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FTR#1378 This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: Highlighting the rise of what many call “Techno-Fascism,” this broadcast begins with discussion of fascism in Manchuria and Japan under Nobusuke Kishi. Kishi’s “Manchurian legacy” is a dominant consideration in Korea and should be reflected on against the background of what is happening in both Korea and the U.S.
Supplementing discussion of Kishi, we detail analysis of another form of “Techno-Fascism,” rooted in the Silicon Valley and featuring the ideological precepts of Curtis Yarvin, aka “Menscius Moldbug.”
For all its apparent novelty, this ideology is a high-tech version of Mussolini’s Corporate State.
” . . . . Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent ‘executives’ running society like a CEO would run a company. . . .”
1.“Techno-Fascism Comes to America” by Kyle Chayka; The New Yorker; February 26, 2025.
. . . . The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”
In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE is the Trumpian equivalent. . . .
2.“The Plot Against America” by Mike Brock; Notes From The Circus; Feb. 08, 2025.
How a Dangerous Ideology Born From the Libertarian Movement Stands Ready to Seize America
As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn’t a spontaneous coup—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress.
DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.
What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.
The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago.
On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the largest failure of an investment bank since the Great Depression. This event catalyzed the global financial crisis, leading to widespread economic hardship and a profound loss of faith in established institutions.
In the aftermath of the crisis, several key figures emerged who would go on to shape a new movement in American politics.
Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, had been developing a critique of modern democracy on his blog Unqualified Reservations since 2007. As the financial crisis unfolded, Yarvin applied his unconventional analysis to the economic turmoil.
In a 2008 post, “The Misesian explanation of the bank crisis,” Yarvin wrote:
Briefly: the fundamental cause of the bank crisis is not evil Republicans, lying Democrats, ‘deregulation,’ ‘affirmative-action lending,’ or even ‘ludicrous levels of leverage.’ A banking system is like a nuclear reactor: a complicated piece of engineering. If it’s engineered right, it works 100% of the time. If it’s engineered wrong, it works 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% it coats the entire tri-state area in radioactive strontium.
Yarvin argued that the crisis was fundamentally an engineering failure caused by a deviation from what he called “Misesian banking,” based on principles outlined by economist Ludwig von Mises. This approach advocates for a strict free-market system with minimal government intervention in banking. He contrasted this with the prevailing “Bagehotian” system, named after Walter Bagehot, which supports central bank intervention during financial crises. Yarvin argued that this interventionist approach was inherently unstable and prone to collapse.
Yarvin’s writings during the crisis period continued to develop his broader critique of modern political and economic systems. His ideas, while not mainstream, began to resonate with a growing audience disillusioned with traditional institutions and seeking alternative explanations for the economic turmoil.
For decades, libertarian thinkers had argued that free markets, left unrestrained, would naturally outperform any system of government. But what if the problem wasn’t just government interference in markets—what if the very concept of democracy itself was flawed?
This was the argument put forward by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mises’s protégé Murray Rothbard, who took libertarian skepticism of the state to its extreme conclusion. His 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed landed like a bombshell in libertarian circles. Published at a moment when many Americans still saw democracy as the “end of history,” Hoppe argued that democracy was an inherently unstable system, one that incentivized short-term decision-making and mob rule rather than rational governance. His alternative? A return to monarchy.
But this wasn’t the monarchy of old. Hoppe envisioned a new order—one where governance was privatized, where societies functioned as “covenant communities” owned and operated by property-holders rather than elected officials. In this world, citizenship was a matter of contract, not birthright. Voting was unnecessary. Rule was left to those with the most capital at stake. It was libertarian thought taken to its most extreme conclusion: a society governed not by political equality, but by property rights alone.
By the 2010s, Hoppe’s radical skepticism of democracy had found an eager audience beyond the usual libertarian circles, but through a different mechanism than simple market disruption. While Silicon Valley had long embraced Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation—where nimbler companies could outcompete established players by serving overlooked markets—a more extreme form of techno-solutionism had begun to take hold. This mindset held that any societal problem, including governance itself, could be “solved” through sufficient application of engineering principles. Silicon Valley elites who had built successful companies began to view democratic processes not just as inefficient, but as fundamentally irrational—the product of what they saw as emotional decision-making by non-technical people. This merged perfectly with Hoppe’s critique: if democracy was simply a collection of “feeling-based” choices made by the uninformed masses, surely it could be replaced by something more “rational”—specifically, the kind of data-driven, engineering-focused governance these tech leaders practiced in their own companies.
