Curtis Yarvin and the Political Evolution of Silicon Valley Reactionaries

paultopia

Glad someone finally stopped pulling punches in describing Yarvin's wickedness and imbecility. There's a kind of elegance and charm to this style of just heaping abuse on people who richly deserve it---Hunter S. Thompson was its greatest practitioner and this is in that tradition nicely.

tptacek

Nobody loves these kinds of pieces more than Yarvin. Look at how important he must be! My Yarvin-contempt bona fides are as strong as anyone's here (maybe except for 'lisper) and I resent the implication this article makes about Hacker News and "race realism". It is in fact not common here. Use the search bar. I've been monitoring this (and jumping in when it pops up) for several years now --- this and DNSSEC are my two "beats", the two things I'm careful to pay attention to --- and it comes up rarely and mostly by the same fringey actors. Race-realism claims are almost always quickly flagged off the site by the community. Almost every time I've reported something to Dan and Tom, I've looked dumb, because it was flagged dead 2 minutes after my email landed. We're a deeply imperfect community (like every other community, in our own idiosyncratic ways), but compared to other communities this is not one of our flaws.

LAC-Tech

Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist. I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within. But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.

keybored

I feel like I care about freak ideologies more than as a passing curiosity based on how powerful those people are. I would care if it was Peter Thiel but not so much if it is a freak subculture among upper middle class SC programmer phreaks. Ideology is overrated. Look instead at what people ranging from self-identified right-liberal to progressive values actually do en masse. Maybe a Habermas was more insidious than a Hoppe. (What do I know as if I could ever read Habermas.)

civvv

Yarvin is a basement dweller and 4chan intellectual, high on his own supply of pseudo-intellectual takes. What is sad and worrying is that these kinds of politics are increasingly moving out of the fringe internet and into pockets of power (eg. Thiel and Vance). It is problematic that these ideas now linger only one or two steps away from the most powerful and influential person in the world.

tastyface

Just as a reminder, Silicon Valley darling Curtis Yarvin recently said this: "We have only one problem. The problem is: our billionaires are n—ers. They may be rich. But they're n—er rich. The nature and function of their wealth is profoundly negrous. You can probably name exceptions. I can too. But in every way, the exceptions prove the rule" https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:sefgphqp2xqwh2hawaixykwz/po... And yet he still happily pops up at social gatherings with these elites.