Yesterday, I joined historian Heather Cox Richardson to discuss Curtis Yarvin, a blogger whose extreme anti-democracy ideas are influencing the Trump White House. You can watch our conversation by clicking the box below:

Ideas don't implement themselves. They need powerful translators. Yarvin's writings inspired the so-called Dark Enlightenment and NeoReactionary (NRx) movements, which call for dictatorships and/or monarchies to replace democracy. These ideas have been embraced by certain Silicon Valley billionaires who, having become wealthy by exploiting democratic institutions and public infrastructure, now want to pull up the ladder behind them.

And these dangerous ideas are being taken seriously by the Trump Administration. JD Vance has quoted Yarvin's ideas for years and recently followed him on X. Over a decade ago, Yarvin called for a future president to seize power, defy the law and purge civil servants from the bureaucracy. He called it RAGE — "Retire All Government Employees" — and it's the exact idea Elon Musk imposed via DOGE (Destruction of Government By Elon).

Yarvin also calls for the United States to be broken up into smaller territories run by corporate dictatorships. He called them "patchworks," but the idea has been updated to something called the Network State. To understand what this means: imagine if Amazon could write its own laws for Seattle, or if Google could arrest people in Mountain View. That's the "patchwork" vision—corporate fiefs with legal immunity.

Donald Trump has pledged to build 10 new corporate-controlled cities on federal lands — an idea that clearly resembles Yarvin's blueprint. The basic concept: Seize land and sell off privatized "sovereignty" to the highest bidder. (I call these "Fascist Cities," but Trump calls them "Freedom Cities.")

I spell out what these ideas mean — and what we can do about them (full transcript below).

Also: For Tech Policy Press, I wrote a brief primer on the Network State movement and why it matters. Click below to read it.

Trump’s Gaza Fantasy and the Network State: The Tech-Fueled Future of Privatized Sovereignty | TechPolicy.Press

We’re watching the rise of a new anti-democratic extremism—networked, crypto-financed, and cloaked in the language of freedom, writes Gil Duran.

Tech Policy PressGil Duran

What to Watch For: Next time you hear about "innovation zones" or "charter cities," remember—you're seeing an authoritarian blueprint in action.

For more of my writing on tech extremist politics, check out my Nerd Reich newsletter (it's free). And if you prefer video, subscribe to the Nerd Reich YouTube channel.

TRANSCRIPT: Heather Cox Richardson Interviews Gil Duran on Curtis Yarvin

Note: Transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors.

Heather Cox Richardson: Hey folks, thank you for being here. I am really excited today to have Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich with us to talk about what's really going on with the tech bros—people like Elon Musk. A lot of us look at what's happening circulating around Musk and the other people like him, and it just looks like chaos. But Gil Duran has been following these people now for decades and says that, in fact, there is method to that madness.

So I wanted to start right in—first of all, Gil, by thanking you for being here.

Gil Duran: Thanks for having me.

Richardson: And now by asking the question that I feel like should be on everybody's lips and maybe is not: Who on earth is Curtis Yarvin, and why should we care about him?

Duran: Curtis Yarvin is a blogger and computer programmer whose extremist anti-democracy writings in the early 2000s spawned these movements known as the Dark Enlightenment and the NeoReactionary movement. And these ideas, unfortunately, have become a lot more important and popular with certain Silicon Valley billionaires in recent years and, in many ways, form the basis of some of the dynamics we're seeing now with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—with DOGE, the experiment to have Elon Musk run the federal bureaucracy and do as much destruction as possible, and with Trump's weird new idea for things like "freedom cities."

And so this obscure blogger who really should have been an internet troll that no one had ever heard of is suddenly—you can trace a lot of the ideas, a lot of the destruction that's happening right now in our politics back to his writings and to the influence he's had on some very powerful people in Silicon Valley and connected to Silicon Valley, namely J.D. Vance.

Richardson: Okay. So can you walk us through the Dark Enlightenment, for example, and the way people like Curtis Yarvin are thinking about American politics and American society?

Duran: Sure. The key to understanding Yarvin's writings is that he overtly defines democracy as a bad system. He sees democracy as the enemy. And he overtly calls for a return to monarchy or dictatorship. He sees those as superior systems and doesn't understand why they were abandoned. He believes democracy is a failed experiment.

