In Part 1 of this series, we explored the political philosophies that have long been adopted and promoted by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and considered the implications, given both men’s obvious influence on the Trump administration. Musk is a high-profile advocate of Technocracy, and Peter Thiel is an accelerationist neoreactionary who favours, in particular, the Dark Enlightenment. Before you read this article (Part 2), I urge you to familiarise yourself with the explanations of Technocracy and the NRx (the neoreactionary movement) provided in Part 1. Otherwise, many of the references here will lack context.

As we noted in Part 1, Thiel and Musk are part of the oligarchic class by virtue of being invited to join a network led by other oligarchs whose stratospheric wealth far surpasses that of the names published on the “richest people in the world” lists. Welcomed into their exclusive club, Thiel and Musk are made men. In Part 2, we will explore how the political philosophies and the associated economic theories of Thiel and Musk are shaping public policy. Keep in mind that these two men are far from alone in attempting to create an American gov-corp Technate.

Libertarian Technocrats?

Although they borrow some libertarian ideas, there is nothing truly “libertarian” about either technocrats or accelerationist neoreactionaries. Their convoluted theories, once applied, could not be more authoritarian, more anti-liberty. Just as it is an oxymoron to describe Musk as a “libertarian technocrat,” so is it absurd to think of Peter Thiel as an “anarcho-capitalist.” Yet propagandists persist in encouraging us to see them in these terms. Witness a 2014 article in The Atlantic titled “The Libertarian Capitalist’s Case for State Power and Making No Money.”

It is possible that people like Thiel and Musk self-identify as libertarians because they think “liberty” means freedom granted by — and to — the oligarchy.

In Part 1, we referenced the Venetian Republic. The Doge of Venice was the ruler of the banking, finance, and commercial empire of the Venetian Republic. That is to say, the Doge was given the liberty to rule by the oligarchs of the day. We might wonder if the naming of the Department of Government Efficiency (the DOGE) that Musk leads deliberately references the Venetian magistrate. Some say it does, while others suggest another possibility. 

Created as a joke in 2013 by cryptographers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, the Dogecoin, a memecoin, has seen its price and market cap soar and fluctuate wildly thanks in no small measure to Elon Musk’s comments about it. Much of Musk’s talk about Dogecoin has been deliberately provocative. For example, in 2019 he declared himself the “former CEO of Dogecoin,” though that was never the case. His social media posts alone have provoked major changes in the price of Dogecoin. Musk has also aggressively hiked its value by, for instance, hinting it might become the basis of the proposed “X pay” payment system on his newly acquired ‘X’ platform — formerly Twitter. 

Musk encouraged bullish investment in Dogecoin. Of course, just because someone encourages you to do something that doesn’t negate your personal responsibility to conduct due diligence. When some investors lost their shirts, as Dogecoin prices tumbled, they tried to sue Musk in 2022 with a potential $258 billion class action lawsuit. The case was dismissed last year. The judge ruled that Musk’s comments were just “aspirational and puffery, not factual and susceptible to being falsified.” Though it is worth noting the offhand comments of one man took the Dogecoin from a literal joke — a crypto parody — to achieving a market capitalisation of $14.5 billion in 2021. 

If there is an in-joke to the naming of the DOGE, nominally led by Elon Musk, some argue it is Musk’s fondness for the Dogecoin that is reflected in the D.O.G.E acronym. Yet, the symbolism of “the Doge ”— one who is granted the liberty to rule by oligarchs — is perhaps more conspicuous. Just as with the term “Accelerator” — meaning high-impact investment to accelerate the growth of a startup — an obvious underpinning ideology is implied, even if rarely discussed.

In the introduction to his 2012 treatise, “The Dark Enlightenment,” political philosopher Nick Land highlighted the importance of an article written three years earlier by oligarch Thiel. 

Land wrote:

One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness. Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

In a related article Thiel penned, titled “The Education of a Libertarian,” he was describing himself, and yet the personal philosophy he outlined in it was pure accelerationist neoreactionism.  

Thiel opined that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim indeed,” given that the government’s response to every crisis was “more government.” He also claimed that the post-WWI deflationary depression in Western nations was the last “sharp but short” shock to have allowed the alleged advantages of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” to flourish. After that depression, he said, so-called “democratic” politics had stifled the opportunities to capitalise on crises. As a result, Thiel said he no longer believed “that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world.” 

Asserting, in so many words, that democracies were useless, Thiel announced he had found a new life goal:

In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called “social democracy.” The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it.

For Thiel, the “unthinking demos” is us: the holders of the “neo-puritan faith” in progressive “social democracy” — the acolytes of the Cathedral (and the people whom Nick Land considers “inarticulate proles”). In Thiel’s view, we must embrace our “technoplastic” future, become intelligible, move beyond politics, and liberate capitalist innovation by swearing fealty to the gov-corp model. 

To this end, Thiel identified three “technological frontiers” upon which he could construct his darkly enlightened aristocracy.

[1] Cyberspace was the first frontier he identified. There, Thiel focused on creating “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution.” Cyberspace would enable “new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states” — and would result in a new world that would “force change on the existing social and political order.”  [2] Outer space would be another Thiel frontier, where the “libertarian future of classic science fiction” could be built.  [3] Seasteading would be his interim frontier, where the unclaimed oceans could be settled by humans. He called seasteading “more tentative than the Internet, but much more realistic than space travel.” Seasteading would at least give us the time to develop the outer-space ideas on earth, prior to colonising the stars.

These frontiers are necessary, Thiel insisted, because “we are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” He concluded: 

We do not know exactly how close this race is, but I suspect that it may be very close, even down to the wire. Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person [Trump?] who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. [Emphasis added.]

Between 2006 and 2012, Thiel was instrumental in organising the Singularity Summits convened by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute — originally the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) — in partnership with Stanford University. Thiel provided much of the funding.

Thiel cannot be both an advocate of accelerationist neoreaction and simultaneously an anarcho-capitalist — a libertarian. The two philosophies are mutually exclusive.

In Part 1, we noted the technocrats’ rejection of the notion that “all men are created equal.” In a similar vein, Land, Yarvin, Fisher, and other accelerationists consider it essential to have a ruling entity, which can only be comprised of a few human beings exercising an unequal, additional right to rule. Both the technocrats and the accelerationists fundamentally misunderstand, or misinterpret, what the Preamble to The Declaration of Independence means. They completely ignore the second clause of the relevant declaration — namely, “that they [human beings] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“Equality,” in real libertarian thinking, does not infer a held belief that everyone is the same — though that is certainly how technocrats interpret the word.

Libertarian “equality” doesn’t deny that people have relative strengths and weaknesses. It is not a rejection of either leadership or possible forms of meritocracy. It self-evidently means that every human being has an equal right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are unalienable — or inalienable. Our rights are not decided for us by others or limited by others, and no one on earth has any more or any fewer “equal rights” than anyone else.

This idea is not difficult to grasp. It is central to the political philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, as clearly enunciated by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995):

[N]o man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the “nonaggression axiom.” “Aggression” is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else.

Anarcho-capitalism wholeheartedly rejects the initiation of the use of force — the aggressive imposition of claimed authority — by the state to coerce individual persons or seize their property. An example is the threat of fining or imprisoning someone who hasn’t paid taxes to the “proper” authorities. Anarcho-capitalism resoundingly rejects the state and all its dictatorial demands.

By contrast, the proponents of Technocracy and the proponents of the Dark Enlightenment, such as Musk and Thiel, are not interested in restricting state power, though they may say otherwise. Instead they wish to move the state from the public to the private sector and expand its power once sufficiently privatized. True, they oppose “representative democracy” and characterise it as both a “democracy” (which it isn’t) and a bureaucratic system riddled with problems (which it is), but the solutions they offer, to all intents and purposes, magnify the power of the very state they supposedly condemn.

What the believers in Technocracy and the believers in the Dark Enlightenment both propose are compartmentalised, hierarchical sociopolitical power structures that couldn’t be more state-like or more authoritarian. They seek to expand and maximise the power of the state, though in slightly different ways. Calling their new model of the state either a Technate (as technocrats do) or a gov-corp (as accelerationist neoreactionaries do) doesn’t change the nature of the tyrannical statism they desire to foist on the rest of us.

The Technopopulist Myth

The term “technopopulism,” coined by political theorists Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti, has increasingly been bandied about. While the US voters who elected Trump were offered technopopulist promises, this was clearly a sales pitch to entice them to support a gov-corp Technate.

“Populism” can be broadly defined as a political attempt to “appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” “Technocracy” is commonly said to mean “a government or social system that is controlled or influenced by experts in science or technology.”

Neither left-wing nor right-wing, technopopulism promises a new kind of politics based on the belief that the more limited role of elected politicians is to put the appropriate teams of experts together to guide policy and to find technological solutions to social and economic problems, thereby benefiting “ordinary people.” But the apparent technopopulist offer to retain democratic accountability in the US is a deceit.

The technopopulists say they want to unleash “technocracy” — with a small “t” — for the public good. But the new government system they propose is constructing “Technocracy” — with a big “T” — to serve the interests of the “American elites.”

This is evident from The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (aka The 2025 Presidential Transition Project), Promise to America. It claims its purpose is to “defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.” While defanging and defunding woke warriors holds allure for American voters, the Project 2025 methodology actually subverts US “representative democracy.”

The Trump administration is evidently closely allied with Project 2025 — denials notwithstanding. One such obvious tie: Trump has nominated Russell Vought to return to the post of director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and, by no coincidence, Vought was a key figure in convening the Project 2025 initiative. Project 2025 contributors were influential in Trump’s first administration and are no less conspicuous in his current picks for office.

Project 2025 sets a presidential agenda for the first 180 days in office that seeks to empower the executive branch to meet these key goals: dramatically reduce the size of the public sector bureaucracy; privatise and deregulate the functions of the state; and liberate American technological innovation by “shuttering” it off from the China tech sector’s alleged infiltration.

Thus, according to Project 2025, US technology can, if applied properly, be used to resolve all manner of social problems—from anti-American inequality of opportunity in the education system to woke propaganda infesting the media. In other words, American technology produced by Americans and for Americans can supply every long-sought answer to America’s ills. The power of American AI can be set free to, for example, police social media and tackle abuses such as Medicare fraud. Project 2025 offers the additional justification that the US is in an AI arms race with China and, therefore, must invest in AI accordingly.

Trump issued a slew of executive orders following his inauguration. These days, this is not an unusual practice for an incoming US president. However, Trump’s EOs were clearly heavily influenced by Project 2025.

Ironically, The Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 are bankrolled by some of the “elites” the project accuses of betraying Americans. The Coors, Koch, Uihlein, Barre Seid, Bradley, and Scaiffe families are among the financial backers of both the Foundation and Project 2025.

Rather than technopopulists it is the “TechnoKings” (see Part 1) who have been “assisting” Trumps selection of his administration’s personnel. Musk’s influence is well known but Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, is another influencer. Andreessen has not just been involved in making Trump’s picks for technology and economic related positions — areas where he perhaps has some expertise — but also for US defense and intelligence posts.

Andreessen’s Machiavellian reasons for supporting Trump are obvious. As reported by the Verge, in July 2024 Andreessen spelled out that he and his partners were backing Trump, not because they shared any of the concerns voiced by Republican voters, but because they could use the Trump administration to deliver the regulatory environment they wanted for their project to succeed.

That project is a gov-corp Technate. Not technopopulism but Techno-Optimism. 

In 2023, Marc Andreessen published The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. He explained precisely why he and his TechKing partners have seized their opportunity: 

We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being. [. . .] We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology. [. . .] We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance. Give us a real world problem, and we can invent technology that will solve it. 

[. . .] Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.[. . .] We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to [. . .] ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever. [. . .] 

We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral, [. . .] as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems. [. . .] We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone. [. . .] We believe in Augmented Intelligence just as much as we believe in Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent machines augment intelligent humans, driving a geometric expansion of what humans can do. 

This is pure accelerationist neoreaction strongly influence by Technocracy. It is Nick Land and notably not Curtis Yarvin that Andreessen considers among the “Patron Saints” of Techno-Optimism.

People like Thiel, Andreessen, and Musk are serious. They want to implement the Dark Enlightenment and are hell-bent on establishing gov-corp Technates. Their oligarch network is indistinguishable from the Trump administration. Currently, the most powerful nation on earth is in their hands.

In true technopopulist fashion, it is perhaps Andreessen’s identification of gov-corp enemies that is most revealing: 

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas. Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.This demoralization campaign is based on bad ideas of the past – zombie ideas, many derived from Communism, disastrous then and now.

The eradication of these “enemies” reads like an American voters’ wish-list. Ridding themselves of the globalist’s overreach exercised through institutions like the WHO, the WEF, the UN and even NATO, is what they seemingly voted for. Andreessen attempt to associate ideas like “sustainability,” “stakeholder capitalism” and even “social responsibility” with communism is, at best, wrong, but appears to be disingenuous and mere pandering. This is the Dark Enlightenment’s technopopulist sales pitch.

Escaping the grasp of the oligarchs was obviously a vote winner. But the American public has not escaped, on the contrary it has fallen into the clutches of the most authoritarian oligarchs imaginable. Oligarchs who, perhaps for the first time in history, not only have the political authority but the technology to make their gov-corp Technates a reality.

This is a clear and present danger to all of us. Not just Americans.

The same commitment to accelerationism and creative destruction is evident everywhere. In essence, gov-corp is the ultimate public-private partnership — a kind of inverted fascism where the private stakeholders use the claimed authority and violence of the state to achieve their goals.

The construction of Technates is not limited to the US. Arguably China, for example, is already operating a public-private Technocracy. What is happening under our noses is no libertarian dream realized. It is the construction of an all-cognizant, all-controlling, all-consuming global network of gov-corp Technates overseen by a bureaucracy of multiple poles.

On the surface, the new brand of technopopulist politics we’ve been examining seems to be anti-Establishment. At least, that’s how it’s being presented. It will use high-tech solutions and AI analysis to, for instance, deliver “lower taxes, much cheaper energy (green and fossil), faster growth and a productivity revolution.” Lest we forget, it will “make America great again” (MAGA).

The trouble with this pipe dream, though, is that the ostensible “technopopulists” and avowed neoreactionaries behind it are actually installing Big “T” Technocracy and gov-corp as their solution. Not MAGA, but “Dark MAGA.”

American Gov-Corp Technates

In 2020 Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen , and Coinbase established the low tax, low regulation nascent city state called Próspera on the island of Roatán in Honduras. The promotional blurb for Próspera read: 

Próspera is a startup city with a regulatory system designed for entrepreneurs to build better, cheaper, and faster than anywhere else in the world.

The current Honduras government considers Próspera’s claim to enjoy special economic and regulatory status illegal. The previous Honduras administration under Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) — who was later convicted of drug smuggling in the US — initially created three so-called Zones for Employment and Economic Development (ZEDEs) of which Próspera is one. The initiative was fiercely opposed by the people of Honduras.

The ZEDEs create a “special regime” where investors — Pronomos Capital (Thiel, Andreessen, etc.) — have absolute control of “fiscal, security and conflict resolution policy.” For all intents and purposes, the ZEDEs are startup gov-corps.

In 2022, the incoming administration of Xiomara Castro Sarmiento started the process of repealing the ZEDE legislation. This is proving difficult because the Próspera ZEDE framework has a fifty year “built to last” clause in it guaranteeing the project for that period. Gov-corp investors instigated an $11 billion law suit to stop the Honduras government’s attempts to stymie their ambitions.

The technocrat oligarchs deployed the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) mechanism against the elected government of Honduras. It is not unreasonable to describe their action as a direct threat to bankrupt the entire nation. As we’ll discuss, these oligarchs are not “nice” people. Whether they call themselves Christian or not.

Many of the Próspera trademarks are held by NeWay Capital LLC, founded by Erick Brimen and Trey Goff. NeWay Capital formed the Freedom Cities Coalition (FCC) which is similarly backed by Pronomos Capital — Thiel, Andreessen, Coinbase et al. In 2023, Trump proposed establishing ten so called “Freedom Cities” in the US. The mainstream media focused on his comments about “flying cars,” but he was really talking about embryonic gov-corp Technates.

Reportedly, the FCC is now supposedly “in discussion” with the Trump administration to create gov-corp Technates across the US. Trey Goff said “the energy in DC is absolutely electric” and the ambition was to create “not just ten, but as many as the market can handle.”

If approved by Congress, these “startup nations” — neoreactionary realms — will be city states like Próspera. The FCC calls these “special districts” Prosperity Zones. The technopopulist offer is to unleash innovation, onshore employment opportunities and revitalise the American economy. The FCC objective is to “accelerate the development of new urban centers.”

Freedom Cities will operate in de facto US ZEDEs. The objective is to remove all regulation and allow tech-oligarchs the freedom to do whatever they like. These will be cities without limits, say the FCC and will be “zones of regulatory clarity and economic dynamism, [. . .] allowing entrepreneurs and builders to move at the speed of human ingenuity.”

The accelerationist neoreactionaries and the technocrats are racing ahead. As evidenced by Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, there is no doubt what they have in mind. 

In 2022, Balaji Srinivasan — former Andreessen Horowitz general partner and former chief technology officer for Coinbase — published his book The Network State: How to Start a New Country. In it, he outlined the neoreactionary strategy to “escape politics in all its forms” and enable tech-billionaire oligarchs to form their own sovereign states—sov-corps.

There is nothing pro-American about the NRx’s collective vision. Srinivasan wants the proposed “startup nations” to secede from the US and considers the US outdated and obsolescent.

Shortly we’ll discuss Trump’s peculiar and seemingly unilateral declaration that his administration is intent upon grabbing Greenland — and Gaza apparently. We are supposed to believe that it is Trump who wants Greenland (and perhaps Gaza); that Trump is the great strategist playing some sort of 5D geopolitical chess game. But it is Peter Thiel and his oligarch network that wants to build a gov-corp Technate called Praxis on Greenland. The people of Greenland should be wary. There is no legal limit to the “built to last” territorial expansion of Próspera and the TechnoKing oligarchs have the backing of the World Bank to make sure their project does last. 

A Humane Alternative to Genocide?

Following Trump’s inauguration, The New York Times published an adversarial interview with aforementioned political theorist of the neoreactionary movement (NRx) Curtis Yarvin.

Outlining Yarvin’s contention that the US should be run as a corporate monarchy (gov-corp) under the leadership of an all-powerful CEO (Trump), Times‘ writer and interviewer David Marchese formulated his arguments on the suspected racist aspects of Yarvin’s ideology.

The pair debated nothing of notable interest. The piece allowed Yarvin to forward some of his ideas to a wider public — but without disclosing any of their appalling implications. Meanwhile, the Times‘ Marchese posited a practically irrelevant counterargument.

The legacy media is not going to point out those appalling implications. But this is what Yarvin, the leader of the NRx admired by Peter Thiel and other neoreactionary oligarchs, had proposed in 2008 under his pen name, Mencius Moldburg:

Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma. The best humane alternative to genocide I can think of is not to liquidate the wards [people]—either metaphorically or literally—but to virtualize them. A virtualized human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.

The suspected racist streak in Yarvin does matter when we consider the implications of his gov-corp philosophy. But to imagine that identity politics provides any kind of intellectual basis to tackle the NRx dooms all such opposition to failure. If the objective is to resist accelerationist neoreaction, then harping on about the divisions between the progressive left and the right-wing — or “alt-right” — serves no useful purpose. Such arguments don’t even come close to comprehending what the Dark Enlightenment is. They only deflect the public from paying vital attention to real threats.

The Dark Enlightenment is not racist. It is anti-human race. Its advocates do not care what colour gov-corp’s customers are. They seek, rather, to transform all of humanity, to bring an end to what it is to be a sovereign human being.

Government Customers

Musk has already stated his desire to transform his X platform into a payment service provider and finance portal that, he hopes, could become “half of the world’s financial system.” Thanks in part to the headway made by Facebook’s Libra (Diem) project — more in this shortly — in 2023, Musk was able to start applying for the necessary regulatory approval for his financial domination project.

Via its “Digital State” — again, we’ll cover this in a moment — Ukrainians are the Digital State’s “customers.” Musk wants to X to form the basis of a worldwide Digital State in which all users will be customers.

Citizens as customers of government services is a key component of the gov-corp structure that neoreactionaries like Thiel and Andreessen desire. Just as we see the rise of the accompanying “accelerators” everywhere, so to the description of us as “customers” is seeping into the lexicon of governments the world over.

