Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries | Hacker News Reader

Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

dontbeasucker.blog

Nobody loves these kinds of pieces more than Yarvin. Look at how important he must be!

My Yarvin-contempt bona fides are as strong as anyone's here (maybe except for 'lisper) and I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar. I've been monitoring this (and jumping in when it pops up) for several years now --- this and DNSSEC are my two "beats", the two things I'm careful to pay attention to --- and it comes up rarely and mostly by the same fringey actors.

Race-realism claims are almost always quickly flagged off the site by the community. Almost every time I've reported something to Dan and Tom, I've looked dumb, because it was flagged dead 2 minutes after my email landed.

We're a deeply imperfect community (like every other community, in our own idiosyncratic ways), but compared to other communities this is not one of our flaws.

Can't say I've made any attempt to quantify it or talk to mods, but I feel this site is more receptive to racist right wing garbage than most communities I read or comment in.

It’s not. It’s unusually inhospitable to it. It’s also explicitly a guidelines violation.

Often they do what Republicans used to do, which is mask it, dress it up to be polite and plausibly deniable, or make it seem like they're just a mainstream right of center person. Other times it surfaces as the way people vote on comments. But I feel it strongly here. It's not everyone by any means, but there is a contingency for it here.

I'm a moderator here and I urge you to email us any time you see any comments that fit this category (hn@ycombinator.com). This is something we take seriously and act on quickly when we see it. People don't always tell us because they don't know they should, but I'm telling you very clearly: you should.

That might be literally true, since it's relative to your browsing habits, but it's an eyebrow-raising assertion to me. Maybe I get exposed to an unusual amount of racist right-wing garbage on the rest of the internet, or maybe you have a much more loose rules than I do for what qualifies, but as far as I can tell, HN is unusually non-tribalistic (in comparison to the rest of the internet).

> HN is unusually non-tribalistic

I think there are a few tribes coexisting here. Like I alluded to earlier, no tribe represents everyone here. But tribalism definitely exists in pockets.

> I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar.

Flagged and dead comments won’t show up in a search, but people can and do have conversations under them for days after the flagging. You were in one of these just this week.

Your claims about the prevalence of non-dead, explicit “race realism” may be true (like the sibling comment, I disagree), but it doesn’t seem to tell the whole story either.

If you disagree, feel free to provide links. I can.

I feel like I care about freak ideologies more than as a passing curiosity based on how powerful those people are. I would care if it was Peter Thiel but not so much if it is a freak subculture among upper middle class SC programmer phreaks.

Ideology is overrated. Look instead at what people ranging from self-identified right-liberal to progressive values actually do en masse.

Maybe a Habermas was more insidious than a Hoppe. (What do I know as if I could ever read Habermas.)

I'm a "leftist" on paper and in my heart. I helped organize a union, I believe in a better future where we abolish wage-labor and tear down unjust hierarchies, I don't believe in the legitimacy of things like copyright or borders, I think all people are created equal that we should judge people by their deeds and behavior rather than the color of their skin or their religion, etc. I want to see space colonies of happy socialists using robots to garden in domes. I want solar panels powering the great cities of the world with electric cars and wind-turbines. I want to see progress. I want us to clean up the planet, and move heavy industry off the planet so we can live in some solar-punk fantasy while my kids can explore the stars. I like sailboats and gliders and building cabins in the woods and learning languages and programming computers and ... the list is to long to fully express here, but I love life. I want to be happy and fulfilled and I want others to be too! I'll even help!

But most people do not seem to want to be happy now. Everyone seems miserable while I'm doing more or less ok and looking at me like I'm an asshole because I have hope.

