Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas (2024) | Hacker News Reader

Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas (2024)

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43 pointsvoxadam13 comments

Interesting the Guardian posted a similar article also mentioning Yarvin, also with a scare word in the title ("Maga’s sinister obsession with IQ is leading us towards an inhuman future"):

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/28/maga-i...

Yeah it's so wild how multiple people can see reactionary bullshit for what it is.

That opinion piece is from yesterday, and OP article is from Jul 2024.

I think it might be hard to come up with a "scare" title for a story involving these people, who relish activating their political adversaries. The person mentioned here is basically epsilon from being an internet troll.

I thought I remembered seeing the moldbug blog pop up on HN a ways in the past, but it doesn't appear to have gotten much traction in the past (and moldbug never really got much traction via comments either):

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=unqualified+reservations

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Followed a couple of links and found his HN account:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moldbug

2nd last comment starts:

> I've never understood why anyone gets so hung up on their "right to vote." Why should women have the right to vote? Why should anyone have the right to vote?

It was a truly strange experience being in San Francisco in the mid-aughts, with the vibes quickly turning away from the idealistic but flawed freaks and geeks (now largely retired) to the brogrammers and techbros of the latter half of the aughts who are still with us today.

It's as if the techbros tried to emulate the positive aspirations of their hippie-tech forefathers and, over the past decade, were just like "naah, forget it."

Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together. It's truly depressing seeing this generation of money-addled idiots set us back thousands of years using the tech we created.

At some point, the Jobs folks took the helm from the Woz folks, and it went from being curious, eccentric (a compliment, if ambiguous) people doing fun stuff to "How can we take over the world from the finance bros (“east coast”, NYC) and the political establishment (DC)?" Andreessen Horowitz, for example.

> "Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together."

There were historical precedents, like the printing press, which was hoped to bring morality and education to the masses but brought penny dreadfuls and yellow journalism along with it, and radio / television, which was hoped to bring culture and education to the masses and brought us soap operas and more yellow journalism along with it, that should have clued geeks in about what humanity would do with computing. Technology can't solve humans being human.

Blaming human nature mystifies the power relations that shape society. Penny dreadfuls and yellow journalism were the result of the commodification of culture under capitalism. The internet failed to bring us together because it was shaped and appropriated by corporate power to fragment solidarity, extract data, and commodify attention. In each case, it’s the profit-seeking of a minority class that bends technology toward commodification and cultural degradation. But let’s blame human nature instead of the power structures that generate these outcomes.

> Once upon a time, we geeks truly believed that computing and telecommunications would bring us together.

I still believe that. We just lost the plot. We can get it back.

Is it just me or does anyone else think of Harry Ellis the guy in Die Hard who tries to negotiate with Hans Gruber.

Maybe just me.

There are loose analogies to Yarvin, where Bill Ayers had a similar relationship to Obama, Aleksander Dugin's relationship to Putin, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's influence on the Blair and Clinton cabinets, Ayn Rand's influence on the Reagan cabinet, Karl Popper/George Soros' influence on the Biden org. Klaus Schwab even became a kind of Rasputin cult figure to the CANZUK countries over the last decade.

Yarvin's ideas aren't really that interesting owing to once being described as doing for words what bitcoin did for electricity. My read was they are reaction to history downstream of Marx, which was itself an anti-clerical reaction, and this "reaction to a reaction," is a hollow simulacrum that takes in productive minds. Where Yarvin fails is that his atheism is a constraint that means he has to sound everything out from scratch again. Whenever I read his stuff all I see is a philosophical game of "God is lava."

If there is any predictive power about this admin from Yarvin's ideas, I'd look for precedents in what the WEF network did with the EU/CANZUK in the background after co-opting Karl Roves "actors of history" mentality in the last decade. Change you can't see until after, ratcheting effects, exercising hard power, etc. not anti-democractic, but post-democratic, where america is healing from decades of capture and democratic failure.

I don't think, other than maybe the sentiment of restoring the legitimacy of america's elite, that Yarvin's ideas influence anyone that much. They absolutely emboldened people to question the progressive narrative machine by showing how alternatives were rich and historically deep, but the moldbug show itself is limited. Insights into Vance and this admin will come more from thinkers with popular traction like Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Sowell, and the stories of American heroes that are examples of the essential American character, and not anti-heroic critics like Yarvin.

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