Right-wing thinker Curtis Yarvin: The nihilism of feeds

One click too many and a murder occurs. Drone footage from the Ukraine war in the Reddit thread, shootings in X's feed. Then a meme, food content. Everything happens at the same time, forming a dreary 21st century narrative. When death flashes across the screen uncensored, I'm rarely prepared for it. And then there are all the racists, masculists and Islamists who chatter into their cameras in their ideological madness and function as kittens in the dark conglomerate of images. I'm writing this because I'm in a bad mood. For a day I watched videos that made me doubt the goodness in people and the internet anyway.

I stumbled upon Curtis Yarvin again. A software developer and niche blogger whose ideas have become a whisperer to men like Peter Thiel and who fits the nihilism of the feed very well between memes and doom. His fans: a mix of tech bros, post-libertarians, fascists and edgelords who want to feel special. They all celebrate him for his idea of ​​dark enlightenment. He wants nothing less than to redeem the world from democracy.

I read it again in the essay “The Dark Enlightenment” by the similarly drifted Nick Land, who supports Yarvin’s ideas. Yarvin wants, in a very broken down way, for states to be run as companies by managerial monarchs. There is freedom for individuals in that they can easily move to another company/state. Co-determination, participation, collective? At Yarvin, only useless relics. Crude stuff from a guy with a fetish for authority, but you have to check why the most influential men in the world love him so much?

I made the big mistake of clicking on a YouTube video called “Imperial Rights and the Post-Democratic Order.” The publisher of an irrelevant Austrian small publishing house, which also published the novel by AfD man Maximilian Krah, and Curtis Yarvin are sitting on leather armchairs. They wear greasy outfits, drink whiskey performatively and: slur their mouths. It's about Osama bin Laden or the feminization of politics. Women should be guided and oppressed anyway, say the two drunks.

Yarvin finds himself incredibly horny. The publisher, in turn, finds Yarvin incredibly hot and wants to be liked by him. Sometimes he laughs a little too enthusiastically and tries to cover it with a cough. An interesting spectacle. You could almost be blinded by the fuss. One of the top comments under the video: “A masterclass in how to talk without really saying anything.”

True, I think, and I make the big mistake of watching more and more videos. Yarvin at the New York Times (“on the End of American Democracy”), Yarvin at Harvard University, Yarvin at Tucker Carlson. It is an endless destructive babble from a man who is good at one thing: associating so wildly and constantly that the person he is talking to falls into a state of shock. This is probably how he paralyzed Thiel and co. But there's nothing there other than the fun of destruction.

The most influential men in the world have fallen victim to a hypnotist, I think, I'll finally make the jump and watch some stupid Lanz summary on YouTube for relief. Somehow healing! Since that day, new Yarvin videos have been playing in my feed every day, but I ignore them. It is important to retain power over the filter. Blocking war drone footage just as actively as Yarvin's lax rant. That Yarvin is passed around as a click guarantee between podcasts, panels and talks? Embarrassing opportunism.