“The world that we are being rapidly propelled into, the world which people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk want us to accept the potential for social engineering is unparalleled. It’s like nothing that we have ever experienced before in terms of government control of populations.”
– Iain Davis, from this week’s interview
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Cornelius Vanderbilt. John D. Rockefeller. Andrew Carnegie. John Pierpont Morgan. Henry Ford. These were the names of a few of the individuals in the late 19th century whose financial achievements transformed the scope of America and the way people lived in it. The railroad system in particular was one of the venues by which these people had near monopolies in oil and steel fuelled their rise.[1]
The men also availed themselves of ruthless and unethical business practices to dominate vital industries. Hence they became known as the “Robber Barons.”[2]
These men actually connived with and controlled governments for a time, thus gaining advantages from public power for private gain. It was the climax of American capitalist excess.[3]
This period though came to a close thanks to the outrage of the Progressive era made up of labour unions, women’s suffragettes, muckrakers and other social and political reformers eventually brought them down from this peak of power in the early 20th century. But as they say, when it comes to this trend of the chicanery of the wealthy, what’s old is new again![4]
Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg seem to not only enjoy their enormous privileges, the methods they use are questionable. In a nutshell, their new endorsement of “Making America Great Again” is really an imperative to protect their own selfish business interests.[5]
With Elon Musk’s philanthropic donation of up to $120 million for the Trump presidential campaign, it is compelling to ask exactly what he could be getting as a thank you for billionaire protector Donald Trump.
It turns out that making him the head of a new creation, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) might be part of that answer. DOGE is an instrument by which the government slashes “wasteful” spending on programs, including those that benefit the poor, working people and the environment.[6]
Is there any possible questions one could put to the assertion that the process is free of all considerations of conflict of interest? The robber barons of yesteryear I doubt would raise stultifying objections.
On this week’s chapter of the Global Research News Hour, we are focusing on what the billionaire tech brothers like Musk might be after, and that it goes even beyond even more wealth. There are dreams afoot to transform our democracy into something even more surreal and frankly dystopian…a technocracy!
In our first half hour, we are joined by Dr. Naomi Wolf, the journalist, author, and co-founder of the DailyClout. She alleges and explains Musk’s digital theft of data on Americans at the U.S. Treasury and talks about how this manoeuvre may have made him the most powerful man on the planet. And in our second half hour we speak to UK-based author and journalist Iain Davis about the beliefs of Musk and the billionaire tech crew to usher in a Technocracy and a Dark Enlightenment under the guise of helping to improve the system for all of us.
Dr. Naomi Wolf is a former political consultant and Co-Founder of the DailyClout, a platform that empowers democracy-building. She is the author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth, which launched her reputation as a leading voice within Third Wave feminism, and she authored the 2023 book Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age (Chelsea Green Publishing.) She also wrote the article, The Sack of Rome: Elon Musk’s Digital Coup.
Iain Davis is an independent investigative journalist and author from the UK. His most recent book “The Manchester Attack” is free to subscriber to his blog https://iaindavis.com. Iain’s work has been featured by the Corbett Report and published by the OffGuardian, Geopolitics and Empire, Technocracy News and Trends, Bitcoin Magazine and other independent news outlets. Iain’s more irreverent articles are posted on his Substack at https://iaindavis.substack.com/. HE authored the 2 part series The Dark MAGA Gov-Corp Technate
(Global Research News Hour Episode 466)
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Transcript of Iain Davis, March 19, 2025
Global Research: What do you mean by dark enlightenment and how is that distinct from technocracy?
Iain Davis: The dark enlightenment came out of Warwick University in the UK, or it’s the ideas that underpin it, started in Warwick University in the UK in the mid-1990s in a research unit called the Cybernetics Culture Research Unit that was headed by a guy called Nick Land, who’s a political philosopher and socio-political philosopher.
What they were doing was they were looking at the idea of Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction. So Schumpeter argued that capitalism works by constantly reinventing markets, and technology has a major impact on that. So the example we might use is the destruction of the horse-drawn carriage market to be replaced by the internal combustion engine market.
So this technology moves forward, constantly there’s this cyclical effect that Schumpeter called creative destruction. What Land and other people like a guy called Mark Fisher were looking at at the CCRU was what those ideas of what Schumpeterian kind of creative destruction meant for technological advances, and they could see that with the advances in computing technology that we were approaching what they called the singularity, which was the point at which technology would become self-perpetuating. So we might consider AI programs writing better programs and moving technology forward, at which point they argued that humanity would lose control of technological advancement and technological development, and we would become secondary citizens subject to technological control, basically computer generated and AI control.
So they proposed a system by which human beings could keep up with the pace of this progress, which they termed accelerationism. So accelerationism is applying the concepts of Schumpeterian creative destruction as a methodology for advancing not just capitalism, but also through the mechanisms of capitalism society as well. And that work was then picked up in the US by a guy called Curtis Yarvin, who wrote as Mencius Moldbug, and he kind of developed these ideas in the written form and explored them, and a lot of his stuff was pretty off the wall, kind of irreverent kind of analysis, but also deliberately provocative as well.
