"The third program that underpins the present moment is often described as a project of right-wing accelerationism. That term is usually associated with Curtis Yarvin, the former computer programmer and amateur poet who was graced with a long interview in The New York Times just after the election (His idea of RAGE—Retire All Government Employees—looks a lot like that of DOGE). Characters like him and the British philosopher Nick Land are freefloating intellectuals without institutional bases beyond their episodic newsletters, articles, and blogs. Yarvin has questioned his own influence, suggesting that his ideas make their way into the Republican ecosystem through staffers who swim in a “very online soup.” Yet even if their direct impact cannot be tracked in a simple flow chart, their work more accurately captures the tech right’s spirit than Burnhamite conservatism, C-suite vampirism, or the Jesus-dipped language of millenarian struggle.

What do they see? Right-wing accelerationists imagine existing sovereignty shattering into what Yarvin, writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug, calls a “patchwork” of private entities, ideally governed by what one might call technomonarchies. Existing autocratic polities like Dubai serve as rough prototypes for how nations could be dismantled into “a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions.” These would be decentralized archipelagoes: fortified nodes in a circuitry still linked by finance, trade, and communication. Think of the year 1000 in Middle Europe but with vertical take-off and landing taxis and Starlink internet."

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/02/15/speed-up-the-breakdown/

#USA #Trump #Musk #DOGE #FederalGovernment #Accelerationism