And he advocates for a new system—a sort of post-United States world where, instead of having one nation or one democracy, we have these little corporate fiefdoms called "SovCorps" or sovereign corporations. That would basically be companies that would control territory, and instead of being a citizen, you would be a customer, and the corporation would have total power over the citizen. Even if they wanted to kill you, basically, that would be within their rights. And your right, allegedly, would be to just choose to live in another sovereign corporate territory.

For example, in one of his writings—something called "Patchwork"—he laid out a plan for a future San Francisco called "Friscorp," where everyone is under constant and total surveillance at all times in order to assure their security. You'd have to scan into town and scan out even if you were coming over the bridge from Oakland. And where even, perhaps, unproductive people or the underclass could be turned into biodiesel to fuel the buses—or else, he says he's joking about that—locked into virtual reality cells for the rest of their lives.

So, this very dark, dystopian vision. And as crazy as it sounds, this idea of creating a post-United States, post-democracy era has become increasingly popular in Silicon Valley. And you can trace a lot of these ideas back to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual.

The Sovereign Individual—it's going to sound real crazy at first, but I'll explain why it matters—predicted that in the 21st century, the information age would eliminate most jobs and that the rise of something called "cyber currency" would enable certain very talented and wealthy individuals from tech, who they termed a "cognitive elite," to rise up and become the rightful rulers of their own territories.

And as nutty as all of that sounds, this book had a massive effect and influence on a guy named Peter Thiel, who as early as 1999 was giving speeches talking about how this new form of currency would emerge and would allow for people to evade taxes and regulations and would undermine the power of existing governments. And the book had such an impression on Thiel that in 2020, when it was reissued, he wrote the preface for it. If you go and look up The Sovereign Individual on any online book site, you'll see "Preface by Peter Thiel."

And if you understand what's in that crazy book, then you're really going to get interested in why Peter Thiel is having such an effect on our government now.

So flash forward: Yarvin, about 10 years later, starts his writings, and what he's largely doing is fleshing out a political theory and an idea for how to bring about this dystopian world ruled by tech that was predicted in The Sovereign Individual.

Richardson: Okay. So let me step back for a minute. If you think about the establishment of nation-states in human society, that happens about 400 years ago, and we get the idea of governments. And governments oversee the people who live within their countries, and they do things like create money and create defense systems and create social welfare systems and so on.

What you're suggesting is that these tech bros, if you will—the very wealthy tech people—are relying on an ideology that developed in the 1990s primarily, and that Curtis Yarvin is fleshing out, to break down the idea of those nation-states and create a new kind of human society in which they are the people who call all the shots. Am I right so far?

Duran: Exactly.

Richardson: Okay. So I just have to ask: Who is Curtis Yarvin? Where did he come from? Because I've read a lot of his stuff, thanks to you often, and it's meandering. It's not very clear. It seems like it's really quite poor history and not a terribly good understanding of philosophy or facts. Where does he come from? What were his influences? Do we have any idea?

Duran: Well, he was largely raised outside of Washington, D.C. His parents both worked for the government, which is interesting because he hates the federal government in particular. He went to college at a very young age and was a sort of prodigy in that way. But then he moved out to California, to the Bay Area in San Francisco, got into tech, had some success there, and was able to, in the early 2000s, sit around thinking of new ideas for how to run the world. And that is pretty much the basis of it.

He doesn't have a Ph.D. in history. He doesn't really have much of a grasp of history. A lot of what he talks about is just directly wrong. For instance, he says that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was essentially a dictator, which I don't think any historian would accept that.

But again, a lot of the basis of the ideology he's been promoting doesn't make sense. But that doesn't seem to matter to the people who like how it sounds. And basically, this idea of creating this new future where liberal democracy no longer exists and the hierarchies of the old world are permanently installed is the basis of what's called the neo-reactionary movement or the Dark Enlightenment.

The "Dark Enlightenment," because we give up on—we've decided that all this progress and democracy stuff didn't work. One of the adherents of these ideas called it basically "an outdated software system." And so they think they're creating a new software system for the future, which basically sounds a lot like tech fascism—at the very least, very severe authoritarianism.

And so a big part of this idea—Yarvin calls it "the Cathedral"—is that we have a society where things like the media and universities and academia are the real power in society. And they want to create an alternative version of that and destroy the existing Cathedral and create their own.

