Filippo Tommaso Marinetti favored vehicles, notably his four-cylinder Fiat sports activities automobile. For him, the automobile represented innovation and vitality, even violence. Most of all, it signified the long run. An Italian poet, performer, and pamphleteer, Marinetti was a reactionary; he loathed egalitarianism and democracy. He additionally wasn’t a conservative in any conventional sense, for there was little that he, and others within the Futurist artwork motion that he based, wished to preserve. In his 1909 treatise, Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, he wrote, “We are going to destroy the museums, libraries, academies of each type.” A precursor to the fascism that might envelop Europe, Marinetti was an affect on Benito Mussolini, and that ideology, which might quickly fulfill that darkish promise of destroying Europe’s museums, libraries, and academies.
Marinetti’s stronghold over Mussolini has hanging parallels to America right now—notably with the rise of the “Darkish Enlightenment” motion and its most vocal steward: software program engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin.
Largely ignored by tutorial philosophers, the “Darkish Enlightenment” motion and Yarvin have curried favor and affect with tech executives lately. A software program engineer by coaching, Yarvin has change into a form of official thinker for tech leaders like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Mosaic founder Marc Andreessen. Not not like the Futurists, Yarvin advocates for changing democracy with a form of techno-feudal state—for the federal government to be run like an organization, with the president as its “CEO.” This new system is elitist—“people match into dominance-submission buildings” Yarvin wrote in 2008; and it’s authoritarian—“If People need to change their authorities, they’re going to should recover from their dictator phobia,” he stated in 2012. There are shades of Yarvin’s philosophy in Thiel’s 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, the place he wrote “I not consider that freedom and democracy are suitable.” And Thiel, by means of his enterprise capital agency, Founders Fund, was an early investor within the blogger’s startup firm Urbit. As for Yarvin’s controversial opinions and whether or not or not Thiel holds them, Yarvin has stated that his patron is “absolutely enlightened,” as he had been “teaching Thiel.” What’s extra, in a latest interview with the Hoover Establishment, Andreessen quoted Yarvin and referred to as him a “pal.”
What’s much more alarming is that Yarvin’s outsize affect on tech executives has now made its option to Washington. The indicators are in all places: Yarvin was a feted visitor at Trump’s so-called “Coronation Ball” in January 2025. Vice President J.D. Vance, a protegee of Thiel’s, spoke admiringly of the blogger’s affect on his considering when interviewed on a podcast in July 2024. And whereas Andreessen’s position within the Trump White Home is unofficial, The Washington Put up reported in January 2025 that the manager “has been quietly and efficiently recruiting candidates for positions throughout Trump’s Washington.” In the meantime, Elon Musk, although not outwardly tipping his hat to Yarvin, seemingly has an identical philosophy: In 2020, Musk instructed the Wall Road Journal that the “authorities is just the most important company.” 5 years later, Musk has been utilizing his place as an unofficial advisor to the second Trump administration and the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE) to operationalize what Yarvin has referred to as “a tough reboot” of the federal government.
Learn Extra: Inside Elon Musk’s Conflict on Washington
As such, it behooves us to be extra aware of Yarvin and different related figureheads of this far-right philosophy. Understanding their motivations is crucial to understanding what the stakes at the moment are—and the way historical past can repeat itself.
A lot may be gleaned concerning the points of interest of this ideology to lots of these in energy from merely parsing the title of the motion. “Darkish Enlightenment” portends the upending of the liberal order that has outlined democratic aspirations for almost three centuries. The place the Enlightenment promised liberty, emancipation, equality, and solidarity, “Darkish Enlightenment” gives servitude, hierarchy, bondage, and ruthlessness.
The motion is most frequently related to the British thinker Nick Land. Land was a founding father of the Cybernetic Tradition Analysis Unit on the College of Warwick in the UK till 1995 when his personal more and more erratic conduct had him expelled. Land is actively anti-democratic, wanting a system the place nice males (guided by algorithms and synthetic intelligence) steer the ship of state. That is an explicitly nihilistic imaginative and prescient—“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future,” wrote Land in 1994—an ideology combining technological utopianism with deep misanthropy, a variant of what the historian Jeffrey Herf described as “reactionary modernism,” however which we’d as effectively name cybernetic authoritarianism or technological fascism.
This leads us to Yarvin. A polemical blogger, Yarvin wrote for years below the goofy title “Mencius Moldbug” the place he advocated for his personal type of techno-authoritarianism in opposition to democracy. Like Marinetti, Yarvin expressed disdain for these symbols of American tradition that he sees as oppositional to “Darkish Enlightenment”—from free voting to free inquiry, a vibrant media to the open college. Yarvin, writing in 2021, posited (with considerably much less poetry than the Futurists), “As a result of the college is the center of the previous regime, it’s completely important to the success of any regime change that every one accredited universities be each bodily and economically liquidated.”
Yarvin speaks disparagingly of one thing that he calls “The Cathedral,” a nexus of academic, media, and nonprofit organizations that he believes units the tenor for discourse, however that additionally impedes the freedom of executives to do what they are going to. Moderately his aspiration is, as he wrote in 2007, that “the state is just an actual property enterprise on a really massive scale.”
Utilizing a wide range of blended metaphors, Yarvin advocates for a “Butterfly Revolution,” a “full energy begin” to the U.S. authorities completed by “giving absolute sovereignty to a single group.” That is imagined as an inside coup meant to denationalise the federal government and exchange democracy with full govt authority. Two years in the past, Yarvin laid out his strategic program with the acronym “RAGE,” or “Retire all authorities staff.” Yarvin argued {that a} hypothetical future Trump administration ought to terminate all nonpolitical federal employees to have them get replaced by loyalists. The federal government’s coffers should then be impounded and redirected, in keeping with the blogger. When courts forestall unconstitutional orders, Yarvin says that they need to simply be ignored. After that, the free press and universities should be curtailed, as effectively—Yarvin stated no later than April after the inauguration.
That a lot of this appears to reflect the actions of the Trump administration and DOGE will not be a coincidence. Up to now, some 30,000 federal staff—throughout departments as different because the FDA, the Nationwide Park Service, and the FAA—have been fired by DOGE within the title of presidency effectivity. Yarvin’s musings in 2009 that the “definition of a sovereign is {that a} sovereign is above the regulation,” maintain a mirror to Trump’s February tweet that “He who save his nation, violates no regulation.”
Yarvin’s declare that “No model or constructing can survive” is completely congruent with the tech business’s infamous ethos to “Transfer quick and break issues.” However what’s additionally being seemingly witnessed is a harbinger of the “monarchism” that Yarvin wishes. On February 19, Trump posted a doctored picture of himself in a crown with the caption “Lengthy Reside the King!” on his social media app Reality Social.
As is so typically the case with Trump, pundits generally tend to imagine a scarcity of seriousness or intention with what the president says. The identical dismissiveness generally accompanied the Futurists, and Mussolini’s fascists for that matter, after they had been ascendant. Now, as Trump threatens longtime American allies from Panama to Mexico, Canada to Denmark, a perception of the Futurists much more disturbing than their worship of know-how must be remembered: Marinetti’s declare that “Conflict is the hygiene of the world.”