Peter Thiel, one of the most outspoken erstwhile libertarians in Silicon Valley, put this sentiment in stark terms in his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel had already begun funding projects aimed at escaping democratic nation-states entirely, including seasteading—floating cities in international waters beyond government control—and experimental governance models that would replace electoral democracy with private, corporate-style rule. Hoppe’s vision of covenant communities—private enclaves owned and governed by elites—provided an intellectual justification for what Thiel and his allies were trying to build: not just alternatives to specific government policies, but complete replacements for democratic governance itself. If democracy is too inefficient to keep up with technological change, why not replace it entirely with private, contractual forms of rule?
The notion that traditional democratic governance was inefficient or outdated resonated with those who saw themselves as disruptors and innovators.
This intellectual throughline—from Mises to Hoppe to figures like Yarvin and Thiel—helps explain the emergence of what some have called “techno-libertarianism.” It represents a dangerous alignment of anti-democratic thought with immense technological and financial resources, posing significant challenges to traditional conceptions of democratic governance and civic responsibility.
From Silicon Valley to Main Street: The Spread of Techno-Libertarian Ideas
2008 did not just destroy the economy—it shattered faith in democratic institutions themselves. Libertarians saw an opportunity. And in Silicon Valley, a new belief took hold: democracy wasn’t just inefficient—it was obsolete. Over the next decade, the ideas incubated in this period would evolve into a coherent challenge to the foundations of liberal democracy, backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology and finance.
As millions of Americans lost their homes and jobs in the years following the crisis, these ideas began to gain momentum. The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against government bailouts and the Obama administration’s response to the crisis.
As the Tea Party gained momentum, it fostered a broader cultural shift that primed many Americans to be receptive to alternative political and economic theories. This shift extended beyond traditional conservatism, creating an opening for the tech-libertarian ideas emerging from Silicon Valley.
The movement’s emphasis on individual liberty and skepticism of centralized authority resonated with the anti-government sentiment growing in tech circles. As a result, concepts like cryptocurrency and decentralized governance, once considered fringe, began to find a more mainstream audience among those disillusioned with traditional political and financial systems.
The convergence of populist anger and techno-utopianism set the stage for more radical anti-democratic ideas that would emerge in the following years. The Tea Party, while not directly advocating for these ideas, inadvertently prepared a segment of the population to be more open to the notion that traditional democratic institutions might be fundamentally flawed or obsolete.
However, the ideological impact of Silicon Valley’s economic performance on movements like the “New Right” was not immediate or direct. The tech industry’s growing economic and cultural influence gradually became more pronounced in the 2010s as tech leaders like Peter Thiel began to more actively engage in political discourse and funding.
The financial crisis didn’t just create political movements like the Tea Party—it spawned entirely new media platforms that would help spread these anti-democratic ideas far beyond their original circles. One of the most influential was Zero Hedge, founded in 2009 by Daniel Ivandjiiski. The site, which adopted the pseudonym “Tyler Durden” for all its authors—a reference to the anti-establishment character from Fight Club—initially focused on financial news and analysis from a bearish perspective rooted in Austrian economics.
Zero Hedge’s evolution from a financial blog to a political powerhouse exemplified how anti-democratic ideas could be laundered through technical expertise. The site gained initial credibility through sophisticated critiques of high-frequency trading and market structure, establishing itself as a legitimate voice in financial circles. But this technical authority became a vehicle for something more radical: the idea that democratic institutions themselves were as broken as the markets they regulated.
By 2015, Zero Hedge was advancing a comprehensive critique of democratic governance that paralleled Yarvin’s, but packaged for a mainstream audience. Its technical analysis of market failures seamlessly evolved into broader arguments about the failure of democratic institutions. When the site argued that central banks were rigging markets, it wasn’t just making a financial claim—it was suggesting that democratic institutions themselves were inherently corrupt and needed to be replaced with more “efficient” mechanisms.
This methodology—using technical financial analysis to justify increasingly radical political conclusions—provided a blueprint that others would follow. The site demonstrated how expertise in one domain (financial markets) could be leveraged to advocate for sweeping political change. When Zero Hedge declared that markets were manipulated, it wasn’t just criticizing policy—it was building the case that democracy itself was a failed system that needed to be replaced by technical, algorithmic governance.
What made Zero Hedge particularly effective was how it straddled multiple worlds. As Bloomberg noted in 2016, it remained an “Internet powerhouse” with real influence in financial circles even as The New Republic characterized it as “a forum for the hateful, conspiracy-driven voices of the angry white men of the alt-right.” This dual identity—technically sophisticated yet politically radical—made it a crucial bridge between mainstream financial discourse and emerging anti-democratic ideologies.