And so Yarvin is this pseudo-intellectual figure who's providing this sort of so-called scholarly basis for all of these ideas to be adopted. But as anybody knows who understands history, who's done the reading, or who's an expert, this is all poppycock and gobbledygook.

But it also helps explain why the Republicans under Trump are going so hard at our universities right now. In Yarvin's view, we have to undermine all the existing institutions of power and influence and truth—the media, establishment politics, academia—and establish a new version that will promote this ideology. He calls that, you know, basically destroying the Cathedral.

And it's amazing how many of his ideas seem to be directly popping up in this second Trump administration.

Richardson: Okay, so there's a real question for me about the interface between religion and this—what would you call this system? The Dark Enlightenment system?

Duran: Yeah, you could call it the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary. I like the word "technology" in there—the tech bros—because this is really a technological vision. This idea of destroying nation-states and replacing them with these new network societies.

Richardson: But clearly, the idea of destroying the pillars of society also is part of evangelical Christianity—the idea of the Seven Mountain Mandate, for example, the idea of cutting down business and education and government and culture and so on down to the very ground to rebuild something that is religious. How does this Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement deal with religion, which, in fact, doesn't really seem to have a lot to do with the idea of technological fascism so much as theocracy?

Duran: I would say it seems to me they're trying to develop a sort of tech theocracy. The ideas very much map onto religion, especially the ideas of that book, The Sovereign Individual. It's this idea that there's this end time coming. There's going to be this massive, cataclysmic shift, and we have to prepare for the aftertime when we will be in paradise, when we will have our tech utopia. And so we're seeing this adoption of a very familiar religious millennial narrative—an apocalyptic narrative in many ways.

Actually, when Trump got reelected, Peter Thiel wrote an essay in the Financial Times that described Trump's re-election as an "apocalypsis," you know, a great revealing in a sort of biblical sense. Peter Thiel talks a lot about "political theology."

And Yarvin is not so much into the religion as much as his ideas form the basis of these ideas. But we're seeing this new movement emerge in Silicon Valley that melds AI, tech, and religion. In many ways, the discussion of creating artificial general intelligence has taken on a religious tone—the idea we're going to create this super amazing thing, and there's going to be the singularity, and everything will change.

One of these tech guys, Bryan Johnson, who claims he's going to live forever—by the way, another promise we see in religion, the idea of eternal life, is being largely adopted by some of these tech bros—says that we are creating God in the form of super intelligence, and we are creating God in our own image.

So this is sort of a new variation that doesn't really appear in the original Yarvin. But I think what some of these tech guys have figured out is that religion is an important software for civilization. And if you really want something to last and to matter, you make it into a belief system that touches people on their moral level. And they very much seem to be trying to create that.

We're also seeing this movement here, even in San Francisco, where these tech bros who are sort of mean bullies online are openly professing their Christian faith, and it's just very strange. So they're trying to meld with the Republican right-wing religious movement in a way, and we see that very much happening under Trump.

Actually, back in September, there was a conference in San Francisco at Fort Mason, and it was called "Reboot." And it was very much "San Francisco Tech Bros meet Heritage Foundation"—literally Project 2025 meets the whole Peter Thiel alumni club in San Francisco. And their website said, "The new reality is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."

And the special guest was the president of the Heritage Foundation—the guy directly responsible and involved in Project 2025. And the title of the conference, "Reboot," was also the name of a Curtis Yarvin speech in 2012 where he talked about the need to carry out something called "RAGE"—"Retire All Government Employees," this plan to take over government and basically purge as many bureaucrats as possible and weaken the government and gut it, very much what Musk was trying to do with DOGE.

Richardson: Well, and also with DOGE, the absorption of Americans' data from the governmental system seems like it feeds right into this idea of an all-powerful AI that runs our lives, right?

Duran: Definitely. If you go back to Yarvin's description of "Friscorp" back in 2008-2009—of future San Francisco where you're constantly under surveillance so that you can't do any crimes—we are seeing something very much like that rise up now with this weird deal Trump is doing with Palantir, again a Peter Thiel-founded company.

Richardson: So can you talk us through a little bit what the network state looks like? Because you mentioned it before, and I have heard somebody else describe it as thinking of the world like a series of lily pads. But what that looks like and how the different tech bros have tried to create their own kinds of network states. And I think it is you who has written about how Trump seems to have adopted some of that language in some of his plans as well.

