has been talking about, they seem incredibly extreme. And even beyond that, right, even beyond the things that we typically tend to hear of from these people, the explicit rejection of democracy in no uncertain terms, the desire to really gut the US government to ensure that the executive,

the president, the CEO, whatever you want to call it, has this kind of absolute power to do what they want. The replacement of the media with a state press that will just repeat whatever the narrative should be, which is something that generally our liberal values are very much against in our Western societies. As you say, law enforcement wearing the red armbands, which sounds a lot like what Balaji Srinivasan has been writing about recently in some of his work. And ultimately, all of this being allowing the state to move at the speed of a startup. It's like, this is kind of the broader vision that they are laying out. And it's like, who is actually buying into this? Because I feel like if you put it in front of like, the average American, the average American voter, that's probably not a project or a proposal they would get behind.

But remember, democracy is eliminated. So it doesn't matter what they want. Yeah, that's an unfortunate point. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it was an interesting summer for all of us, I think, to watch unfold. But Yeah, that's an unfortunate point. Yeah. I think you were finding that like to your average voter, it was very unappealing. I always say like one thing I do take comfort in, in terms of how our democracy is currently functioning, which often I have my concerns, is like Peter Thiel has really, really made efforts to infiltrate our government and he has failed. And like, I'm not saying that will be the case forever. Like we'll see what happens in a couple of months. But it's been kind of heartening to see candidates who are just so sort of artificially implanted by this billionaire class.

They still have to come up against that test of democracy. And like in the case, you know, J.D. Vance hasn't had like the most successful political career or, by the way, as a venture capitalist. And same with Blake Masters. And, you know, you started to see it this summer when Tim Walz had his TV appearance that kind of put the name on it that a lot of people were thinking, like, this is just weird. Like, this is not appealing to your mainstream voter. So to that extent, our democracy appears to still be functioning. Yeah, you know, hopefully it remains that way. And these people can get pushed out and, you know, some better things can happen there. There was an interesting question in the piece that you asked that was kind of like, okay, Curtis Yarvin is saying all these things that sound incredibly extreme, incredibly out there, things that most people would never, you know, support. Does he really mean these things? What was your kind of takeaway on that point?

You know, he's making all of these very out there, very aggressive statements that are meant to try to get you to react, as you were saying, when he's mentioning the red armbands, that's like immediately kind of getting you going and getting you thinking about the Nazis. To what degree do you think he actually believes in this,

actually wants to realize this project? I mean, the short answer to that is I think he really believes it. I think that based on my email interactions with him, you know, as I was writing this piece, he didn't want to get on a call, but we did email back and forth a few times and he stuck to his guns. He corrected me on a couple of points. He said, you know, this is your misinterpreting. And, you know, I reflected anything I had misinterpreted according to him in the piece. But for the most part, he stood by it. And, you know, in terms of this like button pushing approach, I think that it's something that has become super widespread and has been really effective. I mean, I talk a lot about the Overton window, which is, you know, this idea that if you just keep saying something and you keep familiarizing people with it, they'll eventually become more open to it. And then, you know, when you actually make your proposal, people will be kind of conditioned to not be afraid of those ideas. And I think that a lot of people and a lot of people in Peter Thiel's network, especially, have been putting in like very conscious efforts to broaden the Overton window,

especially as it relates to anti-egalitarianism. I think you see this on X.com all the time. People are saying outrageous things and kind of like testing to see what they can get away with. You know, it's this whole free speech argument, free speech absolutism. And you see it on like podcasts, like Red Scare, with, you know, people just saying outrageous things that they know are going to piss off, like, quote unquote, woke liberals. And yeah, they kind of play this coy game where they're like, did I offend you? Like, you know, cry about it. And frankly, I find it all incredibly immature, but I do think that it has been quite effective