In 2019, the US multinational corporation IBM, whose operations make it the largest industrial research organization in the world and whose chequered history includes assisting the Nazis to perpetrate a holocaust, explained why we all need to consider ourselves the customers of our governments: 

Today’s society is changing at a record pace as companies worldwide develop innovative solutions designed to make the world a more efficient and sustainable place. [. . .] Apps provide us with personalized information based on geolocation; we can shop online from the comfort of our couch, and organize our finances on our smartphones.[. . .] [I]t’s time to rethink and reinvent public sector services, [. . .] a digital reinvention helps build trust in the public sector as a brand: the government has your back. [. . .] At IBM, we’re there to guide you through the current age of digital reinvention.

IBM, alongside CIA-linked Oracle, is a partner of the UK government’s Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and is assisting it to “accelerate transformation” to a new digital DWP service. For its part, as it proceeds to make a £6 billion cut, the UK DWP has stopped winter fuel payments to pensioners and has committed to freezing and restricting access to disability payments to the disabled. It is effectively lowering unemployment benefits for the sick and disabled and tightening the eligibility criteria for nearly all state benefits. At the same time, the UK government is pushing through the Terminally-ill Adults (End of Life) Bill — commonly referred to as the Assisted Dying Bill — to make it easier for the state to kill people who just can’t take it any more. All of this, according to the DWP, is part of its drive to provide a better “customer experience.”

In 2021, The Biden administration issued Executive Order 14058 to improve the US federal government’s customer’s experience. Consequently, according to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS):

[. . .] every person who pays taxes or uses Medicare is a customer of the federal government. Every veteran who uses a VA facility is a customer, every government employee that fills out their timesheet is a customer. The “customer experience” is how people experience and perceive our government services. It is what happens at the touchpoints when someone interacts with a government service. The customer experience can be a single touchpoint or several over a longer relationship between the “customer” and government. Each touchpoint is an opportunity for a positive interaction that adds up to a positive customer experience.

The mainstream media is avidly pushing the idea that politicians like Trump are in charge. But, not only does EO 14058 illustrate the clear shift towards NRx gov-corp aligned thinking, it also shows that the transformation is not dependent on whatever administration happens to be in office at the time. Gov-corp represents the underlying philosophy driving this governance reinvention. Technocracy is the operating system for the impending Technates, regardless of who you vote for.

The shift to digital money and “digital states” is key to the reimagining of society. Rather like the WeChat “everything app” in China, which operates as a public-private partnership between the government and Tencent — enabling the technocratic state to directly influence an estimated 1.3 billion Chinese customers –– the size of the X user-base gives Musk’s network an opportunity to construct his version of an everything app digital state. 

With an estimated 600 million users, Musk’s team is ready to launch his platform’s X-money payment system. It seems Musk doesn’t anticipate any regulatory problems, as another building block of the X-digital state is dropped into place. As X moves toward becoming a “comprehensive financial services hub,” working in partnership with Visa, the plan is to reportedly integrate digital currencies into the X-money system by the end of the year.  

The new interoperable global monetary system that is emerging has been designed to perpetuate the same old monetary game with the added benefit of AI surveillance and behavioural control. Investors can speculate — engaging in creative destruction — while protecting their digital finance empires by storing value in new digital reserve assets, almost certainly bitcoin. A so-called Synthetic Hegemonic Currency can and is being created, primarily using USD-denominated stablecoins underwritten by US debt. In contrast to the investor experience, it is unlikely to benefit many of its customers. 

Gov-Corp Technocrats Are Not “Nice” 

Contemplating new methods of genocide to rid yourself of whomever you find “undesirable” is something we associate with tyrannical megalomaniacs not egalitarian democratic “leaders.” Unfortunately, certainly in the US, it seems the maniac tyrants have the upper hand. 

As many Unlimited Hangout readers already know, Thiel received investment funds from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel to accelerate Palantir. Part of that arrangement was for Palantir to establish a public-private partnership that would rescue a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project called Total Information Awareness (renamed the Terrorism-IA program in 2003). The purpose of the TIA was to create an all-pervasive US surveillance and population control system, with a heavy focus on pre-crime and other “predictive” interventions that would allow the state to justify any policy it chooses. 

The TIA project faltered when the US public learned of its intentions. State funding was officially withdrawn — which simply meant that the “less controversial” aspects continued under the guise of combating terrorism while the controversial projects went darker still. Ever since 9/11, “terrorism” has been the convenient PR buzz word for covering up a multitude of illegalities. The TIA program continued, unabated, to spy on the entire US population as a public-private partnership. 

Shortly after incorporating Palantir in 2003, Thiel and Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp reportedly met with the TIA’s chief architect, John Poindexter. The pair apparently impressed upon Poindexter that they shared his vision of a US domestic digital gulag. Yet, unlike TIA, which had been housed at the Pentagon’s DARPA, they would develop the TIA system as a private entity. According to New York magazine, Thiel and Karp convinced Poindexter that Palantir would “pull together data collected by a wide range of spy agencies — everything from human intelligence and cell-phone calls to travel records and financial transactions.”

Evidently, In-Q-Tel’s seed funding followed soon thereafter. The CIA remained Palantir’s sole client until 2008. That is to say, Palantir enjoyed a monopoly due to its partnership with the state. 

Although Thiel’s cadre at PayPal — often called the PayPal Mafia — is supposedly responsible for ousting Musk from the company’s CEO spot, the rift between the two men seems somewhat overstated. Just as it is clear Musk hankers to install Technocracy, Thiel’s passion for the Dark Enlightenment is equally unambiguous. Both ideologies are mutually reinforcing. While there are some apparent tensions between Musk and Thiel, they are on the same path. Yarvin, for one, certainly values Musk’s contribution.

Thiel and Musk are already megarich magnates on the order of the robber barons of old. As such, their respective Dark Enlightenment and Technocracy dreams, when realized, are intended to make them “sovereigns” of what Yarvin calls a “patchwork of realms.”

The shared view of technocrats and neoreactionaries that society would be better if it were ruled by the likes of Musk and Thiel is an absurd and dangerous folly. We shouldn’t labour under any illusions that they’re nice.

Anduril Industries CEO Palmer Lucky is another Thiel protégé who, having sold his Oculus VR headset business to Mark Zuckerberg, moved into the war business with the help of Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund. Through Anduril, Thiel is investing in a defence technology that maximises AI’s ability to kill.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have both been instrumental in the development of AI. They combined forces in 2015 to accelerate Thiel protégé Sam Altman’s OpenAI as a “non-profit” research company. Today, propelled by the success of its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot, OpenAI is valued at around $160 billion. Consequently, its “for profit” subsidiary, OpenAI Global LLC, is poised to make fantastic profits.

OpenAI was pitched as a tool for developing AI to “benefit humanity as a whole.” Presumably, OpenAI’s defence contracts and its participation in the Silicon Valley consortium bid to dominate the US military-industrial complex reflect this principled commitment. Or perhaps the ethical stance of the team behind OpenAI is about as plausible as their “non-profit” pretensions.

There is every reason not to trust hypocrites like Thiel and Musk. One of those reasons is Palantir’s encroachment into national health-data systems, which is creating a virtual healthcare data monopoly in some countries — including the UK. This is extremely concerning, because it is obvious that patient care — or even basic human compassion — is not a priority for Thiel’s Palantir. There is nothing “Christian” about Thiel’s conduct. 

On the contrary, Palantir has actively participated in Israel’s Palestinian genocide and in the almost-complete destruction of the Palestinians’ healthcare system. In January 2024, Thiel and Palantir CEO Alex Karp agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and signed a deal with the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) to “harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.”

Of this deal the British Medical Journal observed: 

IOF operations have been described as a “war on hospitals” because of the systematic destruction of Gaza’s entire health system and 943 IOF attacks on healthcare. Hundreds of health workers have been detained, tortured, and killed. 

In addition to directly attacking healthcare, ongoing bombardment, forced displacement of Palestinians, and near complete siege of Gaza, the IOF has created a severe health and humanitarian crisis with high rates of malnutrition, infectious disease, famine, and dehydration.

Several Thiel-backed companies — Palantir (seed-funded by In-Q-Tel),Anduril and digital surveillance company Clearview AI — have all evidently used the Ukraine-Russia conflict as a test bed for their technology. As noted by Stavroula Pabst in her Unlimited Hangout article, “How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War,” these companies are “taking advantage of the conflict to develop controversial AI-driven weapons systems and facial recognition technologies, perhaps transforming both warfare and AI forever.”

Despite Thiel’s self-described libertarian and Christian beliefs, Pabst noted that the net impact of his venture capitalism couldn’t be more inhuman:

[T]hese Thiel-backed groups’ involvement in war serves to develop not only problematic and unpredictable weapons technologies and systems, but also apparently to advance and further interconnect a larger surveillance apparatus formed by Thiel and his elite allies’ collective efforts across the public and private sectors, which arguably amount to the entrenchment of a growing technocratic panopticon aimed at capturing public and private life. Within the context of Thiel’s growing domination over large swaths of the tech industry, apparent efforts to influence, bypass or otherwise undermine modern policymaking processes, and anti-democratic sentiments, Thiel-linked organizations’ activities in Ukraine can only signal a willingness to shape the course of current events and the affairs of sovereign nations alike.

Though Pabst’s piece was written in October 2023, her prescient observations have certainly been playing out. As we embark on 2025, it is clear that Thiel and Musk are among a troop of tech titans who have ingratiated themselves with the Trump administration.

While the war in Ukraine has evidently been used by the “TechnoKings” behind Trump to develop AI weapon systems, the Trump administration has hypocritically positioned itself as peace broker.

Replacing Representative Democracy

On their own, the ideologies of communitarianism, stakeholder capitalism, Technocracy, the Dark Enlightenment, and any other political ideology amount to little more than academic musings. Once implemented through the power and authority illegitimately claimed by the state, however, they couldn’t be more significant.

Thiel has heavily backed current Vice President JD Vance and other Republican political candidates, such as Blake Masters, who co-authored Zero to One: Notes on Startups, Or How to Build the Future with Thiel in 2014. There is a nexus of Thiel protégés surrounding the new Trump administration. It is hard to see how Vance could rise to what some call the second-most-powerful position in the US were it not for the career-long support he has received from Thiel.

As Thiel’s man, Vance’s admiration for the Dark Enlightenment is transparent. Adopting Yarvin’s “Retire All Government Employee” (RAGE) motto, which now seems to be embodied by the DOGE, Vance suggested that a future Trump administrator should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, [and] replace them with our people.”

In 2017, Buzzfeed published extracts from the dump of an email exchange between Curtis Yarvin and Milo Yiannopoulis. In one email, Yarvin revealed that he had watched the 2016 US election results with Thiel and said that Thiel was “fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.” In his 2021 book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, Bloomberg Technology writer Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” according to a July 2024 article by Gil Duran in The New Republic.

Of course, Thiel does not want it widely known that he supports the Dark Enlightenment of the NRx. With its aim to destroy the political realm and replace it with a corporate monarchy, the Dark Enlightenment, if fully understood by the public, would outrage them and would be, for Thiel, a PR disaster. Despite the potential for that to happen, Yarvin’s ideas continue to influence him.

One such crazy notion was revealed by Yarvin in his talk at the March 2012 BIL Conference (an alternative to TED). Speaking as Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin advocated for gov-corp: 

There is no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.

Just a few weeks later, Thiel gave a lecture at Stanford, where he said:

A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable. We are biased toward the democratic-republican side of the spectrum. That’s what we’re used to from civics classes. But the truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups.

Ten days prior to Trump’s inauguration, Thiel used the Financial Times as an outlet to pontificate about the second-term President’s second-time promises to disclose details of the Kennedy assassination plot and to protect free speech, etc. Time will tell if these promises are kept.

In the same article, Thiel laid bare the lineage of his own philosophy:

Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum. [. . .] The future demands fresh and strange ideas. New ideas might have saved the old regime, which barely acknowledged, let alone answered, our deepest questions — the causes of the 50-year slowdown in scientific and technological progress.

Certainly from 2009 onward, Thiel has viewed politics as a vehicle to promote his accelerationist NRx-aligned objectives. Not because he particularly shares the values of any political party, either Democrat or Republican — or, for that matter, Libertarian — but because he recognises that people are programmed to feel comfortable as long as they believe whatever they support has something to do with “democracy.” Remember, Thiel calls us the “unthinking demos.”

In 2014, reporting the evidence of some of the other links between Yarvin and Thiel, Corey Pein, writing for The Baffler, accurately lumped Thiel in with the NRx and called them collectively a bunch of “mouthbreathing Machiavellis.”

Responding to Pein’s piece, Thiel said, according to an article published shortly thereafter in The New York Times:

Actually, I found that vaguely flattering. [. . .] It was the full-on conspiracy theory. In truth, there’s nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were.

This was blatant baloney. Thiel well knows there are people “sitting around plotting the future.” He himself maintains a web of connections with the plotters of which he speaks — and is obviously one of them.

Thiel, as President of Thiel Capital, sits on the Bilderberg Steering Committee. The steering committee sets the agenda for the secretive Bilderberg Meetings where around 130 selected globalist delegates debate policy initiatives behind closed doors. Palantir CEO, Thiel’s associate Alex Karp, is also on the steering committee, as is former chair and CEO of Google Eric Schmidt and the President of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Børge Brende. Consequently, it isn’t surprising that the main topic for debate at the last 2024 Bilderberg meeting was Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been selected as the chair for the next Bilderberg Meeting and will also serve as chair of the next Munich Security Conference (MSC). The UK Guardian reports that his appointment marks a moment where the “influential” Bilderberg group is contributing toward the “concentration of control at the top of the Atlantic alliance.” Noting that Bilderberg brings together “prime minsters, EU commissioners, bank bosses, corporate CEOs and intelligence chiefs,” it was ridiculous for Thiel — a senior Bilderberger — to feign ignorance of those who evidently are “plotting the future.”

Yarvin, in the earlier-referenced interview with David Marchese in The New York Times, was asked what he meant when he said Thiel was “fully enlightened”:

Fully enlightened for me means fully disenchanted. [. . .] It’s a disenchantment from believing in these old systems. And the thing that should replace that disenchantment is not, Oh, we need to do things Curtis’s [or Peter’s] way. It’s basically just a greater openness of mind.

Sure, the Dark Enlightenment rejects the “old systems” — i.e., representative democracy — but Yarvin’s diplomatic response cannot hide the fact that Thiel and other members of the NRx evidently know what they want to replace it with: gov-corp overseeing a network of sovcorp-managed functional sequences in a Technate instead of within existing nation-states.

The US Satellite Gov-Corp Technate In Ukraine

While the war in Ukraine has evidently been used by the “TechnoKings” behind Trump to develop AI weapon systems, the Trump administration has hypocritically positioned itself as peace broker. Obviously, any sane person would welcome the end of hostilities, but there is a clear subtext to the US policy shift.

The Trump administration has emphasised the US potential deal with Ukraine to access Ukraine’s possible rare earth metal deposits as a “win” for US voters. He told the US public that there were “$500B worth of rare earth” in Ukraine. This is highly speculative.

While Ukraine certainly has a lot of coal, oil, gas and uranium, much if that is in territory currently occupied by the Russian Federation. The estimates of rare earth metal deposits in extant Ukrainian territory were made around half a century ago and some, such as independent energy and mining consultant Tony Mariano, have significant doubts about the commercial viability or even the presence of the alleged deposits:

As far as I know, there are no economically viable rare earth deposits in Ukraine. I have evaluated clay deposits that I thought had potential, but I found that they are not viable. This does not mean that there are none, but that more exploration and evaluation is needed.

With regard to the minerals deposits that are known to exist in Russia’s “new territories,” including any possible if unlikely rare-earth deposits, Russian president Vladimir Putin has indicated his willingness to collaborate with the US again. In the spirit of public-private partnership (stakeholder capitalism), Putin told journalist Pavel Zarubin that Russia was ready “to offer [cooperation] to our American partners – when I say partners, I mean not only administrative and government structures, but also companies.”

While Russians and Ukrainians continued to die, Kirill Dmitriev, former Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company and WEF investment guru, and the current CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund — appointed in 2023 by Putin as special representative of the Russian president for investment — said that US energy corporations would welcome “access to Russian natural resources.”

In 2014, the US enabled and supported Ukrainian Nazis (the Right Sector and others) to orchestrate the violent Euromaidan Coup that overthrew the elected president Victor Yanukovich. Ukrainian Nazi atrocities in Odessa and Mariupol immediately followed and marked the start of an eight-year-long war that Russian forces officially entered in 2022.

From the moment Russia began its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine, the US response was focused on seizing economic, financial and resource control of Ukraine in exchange for bolstering its military. It is not unreasonable to observe that Russian intervention enabled the US public-private partnership to capture Ukraine. With the Russian government now looking forward to working with its US partners, and given that the US state was instrumental in instigating the current conflict, one has to wonder what this war has really been about.

Large US corporations, such as Microsoft and Amazon, began the process of digitising the Ukrainian government on February 24^th 2022, the day Russia is said to have “invaded” Ukraine. This process has since seen Ukraine become a world leader in “digital democracy.” Ukrainian citizens are being coerced towards accepting digital ID, digital payments and into total reliance on digital infrastructure for many of their everyday needs. This has been met with great enthusiasm from globalist think tanks, such as The Centre for International Governance Innovation.

As Ukrainian energy and technological infrastructure became more reliant on US corporations, global investors — through the asset management giant BlackRock — agreed to deals with the Ukrainian government to “structure the nation’s reconstruction funds.” 

In November 2022 BlackRock announced: 

BlackRock FMA [Financial Markets Advisory] will advise the MoE [Ukraine Ministry of Economy] on establishing a roadmap for the investment framework’s implementation, including identifying design choices for the envisioned setup, structure, mandate and governance. The MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] formalizes the discussions the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, held in September on the possibilities of driving public and private investments into Ukraine.

The WEF arranged further meetings between Zelensky’s administration and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon alongside a consortium of investors represented by executives from BlackRock, Bridgewater Associates, Carlyle Group, Blackstone, Dell, ArcelorMittal, and others. With the financial architecture in place, and US and other multinational corporations set to capitalise, the emphasis shifted in early 2024 towards reducing the investment risk.

War is the preferred business model for private military contractors (PMCs – mercenaries), or International Defense Companies (IDCs) as they are called in Ukraine. With Ukrainian government legislation in the pipeline to legalise IDCs operating in post-war Ukraine — coinciding with the Pentagon’s decision to ease restrictions supposedly placed on US PMCs (IDCs) working in Ukraine — US PMCs are just one corner of the US military industrial complex set to exploit the thirty-five-fold increase in the Ukrainian defence market created by Russia’s “invasion.” This is yet another tantalising Ukraine war opportunity for multinational financiers, such as BlackRock’s investors for example.

Obviously, a “post-war” Ukraine is needed to turn these investment opportunities into solid ventures. With the US public-private stakeholder invasion of Ukraine complete, and the Russian public-private stakeholders ready to do business, Ukraine finds itself in a precarious position. It is almost completely in the hands of US corporations.

For example, Ukraine is now heavily reliant on Musk’s Starlink for its internet connectivity and other communication systems. Indeed Ukraine’s “digital democracy” is now largely controlled by oligarchs like Musk.

The Ukrainian Diia app is the product of a joint project between the CIA front organisation USAID and the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation which named Diia the literal Digital State. Diia is an “everything app.” It ties Ukrainian citizens to a centralised digital control system (Diia) through which they access government services. Their digital IDs and digital passports, driving licenses, fine levies and payments, their tax returns, tax accounts, their mRNA vaccine certificates and more can all be overseen by the Digital State.

Of course, the overwhelming priority is to end the war. From a humanitarian perspective, at this point, nothing could be more important. Trump will almost certainly be credited if his apparent diplomacy succeeds and this will surely be perceived as more evidence of his great leadership by his supporters.

We are supposed to believe that the Ukraine government’s stalling over Trump’s deal for US corporations’ access to Ukrainian rare earth deposits is the reason why the US has reportedly threatened to cut off Ukraine’s Starlink connectivity. The privatisation of a state like Ukraine couldn’t be more dangerous for its people. Musk was quick to point out that he could personally end Ukraine’s war effort, claiming the Ukrainian military’s “entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” He later added this is something he would not do. Though obviously, given the Dogecoin debacle, Musk’s team fully comprehend the impact his comments have.

In truth, there is a vast network of international investors looking at a post-war Ukraine with avarice. The rare earth deal is a sideshow to keep the public bemused. The whole nation state of Ukraine is ripe for the picking and the transition to a US satellite gov-corp Technate is already well underway.

The New World Currency

As previously noted, one of Peter Thiel’s long-term ambitions has been to create “a new world currency.” Fortuitously, one of Trump’s first executive orders was aimed at strengthening US leadership in digital financial technology. In it, he promised his voter base that he would prohibit “the establishment, issuance, circulation, and use of a CBDC [Central Bank Digital Currency] within the jurisdiction of the United States.”

