Neocameralism

Neocameralism is the name Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug) gave on his blog Unqualified Reservations to a proposal that a state be owned and run as a joint-stock corporation, with negotiable shares, a board, a chief executive and residents treated as customers. Its presentation under the heading "Patchwork" in November and December 2008 described thousands of such corporate territories. Yarvin paired the proposal with the thesis he called The Cathedral; both appear in the writings grouped under Neoreaction and in Nick Land's Dark Enlightenment essay series.

Cameralism

Cameralism names the administrative science of the German principalities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Albion W. Small opened his 1909 study The Cameralists by explaining that Kammer is a variant of the Latin camera, and that cameralism "was the routine of the bureaus in which the administrative employees of governments, first of all in the fiscal departments, did their work." Small wrote that the writers he treated constructed "a 'science' or group of 'sciences'" around "the central consideration of the fiscal needs of the prince," and suggested that "fiscalists" would be a more accurate name for them than cameralists. His table of contents lists chapters on thirteen writers, from Osse and Obrecht to Sonnenfels, among them Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (born 1626), Johann Joachim Becher (born 1635), Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi and Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733 to 1817).¹

Coinage, August 2007

Yarvin's first Unqualified Reservations post, "A formalist manifesto," appeared on April 23, 2007. The text of that post does not contain the words cameralism, neocameralism, sovcorp, joint-stock or Frederick.²³

On August 16, 2007, in "Against political freedom," Moldbug wrote: "So let me coin another name for formalism, and call it neocameralism. The word is mainly picked for its Google virginity, but it should also be reminiscent of cameralism, the governing philosophy of Frederick the Great, whose Anti-Machiavel is good reading for anyone wondering what went wrong in the 19th and 20th centuries." The post continues: "To a neocameralist, a state is a business which owns a country. A state should be managed, like any other large business, by dividing logical ownership into negotiable shares, each of which yields a precise fraction of the state's profit." Each share has one vote, and the shareholders elect a board, which hires and fires managers; the residents are the business's customers. Moldbug gave as an example a state funding itself by a property tax on self-assessed land values, which he valued as an enterprise whose incentive "is simply to maximize property prices," and named Hohenzollern Prussia, Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong in the discussion of historical analogues.²

The same post states the position on political rights: "In my ideal neocameralist state, there is no political freedom because there is no politics." It adds that there might be a comment box, customer surveys and polls, but "no organization and no reason to organize, because no combination of residents can influence government policy by coercion." It describes Singapore and Dubai as "vaguely quasi-neocameralist states" and not "neocameralist paradises."²

The Autumn 2007 Posts

In part 4 of the series "How Dawkins Got Pwned" (October 2007) Moldbug wrote that he had "described this theory before under the name of neocameralism," and set it out in eight numbered propositions. These include "a good government is a well-managed sovereign corporation," that "the shareholders elect a board, which selects a CEO," that the closest historical equivalents are "the 18th-century tradition of enlightened absolutism as represented by Frederick the Great" and the "lost fragments of the British Empire such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai," and that "productive political efforts should focus on peacefully terminating, restructuring and decentralizing the 20th-century civil-service state along neocameralist lines." The eighth proposition ends: "The ideal result is a planet of thousands, even tens of thousands, of independent city-states, each managed for profit by its shareholders."⁴

On December 13, 2007, in "Why I am not a libertarian," he defined the term: "Neocameralism is the idea that a sovereign state or primary corporation is not organizationally distinct from a secondary or private corporation." He described it as a refinement of royalism: "Under neocameralism, the biological quirks of royalism are eliminated and the State 'goes public,' hiring the best executives regardless of their bloodline or even nationality." Closing the post, he compared the two doctrines: "The advantage of libertarianism, from a practical political perspective, is that it has deep roots in the American value system." He wrote that "The disadvantage of neocameralism is that it is completely alien to American voters, that it has no connection at all to any American value system, that no one has even heard of it at all, that it represents a complete rejection of the sacred American principle of democracy, and that it could be described, not utterly without a grain of truth, as 'corporate fascism' or some such similar epithet."⁵

