Curtis Yarvin

I hardly listen to my car radio, and when I do it's usually music. I no longer have commutes. But then yesterday I switched to NPR and by happenstance caught the start of "Subject to Debate" taking on a nutty topic from someone who promotes monarchy. They called it CEO Dictator.

Later on, I found the program, which was already old, on video. I hardly ever have the patience, but I eventually watched it through. Dazed and confused. 

The hapless fellow across from Yarvin, E. Glen Weyl, did a fine job of subtle ridicule with a good hand on the economic statistics in favor of various attempts at democracy. He works for Microsoft in a somehow socially positive way, including even religion. 

Now I've never consciously heard of Yarvin, but I think we owe him a debt of gratitude for speaking frankly on behalf of a disturbingly common point of view among digital libertarians. He's way more straight up than I've ever heard. 

But somehow no-one was asking the important question which, to me, was "what does corporate structure have to do with government?" Unchallenged and unspoken was that government is a goal-oriented enterprise, which made it almost easy for Yarvin to claim that corporate structure, which is pretty fascist nowadays, is more effective at achieving (corporate) goals. 

Hello, I've always thought that the absolutist power structure of the workplace was something to whittle away at. Left to themselves, they'd all build company towns and bind you to the company store, with Pinkerton guards to keep your cool. 

Nobody seemed to notice that a government has no specific direction or goal. Slid into the rhetorical vacuum was the actual goal for digital libertarians, which was to make the economy burn as hot as possible so that we could keep on keeping on with our wonderful progress.

So citizens become subjects again, and get evaluated for their productivity. What?!?!

At their best, corporations have something useful to do; they produce things that people want. Many times, however, they're really only interested in the money, which is meant and understood to be a complex forcefield to align our wants and needs. Or something like that. 

A well regulated polity provides background for corporate operations, which take place according to allowance, permission, and so as not to transgress any government monopolies. Those would include weaponry for mass extinction and to set the regulations, field of play, and goalposts for corporate operations, all and any of which are subsets of the governmental monopoly on violence.

I suppose that anyone who works or has worked on the cutting edge of any contemporary or historical technology feels that history has a direction, and that forward is always better. But what the hell does forward mean? Especially on the edge of meltdown for the homeostasis of the living earth.

The title of a book which the opposition debater co-wrote might give us a clue as to why my important question was missing: Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. At the least, he seems to understand that you dare not uproot one without uprooting the other. And, so far as I can tell without having read the book he's still after the public good. But the title "Radical Markets" already sounds like it's meant to cover more ground in the polity than I feel comfortable with. As though by radicalizing what has already overwhelmed any other aspect of human life, one can resolve all the trouble. 

I'd say we have to trim the field for commerce and allow in to the polity much more in the way of education, the arts, outdoor pursuits and exercise. Right now all we have is entertainment, and most of that - even or especially in a massive crowd - is a solitary pleasure. It functions mostly in the way that Soma did in Brave New Worlds.

Some protesters against Yarvin were cleared out early, but it sure did seem as though he had lots of fans in the audience. Are these all people who want to be let loose to do what they are allowed by privilege to like and want to do, and who assume that they will be the ones to benefit from all that wealth creation? 

They must be getting a better grade of Soma than I am to be so blind about the detriments of so many of their inventions. It's not hard to imagine a better world because of social media as opposed to the unregulated mess we now have. 

Do either of these debaters have time to watch Alien; Earth? That show sure does call the question of corporate dictatorship. Of course, for me, the show is rather silly, giving machine people all sorts of feelings that they couldn't have IRL. 

Corporations don't have feelings either. That's by design. Neither does our constitution, which is, also by design, a dead machine if humans don't have the feelings "behind" it meant to keep it alive. 

I'd thought that the kid In Alien Earth who owns and is the biggest corporation was sending up Elon Musk. But now I know that he's meant to be a young Curtis Yarvin. Innocent kids can be forgiven for having dictator aspirations. Yarvin also has yet to grow up, impressed as he is by himself and his verbal chess skills, which aren't bad. He has a solid memory for references.

That's all. I've sat on this for a while, cowed by all the sure-fire hatred, left and right among people who are far too certain about things. I remain certain about nothing.