at broadening the conversation in terms of like what people are open to even hearing about, you know, like we used to have our forbidden words and, and now they've been removed from that list because, Oh, I just said it as a joke. But like, then all of a sudden the next day, you're not saying it as a joke. So like, it just, to me, it feels like this edging towards what can you get away with in terms of actions rather than just words. I think you're completely right in what you're saying. On the one hand, you see how some of these really out there ideas are becoming more and more kind of common in the general discourse, especially as they're being pushed by, say, the Trump presidency or J.D. Vance, or Peter Thiel has been saying these things for years, but now more and more tech

people are starting to say them as well. But even beyond that, right, just seeing, say, the right wing move of immigration politics, not just in the United States, but many other kind of Western countries and how there has been this like consistent push to move things in a more extreme direction. And that is now kind of taking root in a lot of Western politics, right? So it's not just this kind of tech thing. It's not just coming from the tech industry, but there's this broader movement, you know, which we'll talk about the connection to this with right wing politics more generally. There is one point I want to get to, though, before we move to this kind of broadening out beyond Curtis Yarvin and these networks and stuff. In the piece, you talk about how Curtis

Yarvin sees himself and his friends as dark elves on a heroic journey to rescue the know-nothing hobbits who make up the American populace. Obviously, we hear these references to Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth quite often in Silicon Valley. You know, we know that Peter Thiel is very much into this stuff. What is up with this? You know, first of all, do you take any specific meaning from what he's talking about? But like, why are they so obsessed with the Lord of the Rings? Do you have any answer? You know, it's so funny. I feel like on this podcast before we've talked about how like, I'm a sci-fi fan. I enjoy fantasy.

I enjoy this speculative fiction stuff. It's always so baffling to me that like we can be reading the same books and having such different takeaways. Like I really struggle to wrap my head around how a Curtis Yarvin figure could read the Lord of the Rings and not realize that like, he's probably more Saruman than Sauron. But like, I even rewatched The Two Towers recently. And you know, Saruman is talking about the fires of industry and like, killing the tree. I'm like, how on earth can you think that you are the people in the Shire? Like, this is so obviously you. So I don't know, that's always

been really baffling to me. The same with, you know, Palantir, Andoril, there's any number of these references, as you say, and it's baffling. It's like, yeah, you're not watching Star Wars and realizing you're the Empire. Like, this is so funny. But I will say on the Dark Elves point in particular, this piece was a relatively like dark space to reside in. And I had to find my moments of joy. And I did find particular joy in writing about the wedding that happened to occur like right around the time that I was publishing. Curtis Yarvin was, you know, marrying this young woman. I'm not going to dwell on her. She's not the point. But like they got married in this Gothic castle in Berkeley and their guests were posting these selfies.

And like these people actually think that like they're the dark elf elites. And I'm sorry, but I had to find some joy in it because the aesthetics were just so grotesque and like tacky. It was just bad aesthetics. I don't know. I kind of couldn't get over it. After I read your piece, I think I posted a picture of Curtis Yarvin and was like, does this guy think he's a dark elf? Like, you know, which was a bit mean as well. But like, I think someone who espouses these ideas, I can take a shot at like that. And it's perfectly okay. He said worse, I promise.

We're sponsored today by Audio Maverick, a new nine part documentary podcast about one of the that and it's perfectly okay. He said worse, I promise. Audio Maverick features archival audio and contemporary interviews with media scholars and podcasters. Learn about the birth of radio, height of radio drama, and discussions about the new generation of podcasting audio mavericks that Brown inspired. As a podcast listener, you'll love learning about Nikola Tesla and the history of radio. Plus, hearing incredible clips of famous shows like Dick Tracy and Mystery Theater. Produced by CUNY TV and the Hyman Brown Archive, this series covers decades of history in nine episodes. Subscribe to Audio Maverick in your podcast app now. That's Audio Maverick, brought to you by CUNY TV. You know, when we're talking about the spread of these ideas, right, you were talking about the network that Peter Thiel has. Obviously, you have someone like Yarvin who is writing these things, has been writing it for about 15 years or so now.

