The Technocratic Dark State: Part I – What Is It, and Who’s Behind It?

“There is no difference between a CEO and a dictator. If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” – Curtis Yarvin, Dark Enlightenment guru

Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack.

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While I, and most readers of this blog, have probably been fortunate enough so far to have been relatively unscathed by the political class’s relentless servings of fear, pain, and humiliation, there is no denying it. Sadly, everything that is happening is, in one way or another, preparing the ground for the global ruling class’s planned main course – a neo-feudal dystopic totalitarian technocracy. This is the end game – the War for Technocracy on humanity.

The word “technocracy” is now a much bandied-about word in alt-media circles, but are we all crystal clear on what it means? If not, Iain Davis’s latest offering – The Technocratic Dark State – will get you fully up to speed, and then some.

https://thepapercutmagazine.com/products/the-technocratic-dark-state-second-edition

It will also confirm one of John Lennon’s most incisive observations about humanity’s current condition: “our society is run by insane people for insane objectives...by maniacs for maniacal ends.” Those maniacal ends are now coming more clearly into view for those who have eyes to see.

I strongly encourage you to pick up a copy of his book – this article is no substitute for Iain’s in-depth investigation. This is a book review of sorts, highlighting what I see as the essentials to grasp, along with my own musings. I thought the book could have been tighter in its argumentation in one or two places, and I’ll explain why in due course. But overall, it achieved its objective as a valuable resource for raising consciousness about the threat of Technocracy. Where I have not provided a note reference to Iain’s work, you can assume the musings are mine, not his.

Here’s the map for this two-part piece:

Part I:

• What is technocracy and why is it being imposed?

• Who is pushing it? In the spirit of know thy enemy, we’ll meet the power-crazy mad-hatters who want to dominate all life on earth, and elsewhere if they could get there. We’ll discuss the ‘philosophy’, such as it is, driving the Dark Technocracy movement, which is a cultish brand of technocracy espoused by the more extreme elements in the movement.

Part II:

• How are they pushing it at the macro level? This deals with the global macroeconomic conditions that are being pushed to implement technocracy.

• How are they pushing it at the micro level? The micro-level relates to the digital and other technocratic tools necessary to implement technocracy. Think of these as the mechanical core of the engine that drives technocracy.

What is technocracy and why is it being imposed?

My own definition, derived from my reading of Iain’s book, is that technocracy encompasses a system of total population control by technocratic means. There are two elements in that sentence – population control and technocratic means, so let’s break those two down a bit more.

Total population control entails control of movement, thought, and behaviour. It is the institution of total compliance, at the individual level, with the ruling class’s dictates. If it achieves its ambitious and diabolical goal, not only will compliance be forced on every individual, but it will be enforced in real time without the need for traditional means of intervention such as police, courts, hearings, and so on. Its fundamental aim is that no single person should be able to slip through the net of compliance, and the only way to achieve this totalising control is through pervasive and invasive digital technology.

It will be far more efficient to simply lock someone out of their bank account with an algorithm than to send out police, or court papers. What’s more, the list of state-decreed infractions is going to become so ridiculous that the concept of legality as being linked to any kind of morality will fall by the wayside. We have already seen this with the passing of the Online Safety Act, which recognises that speech can be legal, but if it is nebulously ‘harmful’, it can be curtailed. So, as we enter this new paradigm of the ‘harmful’ citizen, it will be far more efficient to pass an algorithm than to pass a law.

Think of Technocracy as law by algorithm – highly adaptive, constantly fluid. The ‘law’ on any given day is what the programmer wants it to be.

My definition above emphasises the actual effect of technocracy, not its purported goal. If you took the technocrats themselves at face value, you would think that it was the solution to all of humanity’s problems. But this is technocracy’s marketing brochure – it is sold as a response to all social, economic, and political problems.[1] However, we get a far better sense of its totalitarian nature from the definition provided by the founding fathers of technocracy themselves, who describe it as[2]:

“The science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism to produce and distribute goods and services to the entire population.”

The entire “social mechanism” targeted for control is nothing short of vast continental geographical spaces defined as “technates”. The seemingly unrealistic scale of the ambition is disturbing, as is the means of achieving it by social engineering.

Technates are further sub-divided into regional divisions in which the role of the nation state will be made redundant. The significance of powerful regional blocs within the macro architecture of technocracy will be discussed when we tackle multipolarity under the heading: How are they pushing technocracy at the macro level?

