Dark Enlightenment

The Dark Enlightenment is the title of a serial essay by Nick Land, copied on the site thedarkenlightenment.com with a publication date of December 25, 2012, and the name later applied to the community of writers it describes, centered on the blog Unqualified Reservations by Curtis Yarvin (pen name Moldbug). The same writers are grouped under Neoreaction; the joint-stock state proposal Yarvin published in 2007 is Neocameralism.¹

The Essay and Its Dating

The copy at thedarkenlightenment.com is headed "The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land" and carries page metadata giving a publication time of December 25, 2012. The site's first entry, "Coming...", is dated December 3, 2012 and reads "A subterranean convocation, beneath the foundations of the Cathedral." The earliest reader comment on the essay page is dated February 10, 2013, and the page displays 439 comments. Part 1 of the text refers to events of August 2011 and contains an "Added Note (March 7)" without a year. Land's own venue and the date of the original serialization were not located.¹²

The essay runs in the parts titled 1, 2, 3, 4, 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e and 4f. Its menu on the host site links two further pages, "Moldbug's Gentle Introduction" and "Moldbug's Open Letter," which reproduce the Yarvin series of those names.¹

Part 1: Neo-reactionaries Head for the Exit

Part 1 argues in its opening paragraphs that "a retrograde, or reactionary, 'dark enlightenment' amounts almost to intrinsic contradiction." Land then cites two events as markers. The first is the April 2009 exchange at Cato Unbound among libertarian writers including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel, in which Thiel wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The second is a response in Salon by Michael Lind in August 2011, which concluded that "Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy."¹³

Land describes "Voice-vs-Exit" as the rising alternative to "Equality-vs-Liberty," quotes Friedman ("we think that free exit is so important that we've called it the only Universal Human Right"), and writes that for the "hardcore neo-reactionaries" the political current is "recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression." He continues: "Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites."¹

The text introduces Moldbug as the "supreme Sith Lord of the neo-reactionaries," quotes his statement that libertarians "cannot present a realistic picture of a world in which their battle gets won and stays won," and quotes at length Moldbug's definition of neocameralism ("To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country"). Land adds his own gloss: "The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement." He identifies the ruling class by asking "who do capitalists pay for political favors," proposes mapping "the entire social landscape of political bribery ('lobbying')," and states that Moldbug calls the result the Cathedral.¹

Parts 2 Through 4f

Part 2 summarizes the first chapters of Moldbug's seven-part series on Richard Dawkins, including the "really ugly bug" passage on a hypothetical optimal memetic parasite, and reads it as a history of progressive democracy as an extension of low-church Protestant enthusiasm. Part 3 continues the Dawkins material, concentrating on Moldbug's question "What, exactly, is this Zeitgeist thing?"¹

Part 4 ("Re-running the race to ruin") summarizes a Moldbug essay on white nationalism. Land writes that Moldbug "offers a sanitized white nationalist blog reading list" beginning with Lawrence Auster and ending at the blogger "Tanstaafl," and quotes Moldbug: "It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff." Part 4a is subtitled "A multi-part sub-digression into racial terror," Part 4b "Obnoxious observations," Part 4c "The Cracker Factory," Part 4d "Odd Marriages," Part 4e "Cross-coded history" and Part 4f "Approaching the Bionic Horizon." Part 4 ends with a note promising further material in a Part 5, and the host site's menu labels the last installment "Part 4f(inal)." The later parts draw on writing about group differences, East Asian cities and genetic technology (see Human Biodiversity).¹

Moldbug's Own Usage

Yarvin posted "The path to (dark) enlightenment" on March 29, 2013, an essay built on the image of a chick that perceives the egg it is in; the page sidebar lists the Open Letter, Gentle Introduction, Dawkins, Patchwork and Carlyle series. The post text does not mention Land. The phrase "dark enlightenment" does not occur in the text of the 2007 formalist manifesto, the Dawkins, Open Letter, Gentle Introduction, Patchwork and Carlyle series or four other 2013 posts; it appears in the title of the March 2013 post only with "dark" in parentheses.⁴

Early Dissemination, 2013

A post titled "Heroes of the Dark Enlightenment" on the Radish magazine site carries a web address dated May 24, 2013 and is linked in the TechCrunch article described below. On November 22, 2013 Klint Finley published "Geeks for Monarchy" on TechCrunch, which links Land's essay as "Nick Land's Dark Enlightenment Sequence" alongside Moldbug's posts, and which Ava Kofman of The New Yorker later described as the article that revealed the pen name belonged to Yarvin. Finley wrote that "there has been an explosion of interest since late 2012."⁵⁶⁷