You know, people like Peter Thiel, people like Marc Andreessen read it, start to believe it, and then it spreads through their networks, it feels like, as well. Can you talk about that kind of propagation aspect of it and the power and influence that someone like Peter Thiel and these key figures in the tech industry have in then spreading these sorts of things much beyond just themselves because of the influence they wield in the Valley. You know, Max Chavkin wrote an excellent biography of Peter Thiel, which I'm sure you've read. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners have read. I don't think we can ever get to the bottom of, you know, everything he's done over the years. But every time I learn

anything about what he's done, it's so intentional and it's so meticulously planned. And I almost don't understand how he ever has had time to do the business of investing that actually pays his bills because like his plans for takeover have just appeared to be so consuming. And I guess the answer is like when you have that amount of money, you can just hire so many people to do so consuming. And I guess the answer is like, when you have that amount of money, you can just hire so many people to do your bidding. And yeah, I mean, I'm always just like tracing those people that he has hired those people who are on his payroll in one way or

another. One really, really interesting element of reporting this piece was I got connected with some folks in the frog Twitter network, I believe they call it. And this is like, you remember Pepe the frog, the alt-right meme who became like a mascot. And I at one point saw these emails between these frog Twitter people and Blake Masters, again, who was like such an agent of Peter's over the years. And I don't know, there was just something so strange about it because, I mean, I don't even mean this in a derogatory way. These are just nobodies tweeting from their computers in the basement. And here's one of the richest people in the world who decides to take the time through his lieutenants to contact these people. And I don't know, I guess it's just like he seeds ideas in a very unique way. Again, I think,

I don't know, on one hand, it hasn't worked. On one hand, it has, because obviously this shaped so much of the 2016 election, so much of our politics, and just like this constant state of conflict we're in, and this constant feeling that atrocious things are being said about our fellow human beings. I don't know, to me, that series of emails between these guys and some of them, by the way, the reason a couple of them talked to me is because they kind of woke up one day and realized this guy is not on our side and kind of have disavowed that whole period in their lives. And I have a lot of respect for that. You know, I think sometimes people have to like wake up from something they get caught up in, which, frankly, I think young white American men are really susceptible. It comes from this place of loneliness and disaffected feelings about the world and their place in it. And and so, yeah, they make easy targets and they also understand the internet really well. And again, that's something that they expressed to him. They were quite oppositional in their emails. They were kind of like, why should

we trust you? We don't know you. You're not one of us. We know how this works. We're an asset to you. We know how to seed ideas on the internet. So you need to prove it to us why we should work with you. I don't know exactly what happened at that point, but I would imagine money changed hands. And I mean, that was alluded to for sure. So yeah, I don't know. He has this like understanding of how he thinks humans work. I'm not sure he's totally right about it, but Peter Thiel is obsessed with this philosopher, Rene Girard, who is responsible for memetic theory. And I think a lot of it comes back to that is like, he believes that humans are just always copying each other basically. And he does have a certain understanding of how ideas spread and how to infiltrate those idea networks. I just

think it's so fascinating that someone with that much money who could just go off and live a nice life is worried about these things. I don't know. He's unlike anyone else. That's okay. I wonder that about many of them as well, but I do think that's really fascinating. Right. And I agree I don't know. He's unlike anyone else. for, right? Which, you know, if we want to change these people from not being Trump supporters and stuff in the future, there needs to be that room to allow them to grow out of it, right? Yeah, and change how they feel. I guess one of the other aspects I was thinking about when I was asking that question and just thinking about some of your previous work as well is like, you know, you have figures like, say, a Thiel or a Musk or an Andreessen. And because they command such an intense amount of resources and also have this real view of like, you know, what they want society to be or whatnot, that they build these networks that then help them to achieve these goals in the sense that, you know, Teal has like the PayPal mafia of all