Duran: Definitely. Trump has this plan to build 10 new so-called "freedom cities" on federal land around the country. And that's been reported in some newspapers. No one has explained what that means or why it needs to happen. So here's what's going on with that.

Back in 2008-2009, Yarvin writes an essay called "Patchwork." And "Patchwork," as I mentioned earlier, lays out this idea for a post-United States world in which there's just these little fiefdoms or interconnected territories run by different tech corporations and CEOs.

Well, in 2022, this guy named Balaji Srinivasan, a friend of Curtis Yarvin, updates that to an idea called "the network state." It's basically the exact same idea but with more kind of corporate language in an effort to make it sound somehow more scholarly or acceptable, because Yarvin has some pretty dark ideas about, you know, harming unproductive people, things along that line.

And on the cover of the book The Network State, which I believe was self-published, you have blurbs from Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Brian Armstrong the CEO of Coinbase, Naval Ravikant, a famous tech investor—and, you know, these are legitimate, at the time, people from the corporate world signing onto this book.

This book is largely just Yarvin rehashed, and the idea is that instead of having a unified government, a federal government, we will break the country up into territories run by tech companies, and they will have absolute power within those territories, and they won't have to abide by regular democracy, laws, rules, or regulations. And they can exfiltrate their money from the government into their own private territories, and they can decide who lives there and who doesn't.

And that's basically—it's an escape plan for billionaires. How to escape society, because if you go back to their founding text, The Sovereign Individual, the idea was that when all the jobs disappear because of technology, AI, there's going to be a lot of crime and chaos and violence because what are people going to do when they don't have money, when they can't make a living?

So the billionaires have to build, basically, these digital fortresses, these arks, where they can escape and live with their friends and their followers and their servants in these sort of digital fortresses or castles. And that's basically what the network state idea is.

And it sounds crazy, but there's already a prototype in Honduras called Próspera, funded by a lot of these tech guys, where they are conducting unregulated medical experiments, basically. And it was established when there was a coup in Honduras and a right-wing government that allowed them to do this. And now the new government is trying to get them out of the country, and they're suing the government of Honduras for almost $11 billion.

There's also a company called Praxis, funded by Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel and others, who—they're trying to build a city somewhere in the Mediterranean, though lately they have said they want to build it in Greenland, which Trump is threatening to take Greenland away from Denmark and make it an American territory. And these guys are like, "Well, let us build our city there."

And then, as I mentioned before, there's the "freedom cities" idea that Trump is talking about. Well, what is the freedom city? It's a new zone where the usual rules don't apply, and different corporations can compete to start their own new city that they will then run according to their own rules and regulations.

So we're seeing these crazy ideas become very real and become part of the agenda for the president of the United States. And yet there's really not much of a discussion about that. As I said, you know, Politico and others—they mention freedom cities. No one explains what that means, where the idea comes from, or why we need them.

And that's where the idea comes from, though. This comes from the network state, which comes from Curtis Yarvin.

Richardson: So it does sound bonkers, but it does remind me that the user terms of Starlink, I believe, actually have a provision about how the terms—the contract—are only applicable on the Earth. That, in fact, if the terms are transferred to Mars, as he said they're going to, they have a very different set of ways to work out differences between people. And it's pretty clear he's looking at a different kind of government for Mars, which is one of the reasons he wants to go to Mars, right?

Duran: Yeah, they're looking for ways to escape this reality and create a new one, right? I don't think there would be a bunch of skulls on Mars. I don't think he'll ever get there. I don't think Musk is brave enough to even get on his own rockets.

But they are definitely daydreaming about how to escape. You know, I think part of the problem is they've got so much money, and it's still not enough. They need something more than just the money. So they want the power. And this is a very old problem: When you have the money, you want the power. When you have the power, you want the money. When you have both, you want to live forever. And that's very much where many of them are as well, with this transhumanism idea, this idea of eternal life that some of them are starting to talk about.

So, you know, I think we're learning a big lesson about what happens when certain people have too much money. And I think that they have their eyes on eroding our democracy and weakening it and creating this alternative reality that won't work out. They haven't thought this through. As Professor Dave Karpf says, this is "a blueprint drawn in crayon."

