Alt-right darling Mencius Moldbug wanted to destroy democracy. Now he wants to sell you web services

In the 2000s, Curtis Yarvin was a programmer with two projects. One was personal and turned him into a favorite philosopher of the alt-right: the blog Unqualified Reservations, which he started in 2007, posting under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. For about six years, he regularly updated Reservations with his thoughts on politics and culture, gaining a considerable online following thanks to his controversial, often repugnant views. In one early post, Yarvin wrote that, although he was not himself a white nationalist, he felt “the urge to defend” the ideology. Mostly, Moldbug railed against democracy, questioning whether it might be an aberration that should be done away with.

His posts took hold in some corners of the internet, where they’ve coalesced under the banner of a loose ideology called the “neoreactionary movement,” or the “Dark Enlightenment.” His work is sometimes branded as “neo-monarchism,” although it’s been criticized as veiled fascism. The movement’s ideas are amorphous, but they’re aligned with the alt-right, which has championed President Trump and his authoritarian streak. Last year, Breitbart described Yarvin’s work as “the first shoots of a new conservative ideology,” and it’s true that, if there really is an intellectual foundation to the alt-right, Yarvin is part of it. A recent Politico story claimed Trump adviser and former Breitbart News executive chair Steve Bannon was a fan of Yarvin, and that the blogger now enjoyed a connection to the White House. (Yarvin has denied having any contact with Bannon, and told me the same.)

In 2013, Yarvin largely moved away from blogging and sped up work on the second, more professional project. Since 2002, Yarvin had been working on an algorithm — the backbone of Urbit, a product that would restructure how people use the internet. In 2013, he launched the San Francisco-based company Tlon, which oversees Urbit.

He occasionally hinted at ties between his ideology and professional pursuit. In a 2010 post called “Urbit: functional programming from scratch,” under his Moldbug alias, he winkingly points to a different blog, called Moron Lab, which documented the building of Urbit. “Moldbug” writes that Moron Lab is written by his “good friend, C. Guy Yarvin.”

At first glance, it’s not easy to discern what Urbit does, and its marketing materials don’t help much. A promotional video posted on the company’s website shows Yarvin and Galen Wolfe-Pauly — CEO at Tlon, where Yarvin is CTO — discussing the project. “We need to build a new internet on top of the old internet,” Yarvin says, before explaining the problems inherent in TCP/IP and UNIX. “I quit my job in 2002 to solve this problem,” he says, deadpan.

On the phone, Wolfe-Pauly does a better job of explaining the concept. For the average person, he explains, Urbit will soon be an interface that bundles various web services into a command center for your “personal server.” This will help undo the balkanization of web services — log in to Urbit and you’ll be able to operate Twitter, Instagram, Google, or anything else, from a single place. “It’s hard not to see basically Facebook and Google as basically these giant monarchies that are in complete control in how you conduct, how you communicate,” Wolfe-Pauly tells me.

Tlon is a small, five-person company that caters to a niche audience even as it plans an expansion for everyday users. It has received funding from serious venture capital players, including Andreessen Horowitz. (Wolfe-Pauly declined to discuss specific figures.) And since it produced a prototype, Urbit has generated revenue: in June, it sold “blocks” of addresses to early users, and made more than $200,000 through sales. Wolfe-Pauly says they sold out in about four hours. The occasional user may even be a fan of Yarvin’s politics. In a Reddit session last year, a user took this connection one step further, telling Yarvin they had tried Urbit because they supported his “social-political goals.”

Yarvin seldom gives interviews, but did send me a long email in response to questions. “The American of 2017, right or left, is sick of politics within a minute of turning on the TV,” he told me. “Then she opens Facebook, and remembers how tired she is of toiling on Mark Zuckerberg’s content farm. She is tired of democracy in the real world, and tired of monarchy in the digital world. But the pendulum swings in both directions.”

Yarvin’s activity under the Moldbug penname has drawn outsized attention to a company of its size. In reports on Moldbug, several outlets have suggested that the company is backed by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump adviser who himself has occasionally floated anti-democratic views. Wolfe-Pauly says the company is funded by Thiel’s venture capital arm, Founders Fund, but that Thiel is not personally involved. One of the founders of the company, John Burnham, who no longer works with Yarvin and Wolfe-Pauly, lists himself as a recipient of the controversial Thiel Fellowship, the proceeds of which he reportedly used for unrelated projects.

A former Urbit employee says Yarvin was aware of the impact his digital reputation might have on the company. He would occasionally allude to his ideology, the employee said, although unobtrusively. “He had a sense, I think, that he was pretty polarizing.”

Wolfe-Pauly has been working with Yarvin for years now, he says, and Yarvin’s alternate identity as Moldbug, along with his radical politics, have never been an issue for him. He doesn’t dismiss that Yarvin’s views may be concerning, but tells me the most outrageous parts don’t comport to the Yarvin he knows, who is “a contrarian” but spends most of his time coding. A former employee I spoke to expressed a similar sentiment, saying it never seemed “problematic” to be working alongside Yarvin.

When I mention one particularly inflammatory question posed on a Moldbug blog post — “What’s so bad about the Nazis?” — Wolfe-Pauly suggested that Yarvin was more likely than not trolling.

“There’s just this great irony in this, because the principles of Urbit are very palatable,” Wolfe-Pauly says. “We’re very interested in giving people their freedom.”

Calling himself a retired blogger, Yarvin says he doesn’t disavow any of his much-publicized views. “If the real world today is governed as an insanely dysfunctional republic, and the Internet today is governed as a cluster of insanely despotic corporate monarchies, it doesn’t strike me as at all inconsistent with historical thought to treat the former case of misgovernment with efficient monarchism, and the latter case with liberating republicanism,” he wrote.

In one design sketch for Urbit, Yarvin made the link between monarchies and the platform more explicit, classifying users as “Lords,” “Dukes,” and “Earls.” The design behind the titles, he writes, “is standard Lockean libertarian homesteading theory.” At the end of the sketch, Yarvin indicates that he’s reserved a special title for himself: “The prince (because he spent 8 years working on this project, without being paid), has reserved 32 duchies for his exclusive personal benefit.”

In a 2013 post, around the time Urbit was officially launched as a business, Yarvin seemed to anticipate some of the controversy the company would encounter, as he bemoaned that the CTO of Business Insider was fired for a series of misogynistic tweets, and that Y Combinator founder Paul Graham was criticized for comments about tech company founders’ accents. Yarvin called it a media-led right-wing “witch hunt.”

Yarvin has said he plans to continue work on Urbit for now, and to keep Moldbug in retirement. “Urbit is a lot more important to me in the near term, for probably obvious reasons,” he wrote on Reddit last year. “I would certainly rather be rich than famous, but probably everyone who is (slightly) famous rather than rich says this. Ideally I would have just enough fans to pay the bills, and just enough haters to keep me amused.”

Update, February 21st, 1:27PM ET: this story has been updated with additional information about Urbit’s code. (Thank you to Thomas Wilburn for the tip.)

Creative direction by James Bareham