Debate on Freedom of Speech:
How Silicon Valley’s Corrupted Liber­tar­i­anism Is Disman­tling American Democracy

A shadow revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside Elon Musk’s 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. In short, democracy is being deleted and replaced by AI models and propri­etary technology – Musk’s claims about trans­parent, open-source gover­nance notwith­standing. It is a coup, executed not with guns but with backend migra­tions and database wipes.

This coup, however, isn’t a sponta­neous one – it’s the culmi­nation of a dangerous ideology that has been metic­u­lously developed since the 2008 financial crisis and worked its way from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American gover­nance. And it has been driven by the idea that democracy, being not just ineffi­cient but funda­men­tally incom­patible with techno­logical progress, is itself an obsolete technology that must be “disrupted.”

Never Let a Financial Crisis Go to Waste

The 2008 global financial crisis led to widespread economic hardship and a profound loss of faith in estab­lished insti­tu­tions. As the crisis unfolded, 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. In a post the following year, Yarvin argued that the financial 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. Mises, a pioneer of the Austrian School of Economics, was a thorough-going classical liberal who believed in free markets unencum­bered by fiat currency and a consti­tu­tionally constrained government. He was also an outspoken critic of European imperialism.

But Yarvin contrasted what he considered the Misean approach to free banking 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 broader critique of modern political and economic systems began to resonate with a growing audience disil­lu­sioned with tradi­tional institutions.

The Rise of the Reactionary Libertarian

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. Hoppe’s 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. Hoppe was banished from respectable U.S. liber­tarian circles when he started flirting with fascist ideas and Rothbard has fallen in some disrepute although he remains a beloved of the paleo, Ron Paul liber­tarian faction.

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.

Floating cities and exper­i­mental models of government

By the 2010s, Hoppe’s radical skepticism of democracy had found an eager audience beyond the usual liber­tarian circles, but through a mechanism different from 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 that these tech leaders practiced in their own companies. So Hoppe’s corporate monarchy morphed into Silicon Valley’s corporate techno-monarchy.

Incom­pat­i­bility of democracy and freedom

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, who declared after Trump’s reelection that the 2020 election was a “last stand for the ancién regime that is liber­alism,” 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 “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.

After 2008, a new belief took hold in Silicon Valley: Democracy wasn’t just ineffi­cient – it was obsolete. Over the decade that followed, 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.

From Silicon Valley to Main Street: The Spread of Techno-Liber­tarian Ideas

The Tea Party movement emerged in 2009, channeling populist anger against the Obama administration’s response to the crisis, especially government bailouts. As that movement 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 tech industry’s growing influence gradually became more pronounced in the 2010s as leaders like Thiel began to more actively engage in political discourse and intel­lectual funding.

New media platforms as instru­ments of power

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 – just as Joe Rogan and other sports and enter­tainment influ­encers have shown how democracy-destroying crankery and conspir­acies can be laundered for their non-techie listeners on their platforms. 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. 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 not to be reformed but replaced with more “efficient” mecha­nisms. When it 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.

Technical financial analysis as justi­fi­cation for radical political conclusions

This method­ology – using technical financial analysis to justify increas­ingly radical political conclu­sions – provided a blueprint that others would follow. But 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? 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.

As media scholar Yochai Benkler noted, 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 described as “a kind of fragmen­tation of reality.”

Zero Hedge and the crisis of democ­ratic discourse

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.

Zero Hedge led the way in demon­strating how technical expertise could be used to delegit­imize democ­ratic insti­tu­tions from within and argue that democracy’s replacement by technical systems wasn’t just desirable – it was inevitable.

Existence of a common reality as precon­dition for political legitimacy

This epistemic chaos fostered by algorithmic fragmen­tation wasn’t an accident – it was a crucial tactic in under­mining democracy itself. As 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: From End of History to End of Politics

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. Released 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.

Liber­tar­i­anism, when fused with this kind of techno­logical deter­minism, took a sharp turn away from its classical liberal origins. 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.

CEOs instead of elected government repre­sen­ta­tives and a new digital aristocracy

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 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 Thiel and Balaji Srini­vasan, a Silicon Valley tycoon who made his fortune through bio-genetics and crypto currency startups and who authored, The Network State: How To Start a New Country, took this logic a step further. They argued 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—this is crucial – largely detached from public accountability.

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.

Abolishing democ­racies: The idea of the networking state

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?

Classical liberal liber­tarians accept 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 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 Thiel-backed “network state” project called Praxis (a Misean term) in Greenland. The question, then, was no longer “How do we make government smaller or improve its perfor­mance?” but rather “How do we escape government altogether?”

The answer, for people like Yarvin, Thiel, and 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 neore­ac­tionary ideas, partic­u­larly around the concept of “exit” – the ability to opt out of existing political struc­tures entirely. This shift from techno-liber­tar­i­anism to neore­ac­tionary 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.

From techno-liber­tar­i­anism to neoreaction

The pipeline from techno-liber­tar­i­anism to neore­action 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.

James Pogue’s remarkable Vanity Fair piece, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” traces how these fringe ideas became 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.

Democracy as an untrans­parent system consisting of media, academia and bureaucracy

Pogue details how 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. Srini­vasan emerged as a key figure who helped translate these abstract ideas into a concrete vision. 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 Thiel began to see cryptocur­rency not just as a new financial instrument, but as a tool for funda­men­tally restruc­turing society. 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.

Cryptocur­rency as Subversion

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.

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.

Reactionary as well as liberal perspec­tives on Bitcoin

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.

Imple­menting fringe 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.

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 what I have described as “epistemic author­i­tar­i­anism.” Rather than acknowl­edging that technology is shaped by human agency and political decisions, Srinivasan’s “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.

Techno-liber­tar­i­anism as gateway to neoreaction

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 that laws don’t apply to those who save the country, 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 without to make them irrel­evant. We’re now witnessing the conver­gence of these approaches – using techno­logical control to simul­ta­ne­ously capture and bypass democ­ratic governance.

Trump as enabler of Silicon Valley’s anti-democ­ratic visions

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.

Erosion of trust in insti­tu­tions as a prereq­uisite for power restructuring

The danger lies not just in what these opera­tives are doing, but in how their actions system­i­cally dismantle citizens’ capacity for democ­ratic resis­tance. What we are seeing is an exact imple­men­tation of 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.

Yarvin’s blueprint – remove career officials who might resist on legal or consti­tu­tional grounds and then install private technical infra­structure that makes oversight impos­sible – isn’t merely aimed at changing who runs government agencies. It’s aimed at funda­men­tally trans­forming how power operates, shifting it from democ­ratic insti­tu­tions to technical systems controlled by a small elite.

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. And they are deter­mined to drag the rest of us into this Brave New World whether we consent or not.

“Neocam­er­alism”: The state as a company

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. After disrupting journalism, which replaced truth with engagement-optimized feeds, they moved to disrupting gover­nance itself. Your news, your politics, your very reality – automated, priva­tized, and controlled by those who own the network. 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.

Replacing democ­ratic insti­tu­tions with AI-systems

What’s happening inside “DOGE” 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 unaccountable 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.

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.