Mencius Moldbug
Article
Mencius Moldbug is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 23, 2021 and May 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “SSC’s former sparring partner Mencius Moldbug”; “Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug)“. It most often appears alongside FDA, 2025-Yarvin, Antiversity.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: June 23, 2021
- Last seen: May 07, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- 2025-Yarvin (1 shared issues)
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- Antiversity (1 shared issues)
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- Apple (1 shared issues)
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- Architectonics (1 shared issues)
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- Architectonics blog (1 shared issues)
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- Arizona (1 shared issues)
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- Atlanta Black Crackers (1 shared issues)
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- Atlanta Crackers (1 shared issues)
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- Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Baltimore (1 shared issues)
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- Ben Domenech (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
5: SSC’s former sparring partner Mencius Moldbug seems to be doing well, with Fox News’ Ben Domenech adopting his term “Cathedral” for the progressive establishment (see full video here)
Inline links: see full video here
Cathy Young’s new hit piece on Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) doesn’t mince words. Titled The Blogger Who Hates America, it describes him as an "inept", "not exactly coherent" "trollish, ill-informed pseudo-intellectual" notable for his "woefully superficial knowledge and utter ignorance".
Inline links: The Blogger Who Hates America
Both sides are right. The synthesis is that Moldbug sold out. In the late 2000s, Moldbug wrote some genuinely interesting speculations on novel sci-fi variants of autocracy. Admitting that the dictatorships of the 20th century were horrifying, he proposed creative ways to patch their vulnerabilities by combining 18th century monarchy with 22nd century cyberpunk to create something better than either. These ideas might not have been realistic. But they were cool, edgy, and had a certain intellectual appeal. Then in the late 2010s, as soon as his ideas started getting close to power he dropped it all like a hot potato. The MAGA movement was exactly what 2000s Moldbug feared most - a cancerous outgrowth of democracy riding the same wave of populist anger as the 20th century dictatorships he loathed. But in the hope of winning a temporary political victory, he let them wear him as a skinsuit - giving their normal, boring autocratic tendencies the mystique of the cool, edgy, all-vulnerabilities-patched autocracy he foretold in his manifestos. So, for example, Yarvin urges Trump to become more of a dictator, and Young accuses him of ignoring that fact that dictators can go crazy and do terrible things. The (anonymized) Twitter user above counters that Classic Moldbug includes a cleverly-designed procedure for an unremovable board of directors with well-aligned incentives who can remove a dictator if he screws up. That’s all true! Classic Moldbug does have that part! It’s great, at least as speculative fiction! But Trump hasn’t implemented it and never will, so who cares? The whole point of post-2015 Yarvin is to say “I, a cool person who has thought a lot about autocracy, conjecture that autocracies might go great if you do certain things, so don’t worry about Trump”, and hope you don’t notice that Trump isn’t doing any of the things. Props to the Architectonics blog for writing Curtis Yarvin Contra Mencius Moldbug (Part 2 here), which does a good job pointing this out in one limited domain: countries under international law vs. sovereign corporations under patchwork. But I think the problem is much broader. I’ll divide my argument into four parts: Classic Moldbug thought the default outcome of a modern populist dictatorship was disaster. To avert this, he proposed three mechanisms.