It seems though that the people I once I identified with, saw as my friends and allies, are literally anti-tech right now. I get it, it's popular to hate AI, it's popular to hate the billionaires, I get it, I am not a fan of capital either. Lord knows I'm not. Still, I don't have this all consuming rage I see everywhere. I still am amazingly optimistic at the possibilities for the future! I think it'll be a rocky road, but I think we'll get there. I don't know if it is because I have lived through a great tragedy and the only thing that has let me live has been medical science, but it feels right now that there's a strong regressive core to the "left" in America right now. I'm not talking about idpol or whatever. It's more this pervasive nostalgia that concerns me. This idea that "if only things can go back to how they used to be" as though that is even possible. That's all I see from either side of the spectrum here in the states. From the Republicans, it's "I wish it was 1950 and black people couldn't vote." From the Democrats it's "I wish it was 2009 again and I had hope for the future." But hope is a verb too, and you have to actually do it in order to accomplish anything. You have to have some reason to get out of bed in the morning. But the whole zeitgeist the entire internet and most of the leftist paces I have been in is this weird aft-facing drone of discontent. 2009 wasn't that great. Neither was 1996. I certainly wouldn't translate my life backwards, for one, I'd be dead or suffering immensely, but on the other side, we can't. So wishing for this weird nostalgic fever dream isn't going to make it true. We have to go forward, we have to make the world better! We have to show people that the world can be better.

But today, everyone is convinced of doom and decay and rot and nobody's willing to hope anymore because hoping is no longer in vogue.

I'm still going to hope, and I'm still going to "build" because action precedes motivation. We need to do things to make the world better, not just know about them. Ideology is overrated. I just want to do things to help people live a better life and accomplish the things that make life worth living. I often feel very alone in this desire. Like I'm a weirdo for not just wanting to talk about how fucked up things are. But the wild thing is that things have been much much worse...

As someone who is very left curious/sympathetic recently (though no doubt that only goes one way)... is there not a massive contradiction in how you describe your beliefs?

I believe in a better future where we abolish wage-labor and tear down unjust hierarchies, I don't believe in the legitimacy of things like copyright or borders

Open Borders to me is the most hyper capitalist thing in the world. It's all clearly designed to drive down the price of labour, continuously and without end. All the window dressing about everyone holding hands and enjoying different foods is a lipstick on the pig of the profit motive.

Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist.

I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within.

But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.

> He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker

This is one of the greater ironies about him and the people who admire his writing and ideas. They have a tendency to be firmly connected to rails, incapable of reflection or deviation from the course they've chosen. Regardless of if the ideas are workable or remotely sound, they charge forward.

I suppose most ideologies rooted in notions of subversion or free-thinking tend to suffer in similar ways. Any time you start to believe you've figured something out that others haven't, or that you're outside the confines of conventions, you're either a genius or very ignorant. None of these people are geniuses.

I was a fan of his at one point. I did enjoy him talking about the English Civil war and Glorious Revolution, the US War of Independence, etc etc. He introduced me to the "Whig View of History". And his substack post about the ludicrousness notion that the occupation of the US Capitol my a mob in 2021 was a serious attempt at a revolution/coup was a welcome antidote to the hysteria at the time.

But the thing with Yarvin is - he's widely read, but if you dig deeper into any one thing, his reading is shallow.

And like most extremists I have read (from communists to anarcho capitalists), he is pretty good at diagnosing problems but awful at proposing solutions.

You and I are on different pages. From here in Canada, that occupation of the US Capitol was (and still is) a dark moment in history for me, and a signal of worse things to come. There is no hysteria in my opinion, and the way things have unraveled since is a clear demonstration of why the outcry and outrage was very well-founded.

I also don't agree that extremists are particularly good at diagnosing problems. Instead, they tend to be confidently wrong in a way that's exceptionally compelling if you're emotionally vulnerable to their cause. This is why they rarely succeed in creating collective movements that involve broad cooperation and collective structures that can function and endure. They've misdiagnosed the issue, and they typically can't recruit people based on ideological merit, shared purposes, goals with clear outcomes, or other cohesive and productive substrates. They're more like cults and less like cooperative, coherent, purpose-driven organizations. Yarvin and his set fit squarely into this bucket.

These people typically talk too much and don't actually do anything. It's because there's nothing _to_ do when your ideology is a nebulous, discordant, illogical, and emotional dump.

I think you have a monolithic view of the US Right.

2016 Trump Admin is heavily populist, and his administration contains a lot of genuine political outsiders. People are very dis-satisfied, and genuinely excited about these "deplorables" shaking the establishment.

2024 Trump Admin is the establishment. Nearly textbook neocon, it's only innovation is its sophmoric conduct. To paraphrase Nietzsche... "if you drain the swamp too long, does not the swamp drain into you also?". Of course that assumes a draining attempt was made... regardless, it's populated almost entirely by those who were "never trumpers" during the first admin - including the Vice-President.

