FIlippo Tommaso Marinetti loved cars, especially his FIAT sports car with four -cylinder. For him, the car represented innovation and vitality, even violence. Above all, it meant the future. Italian poet, performer and pamphlet, Marinetti was a reactionary; He hated egalitarianism and democracy. Nor was he a conservative in any traditional sense, because it was not much than him, and others in the futuristic artistic movement he founded, wanted to keep. In his 1909 treaty, Foundation and manifesto of futurism,, He wrote: “We will destroy museums, libraries, academies of all kinds.” A precursor of fascism that would envelop Europe, Marinetti had an influence on Benito Mussolini and this ideology, which would soon hold this dark promise to destroy the museums, libraries and academies of Europe.
Marinetti’s fortress on Mussolini has struck the parallels with America today – in particular with the rise of the “Dark Withenment” movement and its most vocal intendant: the software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin.
Largely ignored by academic philosophers, the movement of “dark” lights and Yarvin has aroused the favor and influence of technology leaders in recent years. Software engineer in training, Yarvin has become a kind of official philosopher for technological leaders such as the co -founder of Paypal Peter Thiel and the founder of Mosaic Marc Andreessen. Unlike futurists, Yarvin recommends replacing democracy with a kind of techno -feudal state – so that the government is led as a company, with the president as “CEO”. This new system is elitist – “humans are part of the submission structures of dominance” that Yarvin wrote in 2008; And he is authoritarian-“If the Americans want to change their government, they will have to overcome their dictator phobia,” he said in 2012. There are nuances of Yarvin’s philosophy in Thiel’s essay in 2009 for the Cato Institute, where he wrote: “I only believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” And Thiel, through his venture capital company, Founders Fund, was a first investor in the start-up company of blogger Urbit. As for the controversial opinions of Yarvin and if Thiel holds them or not, Yarvin said that his boss was “fully lit” because he had “trained Thiel”. In addition, in a recent interview with The Hoover Institution, Andreessen quoted Yarvin and called him a “friend”.
What is even more alarming is that the influence on Yarvin’s size on technology leaders has now made its way to Washington. The signs are everywhere: Yarvin was a guest celebrated to the so-called “coronation ball” of Trump in January 2025. Vice-president JD Vance, a protégé by Thiel’s, admiredly explained the blogger on his thought when she was interviewed on a podcast in July 2024. And while the role of Andreessen in the house of Trump is Debast. The Washington Post reported in January 2025 that the executive “was quietly and managed to recruit candidates for posts through Washington by Trump”. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, although he does not change his hat outside Yarvin, apparently has a similar philosophy: in 2020, Musk declared to the Wall Street Journal that “government is simply the biggest company”. Five years later, Musk used his position as unofficial advisor to the second Trump Administration and the Ministry of Effectiveness of the Government (DOGE) to operationalize what Yarvin called “a hard restart” of the government.
Find out more: Inside Elon Musk’s war against Washington
As such, it is up to us to be more familiar with Yarvin and other figures of the associated bow figures of this extreme right philosophy. Understanding their motivations is essential to understand what are the challenges currently – and how history can be repeated.
Many can be gleaned from the attractions of this ideology to many people in power by simply analyzing the name of the movement. “Dark illumination” presumes the upheaval of the liberal order which defined democratic aspirations for almost three centuries. Where the Enlightenment promised freedom, emancipation, equality and solidarity, “dark illumination” offers servitude, hierarchy, servitude and ruthlessability.
The movement is most often associated with the British philosopher Nick Land. Land was the founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom until 1995, while his own increasingly erratic behavior made him expel. The lands are actively anti-democratic, wishing a system where great men (guided by algorithms and artificial intelligence) direct the state ship. It is an explicitly nihilistic vision – “nothing but man does not leave his quasi -future,” wrote Land in 1994 – an ideology combining technological utopia with deep mischropy, a variant of what historian Jeffrey Herf described as “reactionary modernism”, but that we could so much call cybernetic authorization or technological fascism.
It brings us to Yarvin. Polemical blogger, Yarvin has written for years under the clumsy name “Mencius Moldbug” where he pleaded for his own form of techno-authoritarianism in opposition to democracy. Like Marinetti, Yarvin expressed his disdain for symbols of American culture which he considers an opposition to “dark illumination” – from free vote to a free survey, dynamic media at open university. Yarvin, writing in 2021, posed (with much less poetry than futurists), “because the university is the heart of the old regime, it is absolutely essential to the success of any change of diet that all accredited universities are both physically and economically liquidated.”
Yarvin is talking in a derogatory way of something he calls “cathedral”, a bond of educational, media and non -profit organizations which, according to him, establishes the tenor for speech, but which also prevents the freedom of leaders from doing what they want. His aspiration is rather, as he wrote in 2007, that “the state is simply a real estate company on a very large scale”.
Using a variety of mixed metaphors, Yarvin defends a “butterfly revolution”, a “full start” for the American government accomplished by “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization”. This is imagined as an internal coup to privatize the government and replace democracy with a complete executive authority. Two years ago, Yarvin presented his strategic program with the acronym “rage” or “withdraw all employees of the government”. Yarvin argued that a future hypothetical Trump administration should end all non -political federal workers to be replaced by loyalists. Government chests must then be seized and redirected, according to the blogger. When the courts prevent unconstitutional orders, Yarvin says that they should simply be ignored. After that, the Free Press and the universities must also be reduced – Yarvin said no later than April after the inauguration.
This seems to reflect the actions of the Trump and Doge administration may not be a coincidence. Until now, some 30,000 federal employees – various access departments that the FDA, the National Park Service and the FAA – have been dismissed by DOGE in the name of government efficiency. Yarvin’s reflections in 2009 that the “definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law”, holds a mirror in the February tweet of Trump than “the one who saves his country, violates no law”.
Yarvin’s assertion that “no brand or building can survive” is perfectly in line with the notorious ethics of the technological industry to “move quickly and break things”. But what is also a witness is a warning sign of “monarchism” that Yarvin wants. On February 19, Trump published a tampered image of himself in a crown with the legend “Live the King!” On its social social media application.
As is often the case with Trump, experts tend to assume a lack of seriousness or intention with what the president says. The same clearance sometimes accompanied the futurists, and the fascists of Mussolini, moreover, when they were ascending. Now, while Trump threatens long -standing American allies in Mexico in Canada, Denmark, a belief of futurists even more disturbing than their cult to technology should not be recalled: Marinetti’s assertion that “war is world hygiene”.