these people who are close to him and who he has supported over the years. And also, of course, the Blake Masters and, you know, the JD Vance and people like that, who he kind of cultivates. You know, I believe you wrote a story in the past about Musk and have some of the people in his orbit were like funding that documentary that, you know, kind of, you know, took the world by storm a year or two ago or whatever. And we know that Andreessen has had his own kind of relationships with things. Like, I wonder how you think about that aspect of it as well. And if that's kind of spreads ideas, or if that's more just about their own kind of influence broadly. There's good reason to believe that Elon Musk has kind of learned from this

example of Peter Thiel. You know, for so long, people were treating it like a mystery, like why Elon would want to buy Twitter. And to me, it just seems so obvious from the beginning. Yeah, he's gonna lose money on it. It's not a great investment. But he's buying like one of the greatest channels of information and how information is disseminated in the world. You know, it's not the number one, but like, it's the one you could afford. And it's been really effective. He has completely changed the national conversation. So yeah, I think he's arguably even more successful than Peter Thiel. I have to believe that that's what that was about. And they do it through their philanthropic work as well. Actually just FOIA'd a bunch of documents that I don't even think I'm going to use for a story, but they're just kind of fascinating to look at.

Related to Elon's, I think it was a $10 million donation to the University of Texas in Austin population well-being initiative. It's called something like that. So, yeah, you know, like that's monopoly money for billionaires, like $10 million. I FOIA'd all these emails between him and the staff and like, they're sending him these studies. And on one hand, it all feels really small. It's all like kind of funny that like anyone's taking the time and like, you know, they're sending these studies to, again, one of his like lieutenants who to anyone who exists in Musk world is a very familiar face. And, and it's just kind of weird that she's like taking the time to go to these obscure

academic conferences focused on fertility rates. And, but yeah, you know, if it's, if it's an idea that to him is like on his mind and he wants more people to be thinking about it, it's really easy to throw $10 million at that. And it's been a big focus of my work in the last couple of years. People are talking about fertility rates in a way that they weren't three years ago. So in a way, it's really worked. Yeah. And you see that not just with that donation, but in the past, he's donated to long-termist groups who are doing the research on that. I can't remember the name of it specifically, because there's two that are very similar in name, and I don't want to accidentally get it wrong. Maybe he gave money to both of them. I don't know. But even thinking about those networks, like, you know, you mentioned

earlier that JD Vance is a big part of this, right? Obviously, someone who has been at Peter Thiel's side and been supported and financed by Peter Thiel for many years. But now we're hearing some of these ideas emerge, you know, from his mouth at a time when he is the vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party, a striking chance of not just becoming vice president, but potentially even president if Donald Trump and him win that election in November. What do you see as the influence of these sorts of ideas on the American right more generally, and the broader kind of connections and networks that exist between an increasingly extreme right wing more generally in the United States and what is

coming out of Silicon Valley in this kind of tech politics? I mean, there's a number of focuses. One of them is this dismantling of the administrative state. That's a really key point for Curtis Yarvin, as it is for Peter Thiel, as it is for J.D. Vance, as it is for Project 2025. And that's something that the first Trump administration kind of tried to do,

or like alluded to, but didn't make much progress with. But by all appearances, they're very serious about it this time. Yeah, I remember, I think there were a few stories that Peter Thiel was disillusioned with the first Trump presidency after a while because they weren't, you know, kind of moving fast enough on those elements of it. And I know he specifically wanted to see like the FDA head replaced with someone who was just completely out there. That's a great example. There were two teal world people, one being Balaji Srinivasan, who we all know and love, and the other being Jim O'Neill, who was running the teal fellowship for a time. And yeah, they were the top picks for

