by bitsavers on 6/4/25, 7:04 PM with 425 comments
by kragen on 6/4/25, 7:16 PM
by eikenberry on 6/4/25, 8:13 PM
by legitster on 6/4/25, 7:34 PM
How wrong I was.
by rubyfan on 6/4/25, 7:22 PM
by A_D_E_P_T on 6/4/25, 7:24 PM
I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.
In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-confluence?r=h8x
There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
by AnimalMuppet on 6/4/25, 9:21 PM
2. Even if you have these perfect people, they're going to be rare. Who's going to put them in power? The mass of non-perfect people? Why are they going to do that?
3. Yarvin fails his own test. He's looking for people whose blogs create no negative reactions? Yarvin stands self-condemned; he's not worthy to say how things should be run.
by skrebbel on 6/4/25, 7:45 PM
by tptacek on 6/4/25, 9:07 PM
by ivraatiems on 6/4/25, 7:57 PM
Yarvin comes off - not just here, but through his writing and his work - as absolutely obsessed with proving himself and being smarter than everyone. He admits he has the gifted child need to prove yourself drive, but he doesn't seem to have invested time in figuring out how to move past it or use it productively.
You can completely discard Yarvin's ideology - or even agree with it - and still see this in the way he works. His company, Urbit (not the name of the company but the name of its "product") is a ham-handed, hyper-complex "re-imagining" of pretty much every wheel in computing, from the OS to networking to programming languages. It has effectively no useful user-facing features, but a whole lot of design philosophy and programming language design. It creates lots of problems while solving almost none, but it looks impressive.
...which is to say it maybe actually isn't all that far off from his ideological and political writing, in the end.
by thrance on 6/4/25, 7:29 PM
There is no way America shakes this insanity off easily, it will require a long time and (lots of) suffering.
by senkora on 6/4/25, 7:18 PM
The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.
by defen on 6/4/25, 7:55 PM
by esseph on 6/4/25, 10:19 PM
The fact that it's flagged means someone wants it hidden.
If you don't want to read the post you don't have to, nobody is making you.
by mmustapic on 6/4/25, 8:13 PM
by exizt88 on 6/4/25, 7:51 PM
by Apocryphon on 6/4/25, 8:40 PM
Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries (techcrunch.com) 54 points by davidgerard on Nov 23, 2013 | 109 comments
by rukuu001 on 6/4/25, 10:42 PM
> The term itself [stupidity], he said, wasn’t a description of intellectual acuity, but of social responsibility
by Hikikomori on 6/4/25, 7:21 PM
by monksy on 6/4/25, 8:42 PM
by cempaka on 6/4/25, 7:35 PM
On that, he's not wrong!
by mountainriver on 6/4/25, 7:32 PM
What an absolute joke
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 6/4/25, 9:02 PM
by arp242 on 6/5/25, 12:48 AM
If the prize is being "all-powerful", then you can just assassinate your way to king-CEO, after which you're immune. This system is incredibly easy to hack, and has happened countless of times throughout history.
Giving people cryptographic keys to disarm weapons is not going to change much about that and is just hand-waving with extra steps. Try disarming my knife with your cryptography. Oh no, I repeatedly stabbed you in the chest before you could enter your passphrase. Too bad.
This is like communists: "yeah sure, in the past it ended in spectacular failure, but this time we'll get it right!" (if they're not outright denying things such as Stalin's purges from ever happening that is).
What strikes me is just how incredibly naïve, dumb, and unsophisticated all of this is.
Yarvin seems to have convinced himself that he's always the smartest person in the room, always acts fully rational, and that everything he says is a singularity of pure logic. It's easy to end up with some very curious ideas that way, especially if you combine that with his psychological ... issues.
Once you start dismissing people that disagree as "too dumb to understand the ideas" or consider giving them "Voight-Kampff test" to prove they're not "NPCs" you know you're off the deep end.
