Welcome to Brotopians
Scratch a techbro billionaire – scratch him hard, enough to bleed – and chances are good you’ll find a restless dreamer, a utopian of sorts desperate to transcend our messy and sometimes depressing world.
Some of these brotopian dreamers seek personal transcendence, adopting bizarre diet and workout regimens and sometimes even injecting themselves with the blood of the young in hopes of living forever, or at least closer to forever than the rest of us.
Others want to impose their dreams on the world, building their own “exits from democracy” in the form of manmade floating islands or charter cities plopped down in poorer countries where they can rewrite most of the laws to their liking and rule as CEO-gods. Still others dream of taking over our at least nominally democratic governments and instituting a new monarchy.
Because these dreams tend to be so radically uncalibrated from and incompatible with the world we actually live in, brotopians find their desires continually thwarted. They can’t rewrite the laws of biology to make themselves immortal; their floating micro-countries sink or are sunk by the forces of not-so-micro-countries who don’t want some weird unregulated techbro haven off their shores. It turns out that being a billionaire doesn’t give you the right or the ability to bend the world to your most peculiar whims. At least not all of them.
And so they end up perpetually dissatisfied, often flitting from one failed utopian dream to another, and never quite getting what they want.
Take the odious Peter Thiel, venture capital moneyman and co-founder of Palantir. In a now infamous essay for the Cato Institute, Thiel announced that he had given up on democracy in favor of … building floating cities that more or less wrote their own laws. He donated $1.7 million to something called the Seasteading Institute and evangelized for the cause. But within a few years he had soured on the whole thing. "They’re not quite feasible from an engineering perspective,” he told Maureen Dowd of the New York Times. “That’s still very far in the future.”
In 2016, Thiel threw himself into politics, giving $1.25 million to Trump and speaking at the Republican convention. Since then, his engagement with politics has waxed and waned, with periods of enthusiasm giving way to years of disillusionment and despair (he’s big on that).
But when he has intervened his results have been, well, kind of spectacular. He more-or-less created the political careers of his longtime associates, former employees and proteges J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, donating some $32 million in 2022 to get them elected to the senate. Masters, a weirdo fanatic with all the charisma of Norman Bates, flamed out, but Vance of course won and now sits in what remains of the White House as Vice President, fucking hell. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has taken on a dozen more of Thiel’s pals, including the current AI and crypto czar David Sacks.
And perhaps not so coincidentally Palantir has scored itself a multiyear contract with the Army that could end up being worth $10 billion. The company’s stock is up 166% from a year ago, last I checked, and Thiel’s fortune is estimated to be roughly $27.5 billion, according to the New York Times.
Is Thiel happy? Of course not. In a long and weird conversation with Ross Douthat of the New York Times last year, Thiel tactfully admitted to being “somewhat disenchanted” with Trump, not-so-slyly suggesting that his real feelings about the president were much more strongly negative but that he didn’t want to say so bluntly because then “I'll get yelled at by Mr. Trump.” He hesitated for a long time before answering a question from Douthat as to whether he “would prefer the human race to endure.” (In the end he gave Douthat an unenthusiastic yes.)
Thiel has spent much of the past few months dwelling on theological issues, like whether or not climate activist Greta Thunberg will turn out to be some sort of left-wing antichrist.
Thiel is hardly the only discontented brotopian. Take Curtis Yarvin, the intellectual godfather of neoreaction who wants the world to be run by a CEO-king. A computer programmer by trade, he began his career as a public intellectual back in 2007, writing longwinded political blog posts under the pen name “Mencius Moldbug" for a small audience of racist manosphere weirdos. But for better or worse (actually just worse) he also attracted the attention of some powerful people, ultimately becoming what Thiel biographer Max Chafkin called the "house political philosopher” for Thiel and friends and the inspiration for a not-so-small army of terrible young political operatives. Non-young fans include Vance, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and the accelerationist VC Marc Andreessen. It's said that his RAGE ("Retire All Government Employees") plan helped lead to DOGE. You've probably seen him and his stupid haircut in multiple media profiles.