the FDA. And it didn't happen, as you say. But yeah, I would I would expect to see much more of that. I would expect to see more attempts to, you know, what does Elon say? The Doge joke, Department of Government Efficiency. Oh, I didn't even realize that that was like a Doge. Wow. Okay. It's always a doge thing. Yeah. I think that the fundamental idea, and again, something that they've successfully kind of inserted into the discourse, even if they haven't achieved it yet, is like this bureaucratic administrative state is holding us back in so many ways, holding us back from making more money, holding us back from innovating, holding us back from being the great Western civilization that we are meant to be. And yeah, like if you look at the project 2025 proposals, like that means dismantling like the

department of education. I don't know what you think happens after that. And in fact, that's one of my favorite points in Curtis Yarvin's step-by-step plan is he also wants to dismantle all educational institutions and does not offer an alternative. He kind of makes some vague allusions to like, oh, like I understand that like a lot of people are going to suddenly be forced to homeschool and we should probably like compensate them somehow for that. Like what? You're just going to have a country full of parents who are forced to homeschool overnight. I'm like, yeah, I don't know what day two of any of these plans looks like. But yeah, in terms of like the ideas that are being mainstreamed, dismantling the administrative

state is out there. Dismantling any kind of regulatory body who is trying to step in to limit them from doing what they want. It's interesting. I watched the VP debate last night and it was funny. Both the candidates kind of kept coming back to this housing issue. And I felt like they were both not quite clearly articulating what they were really talking about, which was probably not an accident, especially in the case of Vance. And, you know, Walls kept saying like a house is a home, like a house is meant to be like a home where people live and create their families and their lives. And what he was proposing is the alternative desired by people like JD Vance is like a home as an asset to be traded. And this is kind of this like takeover

of private equity and, and venture capital mindset. And, you know, just this, like everything's an investment that can be traded hands and, and commoditized as an asset and turn into basically like a security. And it's like, yeah, I think that they would love to see a lot of different types of regulations stripped away from things like that. So that, yeah, a certain very small group of people can trade everything else, like chips on a board and the rest of society will just be left to like have no choice but to pay whatever they're charging. It's so grim. public schools and just expected people to like figure it out as a result, you know, not to mention these many other things that they want to do by gutting these regulatory agencies.

So tech companies and of course, these other companies can do whatever they want, you know, obviously getting rid of democracy so they don't need to be held to account any longer. To some degree, it's like not surprising that people with so much power would feel this way. But even then, it's like this feels like on another level compared to what like rich, self-interested people in the past would campaign for. You think back to the Koch brothers and like they're evil as they come, right? Like this is no defense of Koch brothers. But like, even then, it feels like they're building even more on that, what was then considered an extreme, like libertarian right wing politics to reach this level, it would have seemed unimaginable, maybe, I don't know, a decade or so definitely where I look around and I'm like, wait, I didn't realize it got that bad. And that's just so many things, all this stuff all the time. So if you're tuning out, I shudder to think what your rude awakening is going to look like.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And like, to me, this also makes me think back to something that you were mentioning earlier when you were talking about the dark enlightenment and how, you know, these ideas are just seeping everywhere. Along with this anti-democratic stuff is that, you know, you had someone like Marc Andreessen, this venture capitalist who is very influential in the Valley, publish his techno-optimist manifesto in October of last year. lot of things there about calling out his enemies and saying that tech ethics is holding back society and that if we stop the development of ai then that could be seen as a form of murder because there are people who are going to die who wouldn't have if we had created this ai god or whatever they're talking about but in that you know he is explicitly citing you know italian fascists as people who you know are standing out as like examples to him. And also, of course, Nick Land, who co-founded the Dark Enlightenment with Curtis Yarvin. Like, this is not just like a Peter Thiel thing, or this is not something that's exclusive to a small

number of folks in the Valley anymore. These ideas do seem to have spread quite far. And it's, you know, it feels to me that as someone like someone as influential as Elon Musk has been adopting these things that that has even helped to further propel it and like to legitimize it in some of these circles. Yeah, I think that something I tried to be really conscious of in this piece in particular, but I think I always try to be conscious of is like, of course, I want to avoid like guilt by association. Like if you bumped into someone at a coffee shop, like that's okay. I'm not assuming that you share their values, but like if you