If nothing else, all of this is useful to read as a cautionary tale: how you too, as a smart person, can believe some really dumb stuff (to say nothing on the morality of it all).
by tehjoker on 6/4/25, 8:31 PM
by LAC-Tech on 6/5/25, 4:04 AM
He also seems to lose all biting insight and critique when it comes to one certain state he has a legal right to be a citizen of. I'll leave this for readers to find out which one.
I've never made much of his apparent association to JD Vance. Maybe this is the sort of street cred stuff vance liked to surround himself with, much as Obama did with his Bill Ayers association, but I doubt it affected either men much in practice.
by archagon on 6/4/25, 8:09 PM
> Yarvin is only another horribly damaged person, squealing in pain in a pseudointellectual vocabulary. He has neither knowledge nor insight, but a gift for miming these things. The questions are, first, how might we stop so many children from being psychically tortured so that their minds become piles of bloody shred like this, and then second, why does anybody take it at face value when, rarely, one of them learns to scream in sounds that mimic high discourse?
by TSiege on 6/4/25, 9:21 PM
by hexator on 6/4/25, 7:14 PM
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 6/4/25, 10:36 PM
Another dropout; never finished his PhD:
"At 15, Yarvin entered college as part of Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth. A year later, he transferred to Brown University in Rhode Island as a legacy admission to the Ivy League liberal arts college, where his parents had met in the mid-'60s. After graduating, it was on to a computer science Ph.D. program at Berkeley. He dropped out after a year and a half to take a tech job at the height of the go-go '90s dot-com era."
Without the Silicon Valley and the internet, he and his theories have no life. Neither can stand on its own without computers.
He cannot turn off the computer. Without the computer, he becomes irrelevant.
Not suprising if he provides entertainment for so-called "tech" company investors and employees.
by disambiguation on 6/5/25, 7:09 AM
by ianbicking on 6/4/25, 11:55 PM
I have this feeling that Nock, effectively the bytecode of Urbit, is inspired by Paul Graham's Hundred-Year Language essay: https://paulgraham.com/hundred.html – for instance Nock only defines minimal math operations, as proposed in the essay.
The thing is, Paul's ideas in that essay were quite bad, based on a mathematical aesthetic that is both inefficient and aesthetically a poor fit for computing. That's fine for an essay, you throw some ideas out there and maybe they work or maybe they don't.
Then in Urbit Yarvin actually built the thing. And it's _terrible_. Hilariously bad. Some of the worst architecture you'll ever see. As a minor example they have a hexadecimal integer type... I understand i32, i64, etc., but a hexadecimal type is something you come up with if you don't understand how numbers work. There's literally a hundred other things just as embarrassing as that in the design.
It's fine to take a bad idea and explore it. But he didn't just try out the idea, he got people to invest, to develop the system, emotionally commit to this thing. Seeing community posts is sad, it's naive folks hoping to find a home and seeing some phrases that connect with them, and they don't know enough to see Urbit for the fraud that it is. The obscurantist terminology helps maintain the fraud, since people think there must be something there if only they could understand it... but there isn't, and most of them will never understand it. Every cool demo is just a regular web frontend with a half-assed Urbit backend.
All of which is to say, I think this is Yarvin's schtick: grab onto some ideas, explore them in a way that is so confusing that it hids how moronic the ideas are, while successfully appealing to some latent desire in the audience.
by antisthenes on 6/4/25, 7:22 PM
The ultimate irony is that New Yorker in this case is writing an article about him, mocking his views...yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all.
How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?
The only fascinating thing here is the phenomenon that no matter what nonsense you come up with, someone on the Internet will agree with you, think it's a good thing, and maybe even form a fan club.
by twiddling on 6/4/25, 7:13 PM
by antithesizer on 6/4/25, 7:21 PM
Nick Land where have you gone? Your house is in disarray.
by indoordin0saur on 6/4/25, 8:54 PM