Moldbug Was Just the Beginning
Curtis Yarvin didn’t invent the disease.
He just named a symptom early — wrapped it in baroque metaphors, pseudohistory, and a fresh coat of libertarian despair.
But the real threat is what came after:
The Digital Emperor Archetype — a new kind of power-seeker for the digital age.
Less crown, more clout.
Less sword, more stack.
The idea?
You don’t need to win elections or coups.
You just own the infrastructure and publish enough philosophy to convince others that domination is just efficient design.
Identifying the Digital Emperor
Look for these traits:
Hyper-educated but emotionally stunted — fluent in systems, allergic to vulnerability.
Wears the costume of the outsider while networking with the elite.
Obsessed with “order” but only if they define it.
Thinks governance is a UX problem.
Claims to be post-political, yet can’t stop punching down.
Wants a world where the smartest person wins — and they’ve pre-decided that person is themselves.
They write long threads.
They publish “manifestos.”
They start DAOs and found cities in the desert.
They launch coins, then call them post-state currencies.
They are engineers of control systems
masquerading as philosophers of liberation.
Familiar Faces in the Court
Peter Thiel — The patron saint of techno-feudalists. Thinks competition is for losers and that freedom comes from owning monopoly-level power over others.
Balaji Srinivasan — Speaks in the cadence of prophecy, promotes the exit fantasy as if power structures disappear when you switch VPNs.
Patri Friedman — Literal grandson of Milton Friedman, rebranding feudalism as floating real estate.
Elon Musk (on weekends) — Dresses like a meme king but increasingly talks like an emperor who resents that peasants don’t clap harder.
Assorted Substack Monarchists — Each convinced that if we just tried monarchy one more time, it’ll work, because this time the king has a Discord.
They call themselves builders, rationalists, visionaries.
But what they build is always the same:
A world where no one can question them without being exited from the system.
Exit Is Not Freedom
All Digital Emperors promote the myth of exit —
“If you don’t like it, just leave.”
A patch. A city. A protocol. A coin. A sovereign suburb.
But here’s what they never admit:
Exit assumes you can leave.
Exit assumes you’ll be allowed back in.
Exit assumes you’re not the product being extracted from the system in the first place.
In their world, freedom isn’t about dignity — it’s about mobility tokens.
If you don’t like the rules?
Find a new master.
Or build your own patch and become someone else's master.
It’s not liberty.
It’s a vending machine of rulers, and you better have the right crypto.
Why This Archetype Is Dangerous
Because it doesn’t look like fascism.
It looks like design thinking.
It smells like logic.
It sounds like competence.
But underneath?
It’s the same old thirst for hierarchy, obedience, and control —
dressed in code, wrapped in graphs, and laundered through angel investment rounds.
They don't want to fix the world.
They want to own the terrain where you ask if it’s broken.
And Moldbug?
He gave them the script.
He made authoritarianism sound clever, efficient, inevitable.
He didn’t spark a revolution.
He seeded the ideology of the post-democratic billionaire class.
And they’ve been beta testing tyranny ever since.
What We Do Now
Name them. Strip away the mystique.
Translate their fantasies into consequences.
Refuse the aesthetics of inevitability — no matter how sleek the UI.
Reclaim complexity from those who say "messy" equals "broken."
Demand governance that centers people, not profit margins or processor speeds.
Because this isn’t about tech.
It’s about whether the future belongs to everyone, or just to the ones who bought the servers first.
TL;DR
Digital Emperors are the new monarchists — they just use servers instead of swords.
Moldbug gave them the script.
Their ideas are dressed as innovation, but powered by control.
Exit is not freedom. Choice without rights is not liberty.
The future doesn’t need kings. It needs people who aren’t afraid of shared power.