Opinion | A Political Theory of King Elon Musk

Populism in Western politics isn’t a pre-theorized worldview. It emerged from inchoate grievances moderately than present ideologies, and the theorists have been chasing after it ever since.

The chasers embrace populism’s would-be mates, intellectuals attempting to graft agendas onto Trumpism or Brexit or no matter’s taking place in Italy or France. However populism’s critics are additionally all the time within the hunt, keen to search out some darkish wizard, some éminence grise whose concepts may give substance to their fears.

In the previous couple of years that search has made a mico-celebrity out of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer who spent years writing recondite critiques of recent liberalism below the nom de net “Mencius Moldbug,” earlier than rising within the mid-to-late 2010s as half of a bigger solid of Silicon Valley reactionaries.

Not like another figures in that troupe, Yarvin doesn’t should be caricatured to make him out to be an enemy of liberal democracy. He’s forthright in his perception that the current order — to his thoughts, an oligarchy ruled by a posh of elite establishments (like this newspaper) that he calls “the Cathedral” — needs to be overthrown and changed by a digital-age monarchy, a king-C.E.O.

In profiles of Yarvin, whether or not hostile or curious, you may see the profiler struggling to hyperlink this worldview to regular political debates. With adequate work you may interpret the chaos of Jan. 6 as a proto-monarchist gambit. Alternatively you may take the tamest of Yarvin’s concepts and skim him as an advocate of a more-imperial-than-usual president, a Franklin Roosevelt of the precise. However both interpretation leaves a spot between his radical creativeness and precise American politics.

Perhaps, although, Yarvin shouldn’t be learn primarily as a theorist of American political realities. Moderately, consistent with his tech-industry roots, he’s a theorist for digital actuality, and his case for monarchy is basically about the easiest way to rule the emergent principalities of social media.

I’ve been fascinated about this whereas watching Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (about which Yarvin has rather a lot to say). In some methods what’s taking place is capitalism as regular: New C.E.O. fires outdated guard, seeks new income streams, and so forth.

However in different methods the takeover feels extra like a pre-modern political wrestle — a conflict between ecclesiastical and monarchical authority, between clerics and a king.

Musk claims to need Twitter to function a digital city sq.. However that looks like a class error: Social media consists of points of a town-square expertise, however essentially it’s a bigger parallel actuality, a prototype of the immersive digital world that Mark Zuckerberg has thus far didn’t construct. It’s a spot the place folks type communities and alliances, nurture friendships and sexual relationships, yell and flirt, cheer and pray. And all this occurs transnationally, the system spreading itself throughout borders whereas policing who can cross its personal.

So there’s a way during which Twitter is a brand new type of polity, a spot folks don’t simply go to however inhabit. And for a polity it’s essential who units the principles of citizenship, who will get banished or ostracized or dumped in Twitter jail. The livid and enthusiastic reactions to Musk’s takeover resemble the livid and enthusiastic reactions to presidential races as a result of in each circumstances the management change actually impacts how folks expertise their day by day lives.

With the essential distinction, although, that nobody but has a compelling thought of what a social media democracy would appear like. So as a substitute of electoral decisions, the choices are governance of the sort that Twitter used to have, with a clerical class implementing guidelines and norms considerably opaquely, primarily based on the theology of present progressivism, or the customized governance it has now, with Czar Elon I issuing amnesties whereas explaining that Alex Jones will stay without end exiled as a result of the czar has private causes to hate anybody who exploits the demise of youngsters.

If that’s the selection, theories of monarchy and oligarchy are intensely related to digital politics, even when they’re overstretched as theories of the real-world American republic. That goes for Marxist theorizing in addition to nicely as Yarvin’s reactionary evaluation: Simply as his progressive “Cathedral” can doubtlessly exert larger energy over Twitter than over America, so can also a right-wing billionaire or “boss” class extra plausibly dominate a digital polity than an actual one.

There may be additionally some dynamic relationship between digital energy and actual world politics. However we don’t know but the place it’s going to go. Will the metaverse develop to a degree the place it issues extra who guidelines social media kingdoms than who occupies the White Home? Will actuality have its revenge, subjecting the digital sphere to democratic authority, regulating its medieval politics away?

For now, watching Musk rule by decree, all we are able to say for sure is that (pending the income points that all the time baffle monarchs) it’s good to be the king.