The site’s true innovation wasn’t just in mixing finance and politics—it was in suggesting that technical, market-based solutions could replace democratic processes entirely. This aligned perfectly with Silicon Valley’s emerging worldview: if markets were more efficient than governments at allocating resources, why not let them allocate political power as well?
While InfoWars would later adopt some of Zero Hedge’s anti-establishment positioning, it abandoned the pretense of technical expertise entirely. But Zero Hedge’s more sophisticated approach—using financial expertise to justify anti-democratic conclusions—proved more influential in tech circles, where it reinforced the growing belief that democracy was simply an inefficient way to make decisions compared to markets and algorithms.
Zero Hedge’s transformation from financial analysis to anti-democratic ideology previewed a broader pattern that would define the next decade: how technical expertise could be weaponized against democracy itself. While Zero Hedge used financial analysis to undermine faith in democratic institutions, InfoWars would take a cruder but arguably more effective approach: pure epistemic chaos.
As media scholar Yochai Benkler noted in a 2018 study, this period saw the emergence of a “propaganda feedback loop,” where audiences, media outlets, and political elites reinforce each other’s views, regardless of the veracity of the information. Zero Hedge was an early example of this dynamic in action, demonstrating how traditional gatekeepers of information were losing their influence. This erosion of trust in established institutions, combined with the proliferation of alternative information sources, set the stage for what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would later describe as “a kind of fragmentation of reality.”
As we moved into the 2010s, this fragmentation accelerated. Social media algorithms, designed to maximize engagement, amplified sensational and divisive content. The resulting flood of competing narratives made it increasingly difficult for citizens to discern truth from fiction, with profound implications for democratic discourse and decision-making.
The Zero Hedge model—mixing expert analysis with speculative political commentary—became a template for numerous other outlets, contributing to insular information ecosystems where narrative consistency trumped factual accuracy. This presaged how information would be produced, consumed, and weaponized in the age of social media and algorithmic content distribution.
While Zero Hedge pioneered this approach, InfoWars took it to the extreme. Founded by Alex Jones in 1999, InfoWars gained significant traction after the 2008 financial crisis, abandoning any pretense of conventional expertise in favor of sensationalism and conspiracy theories.
“The financial crisis created a perfect storm for outlets like InfoWars,” explains media scholar Whitney Phillips. “People were looking for explanations, and InfoWars offered simple, if outlandish, answers to complex problems.”
By 2015, InfoWars was generating an estimated $80 million annually, monetizing its audience directly through the sale of supplements and survival gear. This business model, which saw sales spike during crises, demonstrated how post-truth narratives could be converted into profit.
InfoWars’ impact extended beyond its immediate audience, providing a playbook for a new generation of alternative media outlets. However, its promotion of baseless conspiracy theories had real-world consequences, from harassment of Sandy Hook victims’ families to the spread of health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these tactics were adopted by a wide range of actors, the post-truth era posed unprecedented challenges to democratic discourse.
The parallel evolution of Zero Hedge and InfoWars revealed two complementary strategies for undermining democracy. Zero Hedge showed how technical expertise could be used to delegitimize democratic institutions from within, while InfoWars demonstrated how raw chaos could make democratic deliberation impossible. But it was Silicon Valley that would combine these insights into something even more dangerous: the argument that democracy’s replacement by technical systems wasn’t just desirable—it was inevitable.
This epistemic chaos wasn’t an accident—it was a crucial tactic in undermining democracy itself. As Curtis Yarvin and his neoreactionary allies saw it, political legitimacy depended on the existence of a shared reality. Break that consensus, and democracy becomes impossible. Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone with shit.” And by the time Trump entered office, the full strategy was in motion: destabilize public trust, replace expert analysis with endless counter-narratives, and ensure that the only people who could wield power were those who controlled the flow of information itself.
Figures like Yarvin didn’t just critique democracy—they sought to undermine the very conditions in which democratic deliberation is possible. By weaponizing media fragmentation, they hacked the cognitive foundations of democracy itself, ensuring that political power would no longer rest on reasoned debate but on the ability to manipulate information flows.
The Sovereign Individual: Blueprint for a Post-Democratic World
But destroying consensus was only the first step. The true revolution would come through technology itself. In 1999, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published a book that would become the blueprint for this technological coup: The Sovereign Individual. Published at the height of the dotcom boom, the book read like science fiction to many at the time: it predicted the rise of cryptocurrency, the decline of traditional nation-states, and the emergence of a new digital aristocracy. Taxes will become voluntary. Regulations will disappear. The most successful people will form their own private, self-governing communities, while the rest of the world is left behind.
