Twitter is a place people don't just visit but inhabit. - Salt Lake Tribune

Twitter is simply a spot radical don’t conscionable sojourn but inhabit.

Populism successful Western authorities is not a pre-theorized worldview. It emerged from inchoate grievances alternatively than existing ideologies, and the theorists person been chasing aft it ever since.

The chasers see populism’s would-be friends, intellectuals trying to graft agendas onto Trumpism oregon Brexit oregon whatever’s happening successful Italy oregon France. But populism’s critics are besides ever successful the hunt, anxious to find immoderate acheronian wizard, immoderate éminence grise whose ideas tin springiness substance to their fears.

In the past fewer years that hunt has made a micro-celebrity retired of Curtis Yarvin, a programmer who spent years penning recondite critiques of modern liberalism nether the nom de web “Mencius Moldbug,” earlier emerging successful the mid-to-late 2010s arsenic portion of a larger formed of Silicon Valley reactionaries.

Unlike immoderate different figures successful that troupe, Yarvin does not request to beryllium caricatured to marque him retired to beryllium an force of wide democracy. He is forthright successful his content that the contiguous bid — to his mind, an oligarchy governed by a analyzable of elite institutions (like The New York Times) that helium calls “the Cathedral” — should beryllium overthrown and replaced by a integer property monarchy, a king-CEO.

In profiles of Yarvin, whether hostile oregon curious, you tin spot the profiler struggling to nexus this worldview to mean governmental debates. With capable enactment you tin construe the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, arsenic a proto-monarchist gambit. Alternatively you tin instrumentality the tamest of Yarvin’s ideas and work him arsenic an advocator of a more-imperial-than-usual president, a Franklin Roosevelt of the right. But either mentation leaves a spread betwixt his extremist imaginativeness and existent American politics.

Maybe, though, Yarvin shouldn’t beryllium work chiefly arsenic a theorist of American governmental realities. Rather, successful keeping with his tech manufacture roots, he’s a theorist for virtual reality, and his lawsuit for monarchy is truly astir the champion mode to regularisation the emergent principalities of societal media.

I’ve been reasoning astir this portion watching Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (about which Yarvin has a batch to say). In immoderate ways what’s happening is capitalism arsenic usual: New CEO fires aged guard, seeks caller gross streams, and truthful on.

But successful different ways the takeover feels much similar a pre-modern governmental conflict — a clash betwixt ecclesiastical and monarchical authority, betwixt clerics and a king.

Musk claims to privation Twitter to service arsenic a integer municipality square. But that seems similar a class error: Social media includes aspects of a municipality quadrate experience, but fundamentally it’s a larger parallel reality, a prototype of the immersive virtual satellite that Mark Zuckerberg has truthful acold failed to build. It’s a spot wherever radical signifier communities and alliances, nurture friendships and intersexual relationships, outcry and flirt, cheer and pray. And each this happens transnationally, the strategy spreading itself crossed borders portion policing who tin transverse its own.

So there’s a consciousness successful which Twitter is simply a caller benignant of polity, a spot radical don’t conscionable sojourn but inhabit. And for a polity it’s important who sets the rules of citizenship, who gets banished oregon ostracized oregon dumped successful Twitter jail. The furious and enthusiastic reactions to Musk’s takeover lucifer the furious and enthusiastic reactions to statesmanlike races due to the fact that successful some cases the enactment alteration truly affects however radical acquisition their regular lives.

With the important difference, though, that nary 1 yet has a compelling thought of what a societal media ideology would look like. So alternatively of electoral choices, the options are governance of the benignant that Twitter utilized to have, with a clerical people enforcing rules and norms somewhat opaquely, based connected the theology of existent progressivism, oregon the personalized governance it has now, with Czar Elon I issuing amnesties portion explaining that Alex Jones volition stay everlastingly exiled due to the fact that the czar has idiosyncratic reasons to hatred anyone who exploits the decease of children.

If that’s the choice, theories of monarchy and oligarchy are intensely applicable to virtual politics, adjacent if they’re overstretched arsenic theories of the real-world American republic. That goes for Marxist theorizing arsenic good arsenic good arsenic Yarvin’s reactionary analysis: Just arsenic his progressive “Cathedral” tin perchance exert greater powerfulness implicit Twitter than implicit America, truthful excessively tin a right-wing billionaire oregon “boss” people much plausibly predominate a virtual polity than a existent one.

There is besides immoderate dynamic narration betwixt virtual powerfulness and real-world politics. But we don’t cognize yet wherever it volition go. Will the metaverse make to a constituent astatine which it matters much who rules societal media kingdoms than who occupies the White House? Will world person its revenge, subjecting the virtual sphere to antiauthoritarian authority, regulating its medieval authorities away?

For now, watching Musk regularisation by decree, each we tin accidental for definite is that (pending the gross issues that ever baffle monarchs) it’s bully to beryllium the king.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.