But there is a caveat: The order “shall be implemented consistent with applicable law.” As we know, legislative “laws” are subject to change at any time.

Trump included in this EO a US government commitment to promote and protect “the sovereignty of the United States dollar, including through actions to promote the development and growth of lawful and legitimate dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide.” [Emphasis added.]

As extensively reported in the four-part investigative series on the cryptocurrency industry published last November by Unlimited Hangout writers Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin, rather than averting the societal risks associated with CBDC, Trump’s January 23^rd executive order arguably portends something far worse.

As Webb and Goodwin pointed out:

[T]he policy of the Federal Reserve since last year has made it clear that they favor “private stablecoin issuance rather than official CBDC issuance.” With stablecoins being just as programmable and surveillable as CBDCs, and some stablecoin issuers like Tether already allied with U.S. intelligence and security agencies, the current stablecoin bill is poised to pave the way for the U.S.’ de facto CBDC and to ensure that Wall Street and well-established titans of digital finance like PayPal have the advantage.

In particular, Thiel, PayPal, Facebook (now Meta), and US financial regulators have, for some time, been preparing for “a new world currency.” In order to understand the process they have been setting up, we first need to consider how this public-private partnership has apparently shaped the financial regulatory framework in the US.

Thiel emphasised the “new world currency” idea in his aforementioned 2009 article, “The Education of a Libertarian” (the piece, you may remember, that influenced Nick Land’s conceptualisation of the Dark Enlightenment). In that piece, he wrote:

[T]he founding vision of PayPal centered on the creation of a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were. In the 2000s, companies like Facebook create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states. By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.

Peter Thiel sat on the Meta (Facebook) board of directors until 2022, when he left to reportedly “focus on political endeavours.” Upon his departure, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his personal gratitude to Thiel for “teaching me so many lessons about business, economics, and the world.”

In 2019, under Thiel’s evident influence, Facebook announced its intention to launch a stablecoin payment system called Libra, which it soon renamed Diem. The project was co-headed by David A. Marcus, who moved to Facebook from PayPal in 2014, and by Morgan Beller, who migrated from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Libra appears to have failed. But, as Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin explain, that interpretation depends upon what one views the purpose of Libra (Diem) to have actually been.

With an estimated two billion-plus Facebook users worldwide, if Libra had succeeded, it would have represented the potential “end of monetary sovereignty” as far as central banks were concerned. Apparently, the mere announcement of Libra’s proposition sent financial regulators into an tailspin. The unregulated issuance of “money” couldn’t be allowed to happen! Hence, Zuckerberg had to be seen being quizzed by pretty much the entire global financial and political “elite.”

The Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC)

In May 2019, Thiel protégé Sam Altman wrote a blog post in which he said:

Although I don’t think the US government can stop cryptocurrency, I do think it could create the winner — let’s call it “USDC” for US Digital Currency — and fix some challenges that governments currently face with cryptocurrency. I think the first superpower government to do something like this will have an enviable position in the future of the world, and some power over a worldwide currency.

In August 2019, at the G7 central bankers symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the main topic of discussion was what the Bank of England’s then-Governor Mark Carney called a growing “destabilising asymmetry at the heart of the IMFS” [International Monetary and Financial System].

Carney told the gathered bankers and financiers that the “world economy was being reordered.” He said that the US dollar remained “important” in the short term but that “the game” must change to suit a “multipolar world.” Therefore, “the global reserve currency”—the US dollar (USD) — needed to transform into some sort of “Synthetic Hegemonic Currency” (SHC).

Carney added:

While the likelihood of a multipolar IMFS might seem distant at present, technological developments provide the potential for such a world to emerge. Such a platform would be based on the virtual rather than the physical. [. . .] 

Technology has the potential to disrupt the network externalities that prevent the incumbent global reserve currency [the USD] from being displaced. [. . .] 

The most high-profile of these has been Libra—a new payments infrastructure based on an international stablecoin fully backed by reserve assets in a basket of currencies including the US dollar, the euro, and sterling. [. . .] 

The Bank of England and other regulators have been clear [. . .] the terms of engagement for any new systemic private payments system must be in force well in advance of any launch. As a consequence, it is an open question whether such a new Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) would be best provided by the public sector, perhaps through a network of central bank digital currencies. [. . .] 

Even if the initial variants of the idea prove wanting, the concept is intriguing. It is worth considering how an SHC in the IMFS could support better global outcomes, given the scale of the challenges of the current IMFS and the risks in transition to a new hegemonic reserve currency like the Renminbi.

So, here is Carney saying that the Libra stablecoin raised the “intriguing” possibility of creating a new SHC “backed by reserve assets” but that Libra itself was “wanting” due to the lack of clear “terms of engagement.” However, if the requisite regulatory “terms of engagement” were “in force well in advance of any launch,” Carney raised the potential to create an SHC using Libra-like stablecoins. This, he proposed, could stave off challenges from new possible hegemonic reserve currency alternatives, such as China’s Renminbi, and create a USD SHC suitable for a “multipolar IMFS.”

A month after Jackson Hole, in September 2019, Zuckerberg met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill to discuss “future internet regulation.” He was also invited to the White House for a “surprise” meeting.

Then, in October, Zuckerberg testified before the House Financial Services Committee about the aforementioned Libra (Diem) and was invited again to the White House — this time for dinner and this time accompanied by then Facebook board member Peter Thiel. The Trump administration didn’t think it necessary to disclose what was discussed, according to an NBC News report.

Immediately thereafter, Zuckerberg’s Libra project began to shift away from a stablecoin based on “a basket of currencies,” and by 2020 it was more closely aligned with the USD. The Financial Times reported in late November 2021 that Libra would initially launch as “a single coin backed one-for-one by the dollar.”

Webb and Goodwin speculate, with good reason, that the whole point of Facebook’s purportedly aggressive pursuit of Libra (Diem) was not so much about the stablecoin itself but rather about creating a threat that would appear to warrant regulatory change. It appears the team behind Libra always anticipated the failure of Libra and the resultant formation of a regulatory framework for a potential USD Synthetic Hegemonic Currency.

Going back to July 2019, two months before the Jackson Hole symposium, Facebook stated in an SEC filing:

Libra has drawn significant scrutiny from governments and regulators in multiple jurisdictions and we expect that scrutiny to continue. [. . .] These laws and regulations, as well as any associated inquiries or investigations, may delay or impede the launch of the Libra currency. [. . .] As such, there can be no assurance that Libra or our associated products and services will be made available in a timely manner, or at all.

The fact that Facebook (now Meta) knew Libra might fail and was counting on new regulations that would open new digital financial markets could cause careful observers to conclude that Zuckerberg’s Libra project was intended to be an embodiment of “creative destruction.”

While the Libra (Diem) stablecoin didn’t make it, the stablecoin market as a whole has done quite well, if one measures by market capitalization. The leading stablecoins are Tether’s USDT ($140 billion), Circle’s USDC ($44 billion), and the Ethereum blockchain-based “decentralised” DAI ($3 billion). Then we have FD121 Ltd.’s FDUSD ($1.8 billion) and USDD ($750 million), initially issued on the TRON blockchain.

PayPal stablecoin PYUSD, issued by the Paxos Trust Company and currently at $480 million market cap, stands apart because Paxos is a fully regulated US custodian. What’s more, PYUSD is perhaps the most firmly 1:1 USD-pegged stablecoin, backed as it is with a mix of USD deposits, short-term US Treasurys, and cash equivalents.

When the Nixon administration closed the gold window in 1971, ending the monetary system formulated at Bretton Woods in 1944, the USD became fully disassociated from any real intrinsic value (gold), though fractional reserve banking had already practically relinquished the dollar-and-gold association. The subsequent fiat currency monetary system has led to an enormous expansion of the money supply and ballooning of global debt. Those inevitabilities ultimately caused what Carney described as the “destabilising asymmetry at the heart of the IMFS.”

Carney recognised that the world’s leading holders of US debt were Japan and China. Both countries have been accelerating the process of dumping US Treasury securities (government bonds). Their bond market moves further threaten the dominance of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Now Trump has come to the White House with a fiscal policy package promising low domestic taxes and higher international trade tariffs at the very time that his country’s “exorbitant privilege” — the US economic advantage gained by funding its own deficit by issuing the reserve currency every other nation needs to buy — is receding. 

US public spending is fuelled by borrowing — by issuing government bonds. The traditional monetary view would suggest that the only option available to the US is to massively inflate the money supply — again! But, with its staggering $36 trillion national debt, and with other national governments increasingly unwilling to buy that debt (creating a lower demand), US borrowing costs seem set to rise and exacerbate the mounting debt problem.

Bluntly put, the US dollar and the US economy would appear to be screwed. Unless, of course, the US can find some other outlet to absorb its debt. If it can, there’s no reason why the monetary Ponzi scheme can’t carry on. Obviously, it will continue to have a terrible impact on people around the world, especially the poorest — including the poorest Americans. But when have rapacious oligarchs ever cared about social deprivation?

The total supply of stablecoins has now eclipsed $200 billion. In the US, Tether is currently the third-largest buyer of US 3-month Treasuries and the 16^th-largest purchaser of US government bonds globally. Because they absorb US debt, stablecoins are seen as the key to stabilising US interest rates. The proposed Clarity for Payment Stablecoins Act has led some to suggest that it might become a regulatory requirement for USD-denominated digital tokens (stablecoins) to back their coins with nothing but US Treasury bills. If so, under Paxos’ custody, PYUSD is already well-placed to take advantage.

The bitcoin (BTC) hard cap, embedded in its code, ensures that no more that 21 million BTC can ever be “mined” (that is, issued). Every four years “halving” occurs, thereby theoretically reducing bitcoin issuance. This is the polar opposite of the fiat monetary system, in which the money supply can, realistically, only expand. The resulting inflation persistently devalues fiat currency. Bitcoin, however, is inherently deflationary. It is a tempting store of value for oligarchs who have treated the fiat currency system as if it were their own fiefdom to control and have run it into the ground.

Currently the top 21 holders of bitcoin collectively possess 2.3 million BTC, representing around 11% of the total bitcoin supply. At today’s prices, that is the equivalent of $236 billion in BTC holdings.

The presumably pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, author (or authors) of the original bitcoin white paper and possessor of perhaps as much as 1.1 million BTC, is officially the 19th wealthiest individual on the planet, worth around $91 billion. He may not be an individual but a collection of bitcoin founders. Some believe the name was made up by intelligence officials who could be behind the creation of bitcoin.

MicroStrategy, which provides business intelligence and mobile software services and whose leading shareholders are Capital Group, Vanguard, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock, is the second-largest holder of bitcoin after Nakamoto. The third largest are the combined governments of the US and the UK, which reportedly hold $19 billion and $6 billion of bitcoin, respectively. Block.one — backed by Thiel — is the fourth largest, with more than $15 billion. The fifth-largest holder is Tether, owner of the USDT stablecoin, which has $8 billion and is the world’s largest trader of cryptocurrency. Tether has committed to investing 15% of its annual profits in bitcoin.

MicroStrategy founder and Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, grilled last March by Yahoo Finance, called BTC “the most valuable asset in the world” and “the endgame for anybody that wants to own the greatest property in the 21^st century.” And, according to a blurb last October by Forbes senior contributor Billy Bambrough, who has the magazine’s bitcoin and blockchain beat, “Saylor has revealed [MicroStrategy’s] endgame [. .  .] to become a bitcoin investment bank—and to buy up to $150 billion of bitcoin.”

MicroStrategy investors are presumably eager to see that bid succeed. They’re aware, as is Saylor, that being bullish on bitcoin further stimulates demand for BTC and brings “the endgame” closer.

BlackRock apparently agrees. The multinational investment company has seen its global asset portfolio increase to approximately $11 trillion, thanks in no small measure to its pivot toward digital currencies. Hitherto cool on cryptocurrencies, as other large investment houses have been, BlackRock now considers bitcoin in particular to be a digital asset. “We believe,” said CEO Larry Fink last October, that “bitcoin is [an] asset class in itself, an alternative to other commodities like gold.” Also, BlackRock is now among those advocating digitizing the dollar.

Trump’s executive order establishing the Presidential Working Group on Digital Asset Markets has tasked that group with developing “a Federal regulatory framework governing digital assets, including stablecoins, and evaluating the creation of a strategic national digital assets stockpile.” 

Simultaneously, the trajectory toward setting bitcoin as the “new gold alternative” is well underway. Notably, the Swiss government has already started the formal process of amending Article 99 of the Swiss Federal Constitution to allow the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to hold BTC reserves.

“On-ramps” are payment services that allow users to exchange fiat currency for digital assets like stablecoins. “Off-ramp” services allow users to convert digital assets back into fiat currencies. Using stablecoins, pegged 1:1 to the USD, greatly simplifies the process if you want dollars. That said, in a “multipolar IMFS,” Chinese and Japanese customers, for example, might not want USDs. Advances in decentralized finance technology (DeFi) are homogenizing global currencies. An effective SHC, with the USD set to dominate, is rapidly approaching.

Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) facilitates cross-border payment in USDC. This is fine if you want to off-ramp into fiat USDs, but if you want Euros, you still need to deal with the USD-Euro exchange rate (market price). This additional exchange reduces speed and increases the cost of the transaction (gas fees), thereby limiting scalability to non-USD customers.

Decentralized exchanges (DEXs), such as Uniswap, make use of Automated Market Maker (AMM) DeFi. This better enables cross-border transactions between stablecoins backed by different fiat currencies. Cross-chain interoperability protocols facilitate communication and data-sharing between different blockchains. Combined with AMM advances, cross-border stablecoin transactions are consistently becoming faster and cheaper.

Circle’s EURC is a Euro-backed stablecoin fully compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). In 2024, researchers from Warwick Business School on-ramped in USD (USDC) and off-ramped in Euros (EURC) using Circle’s AMM.

The researchers reported:

Given that EURC is pegged to the Euro and USDC to the US dollar, trading in the EURC/USDC market should closely track developments in the traditional EUR/USD market. Indeed, we found that the blockchain market operates efficiently, with EURC/USDC prices staying within 20 basis points — or 0.2 percentage points — of traditional EUR/USD market prices. Furthermore, blockchain prices responded to macroeconomic information, such as interest rate announcements from the US Federal Reserve.

The USD-backed stablecoins have primacy, and a USD-denominated SHC seems by far the most likely outcome. That said, some experts, such as former Binance.US CEO and 1Money founder Brian Shroder, predict a multicurrency stablecoin future. In a recent interview with CoinTelegraph, Shroder said, “We envision a global network powered by stablecoins representing all major currencies.”

Equally, if interoperability protocols and AMM DeFi development continue to accelerate, such a multicurrency system is still likely to protect the USD. Those pushing USD dominance, such as the Thiel-led consortium behind the Global Dollar Network’s USDG stablecoin, with its proposed cross-chain interoperability, evidently have the edge.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) runs The Taskforce on Cross-border Payments Interoperability and Extension (PIE Taskforce). The committee was formed in response to the G20 Roadmap for Enhancing Cross-border Payments (established in 2020 with the final stage three report published in 2023 — hereafter referred to as the G20 Roadmap), which, the BIS notes, seeks to enhance “cross-border payments’ speed and transparency, while increasing access to cross-border payment services and reducing their costs.”

The G20 — short for Group of 20 — is an international forum comprised of 19 member states (including the US, the UK, Russia, China, and India) plus the European Union (EU) and the African Union (AU). Formed in 1999, it is structured as a multipolar global forum of five internal groups with the aim of coordinating economic policy. The finance ministers and central bank governors of the respective G20 member states and of the EU and AU dominate G20 deliberations.

An important contributor to the G20-and-BIS-aligned CPMI-PIE taskforce is Coinbase, which was accelerated into existence by Y-Combinator (see Part 1). Coinbase responded to the recent PIE consultation by making the point that all the G20 Roadmap targets could be met by properly regulated stablecoins. Coinbase observed that “a mixed-payments ecosystem” that supports “traditional bank rails and wholesale payments” can benefit from stablecoin adoption.

The global digital ID network is being created from a range of “interoperable” but “vendor-agnostic” digital ID products. There won’t be just one global digital ID card or biometric ID product—such as a single facial recognition system. Instead, all such products and systems will export data using an agreed-upon machine-readable format. In the case of digital ID products and systems, they will comply with ISO/IEC 19794 Series and ISO/IEC 19785 biometric data interchange formats.

Thus, it is entirely possible that a single global database, perhaps the World Bank’s ID4D or some similar global solution, could collect data from all the interoperable vendor-agnostic digital ID products and systems worldwide. The ID4D project is supporting the introduction of global interoperability standards that will be “capable of facilitating transactions in the digital age.”

The International Organization for Standardization, abbreviated as ISO (not IOS), has an international standard for electronic data interchange between financial institutions. This standard, called “ISO 20022,” is explained as: 

[. . .] a global messaging standard designed to improve communication between financial institutions through structured, machine-readable messages. [. . .] ISO 20022 facilities interoperability and efficiency across payment systems, securities markets, and other financial domains. Its rich data fields and extensibility make it a cornerstone for modernizing global financial infrastructure.

It goes without saying that the BIS — specifically its Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) — is eager to embrace the ISO’s “payments data harmonisation,” which it announced last month. As noted by CentralBank.com, “A key factor in achieving more efficient cross-border payments is the use of the same data standards by all countries, and the ISO 20022.” 

ISO 20022-compliant stablecoins and underlying blockchains are emerging, according to a December 2024 article in CryptoNews.com. This innovation is being propelled by the multipolar G20 Roadmap and raises the potential of establishing a global “unified ledger” — or “shared ledger” — that effectively oversees every digital financial transaction on earth.

In 2024, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, recognizable by its acronym, SWIFT, reported:

The concept of a new, universal shared ledger for digital payments and assets is gaining interest as a way of transforming how transactions are recorded and settled. [. . .] In its Annual Economic Report 2023, the BIS presented its blueprint for a future monetary system, envisaging a new type of financial market infrastructure—a “unified ledger”—which could “capture the full benefits of tokenisation.” [. . .] [T]he shared ledger model could potentially help to improve the cost, speed, predictability and accessibility of cross-border payments — thereby supporting the G20 roadmap. [. . .] [A]n ISO 20022-based messaging layer will enhance the shared ledger proposition.

A Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) is being constructed, but, like its global digital ID counterpart, it is very unlikely to be one stablecoin or one digital asset or token. Rather, as Coinbase developers put it, the SHC will be a “mixed-payments ecosystem.”

The SHC is going to be an interoperable network of “vendor-agnostic” digital tokens. Stablecoins are accelerating the SHC’s development. Interoperability, enabled by machine-readable data harmonisation, will revolutionise business-to-business (B2B) transactions.

The race is on to seize control of the “new world” of regulated stablecoins. Peter Thiel and his protégés, working in partnership with Musk and others, have established a global network of tech and tech-finance companies that have been key drivers in creating a “new world currency.” That we find ourselves where we are today is no accident.

The Public-Private SHC Surveillance State

In 2023, Tether’s new CEO, Paolo Ardoino, was under investigation by the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs for potential sanction-busting financial activity. He submitted a letter to the committee in which he reported yet more evidence of the close relationship between leading players in the financial technology (FinTech) development community and the US defence-and-intelligence complex.

Ardoino wrote:

On December 1, 2023, we launched a wallet-freezing policy designed to significantly enhance the tools available for law enforcement agencies seeking to combat illicit use of stablecoins. [. . .] Tether recently onboarded the United States Secret Service into our platform and is in the process of doing the same with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). These strategic relationships reinforce our commitment to supporting law enforcement. [. . .] We have assisted in freezing, as of the date of this letter, approximately 326 wallets totaling approximately USDT 435 Million for the Department of Justice, US Secret Service, and FBI. [. . .] We look forward to maintaining a close working relationship with law enforcement, policymakers, and regulators in shaping a secure, compliant, and resilient future for digital currencies.

During the Canadian trucker protests against pandemic mandates in early 2022, commercial banks and payment providers facilitated the Canadian government’s demand to freeze protesters’ financial assets and disable supporters’ ability to donate to fundraising campaigns for the truckers. Similarly, the UK government is currently forming legislation that would allow authorities to access citizens’ bank accounts and seize control of their finances — under the guise of combatting fraud.

In both of these examples of the public-private abuse of claimed authority, two mechanisms were and are needed to enforce tyranny: agreement (that is, the banks and payment providers’ willingness to collaborate) and legislation (either existing or new). But in a world of solely digital money, neither policy debates nor the passing of legislation are strictly necessary. Total surveillance of our use of money and the ability to programme our spending is innate to the “new world currency” —USD SHC.