Finley placed the current beside several Thiel-connected enterprises. He wrote that Yarvin was scheduled to speak at the 2009 conference of the Seasteading Institute before his appearance was canceled, that Patri Friedman, whom he described as a co-founder of the institute with Peter Thiel, named Yarvin's blog in a reading list at the end of a Cato Unbound essay, that Thiel's Founders Fund was an investor in the company Counsyl of Balaji Srinivasan, and that a co-founder of Yarvin's startup Tlon was one of the first recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. Finley added: "I'm not actually suggesting that there's a conspiracy here." Finley also quoted Srinivasan, who had given a Y Combinator speech in 2013 on exit, as writing "I'm not a libertarian, don't believe in secession, am a registered Democrat." The same article mentions Scott Alexander's anti-reactionary FAQ as a published refutation.⁶

Thiel and the Correspondence

Thiel's Cato Unbound essay ("The Education of a Libertarian," April 13, 2009) states "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," lists seasteading with cyberspace and outer space as the means of escape from politics, and writes "all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment."³

Kofman reported that Yarvin linked to the essay in a post titled "Democraphobia Goes (Slightly) Viral," that Yarvin and Thiel "soon met for the first time, at Thiel's house in San Francisco," and that they began a correspondence she reviewed. She wrote that in 2014 Thiel emailed Yarvin: "How dangerous is it that we are being linked?" She wrote that Srinivasan, whom she described as then a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Thiel had both become friends with Yarvin after reading his blog, and that Srinivasan proposed in an email after the TechCrunch article "to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them," which Yarvin dissuaded.⁷

Corey Pein reported in The Baffler that Thiel had called him a conspiracy theorist at a debate for connecting Thiel to Moldbug; Pein quoted Thiel's reply to the New York Times that "there's nobody sitting around plotting the future, though sometimes I think it would be better if people were." Pein also reproduced a BuzzFeed account of October 2017, based on leaked emails, in which Yarvin told Milo Yiannopoulos he had been "coaching Thiel" and wrote "I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday"; Pein wrote that the timing of the exchange, after May 2016, was unclear and that Tlon had received investment capital from Thiel, and that after the 2014 debate Yarvin emailed him congratulations on a book deal he had told only people at The Baffler. Vox reported that Yarvin wrote in an email that Thiel is "fully enlightened" and "just plays it very carefully."⁸⁹

Tlon and Urbit

Yarvin's software company, Tlon, is the developer of Urbit. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission holds four Form D notices for Tlon Corp (CIK 1727669), a Delaware corporation at 2325 3rd Street, Suite 428, San Francisco, listing 2013 as its year of incorporation and naming Galen Wolfe-Pauly as an executive officer (and, in the June notice, a director) and Yarvin as an executive officer and director.¹⁰

The first, filed on February 27, 2018 under Rule 506(c) and signed by an attorney on February 26, reports a first sale on February 16, 2018 of a security described as "Simple Agreement for Future Address Space (S.A.F.A.S.)," an indefinite offering amount, $17,806,131 sold to 24 investors, and an estimated $470,000 of gross proceeds paid to related persons, which the filing describes as "estimated salary payments to the parties described in Section 3." Two amendments filed on March 29, 2018 report $20,232,601 sold to 29 investors. A fourth notice, filed June 5, 2018 and signed by Yarvin as President on June 4, reports an equity offering under Rule 506(b) with a first sale on May 29, 2018, an offering of $2,529,649, $1,263,516 sold, $1,266,133 remaining and 17 investors. The notices do not name the investors. No later Form D for Tlon was found.¹⁰

A separate Form D, filed on August 29, 2023 by Portal Ventures Urbit Co Invest LP (Baltimore, Maryland; general partner Evan Fisher), reports a pooled venture fund with a first sale on August 8, 2023, $2,980,000 offered and sold, nine investors and a $30,000 minimum investment.¹¹

The Verge reported in 2017 that Wolfe-Pauly said the company is funded by Founders Fund and that Thiel is not personally involved, that it had also received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, and that Urbit had sold "blocks" of addresses in June and made more than $200,000. It reported that Tlon co-founder John Burnham listed himself as a Thiel Fellowship recipient. Kofman reported that Tlon's investors included Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund, that Urbit had drawn an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, that Yarvin left the company in 2019, that he returned in 2024 as a "wartime C.E.O." after which several top employees resigned, and that in February 2025 it raised more money from Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen, Kofman wrote, got to know Yarvin after investing in Tlon.⁷¹²

Campaign Contributions

Records of the Federal Election Commission list a contributor named Curtis Yarvin, retired, at a Reno, Nevada address, giving on March 31, 2022 two contributions of $2,900 each (designated for the primary and the general election of 2022) earmarked through WinRed to Blake Masters for Senate, the committee of Blake Masters in Arizona. The FEC data return three records under that name: the two receipts and the WinRed conduit record. The record gives a name, address and occupation only; Noah Lanard of Mother Jones described Yarvin, the "absolute monarchist" blogger who is friends with Masters and Thiel, as "now a Masters campaign donor."¹³¹⁴