Libertarianism, when fused with this kind of technological determinism, takes a sharp turn away from classical liberal thought. If you assume that government will inevitably be outcompeted by private networks, decentralized finance, and AI-driven governance, then trying to reform democracy becomes pointless. The more radical conclusion, embraced by the figures at the forefront of this movement, is that government should be actively dismantled and replaced with a more “efficient” form of rule—one modeled on corporate governance rather than democratic participation.
This is precisely where libertarianism morphs into neoreaction. Instead of advocating for a constitutional republic with minimal government, this new strain of thought pushes for a private, post-democratic order, where those with the most resources and technological control dictate the rules. In this vision, power doesn’t rest with the people—it belongs to the most competent “executives” running society like a CEO would run a company.
This is how Curtis Yarvin’s argument that democracy is an outdated, inefficient system became so appealing to Silicon Valley elites. It wasn’t just a philosophical argument; it aligned with the way many in the tech industry already thought about disruption, efficiency, and control. If innovation constantly renders old systems obsolete, then why should governance be any different?
Figures like Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan took this logic a step further, arguing that rather than resisting the decline of democratic institutions, elites should accelerate the transition to a new order—one where governance is voluntary, privatized, and largely detached from public accountability. The rhetoric of “exit” and “network states” became the libertarian justification for abandoning democracy altogether.
This wasn’t just theoretical—there were actual attempts to implement these ideas, like the Peter Thiel-backed “network state” project called Praxis in Greenland.
This mindset is deeply ingrained in Silicon Valley, where disruption is seen as not just a business model, but a law of history. Entrepreneurs are taught that old institutions are inefficient relics waiting to be displaced by something better. When applied to government, this logic leads directly to Yarvin’s argument: democracy is outdated “legacy code” that can’t keep up with modern complexity. The future, he and others argue, will belong to those who design and implement a superior system—one that runs more like a corporation, where leaders are chosen based on competence rather than elections.
This is why neoreactionary ideas have found such a receptive audience among tech elites. If you believe that technology inevitably renders old systems obsolete, then why should democracy be any different? Why bother fixing the government if it’s doomed to be replaced by something more advanced?
This is where the transition from libertarianism to neoreaction becomes clear. Classical libertarians at least paid lip service to democracy, arguing that markets should exist within a limited but functioning democratic system. But the Silicon Valley version of libertarianism, shaped by The Sovereign Individual and reinforced by the rise of cryptocurrency, started to see democratic governance itself as an obstacle. The question was no longer “How do we make government smaller?” but rather “How do we escape government altogether?”
The answer, for people like Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and Balaji Srinivasan, was to replace democracy with a new system—one where power belongs to those with the resources to exit and build something better. And as we are now seeing, they aren’t waiting for that transition to happen naturally.
Srinivasan, like others in this movement, had undergone an ideological evolution that exemplifies a broader trend in Silicon Valley. As a former CTO of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, he initially approached cryptocurrency from a techno-libertarian perspective, viewing it as a tool for individual empowerment and market efficiency.
However, his thinking increasingly aligned with neo-reactionary ideas, particularly around the concept of “exit”—the ability to opt out of existing political structures entirely. This shift from techno-libertarianism to neo-reactionary thought isn’t as large a leap as it might seem. Both ideologies share a deep skepticism of centralized authority and a belief in the power of technology to reshape society.
The pipeline from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction often follows a predictable path: It begins with a libertarian critique of government inefficiency and overreach. This evolves into a broader skepticism of all democratic institutions, seen as slow and irrational compared to the speed and logic of technology. Eventually, this leads to the conclusion that democracy itself is an outdated system, incompatible with rapid technological progress. The final step is embracing the idea that democracy should be replaced entirely with more “efficient” forms of governance, often modeled on corporate structures or technological systems.
Srinivasan’s journey along this ideological pipeline is reflected in his evolving views on cryptocurrency. What started as a tool for financial freedom became, in his vision, the foundation for entirely new forms of governance outside traditional state structures. This transformation—from seeing crypto as a means of individual empowerment within existing systems to viewing it as a way to build entirely new political entities—mirrors the broader shift from techno-libertarianism to neo-reaction in Silicon Valley.
As I wrote last year, what makes the Sovereign Individuals’s influence particularly concerning is its epistemically authoritarian nature. By presenting technological change as an unstoppable force that would inevitably dissolve traditional democratic institutions, the book provided Silicon Valley with a deterministic narrative that justified the concentration of power in the hands of tech elites as historically inevitable rather than a choice that deserved democratic deliberation.
