A political theory of King Elon and the Twitterverse

Populism in Western politics is not a pre-theorized worldview. It emerged from inchoate grievances rather than existing ideologies, and the theorists have been chasing after it ever since.

The chasers include populism’s would-be friends and its critics too.

In the past few years that search has made a micro-celebrity out of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer who spent years writing recondite critiques of modern liberalism under the nom de web “Mencius Moldbug,” before emerging in the mid-to-late 2010s as part of a larger cast of Silicon Valley reactionaries.

Unlike some other figures in that troupe, Yarvin does not need to be caricatured to make him out to be an enemy of liberal democracy. He is forthright in his belief that the present order — to his mind, an oligarchy governed by a complex of elite institutions (like The New York Times) that he calls “the Cathedral” — should be overthrown and replaced by a digital age monarchy, a king-ceo.

In profiles of Yarvin, whether hostile or curious, you can see the profiler struggling to link this worldview to normal political debates You can take the tamest of Yarvin’s ideas and read him as an advocate of a more-imperial-than-usual president, a Franklin Roosevelt of the right. But either interpretation leaves a gap between his radical imagination and actual American politics.

Maybe, though, Yarvin shouldn’t be read primarily as a theorist of American political realities. Rather, he’s a theorist for virtual reality, and his case for monarchy is really about the best way to rule the emergent principalities of social media.

I’ve been thinking about this while watching Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (about which Yarvin has a lot to say). In some ways what’s happening is capitalism as usual: New CEO fires old guard, seeks new revenue streams, and so on.

But in other ways the takeover feels more like a pre-modern political struggle — a clash between ecclesiastical and monarchical authority, between clerics and a king.

Musk claims to want Twitter to serve as a digital town square. But that seems like a category error: Social media includes aspects of a town square experience, but fundamentally it’s a larger parallel reality. It’s a place where people form communities and alliances, nurture friendships and sexual relationships, yell and flirt, cheer and pray.

So there’s a sense in which Twitter is a new kind of polity, a place people don’t just visit but inhabit. And for a polity it’s crucial who sets the rules of citizenship. The furious and enthusiastic reactions to Musk’s takeover resemble the furious and enthusiastic reactions to presidential races because in both cases the leadership change really affects how people experience their daily lives.

With the crucial difference, though, that no one yet has a compelling idea of what a social media democracy would look like. So instead of electoral choices, the options are governance of the kind Twitter used to have, with a clerical class enforcing rules based on the theology of current progressivism, or the personalized governance it has now, with Czar Elon I issuing amnesties and punishments.

If that’s the choice, theories of monarchy and oligarchy are intensely relevant to virtual politics, even if they’re overstretched as theories of the real-world American republic. That goes for Marxist theorizing as well as well as Yarvin’s reactionary analysis.

There is also some dynamic relationship between virtual power and real-world politics. But we don’t know yet where it will go. Will the metaverse develop to a point at which it matters more who rules social media kingdoms than who occupies the White House?

For now, watching Musk rule by decree, all we can say for certain is that it’s good to be the king.