From humanity’s perspective, no matter where we reside, the most alarming aspect of digital currencies — stablecoins, retail CBDC, or otherwise — is their surveillance capabilities and, in particular, their programmability feature. Trump’s new executive order on digital finance suggests that instead of elected officials programming our money, this task should be handed over to multistakeholder partnerships.

To understand why programmability is a risk to all of us, consider the words of Bo Li, the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of China and the current Deputy Managing Director of the IMF. In October 2022, Bo Li said:

CBDC can allow government agencies and private sector players to program — to create smart contracts — to allow targeted policy functions. For example, welfare payments; for example, consumption coupons; for example, food stamps. By programming CBDC, [. . .] money can be precisely targeted [to] what kind of [things] people can own, and [the kinds of ways] this money can be utilised. 

Digital “money” can be programmed to automatically bar us from donating to the “wrong” cause or from transacting with certain “undesirable”individuals. Every transaction we make and all funds we receive will be recorded on the corresponding “ledger” (likely to be a blockchain) from which our financial activity will be monitored, analysed, and inspected. Such a system obviates the need for legislation to snoop into our bank accounts.

China’s digital states — WeChat pay, and the similarly popular Alipay — are fully integrated with China’s e-CNY retail central bank digital currency (r-CBDC). China’s stakeholder capitalist approach to controlling its “customers” payments is not dissimilar to that currently being pursued in Ukraine—using its e-Hyrvnia r-CBDC—and a similar system is proposed by the Russian public-private state.

The head of the State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, Anatoly Aksakov, told the news outlet Rossiyskaya Gazeta that the battle against cybercrime and financial fraud meant that the Russian retail CBDC — the digital ruble — would allow accounts to be blocked, depending on “certain rules.” Payment restrictions could be applied, transactions inspected and control measures taken “if necessary,” he said.

Also adopting the stakeholder capitalism model, Aksakov said Russia’s “major telecom operators, cybersecurity experts and key IT companies,” alongside the commercial banks, would partner with the Russian government to put together these “new measures.” Looking to the future, he suggested “joint ventures” could include the “American banks,” adding that “Visa or Mastercard” could assist with the rollout of the digital ruble control measures.

Like Bo Li, Anatolov also emphasised the social engineering potential of the digital ruble: 

Payments in the digital ruble can be linked to smart contracts, where the transfer or remuneration to the contractor is regulated by a computer program, not a person. [. . .] We are now focusing on using the digital ruble to control the targeted spending of the [fiscal] budget. [. . .] Should we convert maternity capital or child benefit into the digital ruble and make it so that they cannot be spent on alcohol and cigarettes? In my opinion this is a justified measure and such restrictions are necessary.

The US is evidently taking a different path towards its proposed digital state, preferring cryptocurrencies and stablecoins for programmability. But irrespective of whether your government and its partners opt for the retail CBDC or the approved stablecoin route, the outcome is a digital surveillance and control system.

The Programmable Digital State

Stablecoins are certainly no less programmable than CBDCs. Global outsourcing digital employment agency Rise observed:

The programmability of stablecoins through smart contracts opens avenues for innovations such as machine-to-machine payments in IoT applications. [. . .] The future of stablecoin payments is bright, with ongoing innovations and increasing adoption promising to transform how we conduct financial transactions.

These technological innovations portend much more than simply transforming “how we conduct financial transactions.” In its totality, interoperable, AI-controlled digital technology threatens to change every aspect of our lives. If it does, we should not lose sight of the fact that AI is programmed by motivated human beings who hold ideological beliefs.

The Internet of Things (IoT), the Internet of Bodies (IoB); advances in machine-to-machine (M2M) payments — with AI algorithms automatically deducting digital money from our digital wallets absent any human interaction –– and an interconnected network of smart homes on smart grids paints a dystopian future few of us wish to contemplate. Unfortunately, the enabling gov-corp Technates are being built.

The digital currency powered smart home concept has already arrived. This is achieved by linking IoT powered homes to digital wallets overseen by surveillance of the smart grid to which they are attached. Howard Lutnick’s—Trump’s pick for secretary of commerce — investment in Satellogic, via Endeavour, places him and his partners in prime position to capitalise on what the WEF calls the “trillion dollar opportunity” presented by the Earth Observation industry (EO). Orbiting satellite networks harvest data from digital devices and the subsequent AI analyses of the gathered EO data is set to revolutionise pretty much every industrial sector.

Now in office, Lutnick can be confident in his assertion that Satellogic and its investors, including Tether, are “uniquely positioned to dominate the Earth Observation industry.” Just as cryptocurrencies, stablecoins in particular, are providing space for expansion of US debt, so to they are enabling accelerated investment in the development of the emerging “digital states.”

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, such as that being developed by Musk’s Neuralink, is bringing us closer to becoming “technoplastic beings.” It comes as no surprise that Peter Thiel is a Neuralink investor. Thiel also invests in Musk’s BCI competitors — Blackrock Neurotech is one. Again, Tether is also an investment partner of Blackrock Neurotech.

There is evidently technological competition. On the one hand we have Musk’s Space X, Neuralink and X-pay, on the other we have Sattelogic, Blackrock Neurotech and Tether. But as we can see from Thiel’s investment strategy, it is the transhumanist and neurowarfare potential of BCI technology that excites technopopulist oligarchs. Competition stimulates development until the winning monopoly establishes itself.

The programmable nature of the so-called “digital money,” combined with smart devices on smart grids, enabling precise monitoring of our energy use means that, de facto, “Energy Certificates” are being rolled out. 

Trump’s digital finance executive order does not nullify the threat posed by CBDCs. It simply diverts public attention away from the immense threat posed by programmable digital currency in general.

Programmable, privately issued stablecoins are intended to avert the looming US debt crisis by absorbing US debt in cryptocurrencies. But the evident additional hope is that this tactic will give the US a head start in the race toward Technocracy.

When Technocracy was designed in the 1930s, the scale of the surveillance and control system it proposed was soon discarded as unworkable. The idea of creating a bureaucracy capable of monitoring the energy use of every citizen and every business across a continent, using the technology of that day, was a fantastical proposition. Measuring a citizen’s or business’ energy usage via any kind of manageable monetary system, with expenditures controlled by linking the currency to identity, was simply not feasible.

But today, not only is Technocracy finally technologically possible, the infrastructure for the rollout of Technocracy is ,as a result, being actively constructed.

Technologically, such a dystopia is well within the realm of possibility. Do you imagine that the oligarchs behind the construction of the necessary infrastructure would never implement this digital panopticon? If so, perhaps it is time to ask yourself why they are building it. Is it simply because people like Elon Musk want us to live “lives of abundance”?

To be clear: programmable money combined with digital ID is likely to enable oligarchs, via public-private partnership, to oversee “the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism”—that is, Technocracy. It will potentially give them total control of the distribution of “goods and services to the entire population.” In short, technological innovation has made a Technate eminently possible.

The American Multipolar Technate

The newly not-elected prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, is among the few, in the current crop of politicians, who is closely and directly connected to the globalist oligarchy. In a interview with Juno News, given shortly before he became prime minister, Mark Carney argued for the alleged benefits of said global oligarchy:

I know how the world works, I know how to get things done, I’m connected. [. . .] People will charge me with being elitist or a globalist, to use that term, which is, well, that’s exactly, it happens to be exactly what we need. 

Carney’s proposed Synthetic Hegemonic Currency (SHC) is intended to position the West in preparation for the emerging multipolar world order. It is obvious, therefore, that multipolarity poses no threat to globalist oligarchs.

The so-called “global elite” have always been quite open about their ambitions, but Carney’s words suggest that they feel extra-emboldened at the moment. There is nothing new about their concept of a world split into more manageable “regions” or “poles,” but we do seem to be approaching the end of an inexorable path toward it.

We do not have to take that path. It is not yet set in stone.

Carney has openly told us that he and his globalist cronies have not haphazardly stumbled into his proposed SHC, nor have they randomly meandered into the clutches of a multipolar world order or its new IMFS. Conscious, deliberate decisions have been made, and specific steps have been taken, to bring about this state of affairs.

There are people who insist that the push toward multipolarity is being led by the BRICS+ nations — in particular, the Russian and Chinese governments. President Putin and Paramount Leader Xi Jinping have been prominent advocates of multipolarity, for sure. Speaking in October 2024 in the lead-up to the 16^th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, Xi explained the multipolar vision. He said it is about fostering “inclusive economic globalization.” This can be done, he noted, by building “solidarity and cooperation” between countries.

The BRICS (now BRICS+) project forms a bloc, or “pole,” of nation-states. It has already started to redesign globalism. As pointed out by former Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, who now chairs the New Development Bank (NDB) at the heart of the BRICS+ project, “measured by GDP, the BRICS countries have already surpassed the G7 in importance.”

In truth, a multipolar world order has always been the penultimate destination prior to establishing full-blown, centralised global governance. The evidence supporting this conclusion is abundant.

Renowned American historian, professor, and author Carroll Quigley meticulously catalogued the activities of the British/American oligarch network that was inspired by the imperial vision of the early-20th century Rhodes-Milner Group (also known as the Round Table Group). In a 1974 interview with Washington Post reporter Rudy Maxa, Quigley spoke about the “three-power world” that the network envisaged prior to WWII. The idea was that a transatlantic bloc and a united European bloc and an Eastern Soviet bloc would dominate a global “balance of power” structure.

Following a 1956 Special Studies Project directed by Henry Kissinger at the request of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a 500-plus-page document titled Prospect for America: The Rockefeller Panel Reports emerged (its copyright spans 1958–1961). The five reports in it aimed to define the problems and opportunities the US faced in the late 1950s, clarify national objectives, and develop a framework on which national policies could be based.

The United Nations had already been established in 1945 (the UN headquarters was built on land donated by the Rockefellers), but, according to some of the panel report researchers, this international organisation hadn’t delivered on its goals. So, these researchers returned to the original prospect outlined by the Rhodes-Milner Group and suggested “a world divided into smaller units” [page 26] that would “consist of regional institutions under an international body of growing authority” [page 26]:

The most natural multination arrangements are frequently regional. [. . .] Fully developed, they imply a joint accord on monetary and exchange arrangements, a common discipline on fiscal matters, and a free movement of capital and labor. [. . . ] We believe that this regional approach has world-wide validity. [. . .] What is needed immediately is a determination to move in the direction they imply. Regional arrangements are no longer a matter of choice. They are imposed by the requirements of technology, science, and economics. Our course is to contribute to this process by constructive action [pages 188–190].

In October 1968, the Rockefellers supported the foundation of a globalist international policy think tank — the Club of Rome — to implement the “regional arrangements” that they had declared seven years earlier to be “no longer a matter of choice.”

The 1973 third symposium of the WEF is considered by the WEF to have been an important moment in its history.  At this event, Club of Rome co-founder Aurelio Peccei outlined the Club’s concept of the “sustainability of global economic growth” which, WEF delegates were told, required society to reconcile “economic development and environmental constraints.” Consequently, with this in mind, the WEF adopted “Klaus Schwab’s stakeholder concept.”

In same year, September 1973, the Club of Rome wrote a confidential report titled “Regionalized and Adaptive Model of the Global World System.” It proposed that the world be divided into ten “Kingdoms”—comparable to blocs, or poles. Though presented simply as an analytical computer model, the Club of Rome added a vision statement to its report:

Our efforts in the immediate future will be concentrated on further use of the already developed [Kingdoms] model. [. . .] Implementation of the regional models in different parts of the world and their connection via a satellite communication network [will be] for the purpose of joint assessment of the long-term global future by teams from the various regions [Kingdoms or “poles”]. Implementation of the vision for the future outlined by leaders from an underdeveloped region in order to assess with the model existing obstacles and the means whereby the [multi-Kingdom or multipolar] vision might become a reality.

More recently, World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab co-wrote, with Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The Great Reset. One point they made in their book is that global supply chains are fragmenting due to global existential crises. They pinned the blame on a lack of cohesive global governance and offered a solution:

The most likely outcome along the globalization–no globalization continuum lies in an in-between solution: regionalization. The success of the European Union as a free trade area or the new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in Asia (a proposed free trade agreement among the 10 countries that compose ASEAN) are important illustrative cases of how regionalization may well become a new watered-down version of globalization. [. . .] In short, deglobalization in the form of greater regionalization was already happening. COVID-19 will just accelerate this global divergence as North America, Europe and Asia focus increasingly on regional self-sufficiency rather than on the distant and intricate global supply chains that formerly epitomized the essence of globalization [page 79].

Shortly before the 2025 Munich Security Conference, Trump’s pick for Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave an interview to Megyn Kelly where he said: 

[. . .] it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. [. . .] That was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. [. . .] [F]oreign policy has always required us to work in the national interest, sometimes in cooperation with people who we wouldn’t invite over for dinner or people who we wouldn’t necessarily ever want to be led by.  And so that’s a balance, but it’s the sort of pragmatic and mature balance we have to have in foreign policy.

Casting the multipolar world order as a confrontation between great powers but also a “pragmatic and mature balance,” Rubio’s comments were congruent with the view of the globalist think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)—which has consistently promoted multipolarity. The CFR believes the international rules-based order (the unipolar model) is “disintegrating at an accelerating pace.”

CFR fellow Thomas E. Graham sees five potential regional poles in a multipolar global governance system consisting of the US, China, India, Russia, and Europe. The CFR line of thinking is that the US can contribute to multipolarity through foreign policy that seeks to constrain China as a great power; nurture India as a power, preserve Russian power and promote European power.

Europe is considered the greatest challenge by the CFR because, despite its economic and possible military might, it “lacks political cohesion.” Therefore, in January 2025 the CFR argued for a new US foreign policy mindset “to encourage Europe to assume the responsibilities of a great power [. . .], one that has the hard power needed to deal with most security contingencies in its immediate neighborhood.”

In March 2025, the Trump administration’s very public press conference spat with the visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy was immediately followed by the US supposedly withholding military aid to Ukraine. This was met with seeming condemnation from the US’ European partners who responded by publicly announcing an €800 billion ($841.5 billion) “ReArm Europe” plan. This gives further impetus to the EU’s long-held desire for European military unification.

It seems that Trump’s order not to supply US arms to Ukraine doesn’t apply to Thiel-backed enterprises like Anduril. While Trump was telling American and European voters that the US would not supply arms, Anduril was finalising a deal with the UK government to send their Altius 600m and Altius 700m attack drones to Ukraine.

It is hard to say if the press conference between Trump (the former reality TV personality) and Zelenskyy (the former actor and TV comedian) was entirely staged or not. Obviously, both presidents were, at the very least, briefed prior to their quite extraordinary public row. What is not in doubt is that the trajectory of the global policy response is precisely as modelled and suggested by the think-tanks.

Elon Musk’s ‘X’ social media platform is, at the time of writing, heavily promoting Trump as the global peace maker who just wants to stop the slaughter in Ukraine. Consequently, the public debate swirling across the entire western media and social media landscape is polarising opinion between those who want peace and those who argue this is short-sighted appeasement and Ukraine must keep fighting to stave off “Putin’s aggression.” Meanwhile, the globalist plans for a multipolar world order are surging ahead regardless of which of those two, pre-determined options is championed by the US or any other government.

Political leaders, influential financiers, and representatives of policy think tanks across the West have evidently been planning for some time, even enthusiastically endorsing, construction of a regionalised multipolar world order. Their fundamentally globalist project is the latest iteration of the oligarchs’ persistent dream: global governance under their exclusive control.

The Munich Security Conference (MSC) is ostensibly a transatlantic forum where hi-ranking so-called “thought leaders” engage in a “marketplace of ideas.” The self-appointed glitterati discuss, plan and agree security and defence policy trajectories. The theme of MSC 2025 was “Multipolarization.”

In the executive summary for the Munich Security Report 2025 we are told that “multipolarization is a fact.” Again, presenting us with the idea that things just happen organically: there is no design.

We are given to understand that those who are positive about multipolarity see “opportunities for more inclusive global governance and greater constraints on Washington.” Whereas, those who are more pessimistic believe it “increases the risk of disorder.”

The report notes the international enthusiasm for the United Nations 2024 Pact for the Future, replete with its Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations. Following the UN’s “quiet revolution,” the Pact is grounded in stakeholder capitalism’s public-private partnerships and “draws on the energy and expertise of governments, civil society and other key partners.”

The UN Pact promises more public-private global censorship, centralised world economic and financial control partnerships (global taxation), and firmer mechanisms for global governance partnerships to seize control of nation states as deemed necessary. The MSC thought leaders conclude “for this cooperation [UN Pact] to materialize, the world could well use some ‘depolarization’.”

The evident plan is for the global order to undergo a process of creative destruction to deterritorialize it in its current form and reterritorialize it as a more efficient multipolar global governance structure. To this end the MSC report notes:

The next four years will show whether a more selectively engaged US fuels or contains global disorder. As other actors will (have to) step up to fill the gap, the multipolarization of the international system could accelerate.

Despite US policy decisions supposedly being designed to confront and oppose China, again, as a result of the same US policy decisions, China has shown it is ready to “fill the gap.” In his MSC speech the head of China’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission — China’s foreign minister — H.E. Wang Yi said:

[. . .] we should work for an equal and orderly multipolar world. [. . .] China will surely be a factor of certainty in this multipolar system, and strive to be a steadfast constructive force in a changing world. [. . .] The U.N. is at the core of practicing multilateralism and advancing global governance. [. . .] We have firmly upheld the authority and stature of the U.N.

J.D. Vance address to the MSC has been reported as harsh criticism of European censorship of its citizen’s and its media, especially with reference to the censorship of US commentators. Within his criticisms, Vance also advocated construction of a European “pole”:

[. . .] the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense. [. . .] [W]e think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

The extremely rapid response to the US foreign policy shift toward Ukraine has stimulated EU military unification and rearmament. This is entirely in keeping with the strategies and plans laid out by globalist policy think-tanks. Perhaps random events collide and every decision is nothing more than a reaction, but the weight of evidence thoroughly contradicts mere “coincidence theory.”

We are supposed to believe that US isolationism is the pessimistic response to multipolarity while the more positive multilateral approach is closer aligned to the essence of the UN’s Pact for the Future. Either way, both pessimistic isolationism and positive multilateralism seem likely to accelerate multipolar global governance.

Despite the different approaches, the geopolitical outcomes are seemingly indivisible. Both portend a regionalised world order bureaucracy and this has always been the planned administrative reorganisation of the planet prior to imposing firm global governance and, ultimately, global government.

The Trump administration is blatantly declaring its isolationism. Trump, has publicly withdrawn from the World Health Organisation, the Paris Agreement, and the US pact with the OECD to work on a Global Tax Deal. He has imposed international trade tariffs and his toughening of US border security is apparently one of the primary reasons he was re-elected.

A lot of what Trump and his staff say is rhetoric and horse-trading.

A lot of what Trump and his staff say is rhetoric and 
horse-trading. OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann has already said Trump’s posturing was interpreted as “concerns raised.” Cormann also said the OECD would “keep working with the U.S. and all countries at the table to support international cooperation that promotes certainty, avoids double taxation, and protects tax bases.” Trump may be haggling for a stronger negotiating position, and we should certainly take his grand statements with a pinch of salt.

That said, if we put all this together, what we see is a distinct narrative shift toward polarisation. It is important to stress that we’re witnessing a full-on propaganda offensive. Nevertheless, we are supposed to believe that there are real geopolitical tensions between the EU and the US, not just in relation to Ukraine, but in relation to Greenland. The European Council President António Costa said Denmark had the EU’s “full support” in the Danish government’s alleged confrontation with the US government.

Trump has also made aggressive gestures toward BRICS+, warning that tariffs will rain down if the group dumps the USD.

Meanwhile, one of he BRICS+ leading nations Russia has said that Trump’s “withdrawal” from the WHO risks “dangerous consequences.” Alexei Kurinney, deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee on Health, said that “from the point of view of protecting exclusively the interests of the United States, this is an isolationist step.”

In response to seeming US isolationism, the Chinese government has also criticised the US withdrawals from the WHO and from the Paris Agreement. As we’ve just highlighted, China has offered itself as a reliable global partner to these two entities. China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said:

China is concerned about the US announcement to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. [. . .] Climate change is a common challenge that all of humanity must face. [. . .] The role of the World Health Organization should only be strengthened, not weakened.

The stage is clearly set for the final push toward the multipolar world order. But, strange as it may seem, this very push toward multipolarity is bringing the nations closer to a single global political, economic, and (perhaps most notably) financial and monetary “union.” In other words, multipolarity, as it is presented to us, appears to be a monumental psychological operation (psyop).

There have been many attempts over the years to form a North American Union (NAU), which would be composed of Mexico, the United States, and Canada. This geopolitical goal received a boost in 1994 with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but the plan stalled after receiving strong resistance by the populace of all three countries.