This is what makes the convergence of crypto, AI, and neo-reactionary ideology so dangerous. If people can’t agree on basic facts, who gets to decide what’s true? The answer, in Yarvin’s world, is the sovereign executive—a singular, unchallenged ruler whose legitimacy derives not from elections, but from sheer control over the information landscape.
James Pogue’s remarkable piece of investigative journalism—Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets—traces the movement of these ideas fringes into a sophisticated political movement backed by some of the most powerful figures in technology.
Reporting from the 2022 National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Pogue encounters everyone from “fusty paleocon professors” to mainstream Republican senators, but his focus on the younger cohort is particularly illuminating. They are highly educated young elites who have absorbed Yarvin’s critique of democracy and are working to make it political reality.
As Pogue documents, Yarvin’s writings during the crisis period didn’t just diagnose economic problems—they offered a comprehensive critique of what he called “the Cathedral,” an interlocking system of media, academia, and bureaucracy that he argued maintained ideological control while masking its own power.
The fusion of Austrian economics, techno-libertarianism, and Yarvin’s critique of democracy found its perfect vehicle in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. As Pogue documents in Vanity Fair, Balaji Srinivasan emerged as a key figure who helped translate these abstract ideas into a concrete vision for restructuring society.
This vision resonated deeply with Silicon Valley elites who had been influenced by Yarvin’s critique of democracy but were seeking concrete mechanisms to implement alternative governance structures. Cryptocurrency offered not just a way to circumvent state monetary control, but also a model for how digital technology could enable new forms of sovereignty.
As Pogue documents, figures like Peter Thiel began to see cryptocurrency not just as a new financial instrument, but as a tool for fundamentally restructuring society. The technology offered a way to make the abstract ideas of Yarvin and The Sovereign Individual concrete. If traditional democracy was hopelessly corrupt, as Yarvin argued, then perhaps blockchain could enable new forms of governance built on immutable code rather than fallible human judgment.
This vision found its perfect technological expression in Bitcoin. Launched in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis by an anonymous creator using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin seemed to validate The Sovereign Individual’s core thesis—that technology could enable individuals to opt out of state monetary control. The timing was perfect: just as faith in traditional financial institutions had been shattered, here was a system that promised to replace human judgment with mathematical certainty.
Bitcoin’s philosophical underpinnings drew heavily from Austrian economics and libertarian thought, but it was Saifedean Ammous who most explicitly merged these ideas with reactionary politics in his 2018 book The Bitcoin Standard. What began as an economic argument for Bitcoin based on Austrian monetary theory evolved into something far more radical in its later chapters. Particularly telling was Ammous’s critique of modern art and architecture, which mirrors almost precisely the fascist aesthetic theory of the early 20th century. When he rails against “degenerate” modern art and architecture in favor of classical forms, he’s invoking—whether intentionally or not—the exact language and arguments used by fascists in the 1930s. One German friend’s observation to me is that it is “far more striking in the original German.”
The Bitcoin community’s embrace of figures like Ammous reveals how cryptocurrency became not just a technology or an investment, but a vehicle for reactionary political thought. The idea that Bitcoin would restore some lost golden age of sound money merged seamlessly with broader reactionary narratives about societal decline and the need for restoration of traditional hierarchies.
While figures like Ammous attempted to claim Bitcoin for a reactionary worldview, the technology itself—as Bailey, Rettler and their co-authors argue in Resistance Money—can equally serve liberal and democratic values. The key distinction lies in how we understand Bitcoin’s relationship to political institutions.
Where reactionaries see Bitcoin as a tool for replacing democratic governance entirely, the liberal perspective presented in Resistance Money understands it as a check against overreach and a means of preserving individual autonomy within democratic systems. This frames Bitcoin not as a replacement for democratic institutions, but as a technological innovation that can help protect civil liberties and human rights—particularly in contexts where traditional financial systems are used as tools of surveillance or oppression.
This tension between reactionary and liberal interpretations of Bitcoin reflects a broader pattern we’ve seen throughout our narrative: technological innovations that could enhance human freedom being co-opted into anti-democratic frameworks. Just as Yarvin and others attempted to claim the entire trajectory of technological development as inevitably leading to the dissolution of democracy, figures like Ammous tried to present Bitcoin’s monetary properties as necessarily implying a broader reactionary worldview.
From Theory to Practice: The Implementation of Anti-Democratic Ideas
From Yarvin’s early writings during the financial crisis to today’s constitutional crisis, we can trace a clear intellectual evolution. What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them. But the key accelerant in this process was cryptocurrency—it provided both a technological framework and a psychological model for opting out of democratic governance entirely.
