The Obama-to-Yarvin Pipeline

Continuities of the Californian Ideology, 2014-2025

Public Domain

I first came across the blog Unqualified Reservations, written under the memorable byline “Mencius Moldbug,” sometime in the second Obama term, around the same time the tech press started catching onto the burgeoning ranks of monarchists in and around Silicon Valley. One key incident that raised the profile of Moldbug and his acolytes at the time was the transgender former Occupy leader and Google engineer Justine Tunney’s petition to the White House demanding that it: “1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America.” Items 1 and 2 might as well have been DOGE’s marching orders in early 2025, and that’s no accident. As Ava Kofman says in her much-discussed profile of Curtis Yarvin, the man behind Moldbug, he can be seen as “an engineer of the intellectual source code for the second Trump Administration.”

On its face, this seems like a story about how ideas matter—how an obscure intellectual, widely ridiculed as a crank, used his ability to produce sprawling blog posts and expatiate on podcasts to gain the attention of the most influential people in the world and see his once extreme-sounding proposals brought to partial fruition. This seems to be how Yarvin has long hoped his career would play out. He named a company he founded after Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional text “Tlön Uqbar Orbis Tertius,” which tells the story of how “a scattered dynasty of solitary men … changed the face of the world” by composing an encyclopedia of an imaginary world that gradually infiltrates the real one. Borges’s story is a potent illustration of what Yarvin’s sometime interlocutor Nick Land called hyperstition—in layman’s terms, meming something into existence. Yarvin has elsewhere compared his project—and that of others on the “deep right”—to that of the 19th-century (left-wing) Russian intelligentsia, which suffered decades of marginalization and persecution under Tsarist rule but eventually was able to marshal the power of aesthetics to seize hold of the cultural narrative, and then the state.

The implication of all this is that Moldbug/Yarvin and those who sought to ban and deplatform him and his ideas for over a decade agree on one thing: Those ideas are, from the perspective of the “regime” we have lived under for decades, beyond the pale and highly dangerous. The current administration, by this account, is what happens when the ideas Yarvin has put out there are allowed to gain traction. Having now recognized his influence, the mainstream press is attempting to understand him, leading to profiles like that of The New Yorker’s Kofman, as well as a long New York Times interview. Juding by Yarvin’s posts on X over the past week, the scandalized reactions to these portrayals have flattered his view that his ideas are simply too hot to handle for the brainwashed guardians of what he calls the Cathedral.

My own reaction when I first came upon Moldbug’s work was different: I was a bit confused about what exactly made it so heretical. To be sure, there were elements of it that were clearly taboo from the perspective of the Cathedral and its denizens: most notably, wanting to talk about race and IQ and expound on revisionist World War II history. But these aspects of his oeuvre weren’t particularly novel, even if they were not to be found in the more polite precincts of the internet; if you followed the weirder realms of the right-wing blogosphere, which I did at the time, they were pretty commonplace. (Moldbug himself made clear enough that he was drawing on the work of others here, frequently linking to fringe right-wingers of an older generation like Ron Unz and Steve Sailer.) Even the account of the Cathedral was a somewhat more systematic and expansive version of the standard right-wing critiques of liberal bias in the media and higher education.

Instead, Moldbug’s claim to originality lay in his political theory, which he dubbed formalism or neocameralism: essentially, his ideal of the state as a “SovCorp” run by a CEO-monarch (although even on that front, in his 2007 “Formalist Manifesto” he declared: “Most everything I have to say is available, with better writing, more detail and much more erudition, in Jouvenel, Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leoni, Burnham, Nock, etc., etc.”) In other words, if you leave aside the colorful prose and the beliefs Moldbug shared with the rest of the right-most sector of online opinion, what you’re left with is the argument that informed Tunney’s “make Eric Schmidt CEO of America” proposal.

What I asked myself when I came upon that petition back in 2014 was what those staffing the Obama administration would actually think about the idea of making Eric Schmidt CEO of America. It wasn’t as obvious to me as it seemed to be to Moldbug’s adepts that they’d recoil in horror at it. In fact, if you listened to the Obama White House, it was clear its denizens were also quite taken with the leadership of people like Schmidt. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama had talked about needing “not bigger, but ‘smarter’ government” ; the same year Tunney posted her demands, the White House launched the US Digital Service, the predecessor to DOGE, which was headed up by a former Google engineer, Mikey Dickerson. The Obama administration also recruited various other Google employees, including Megan Smith, Nicole Wong, and Sonel Shah. In the same period the White House was aggressively recruiting tech talent, it was also sending many of its own top people to Silicon Valley, including David Plouffe (Uber), Jay Carney (Amazon), Lisa Jackson (Apple), Eric Holder (Airbnb), and Valerie Jarrett (Lyft).

In other words, the Obama administration seemed to be animated by something like a soft version of Moldbug’s worldview. It agreed with him that Silicon Valley companies were way better-run than Washington; that the political establishment should look to their example and try to figure out how to run government in a “smarter” way; and that even if we don’t exactly replace the president with a tech CEO, we should at least recruit tech talent to the highest levels of government while also creating a revolving door between the executive branch and tech c-suites. It isn’t hard to imagine a hypothetical liberal-technocratic Yarvin who espoused a slightly softer version of his “formalism”—without the race realism or historical revisionism—having gained the ear of Obama’s people, not least because they were frustrated by the obstacles facing their agenda and might have been receptive to a novel brief for expansive executive power.

In other words, Yarvin is a “timely man,” in the phrase of a Trump official interviewed by Kofman, in that his ideas resonate not just with those informing Trump 2.0, but also those animating the regime it overthrew. (The seamless replacement of the “US Digital Service” with “US DOGE Service” illustrates the continuity nicely.) Yarvinism, in other words, is a mask-off version of the End of History consensus, which eagerly pursued, among other things, the privatization of state functions, the merger of the public and private sectors, and the erosion of popular sovereignty. Yarvin almost admitted as much in his “formalist manifesto”: “‘democracy’ appears to work because it is not in fact democracy, but a mediocre implementation of formalism.” He doesn’t present the formalist future as a pie-in-the-sky utopia but a system already on view in places like Dubai—a place where End of History luminaries like Tony Blair have done plenty of lucrative business.

The political flexibility of late-stage Californian Ideology shouldn’t be surprising. As Richard Barbrook, whose work I discussed last week, noted in his book Imaginary Futures, a “fetishized ideology [has] no political loyalties.” The Californian Ideology is ultimately about divesting technological progress of any expansive political vision. Yarvin, like the End of History ideologues who preceded him, offers us a fantasy of the future in which we can enjoy the riches of advanced industrial civilization without the political contradictions that arise as a result of its creative destruction. The softer version of this vision offered by the Obama-era Democrats came to a bad end in 2016, creating an opening for the “heretical offspring” (Barbrook’s phrase) of the techno-optimist creed. Those now learning about Yarvin from the New Yorker and the Times will mostly fail to see the genealogical linkage. As a result, they will continue to misunderstand the moment we are living through.

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