Populism in Western politics is not a
pre-theorized worldview. It emerged from inchoate grievances rather than
existing ideologies, and the theorists have been chasing after it ever since.
اضافة اعلان
The chasers include
populism’s would-be friends, intellectuals trying to graft agendas onto Trumpism
or Brexit or whatever’s happening in Italy or France. But populism’s critics
are also always on the hunt, eager to find some dark wizard, some éminence
grise whose ideas can give substance to their fears.
In the past few
years that search has made a micro-celebrity out of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer
who spent years writing recondite critiques of modern liberalism under the nom
de web “Mencius Moldbug”, before emerging in the mid-to-late 2010s as part of a
larger cast of Silicon Valley reactionaries.
Unlike some other
figures in that troupe, Yarvin does not need to be caricatured to make him out
to be an enemy of liberal democracy. He is forthright in his belief that the
present order — to his mind, an oligarchy governed by a complex of elite
institutions (like The New York Times) that he calls “the Cathedral” — should
be overthrown and replaced by a digital age monarchy, a king-CEO.
In profiles of
Yarvin, whether hostile or curious, you can see the profiler struggling to link
this worldview to normal political debates. With sufficient work you can
interpret the chaos of January 6, 2021, as a proto-monarchist gambit.
Alternatively you can take the tamest of Yarvin’s ideas and read him as an
advocate of a more-imperial-than-usual president, a Franklin Roosevelt of the
right. But either interpretation leaves a gap between his radical imagination
and actual American politics.
Maybe, though,
Yarvin should not be read primarily as a theorist of American political
realities. Rather, in keeping with his tech industry roots, he is a theorist
for virtual reality, and his case for monarchy is really about the best way to
rule the emergent principalities of social media.
I have been
thinking about this while watching Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (about which
Yarvin has a lot to say). In some ways what is happening is capitalism as
usual: new CEO fires old guard, seeks new revenue streams, and so on.
(Social media) are a place where people form communities and alliances, nurture friendships and sexual relationships, yell and flirt, cheer and pray. And all this happens transnationally, the system spreading itself across borders while policing who can cross its own.
But in other ways
the takeover feels more like a pre-modern political struggle — a clash between
ecclesiastical and monarchical authority, between clerics and a king.
Musk claims to want
Twitter to serve as a digital town square. But that seems like a category
error: social media include aspects of a town square experience, but
fundamentally they are a larger parallel reality, a prototype of the immersive
virtual world that Mark Zuckerberg has so far failed to build. They are a place
where people form communities and alliances, nurture friendships and sexual
relationships, yell and flirt, cheer and pray. And all this happens
transnationally, the system spreading itself across borders while policing who
can cross its own.
So there is a sense
in which Twitter is a new kind of polity, a place people do not just visit but
inhabit. And for a polity, it is crucial who sets the rules of citizenship, who
gets banished or ostracized or dumped in Twitter jail. The furious and
enthusiastic reactions to Musk’s takeover resemble the furious and enthusiastic
reactions to presidential races because in both cases the leadership change really
affects how people experience their daily lives.
With the crucial
difference, though, that no one yet has a compelling idea of what a social
media democracy would look like. So instead of electoral choices, the options
are governance of the kind that Twitter used to have, with a clerical class
enforcing rules and norms somewhat opaquely, based on the theology of current
progressivism, or the personalized governance it has now, with Czar Elon I
issuing amnesties while explaining that Alex Jones will remain forever exiled
because the czar has personal reasons to hate anyone who exploits the death of
children.
If that is the
choice, theories of monarchy and oligarchy are intensely relevant to virtual
politics, even if they are overstretched as theories of the real-world American
republic. That goes for Marxist theorizing as well as well as Yarvin’s
reactionary analysis: Just as his progressive “Cathedral” can potentially exert
greater power over Twitter than over America, so too can a right-wing
billionaire or “boss” class more plausibly dominate a virtual polity than a
real one.
There is also some
dynamic relationship between virtual power and real-world politics. But we do
not know yet where it will go. Will the metaverse develop to a point at which
it matters more who rules social media kingdoms than who occupies the White
House? Will reality have its revenge, subjecting the virtual sphere to
democratic authority, regulating its medieval politics away?
For now, watching Musk rule by decree, all we can say for
certain is that (pending the revenue issues that always baffle monarchs) it is
good to be the king.
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