Curtis Yarvin and the Temptation of Techno-Tyranny

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Illustration (Donny Evans)

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Once upon a republic, tyranny came booted and helmeted, shouting slogans and toppling statues. Today it slips through the firewall, wears a Patagonia vest, and sends emails with subject lines like The End of Democracy—And Why That’s a Good Thing.

The aspiring tyrants of our time do not march beneath bloodied banners. They wear polos, armed with podcasts and TED Talks. They tweet in lowercase and are more familiar with the WiFi password at WeWork than with a single clause of the Constitution.

Their revolutions arrive not on horseback, but on Slack. They come not with barricades, but with bullet points and brand strategy—sanitized, scheduled, and downloadable. And their prophets—their sages, their self-anointed Ciceros—do not rise from the lineage of Burke or Jefferson, but from the tepid bathwater of Silicon Valley libertarianism, where governance is reduced to a glitch and power is celebrated so long as it comes without responsibility.

One such prophet is Curtis Yarvin, a minor software developer turned dark enlightenment evangelist, who now fancies himself the architect of America’s post-democratic future.

A man of no public office, no civic duty, and no discernible charisma, Yarvin exercises an influence both grotesque and profound. It is he—writing under the smug pseudonym Mencius Moldbug—who has gifted the American right its latest philosophical plaything: neo-reaction, or as it might better be called, monarchy in a hoodie.

Yarvin’s worldview, if you’ll pardon the phrase, is elegantly fascistic. Liberal democracy is inefficient. Voters are dumb. Institutions are slow. Bureaucrats are meddlesome.

The solution? Treat government like a startup. Scrap the Constitution. Fire the lifers. Install a CEO-king with absolute executive power. Let him fire, hire, and execute policy without the tiresome burdens of public consent. In short: give the republic a single neck—and place a boot upon it.

This is not merely ideological idiocy. It is, to borrow from Orwell, a boot stamping on a human face—rebranded as “leadership.”

Were it confined to the darkened forums of political fandom, this ideology might be laughed off. But ideas, like viruses, travel. And Yarvin’s most prominent acolyte now resides a heartbeat from the presidency.

J.D. Vance, Vice President of this increasingly unrecognizable republic, has not only read Yarvin’s work, but appears to draw policy inspiration from it. Vance has openly endorsed Yarvin’s RAGE plan—“Retire All Government Employees”—a scheme as cynical as it is crude: dismantle the civil service and replace it with political appointees, not for skill or experience, but for obedience alone.

The blueprint for this bloodless coup is now institutionalized in a document so brazen it reads like a manifesto. Project 2025, drafted by the usual collection of suits and zealots, proposes to abolish the so-called “deep state,” consolidate power in the executive, and eliminate the structural barriers that once stood between individual liberty and unchecked authority.

It is no exaggeration to say that this is an effort to create a presidency with imperial reach and no sunset clause.

While the architects of this plan whisper about “efficiency” and “accountability,” their true aim is unmistakable: to establish permanent one-party rule under the sheen of democratic process. This is Caesarism via spreadsheet—authoritarianism masquerading as project management.

The consequences are already visible in the legislative theater. On April 10, the House passed the so-called SAVE Act—a name so cloyingly disingenuous it practically begs for scare quotes.

Beneath its patriotic drapery lies a petty and punitive scheme: to force every would-be voter to produce original, physical proof of citizenship—passports, birth certificates, or other antiquated documents—dragged by hand to a government office like offerings to some minor clerical deity.

No matter that voting by noncitizens is already illegal and vanishingly rare; the fraud isn’t in the electorate, it’s in the premise.

According to a 2023 Brennan Center study, over 21 million Americans lack easy access to these documents, and nearly 4 million don’t possess them at all. Their crime? Being poor, displaced, or simply unlucky in the great lottery of paperwork.

In a functioning democracy, such citizens would be welcomed to the ballot box. In ours, they are being quietly cordoned off behind a wall of red tape.

And the dragnet doesn’t stop there. Some 69 million women and 4 million men have names that no longer match their birth certificates—thanks to marriage, divorce, or the radical act of living a full life.

