Artificial Ignorance
What attracts the tech bros to a movement that cultivates stupidity?
At Grand Rapids in Michigan, in his first rally since an attempt was made on his life, Trump paused from the usual maundering speech to tell the vast crowd about a 900-page document drawn up by a right-wing think tank.
He readily confessed to being vague about the document’s contents, asserting only that it was ‘extreme.’ For the former president, apparently, this word carries no pejorative charge.
The think tank in question is known as the Heritage Foundation, though Trump was equally unclear who exactly they were: ‘Like, some on the right, severe right, came up with this Project 25, I don’t even know, some of them I know who they are, but they’re very, very conservative. They’re sort of the opposite of the radical left.”
Trump continued to riff on his ignorance. “I don’t know what the hell it [the Project] is […] they [sic] read some of the things and they are extreme, they’re seriously extreme. But I don’t know anything about it, I don’t want to know anything about it” (The Independent, 22 July, 2024).
This declaration of avowed ignorance had the effect of a humble brag. Trump was telling his followers “Look, it’s complicated, but who cares? These boffins, we know how hard they are to understand. But you really don’t need to worry your pretty little heads! Leave the thinking to them, like I do.”
The Independent (22 July 2024) went on to report some of the Project’s severely extreme plans. They included crushing abortion rights, and an immigration agenda that would lead to mass deportations. They also involved sacking a whole bunch of civil servants right away and replacing them with loyalists. None of this sounds too complex for a man with Donald Trump’s preoccupations. One wonders what part of the phrase “You’re fired!” had given him such difficulty.
In contrast, Trump’s choice for vice president, JD Vance, has been eager to advocate that particular policy, but then Vance is a Yale man. Soon after the announcement of Donald Trump’s running mate, one member of the crowd in Grand Rapids was guarded in his reaction to the pick: “Honestly, I had to Wikipedia him,” he admitted, “but he seems all right” (Guardian, 21 July 2024).
The Trump follower could be forgiven for his ignorance. Even among the political pundits who knew something of him, the choice of JD Vance has proved hard to understand, not because it feels wrong, but because Vance is such a complex individual.
Trump’s choice for his first term of office was a lot simpler. Mike Pence represented a counterweight to Trump's celebrity status and erratic oratory, the straight man to Trump's comic turns, forever standing behind the president, stiff, unflappable, quietly approving. He never dreamt the day would come when insurrectionists would march on the Capitol, intent on hanging him from a lamppost.
Should Trump win a second term, this new vice president would be another matter entirely. Almost half the former president's age, with a beard of the kind Trump reportedly considers unhygienic, he is unlikely to emulate Pence's stiff impassivity.
In trying to assess Vance’s significance, commentators have tended to pluck at the low hanging fruit. They have stressed his working-class roots in Ohio and his populism, both of which are novelties in the current Republican milieu. They’ve mentioned that he wrote a book – later made into a film – called ‘Hillbilly Elegy’, and that he served for a spell in the Marines.
What they have not examined is possibly the most intriguing aspect: Vance was once a denizen of Silicon Valley. His start-up was financed by Peter Thiel, a talented mathematician who has need of a good head for figures, just to keep track of his bank account. In the early days, Thiel made his fortune founding PayPal with Elon Musk.
Courtesy of tech bros like Thiel, Vance arrives on the scene equipped with an intellectual hinterland, which is enough to induce cognitive dissonance in the brainiest layperson: MAGA and intellectual hinterland have not hitherto been phrases that appeared in the same sentence.
Perhaps sections of the American press are more attuned to these connections than their European counterparts. Vox, for example, has been speaking about another of Thiel’s associates, one Curtis Yarvin. I shall have more to say about Curtis anon.
Here in Britain, however, Carole Cadwalladr has been almost alone in speaking about Vance’s links to what she calls the ‘broligarchs’. It’s not a pretty neologism, but then Cadwalladr is not enamoured of the people it describes. ‘The broligarchs have made their move,’ she says, ‘and the rest of us need to understand exactly what that means’ (Guardian, 20 July 2024). She makes it sound so easy. Cadwalladr goes on to describe Vance, somewhat impolitely, as ‘Thiel’s creature’:
‘He is a man Thiel moulded in his own image through lavish investments in his business and political careers. Thiel gave Vance a job at his VC firm, Mithril Capital, backed him to start his own venture fund, Narya Capital, then later invested $15m in his successful run for the senate. Max Chafkin, Thiel’s biographer, describes Vance as his “extension”.’
She claims that this will have implications for us all. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI. Now this really isn’t the kind of thing you try explaining to the MAGA crowds in Michigan. But then most of the things Peter Thiel comes out with would amount to a whoosh moment for the base.