On December 20, 2007, "Neocameralism and the escalator of massarchy" set out the vocabulary and the cryptographic-weapons mechanism that reappear in the Patchwork posts of 2008. It uses the phrase "neocameralist patchwork planet," calls the owning organizations "sovcorps," names their owners "subscribers," their employees "agents" and the inhabitants of the territory "residents," and names the secondary corporations and nonprofit organizations they permit "subcorps" and "suborgs." It proposes two governance devices for a sovcorp: cross-listing on one another's secondary exchanges and "cryptogovernance," under which subscribers "use private keys to sign their contributions to its governance." The post adds that "anything even remotely resembling anonymous cryptogovernance is known as 'money laundering' by our friends in Washington," and advises readers not to try it with real money.⁶

The same post connects cryptogovernance to the control of weapons. It describes extending the cryptographic "permissive action links" already used for "the world's most powerful weapons" to small arms, so that "Military formations loyal to the CEO will find that their weapons work. Rebel formations will find that theirs don't." To prevent the armed formations from arresting the keyholders, it proposes: "keep the sovcorp's directors, or whoever has ultimate control of the highest grade of military keys, outside the sovcorp's neostate." It warns that if the patchwork consolidates into "a few giant megasovcorps," stability is at risk, and that subscribers "can sell every share in the sovcorp to Google if they like."⁶

The Open Letter, May to July 2008

In chapter 6 of "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" ("The lost theory of government," May 22, 2008), Moldbug used a hypothetical corporate California ("Stevifornia," ruled by a figure called Steve) as the example, and in the passage on security wrote "this is Arnold Kling's objection to the above design, which I've given the cute name of neocameralism." He wrote there that "Secure neocameralism depends on a cryptographic decision and command chain (CDCC)" and that "The neocameralist state never existed before the 21st century. It never could have existed. The technology wasn't there." The chapter adds that once 21st-century technology is recognized as necessary to the design, "good old cameralism, Frederick the Great style, was the best that previous centuries could do."⁷

In chapter 7 (May 29, 2008), in a passage on corruption in China and the United States, he wrote: "Government serves as a profit center, but (unlike in neocameralism) the distribution of profits is informal."⁸

In chapter 12 (July 2, 2008) he wrote: "Ergo: responsible and effective government is best achieved by sovereign capitalism, ie, neocameralism."⁹

Chapter 13 (July 10, 2008) describes a transition for a state he calls Plainland, whose government ("Plaingov") would become a corporation ("Plaincorp"). He wrote that "any plan in which Plaingov relinquishes its sovereign power must involve a transfer of that power to an agency which is intrinsically trustworthy," called "the Trust"; that the chief executive, the "Receiver," is an employee of the Trust; and that "Sovereignty is an attribute of the Trust, not of the Receiver." He added that if the assumption that good government maximizes the value of the territory to the corporation "appears mistaken, the Trust should not complete the transition to neocameralism."¹⁰

Patchwork, November and December 2008

The four-part series "Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century" appeared on November 13, November 20, November 27 and December 3, 2008. Chapter 1 states: "The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by 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. If residents don't like their government, they can and should move. The design is all 'exit,' no 'voice.'"¹¹

Chapter 2 (November 20, 2008) argues that a neocameralist structure creates "the profitable should," and states: "We can construct a political structure that will enforce financial responsibility. Thus neocameralism. We might say that financial responsibility is the raw material of moral responsibility." An editorial note in the archive edition of that chapter glosses the term: "Neocameralism, a Moldbuggian neologism for the State as profitable corporation, is a reference to the cameralism of Frederick the Great."¹²

Chapter 3 introduces neocameralism as "a synthetic organ of government" and states that governments should be "administered as sovereign joint-stock corporations, controlled absolutely by their shareholders, who hold the master encryption keys for the government's invincible robot armies." It calls the result "private government" and describes a joint-stock sovereign as "a clean, lean and mean revenue-extracting machine. Its goal: loot."¹³

Land's Gloss

Part 1 of Land's The Dark Enlightenment reproduces the 2007 definition and comments: "The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement," and "Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place." Land sets out three numbered stages: the conversion of a democratic state's actual power holders into shareholders, the identification of that ruling class by mapping lobbying and its returns, and the appointment of a chief executive whose interest is "the maximization of long-term shareholder value." Land describes the dark enlightenment as asking, "From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond," how the sovereign power can be prevented from devouring society. In the same part Land writes of the state-corporation: "If gov-corp doesn't deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere," and "Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers."¹⁴

