Curtis Yarvin

Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger.

He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neoreactionary movement (NRx).

Curtis Guy Yarvin was born in 1973 to an educated, liberal, secular family.

His grandparents on his father's side were Jewish American and communists.

His father, Herbert Yarvin, worked for the US government as a foreign service officer, and his mother was a Protestant from Westchester County.

Yarvin spent part of his childhood abroad, mainly in Cyprus.

In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of the Silicon Valley.

Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works.

The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced him to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin's mind-set.

Yarvin's pen name, Mencius Moldbug, is a combination of the classical name "Mencius" and a play on "goldbug."

In 1985, he returned to the US and entered Johns Hopkins' longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth.

He graduated from Brown University in 1992, then was a graduate student of a computer science PhD program at UC Berkeley, before dropping out after a year and a half to join a tech company.

In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin's anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama's election as US president later that year reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies.

Yarvin's reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe's 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed marked Yarvin's first break with democracy.

Another influence was James Burnham, who asserted that real politics occurred through the actions of elites, beneath what he called apparent democratic or socialist rhetoric.

In 2002, Yarvin began work on a personal software project that eventually became the Urbit networked computing platform.

In 2002, Yarvin founded the Urbit computer platform as a decentralized network of personal servers.

In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and on his later Substack page called Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment which should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.

Yarvin has been described as a "neoreactionary" and "neo-monarchist" who "sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy".

In 2007, Yarvin began the blog Unqualified Reservations to promote his political vision.

In 2013, he co-founded the company Tlon to oversee the Urbit project, and helped lead it until 2019.

In 2013 he co-founded the San Francisco-based company Tlön Corp to build out Urbit further with funding from Peter Thiel's venture capital arm, the Founders Fund.

He largely stopped updating his blog in 2013, when he began to focus on Urbit; in April 2016 he announced that Unqualified Reservations had "completed its mission".

, Yarvin blogs his views on Substack under the page name Gray Mirror.

Yarvin believes that real political power in the United States is held by something he calls "the Cathedral", an amalgam of universities and the mainstream press.

According to him, a so-called "Brahmin" social class dominates American society, preaching progressive values to the masses.

Yarvin and the Dark Enlightenment (sometimes abbreviated to "NRx") movement assert that the Cathedral's commitment to equality and justice erodes social order.

Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a "hard reset" or a "rebooting", not a series of gradual political reforms.

Instead of activism, he advocates passivism, claiming that progressivism would fail without right-wing opposition.

According to him, NRx adherents should rather design "new architectures of exit" than engage in ineffective political activism.

Yarvin argues for a "neo-cameralist" philosophy based on Frederick The Great of Prussia's cameralism.

In Yarvin's view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose "shareholders" (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure.

The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch.

Yarvin admires Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatic and market-oriented authoritarianism, and the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

He sees the US as soft on crime, dominated by economic and democratic delusions.

Yarvin supports authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, claiming that the division of political sovereignty expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused.

In 2016, Yarvin was invited to present on the functional programming aspects of Urbit at LambdaConf 2016, which resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two sub-conferences, and several sponsors.

Yarvin left Tlon in January 2019, but retains some intellectual and financial involvement in the development of Urbit.

Yarvin has denied being Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of bitcoin.