Governance functions are split into appropriate industrial or service categories, with continental control overseen by a Continental Director who is appointed by members of a body called, funnily enough, the “Continental Control”. This Continental Control body is itself self-appointed and consists of “only some 100 or so members, all of whom know each other very well.” On this basis, the technocracy boffs conclude that “there is no one better fitted to make this choice [of Continental Director] than they.”[3] So, it’s a command-and-control system in the hands of a select few.

Well, for a minute, I was worried that the masses would be given a say in this neo-feudal leadership system but, thankfully, we the people will be comprehensively excluded. There’s no use complaining either – we brought it on ourselves with our foolish penchant for voting for different colours of the same team: Team Plutocracy. There is a price to pay for botching our freedom so badly, and technocracy might just be that price…unless we wake from our deep slumber and tell them to jog on.

The key takeaway so far is that if the modern-day technocrats have their way, it’s hard to argue against Iain’s assessment that “words like ‘communism’, ‘fascism’ or even ‘feudalism’ don’t come close to describing the extent of the radical tyranny intrinsic to Technocracy.” Technocrats can only succeed in imposing their will on a techno-receptive population, so we need to become more Techno-resistant.

Who is pushing technocracy?

Iain’s book is a compendium of who’s who in the technocracy zoo, as you would expect of any good in-depth investigation. I will mention in passing only a few of the bigger players by name, but what we should bear in mind is that any bureaucrat or politician who advocates digital-tech ‘solutions’ to problems that either don’t exist, have been manufactured, or could be solved by existing legislation and other sensible human practices, is a technocrat to be treated like a gatecrasher at a party – turf them out before they steal your valuables.

Come to think of it, even if you’re not in a position of power, but think that digital technology is the default solution to all of humanity’s problems, you too are a technocrat.

The Trump administration was paid for in the last puppet selection round (aka US elections) by Big Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Elon Musk is a technocrat tycoon who invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars[4] to install Trump in the White House, and is reaping the rewards for his investment through the establishment of a US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) whose Trojan-horse purpose is to make private digital data held by the government more malleable and accessible to Big Tech and digital surveillance contractors.

And as far back as 2022, the New York Times was already reporting that Thiel was “a key financier of the Make America Great Again movement”, and that Thiel saw Trump as “a vessel to push through his ideological goals”.[5]

While tech tycoons like Musk can be seen as technocrats, Iain has exposed another unsavoury group called Neo-reactionaries, the short-hand for which is NRx. Iain wishes to rebrand both technocrats and NRx lunatics as Neonerds, which is a moniker that isn’t going to catch on for me, since it makes a group of Luciferian psychopaths sound cutesy rather than baleful. To describe them as Lucifer’s IT Help Desk is also probably too kind, since it’s got the word ‘help’ in it, but Neonerds doesn’t cut the mustard for me. Sorry Iain.

That said, the technocrat and NRx belief systems overlap to such an extent that, for all intents and purposes, we can regard them as a single threat. They want essentially the same thing and, while they may worship slightly different false gods, they are broadly in agreement on how to achieve their objective.

While Musk is regarded as a technocrat, Peter Thiel, the Palantir tycoon, fits into the NRx mould. It is worth reminding readers how Palantir was conceived to appreciate the hand-in-glove relationship between Musk’s DOGE takeover of government digital data, and Palantir’s role as the US government’s outsourced private data surveillance arm.

US Navy Vice Admiral John Poindexter, who was at the centre of the Iran-Contra weapons scandal in the mid-to-late 1980s, is considered by researchers like Whitney Webb to be the father of the US surveillance state. After the Iran-Contra affair, he resurfaced in the wake of the diabolical 9/11 false flag attack in New York to advocate for the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme, which sought to leverage 9/11 as the pretext for instituting uninhibited digital data collection on all US citizens.

When the public learnt about the TIA project, the ensuing outcry led to its defunding. However, this proved to be a temporary setback, which was overcome by quietly outsourcing the project in 2003 to a private sector operator funded with seed capital from the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. That operator was, and is, Palantir Technologies, headed up by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. The CIA remained Palantir’s sole client until 2008, and it has remained the Pentagon’s primary contractor for digital surveillance technology programs.[6]

Palantir has branched out since 2003. It is now getting its claws into the UK healthcare system, helping the government here to exploit private health data for government and commercial gain. It has also actively participated in the Gaza genocide, contracting with the Israeli Occupation Forces to, in its words, “harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.”[7] Thiel’s Orwellian ability to balance his company’s active participation in weapons technology with his professed Christian beliefs is one of many reasons why I don’t think we should settle for describing him as a mere “Neonerd”.

