Ask HN: Thoughts on Curtis Yarvin?
No synthesized answer yet. Check the discussion below.
There's been a huge amount written about him. He has also published a lot of his own writing. I assure you that not everything critical about the man is clickbait or ragebait.
His original bibliography is largely ignored in polsci circles, found most often next to a print copy of Protocols of the Elders or somesuch conspiracy.
I don't really take issue with people who write this sort of literature, but I also don't take it very seriously myself.
That said, he does raise some interesting points--in extremely roundabout ways--and it's incredibly telling how different people react to him. The amazing amount of butthurt und sturm und drang that comes up whenever urbit is mentioned, for example, is almost always due to political/tribal stuff and not due to technical deficiencies or the deliberate obfuscation of whatever ideas actually might be there.
I think he's basically riding coats of the populist MAGA movement at this point in an almost ESR "I helped make this" sort of way, and while an interesting footnote in the evolution of NRx he's basically just an edgelord with some extra money.
I think that's exactly what he's doing.
I don't think Curtis Yarvin ever says the word "degrowth" and the people who think "degrowth" is inevitable, necessary or desirable would not endorse him, but his vision of the future is a vision of degrowth.
I think he sees the peak of civilization as around 1777 in France or 1852 in Japan when there was a relatively high technology level and material stock but we were still basically on a solar economy where wealth derived from holding agricultural land and food supplies were limited so we weren't quite ready for Marx's labor theory of value. If you thought the greatest thing in life was the exploitation of personal services, whether that is having a house full of servants or the debauchery of Valmont from Dangerous Liasons, you'd probably think that was the pinnacle of development. If you like pharmaceuticals or good food or things made out of metal, not so much. (Even if he didn't die in a duel or under the guillotine or from syphilis he would have been lucky to make it past 40)
So far as I know the story was the same in feudal agrarian Europe, Japan and China and likely elsewhere. There was an ideology that the King or Emperor or whatever had a divine right or was a god or was descended from the gods but actually he ruled with the consent of a class of warlords and landowners and if they wanted him overthrown he was overthrown though it often ushered in a century of chaos as those warlords struggled to figure out who'd come out on top finally falling back on the old ideology out of exhaustion.
The strength of modern society is not formal democracy but the very large numbers of institutions of many kinds large and small that through their many degrees of freedom are able to face the complexity of the problems that face civilization. (See Ashby's Law) You have the many branches of government, not one church, but many churches, many businesses, labor unions, professional associations, the academy, and civil society organizations of every stripe from Greenpeace to the Freemasons.
The case for degrowth is that civilization faces many threats not least pollution, resource depletion, war, pandemics as well as continuously changing technology, culture and economy. Critically, as Ezra Klein points out lately, the institutional complexity that it takes to manage these threats itself gets in the way of the responsiveness of the system and that's a tough problem.
I'll grant it to Yarvin that there has been an "ahistorical turn" and a lot of people, particularly the identitarian left, aren't interested in thinking about 2005 or 1974, never mind 1843 or the Ancien Regime. Yarvin's answer though is either going to be the cause of collapse or the consequence of collapse. Even if you're Peter Thiel your wealth can only protect you so much in that scenario, it's like playing Russian Roulette with a 10 chamber revolver and 9 bullets loaded. For the median person, it's worse. If you are looking for answers that will work in that kind of world you are better looking into matters of religion and the spirit because those are things that don't change along with economy and technology.
The way out is the way through.
1. 1777 & 1852 were peak for iron tech. Black smithery decentralized in both solar econs. (+nitrate prod. How could those revolutions succeed otherwise?) did not read GG+S to know if he had the same or counter argument (eg incompetent monarchs.) (Role of aluminum tech is a fun rabbit hole)
2. When your main threats are either yourselves other supra-organisms (not the universe), there may be a case for violating Ashby's Law. That might not be so crackpot if your fave supra-organism has a sustainably robust energy infra
2b. One might have to make the case that the brain may be materially バロック but organizationally simple? Do hominids have the most complex brains of all? Will botanics outlive us?
2a. The hard to formalize notions of simplicity from Clausewitz
3. Loki "physically" manifesting as a Hydra, thus concluding the TV series: what if he's The Good Guy?
If the control system inevitably becomes too complex to control than that's another law and degrowth is inevitable.
I kept that answer as short as I could and left out many threads, such as this one:
Circa 2000 I had a theory of "the Syndrome" which was that the business cycle is a battle of problems and solutions and that in the 1970s solutions were becoming part of the problem and the solution of the 1980s was taking the foot off the growth accelerator (which a Republican could do more easily than a Democrat) and a bit of tearing down of the solution apparatus. That ideology was absorbed by Bill Clinton and between that and the ongoing progress in microelectronics we got the boom of the 1990s.
That kind of analysis which posit "growth" and "degrowth" as phases of a cycle as opposed to two sides of a pulse is key to envisioning a future we want to live in and thinking through how to keep the control system controllable.
Also that answer leaned to the right as there is no point in giving the likes of Yarvin excessive space. Yet, that bit about spirit is not just coding or pandering [1], it's a part of the solution. We need faith in ourselves and the possibilities of cybernetics. I came to work one morning to find this stuck on the door of my building
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114356523256174674
Our "moment of reckoning" was not a defeat on the factory floor, in the operating room or on the battlefield. It was a defeat at the ballot box and had it gone differently by a few points, we'd be in different place. We've lost faith in our own institutions.
[1] presented so gently it's likely to evade the man-of-the-moment in 2025
The business cycle model of yours might have be fully understandable within cybernetics, especially in the time series respect. But are we not also interested in competing/interacting "peer" systems "beyond mean field"? How Apple and Desktop Linux gained ground against MSoft by reducing fragmentation, how MSoft responded by diversifying. You might have other examples for and against?
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114860542662347802
Marxism is a complex system that appeals to systematizers, "anti-racism" is a little less smart and more pessimistic and has about as much appeal to noneducated minorities as Marxism has to the working class -- the rank and file's ideology is more like
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112503020931163144
A lot of it is path dependent. I mean, Trump greased the skids for those mRNA vaccines and I remember my leftist friends saying in December 2020 that there must be something wrong about them being developed at "warp speed". Had he won it would have been leftists shunning vaccines and rightists shunning them for being stupid.
Every good paranoid believes the "pincer theory" that every social movement needs a wing that appeals to the elite (lacks manpower) and mass (lacks resources, vision, ...) to the smart and the stupid, etc.
My erstwhile understanding of the earlier appeal of Marxism was that it was fully compatible with the Weberian work ethic-- right until someone found a way to work the famous laziness of the Russians into propaganda.
Now that you mention it. Simplicity can appeal to the elites as a standin for "marketability to the masses". Helps the Kessel Run. (Pincer)
(That Mormons are a significant deal in the USG hiring pipeline is not a symptom of right wing sophistication-- unless one is a conspiracy theorist)
--Curtis Yarvin, https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3lv7lipobrs2a
That should give you a good sense of what kind of man he is, and what it says about those who support him.