On and off, the US government has made numerous attempts to pry Greenland away from Denmark — more often than not citing US defence needs. Greenland is an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Its inhabitants are therefore citizens of Denmark and, by extension, of the European Union. In 1951, the US and Danish governments signed the Defense of Greenland Treaty, which ostensibly appeased US national security concerns. The US maintains the Pituffik Space Base — formerly known as Thule Air Base — on the island of Greenland.

Greenland has never been mentioned with respect to any proposed versions of either a North American Union or a free trade agreement. The prospect of building the Praxis gov-corp Technate on Greenland has evidently reignited enthusiasm.

The original American technocrats, however, did include Greenland, along with Caribbean island states and Central American states — as far south as the northernmost territory of South America’s Columbia and Venezuela — in their proposed model of a North American Technate.

Prior to this year’s inauguration, Trump outlined his dreams of establishing  what can only be described as a plan almost geographically identical to Technocracy Inc.’s original North American Technate. In a series of off-the-wall-sounding statements — not unusual for him — Trump indicated that he wanted to add Greenland, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama to a NAU of Mexico, the US, and Canada. He even threatened the use of force, both economic and military, to construct a geopolitical map that is exactly mirrors the aforementioned North American Technate.

There is no realistic prospect, in any geopolitical sense, of this imaginary North American Technate actually being formed. But, as we have already discussed, the Dark Enlightenment and Technocracy portend a kind of geopolitics more reminiscent of the system of city states ruled by the Venetian bankers. The Venetian city state was perhaps the most powerful seasteading project the world has ever known.

Trumps seemingly weird ideas about seizing control of Gaza and Greenland, as if they can simply be acquired as sovereign states, and where the sovereignty of the people living there is considered “with derision,” is the epitome of the Dark Enlightenment thinking. Forced displacement of the “unthinking demos” is meaningless if you fervently believe “the system must be first.”

The North American Technate map that Trump appeared to deliberately outline first appeared on the cover of the Technocracy Study Course. Yet even the original technocrats didn’t explain how all these nation-states would fall in line with their unhinged ideas.

Ironically, the technological advances that have today made the prospect of a Technate feasible have also rendered the concept of a geographical Technate moot. By its nature, global communication technology globalises. The technocrats’ notion of a geographically bounded political Technate has largely been subsumed by the globalist oligarchs’ rollout of global governance architecture and technology.

The Club of Rome’s Ten Kingdom model was precisely that: a model. While it is obvious there has been a global effort to make that model a functioning reality, it is clear that the gov-corp Technates under construction will first and foremost be economic and financial administrative zones rather than physical or geopolitical nations as we understand them. The technology used to construct each digital state is common to all.

Gov-corp realms may be distinct, with, for example, Amazon dominating its sov-corp realm in the West and the Alibaba-Group dominating its sov-corp realm the East, but the “patchwork of realms” will be global. The decentralisation toward the digital city state is the network enabling centralised control. The formation of regionalised poles looks more like bureaucratic reorganisation in preparation for a simplified global governance administration of realms.

Nonetheless, the symbology of Trump’s otherwise bizarre imperial statements seems relatively easy to interpret. Trump and/or his close advisers want to make it clear that Technocracy and the Dark enlightenment are the ideas driving the administration. I suspect Trump will say whatever he is told to say, within reason, on this subject or any other. In my opinion, posturing as a would-be emperor probably appeals to his ego. Personally, I doubt Trump even understands what a gov-corp Technate is, but he may.

Whatever the case, the communicated signal could not be made more obvious: The neoreactionary technocrats are in control.

Thiel and Musk are not the leading architects of the project to establish the global gov-corp Technate. But they are firm believers and, as made men, have been positioned to lead the US in that direction. Ultimately, the digital transformation of the Fourth Industrial Revolution renders the very concept of the nation-state superfluous. The technocrats and accelerationist neoreactionaries know this.

Oligarchs have never had an affinity for one nation more than for any other. The system they seek ignores nation-states completely. If their plan succeeds, the only borders that will still have any relevance to them will be those delineating the “Kingdoms” or “poles” of a much-simplified multipolar global governance structure overseeing a network of realms. 

Once the mycelium-like global financial network is thriving and once seamless cross-border transactions are instantaneous — enabled by a digital SHC fit for a multipolar world — then geographical political borders will cease to have any economic or monetary meaning. As Peter Thiel observed in a 2001 PayPal all-hands meeting:

The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related.

The global system of gov-corp Technates that is emerging represents the most oppressive, totalitarian system of absolute behavioural control ever devised. There will be no need for government policy when entire populations — comprised of millions of individual human beings who were born to think for themselves — can be mentally hijacked and literally programmed by corporate behemoths.

But of all the psyops foisted upon us, the greatest among them is the millennia-long propaganda campaign to make us believe we are powerless. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the “representative democracy” charade.

Recognising the staggering audacity of the globalists’ plans and the enormous resources they presently have under their command is not to be “blackpilled.” On the contrary, it is the first step toward liberation. In order to resist the maniacs, we first have to understand what they’re doing and how and why they’re doing it. After that, the only hurdle we must surmount is that of putting all of our own solutions into effect.

Our solutions do not have to reimagine the world, we just have to reimagine our tiny portion of it. You don’t need to worry about energy costs if you are energy self sufficient—or as close to it as you can be. You don’t need to be too preoccupied with food prices if you grow it yourself or barter goods and services with those that do, and you don’t need to be overly concerned with exchange rates if you choose your own medium of exchange and trade with other like-minded people in your own community.

International financial institutions do not control “money.” Oligarch investors do not control technological development. Governments do not control populations. Only deception, coercion and the use of force ensures these false perceptions. Deception works by bombarding people with propaganda and psyops. Coercion and manipulation are designed to convince us to accept that which we can — and must — decisively reject. Force will almost certainly be used if we do, but there are also eight billion of us.

There are better alternatives to top-down oligarch control. Despite the hopes of Musk and Thiel and their ilk, gov-corp Technates are not inevitable. We need only peaceably decline to obey their demented edicts, quit subscribing to their insane schemes, and build something better.

The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 2.

What did Elon Musk mean when he said he was “dark MAGA?” Exploring this question will certainly take us to a very dark conclusion. Yet, ironically, it is this very conclusion that, once seen in the right light, can liberate us.

This two-part series examines the genuine but misplaced hopes of the millions of US citizens who elected Donald Trump to his second non-consecutive term. Unbeknownst to them, they have voted to live in a Technate administered by what is called “gov-corp.” In so doing, they have taken another step toward a multipolar world order, or “New World Order,” as some have long called it.

Shortly before the November 2024 election, Elon Musk, speaking at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, announced, “I’m not just MAGA, I’m dark MAGA.” Only a couple of months earlier Trump had survived an alleged assassination attempt at the same Butler show grounds. Sharing the stage with “bullet-proof” populist hero Trump, an absolute shoe-in for the presidency, Musk seized his moment.

The Make America Great Again (MAGA) acronym is broadly understood. But Musk’s added adjective “dark” is little understood — and implies much more.

Explanations for his “dark MAGA” declaration have ranged from Musk pushing the Dark MAGA meme coin to Musk casting himself as a super-antihero or even an advocate of a violent fascist takeover of the US. None of these claims have addressed his more obvious reference. Musk is one of a cadre of technocrats behind the Trump presidency who promote the ideas encapsulated by the Dark Enlightenment.

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal along with Musk, is probably the best-known proponent of the Dark Enlightenment while Musk is the best-known proponent of Technocracy. But, as we shall see in this article, these sociopolitical theories have considerable overlap and are mutually reinforcing.

Elon Musk’s Technocratic Heritage

In a 2021 SEC filing, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Tesla’s then-Chief Financial Officer Zach Kirkhorn officially changed their respective working titles to become the “TechnoKings” of Tesla. This might seem like nothing but irreverent fun—consider that Kirkhorn was also known by the Game of Thrones title of “Master of Coin”—but Musk certainly understands the gravity of Technocracy and the associated term “technocrat.”

Their careful choice of words is an important point emphasized throughout this article. While oligarchs like Musk and Thiel often express ideas in a seemingly flippant manner—or as if the ideas sprang from out of nowhere—these apparent offhand remarks are not meaningless. It is Aesopian language indicative of the core beliefs held by people like Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and other members of what Council on Foreign Relations think tank member David Rothkopf generously characterizes, in his book on the subject, as the “Superclass“: people who can “influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis.”

The “joke” is on us. Or, rather, on those of us who assume it’s all just a joke.

Both Musk and Thiel are members of the “superclass,” though “parasite class” might be a more fitting description for the oligarchy Rothkopf describes. “Insider” Rothkopf’s estimate of around 6,000 individual oligarchs, whose decisions impact the lives of the remaining eight billion of us, seems feasible.

Musk and Thiel are just two among the 6,000 by virtue of being welcomed into the “superclass” by behind-the-scenes oligarchs who do not feature on the published lists of the world’s wealthiest men and women. Musk and Thiel are made men. We are focusing on them because they are prominent accelerationist technocrat supporters of the Trump/Vance administration.

Elon Musk’s maternal grandfather was Joshua N. Haldeman (1902–1974), who hailed from Pequot, Minnesota. In 1906, when Joshua was four, his parents took the family north and settled in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. In 1936, after 34 years of life on the western plains of the US and Canada, Joshua Haldeman moved to Saskatchewan’s provincial capital, Regina, where he established a successful chiropractic business.

Between 1936 and 1941, Haldeman did more than realign spines. He was also the research director and leader of the Regina branch of an up-and-coming entity known as Technocracy Incorporated, shortened to Technocracy Inc. In 1940, while serving in that post, he was arrested by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for violating Defence of Canada regulations, under which Technocracy Inc. was deemed an “illegal organisation.” As a result, Haldeman was denied entry into the US, where he had intended to deliver a speech promoting Technocracy. He was then fined and given a suspended sentence for heading up the controversial Technocracy Inc.

Following his 1941 conviction, Haldeman joined the Canadian Social Credit Party (Socred), which had been formed in 1932 by evangelist William Aberhart. Socred sought to implement the “social credit” economic theory of British engineer and economist C. H. Douglas. Like Socred, Technocracy was based upon the “industrial efficiency” ideas of engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor (Taylorism). It also dovetailed with the “conspicuous consumption” economic theories of Thorstein Veblen.

C. H. Douglas presented his theory of social credit to tackle what he saw as the inequality of opportunity created by the centralised control and hoarding of resources and wealth. He identified the “macro-economic gap” between retail price inflation and wage growth. He suggested filling that gap by creating the “National Credit Office”—which would be independent of state control—to issue “debt-free” credit to consumers. Part of this National Credit would be used to lower retail prices. The remainder would be distributed to all citizens, irrespective of their personal financial situation, as a way of creating consumer demand for goods. Douglas’ suggestion was an early model of Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Joshua Haldeman’s family of seven, which included a daughter, Maye Haldeman, left Canada in 1950 to set up base in Pretoria, South Africa. As entrepreneurs and adventurers, they travelled extensively. By her own account, Maye Haldeman was close to her parents and adopted their entrepreneurial spirit, sense of adventure and work ethic. Unavoidably, she was also familiar with her parents’ political ideas. Maye recalled that, as a child, she and her siblings would do their “monthly bulletins and photocopy newsletters, and then put the stamps on the envelopes.”

Maye Haldeman married Errol Musk in 1970. Their son, Elon, was born in Pretoria a year later. He was an infant when his grandfather died in a plane crash. Nonetheless, as he was growing up, Elon learned about and became intimately familiar with his grandfather’s political philosophy.

Though Musk was evidently close to his mother, he elected to stay with his father in Pretoria when his parents divorced in 1979. After Elon’s relationship with his father soured, he encouraged his mother to claim her Canadian passport, according to Maye. Her doing so enabled Elon to quickly secure his own Canadian passport, emigrate from South Africa—which he did at age 17—and thereby avoid compulsory military service in that country.

Elon’s ultimate goal was to live and work in the US. But before that, he decided to head from Montreal to Waldeck, Saskatchewan, where, upon returning to his roots, he worked as a farm hand on his second cousin’s farm. There, he awaited his mother Maye’s arrival from Pretoria. She was followed by Elon’s two siblings, Kimbal and Tosca, who also wanted to be closer to the Haldeman side of the family in Canada.

Musk studied at Queen’s College in Kingston, Ontario, for two years before acting upon his aim of settling in America. He transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics. Subsequently, he interned in Silicon Valley tech companies before abandoning education to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.

Fast Forward to Today

In October 2024, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos posted on Musk’s “X” platform an alluring statement: “The Network State for Mars is being formed before our eyes.” Musk enthusiastically replied, “The Mars Technocracy.” To which Bezos responded, “Count me in.”

As he continues to dream about colonising Mars, Musk has made it abundantly clear which political system he prefers. In 2019, he wrote: “Accelerating Starship development to build the Martian Technocracy.” Note his use of the word “accelerating.” For Musk “accelerating” doesn’t simply mean an increase in velocity.

Musk has long advocated Universal Basic Income. Here’s one instance of his embrace of UBI: At the World Government Summit in 2017, Musk said, “We will have to have some kind of universal basic income.” Another example: In June 2024, speaking with then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the UK-convened first global “AI Safety Summit,” Musk painted a Utopian vision of an artificial intelligence-dominated society and “an age of abundance” before adding, “We won’t have universal basic income, we’ll have universal high income.” In other words, he was suggesting that the masses would have perfect “lives of abundance” enabled by the ultimate AI-controlled distribution of UBI.

Musk desires Technocracy—and a social credit system—just as his grandfather Joshua Haldeman did. This is evident beyond his personal history and his words. Everything Musk does is completely congruent with these dual pursuits. But when we are invited to discuss Technocracy in reference to Mars, we are of course asked to ignore all the evidence that exposes Musk’s and his fellow oligarchs’ attempts to establish a “Technate”—a system of technocratic, totalitarian continental control—here on Earth.

As is the case with many of his oligarch brethren, Musk’s business acumen and his ethics are highly questionable. It appears he has survived and thereafter thrived in business solely because of his network connections, his considerable state backing, and the largess of his investors. As George Carlin wisely observed, “It’s a big club.”

Musk invested more than a quarter-billion dollars to install Trump in the Oval Office. Naturally, he anticipates a return on his investment. In fact, that ROI is a done deal: Musk already makes billions from US taxpayers through a web of government contracts. For tycoons like Musk, money is simply a means to an end: obtaining power. His wealth has positioned him to start seriously implementing his grand vision of Technocracy.

Musk’s dive into Technocracy is underway through the newly established temporary agency in Washington, D.C., he now chairs. Announced last November by Trump, created on his first day in office, and supposedly set to complete its mission by the summer of 2026, the US Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, appears to be a nascent Technocracy.

Venture capitalist Musk and biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy were handpicked to run DOGE with the help of Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick. Vivik has since departed to run for Governor of Ohio. Lutnick was Trump’s choice to become the US Secretary of Commerce and was recently confirmed. His appointment raises many concerns. Not least of them is his link to Satellogic, a strategic partner of Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies. This link reveals Lutnick’s personal investment in the public-private surveillance state that is governed by US and Israeli intelligence agencies.

Yet Lutnick has an even more significant conflict of interest. He is steering Cantor Fitzgerald to back Tether (USDT), a stablecoin that is increasingly purchasing US Treasurys. As we move toward the era of digital currencies, the US government project to save its debt-laden dollar and its fragile economy is closely tied to stablecoins. Thus, as Secretary of Commerce, Lutnick will be in a position to guide the development of markets toward the new US digital economy. We’ll expand on this angle in Part 2.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that “the Doge” was the formal title of the chief administrator (magistrate) of the mercantile Venetian Republic. As we shall also discuss in Part 2, there are many reasons to suspect that today’s DOGE acronym is not a mere coincidence.

The departure of Ramaswamy and Lutnick from the DOGE project appears to leave Musk as its sole “CEO.” A corporate monarchy, led by a CEO “king,” (TechnoKing) is in keeping with the theories underpinning the Dark Enlightenment.

The stated purpose of the DOGE is to restructure the federal government to reduce expenditures and maximise efficiency. That goal is in keeping with Taylorism, a foundation of Technocracy.

One of the leading neoreactionaries (we’ll explain this term shortly), Curtis Yarvin, coined the catchy acronym RAGE. It stands for Retire All Government Employees. The parallels between the stated ambitions of the DOGE and the intention of Yarvin’s RAGE are marked.

Apparently, the DOGE will not be an official executive department but will instead operate as a Federal Presidential Advisory Committee, supposedly outside of government. But make no mistake: The DOGE will be inextricably tied to the political process. Its employees will be housed in the former offices of its predecessor, the United States Digital Service. And its helmsman, Musk, will reportedly have a personal office in the West Wing of the White House.

The efficiency ideas of certain nominated experts, starting with Musk, will be given political clout via a new “DOGE” subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This subpanel is chaired by controversial congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)—often referred to as MTG. On the surface, it may look like an oversight subcommittee with authority over the science, engineering, and technology “experts,” but in practice the “experts” will be effectively controlling the related political policy decisions. This concept of policy designed by technical “experts” is central to Technocracy.

J.P. Morgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon is among those who have welcomed the DOGE plan. Certainly, the proposal to radically reduce or even eradicate US government’s financial regulators appeals to bankers like Dimon. The Trump administration is seeking to seize and centralise control of financial regulators such as the Security and Exchange Commssion (SEC) and the antitrust regulator the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Consequently, the banks are anticipating a much lighter regulatory touch. Speaking at Davos, J.P. Morgan asset wealth fund manager Mary Erdoes—tipped to succeed Dimon as CEO—said the moves had freed US bankers’ “animal spirits” and set investment banks in “go-mode.”

Given that Elon Musk was neither elected by Americans nor authorized by their representatives in Congress, the DOGE represents a formal shift in political power from the public to the private sector. It is fundamentally a private sector-dominated think tank openly empowered to “restructure federal agencies.” If the DOGE proceeds as suggested, it is clear that, as we pointed out above, elected US representatives—MTG among them—and US senators will not have the upper hand. Indeed, we might question if they are even capable of grasping the ulterior motives of those driving the DOGE concept.

Also, given that Musk and other DOGE supporters—Bezos, for example—have long profited from huge government contracts, and given that the likes of Dimon will doubtlessly be asked to “advise” the DOGE, we see a massive conflict of interest at the heart of the DOGE project. That conflict, like everything else about the DOGE, is aligned with Technocracy, for it affords pecking-order privileges to the very technocrats who seek to control a Technate.

An In-Depth Look at Technocracy

To appreciate why people like Musk and Bezos are so enthused by the prospect of Technocracy, we must understand the full extent of Technocracy. We must grasp not just what it is superficially portrayed to be, but also recognize its deep, dark, humanity-mutating, society-altering intentions and aims.

Technocracy does not merely call for technocratic governance—that is, a sociopolitical system where qualified experts, or “technocrats,” rather than politicians, set policy.

Technocratic governance came to the fore during the 2020–2023 pseudopandemic. Medical “experts,” notably Anthony Fauci and other members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, were put in positions very visible to the public. They were widely seen as leading the policy response—namely, mass “vaccinations,” lockdowns, small business shutdowns, and other imposed-from-on-high mandates designed to enforce and measure worldwide compliance.

But the Technocracy that Musk, Bezos, and other tech “experts” seek to establish implies more than an experiment in the effects of mRNA injections, more than a test of controlling and mesmerizing the masses.

Technocracy is based on the belief that there are technological solutions to all social, economic, and political problems. The Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of the planet and many more of their ilk share this single-minded belief.

For example, when, 20 years ago, Thiel co-founded the impact investment platform called the Founders Fund, its mission statement noted that “technology is the fundamental driver of growth in the industrialized world.” It also declared that the Founders Fund exists to solve “difficult scientific or engineering problems.” If the right technology succeeded, the Founders Fund rationalized it to be the “shortest route to social value.”

Technocracy offers a form of policy response—there is no political “policy” as we understand the term in a Technocracy—as technological solutions to social problems. But this is only a limited aspect of Technocracy. (Keep in mind, faith in technological solutions is not found solely in Technocracy.)

Technocracy is truly unique, unlike any of the sociopolitical, philosophical or economic ideologies familiar to most of us.

In 1937, Technocracy Inc.’s in-house magazine, The Technocrat — Vol. 3 No. 4, described Technocracy as:

The science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.

To give that definition context, we’ll go back two decades to 1911, when American mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, arguably the world’s first management consultant, published The Principles of Scientific Management. His book came out at the culmination of the Progressive Era in the United States.

The Progressive Era was a historical period marked by the political activism of the US middle class, who sought to address the underlying social problems—as they saw them—of excessive industrialisation, mass immigration, and political corruption. “Taylorism,” which was fixated on the imminent exhaustion of natural resources and the advocacy of efficient scientific management systems, was part of the spirit of the age.