Perhaps they could just about keep up when he talks about democracy being incompatible with freedom, for instance, but not when he starts plotting to avoid the climate apocalypse in a New Zealand bunker, or else to be cryogenically preserved. Then there’s the monstrous outrage of death itself:
‘I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,’ he has written, which might raise a few eyebrows on the convention floor. ‘For all these reasons, I still call myself libertarian.’
Thiel will have no further need of his bunker once he has successfully ascended into the cloud. It is almost as if he represents the progress of the entire species, a one-man fulfilment of human destiny:
‘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” into an oxymoron.’
As Wilde once said of the wallpaper in the room he was to die in, one of them had to go. People on welfare, women, they are all unattractive wallpaper to Thiel. It must be hard for him to believe that a sculptor was ever misguided enough to portray Liberty as a female.
Compared to this elevated level of theory, Thiel’s interest in a Trump victory – and that of other tech bros, such as Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz – seems reassuringly mundane:
‘…while he [Thiel] has it in for the legacy monopolies of Google and Facebook’ says Cadwalladr, the platforms ‘who his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating right-wing speech – Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business goldrush.’
Mundane indeed, in the sense of worldly. But the prize here is more than simply a lot of money. It is delivering the body politic, the republic itself, over to a new model of governance based on the Silicon Valley company structure. A ‘reboot’, to use the jargon of another of the new right’s cognitive elite and a personal friend of both Thiel and Vance, one Curtis Guy Yarvin.
That kind of succinctness is not something Curtis – once known as Mencius Moldbug, aka Supreme Sith Lord of the neo-reactionaries – is prone to. Despite pithy references to red pills, his preferred medium is the endless discursive ramble. This style resembles that of Trump, but instead of random digressions on preferred ways of dying – electrocution or being devoured by sharks – and the habits of the ‘late, great’ Hannibal Lecter, Yarvin is more likely to display his knowledge of the British monarchy, or the number of republics France has got through since 1789. The theory is that America has also had a succession of republics, only without officially numbering the sequence.
America should also take a lesson from the British and get itself a monarch. That is, if one can be found who acts like the CEO of a company. To be precise, and considerably less prolix than the purveyor of Dark Enlightenment, the CEO of a tech company.
There is a quote doing the rounds which, despite appearances, is not something Albert Einstein ever said: ‘Light travels faster than sound, which is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.’ This explains why some members of the cognitive elite can appear to radiate intelligence until you’re within earshot.
In the case of Curtis Yarvin, however, this law of the universe was reversed. When he first showed up and tried to persuade rich people of his brightness, they spurned him as a bit of a dweeb. It was only when he became audible that his silken tongue began to tickle their fancies.
One of the people whose fancy he managed to tickle was the aforementioned PayPal billionaire. By 2016, Yarvin claims to have been ‘coaching Thiel’. You could say, to adopt Cadwalladr’s unflattering expression, that if Vance was Thiel’s creature, then Thiel was Yarvin’s. The two buddies even watched the 2016 US election together, in the billionaire’s house.
Back in the day, when he still wrote under his alias, Moldbug did not give tongue so freely to his views as he does now. Instead, he kept said tongue rammed permanently in his cheek, which made it hard sometimes to know whether he was in earnest when he moaned about ‘the Cathedral,’ as he called it, comprising the media, academia and the civil service, or when he proposed with straight face that America should be run by a white man with business acumen who was accountable only to the members of a board.
But that was then. These days, having shed the bug identity, he is more open in his disdain for the failings of the democratic order:
‘Can you imagine a 21st-century post-demotist [sic] society? One that saw itself as recovering from democracy, much as Eastern Europe sees itself as recovering from Communism? Well, I suppose that makes one of us.’
You see what he did there.
It is a supreme irony of history, that people who spent decades languishing behind the iron curtain should become role models for a person who thinks one cheer for democracy would be seriously overdoing it. In common with Winston Churchill, there are times when a lot of us think democracy is the worst form of government, before pausing to think about it and adding ‘except for all the others.’
But the sheer effort involved in pausing to think about things, and about their consequences in the real world, has proved an insuperable impediment for some members of the cognitive elite. Maybe that’s why Yarvin, as their pet theorist, offers the quickest of fixes. He prescribes a sudden and complete change to which no one has time to react, executed at such speed that it ‘takes everyone’s breath away’.
In late 2020, Trump issued an executive order called “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 new president.
Like the former president and his new sidekick, Yarvin has it in for the administrators. He once came up with the acronym RAGE, which stood for Retire All Government Employees.