Thiel has attempted to rebrand Christianity to make Silicon Valley’s involvement with the Military Industrial Complex more amenable to the intersection of Christianity and politics. As Whitney Webb explains: “There’s an attempt to develop a new form of a more violent Christianity, which I think most Christians would be against”. [time stamp 45:00 – 50:00]. My immediate reaction to that was, yes, that can’t possibly work, until I remembered that Rome did not become Christian. The Christians became Roman. And Rome, after its conversion to Christianity, pioneered the violent Christianity that became the hallmark of Western civilisation. Thiel is merely doing what nearly every ‘Christian’ leader before him has done for centuries. Sadly, it might work. Again.

War is in fact instrumental in the pursuit of the technocrats’ and NRx goals of using wholesale destruction – which they call ‘deterritorialization’ – as a fertile testbed for constructing digital technocratic states – ‘reterritorialization’ in their jargon. As I have previously discussed, Gaza is set to become a controlled experiment in full-scale digital technocracy. In Ukraine, a Blackrock-led carve-up is explicit in the Ukrainian government’s announcement in May 2025 of a Reconstruction Investment Fund. In the Ukrainian government’s own words, “American companies will [have] access to vast new opportunities in the joint development of Ukraine’s natural resources”.[8] And the digital mafia have wasted no time in using the destruction of life in Ukraine to ‘reterritorialize’ it into a Digital govcorp.[9]

Iain gets into the weeds of the thinkers who have influenced the likes of Thiel, Karp, and their fellow NRx travellers. At the outset, I will say that I refuse to fall into the same trap that Iain fell into by labelling the most influential ideas peddlers within this movement as philosophers. As you will see from the ideas they peddle, rational thinking that bears the hallmarks of philosophy is antithetical to their ideas.

The two most prominent NRx mad-hatters are American Curtis Yarvin and Englishman Nick Land. Yarvin was described by Bloomberg technology writer Max Chafkin as the “house philosopher” of the “Thielverse”.[10] The NRX mad-hatters’ ire is directed at a nebulous embodiment of the existing sociopolitical system that they call the “Cathedral”. To be frank, and in my humble view, Iain has not succeeded in clearly defining the NRx’s conception of the Cathedral. But I rather suspect this is because the NRx themselves are incapable of articulating their own conception of the Cathedral. Thankfully, it’s not important. What is important is that they want to usurp the current order and replace it with their own. Don’t we all! The thing to focus on is their endgame, and not the current “Cathedral” they vilify.

In spite of all the inchoate NRx mud-throwing at the current dysfunctional Cathedral, it’s not the Cathedral per se that they really object to. What irks them is their lack of control over it. So their somewhat ambitious goal is to subsume the entire current state bureaucracy and socio-economic system into sovereign corporations, or sovcorps. These newly constituted sovcorps will operate in a “patchwork of realms”, which is a network of sovcorps. Needless to say, each sovcorp will be run with an iron fist by its CEO, aka “TechnoKing”.[11]

Are you starting to see what I mean about these NRx IT guys not quite displaying the intellectual credentials that one might associate with philosophy? If not, let me give you a few more examples of their ‘philosophical’ thinking’.

Now, I will admit, I didn’t always find Iain’s exposition of their ideas, such as they are, a smooth ride. I think there are one or two areas where he either gets slightly bogged down, or simply fails to make it clear that these bumptious data-processing salesmen are maddeningly incoherent. Accelerationism – a central NRx concept – is a good example of this, partly because it’s a ridiculous concept on its face (and that’s obviously not Iain’s fault), but partly because Iain doesn’t quite rip it to shreds in the way that it deserves.

Accelerationism begins with the premise that “creative destruction” is intrinsic to capitalism. This means that the social and political order is in constant flux as a result of rapid technological advancements and new market creation. So far so good.

The malign NRx, wishing to imbue themselves with philosophical credentials, have renamed the creative destruction of capitalism, and the changes it imposes on society, as deterritorialization and reterritorialization respectively. Just think of it as destroy and rebuild. Remember ‘Build Back Better’? Now you’re getting the picture! Not complicated actually. You accidentally-on-purpose screw things up, and then you profit from ‘fixing’ things, while re-engineering society in the ‘fixing’. Seen in that light, the jargon is bloody annoying, but I guess it goes with the territory (no pun intended) of being a self-styled philosopher who wants to convey the idea that they are wrestling with the universe’s most intractable problems. The reality is that a six-year old with a day’s experience of playing Lego could explain it more clearly, and certainly with much less fanfare.

