THE NEW FEUDALISM: Curtis Yarvin and the Rise of the Digital Gods

In part 6 of New Feudalism we move from surveillance to profit and the curious ideology of Curtis Yarvin

This is part six of our multi-part investigation. Read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, part 4 here, and Part 5 here.

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Palo Alto, CA in the late 90s, the air crackled with possibility. "Move Fast and Break Things" wasn't just a hollow slogan, it was the war cry of a young and ambitious group of mostly white men—determined to break the rules and disrupt the system.

Imagine for a minute you're back there—charting a new course for humanity in the digital frontier. You're working eighty-hour weeks fueled by pizza and Red Bull, sleeping under your desk, ideas racing through your head about total disruption, and when you do finally catch some sleep it's about unicorn dreams.

Nobody asks uncomfortable questions about venture capital flowing in from Russian oligarchs or Saudi princes. Nobody questions your company's traffic or revenue projections as long as it looked like a hockey stick—your future of fast cars, fast women, endless wealth, and legions of followers was assured.

With so much dizzying wealth, no one asks what happens when you create a world of demi-gods from a group of entitled Ivy League sharks, when you centralize power in the hands of twenty-something coders contemptuous of democratic institutions. "The internet will democratize the world, and make the world more equal," they say—how could you know they would eventually build the most authoritarian surveillance state in human history, that they would dismantle democracy and America as we know it? How could anyone know?

This was the world that created Curtis Yarvin and the PayPal Mafia—an elite circle that leveraged regulatory blind spots and libertarian fantasy into unprecedented wealth and power. A group that now, having conquered the digital realm, has set its sights on conquering the state itself.

If DOGE were a religion, Curtis Yarvin would be its high priest. While Elon Musk stands as the public face of the Department of Government Efficiency, the ideological architecture behind this transformation traces directly to Yarvin—a computer programmer turned political philosopher whose vision for America's future amounts to nothing less than a complete dismantling of democracy itself.

Yarvin: The Failed Coder Who Would Be King

Born in 1973 to academic parents, Curtis Yarvin couldn't even finish his computer science degree at Johns Hopkins. His technical career was unremarkable, but his talent for connecting with powerful people proved exceptional. During the first dot-com boom, he embedded himself with the emerging Silicon Valley elite who would later become the "PayPal Mafia."

Writing as "Mencius Moldbug" starting in 2007, Yarvin crafted a philosophy tailor-made for tech billionaires who resented democratic oversight. His blog "Unqualified Reservations" railed against what he called "The Cathedral"—his term for the democratic institutions that constrained tech power. Perhaps he really meant "The Citadel," because what he advocated wasn't freedom but a new feudalism.

In 2002, Yarvin began work on Urbit, which started with noble-sounding goals about personal data control—ironically the complete opposite of the centralized surveillance machine that Elon Musk is building today. With significant funding from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Urbit evolved into a digital feudal system structured around "galaxies," "stars," "planets," and "comets"—deliberately creating hierarchy and scarcity in digital identities.

Mainstream America dismissed Yarvin as an internet crank, but Silicon Valley's billionaire class embraced him. They didn't just see provocative ideas—they saw intellectual justification for their growing hostility toward democratic oversight. In Yarvin, they found the perfect philosopher to sanctify their power grab.