The New Yorker's Ava Kofman wrote that Yarvin read Hoppe's Democracy: The God That Failed (2001) as a programmer in his late twenties and "soon adopted Hoppe's imago of a benevolent strongman," and quoted the authoritarianism scholar Julian Waller: "It's not copy-and-pasted, but it is such a direct influence that it's kind of obscene." Kofman added that Hoppe, by email, recalled meeting Yarvin once at a gathering at Peter Thiel's home where Hoppe had been invited to speak, acknowledged his influence on Yarvin, and wrote that "For my taste his writing has always been a bit too flowery and rambling."¹⁵

Urbit and the Sale of Address Space

Tlon, the company Yarvin co-founded in 2013 to develop Urbit, filed U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission notices in 2018 for the sale of a security it named a "Simple Agreement for Future Address Space (S.A.F.A.S.)": $17,806,131 sold to 24 investors in an offering that opened on February 16, 2018, and $20,232,601 sold to 29 investors as amended on March 29, 2018. A further notice in June 2018 reported an equity offering of $2,529,649 with $1,263,516 sold to 17 investors. Yarvin was listed as an executive officer and director and signed the June notice as President.¹⁶

Kofman described the Urbit network as designed "around a hierarchical model of virtual real estate, with users owning 'planets,' 'stars,' or 'galaxies,'" and wrote that in an early sketch of the system Yarvin "named himself its 'prince.'" She reported an estimated thirty million dollars of investment, that Yarvin left the company in 2019 and returned in 2024 as a "wartime C.E.O."¹⁵

Exit Without the Word

Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State (2022) describes 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." Its text cites Yarvin's Unqualified Reservations in a reading list and "How Dawkins Got Pwned" in a passage on Wokeness, and uses the term "the Cathedral" among its names for the "left-authoritarian network." The book does not contain the words "neocameralism" or "Patchwork." Its discussion of seasteading describes the idea as "Conceived by Patri Friedman and backed by Peter Thiel."¹⁷

Thiel's 2009 essay at Cato Unbound, "The Education of a Libertarian," listed seasteading, with cyberspace and outer space, as a place to escape politics and wished Patri Friedman "the very best in his extraordinary experiment." Klint Finley wrote in 2013 that Friedman co-founded the Seasteading Institute with Thiel.¹⁸

Próspera

WIRED reported that the Honduras Congress enacted a law in 2013 under which private investors could create "largely self-governing zones" (ZEDEs, from the Spanish acronym) empowered "to write their own civil laws, enact their own regulations and building codes and create their own courts," with businesses paying taxes to the zone rather than to municipal or national governments. The zones were overseen by a committee appointed by the president whose initial members included "the son of former US President Ronald Reagan and the anti-tax crusader" Grover Norquist. Próspera, the first ZEDE, was established in December 2017 on the island of Roatán, funded by Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm "founded to help launch charter cities around the world," which WIRED wrote was backed by billionaires including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. The ZEDE law was repealed in April 2022, and in September 2024 the Honduran Supreme Court ruled the law and related constitutional amendments unconstitutional.¹⁹

On December 19, 2022 the Delaware-based Honduras Próspera Inc., together with St. John's Bay Development Company LLC and Próspera Arbitration Center LLC, filed a request for arbitration against the Republic of Honduras at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes under a Legal Stability Agreement and the CAFTA-DR free trade agreement. The case, ICSID Case No. ARB/23/2, was registered on February 3, 2023, and the tribunal was constituted on January 29, 2024 (Juan Fernandez-Armesto, president; David W. Rivkin, appointed by the claimants; Raul E. Vinuesa). White & Case acts for the claimants and Foley Hoag for Honduras. WIRED reported that the claim sought up to $10.775 billion and was one of fifteen similar claims against Honduras. Honduras filed a proposal on February 19, 2024 to disqualify Rivkin, a United States national appointed by the three United States claimants, citing Article 39 of the ICSID Convention and Arbitration Rule 13(3); the Chairman of the ICSID Administrative Council, Ajay Banga, rejected the proposal on August 7, 2024 after receiving a recommendation from Pierre-Marie Dupuy on July 29, 2024. On September 9, 2026 the tribunal issued a procedural order inviting amicus curiae submissions; the case was listed as pending.¹⁹²⁰