Having got this far in the logical steps towards articulating accelerationism, Iain loses me by jumping into the concept of the…wait for it…“technological singularity” by simply stating that this is “the point at which technological growth becomes self-perpetuating and thus inevitable”. Thus, according to the NRx, deterritorialization (which is really just the creative destruction of capitalism) “would accelerate sharply, and outstrip humanity’s ability to intervene or adapt to it.” I think this is the singularity – the inevitable speed wobble of technological advancement that turns it into a wild and uncontrollable beast.

The question this then poses is: how should humanity adapt to this self-inflicted technological fury? Well, “adapting means we must embrace and intensify the creative destruction of capitalism”. This is accelerationism. The illogical insanity of accelerationism peaks at the point where the NRx conclude that “acceleration … would be the only way to keep pace with the inevitable deterritorialization that takes place as we speed towards the singularity”[12].

It’s riddled with false premises and logical errors. Why does technological growth become “self-perpetuating”, and what does that even mean? Can technological growth occur without external agency? I don’t doubt that it can occur rapidly, but technological growth is not some wild animal that’s escaped from a zoo, and multiplying in inaccessible forests beyond our reach. It’s a product of human ingenuity (and sometimes stupidity), so we can intervene, and we can adapt, if we choose to. Proof of our ability to intervene lies in our technocratic overlords’ constant intervention to suppress technology that they can’t control and monopolise for themselves.

And why does adaptation involve making it go faster? I wasn’t a physics whizzkid at school, but I think that most self-respecting physicists will probably tell you that making something go faster is not the best way to keep pace with it. In any case, admitting that you can make it go faster is also an admission that there is some element of human agency in this process. In fact, quite a lot of human agency. If you can put go-faster stripes on it, you could also make it go slower.

So! Here is accelerationism in a Plague-on-Both-Houses nutshell: technological shit is happening faster than we can control or adapt to (not true), so let’s speed up shit (which in itself negates the supposed lack of control over said shit), because speeding shit up is the only way to keep pace with the speed of shit (which defies a basic law of physics).

Now! That’s clearly not the thinking of clear-eyed philosophers. It looks like the work of teenagers who have spent the last three years locked up in their bedroom eating five Dominoes pizzas per day, and playing Minecraft[13] to the sound of heavy metal, interspersed with readings of Slavoj Zizek. And by the way, if Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher, then he is the philosopher of Confusionism. Again, no pun intended, since that would be disrespectful to Confucius, who actually was a philosopher.

I know that Iain thinks the NRx IT guys are more kooky than the average channeler plying their wares on YouTube, but I was ever so slightly frustrated that he presented this particular strand of their psychedelic thinking without pausing at appropriate stops to properly deconstruct it for the garbage it is. Never mind, I’ve done it for you.

To be fair to Iain, after grappling with this topic, he does understatedly conclude that: “It is not clear, however, whether neoreactionaries are trying to purposefully perplex us with their abstruse, impenetrable jargon.” I think that their purposeful lack of clarity is perfectly clear.[14]

At any rate, while Yarvin is an advocate of sovcorps ruling over us, Land advocates for gov-corps. This particular strand of NRx thinking proposes that entire nations would be converted to business enterprises run by gov-corps.[15]

It is essential to quote Land himself in order to understand how mad, bad and dangerous these miscreants are. Before we do so, and because the NRx IT guys use jargon to mask their inferiority complex, which I surmise stems from not being actual philosophers, we will need to explain the term ‘neo-cameralism’.

Cameralism, in its narrowest sense, is simply the science of public finance and administration. The NRx concept of neo-cameralism broadens cameralism to mean the cataloguing and mapping of all ruling class functions with a view to subsuming them (discarding where necessary) into their new vision of technocratic ruling systems and entities, such as gov-corps.

To quote Land[16]:

“[I]t is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state ‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will remain in the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue.”

This is actually a rare example of clear-eyed, albeit demonic, NRx thinking. I think most readers of this blog would agree that, although the state does not belong to us because it has been hijacked by the oligarchy, it ought to belong to us. The NRx crowd, on the other hand, believe that the best way to correct this ownership problem is to simply make the current fraud official. This amounts to wholesale Revelation of the Method – let’s dispense with the Punch and Judy show and publicly bow down to Baal.

