Filippo Tommaso Marinetti liked automobiles, particularly his four-cylinder Fiat sports car. For him, the car represented innovation and vitality, even violence. Most of all, it signified the future. An Italian poet, performer, and pamphleteer, Marinetti was a reactionary; he loathed egalitarianism and democracy. He also wasn’t a conservative in any traditional sense, for there was little that he, and others in the Futurist art movement that he founded, wished to conserve. In his 1909 treatise, Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, he wrote, “We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind.” A precursor to the fascism that would envelop Europe, Marinetti was an influence on Benito Mussolini, and that ideology, which would soon fulfill that dark promise of destroying Europe’s museums, libraries, and academies.
Marinetti’s stronghold over Mussolini has striking parallels to America today—particularly with the rise of the “Dark Enlightenment” movement and its most vocal steward: software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin.
Largely ignored by academic philosophers, the “Dark Enlightenment” movement and Yarvin have curried favor and influence with tech executives in recent years. A software engineer by training, Yarvin has become a kind of official philosopher for tech leaders like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Mosaic founder Marc Andreessen. Not unlike the Futurists, Yarvin advocates for replacing democracy with a kind of techno-feudal state—for the government to be run like a corporation, with the president as its “CEO.” This new system is elitist—“humans fit into dominance-submission structures” Yarvin wrote in 2008; and it’s authoritarian—“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” he said in 2012. There are shades of Yarvin’s philosophy in Thiel’s 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, where he wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And Thiel, through his venture capital firm, Founders Fund, was an early investor in the blogger’s startup company Urbit. As for Yarvin’s controversial opinions and whether or not Thiel holds them, Yarvin has said that his patron is “fully enlightened,” as he had been “coaching Thiel.” What’s more, in a recent interview with the Hoover Institution, Andreessen quoted Yarvin and called him a “friend.”
What’s even more alarming is that Yarvin’s outsize influence on tech executives has now made its way to Washington. The signs are everywhere: Yarvin was a feted guest 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 influence on his thinking when interviewed on a podcast in July 2024. And while Andreessen’s role in the Trump White House is unofficial, The Washington Post reported in January 2025 that the executive “has been quietly and successfully recruiting candidates for positions across Trump’s Washington.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk, though not outwardly tipping his hat to Yarvin, seemingly has a similar philosophy: In 2020, Musk told the Wall Street Journal that the “government is simply the largest corporation.” Five years later, Musk has been using his position as an unofficial advisor to the second Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to operationalize what Yarvin has called “a hard reboot” of the government.
Read More: Inside Elon Musk’s War on Washington
As such, it behooves us to be more familiar with Yarvin and other associated figureheads of this far-right philosophy. Understanding their motivations is essential to understanding what the stakes currently are—and how history can repeat itself.
Much can be gleaned about the attractions of this ideology to many of those in power from simply parsing the name of the movement. “Dark Enlightenment” portends the upending of the liberal order that has defined democratic aspirations for nearly three centuries. Where the Enlightenment promised liberty, emancipation, equality, and solidarity, “Dark Enlightenment” offers servitude, hierarchy, bondage, and ruthlessness.
The movement is most often associated with the British philosopher Nick Land. Land was a founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom until 1995 when his own increasingly erratic behavior had him expelled. Land is actively anti-democratic, desiring a system where great men (guided by algorithms and artificial intelligence) steer the ship of state. This is an explicitly nihilistic vision—“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,” but which we might as well call cybernetic authoritarianism or technological fascism.
This leads us to Yarvin. A polemical blogger, Yarvin wrote for years under the goofy name “Mencius Moldbug” where he advocated for his own form of techno-authoritarianism in opposition to democracy. Like Marinetti, Yarvin expressed disdain for those symbols of American culture that he sees as oppositional to “Dark Enlightenment”—from free voting to free inquiry, a vibrant media to the open university. Yarvin, writing in 2021, posited (with significantly less poetry than the Futurists), “Because the university is the heart of the old regime, it is absolutely essential to the success of any regime change that all accredited universities be both physically and economically liquidated.”
Yarvin speaks disparagingly of something that he calls “The Cathedral,” a nexus of educational, media, and nonprofit organizations that he believes sets the tenor for discourse, but that also impedes the liberty of executives to do what they will. Rather his aspiration is, as he wrote in 2007, that “the state is simply a real estate business on a very large scale.”
Using a variety of mixed metaphors, Yarvin advocates for a “Butterfly Revolution,” a “full power start” to the U.S. government accomplished by “giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization.” This is imagined as an internal coup meant to privatize the government and replace democracy with complete executive authority. Two years ago, Yarvin laid out his strategic program with the acronym “RAGE,” or “Retire all government employees.” Yarvin argued that a hypothetical future Trump administration should terminate all nonpolitical federal workers to have them be replaced by loyalists. The government’s coffers must then be impounded and redirected, according to the blogger. When courts prevent unconstitutional orders, Yarvin says that they should just be ignored. After that, the free press and universities must be curtailed, as well—Yarvin said no later than April after the inauguration.
That so much of this seems to mirror the actions of the Trump administration and DOGE may not be a coincidence. So far, some 30,000 federal employees—across departments as varied as the FDA, the National Park Service, and the FAA—have been fired by DOGE in the name of government efficiency. Yarvin’s musings in 2009 that the “definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law,” hold a mirror to Trump’s February tweet that “He who save his country, violates no law.”
Yarvin’s claim that “No brand or building can survive” is perfectly congruent with the tech industry’s notorious ethos to “Move fast and break things.” But what’s also being seemingly witnessed is a harbinger of the “monarchism” that Yarvin desires. On February 19, Trump posted a doctored image of himself in a crown with the caption “Long Live the King!” on his social media app Truth Social.
As is so often the case with Trump, pundits have a tendency to assume a lack of seriousness or intention with what the president says. The same dismissiveness sometimes accompanied the Futurists, and Mussolini’s fascists for that matter, when they were ascendant. Now, as Trump threatens longtime American allies from Panama to Mexico, Canada to Denmark, a belief of the Futurists even more disturbing than their worship of technology should be remembered: Marinetti’s claim that “War is the hygiene of the world.”