But what makes this vision dangerous is not just its hostility to democracy—it’s the way it frames the collapse of democratic governance as an inevitability rather than a choice. This is precisely what I have described as epistemic authoritarianism. Rather than acknowledging that technology is shaped by human agency and political decisions, the Network State vision assumes that technological change has a fixed trajectory, one that will naturally dissolve nation-states and replace them with digitally mediated governance structures. This deterministic thinking leaves no room for public debate, democratic decision-making, or alternative paths for technological development. It tells us that the future has already been decided, and the only choice is whether to embrace it or be left behind.
This deterministic framing also explains why so many libertarians found themselves drifting toward reactionary politics. If democracy is doomed, then why bother defending it? If technology is going to replace governance, then why not accelerate the process? This is how techno-libertarianism became a gateway to neoreaction—it replaced the classical liberal commitment to open debate and incremental progress with an absolutist vision of history that justified abandoning democratic ideals entirely.
When Musk gains control of Treasury payment systems, or Trump declares he won’t enforce laws he dislikes, they’re implementing ideas incubated in the crypto world. The notion that code can replace democratic institutions, that technical competence should override democratic negotiation, and that private power should supersede public authority—these ideas moved from crypto theory to political practice.
Both Srinivasan’s “network state” and Yarvin’s critique of democracy see technology as a means of escaping democratic constraints, but they approach it differently. Yarvin advocates for capturing and dismantling democratic institutions from within, while Srinivasan proposes building parallel structures to make them irrelevant. We’re now witnessing the convergence of these approaches—using technological control to simultaneously capture and bypass democratic governance.
These ideological frameworks might have remained abstract theorizing if not for a unique convergence of factors that made their implementation suddenly possible. The rise of Trump—a figure simultaneously hostile to democratic institutions and eager to embrace tech oligarchs—presented an unprecedented opportunity. Here was a potential autocrat who didn’t just accept Silicon Valley’s critique of democracy, but embodied it. His contempt for constitutional constraints, his belief that personal loyalty should override institutional independence, and his view that government should serve private interests aligned perfectly with Silicon Valley’s emerging anti-democratic worldview. When combined with unprecedented technological control over information flows, financial systems, and social networks, this created a perfect storm: the ideology that justified dismantling democracy, the political vehicle willing to do it, and the technological capability to make it happen.
The financial crisis created the conditions for anti-democratic thought to take root in Silicon Valley, but the actual transformation occurred through a series of distinct phases, each building on the last. Let’s trace this evolution carefully:
The institutional context for this transformation is crucial. Gallup polls show trust in the media fell from 72% to 31% between 1976 to 2024, while distrust in government hit 85% post-2008, according to Pew Research. This erosion of institutional trust created fertile ground for alternative power structures. As the Brookings Institution noted in a 2023 analysis: “Tech leaders increasingly adopt neo-feudal framing of users-as-serfs, reflecting a broader shift away from democratic conceptions of citizenship.”
The danger lies not just in what these operatives are doing, but in how their actions systemically dismantle their capacity for democratic resistance. What we are seeing is an exact implementation of Curtis Yarvin’s “RAGE” doctrine—Retire All Government Employees—that he first proposed in 2012. But what makes this moment particularly significant is how it combines multiple strands of neoreactionary thought into coordinated action. When Yarvin wrote about replacing democratic institutions with corporate governance structures, when he argues that technical competence should override democratic process, he is describing precisely what we’re now watching unfold.
Consider how this maps to Yarvin’s blueprint: First, remove career officials who might resist on legal or constitutional grounds. Then, install private technical infrastructure that makes oversight impossible.
The goal isn’t just to change who runs government agencies—it’s to fundamentally transform how power operates, shifting it from democratic institutions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.
But what makes this implementation particularly dangerous is how it combines Yarvin’s institutional critique with Balaji Srinivasan’s technological vision. Where Yarvin provided the theoretical framework for dismantling the democratic institutions, Srinivasan’s “network state” concept provided practical tools and training. Many of these young operatives came through programs explicitly designed to build parallel governance structures outside of democratic control, operated by Srinivasan.
What we’re witnessing isn’t just a power grab—it’s the culmination of an ideology that has been incubated, tested, and refined for over a decade.
First, these thinkers argued that democracy was inefficient. Then, they created technological tools—cryptocurrency, blockchain governance, and AI-driven decision-making—to bypass democratic institutions entirely. Now, they’re no longer experimenting. They are seizing control of government infrastructure itself, reprogramming it in real-time to function according to their vision.