are having someone over to your home, as Mark Andreessen has been known to have Curtis Yarvin host him in his home, and then you're writing something that is so obviously reflecting his ideas. And again, as you say, citing Nick Land, who's like the other guy in The Dark Enlightenment, like, yeah, I'm going to mention The Connection because it's relevant. So yeah, that just occasionally I hear that feedback or maybe I just imagine that feedback to myself. But it's like, these people aren't hanging out by coincidence. They're seeking each other out. hanging out by coincidence. They're seeking

each other out. They're sharing ideas. They're learning from each other. Yeah, no, absolutely. And like, even when we're talking about these wider connections, one of the things that you mentioned to me before we started recording was how the Heritage Foundation, you know, which is one of these like right wing institutions that, you know, we're quite familiar with, if you pay any attention to what the right is doing in American politics and has been doing for decades, was I believe one of the main funders of this reboot conference, or at least someone who is associated with them was there. Can you talk about those linkages too and how that does suggest that these ideas are far beyond the tech industry, but have these linkages with the broader right within the United States?

Yeah. So going to the reboot conference in San Francisco in early September, like felt like just stepping into the real world version of all this stuff I write about. It was crazy. It was crazy. The Heritage Foundation was indeed a sponsor, as was the Institute for Family Studies. You know, it's so funny being at this like food truck lunch in the courtyard. And it was like sponsored by the Institute for Family Studies, which like these are the kinds of organizations we associate with like old school, like Reaganism, like freedom, family. I don't know, just this like kind of republicanism that has so not been aesthetically aligned with modern Silicon Valley. So yeah, that was very surreal. And then there was a, I mean, the entire lineup was insane, just like such a fascinating group of individuals. And to be fair, there were some people who leaned more left and some who lean more right. But there was very notably one special guest who wasn't revealed until the last

moment. And it turned out to be Kevin Roberts from the Heritage Foundation, known sort of as the architect of Project 2025, who flies on Donald Trump's private jet. And yeah, like seeing him on stage being interviewed by this young AI podcaster. I'm not, I mean, the guy seemed to grasp kind of what was going on, but yeah, it was just a reminder of like, again, the, the very intentional planning that goes into these ideas spreading. And like, these are old school think tanks. Like you talked about the Koch brothers, like Heritage Foundation is an old institution that's been around. Like this isn't the modern day alt-right,

right wing that we've become familiar with. Like, so yeah, just to see them on stage with Silicon Valley, crypto people, like they're just some very strange alliances being formed. And I think there were moments when like the audience was realizing it. I had some interesting conversations. I kind of expected everyone at the conference to be more or less aligned with these ideas. But from the conversations I had, people were really caught off guard. They were kind of like,

oh, like, yeah, I came because Y Combinator was doing the keynote, like Gary Tan, who, you know, we could talk about him another day, but I still don't think that people expected to show up and be lectured about how like the nuclear heterosexual family unit is America's greatest institution and must be protected at all costs. Like these are just such old fashioned values being pushed on people. And yeah, I'm going to be fascinated to keep watching that space because, you know, there's so many contradictions there that they're going to run up on and it will be really interesting to see who ends up compromising more because someone's going to have to bend. Absolutely. You know, as you, as you talk about that, I think about like how some of these mega churches, like kind of, I talked to someone

about this a couple of years ago, I think, you know, about how mega churches had like taken advantage of digital technology and social media. And, you know, some of them also do these like music things to try to bring in younger people and, you know, give people a sense of community. And it almost seems like as you're talking about that, like I'm imagining like the kind of rebranding and like modernizing of you know this kind of really socially conservative extreme right-wing movement but now giving it this like you know tech makeover or whatever to make it seem like it's not this really backward thing that went out of style ages ago but based on what you were saying there like I was interested in the question of how much