You know, where's the money going to come from when nobody has a job? How's the economy going to work? Why wouldn't your security guards kill you if there's nothing to stop them from being the kings? There's all these old problems that we know from history occur when you have an absence of democracy.

And, in fact, the only reason these guys can talk this way is because we do have a democracy, right? If you were saying this in Russia—if Elon Musk was doing what he's doing to Trump in Russia—his plane would fall from the sky tomorrow.

So they're using our democracy in order to argue against it. And this is because, as Professor Brooke Harrington has said, they're basically like indoor cats who think they're the kings of the jungle, but they don't realize the degree to which all of these guys are dependent on government contracts, right? They've been—most of them have become wealthy from government subsidy. And now they want to take all that, pretend that they created it, and escape from democracy. And it's a real problem we have to confront.

Richardson: Well, there is that fact that they seem to think that they're better than everybody else. And that is, you know, absolutely the roots of fascism as well—the idea that some people are better than others and have the right to rule. And it's just astonishing to me both that they didn't seem to study the robber barons in the late 19th century, but also that they didn't know the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun. And wanting to become a god is not a good thing, right?

So that brings me to the next question that I think people are going to want to hear, and that's: How do we—once we are aware that there is this bonkers theory running around that at least tangentially is affecting our government and is attacking our democracy—what do we do? What things can ordinary Americans do to try and shore up democracy against people who are trying to destroy it to put themselves in power?

Duran: I think the first thing people can do is recognize the pattern and expose it. This isn't chaos or random "tech bro antics." This is an organized ideological project with shared goals, with funding networks, and with a coordinated political strategy to a certain degree. And they are making progress.

And so when you hear talk about charter cities or special economic zones or freedom cities in the coming year, remember what this is: that this is the network state agenda. This is Curtis Yarvin's "Patchwork," and it's not something that's benign or good. It's very much a threat to democracy by design.

Second, I think we have to target the corporate infrastructure. The Tesla takedown worked. It put tremendous pressure on Musk, and it forced him out of government. It took money from him, and he is still in great jeopardy because that company is falling apart because of his politicization of it. But Tesla's not the only company that's a problem.

So we have to expand the target list. Palantir is trying to create this massive surveillance project with Trump. Andreessen Horowitz—those guys are largely behind a lot of this and pushing these ideas. Anduril is a massive military contractor that's also pushing these ideas. And Coinbase—crypto is largely designed to undermine government, to undermine American democracy, and there's no real use case for it except for crime.

Why are our politicians, including many Democrats, rushing to give these crypto guys what they want? Can any of them explain what crypto is for? Americans lost $6.5 billion in crypto scams last year. This thing should be illegal, not legitimized.

And third, I think we've got to force our elected officials to choose sides. This is very much either/or. You're for democracy, or you're against it. You're for tech fascism, or you're against it. There is no in-between. And we see a lot of people right now trying to be in-between.

And the last thing I would say is that I've talked to a lot of experts on this in recent weeks, and the one thread is that we don't have to accept this future. These billionaires don't get to decide what the future is. We can build alternative narratives. It doesn't have to be this way.

And it's important not to feel defeated or like there's nothing you can do or scared. I had somebody who didn't want to go to a book signing because they didn't want to be on the radar. No. We have a lot of power. We have a lot of agency here, and we see them already starting to fall apart. They can bleed. And so don't forget how much power we have to define what our future is.

Richardson: I like that you ended with that, because in a similar moment in the United States in the 1890s, it seemed as if the robber barons controlled everything and nobody had any power at all. And, of course, at that point, only white men could vote, for the most part. And yet, within about 12 years, every single person running for president in 1912 was a reformer who was trying to expand democracy. So it's a question of speaking up and making sure your voice is heard.

I just can't thank you enough for being here. This is really complicated material, and I know it's hard for a lot of people to recognize that it's out there. It's hard to find. And yet the intellectual development of this idea of network states and of the tech bros has captured me since I started reading you. I think it's important to understand how they think. So thank you so much for being here, Gil.

And just a reminder for everybody: Gil writes The Nerd Reich, and you'll see more of him. He writes for a lot of other papers as well, other than his own. And you'll see him now that you look for him. And I'm going to tip his hand a little bit without permission that there is a book underway that we're very much looking forward to. So thank you for being here, and I hope you'll come back.

Duran: I definitely will, and thank you for having me.

Richardson: Take care.