This is why focusing solely on the technical aspects of what’s happening inside agencies misses the deeper transformation underway. Every unauthorized server, every AI model, every removed civil servant represents another step in converting democratic governance into what Yarvin called “neocameralism”—a system where society is run like a corporation, with clear ownership and control rather than democratic deliberation. The infrastructure being built isn’t meant to serve democratic ends—it’s meant to make democracy itself obsolete.
The strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” was never just about controlling the news cycle—it was about reshaping the conditions of governance itself. The goal was not just to mislead, but to create an environment so chaotic that traditional democratic decision-making would become impossible.
First, they disrupted journalism, replacing truth with engagement-optimized feeds. Now, they are disrupting governance itself. Your news, your politics, your very reality—automated, privatized, and controlled by those who own the network.
And then, once the public lost trust in government, the tech elite could present the solution: a new, AI-driven, algorithmically optimized form of governance. One that wouldn’t be subject to human irrationality, democratic inefficiency, or the unpredictability of elections. Just like social media companies replaced traditional news with algorithmic feeds, these technocrats sought to replace democratic governance with automated decision-making.
What’s happening inside the Department of Government Efficiency is the final phase of this plan. The old democratic institutions, weakened by years of deliberate destabilization, are being replaced in real-time by proprietary AI systems controlled not by elected officials, but by the same network of Silicon Valley operatives who engineered the crisis in the first place.
We are not heading toward this future—we are already living in it.
Government functions that once belonged to democratically accountable institutions are already being transferred to proprietary AI systems, optimized not for justice or equality, but for efficiency and control. Already, decisions about financial regulation, law enforcement priorities, and political dissent are being made by algorithms that no citizen can vote against and no court can oversee. Your rights are no longer determined by a legal framework you can appeal—they are dictated by a set of terms of service, changeable at the whim of those who control the network.
Resistance and Alternatives
Despite the growing influence of these anti-democratic ideas, they have not gone unchallenged. Scholars like Evgeny Morozov have critiqued the “technological solutionism” that underpins much of this thinking. Grassroots movements advocating for digital rights and democratic control of technology have gained traction. Some tech workers themselves have begun organizing against the more extreme visions of their employers.
However, these resistance efforts face an uphill battle against the immense resources and influence of those pushing for a post-democratic future.
And if we do not act now, we may wake up one day to find that democracy was not overthrown in a dramatic coup—but simply deleted, line by line, from the code that governs our lives.
And yet, the most terrifying part? Donald Trump, the supposed strongman at the heart of it all, is oblivious. He has no grand ideological project beyond his own power. He does not understand the system being built around him, nor the fact that his own presidency is merely a vehicle for forces that see him as a useful, temporary battering ram against democracy.
But those around him? They understand perfectly.
J.D. Vance, the Vice President in waiting, has studied Curtis Yarvin’s work. Peter Thiel, his longtime patron, has been funding this vision for over a decade. Balaji Srinivasan is writing the blueprint. Elon Musk is laying the infrastructure. And the young operatives now wiring AI models into the Treasury Department—disbanding civil service, bypassing traditional government, and replacing democratic accountability with technological sovereignty—are working toward a future that will long outlast Trump himself.
This is not about Trump. This is about what comes after him.
Actuarial realities do not favor an aging leader with a declining grasp on policy. But they favor the thirty- and forty-somethings laying the foundation for the post-democratic order. The men who have spent the past decade engineering an exit from democracy are no longer whispering in the dark corners of the internet. They are in power, with money, AI, and a plan. And democracy, in its current form, has never been closer to the brink.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei, Elon Musk declares from his digital throne—the voice of the people is the voice of God.
But in the world they are building, the people have no voice. The algorithms speak for them. The executives decide for them. The future is optimized, efficient, and entirely out of their hands.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei. They whisper it, as they lock the gates.
Martin Borman, Nazi in Exile
Here’s a pair of pieces about the DOGE surveillance state currently under construction. Or rather, the DOGE/Palantir surveillance state. Yes, as we’re going to see, not only is DOGE seemingly attempting to build some sort of ‘master database’ on everyone in the US but Palantir appears to be the firm that has been tapped to actually construct it. Which is more or less what we should have expected.
First, the New York Times just had an op-ed by investigative journalist Julia Angwin warning about the growing evidence that DOGE hasn’t just been tasked with ‘dismantling the administrative state’, a core goal of Project 2025. It’s not just destruction. DOGE is building things too. Building something awful: the “database of ruin”.
That’s the term coined back in 2009 by Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm who envisioned the implications of the merger of all of the different databases of the US federal government into a single master database. A database that would contain the most sensitive information on everyone in on location. “Almost every person in the developed world can be linked to at least one fact in a computer database that an adversary could use for blackmail, discrimination, harassment or financial or identity theft,” as Ohm put it. That was 16 years ago. Here we are.
