Patchwork

I picked up this short treatise today, because Mencius Moldbug/Curtis Yarvin has been getting a lot of traction lately, and I never actually read anything that he published. Given recent events in American politics (and you can see by the date that I am posting this), I figured it was time to pick it up. It also pairs really well with Yanis Varoufakis's Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, which appears to be more relevant than ever.

To start off, I have to say that I agree with Yarvin in various ways on his "negative" critique of modern political theory. He is right that the sovereign is that which is above the law. American politics tends to frame itself as an immanent system, where all people, regardless of position, are all subject to the law. In their view, only the Constitution is transcendent; only the Constitution has the final say. However, we all know that this argument simply does not hold water. The Constitution is a text, and all who hold political power--it doesn't matter whether they're in the Judicial, Legislative, or Executive branch--interpret it. It is the process of interpretation that gives the Constitution teeth. Instead of transcending the American political system, we need to recognize that it is merely a tool used to marshal power. Different branches are more than happy to use it against one another, and we normally see the Supreme Court as the final say. That is, the Supreme Court is ostensibly the sovereign.

But Yarvin is right that the American electoral system means that, on some level, the people stand above politics. By voting, they can put legislators or presidents into power who could pack the courts, produce new laws, and so on. Still, even higher is the military. Ostensibly, it has a monopoly on violence, and it's only by recusing itself from the political process that the "people," as an abstract concept, are sovereign. This does not change the fact that, when push comes to shove, the military is always the most powerful component of any political system (which is why so many political leaders like to put wedges in it--to coup-proof their states).

Yarvin is also entirely correct that the defining factor of liberal democracies is an emphasis on moral responsibility over any other type of responsibility--he offers fiscal responsibility as a counterpoint.

Essentially, Yarivn is totally right about a lot of his critique of liberal politics. However, his positive vision of what politics could be are totally reprehensible. At the end of the day, my qualm with Yarvin isn't some rational argument about marshaling facts; it is a divergence of values.

Yarvin's argument hinges on his view that the single most important components of good governance are security and prosperity. The United States, as it stands today, has a contradictory set of values--security and prosperity, but also liberty and some degree of egalitarianism. The question, then, becomes: how do you want to rank these values? My ranking, I believe, would be something along the lines of:

1. Egalitarianism
2. Prosperity
3. Liberty
4. Security

Yarvin's, on the other hand, is something like:

1. Security
2. Prosperity
3. Liberty
4. Egalitarianism

His view of a good state is one where people can prosper and never have to worry about any sort of crime. Mine is one where people are treated equally (and, not in my original list of values, with dignity). Oversecuritization neuters the things that are most important to me.

Worse, still, his actual picture of what this would look like is nothing short of dystopian. Each "state," which are not the nation-states we would recognize today, but is akin to a city-state-cum-corporate-fief. Each state is to be run like a capitalist firm: the ones who invested in the "patch"--but who are not residents of it--appoint a CEO to govern it as a monarch. The board members can fire the CEO at any time, to be replaced by a new one. The board, then, is sovereign. Moreover, they are shareholders in the fief, so they want it to be governed as well as possible, but they are also not residents. Residents of a fief can be expelled at any time for not contributing enough, or they can choose to leave at any time (should another fief choose to accept them).

The inhabitants all enter into private contracts with their corporate overlords, who have two interests in governing it well: (1) to attract the most productive and well-behaved inhabitants, and (2) to generate a profit [or is it rent?]. If they rule like dictators, their reputations will precede them and they will scare away all potential residents/serfs. The serfs, for their part, have an obligation to be upstanding citizens. If nobody will take them, Yarvin suggests that they should be imprisoned and uploaded into the metaverse, where they can live out the rest of their lives without affecting anyone else in the world. Alternatively, they could be ground up and turned into biofuel. Woof.

The power relation here, as in all states, is asymmetric. But, perhaps much more than liberal democracies (whether in theory or practice), the potential for control over one's own life is much less. True, a serf--unlike those of classical feudalism--can pick up and leave their fief at any time, but with what? Is each board going to issue their own cryptocurrency, making exchange challenging (if not impossible) for those who are not on the board? It's not impossible in Yarvin's fantasy, given that he wants the whole fief to be intensely surveilled with modern technologies every second of every day (including location, biometrics, and everything else). Moreover, is this not just an exterminationist fantasy (which it actually is), given that we're on the cusp of the majority of the workforce being automated?

This all may be beside the point if it were shared by some shitty blogger isolated and ignored on the internet. What is alarming is that Yarvin seems to have the ear of Peter Thiel (who has invested in Yarvin) and the new VP J.D. Vance (hence all of Yarvin's recent interviews). He's really influential in e/Accelerationist and r/Accelerationist circles, not to mention the larger world of Silicon Valley cloudalists.

I don't want to be alarmist, but this might well be the playbook of the current administration, which appears to be engaging in some sort of self-coup as I write. It's too soon to tell what exactly is taking place, but conditions are not looking good.

All that said, Curtis Yarvin should eat shit and die.