Andrew Prokop reported in Vox that nearly a decade before, Masters, then a Stanford law student asked for reading recommendations, had emailed a link to Yarvin's blog posts, and, citing James Pogue's reporting in Vanity Fair, that at a 2021 campaign event Masters said "One of my friends has this acronym he calls RAGE," which expands to Retire All Government Employees. Kofman wrote that Thiel published Zero to One in 2014 with Masters, "his employee and a longtime Moldbug fan."⁷⁹

RAGE and the 2021 Vance Remarks

On October 20, 2012 the BILtalks channel uploaded a video of Moldbug's BIL Conference talk titled "How to Reboot the US Government," 18 minutes long. The Verge reported that the talk advocated "Retire All Government Employees," abbreviated RAGE, and quoted Yarvin as saying "If Americans want to change their government, they're going to have to get over their dictatorphobia."¹⁵¹⁶

In September 2021 JD Vance, a Senate candidate in Ohio, appeared on the podcast of Jack Murphy. In the episode as transcribed by WBUR's On Point, Vance said "There's this guy, Curtis Yarvin. Who's written about some of these things," and "another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own purposes." Vox reported that he urged Donald Trump, if re-elected, to "fire every single midlevel bureaucrat" and "replace them with our people," and that "when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, 'The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'" David Corn reported in Mother Jones that Vance also described replacing liberal officeholders and compared the program to de-Nazification, and that the host had written in 2015 "Feminists need rape."^9161718

Yarvin wrote in a July 2024 Substack post, as quoted by The Verge, that Vance was a "random normie politician whom I've barely even met" and that he could not imagine having influenced him. An adviser to Vance told CNN the two had met "like once." Kofman wrote that Yarvin told her he met Vance through Thiel around 2015, and quoted Vance, reportedly speaking at a bar during the 2021 National Conservatism Conference: "Does a normal Ohio voter read . . . Mencius Moldbug? No."⁷¹⁶¹⁹

Kofman wrote that on the night before the January 2025 inauguration she drove Yarvin to a black-tie "Coronation Ball" at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, organized by the publisher Passage Press and billed as "MAGA meets the Tech Right," where Anton attended and Steve Bannon was the keynote speaker, and that Yarvin wore the same tuxedo he had worn to a party at Thiel's house in Washington the night before, where, as Politico reported, Vance greeted him with "You reactionary fascist!"⁷

Michael Anton and the State Department

CNN reported that Michael Anton, later director of policy planning at the State Department, featured Yarvin on a 2021 podcast he hosted while at the Claremont Institute, that Yarvin said he was not in close contact with Vance and was closer to officials such as Anton, and that he had made a staffing recommendation. The State Department and White House did not respond. Vox quoted Yarvin telling Anton in a podcast conversation: "You can't continue to have a Harvard or a New York Times past the start of April." Yarvin's essays were published from 2019 by The American Mind, the Claremont Institute's journal, according to Vox.⁹¹⁹

CNN reported that Thiel told The Atlantic in 2023 that he did not think Yarvin's ideas would "work" but found him an "interesting and powerful" historian, that Andreessen has called Yarvin a "good friend," and that Andreessen posted that one can read Yarvin without becoming a monarchist.¹⁹

Schedule F and DOGE

In October 2024 The Verge wrote that RAGE "bears obvious parallels" to Trump's attack on federal bureaucrats, described the 2020 executive order creating Schedule F, and noted that Schedule F was among the proposals in the Heritage Foundation's 2025 Mandate for Leadership. CNN's Hadas Gold wrote in May 2025 that Yarvin's 2022 proposal for "teams of 'ninjas'" dropping into agencies was "strikingly similar to what DOGE has been doing in Washington." Kofman wrote that an anonymous adviser to the Department of Government Efficiency told the Washington Post it was "an open secret that everyone in policymaking roles has read Yarvin." Kofman also wrote that Yarvin dismissed DOGE as having "so much libertarian DNA" and called the administration's approach a "vibes coup," and that in 2022 he had recommended that a re-elected Trump appoint Elon Musk to run the executive branch.⁷¹⁶¹⁹

Srinivasan and the Network State

Balaji Srinivasan's book The Network State (2022) defines a network state as "a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states." The book lists Yarvin's Unqualified Reservations among its recommended reading, cites Yarvin's "How Dawkins Got Pwned" in a passage on Wokeness as a religious successor, writes that "as Yarvin in particular has documented at length, the most important left-authoritarians are not formally part of the elected State at all," and names the network of professors, activists, bureaucrats and journalists "the Paper Belt," "the Cathedral," or "the regime." It describes seasteading as "Conceived by Patri Friedman and backed by Peter Thiel." The text of the book does not use the words "neocameralism" or "Patchwork."²⁰