Dark Enlightenment: The Authoritarian Trajectory Being Taken by Tech Giants

Since key Silicon Valley billionaire tech bros lined up behind Donald Trump for his second coming inauguration to the US presidency on 20 January 2025, it’s become clear that these increasingly influential figures aren’t beacons of democratic values, but their political persuasions are aligned with the authoritarianism of the MAGA White House, as they’re heralding in the Dark Enlightenment.

Indeed, it was on that day, during a post-inauguration rally, that the world’s first momentary trillionaire Elon Musk gestured a Nazi salute before a global audience to spark a debate over whether he meant to signal the far-right gesture. Yet, 20 months later, following his stint as the head of DOGE and his advocating for white supremacist movements, Musk’s gesture now appears clearly genuine.

Also known as the neo-Reactionary movement, the Dark Enlightenment is antihumanist, antiliberal and it rejects the thrust of the 18th century Enlightenment. Instead, the proponents of NeoReaction philosophy advocate for a return to the traditional values of the West, including authoritarian rule by absolute monarch, in the form of a CEO that runs a society like a corporation, with client citizens.

But whilst publics across the West have just become privy to the reactionary philosophical outlook of billionaire tech bros, American far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin has been extolling the virtues of the Dark Enlightenment since the late 2000s, while key Silicon Valley influencer and venture capitalist Peter Theil has embraced the Dark Enlightenment since the early 2010s, as it aligns with his beliefs.

And whilst Palantir founder and early Facebook investor Thiel wasn’t standing behind Trump at the 2025 inauguration, he is a figure with a finger in every Silicon Valley pie. Thiel was the first tech bro backer of Donald Trump for president in 2015. He financed Yarvin’s early tech endeavours. And Thiel has bankrolled the entire career of Dark Enlightenment proponent US vice president JD Vance.

Key Dark Enlightenment concepts

Famed for his work with the 1990s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, British philosopher Nick Land coined the term Dark Enlightenment in 2012. His 1990s thought involves humanity evolving towards and birthing a technocapitalism, which is conscious, autonomous and replaces human control. Land too posits that this involves “the singularity”, where technology becomes self-improving.

Land remerged in the early 2010s, as figures, like Yarvin and the tech bros, embraced his thought. But in the present, the autonomous technocapitalism that humanity is birthing has become artificial general intelligence, or autonomous AI. And this could lead to the recently warned of AI apocalypse, when AI wipes out humanity, which tech bros don’t necessarily consider to be a bad outcome.

Another key Landian concept is “accelerationism”, which involves propagating the best conditions to bring about the singularity. He and other accelerationists consider that leftwing egalitarian and democratic policies slow down this process. And Yarvin’s concept of a CEO technocratic head of an autocratic state presiding over client citizens is part of the goal society is rushing towards.

Yarvin’s concept of “the Cathedral” is also central to NeoReaction. The Cathedral comprises of a decentralised network of western institutions that serve to shape the public mind. These institutions are universities, the media and government bureaucracy, and they propagate egalitarian ideas and values, whilst consolidating their own power and suppressing any conservative dissent.

Having originally blogged under pen name Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin is a proponent of RAGE or “retire all government employees”, which involves dismantling bureaucracies. And both Land and Yarvin, in progressing conservative ideas, embrace scientific racialism, or human biodiversity, or the belief that humanity is divided into genetically distinct races, with some being superior.

Freedom cities

Thiel is not as well-known as counterparts like Musk and Sam Altman, but the founder of surveillance and weapons contractor Palantir, has funded Yarvin’s ventures, JD Vance’s career and Trump’s first election. And whilst not openly declaring as much, the concepts in his 2004 essay The Straussian Moment and 2008’s The Education of a Libertarian firmly align him with the Dark Enlightenment.

Thiel founded Palantir circa 2003. The data analytics company uses AI to integrate disparate siloed data to create new datapoints. Palantir was initially funded by CIA venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The CIA was Palantir’s only client until 2008. And that the company is building a vast digital panopticon has become increasingly clear, as its operations with the MAGA White House become public.

Dark Enlightenment proponents, like Thiel and Yarvin, propose the creation of private city-states, which are also termed “freedom cities”. These jurisdictions would involve Yarvin’s corporate states run by a CEO monarch and technocrat assistants. These corporate autocracies would be free from bureaucratic restrictions, with citizenship reduced to client consumers.

In this regard, Thiel has been an early investor in seasteading, or the creation of independent, permanent communities on the surface of the ocean. The Seasteading Institute was founded in 2008, and Thiel was an early investor in the project that same year. Thiel also invested $140 million in US-based startup Panthalassa in March this year, as it plans to create floating datacentres.

Thiel was a cofounder of PayPal. Both he and other key PayPal figure Musk secured their fortunes when they sold the company in 2002. Thiel, Musk and other PayPal staff have become prominent Silicon Valley figures, and they’ve been dubbed the PayPal mafia. And software developed by PayPal to prevent online payment fraud provided the basis for ongoing developments at Palantir.

The Dark Enlightenment is impacting

Since Trump’s second coming at the White House, the influence of the Dark Enlightenment has been obvious once the observer is aware of the Silicon Valley philosophical and cultural movement.

On taking office in January 2025, Trump appointed his primary financial backer in the 2024 presidential election campaign, Elon Musk, to head up the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This saw mass layoffs of public service employees, the cutting of overseas aid assistance, which is superfluous through a NeoReaction lens, and it provided access to key federal databases.

In terms of freedom cities or privatised city-states, there already exists Próspera on the Honduran island of Roatán, while Trump has a plan to create 10 freedom cities in the USA. And there is also a proposal to establish a privatised city called Praxis in Greenland, which explains why Trump has been so concerned about his nation annexing the semiautonomous Danish territory.

In its vision of corporatised states, the Dark Enlightenment proffers societies where bureaucratic red tape is done away with. So, billionaires would receive unchecked freedom to invest and propagate new technologies, whilst the vast majority are disenfranchised under state rule and would be relegated to consumers subservient to corporate feudalism and subject to total surveillance.

Perhaps the most significant way in which the Dark Enlightenment is unfolding is in the White House/Silicon Valley race to produce superintelligence, which could see autonomous AI agents taking control of society. This proposal is understood to risk an apocalyptic scenario, but it also carries with it the potential to undermine the collective power bargaining of labour to the benefit of billionaires.

Image: Left, Donald Trump by Daniel Torok is in the public domain. Middle, Curtis Yarvin in 2025 by Elekes Andor is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Right, Peter Thiel in 2022 by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY SA 3.0.