Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé, Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics, but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years, hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas. Yarvin was one of them. Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He had also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late aughts (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).

Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. In 2013, Thiel invested in Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin. In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.

Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised—and parroted—Yarvin’s ideas. That was worrying enough when Vance was only a senator. Now that he could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his close ties to Yarvin are more alarming than ever. Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like taxes and regulations, but that’s only part of the story. Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon Musk already have money. Now they want power—as much as money can buy.

Stories about Vance tend to focus on his hardscrabble Ohio roots, but his relationship with Thiel—and his stint in San Francisco—are key to understanding his politics. Vance owes his meteoric rise to Thiel, who largely bankrolled it. As a Yale Law student in 2011, he heard Thiel give a speech in which he suggested that smart people should be working in tech instead of wasting their time at elite schools. Afterward, Vance emailed Thiel, who invited him to California.

Following a brief stint as a lawyer, Vance moved to San Francisco. Eventually, he landed at Mithril Capital, a company co-founded by Thiel. He finished writing Hillbilly Elegy while there, and Thiel wrote a blurb praising it. When Vance moved back to Ohio and eventually started his own fund, Narya Capital, both Thiel and Marc Andreessen invested. When Vance ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, Thiel spent an unprecedented $15 million on the campaign and persuaded Trump to endorse him (Vance had previously compared Trump to Hitler). In 2024, Thiel led the charge to convince Trump to pick Vance as VP.

Vance is a Thiel creation. And like his billionaire benefactor—who once wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”—Vance embraces a radical ideology hellbent on destroying government as we know it. And they got these ideas, at least in part, from Yarvin.

Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction (NRx) movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to re-engineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks” which would be controlled by tech corporations.

“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote in “Patchwork: A Political System for the 21^st Century.”

Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.

The realm, having sovereign power, can compel the resident to comply with all promises. Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal. But it could. And San Francisco, likewise, can promise not to cut off its residents’ hands until it is blue in the face—but, since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it.

In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”

Vance has not advocated for realms—yet—but some of his most extreme ideas echo Yarvin. They’re both fond of political purges, for instance. In the 2021 podcast interview, Vance was asked how to get liberals out of government institutions. “De-Nazification, De-Baathification,” he replied. “I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left. And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”

He predicted Trump would run again and win, then offered some advice: “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” He added that Trump should defy any court orders that tried to halt this partisan purge of the civil service.

Yarvin calls this plan RAGE: Retire All Government Employees. It’s captured perfectly in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, which calls for firing an estimated 500,000 federal employees and dismantling entire agencies. If Trump wins, Vance may well be in charge of executing the plan.

Vance did not get this extremist ideology from his Appalachian upbringing or—needless to say—Yale Law. It was incubated in America’s tech capital, San Francisco, where he forged crucial ties with Thiel, Yarvin, and David Sacks, the longtime Thiel associate and pro-Putin crusader who recently hosted a Trump fundraiser at his mansion in Pacific Heights. And if Vance ends up in the White House, it will be with $45 million in monthly campaign contributions from Musk, who already made a $44 billion in-kind contribution by gutting San Francisco-based Twitter and transforming it into a right-wing misinformation weapon.

In a fateful twist, San Francisco also launched the political career of Kamala Harris, who is set to inherit the task of saving American democracy from tech authoritarianism.