In The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor wrote:

In the past[,] the man has been first; in the future[,] the system must be first[.] [. . .] The best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation[.] [. . .] [T]he fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations.

Taylor’s ideas jibed with the theories of economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen proposed that economic activity isn’t just a function of supply and demand, utility and value, but that it evolves with society and is thus shaped also by psychological, sociological and anthropological influences.

Veblen is perhaps best known for his theory of “conspicuous consumption.” He observed that the wealthy signalled their social status through ostentatious display of their purchasing power: expensive properties, cars, jewels, etc. Within the hierarchical class structure, aspiring classes tried to emulate the conspicuous consumption of the class above them. Veblen contended that the cascade effect of this social climbing created demand for superfluous goods and services and that the net economic impact was therefore hopeless inefficiency and wasted resources.

In The Engineers and the Price System, Veblen suggested that technocratic engineers should undertake a thorough analysis of the institutions that maintained social stability. Once the institutions were understood, those with technological expertise should reform them, improve efficiency, and thereby engineer society to be less wasteful. Shortly, we’ll discuss how this idea was later adapted by the accelerationist neoreactionaries.

Both Taylor and Veblen were focused upon maximising the efficiency of industrial and manufacturing processes. That said, they both recognised that their theories could be extended to a wider social context. It was the more expansive application of their proposals that beguiled the oligarchs of the day.

In 1919, Veblen was one of the founding members of a John D. Rockefeller-funded, New York City-based private research university in New York called The New School for Social Research (later renamed The New School). This progressive educational model soon led to the creation of the Technical Alliance, a small team of scientists and engineers notably including not only Veblen but also Howard Scott, who would come to lead the group.

The Technical Alliance was reformulated in 1933 after an enforced hiatus was prompted by Scott’s exposure as a fraudster. He had falsified some of his credentials—as, apparently, had C. H. Douglas. Post-hiatus, Scott was joined by M. King Hubbert—who would later become globally renowned for his vague and generally inaccurate “peak oil” theory—and others. The members of the Technical Alliance renamed themselves Technocracy Inc.

Technocracy was thoroughly outlined in Technocracy Inc.’s 1933 publication of its Technocracy Study Course. According to the study course’s technical specifications, society should be separated into what the advocates of Technocracy (from now on referred to as “technocrats”) call a “sequence of functions.” In this sequence, society as we know it is removed. Instead, centralised control of all human interactions and behaviour is proposed as part of the “social mechanism.”

An entire “social mechanism” subjected to technocrats is called a Technate. A Technate is designed to work “on a Continental scale”—that is, on each continent, or Technate, whose boundaries are drawn on a map. The Technate of North America map includes Greenland, Canada, the United States, Mexico, parts of Central America, northern South America, Caribbean islands, and the eastern Pacific Ocean.

There are no national governments in Technocracy. Nation-states are abolished in each continental Technate.

Driven by the assumed precepts of efficiency, technocrats deem the centralised control of all resources essential:

Technocracy finds that the production and distribution of an abundance of physical wealth on a Continental scale for the use of all Continental citizens can only be accomplished by a Continental technological control, a governance of function, a Technate.

Each function, or “Functional Sequence,” is categorised as either an industrial sequence, a service sequence, or a special sequence. For example, the “Transportation Functional Sequence” and the “Space Tech Functional Sequence” are both industrial sequences. The “Public Health” and “Education” functional sequences are among the service sequences. The “Special Sequences” are those related to security and defence (Armed Services), scientific and technological development (Continental Research), governance of the population (Social Relations), and the Technate’s relationship with other Technates or nation-states (Foreign Relations).

Administration of an entire Technate—each continent—is further subdivided by “Regional Divisions,” each defined according to their longitude and latitude boundary markers and designated by a corresponding grid-reference number. “Area Control” is an administrative rather than a functional sequence. The Technocracy Study Course specifies what that means:

[An Area Control] is the coordinating body for the various Functional Sequences and social units operating in any one geographical area of one or more Regional Divisions. It operates directly under the Continental Control.

The whole system is overseen by “Continental Control” (shown as the Continental Board above) and ultimately by the “Continental Director”:

The Continental Director, as the name implies, is the chief executive [CEO] of the entire social mechanism. On his immediate staff are the Directors of the Armed Forces, the Foreign Relations, the Continental Research, and the Social Relations and Area Control. [. . .] The Continental Director is chosen from among the members of the Continental Control by the Continental Control. Due to the fact that this Control is composed of only some 100 or so members, all of whom know each other well, there is no one better fitted to make this choice than they.

To be clear: each entire continent—a Technate—is controlled by a self-appointed body which selects its great leader—the Continental Director—from within its own ranks. This self-appointed body controls everything in the Technate.

These early technocrats were supposedly trying to devise a classless system that would provide “lives of abundance” for all. Musk’s words often echo the specific meanings defined by Technocracy Inc. When, for instance, Musk spoke of “an age of abundance,” he was referring to Technocracy. Unfortunately, the original technocrats purported aspirations for a classless society appear to have been inspired either by unimaginable evil or hapless naïveté. Take your pick!

For example, 1930s technocrats viewed all crime simply as a product of the inequality inherent in the capitalist Price System; we’ll cover the “Price System” in a moment. Because technocrats looked upon the “human animal” as little more than a behavioural automaton, they either chose to ignore or didn’t even recognise—let alone account for—other possible motivations for crime besides economic inequality, such as megalomania. Consequently, power-hungry people like the Rockefellers, who recognised that there are other incentives for human behaviour besides practical necessity, viewed Technocracy in terms the technocrats could either barely comprehend or decided to ignore.

The technocrats’ seemingly woeful grasp of the human sciences led them to imagine a Technate that would enable some kind of spontaneous order to emerge—”spontaneous natural priority,” they called it. They rejected the principle that “all men are created equal”—largely, it seems, because they didn’t understand it. In their minds, it had “no basis in biologic fact.”

Upon analysing the behaviour of cow herds and chicken flocks, the technocrats identified a pecking order—from which they derived so-called “peck-rights”—as an explanation to justify the totalitarian, hierarchical social mechanism they were advocating for humans:

Certain individuals dominate, and the others take orders. These dominant ones need not be, and frequently are not, large in stature [referring to cattle and domestic fowl], but they dominate just as effectively as if they were. [. . .] The greatest stability in a social organization would be obtained where the individuals were placed as nearly as possible with respect to other individuals in accordance with ‘peck-rights,’ or priority relationship which they would assume naturally. [. . .] There must be as far as possible no inversion of the natural ‘peck-rights’ among the men.

Regardless of the intentions of technocrats who first designed Technocracy, the appeal of this system for oligarchs is obvious. Technocracy constructs a “social mechanism,” controlled by those who claim “peck-rights,” specifically engineered to facilitate the ultimate form of totalitarianism.

As mentioned above, citizens of the Technate are described as “human animals” and are viewed as programmable machines. The scientific operation of the social mechanism—Technocracy—enables the “service” (labour) of the “human animal” to act as the “human engine” for the efficient operation of the various Functional Sequences.

The technocrats flatly rejected concepts such as the human “mind” and “conscience” and “will.” These constructs, they said, belonged to humanity’s “ignorant, barbarian past.” To them, a human being was nothing more than an “organic machine” that makes a certain variety of “motions and noises,” similar, according to the technocrats, to a dog or a vehicle.

As explained in the Technocracy Study Course, the Technate would maximise the “efficiency” of the Technate by socially engineering—behaviourally controlling—the “human animal”:

Practically all social control is effected through the mechanism of the conditioned reflex. The driver of an automobile, for instance, sees a red light ahead and immediately throws in the clutch and the brake, and stops. [. . .] If they are taken young enough, human beings can be conditioned not to do almost anything under the sun. They can be conditioned not to use certain language, not to eat certain foods on certain days, not to work on certain days, not to mate in the absence of certain ceremonial words spoken over them, not to break into a grocery store for food even though they may not have eaten for days.

Tying this terrifying oppression together was a new monetary system designed to tackle the problems the technocrats saw with the capitalist “Price System.” Much like the proponents of Socred, the technocrats viewed the inequality of wealth and resource distribution as a major problem.

The capitalist “Price System” was thought “wasteful” and therefore unacceptably “inefficient,” largely because the “money” used to measure prices was generated by bank lending (debt). The technocrats referred to fiat currency as a “generalized debt certificate.”

The technocrats therefore determined that the capitalist “Price System” inevitably led to both class inequality and conspicuous consumption as the holders of the debt accrued more wealth than anyone else. Conspicuous consumption, in turn, led to the inefficient allocation of resources into pointless production, expenditure, and vanity projects. So, they proposed a new monetary system based upon the energy cost of production.

Corresponding “Energy Certificates” would better reflect productive work done, as opposed to wasteful credit (debt) consumed, because “energy is measurable in units of work—ergs, joules, or foot-pounds.” Thus, Energy Certificates could be equitably distributed—by the Distribution Sequence—across the Technate, based on the energy required to perform the function.

The technocrats recognised that some functions require more energy than others. The Transportation Sequence construction of a new railroad would require more energy than a single “human animal” working on constructing that railroad. The Distribution Sequence would manage the resultant “fair” allocation of Energy Certificates:

[E]nergy can be allocated according to the uses to which it is to be put. The amount required for new plant, including roads, houses, hospitals, schools, etc., and for local transportation and communication will be deducted from the total as a sort of overhead, and not chargeable to individuals. After all of these deductions are made, [. . .] the remainder will be devoted to the production of goods and services to be consumed by the adult public-at-large. [. . .] Thus, if there be available the means of producing goods and services [. . .] each person would be granted an income[.]

Put another way (with quote marks around Technocracy’s words): “If” there are remaining means, after those with sufficient “peck-rights” have taken the resources they need for their function—”a sort of overhead”—the “remainder” would be allocated “fairly” to the “human animals” and considered sufficient for them to perform their function.

Each issued Energy Certificate would be non-tradable and could be used only for the purchase of resources, goods, and services provided by Continental Control within the Technate.

The Distribution Sequence would record the details of every group or individual to whom the Energy Certificates were allocated and would then monitor how that Energy Certificate was used.

The degree of centralised control inherent in Technocracy is almost beyond imagination:

[O]ne single organization is manning and operating the whole social mechanism. This same organization not only produces but distributes all goods and services. Hence a uniform system of record-keeping exists for the entire social operation, and all records of production and distribution clear to one central headquarters. Tabulation of the information [contained on the Energy Certificates] provides a complete record of distribution, or of the public rate of consumption by commodity, by sex, by regional division, by occupation, and by age group.

With Energy Certificates allocated to the individual and recording all their personal details, the surveillance state is complete. Continental Control will have oversight over every citizen and will be able to monitor and control whatever they buy and wherever they go. In other words, in a Technocracy, all human behaviour is watched and rationed.

Despite their expressed aversion to the capitalist Price System, the technocrats were not antagonistic to the accumulation of wealth. They simply redefined wealth in their own technocratic terms.

In 1933, the authors of the Technocracy Study Course also published their Introduction to Technocracy, in which they wrote:

Technology has introduced a new methodology in the creation of physical wealth. [. . .] Physical income within a continental area under technological control would be the net available energy in ergs, converted into use-forms and services over and above the operation and maintenance of the physical equipment and structures of the area. [. . .] This method of producing physical wealth and measuring its operation precludes the possibility of creating any kind of debt.

Usury—that is, the issuance of nearly all fiat currency as debt repayable with interest—is undoubtedly a key instrument with which today’s oligarchs amass wealth, which they then convert into sociopolitical power. It is useful to note that the word “wealth” means “prosperity in abundance of possessions or riches.” “Riches” implies “an abundance of means.” The etymology of the word “means” defines it as “resources at one’s disposal for accomplishing some object.”

Technocracy places all resources under the command and control of a select few, who are then free to accomplish whatever objective they desire—across an entire continent—by rationing all resources to whomever they choose, whenever they wish, as they see fit. In a Technocracy, the “select few” who have “peck-rights” over and above everyone else do not need monetary wealth. Technocracy promises to deliver the zenith of Aristotelian oligarchy.

To say Technocracy is radical would be a massive understatement. We think in terms of political “isms,” but words like “communism,” “fascism “or “feudalism” don’t come close to describing the extent of the radical tyranny intrinsic to Technocracy.

In 1965, Technocracy Inc. published a written exchange between its founder, Howard Scott, and assistant professor of economics J. Kaye Faulkner. The conversation was later re-released under the title The History and Purpose of Technocracy.

Scott wrote to Faulkner:

Technocracy has always contended that Marxian political philosophy and Marxian economics were never sufficiently radical or revolutionary to handle the problems brought on by the impact of technology in a large size national society of today. [. ..] We have always contended that Marxian communism, so far as this Continent is concerned, is so far to the right that it is bourgeois. It is well here to bear in mind; the technological progression of the next 30 minutes invalidates all the social wisdom of previous history. [. . .] Technology has no ancestors in the social history of man. It creates its own.

As Scott’s words indicate, the technocrats foresaw that the rapid advance in technology would inevitably present both immense opportunities and risks. In an effort to mitigate the risks, the technocrats’ proposed solution was to embrace technology and purpose it to the service of more “efficient” government—i.e., a Technate.

This notion of a technological “singularity” threatening to surpass humanity’s ability to adapt would later inspire the perhaps even more radical political philosophy of the accelerationist neoreactionaries. There are many commonalities between the two sociopolitical theories.

Technocracy, both then and now, is literally inhuman. It elevates technological development above morality. As Taylor made clear, “the system must be first.”

People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to install a Technocracy and live in it—or at least make us live in it. Why? Do they hope we will all live “lives of abundance” under Technocracy? Or do they envisage themselves as elitist members of Continental Control, with a free hand to socially engineer the rest of us, whom they view as a herd of “human animals”?

What do you think?

The Accelerationist Neoreactionaries

Just as Technocracy is based upon the analysis of the “social mechanism” and the subsequent “efficient management” of “Functional Sequences,” so the Dark Enlightenment—also known as the neoreactionary movement (NRx)—is based upon the deconstruction and redistribution of power held by the real ruling entity. The neoreactionaries called this entity “the Cathedral.”

Once the “administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges” of “the Cathedral” are properly understood and quantified, they can be “converted into fungible shares” to be owned and traded by “sovereign corporations”—sovcorps—that will form a “patchwork” of “neostates”—neocameralist-states, to be exact—as a result of “neocameralism.”

Thus, the state can be separated from the “ruling entity”—the Cathedral—and can be run more efficiently as a corporate structure called “gov-corp.” This structure is very similar to the efficient management of the “Functional Sequences” forming the “social mechanism” suggested by Technocracy.

Admittedly, there is quite a lot to unpack here.

Building on the work of Karl Marx, in 1942 the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter theorised that capitalist economies constantly evolve due to the cyclical disruption caused by innovations that destroy old markets and create new ones. He popularised the term “creative destruction” to describe this theoretical economic growth process, which, he said, was fundamental to capitalism. Schumpeter emphasised that emergent technology had the potential to disrupt, overturn, and renew the associated socioeconomic and sociopolitical power enjoyed by capitalist monopolies. Therefore, creative destruction also implied a realignment of the social and political order.

During the mid-1990s, a diverse group of iconoclast scholars working out of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) of Warwick University in the UK and led by the philosophers and cultural theorists Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, combined their thoughts about Schumpeter’s creative destruction with their exploration of “deterritorialization.” A product of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, “deterritorialization” suggested that any sociopolitical “territory”—whatever it may encompass—would ultimately be altered, mutated or destroyed, only to reemerge as something else following the process of “reterritorialization.”

Considering deterritorialization an inevitability and viewing capitalist “creative destruction” as an essential sociopolitical and economic evolution, the CCRU cyberpunks (led by Fisher and Land) noted that the rapid improvements in modern computation—quantum computing, for example—enabled successive forward technological leaps at ever-shorter intervals.

A technological singularity—or simply the singularity—in which technological growth becomes self-perpetuating, was seen as unavoidable. The technological feedback loop meant deterritorialization would be automatic. It would accelerate sharply and outstrip humanity’s ability to intervene or adapt to it, according to the CCRU.

Therefore, the task before society is to either adapt or die. Adapting means that creative destruction of capitalism must be embraced and intensified—not just because it is a socioeconomic phenomenon but because it is a desirable “schema” to implement. The creative destruction of social, economic and political systems is a proposed survival strategy that itself needs to accelerate to keep pace with the inevitable deterritorialization as we speed towards the singularity—or some other apocalypse.

In his 1967 novel Lord of Light, American science fiction writer Roger Zelazny depicted revolutionaries who wanted to rapidly transform their society by enabling greater public access to technology. Zelazny called his fictional revolutionaries “accelerationists.” The term was subsequently popularised by professor of critical theory Benjamin Noys. Note: This was prior to Nick Land labelling his interpretation of Schumpeter’s creative destruction “accelerationism.”

In 2016, Land explained:

Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about. [. . .] In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Creative destruction” is the whole of it [. . .]. Capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could.

Leading CCRU figures Nick Land and Mark Fisher in the UK and, notably, Curtis Yarvin in the US were part of the growing neoreactionary movement (NRx). Neoreactionaries fall on both the left and the right of the traditional political divide, but all neoreactionaries are accelerationists.

The associated term “accelerator” has certainly caught on. In 2011, researchers from the UK business and innovation “charity” Nesta published a discussion paper in which they noted the rapid rise of “accelerator” programmes, starting in the US and subsequently spreading to Europe and beyond:

The number of accelerator programmes has grown rapidly in the US over the past few years and there are signs that more recently, the trend is being replicated in Europe. From one accelerator programme, Y Combinator in 2005, there are now dozens in the US that are funding hundreds of startups per year. There have already been a number of high-profile startup successes from accelerator programmes.

Now 20 years old, Y Combinator (YC) applied the accelerationist approach to venture capitalism. Notable successful start-up ventures followed. Stripe, Coinbase, and Dropbox were among YC’s winners. In 2011, Peter Thiel protégé Sam Altman (who, alongside Thiel, Musk and others, co-founded OpenAI) joined YC and in 2014 became its president.

Besides the US government, the UK government and EU members states have fully embraced accelerationism. The UK government, for example, runs numerous accelerators.

Accelerationism has been conspicuously used to develop defence and surveillance technology. Consider the D3 accelerator which is reportedly “entirely focused on military-related startups.” Initially focusing in Ukraine, the “Dare to Defend Democracy” (D3) accelerator is a public-private partnership that adopts the accelerationist approach to startups focusing exclusively on AI enabled intelligence, cybersecurity, and military technology.

The D3 accelerator’s leading investors include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Together with Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and other investors in AI solutions, they have combined to use the Ukrainian battlefield as a test bed. In addition, Thiel’s Palantir and Musk’s Starlink experimentation collaborated with the Pentagon to develop Project Maven. The project deploys AI to rapidly analyse vast amounts of data to generate automated targetting. Accelerationism’s influence on public-private AI start-ups in the defence sectors on both sides of the Atlantic is already significant. We’ll explore this further in Part 2.

But, for all its winners, the accelerationist approach also creates many losers we never hear about.

[A]ccelerators typically provide services through a highly selective, cohort-based programme of limited duration (usually 3–12 months). Services often include assistance in developing the business plan, investor pitch deck, prototypes, and initial market testing. [Accelerators] base their business model on equity from the startups. This means that they are more growth driven, typically aiming to produce companies that will scale rapidly or fail fast, thus minimising wasted resources.

This selective, high-impact, creative destruction-based model of venture capitalism covers its potential losses by seizing equity from the start. The start-ups that don’t make it are left with nothing. Their investors seek to recoup what they can.

The Cathedral

Writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug between 2007 and 2014, Curtis Yarvin published a series of essays in which he laid out his various “UNQUALIFIED RESERVATIONS” (a title that runs across the bottom of each essay).

In 2014, Yarvin took a break from writing as Moldbug to focus on his business interests, with Thiel’s assistance. In 2013 he received start-up funding from Thiel for his company Tlön and its Urbit platform, a decentralised peer-to-peer (P2P) network technology company. (Note: Yarvin shifted his focus back to writing in May 2020, issuing an announcement that he was partway through his book, Gray Mirror Of The Nihilist Prince.)

Yarvin (as Moldbug) identified what he called “the Cathedral” as the primary target for creative destruction. Fellow neoreactionary Michael Anissimov described the Cathedral as “the self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service. [. . .] The Cathedral has no central administrator, but represents a consensus acting as a coherent group that condemns other ideologies as evil.” In other words, the Cathedral is not a formal structure of the state but rather the dominant progressive ideology of those exercising a controlling influence over the state.