As for the man himself...I do not seem him as a deep or long term thinker. He's cleary attached himself to any vehicle which brings him to power. The idea that he planned and master-minded some "insurrection" in 2021 that was supposed to install him as a dictator, and his current Swamp Creature administration is somehow a continuation of that, just lacks credibility. It was a populist outburst of supporters of the first populist admin.Disillusioned protestors occupying a building is not a viable way to topple regimes (indeed it failed to do so in Hong Kong a few years earlier). These things do not work without institutional and military support, and the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.

A final note - the famous picture of the Jan 6 guy with the painted face and viking horns? He is now staunchly against Trump. Remember Trump is an egotist and an opportunist, not an ideologue. He wouldn't know what to do with a coup if he tripped over it.

> These things do not work without institutional and military support, and the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.

I don’t think it was a threat in that sense; I think it speaks volumes about the state of the country, though.

I wasn’t making a broad statement about the right at all. I don’t see a monolith in the United States. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, in a sense. There’s so little unity, the only common thread and binding force at the moment seems to be fear and uncertainty. This is perhaps Trump’s greatest strength and opportunity. Without it he would have remained irrelevant in my opinion.

> the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.

As a leftist I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, especially the Israeli/neocon influence (to put it mildly).

But, you’re making the same mistake many do on the right. Neoliberals are not “the left”. They are right wing with a patina of left wing messaging (at times). They are warmongering Zionists who love insurance companies and mainstream media. The Democrats are a corporate party. You’ll find more allies on the left (like Massie did) if you make that clear distinction.

For the record, I never gave a shit about Jan 6th. More people should hold our government accountable like that. Their biggest mistake was not grabbing Pelosi’s hard drive and publishing it as a torrent.

Based. I always thought there must have been red-blooded leftists who enjoyed the photos of the politicians cowering on the floor as much as I did. Even if the "wrong people" made them do it.

Yes, our government is fully corrupt and Zionist occupied. There is no voting our way out of it, direct action is required. We probably also agree that the "Russian interference" hoax was little more than propaganda runup to their little adventure in the Ukraine. Liberals have an unfathomable obsession with Russia, China and Iran. The latter is lessening though, as even they are tired of doing Israel's dirty work for them.

Where we probably disagree, but maybe this conversation will shift your perspective, is on ACAB and the BLM riots. Bombing a police station is equally based to storming the Capitol. I also support direct action against ICE. Imho this government is far beyond redemption and should be dissolved.

If anyone is interested in more perspective similar to this, I recommend these two twitter accounts:

* https://x.com/SocialistMMA

* https://x.com/BreeNewsome

I have been encouraged by some of the right wing (not Republican) perspective on Gaza. They were disgusted by the genocide and that's something I can align with. My hope that is in the fight against Zionism we can reach a place of racial harmony and understanding. We all have a common enemy.

If right wingers can have sympathy for Palestinians and Arabs in general, I have hope that they can recognize that Black Americans and Indigenous Americans were treated the same way. Seeing a genocide live-streamed has flushed out those of us who care and those of us who don't, and it turns out there were some unexpected allies (or potential allies) in places you wouldn't expect them.

Yarvin is a basement dweller and 4chan intellectual, high on his own supply of pseudo-intellectual takes. What is sad and worrying is that these kinds of politics are increasingly moving out of the fringe internet and into pockets of power (eg. Thiel and Vance). It is problematic that these ideas now linger only one or two steps away from the most powerful and influential person in the world.

Increasingly moving out? They've taken over the entire government. We are well on our way to a dystopia. Nice job, everyone.

Just as a reminder, Silicon Valley darling Curtis Yarvin recently said this:

"We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule"

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/po...

And yet he still happily pops up at social gatherings with these elites.

Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility.

There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.

> Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility

That's much too simplistic and mean spirited. We're not going to address the problems we're facing with personal dismissals. Yarvin, the man, isn't the problem. Some of his ideas are ridiculous and unworkable, but they're motivated by something real and unaddressed by many other commentators. The current zeitgeist, which is centered on personal attacks and dismissals is contributing to our problems, and inability to make any real progress at addressing them, by increasing factionalism and intellectual silos.

Edit: As to the addition you made to your comment, we live in a very different world than when Hunter S. Thompson was making his contributions.

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