Artificial Ignorance: broligarchs and their brains should read Gulliver

Courtesy of 'tech bros' like Thiel, Vance comes equipped with an intellectual hinterland. This is unusual. Make America Great Again (MAGA) is seldom said in the same sentence as 'intellectual hinterland'.

Talking of intellectual hinterlands, Vox covered another of Thiel's associates: Curtis Yarvin. More on him in a minute. British journalist Carole Cadwalladr has looked at Vance's links to rich tech bros, or what she calls the "broligarchs".

Max Chafkin, Thiel's biographer, describes Vance as his "extension", while Cadwalladr describes Vance, somewhat impolitely, as "Thiel's creature… a man Thiel moulded in his own image through lavish investments in his business and political careers".

Still a libertarian

Thiel, who has a habit of seeing things early (having been one of the first outside investors in Facebook), gave Vance a job at his venture capital firm (Mithril Capital), then backed him to start his own venture fund (Narya Capital), then gave him $15m for his successful run for the Senate.

Cadwalladr claims that this will have implications for us all. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI, but these kinds of policies are typically omitted from the big MAGA rallies.

Thiel's musings are salient for MAGA diehards, if not always comprehensible. For instance, he talks about democracy being incompatible with freedom.

"I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual," he said, albeit not from the convention floor. "For all these reasons, I still call myself libertarian."

Elsewhere, he wrote that since 1920, "the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' an oxymoron."

As Wilde once said of the wallpaper in the room in which he was to die in, one of them had to go. Welfare claimants and women are Thiel's ugly wallpaper. The Liberty sculpture a woman? Presumably an error.

The MAGA broligarchs

Thiel is not alone in his interest in a Trump victory: Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and more recently, Elon Musk are fellow MAGA broligarch bedfellows.

Thiel "has it in for the legacy monopolies of Google and Facebook," says Cadwalladr, seeing these as part of the "censorship industrial complex" suffocating right-wing speech.

It seems timely, therefore, that on 12 August, Trump rejoined Musk's Twitter/X social media platform, just as members of Britain's left-wing ruling party (Labour) were saying they would be leaving.

For Thiel and others, the prize here is more than money. It is delivering the body politic, the republic itself, over to a new model of governance based on the Silicon Valley company structure.

It is a 'reboot', to use the jargon of another of the new right's cognitive elite—and a personal friend of both Thiel and Vance: Curtis Guy Yarvin.

Succinctness is a stranger to Curtis, who was once known as Mencius Moldbug. Despite pithy references to 'red pills', his preferred medium is endless discursive ramble, a style that Trump might recognise.

Yarvin's knowledge extends to the British monarchy and French republics since 1789, under the theory that America has also had a succession of republics, only without officially numbering the sequence.

Yarvin's chief executive

For Yarvin, who remains essentially a blogger, America should take a leaf from the British book and get itself a monarch, ideally one who acts like the chief executive of a tech company.

"Light travels faster than sound, which is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak," is a quote oft but incorrectly attributed to Einstein. It could apply to much of the cognitive elite.

With Yarvin, the opposite is true. When he first showed up, he was dismissed as a dead-end dweeb. Only in recent years has he been really heard. Among the first to pay attention? You guessed it.

By 2016, Yarvin claimed to have been 'coaching Thiel'. If Vance was "Thiel's creature", then Thiel was Yarvin's. They even watched the 2016 US election together, in the billionaire's house.

Back in the day, when he still wrote under his Moldbug alias, he was a little more reserved. He moaned about "the Cathedral," as he called it—media, academia, the civil service etc. For Moldbug, America should be run by a white man with business acumen, accountable only to board members. 

Back in the real (if surreal) world, with real money, Thiel invested in Yarvin's startup company, Tlön (named after a land invented by Luis Borges, a writer known for his love of dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, mirrors, and mythology).

Short, sharp revolution

These days, having shed the bug, Yarvin is more open in his disdain for the failings of the democratic order. British wartime leader Winston Churchill famously said of democracy that it was the worst form of government, except for all the others.

Yarvin offers a quick fix, an ice dunk, a sudden and complete change to which no one has any time to react, executed at speed that "takes the breath away".

In late 2020, shortly before he left office, Trump issued an executive order (Schedule F) that would reclassify as many as 50,000 civil servants in middle management as political appointees who could be fired and replaced by the president.

Yarvin also dislikes administrators and came up with the acronym RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). He also sees change as a largely bureaucratic issue.

The whole American state and its constitutional arrangements need replacing, he feels. The courts need neutering, elite media and universities need shuttering, and police forces need centralising.

So long as all this is achieved at pace, it will be a peaceful transition, he says. Supporters "shouldn't be menacing" like the 6 January crowd, he reassures us.

"It should have this joyous sense that you're actually winning and winning forever, and the world is being completely remade." Yarvin is not so much internally remodelling the 'Cathedral' as blowing it up.

Silicon continent

Who would rule this new streamlined kingdom? Yarvin has in mind a Tudor monarch, not so much the tyrannical Henry VIII, but rather something along the lines of Elizabeth I, who he sees as akin to a Tudor start-up phenomenon, hence the pool of entrepreneurial talent that gave us Shakespeare.

In short, the Thiel-backed, Vance-admiring Yarvin message is this: America should be run like Silicon Valley, because Silicon Valley is successful and makes money.

Oh, and don't call this fascism. Fascists work people up into a class war, set people against each other over race, or both. Yarvin's monarch would never dream of fostering disunity. 

Obviously an avid reader and a bit of an Anglophile, Yarvin is probably acquainted with Britain's greatest practitioner of satire: Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, that has delighted generations of children with its account of Lilliput.

After, in the third section, Gulliver visits the island of Laputa, which hovers over the surface of the earth and can even move around at will.

Here lives a ruling class of mathematicians whose entire time is taken up in complex calculations. They get so lost in algebra that they must be stirred periodically to eat or perform other bodily functions.

Lackeys who are free of the mathematical addiction walk around with bladders on the end of sticks and, from time to time striking the elite, including the monarch, to bring them to their senses.

The Laputans' Engine

Quite incredibly for a book published in 1726, Swift also refers to something in the Laputans' possession, called The Engine. He even illustrates it. The Wikipedia entry calls this "possibly the earliest known reference to a device in any way resembling a modern computer".

It gets even more uncanny. As Swift explains: "Everyone knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study."

This is no mere calculator. It is an explicit forerunner of Artificial Intelligence, the necessary prerequisite for the ignorance which facilitates another eccentricity of the Laputans' ruling class: that they bestride their populations below without paying them the least bit of attention.

In the event of uprisings, the Laputans manoeuvre their island into position over people's heads, block the sun, cause crops to fail, and wait until the famished beg. They then return to their cogitations, undisturbed except for a bladder's occasional blow around the ear.

Trump, a "very stable genius" in his telling, may not often be inclined to algebra. That is fine. He does not need to. With the help of their beautiful 'Engines', the boffins in the Valley will do all his thinking for him.