In essence, the neoreactionaries view “the Cathedral” as the governance effect of the belief system maintained by the Establishment—the ruling class. Yarvin observed that the Cathedral prevails as an informal “institution rather than a person.” Thus, he argued, traditional approaches to political reform were useless. The real ruling entity, he reasoned, existed more as a shared ideology and as a resultant set of agreed-upon objectives held by a dominant class than as an identifiable political structure:

[T]he power structures that bind the Cathedral to the rest of the Apparat [bureaucracy] are not formal. They are mere social networks. [. . .] [T]here is nothing you can do about this structure. You can’t prevent people from emailing each other.

The NRx claims that the Cathedral champions modern, left-leaning progressivism. The fact that there is very little evidence of any Establishment commitment to egalitarian social reform is just one of many glaring errors and woeful assumptions littered throughout neoreactionary political philosophy and accelerationism more broadly. We’ll cover the most egregious errors and assumptions shortly.

While progressive mores are frequently touted by members of the Establishment, this is evidently a perception management tactic and part of social engineering. The Establishment likes to be seen as progressive and certainly prefers that we adopt progressive values, but there is no evidence that the Establishment conducts itself in keeping with progressive ideology. Nonetheless, there is truth to Curtis Yarvin’s observation that the Cathedral, expressed in neoreactionary terms, “does not wish to relinquish power.”

The NRx uses the word “democracy” when referring to “representative democracy.” Yet “democracy” and “representative democracy” are two separate, distinct, and almost diametrically opposed political systems. Representative democracy is based on every sovereign individual devolving all of their decision-making “authority” to a select few elected politicians, whereas “democracy” sees every sovereign human being retaining and exercising their own sovereign authority through the rule of law.

This confusion of definitions is a common NRx error. So common, in fact, one has to wonder if it is simply an “error” or a deliberate obfuscation. Whatever the case, the NRx is right to highlight the near-religious zealotry with which said Cathedral extols so-called “democracy.” By declaring representative democracy righteous, the NRx contends that the Cathedral establishes what is effectively a moral dictatorship.

Yarvin wrote:

The real problem is that, as a political form, democracy is more or less a synonym for theocracy. (Or, in this case, atheocracy.) Under the theory of popular sovereignty, those who control public opinion control the government.

As “democracy” hinders the necessary creative destruction and is propelling humanity like lemmings towards the cliff-edge of the singularity, axiomatically democracy must be destroyed and a better form of government—a kind of corporate monarchy—installed, per Yarvin:

The only way to escape the domination of canting, moralizing apparatchiks [the Cathedral and its acolytes] is to abandon the principle of vox populi, vox dei, and return to a system in which government is immune to the mental fluctuations of the masses.

Cameralism can be described as the science of public administration. It perceives the state as a business that runs a country. Cameralism unfolded in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries, as large, centralised states emerged. The systematic gathering and analysis of statistical data became increasingly important for state administrators and planners.

Cameralism breaks the function of the state into three parts: (1) public finance (cameral), (2) the administration of order, and (3) oeconomie. The latter determines the relationship between state and society. It is social engineering using economics and other tools. Cameralism, in all its functions, serves the efficiency of the state.

The neocameralism of the NRx applies cameralism to the Cathedral. The envisaged post-neocameral state, in which the government is “immune to the mental fluctuations of the masses,” can best be realised, or so say the neoreactionaries, by converting the state into a corporate structure.

Yarvin explained it this way:

Let’s start with my ideal world — the world of thousands, preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps.

The Dark Enlightenment

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) and French psychoanalyst and political activist Félix Guattari (1930–1992), who wrote a number of works together, argued that while capitalism set free the acquisition and distribution of resources, its architects were highly territorial, tending toward monopoly, which ultimately resulted in capitalism bringing “all its vast powers of repression to bear.” Therefore, they argued, “deterritorialization” was essential. As capitalism was inherently self-destructive, the task, they said, was to “accelerate the process.”

Echoing the “conspicuous consumption” theories of Veblen, French philosopher and sociologist Jean-François Lyotard posited that consumerist workers in modern capitalist societies did not want emancipation. Their materialistic desires meant they enjoyed “swallowing the shit of capital,” Lyotard wrote.

Building on these theories and pushing the concepts presented by Mencius Moldbug (Yarvin) to the maximum, former CCRU leader Nick Land published “The Dark Enlightenment“ in 2012. If Technocracy is inhuman, Dark Enlightenment borders on psychopathic.

Land contended that the postmodern tenets of liberal democracy—by which he meant liberal “representative democracy”—created an inescapable sociopolitical “vector” that would inevitably lead to a “new dark age” as “Malthusian limits” would unavoidably “brutally re-impose themselves.” Only an accelerationist neoreaction could avert the inevitable totalitarian catastrophe.

Land continued:

For the hardcore neoreactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing its approaches is an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression.

By agreeing to Rousseau’s “social contract” myth, propagated by the Cathedral, everyone condemned themselves to “democratic politics,” Land argued. The result of “democratization” is a capitalist “sovereign power” that runs the state to everyone’s detriment and to seemingly inescapable corruption:

[T]he dynamics of democratization [are] fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption. The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement, in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism, until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten.

Land highlighted the accelerationist view that the Cathedral assumes a postmodern “central dogma” and, as a result, maintains a misplaced “absolute moral confidence.” Unquestioningly accepted by the brainwashed public, the “secularised neo-puritanism of the Cathedral” deifies the “evangelical state.” Consequently, all opposition to it is deemed heresy. Land argued that nothing could be more intolerant of dissenting views or less inclusive.

The problem with the Cathedral, Land declared, was that while technology was capable of “accelerating development,” the “rent-seeking special interests”—the ruling class—who maintained the Cathedral swallowed all the benefits. There were no political solutions to this capitalist conundrum because their neo-puritan faith in so-called liberal democracy rendered populations incapable even of understanding, let alone tackling, the overwhelming power of the Cathedral. Land considers this a societal mental disorder that Yarvin called “demosclerosis”—an intransigent, self-destructive faith in the Cathedral.

The Cathedral had integral morbidity, and post-WWII globalization had spread the sickness. To maintain demosclerosis, the Cathedral’s only solution was to consume ever more to retain the neo-puritanical beliefs of the faithful. Land called this condition “modernity 1.0.” It necessitated the constant expansion into new markets, to the point where Land predicted that the “Eurocentric” model would be abandoned. Anglo-American power would thus be diffused as the Cathedral sought to roll out “modernity 2.0.”

Writing in 2012, Land said:

Modernity 2.0. Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new ethno-geographical core [the East], liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly realized.

The Dark Enlightenment suggests that modernity 2.0 merely postpones the inevitable failure to adapt to the singularity. A true “Western Renaissance” could only be realised with the demise of the extant global Cathedral. Therefore, every crisis should be accelerated and exacerbated in an attempt to break the Cathedral’s hold:

To be reborn it is first necessary to die, so the harder the ‘hard reboot’ the better. Comprehensive crisis and disintegration offers the best odds. [. . .] Because competition is good, a pinch of Western Renaissance would spice things up, even if — as is overwhelmingly probable — Modernity 2.0 is the world’s principal highway to the future. That depends upon the West stopping and reversing pretty much everything it has been doing for over a century, excepting only scientific, technological, and business innovation. [Emphasis added.]

Observe that, from the neoreactionary perspective, “scientific, technological, and business innovation” are the only valuable Cathedral attributes. As neoreactionaries incorrectly think sovereignty implies nothing more than the power to exert authority over another and as the Cathedral possesses the ultimate alleged “sovereignty,” neocameralism can be used to audit Cathedral sovereignty and thereby run the state more effectively.

While the word “sovereignty” certainly implies “superiority,” the libertarian concept of self-ownership, or individual sovereignty, is more than just ignored by the accelerationist NRx. It is wholeheartedly rejected. The proponents of the Dark Enlightenment describe themselves as libertarians, but are using that term in a bizarre sense.

Land at least acknowledged the existence of a ruling class, but the Dark Enlightenment is based on the misconception that oligarchs simply pay for political favours. Once the oligarchs’ path to monetary bribery is removed, they can safely be ignored:

[T]he ruling class must be plausibly identified. [. . .] It is [only] necessary to ask [. . .] who do capitalists pay for political favors, how much these favors are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them is distributed. This requires, with a minimum of moral irritation, that the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares.

Thus, the useful “functions”—or “chambers,” in neocameralist terms—of the Cathedral can be “mapped” and converted into freely transferable shareholdings.

Yarvin suggested breaking nations into neostates run by the shareholders of sovereign corporations—sovcorps. Land, perhaps adopting a more traditional cameralist position, envisaged converting the entire nation into a business enterprise run by gov-corp:

The formalization of political powers [. . .] allows for the possibility of effective government. Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp, the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value.

In a practically identical fashion to Technocracy, the Dark Enlightenment proposes dictatorship. Instead of a Continental Director of Continental Control, it advocates for a CEO of gov-corp. It is still a select few who rule with absolute authority and impunity.

Obviously, there is no democratic accountability of any kind—not even representative democratic accountability—under the totalitarian rule of gov-corp. Indeed, politicians and politics would become obsolete. Nevertheless, like the technocrats, the accelerationist neoreactionaries were, in their own seemingly naïve way, trying to address government corruption and its impacts.

In the Dark Enlightenment, gov-corp would act as a service provider of effective government. Citizens would become its “customers.” They could therefore expect value for their money, and they could make a complaint if they were dissatisfied:

If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and[,] if necessary[,] take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers.

It is difficult to know where to start criticising this absurd idea. Whether they are called “sovereign rents” or “taxes,” no one chooses to pay them. The notion that a customer “buys” a service implies that they are equally free to choose not to buy it. Yet the only choice offered by the NRx’s gov-corp is to either pay up or get out. As Land puts it, absent politics of any kind, “no voice, free exit.” For billions of people this is not remotely possible.

The neoreactionaries’ appreciation of oligarchy is monumentally facile. Land openly acknowledges that the proposed “owners of the state” are those who would have sufficient means to “buy out” the Cathedral’s existing “stakeholders”—that is, its “owners.” So, who does he imagine will run gov-corp but the oligarchs who already “own” the state? Gov-corp does not challenge the “ruling class.” Instead, it hands total control of society and state over to the “ruling class” on a gold platter.

Citizens can already make a complaint to government through a variety of mechanisms, including lobbying, petitions, protest, and other forms of activism. Elections make no difference precisely because government is always corrupted by oligarchs who, while they sometimes squabble, essentially agree on the direction they want humanity to head. To be honest, the other existing routes of complaint don’t really work either, for more or less the same reason.

The Dark Enlightenment solution to this accurately identified problem is to “formalise” every avenue of dissent and sell it off to oligarchs, who are trusted by the neoreactionaries to operate a fair and just “customer service function.” This is not a plausible solution of any kind from humanity’s perspective.

There is every reason to suspect that this so-called solution is an attempt to mollify fools and convince them to buy into the Dark Enlightenment. Frankly, humanity is despised by the neoreactionaries, who wish to see it entirely dispossessed.

The Cathedral would hold nearly all “sovereignty,” but the share of “sovereignty” held by regular humans would be negligible. Rather than address this logical conclusion, however, the Dark Enlightenment treats human beings as practically irrelevant. As Land sees it:

Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion of sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision.

Land’s eugenical tendency is obvious when he claims that “people are, on average, not very bright.” Since, in Land’s eyes, the citizenry is worth so little and their share of sovereignty is practically nil, it is best to treat them as the largely clueless customers of gov-corp. In light of looming singularity, the question, according to Land, is how to maximise the useful function of these customers in order extract the appropriate “sovereign rent” from them.

His suggestion is that we should all become “technoplastic beings.” This will make us “susceptible to precise, scientifically informed transformations.”

Land writes:

‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of the genome — for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect coincidence. To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its technology.

Essentially then, in accordance with the Dark Enlightenment, the accelerationist solution to humanity’s ills is to end humanity.

Once we are “technoplastic beings”—transhuman cyborgs—in a world where “biology and medicine co-evolve,” we will cross the “bionic horizon,” as Land calls it. At that point, we can finally kill God and abandon the “essence of man as a created being.” We will be free to sacrifice our humanity and embark upon our “new evolutionary phase.”

As valued customers who are rendered intelligible only by melding with technology, we can all prostrate ourselves and our children before the sovereignty of gov-corp. Under the watchful eye of our illustrious CEO, we can be programmed as required. The result? Finally, at long last, we will have an effective government. After all, “the system must be first.”

The Accelerationist Left

In 2008, two Canadian left-leaning neoreactionaries, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, published the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics. In this treatise, the pair were responding to Mark Fisher’s thoughts on “capitalist realism.” (The following year, Fisher turned those thoughts into a book called Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative.) Fisher had observed that, after the Soviet Union collapsed, no viable political-economic alternative to capitalism had been offered. Probably quoting Slavoj Žižek, Fisher had written, “[I]t is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”

Fisher argued that the left had failed to challenge neoliberalism, which he described as a separate but reinforcing component of modern capitalism. Considering the inequities wrought by neoliberalism, Fisher urged the left to embrace an accelerationist approach to capitalism. He identified neoliberalism, rather than progressivism, as the founding faith binding what Land and Yarvin called “the Cathedral.”

Like his counterparts on the right, Fisher contended that technological growth was unstoppable. He argued that the traditional left’s attempt to recreate a socialist society without accounting for the homogenising effect of modern technology was an act of futility. If the hope was to make meaningful use of progressive political theory, the left needed to embrace capitalist realism and deploy accelerationism to creatively destroy and “deterritorialize” neoliberalism to ensure a progressive, post-capitalist reterritorialization.

In their #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO, Williams and Srnicek accepted capitalist realism and said:

In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.

Applying neocameralism to neoliberalism, they added:

[T]he left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic modelling is — simply put — a necessity for making intelligible a complex world. [. . .] The tools to be found in social network analysis, agent-based modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist left must become literate in these technical fields.

As accelerationist leftists who are pursuing a progressive future, the co-authors advocate a “sociotechnical hegemony” to ensure that “production, finance, logistics, and consumption” are “reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.” They promote public-private partnership—stakeholder capitalism. And they believe that “governments, institutions, think tanks, unions, or individual benefactors” should work together to create “an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces.”

This “ecology” of public and private institutions could, Williams and Srnicek envisioned, create “a new ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the good” and design new “institutions and material paths to inculcate, embody and spread them.” Working together, this partnership of stakeholders would construct “a positive feedback loop of infrastructural, ideological, social and economic transformation, generating a new complex hegemony, a new post-capitalist technosocial platform.”

It is somewhat humorous that, despite all their talk of a “sociotechnical hegemony,” the accelerationist left has been divided from the neoreactionary right by the same old disagreements—not to mention some degree of animosity. Harshly critical of Land in particular, Williams and Srnicek described Land’s inhuman model of accelerationism as “a simple brain-dead onrush,” whereas their own model promises a more human-centred “navigational” accelerationism.

Any human being who would like to see future generations of humanity thrive would be hard-pressed to choose either the #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO or the Dark Enlightenment. Both are deeply rooted in transhumanism. Instead of being programmed to be good customers of gov-corp, we’d be programmed to be outstanding progressives under sociotechnical hegemony. Of the latter, Williams and Srnicek write:

Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation[,] [. . .] fusing advanced cybernetic technologies [. . .] with sophisticated economic modelling [. . .] and a democratic platform instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself, [. . .] employing cybernetics and linear programming in an attempt to overcome the new problems. [. . .] The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. They establish the basic parameters of what is possible, both behaviourally and ideologically.

In truth, accelerationist neoreaction, on both the left and the right, outlines nothing other than a future technological and sociopolitical dystopia. There is absolutely no reason to imagine that hegemony of any kind is capable of delivering anything but tyranny. Like the technocrats, the accelerationist neoreactionaries seem equally unable to grasp that there will always be megalomaniac oligarchs set on “accomplishing some object,” no matter how deranged their objective may be.

Disillusionment with representative democracy is no reason to hand over totalitarian sociopolitical control systems to oligarchs. Accelerating towards hegemony is not a solution. Unless you are an oligarch, it is a stupid and suicidal proposition.

Neither Technocracy, accelerationism nor the Dark Enlightenment exist within our familiar political paradigms. They are so far outside the Overton window that we can’t even discuss them without either being embroiled in pointless and redundant debates about whether they are communist or fascist or being subjected to eye-rolling scorn.

To be frank, it makes little difference what we hoi polloi believe. The oligarchs who are conversant with these political philosophies are evidently trying to bring them to fruition in our lifetime. We ignore the consequent cultural revolutions and social engineering projects at our peril. Make no mistake: They are already underway.

Consider Land’s darkly enlightened determination that we must reject “any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression”—the common perception of the “social contract.” We are now seeing his objective transition into [public] policy.

President Trump has come to power backed by technocrats like Elon Musk and neoreactionaries like Peter Thiel. One of Trump’s first acts as president was to announce a $500 billion public-private infrastructure investment project called “Stargate.” The aim is to construct the data centre and power generation capacity needed for the development and rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The Stargate public-private consortium brings the US government into a partnership with OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank. Thiel’s protégé, Sam Altman, is the CEO of OpenAI. Speaking shortly after Trump’s announcement, Altman made a statement thick with Aesopian language. He told reporters:

I think technology does a great deal to lift the world to more abundance and to better prosperity. [. . .] I still expect that there will be some change required to the social contract. [. . .] [T]he whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration.

Darkly Enlightened Christianity

Irrespective of the various religious rites practiced by different Christian denominations or of the sectarian divisions to which they give rise, the unifying values of all genuine Christians—love, compassion, humility, integrity, and justice—are easy to appreciate and respect.

But right-leaning members of the neoreactionary movement, including Yarvin and Land, take exception to what they consider a progressive translation of those Christian values. Consequently, self-proclaimed Christian neoreactionaries have adopted a warped reinterpretation of the traditional Christian values most of us recognise.

“Universalism” is a Christian theology that preaches the doctrine of universal reconciliation with God. Christian Universalism maintains that anyone—Christian or not, saint or sinner—can find salvation through Jesus Christ. Universalism often holds that there is no permanent damnation to Hell because “the Lord will not cast off forever.”

The theology of Universalism is aligned with Mainline Protestantism, which emphasises social justice and personal salvation and offers more liberal and progressive interpretations of scripture. Yarvin attacks Christian Universalism as an extreme form of Calvinism, which, he says, dictates that “all dogs go to Heaven and there is no Hell.” His objection is to the inference that “everyone is part of the elect.”

The belief that we are all equally deserving of grace is contrary to the dogma of the neoreactionary right. Remember, the NRx proclaims that humanity’s “portion of sovereignty” is worthy only of “derision.”

Consequently, the NRx neologise “Universalism” to mean the synthesis between “the mainline Protestant and secular Nationalist movements.” Yarvin argues that US secular nationalism has become “internationalism”—globalism—and that “nationalism” has consequently become “an inappropriate term.”

The neoreactionaries reference an article published in Time magazine in 1942, titled “Religion: American Malvern” as alleged proof that progressive liberal theology has mutated and merged with progressive, political globalism. This is considered to be to the detriment of both Christian beliefs and nationalism. Though the article links the political corruption of the church in the US with globalists like John Foster Dulles, it does not demonstrate that Christian theology and progressive political ideology are intertwined.

Nonetheless, as the Cathedral is defined as the supposed dominant progressive ideology of the ruling class, Yarvin concludes that political progressivism is a “sect of Christianity”—and not a sect he embraces.

Frankly, this appears to be little more than linguistic trickery. Other than the fact that reform is common to both political progressivism and theological liberalism, the neoreactionaries’ suggested marriage of the two seems tenuous. It is almost impossible to follow Yarvin’s and Land’s reasoning, to the point where many have questioned if there is any.

Yarvin insists that modern Christianity itself has become a core component of the “nontheistic sect” of NRx-defined Universalism—the neo-puritanical faith in the Cathedral. Consequently, according to the NRx, the neoreactionaries who oppose Universalism are viewed as literal heretics by the neo-puritan acolytes of the Cathedral—that is, everyone who is not a neoreactionary.

Yarvin rejects this notion and sees those who embrace liberal theology—progressivism—as the true heretics. It is the NRx, he posits, that seeks to restore the true Christian faith:

If a Christian who believes his or her faith is justified by universal reason is a Universalist, a Christian who believes his or her faith is justified by divine revelation—in other words, a “Christian” as the word is commonly used today—might be called a Revelationist.

For NRx Christians like Peter Thiel, imposing gov-corp and removing the stultifying influence of the progressive Universalism is the Christian thing to do. In their view, the true revelation is that “real” Christians reject liberal theology and hold to a more literal reading of scripture. Combined with his sociopolitical philosophy, this theology has evidently led Thiel, and presumably others who share his faith, to adopt supposed Christian values most of us would struggle to recognise as Christian.