And as Angwin also warns, while the construction of such a ‘database of ruin’ would most likely violate federal privacy laws, those laws don’t actually include any forms of punishment for breaking them. Judges lack the ability to levy meaningful fines or easily halt illegal actions and no enforcement agency exists to investigate violations. It’s a law in name only. That’s what protecting the US public from wild abuses of privacy with their federal data.
And that warning by Angwin bring us to another recent story from last week about DOGE’s big immigration plans. An immigration plan that just happens to involve fusing a number of federal databases into one master database that can be used for rapidly generating immigrant “targeting lists”. But while whistleblowers have already come forward warning about DOGE employees showing up with backpacks of laptops — each one containing a database from a different federal agency — for the purpose of merging them, it doesn’t sound like it’s the DOGE employees who will be building and maintaining this master database. That job will be going to Palantir. Which is hardly a surprise given the role Palantir played during President Trump’s first term providing immigration database services. Except, of course, there’s no reason to assume this master database is going to be limited to immigrants or immigration-related activities. What that article is describing is effectively the use of immigration enforcement as the pretext for building the “database of ruin”. Built and managed by Palantir.
Ok, first, here’s Julia Angwin warning. A warning that DOGE isn’t just building a surveillance state that will be watching all of us going forward. It’s building a tool that can be used to look back in time and find some, anything, compromising on virtually anyone:
“President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged, it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have been told that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or ‑Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).”
An AI-powered federal surveillance state. That’s the nightmare situation that appears to be emerging out of all this DOGE madness. Or as Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm described such a database back in 2009, a “database of ruin”, which also happens to be an authoritarian dream:
And as the article sadly reminds us, while the creation of such a ‘master database’ would likely be illegal and in violation of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974, there’s no real enforcement mechanism for the privacy law. Judges can’t impose fines or easily halt illegal actions. So yeah, it’s likely against the law and also going to happen anyway:
And that alarming op-ed brings us to the following piece about the “master database” currently being constructed by DOGE. Well, DOGE and Palantir. As we’re going to see, it appears that Palantir has been tapped as the go to entity for building these DOGE databases, ostensibly for immigration enforcement purposes much like the role Palantir played during Trump’s first term. And while the generation of “targeted lists” of individual immigrants appears to be the current plan, there’s obviously nothing stopping DOGE (and Palantir) from generating whatever “targeted lists” they choose once this “master database” is constructed. Sure, there are already whistleblowers warning about DOGE employees recklessly working to combine sensitive information from Social Security, IRS, HHS and other departments into a single, cross-agency database, it’s not like there’s realistically going to be any repercussions...unless we’re talking about repercussions for the whistleblowers:
“The goal is to create a massive repository of data pulled from various agencies, according to sources familiar with the project who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk about it. The administration has previously sought to centralize information from a number of agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration and Health and Human Services, among others.”
A massive repository of data pulled from various agencies. That sure sounds a lot like the foundations for “database of ruin”. And look who happens to be tasked with actually constructing this database of ruin: Palantir. It’s more or less what we should have expected. And as we can see, one of the official plans for this master database Palantir is constructing is the rapid building of “targeting lists”. Ostensibly just for immigration enforcement purposes. But, of course, there’s going to be nothing stopping preventing “targeting lists” of pretty much any variety desired. As long as the data is capable of generating a list, those lists will likely be generated. At least when a lawless administration is doing the generating. And that ignores all the targeting lists Palantir will be able to generate for its own purposes:
And as we can see can, despite all the focus on immigration enforcement, President Trump himself “because we want to find waste, fraud, and abuse, and want to cut our costs.” And then he went on to dismiss the possibility that this database would be used for deportations. Which only underscores the reality that this ‘targeting list’ capability will potentially be weaponizable against anyone in the US, citizen or not:
And then we get to the reporting on DOGE’s ‘hostile takeover’ of the IRS. And, oh look, it’s Palantir right there, ready to help facilitate this hostile takeover:
And that hostile takeover of the IRS brings us to the highly alarming whistleblower allegations by government employees that, again, sure sound like attempt to build a database of ruin. Information from Social Security, the IRS, HHS, and other departments are being merged into a single, cross-agency database, with DOGE staffers literally showing up with backpacks full of laptops, each containing a separate agency’s databases. And basically no one is overseeing this:
Taking backpacks full of laptops filled with highly sensitive federal databases and merging them sure sounds like a massive violation of the Federal Privacy Act of 1974. It would be nice if someone enforced it. Oh well. Database of ruin here we come.