What would a CEO-style dictatorship under a barking-mad gaggle of NRx IT guys look like? Well, Yarvin, the American NRx ‘philosopher’ king, has solved what he called “the problem of adults who are not productive members of society.” Exactly how he would define an unproductive member of society is not clear, but don’t be surprised if it involves a below-average score on Minecraft for the previous two quarters. In explicitly ruling out genocide, Yarvin demonstrated that genocide had seriously crossed his mind, and that the idea was canned probably on the basis of its low PR rating. So instead, Yarvin proposes to “virtualise them.”

Yarvin attempted to sooth the nerves of those who might baulk at “virtualising” their fellow human beings by suggesting that[17]:

“a virtualised human is in permanent solitary confinement, waxed like a bee larva into a cell which is sealed except for emergencies. This would drive him insane, except that the cell contains an immersive virtual-reality interface which allows him to experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Anything I said to describe this proposal would not adequately express the outrage that should well up on reading those words. Here I must confess that I lack the requisite extravagance of vocabulary to do justice to the scale of Yarvin’s depravity. Even when I try to switch from condemning to understanding, I find myself staring again into a pool of psychological knowledge that is too shallow to accommodate the volume of his madness. The best I can do is to reflect that it might be more realistic to ask a fish to grow legs and run the London marathon than to expect an NRx IT guy to solve any problems, human or otherwise, using a non-digital paradigm.

I don’t doubt that the Yarvins of the world have read more than just data processing manuals and computer processing theory. In fact, I’m quite sure they’ve had a better education and more time on their hands than me, so they have to be far better-read than me. But what is the point of all that time, education, and reading if, at the end of your philosophical search for knowledge, the best you can offer as a solution to “unproductive” humans is to “virtualise” them, or that the ‘solution’ to rapid technological advancement is to simply accelerate it? What have they been reading and why has it turned them into human malware?

It seems, therefore, that it is quite possible to read extensively, and yet still emerge as a human simulation of a synthetic computer program. Worse still, the starting point of viewing “unproductive” humans as a problem renders these supposed independent ‘thinkers’ as unwitting and witless automatons of a system which has programmed them to value “productivity” as a worthy end in itself. There is no evidence of any capacity for independent thought that would lead to questioning what it would mean for a human to be productive, and who should benefit from human productivity. Moreover, how can a human-made production system result in so many humans becoming mysteriously “unproductive”? What does that tell us about the minds behind the creation of the system? I’m no philosopher, but I’d expect one to at least pretend to grapple with these questions, before throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “Let’s virtualise the whole lot of them.”

Perhaps the best way to draw a line under the ‘thinking’ of the NRx movement is to highlight a description of them offered by a more astute tech writer. Corey Pein, writing for The Baffler in 2014, essentialised them in two words – “mouthbreathing Machiavellis”.[18]

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In Part II of this review of Iain Davis’s work, we will examine the macro-level and micro-level dynamics that will make technocracy function. I will also put Bitcoin in the cross-hairs in a way that most alt-media writers don’t. Bitcoin is somewhat of a sacred cow, which to my mind it does not deserve to be.

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[1] Iain Davis, The Technocratic Dark State, The Papercutmagazine.com, 2025, Pg. 23.

[2] Ibid., Pg. 29.

[3] Ibid., Pg. 33.

[4] Ibid., Pg. 19.

[5] Ibid., Pg. 196.

[6] Ibid., Pg. 175.

[7] Ibid., Pg. 178.

[8] Ibid., Pg. 190.

[9] Ibid., Pg. 193.

[10] Ibid., Pg. 194.

[11] Ibid., Pg. 43.

[12] Ibid., Pg. 44-45.

[13] A google search reveals that “Minecraft is a popular 3D sandbox video game often described as virtual Lego, where players explore an infinite, block-based world to mine resources, craft items, and build structures. It has no set goals, allowing players to choose between survival (fighting mobs/gathering resources) and creative modes (unlimited building).” [emphasis added]

[14] Davis, op. cit., Pg. 49.

[15] Davis, op. cit., Pg. 64.

[16] Davis, op. cit., Pg. 67.

[17] Davis, op. cit., Pg. 151.

[18] Davis, op. cit., Pg. 196.