So, is Yarvin happy? I’ll let you guess. In a Substack post shortly after Christmas, Yarvin declared that Trump 2.0 has become “a tragedy … .I hate to say it, but it looks like the administration has already lost.” Why? Because it hasn’t completely torn up the old regime and replaced it with something more to Yarvin’s liking. After the impressive “shock and awe” of Trump 2.0’s early days, the administration has sometimes paused its shock-and-aweing and attempted to, you know, govern. But, Yarvin insists, “[a] regime change, like a shark, can’t stop. It can’t even pause. If it does X this week, and blows everyone’s mind, it needs to do 2X next week.”
The sprawling essay descends into weird sexual metaphors.
On the streets, we are the best of husbands. In the sheets, we are nowhere near man enough for our wives. Power will only be serviced by the Deep State or the Cathedral [i.e. the liberal establishment -DF]. The sneer with which Washington obeys the Trump administration, when it really must, is the sneer of a woman who wants her husband’s child—but not her husband.
Hoo boy. And it turns out the only remedy for this is a, wait for it, “hard party.” Rock hard and presumably throbbing.
America needs a new kind of political party, which is actually an old kind of party: a hard party. A hard party is a party designed to take unconditional control of the state. A hard party is a party in which all members delegate 100% of their political energy to the party’s command. Joining a hard party is a political marriage, not an election-night hookup with any random politician whose name on a lawn sign catches your eye.
It turns out this monarchist is also sort of a Leninist. ”[B]esides absolute power, everything else is just a way to lose,” Yarvin declares, untruely.
Anyway, Trump’s been too much of a cuck and so he’s basically screwed, as are all his minions.
If the GOP loses the next Presidential election, Trump will spend the rest of his life in court or in jail. This will also be true of all prominent Trump supporters, appointees, donors, etc. This will be an all-you-can eat barbecue of fully-funded lawfare and endless fawning PR. Every Democratic prosecutor in the country will find a way to do her part in cleaning up the ruins of Trumpism. That is, rounding up and bayoneting the defeated veterans.
That’s why Yarvin posted, and then deleted, the statement “I feel that I personally have to start thinking realistically about how to flee the country” back in October. Because Trump didn’t make himself into the CEO-king of Yarvin’s imagination.
The list of disgruntled brotopians goes on and on. Elon Musk – the fucking richest man in the world, with a net worth somewhere north of $700 billion according to Forbes – frets because he doesn’t get enough “likes” for his posts on the social media platform he fucking owns and because his supposedly anti-woke AI bot Grok sometimes says things that are distressingly woke, and whenever Musk tries to fix this the bot turns into Hitler.
And recently he’s even given up his dreams of an escape to Mars, at least according to Thiel in that long weird conversation with Douthat I mentioned earlier. Not because his rockets keep exploding, or because the planet is colder than the coldest place on earth and its soil is toxic and its atmosphere is so thin and oxygen-poor that anyone exposed to it will have their blood literally start to boil and, oh, did I mention the radiation, but because he worries he’ll be followed to the red planet by woke AI and “socialism.” Also, I think maybe he’s scared of Kuato.
I could add more names to this list but I won’t because, well, that’s what this newsletter is going to be about: the brotopians, their wild dreams of perfect lives and perfect worlds (for them anyway) and the regular squashing of these dreams by reality. I will talk about everything from failed charter cities to the weird diets of life-extensionists.
I will talk about Effective Altruism and Effective Accelerationism and why they are not at all the same thing. We'll do peptide raves. I’ll expose you to more of the weird sexual metaphors of Curtis Yarvin. I will explore why pretty much all of these techie utopians tend to be men. (This may in part be related to the weird sexual metaphors of Curtis Yarvin.)
So stick around, for the schadenfreude if nothing else.
Welcome to Brotopians.
Your host, David Futrelle.