From across the pond, one is bound to wonder if Dominic Cummings is a kindred spirit. Yarvin is a fellow blogger, but while his English counterpart is unimpeachably humourless, the American has never quite lost his satiric touch.
Yet America’s Brexiteer also sees change as a largely bureaucratic issue. The whole American state and its constitutional arrangements need replacing, the courts need to be neutered, the elite media and universities need to be shut down and the police need to be centralised.
Once that’s done, the grateful people can take to the streets. Yarvin sweetly assures us that, so long as it is achieved at pace, this will be a peaceful transition. There will be some blood on the floors of the federal departments, granted, but mostly metaphorical blood. The people’s demonstration of support “shouldn’t be menacing” like January 6. Rather, “it should have this joyous sense that you’re actually winning and winning forever and the world is being completely remade.”
So, it’s not so much a removal of the ‘Cathedral’ that Yarvin is offering us here, as a 21st century equivalent to the dissolution of the monasteries, which is where the monarch comes in. Yarvin has in mind a Tudor monarch – not the tyrannical Henry VIII, but the benign Elizabeth I, who he sees as basically a Tudor start-up phenomenon, hence the pool of entrepreneurial talent that gave us Shakespeare. Though Good Queen Bess had the actual power to say “Off with his head!” and get her way, she didn’t do it with her father’s regularity.
Having sat through hours of this kind of stuff, I feel entitled to conclude that, in essence, it amounts to endless variations on this flattering message: America should be run like Silicon Valley, because Silicon Valley is successful and makes pots of money.
Oh, and by the way, don’t call this fascism. Everyone knows that fascists work people up into a class war, or else set people against each other over race, or both. Yarvin’s monarch would never dream of fostering disunity.
It should come as little surprise that someone propagating this kind of thesis appealed to Peter Thiel. He invested proper money in Yarvin’s startup company, Tlön, which took its name from a land invented by Luis Borges, where everyone behaves as if Bishop Berkely’s subjective idealism was common sense. Yup!
Now the objective reader might reasonably ask just how clever this neo-reactionary geek philosophy really is. Because, according to this plan, what society needs is not incremental reform. On the contrary, Yarvin’s unique addition to political science can be summed up as ‘Have you tried turning it off and on again?’
Surely no one, apart from a geek, could imagine that such long-winded cleverness could preserve its innocence when confronted with reality. At some point every theory worth its salt has to be put into practice. Then the slogans start to replace the learned circumlocutions, poetry turns into prose and heads get broken, at pace.
But until such time, Yarvin is happy in the role of the tech bros’ licensed fool, sending his masters up in the process, forever dodging responsibility for his words through the guise of satirist.
As he is obviously an avid reader and a bit of an Anglophile, Yarvin is probably acquainted with Britain’s greatest practitioner of satire. If not, he should definitely give him a whirl. Jonathan Swift’s most famous book, Gulliver’s Travels, has delighted generations of children with its account of Lilliput. Appropriate, really, since children are themselves small in stature. Only adult readers, however, read as far as the third part, when Gulliver visits an island called Laputa.
This fantasy island is able to hover above the surface of the earth. It can even move around at will. On the island are a ruling class of mathematicians whose entire time is taken up in complex calculations. They get so lost in algebra, that they have to be woken periodically from their reveries, 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, strike the members of the ruling elite, including the monarch, in order to bring them to their senses.
So far so geeky, but Swift also – quite incredibly for a book published in 1726 – refers to a device in the Laputans’ possession, called The Engine. He even illustrates it for us. The Wikipedia entry calls this ‘possibly the earliest known reference to a device in any way resembling a modern computer.’ And 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’ (Gulliver’s Travels, Part 3).
This is no mere calculator, but an explicit forerunner of artificial intelligence, the necessary prerequisite for the ignorance which facilitates another eccentricity of the ruling class, that they domineer over the populations below without paying them the least bit of attention.
In the event of uprisings among the discontented multitude, the Laputans manoeuvre their island into position over people’s heads, interposing its bulk between them and the sun, and staying there, until such time as crops fail and the famished populace beg for mercy. The rulers are then at liberty to return to their cogitations, undisturbed except for the occasional blow around the ear from a harmless bladder.
Trump may not often be inclined to mathematical reverie. For all his subjects know, or care, he may as well be thinking about the day Hannibal Lecter jumped the shark and got electrocuted. It’s the kind of accident that could befall even the most stable genius.
This ignorant state of mind is absolutely fine, though, because Trump doesn’t actually need to be a genius, stable or otherwise. With the help of their beautiful computers, the boffins in the Valley will do all his thinking for him.
Maybe this is just the kind of thing the rest of us, as mere earthlings in this equation, need to understand.