In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and on his younger 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.
And I'm not sure that many Americans, say, look at corporations as an example that we want the government to emulate. That idea shows a profound lack of awareness of how corporations come down on much of the population. Sure, they're efficient. We don't want to be on the receiving end of that kind of efficiency.
It has been discussed on HN before. The oldest discussions give you a sense of the 'flavor' it had when Yarvin was still closely involved in producing the code and documentation: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=urbit
As for the political philosophy, this was a pretty useful resource for contextualizing this whole world back in the day: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...
Regular and historical readers of that blog will also recognize the pattern of intellectual presentation detailed in the following article as Yarvin pulling the 'motte and bailey': https://auth.jacobinmag.com/2022/12/curtis-yarvin-right-wing...
> Yarvin often calls himself a “monarchist.” If you catch him when he’s trying to sound reasonable, he’ll explain that all he means by that is we should have a much stronger presidency within the existing constitutional system. If he’s trying to be provocative, he’ll talk about finding a suitable Silicon Valley CEO to be the American “Augustus,” replacing our sclerotic republic with something new and glorious.
> The “provocative” mode is one he seems to have spent more time in than not since he started his Unqualified Reservations blog (under his old pen name “Mencius Moldbug”) in 2007. Before our debate in Chicago, he joked two or three times in my presence that the subject of our back-and-forth would be whether “it was really six million or more like five point five.”
That also gives a pretty good sense of the genre of his rhetoric: a dressed-up version of the standard haha-only-serious, ironic-until-it's-not fascism, complete with edgy jokes about holocaust denial.
This stuff was shocking and strange to me when I first discovered it via its connection to Urbit when I was in college, but my main takeaway after I came out of the rabbithole was that I wanted my time back. I guess this political philosophy 'movement' has some new relevancy now that it has been cited approvingly by a couple of nationally recognizable Republicans. Fair enough.
I don't know how this guy grift his way to notoriety and influence. It seems like everywhere he is onboard on every ship of fools.