do you think this is like a bunch of ideas that are shared by these like billionaires and people at the top of the industry? And how much do you feel that it has filtered down within more of like the rank and file, the people who are not these like super rich, super powerful people in the Valley. Because I feel like on one hand, you see these types of people who are not really powerful, say on Twitter X, who are supporters of Elon Musk, who are going along with this, or say in your story about pronatalism, where, you know, you talk to people who are obviously not super, super rich, who are going along with these ideas, who really believe in it. But then, you know, you're talking about also showing up at this conference and meeting people who

also probably aren't like the, you know, super richest people in tech who are like, okay, there's something going on here that's really not, you know, jiving with me. I don't know. What's your sense of that? I think it totally depends on like the topic and it depends on the person. I think certain types of people are more susceptible just to give like an example, obviously part of all this return to these backwards values that troubles me is like, I feel like I've seen a lot of new rhetoric around like women don't belong in the workplace. And that's definitely the kind of thing that the heritage foundation would seed. When you were talking about the abolition of all schools, that was like one of the first things

that came to my mind, like a kind of sly way to force women back into the home, right, to take care of the children. Yeah, and it's exactly, it's not always said so straightforwardly. Sometimes it's sort of implicated through other things that you're saying. And like, well, that's the only conclusion I could possibly come to is that women are going to fill that role. And yes, that's, again, just to pick one example, like anecdotally, it's something that I worried about from watching the billionaire rhetoric from watching the Elon Muskification of the internet. And then anecdotally, I will hear off the top of my head, think of a couple notable examples where I've had female friends be sort of alarmed, like, oh, like, my boyfriend actually was agreeing with a lot of that. And that came out of nowhere. Or like, knew one other reporter who was at a gathering of male CEOs.

And she was like, yep, they were all saying that women should stay at home. And like, so yes, I guess that's just to say, that doesn't mean everyone's saying it, but are certain groups who might be like young white men in business school, are they going to be more susceptible? Probably. And yeah, we'll just see how, around how these ideas are really coming back and how people are buying into this stuff. Like it really doesn't make any sense to me how we could be looking at this like major kind of social regression. It feels like, you know, after fighting so hard to make these advances for so long, and why so many people would go along with it. But to kind of take a step back and kind of look more broadly to ask you a final question, what kind of threat do you think that these ideas really pose to democracy? You know, you have these people who are very powerful in the tech industry, the Teals, the Musks, the people like that, who do seem to be increasingly questioning the democratic values that our societies are built on because it seems to challenge the power and the wealth that they have built up over the past few decades. And now increasingly, you see someone like J.D. Vance in office, you see comments from Donald Trump that, you know, he's kind of open to being a

dictator quite explicitly. I feel like we're seeing, you know, some of the most powerful and influential people in society really trying to work harder than they have in a very quite explicitly. I feel like we're seeing, you know, some of the most powerful and influential people in society really trying to work harder than they have in a very long time and trying to roll back democratic rights and democratic values. And we know that this has been part of the right wing in the United States and the Republican Party for quite some time with gerrymandering and all those sorts of things. But it feels like having this power and influence and the kind of general interest that like the tech industry kind of brings along with it potentially helps to expand these anti-democratic ideas in a way that maybe we haven't seen in a long time. What do you think about the threat that these tech people pose?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to remember that democracy does not just take place on election day. That is like the most explicit way in which democracy is exercised. But democracy is a super complex piece of machinery. And I guess most fundamentally, it's based on the idea of checks and balances. No single entity should have so much power that there's no one to challenge them and we've got so far a relatively well-functioning society where we do have regulatory structures we do have a free press we do have different branches of government which have representatives from different parties and you know have different jobs and like it's at best, a well-oiled machine that is just like constantly checking itself. And that's how it functions. So yes, there are plenty of attacks happening

