Mike Brock writes:

As I write this in early 2025, a quiet revolution is unfolding within the U.S. government. Inside the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), teams of young tech operatives are systematically dismantling democratic institutions and replacing them with proprietary artificial intelligence systems. Civil servants who raise legal objections are being removed. Government databases are being migrated to private servers. Decision-making power is being transferred from elected officials and career bureaucrats to algorithms controlled by a small network of Silicon Valley elites. This isn’t a spontaneous coup—it’s the culmination of a dangerous ideology that has been meticulously developed since the 2008 financial crisis, one that sees democracy itself as obsolete technology ready to be “disrupted.” To understand how we reached this critical moment, and why it threatens the very foundation of democratic governance, we need to trace the evolution of an idea: that democracy is not just inefficient, but fundamentally incompatible with technological progress.

DOGE is not about efficiency. It is about erasure. Democracy is being deleted in slow motion, replaced by proprietary technology and AI models. It is a coup, executed not with guns, but with backend migrations and database wipes.

What follows is not speculation or dystopian fiction. It is a carefully documented account of how a dangerous ideology, born in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, has moved from the fringes of tech culture to the heart of American governance.

The story of how it begins starts sixteen years ago.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking the largest failure of an investment bank since the Great Depression. This event catalyzed the global financial crisis, leading to widespread economic hardship and a profound loss of faith in established institutions.

In the aftermath of the crisis, several key figures emerged who would go on to shape a new movement in American politics.

Curtis Yarvin, writing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, had been developing a critique of modern democracy on his blog Unqualified Reservations since 2007. As the financial crisis unfolded, Yarvin applied his unconventional analysis to the economic turmoil.

In a 2008 post, “The Misesian explanation of the bank crisis,” Yarvin wrote:

Briefly: the fundamental cause of the bank crisis is not evil Republicans, lying Democrats, ‘deregulation,’ ‘affirmative-action lending,’ or even ‘ludicrous levels of leverage.’ A banking system is like a nuclear reactor: a complicated piece of engineering. If it’s engineered right, it works 100% of the time. If it’s engineered wrong, it works 99.99% of the time, and the other 0.01% it coats the entire tri-state area in radioactive strontium.

Yarvin argued that the crisis was fundamentally an engineering failure caused by a deviation from what he called “Misesian banking,” based on principles outlined by economist Ludwig von Mises. This approach advocates for a strict free-market system with minimal government intervention in banking. He contrasted this with the prevailing “Bagehotian” system, named after Walter Bagehot, which supports central bank intervention during financial crises. Yarvin argued that this interventionist approach was inherently unstable and prone to collapse.

Yarvin’s writings during the crisis period continued to develop his broader critique of modern political and economic systems. His ideas, while not mainstream, began to resonate with a growing audience disillusioned with traditional institutions and seeking alternative explanations for the economic turmoil.

For decades, libertarian thinkers had argued that free markets, left unrestrained, would naturally outperform any system of government. But what if the problem wasn’t just government interference in markets—what if the very concept of democracy itself was flawed?

This was the argument put forward by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a student of Mises’s protégé Murray Rothbard, who took libertarian skepticism of the state to its extreme conclusion. His 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed landed like a bombshell in libertarian circles. Published at a moment when many Americans still saw democracy as the “end of history,” Hoppe argued that democracy was an inherently unstable system, one that incentivized short-term decision-making and mob rule rather than rational governance. His alternative? A return to monarchy.

But this wasn’t the monarchy of old. Hoppe envisioned a new order—one where governance was privatized, where societies functioned as “covenant communities” owned and operated by property-holders rather than elected officials. In this world, citizenship was a matter of contract, not birthright. Voting was unnecessary. Rule was left to those with the most capital at stake. It was libertarian thought taken to its most extreme conclusion: a society governed not by political equality, but by property rights alone.

By the 2010s, Hoppe’s radical skepticism of democracy had found an eager audience beyond the usual libertarian circles, but through a different mechanism than simple market disruption. While Silicon Valley had long embraced Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation—where nimbler companies could outcompete established players by serving overlooked markets—a more extreme form of techno-solutionism had begun to take hold. This mindset held that any societal problem, including governance itself, could be “solved” through sufficient application of engineering principles. Silicon Valley elites who had built successful companies began to view democratic processes not just as inefficient, but as fundamentally irrational—the product of what they saw as emotional decision-making by non-technical people. This merged perfectly with Hoppe’s critique: if democracy was simply a collection of “feeling-based” choices made by the uninformed masses, surely it could be replaced by something more “rational”—specifically, the kind of data-driven, engineering-focused governance these tech leaders practiced in their own companies.

Peter Thiel, one of the most outspoken erstwhile libertarians in Silicon Valley, put this sentiment in stark terms in his 2009 essay The Education of a Libertarian: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel had already begun funding projects aimed at escaping democratic nation-states entirely, including seasteading—floating cities in international waters beyond government control—and experimental governance models that would replace electoral democracy with private, corporate-style rule. Hoppe’s vision of covenant communities—private enclaves owned and governed by elites—provided an intellectual justification for what Thiel and his allies were trying to build: not just alternatives to specific government policies, but complete replacements for democratic governance itself. If democracy is too inefficient to keep up with technological change, why not replace it entirely with private, contractual forms of rule?

The notion that traditional democratic governance was inefficient or outdated resonated with those who saw themselves as disruptors and innovators.

This intellectual throughline—from Mises to Hoppe to figures like Yarvin and Thiel—helps explain the emergence of what some have called “techno-libertarianism.” It represents a dangerous alignment of anti-democratic thought with immense technological and financial resources, posing significant challenges to traditional conceptions of democratic governance and civic responsibility. [Continue reading…]