Today, the TechnoKings—such as Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan—and many of the leading lights in the Mainstream Alternative Media (MAM)—are more openly discussing and promoting their Christian faith. Take Russell Brand, for example. Brand’s proselytising is popular on the Thiel-backed Rumble video-sharing platform, where many MAM heavyweights have prospered.

As noted by the UK’s Christian Today, Hulk Hogan, Shia LaBeouf, Rob Schneider, Kat Von D, Candace Owens, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are also among the many celebrities and “talking heads” to have very conspicuously converted to Christianity (mainly Catholicism) in recent months. Before we assume this indicates a resurgence in Christian values, perhaps we should first look at what those values might be.

It is tempting to see the fashion for openly advocating your Christianity as a marketing strategy, particularly in the US. The “Bible Belt” represents a sizeable demographic and usually a Republican heartland. But there is more to it.

Peter Thiel has been something of a faith leader among the TechnoKing class and has long been open about his own allegedly Christian beliefs. Thiel is also an enthusiast and former student of the philosophy of René Girard (1923–2015). His personal Christian values are evidently heavily influenced by his sociopolitical and philosophical beliefs. They diverge considerably from the Christian values we have discussed to this point.

Girard argued that people’s desire to imitate others—mimesis—led them to covet objects and services, ascribing them corresponding and often irrational value. His mimetic theory is largely consistent with Veblen’s conspicuous consumption.

When humans are driven by mimetic desire, social conflict—and ultimately violence—is inevitable as we compete for resources, Girard proffered. The conflict escalates until it becomes all-consuming and threatens to destroy society. That’s when a scapegoat becomes necessary, he argued.

Via the scapegoat mechanism, an individual or group is blamed, persecuted, and murdered. This “founding murder” unites society and returns it to a more stable condition. But the peace is precarious, for the underlying mimetic desire remains. If we follow Girard’s reasoning and assume the founding murder requires planning, we could describe the othering of the scapegoat as an archetypal psychological operation (psyop).

The founding murder facilitates cultural renewal through the process of sacralization. An accompanying mythology imbues the murdered scapegoat with great power. The scapegoat’s guilt means they had to die for society to be reborn, thereby rendering the murder a sacred act. Subsequent symbolic sacrifices, according to Girard, were reaffirmations of the cultural significance of the founding murder.

Girard converted to Catholicism in 1959 based on what he contended was an empirical philosophical approach to scripture. He identified the story of Christ Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection as an archetypal example of a “founding murder.” The Lamb of God was the scapegoated slain victim who becomes the miraculous foundation of a new culture.

Girard viewed the resurrection of Jesus—theologically proving he was “not guilty”—as a cultural turning point in human history. It exposed the lie underpinning the scapegoat mechanism. The founding murder of Christ reveals the contradiction at the heart of human society. Its treasured “peace” is only—can only—stem from its own inherent and uncontrollable violence.

In 2003, Thiel wrote an essay titled “The Straussian Moment.” In it, Thiel challenged both the rationality of the Enlightenment and prevailing Christian theology. He argued that the founding murder “is the secret origin of all religious and political institutions.” Therefore, to maintain its Enlightened delusions and its Christian pretensions—in Girardian terms—modern society’s only option is to deceive itself by ignoring the “truth about human nature.”

Thiel criticized Enlightenment philosophers, such as John Locke, for overlooking the mimetic desires of human beings. Determining this “desire” to be a fundamental aspect of human nature, Thiel wrote: “In the place of human nature, Locke leaves us with an unknowable X.”

Thiel argued that human nature—the unknowable X—could be known and accounted for. Thus, like Yarvin, Land, and the broader NRx, Thiel rejected the alleged ambiguity of the Enlightenment:

[T]he Enlightenment undertook a major strategic retreat. If the only way to stop people from killing one another [in the name of religion or conflicting beliefs] involved a world where nobody thought about [human nature] too much, then the intellectual cost of ceasing such thought seemed a small price to pay. The question of human nature was abandoned because it is too perilous a question to debate.

Thiel finds this “lack of understanding of this truth of human culture” to be a fatal flaw. He agrees with Girard’s point that “the modern world contains a powerfully apocalyptic dimension”—mimetic desire. It is fundamentally unstable, prone to revolution, corruption, and collapse and cannot be permanent. Therefore, the Christian imperative is to acknowledge mimetic apocalypse and understand that the truth delivered by the resurrection is the real revelation of the founding murder: humanity is the problem.

In “The Straussian Moment,” Thiel presents this world view by proposing a course of action for Christian politicians who understand the “truth” about the founding murder of Christ. Once understood, violent human nature and the cyclical inevitability of apocalypse can be included in a more cohesive theology, he believes.

Christian politicians should proceed by “determining the correct mixture of violence and peace” they may need to utilise, depending on the circumstances. The task is to manage the “limitless violence of runaway mimesis” with the objective of delivering the “peace of the kingdom of God.”

It is ironic that Thiel criticises what he sees as the vagaries within Enlightenment rationality. There appears to be quite a lot of moral ambiguity in Thiel’s Christian “values.”

Over the last two decades, Thiel’s opinion has changed little. His Girardian view of mimetic apocalypse has presumably combined with his darkly enlightened conceptualisation of the singularity and shaped his personal theology. Speaking to Peter Robinson from the Hoover Institute, Thiel laid out his thoughts about the apocalypse.

Thiel said that human nature has a “limitless violence to it.” Therefore, biblical prophecies of the apocalypse really speak of what “humanity is likely to do in a world of ever more powerful technology.” Thiel agrees with René Girard that violence is not “one of God’s attributes.” Consequently, he rejects the more humanist view of the Enlightenment philosophers that humanity “is not that dangerous.” Again, humanity is the primary risk in Thiel’s theology.

Thiel considers that the world is beset with existential crises. He lists climate change, the threat of nuclear war, the singularity, pandemics and other aspects of the so-called polycrisis. Humanity fears the “apocalyptic specter” but, he contends, it views the solution to be “a one world state that has real teeth, real power. And the biblical term for that is the Antichrist.” Thiel deems centralised global government synonymously as “the Antichrist or Armageddon.” As salvation will only be found when people recognise the truth about the founding murder of Christ, society must confront and be realistic about its own mimetic violence. The problem is, Thiel argues, that humanity is not “apocalyptic enough.”

Continuing his conversation with Robinson, Thiel used the allegory of Odysseus‘ return voyage to Circe’s island, observing how Odysseus carefully navigated the waters between the dangers of the six-headed monster Scylla (the polycrisis – apocalypse) and the whirlpool Charybdis (a one world state – Armageddon or the Antichrist). Comparing himself to Odysseus, Thiel says that he would like to chart “some narrow path between these two where we can avoid both.”

From Thiel’s theological perspective, the mimetic apocalypse is driving the polycrisis and humanity is reacting to it buy embracing the Antichrist—one world government (Armageddon). He posited that humanity is “groomed to the Antichrist solution.” Thiel said he is “not a Calvinist,” that these outcomes were not predetermined and he could envisage a “third way.”

Accepting mimetic apocalypse and the Antichrist Armageddon as the only “two options” is the mistake of the “political atheist,” according to Thiel. Apparently, the third way lies somewhere between. If you take a more Christian view, as the “US is ground zero of globalization” its is also “ground zero of the resistance to bad globalization.” Globalization isn’t unchristian but the wrong kind of globalisation—bad globalisation—is seemingly so.

Speaking as a “Christian” at an event last year organised by the ACTS 17 Collective—a backronym whose full name is Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society—and held at the home of Garry Tan, Thiel claimed that humanity is “caught up in all these crazy dynamics” and that “[t]here are these bad cycles of imitation, status games that you get wrapped up in.” When considering how his fellow Christians should respond to the inevitable mimetic crisis and future apocalypse, Thiel advised:

[Of] the Ten Commandments, the two most important are the first and last on the list. The first commandment is, you should worship God. The tenth commandment is, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbor.

According to Thiel, the Christian thing to do, first and foremost, is to avoid mimetic failings and worship God. It seems the other eight Commandments—which extol traditional Christian values of not taking God’s name in vain, not killing, stealing, committing adultery, or bearing false witness, and so on—are less crucial to him. One wonders what the point of worshipping God is if God’s essential message to humanity is of secondary importance to this self-proclaimed Christian.

That said, moral leeway certainly accommodates “Christians” who want to ensure they maintain the “correct mixture of violence and peace.” As we shall see in Part 2, this would seem particularly important for Thiel’s “Christianity,” given his extensive links to the US military-intelligence-industrial complex and his genocidal war profiteering. (It isn’t quite clear how these pursuits fit with any recognisable Christian values.)

ACTS 17 bills itself as a Christian non-profit organisation that is “redefining success for those that define culture.” It seems that “success” and the ability to “define culture” are now Christian values.

This non-profit runs church seminars and workshops instead of food banks or community projects. It reaches out to America’s tech-savvy, TechnoKing wannabes rather than embracing the disenfranchised poor. It was formed by three servants of God: Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, Founders Fund partner (and Anduril co-founder) Trae Stephens, and Trae’s wife Michelle.

ACTS 17’s exploration of Christian values is unusual. It appears to be offering Christianity as an alternative to believing in “whatever.” Michelle Stephens, a PhD and RN who co-founded Oath Care and is its chief nursing officer, explained the philosophy this way to San Francisco Standard reporters:

As humans, we are all made to worship and will worship something if we don’t worship God. [. . .] What are you putting your faith in? What are you worshipping?

Oh well, why not give the Christian God a go then? It’s not as if you have to commit to anything else, other than avoiding mimesis, if you can.

For his part, defense contractor and venture capitalist Trae Stephens is at ease with developing AI weaponry and simultaneously being a “Christian.” In a September 2024 interview with the technology magazine Wired, Stephens declared his belief that “Jesus doesn’t care about classes of people. He cares about people.” He then added:

There’s a lot that venture capitalists do that is directly aligned with abundance—caring about improving humanity. [. . .] [T]he essence of venture capital is creating wealth. It’s not extractive. It’s not zero-sum. It’s the idea that you can make something from nothing, and that is, foundationally, a theological idea.[. . .] The call that I have been trying to make to the tech community is that we have a moral obligation to do things to benefit humanity, to draw us closer to God’s plan for his people.

Accelerationist venture capitalism is thus made a Christian act of mercy. The social consequences of one’s investment strategy are largely immaterial. Generating something—great wealth and the power to kill—from nothing is our moral obligation and the essence of Christianity.

Trae is instrumental in moving warfare into the private sector. Under his guidance—and Thiel’s influence—Anduril’s “Lattice for Mission Autonomy” system uses Anduril’s bespoke Lattice AI software to enable a single human operator to supposedly control hundreds of autonomous weapons systems. This includes Anduril’s AI-run Barracuda cruise missiles.

I am in no position to question anyone’s faith, and I am not doing so here. But it is reasonable for any of us to challenge obvious hypocrisy. When used as an adjective, the word “Christian” means “good, kind, helpful” conduct. These qualities reflect real Christian values and are the least we can expect from someone who describes themselves as “a Christian.”

It is indefensible to profess oneself a Christian while acting in a way that no rational person could ever perceive as Christian. Calling oneself a follower of Christ while founding companies whose mission is normally perceived as unchristian—indeed, is antithetical to the common understanding of what it means to be Christian’. It sounds like moral grandstanding and it is legitimate, if not requisite, to question such duplicity.

This is not to suggest that all the characters in this article do not believe in God or genuinely consider themselves Christian. They well may. But if Thiel and Stephens do, their concept of Christianity is one that the vast majority of us cannot relate to.

Dark Enlightenment Christianity, then, appears to be an intellectual reimagining that is based more upon sociopolitical philosophy than on any cogent theology. Sure, if you claim that Christianity demands a supposedly realistic appraisal of the mimetic violence of human culture; if you believe a more practical approach to conflict is warranted; if you contend that your ultimate objective is to mitigate the human cost of the impending apocalypse and avoid the Armageddon of the Antichrist, then calling your company’s targetted drone strikes “Christian” is not off base. But to the rest of us, such self-justifying talk sounds more like self-deception than an unselfed Christian walk.

As to what the other recent converts to the Thielverse truly believe, who can say. But, if it is anything like Thiel’s version of Christianity, there is no reason to welcome it.

From Ideology to Policy

Political ideology only becomes influential once it shapes government policies and political agendas and, in turn, once those policies and agendas impact society. By way of example, let’s consider stakeholder capitalism.

The United Nations (UN) redefined the role of governments during the 1990s. Its then-Secretary-General Kofi Annan, addressing the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 1998, spoke of a “quiet revolution” at the intergovernmental level:

The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community and civil society.

Annan described the shift to a global public-private partnership (G3P) model of global governance. This “multistakeholder governance” resets and diminishes the role of governments. As mere partners of the private sector and of civil society organisations (CSOs), governments are tasked with creating what is called an “enabling environment“:

An economy’s enabling environment encompasses both formal and informal institutions; utilities and infrastructure such as transport, energy, water and telecommunications; as well as the framework conditions set by monetary and fiscal policy, and more broadly, public finances. [. . .] [T]he quality of a country’s enabling environment will not only have to be assessed on its ability to support growth and productivity, but also on the ability to transform the economy to achieve environmental and shared prosperity targets.

A properly designed and centrally planned enabling environment ensures that multistakeholder partnerships—of which governments are partner members—can set policy and regulations to achieve their shared “targets,” whatever they may be. For example, the UK government has created the necessary enabling environment in order for public-private partnerships to achieve Net Zero prosperity targets. Its policy and regulatory measures include:

• New business models, standards and market arrangements to facilitate uptake of solutions, for example energy as a service and time-of-use tariffs.
• [F]inance options to support new products and services.
• Economic models for new or significantly scaled-up commodities.

It is a mistake to assume enabling environments are components of the kind of centrally planned command economy we might normally associate with communism. Multistakeholder partnerships and enabling environments have emerged not from collectivism but from stakeholder capitalism. First outlined by the current chairman of the WEF’s Board of Trustees Klaus Schwab in the 1970s, stakeholder capitalism has progressed by exploiting the communitarianism proposed by Amitai Etzioni and others. Although the communitarian philosophy is an outgrowth of the ideas espoused by the Utopian socialists, there is nothing socialist about stakeholder capitalism.

A full-blown stakeholder capitalist society would replace representative democracy with a network of so-called citizen assemblies. The propaganda pitch for these assemblies alleges they are designed to improve citizen engagement in policy making. Representative members of the public, private, and “civil society” sectors assemble to deliberate policy with the purported aim of decentralising political power.

But if we look more closely at the stakeholder capitalist assembly model, we see that the public-private partnership retains all the authority and controls the distribution of all resources. What’s more, the public-private partnership sets the agenda for debate. The “civil society” component, largely represented by what investigative journalist Cory Morningstar calls the non-profit industrial complex, is dominated by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which are beholden to the “philanthropy” of oligarchs like Jeff Bezos.

We’ve already said that stakeholder capitalism suggests a triumvirate power-sharing structure leading to multistakeholder policy-setting. And we’ve said that, in truth, the public-private partnership two-thirds of the triumvirate dominates the civil society one-third. “Citizen assemblies” are merely PR stunts meant to lend the public-private partnership faux democratic legitimacy.

Representative democracy does not afford the people much democratic oversight. If stakeholder capitalism, including its citizen assemblies, were fully implemented, as Klaus Schwab proposes, democratic oversight would be removed completely. Stakeholder capitalism is designed to liberate public-private partnerships—not the people.

Multistakeholder public-private partnerships are ubiquitous. China’s model of stakeholder capitalism, for instance, has fully integrated public-private partnerships within the mechanism of the state. While large, state-run policy research units remain dominant in China, privately funded policy think tanks, such as the National Strategy Institute and the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, have been afforded increasing influence.

In the West, the historical relationship between private capital and the state is different from that of, say, China. The US and UK governments, for example, have long favoured policy development suggestions from private think tanks.

Nonetheless, wherever we look, stakeholder capitalism has taken root. Gov-corp represents the complete privatization of the state, and Technocracy offers a blueprint for how the fully privatised state can manage the public “social mechanism.”

The notion of a fully privatised state, that is, a “private” yet “public” state, is a somewhat odd concept for most people to wrap their heads around. Probably the nearest example of a similar governance structure would be Benito Mussolini’s fascist Italy. In the 1935 publication Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Mussolini wrote:

The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful [sic] instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. [. . .] State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved.

That said, stakeholder capitalism is not fascism. It is an inversion of the fascist relationship between the public and private sectors.

The fascist doctrine sets the private sector free to innovate but constrains its authority within the orbit of the political state and its institutions. Stakeholder capitalism ultimately enables private corporations to use the political authority of the state for their own ends through partnership agreements. Stakeholder capitalist ideology has taken hold of government policy everywhere and is a logical step along the road to a gov-corp Technocracy.

Oligarch Upheaval

Highly plausible rumour has it that several Silicon Valley companies run by self-styled “TechnoKings”—among them Thiel at Palantir, the directors of OpenAI, and SpaceX founder Musk (the original “TechnoKing of Tesla”)—are forming a consortium and leading the charge to seize control of the US military-industrial complex. For his part, Musk’s defence and intelligence contracts are the centrepiece of his sprawling commercial empire. His provision of Starlink satellite terminals to Ukraine during the war with Russia is well-known.

Starlink, a SpaceX division, was used by the Ukrainian military for offensive purposes. It would be ridiculous for Starlink representatives to pretend they didn’t know their satellite service would be used to launch attacks, and yet deny it they did. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, for instance, said Starlink was “never intended for offensive purposes.” Ukrainian officials said they found Shotwell’s comments “strange,” since Starlink’s intended military use was glaringly obvious.

It should come as little surprise that practically the first “inefficiency” concern raised with the DOGE came from a defence contractor. CEO Chris Kubasik of L3Harris Technologies, a company that specialises in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) as well as signals intelligence systems, told the DOGE that the US defence acquisition system—procurement process—was too slow and bureaucratic to keep pace with the threats posed by Iran and China.

It is clear who will be the beneficiaries of the DOGE drive to make the US military-industrial complex more efficient. In an interview with CNBC, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a Thiel protégé who invests heavily in Anduril, said:

I have a lot of friends involved in DOGE. [. . .] If you are forced to use your money more efficiently [. . .] that’s when Palantir and Anduril will win. [. . .] Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense, was very clear that he wants to have competition, he wants the best ideas to win. [. . .] And that means companies like Anduril and like Palantir are going to keep growing really fast.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s public Venmo profile exposes his close relationship with the Thiel/Musk-linked faction bidding to seize control of Department of Defense (DOD) procurement. It seems Lonsdale’s observation that Hegseth is “our Secretary of Defense” is far more specific than most American voters realise.

We are evidently witnessing a power shift within the globalist oligarchy. The new breed of technocrat neoreactionaries are favoured in the US. Sadly, while American voters have been duped into thinking this offers them an escape from what they perceived as the suffocating “woke” censorship regime of the Biden administration, they are actually being accelerated toward something worse.

Oligarch upheaval never improves our lives, it merely indicates which oligarch faction has primacy. The DOGE attack on USAID—which was extensively infiltrated by US intelligence agencies—is symbolic. While Musk has castigated USAID’s waste and inefficiency, he has failed to mention that USAID previously funnelled funds to finance Starlink’s ventures in Ukraine. Are we supposed to believe Musk would destroy one of his own income streams?

If and when the Thiel/Musk-fronted oligarch network seizes control of DOD budgets, they won’t need the USAID back door. As will be evidenced in Part 2, the new public-private intelligence partnership formed by Palentir, Anduril, ClearviewAI, and others means that the potential for US intelligence agency projects to go even darker has increased, not decreased, with the purported demise of USAID.

Meanwhile, hapless US voters, not to mention numerous MAM pundits around the world, are cheering the end of USAID. While, in many respects, some enthusiasm is understandable, it is hopelessly misplaced. A privatised, darker deep state is certainly not going to benefit humanity, only the oligarchs.

As the DOGE sets about using AI to evaluate the efficiency of the human beings that work in government departments, it is not without justification that some have recognised the “post-human” nature of this new form of technological governance. The technocrats and the accelerationist neoreactionaries are remaking the US state in their own image absent any notable oversight. They are using creative destruction to deterritorialize the extant Cathedral and reterritorializing the US state with an even more rigid and authoritarian Cathedral of their own.

In Part 2, we will look at more examples that reveal how members of the so-called superclass that backs Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are exploiting their relationships with the US state to roll out a government policy agenda aligned with their political ideology. In doing so, they are knowingly laying the groundwork for a US gov-corp Technate fit for a multipolar world order.

The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate — Part 1.