on voting specifically. And I'm not remotely claiming that that element of democracy is safe, but I think I'm more worried about like the less obvious, less surface level types of democracy that play out on any given day that are under attack. Again, just like this dismantling of the administrative state is really dismantling all the various bodies who exist to check and balance. I saw today a story about the Heritage Foundation and how it's been filing like thousands and thousands of FOIA requests. I file FOIA requests all the time. I don't know how they're doing it so quickly. It takes me forever. I guess they've automated it. But what they're doing is FOIAing all these government branches, all these wings of the government to identify anyone who has said certain words, things like gender identity or healthcare equity, or these words that they've deemed unacceptable,

which are pretty innocuous words, I would argue. And one has to believe that the end goal of this is like, if a Trump administration comes to office next year, they will have this list of all the people who they can now deem enemies and they can purge them. They can eliminate them. And like that kind of like complete homogenizing of thought is just the opposite of democracy. And I find it so ironic, again, from people who preach like free speech, like that's your free speech. Someone dared to write the words gender identity in a page 63 of some document. Like, and so you're going to go after their

livelihood. Like it's just, yeah, it's very much democracy is under attack and it's not always about like the ballot machines or these obvious election day things. Democracy is, as I say, a very large, very complex Rube Goldberg machine that is just constantly whirring and moving. And there's people trying to take out parts here and there that will make the whole thing fall apart. So that's my cynical take of the day. Yeah. It really shows you what they actually mean by free speech, right? And it's not everyone's right to free speech. It's like their own, but even more limited than that. I don't think it's something that we need to get into right now. and getting into Curtis Yarvin is it brought me back to like thinking about when I used to talk to Emil Torres about like long-termism and how some of this stuff just seemed like so out there

and so wild and like how could anyone believe this but then it became increasingly clear that like oh yeah they are kind of like basing their decisions on these really out there kind of science fictional ideas and I think sometimes when we hear about some of these things that someone like a Curtis Yarvin says, having a monarchy, having a CEO as the head, you know, gutting the bureaucratic state, getting rid of all schools, it can seem like, man, that's so out there. That's so extreme. Like this isn't going to happen. But like, then you think about the erosions that we've already seen and, you know, the increasing influence that the far right has had over the past decade on like politics in North America and in Europe. And it's like, no, like don't write any of this stuff off because, you know, it feels like almost anything could happen at this point, which is really worrying. Yeah. I kind of want to introduce

you and possibly your listeners just to like this one term, which I've learned recently, and it's an interesting rabbit hole to go down. It's hyperstition. Of course, it is somewhat connected back to like some of Nick Land's philosophies. But from what I understand, it's kind of this idea that like you can make sci-fi into a reality. And so by like writing this fiction, like you actually, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I think it's like a useful term to have on hand as you watch how some of this is playing out. And again, it kind of gets back to the Overton window stuff. Like there is kind of this magic process by which like your words eventually do become real. And like, it's why I think so many people are trying to push

these limits of free speech because, you know, like if you can imagine it, it can happen. And in Silicon Valley, like that is of course the case, like every startup starts as just an idea and then gets funding and, and grows into this company. And so, yeah, I think like there's a light and a dark side to it. Like on one hand, it's kind of a wonderful idea. Of course we want to be able to imagine wild, fantastical things and make them happen. But in the current context of everything that's going on, I think it starts to take a darker side of like, Oh, we're just playing with the ideas. Like, come on, I'm allowed to say it. Like my words aren't going to hurt anyone, but but if the idea is for those words to become reality down the line, they become more dangerous. Yeah, well, thank you for introducing us to that term.

I feel like the one other piece of that statement is, if you can imagine it, it can happen as long as you have the power and the wealth to make it happen and to bring it into being. But Julia, it's always great to talk to you. It's always great to learn about the fascinating reporting that you're doing. Thanks so much for taking the time. Thank you. I love coming on the show. So good to talk to you. Julia Black is a features reporter

with the Informations Weekend team. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you

to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.