Add to them students who move too often, veterans whose records have vanished in fires or floods, rural residents without IDs, and naturalized immigrants whose documents bear the stamps of long-defunct regimes.

These aren’t anomalies. They are the intended casualties.

The true genius of the SAVE Act lies in its plausible deniability—disenfranchisement not by poll tax or literacy test, but by clerical technicality. It is the quiet violence of paperwork, dressed up as reform. And its authors know precisely what they’re doing: weaponizing bureaucracy to shape the electorate, while swearing allegiance to the very democracy they are gutting from within.

In short: the very people democracy was meant to serve, now treated as suspects for daring to participate in it.

We are told this is about “election integrity.” Please. The real fraud is not at the ballot box—it is in the cynical premise of the bill. There is no statistically significant evidence of noncitizen voting.

What there is, is a long and dishonorable tradition of voter suppression dressed in the patriotic drag of national security.

And what of the man whose name still crowns the ticket? President Trump, who once decried the deep state like a man yelling at windmills, now presides over a quiet revolution he no longer needs to publicly lead. He disavows Project 2025 with one hand while hiring its authors with the other. The plan is too explicit, too crude for his branding instincts—but its architecture is already being installed, brick by administrative brick.

And presiding over this quiet, calculated undoing of democratic government is a man who, despite never winning an election, now haunts the policymaking halls of the republic like a ghostwriter for despotism.

Curtis Yarvin may never hold office, but his ideology has taken hostages.

It is Yarvin’s fingerprints we see, faint but unmistakable, on every page of Project 2025—smudged between the euphemisms and executive orders. This is not merely an agenda for reform, but a software update for despotism.

Like all good programmers, Yarvin abhors inefficiency, and in his deranged calculus, democracy is little more than lag: buggy, bloated, and in need of a hard reboot.

The RAGE plan, the SAVE Act, the obsessive drive to ‘streamline’ governance by gutting it—these are not isolated initiatives. They are code snippets in a larger algorithm to transform the republic into what Yarvin has always envisioned: a sovereign corporation with a single shareholder at the helm.

Therein lies the true horror. Project 2025 does not merely reflect Yarvin’s ideas—it implements them.

The executive becomes the CEO-King, Congress a suggestion box, the judiciary a minor IT issue to be debugged later.

The SAVE Act, for its part, is not just voter suppression. It is a database purge—an attempt to sanitize the electorate by deleting the entries deemed unclean, unreliable, or insufficiently credentialed.

We used to purge rolls with rubber erasers. Now we do it with regex and a smug grin.

Yarvin’s ideology thrives in this sterile, spreadsheeted approach to authoritarianism. It demands obedience, not ideology. It asks not for loyalty to country, but for compliance with protocol.

It wants you tagged, numbered, and preferably too confused to protest. And it has found in today’s Republican apparatus not just willing accomplices, but enthusiastic beta testers.

One almost envies the raw, naked tyranny of history—the jackboots, the mobs, the banners in the square. At least it had the decency to be obvious.

What we face now is far worse: tyranny rebranded, reengineered, and running silently in the background, like malware embedded deep in the firmware of the state.

And Curtis Yarvin—unburdened by elections, unbothered by scrutiny—just keeps writing the code.

Let us have no illusions. What Yarvin proposes—what Project 2025 enacts—is not the future of governance. It is its auto-erotic asphyxiation. A self-induced suffocation of liberty, carried out not by madmen in uniforms but by smooth-talking nihilists with LinkedIn accounts.

These are not visionaries—they are vandals with diplomas, saboteurs with sinecures. Their dream is not of progress, but of control: cold, constant, and unaccountable.

And if we do not name them, shame them, and resist them with the full force of reason and revolt, then we will deserve precisely what we get: a republic reduced to an app, administered by algorithms, overseen by a CEO with a god complex, and debugged by men who believe freedom is the problem and power is the fix.

Yarvin may fancy himself a philosopher-king.

In truth, he is nothing more than a court eunuch for the next autocracy, whispering poisoned verses into the ears of cowards.

And those who follow his lead—who praise his vision while pretending to preserve democracy—deserve not your curiosity, but your contempt.