And then that was picked up by Land. Land then obviously, I don’t know, you know, it’s difficult to know what degree that Land was working with Yarvin, but certainly he picked up on Yarvin’s ideas and developed this into a treatise that he published in 2012 called The Dark Enlightenment. And in that he laid out, you know, he brought all these ideas together, and he proposed basically a privatised form of government.
So this privatised form of government would be called GovCorp, and this was building on something that Yarvin explained, which was Sovereign Realms, which would be operated by what he called Sovereign Corporations or SovCorps. So this would be a patchwork of realms in Yarvin’s terminology, but Land took this under the umbrella, applied this to the entire nation-state, and beyond, and said that the overarching corporate body that would control the state, and I mean, we have to rethink the terms of the state here, because they’re thinking about things in a very different way, it would be, you know, entirely in the hands of private capital. So they were literally talking about privatised government, and Peter Thiel is very closely associated with Curtis Yarvin.
He backed Curtis Yarvin’s own ventures, he’s an investor in Yarvin’s own business, and, you know, Yarvin has spoken about how he watched the 2016 election results with Thiel, he calls Thiel fully enlightened. If you look at Yarvin, you know, there are numerous examples of Yarvin giving speeches at conferences, and then Thiel very closely echoing what Yarvin said at another conference. You know, they’re obviously in line with each other’s thinking, they obviously share the same kind of outlook.
And obviously now Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Musk is very much, you know, he’s got a family history, he’s steeped in technocracy, and both technocracy and what we might call the dark enlightenment, which we can call GovCorp, are closely aligned in many senses. And I think probably the best way to look at it is that technocracy is like the operating system for a political, say political, a privatized state. It’s apolitical, there is no politics in either technocracy or Gov-Corp, the dark enlightenment.
All political parties are done away with, society itself is done away with, nation states are done away with, they don’t exist anymore. You have a network of realms operated by corporations, and we are considered to be what they call technoplastic beings, cyborgs. So we’re like programmable subroutines within a society, which the technocrats called a social mechanism, rather than a society, which is programmed, you know, to run on a very mechanistic, soulless way.
GR: You mentioned Peter Thiel, he is a major figure in this administration, along with Elon Musk, but it should be pointed out that several of the figures in this administration, for example, J.D. Vance himself, he was considered a protege of Thiel, and he heavily supported financially. The US Ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, was also Ken Howard. He was a PayPal co-founder with Thiel. Jacob Holberg, the Undersecretary of State of Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, he was a pro-Israel and a senior advisor to another private surveillance firm co-founded by Peter Thiel.
Michael Kratios, science advisor and director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, was a first-term policy specialist on artificial intelligence, drones, quantum computing, and cybersecurity. He worked for two of Peter Thiel’s funds. Can you tell us a little bit more about Peter Thiel’s background and what made him such a major force within this administration?
ID: Yeah, so when Land wrote The Dark Enlightenment, he cited a speech, a reference to speech, given by Peter Thiel.
There was a discussion, I think it was held by the Cato Institute, and following that discussion, Thiel wrote an article which Land found inspirational. And in it, Thiel argued that basically that democratic politics, I mean, he echoed and was almost kind of the forerunner for much of the kind of thinking that is contained within The Dark Enlightenment. So, for example, democratic politics is an obstacle to be overcome because the unthinking demos, and these are Thiel’s words, the unthinking demos, which means us, we are acolytes of the power structure and we can’t get beyond it.
In The Dark Enlightenment, the power structure is called the cathedral, and that we can’t move beyond it. And we are stopping billionaire oligarchs like Peter Thiel being able to do whatever he wants, which would enable technology to move forward at the pace that advocates of The Dark Enlightenment think it needs to move in order to keep up with, you know, keep humanity up with approaching the singularity. So Thiel said that there were three realms that he thought were vitally important.
The first one was cyberspace that, you know, he thought that it would do away effectively with the need for democratic government, that you would have new forms of dissent, new forms of debate, new forms of decision making enabled by global communication networks. The second was monetary reform. You know, he advocated a new form of currency, which is, or a new form of money, which is common to both, you know, technocracy.
In technocracy, you know, the idea was to move to these things called energy certificates. But so this idea of monetary form. And the third was seasteading, which he said would be an interim step before the conquest of space.
So that is very much, you know, obviously that’s aligned with the technological development that both Thiel and that network and some, you know, somebody else that I would highlight is Mark Andreessen from Andreessen Horowitz, the founder of Netscape and one of the earliest internet kind of entrepreneurs, or certainly one of the first, you know, highly successful internet entrepreneurs. And Horowitz, you know, is obviously part of that network as well, you know, with Musk and Thiel and, you know, Lutnick and Ellison and people like this. And they are very much advising and steering, I would suggest, the Trump administration.
Now, Andreessen has been involved in picking in Trump’s picks for office. Now, he’s been part of a group that have been assisting Trump in picking people for various positions, you know, assisting, I use the word, I use the word advisedly. And he wrote a document called the Techno Optimist Manifesto shortly before the Trump, I think it was in 2024, may have been earlier.
But in it, I mean, he basically just says outright that we are, and he uses the term we, and I think it’s fairly obvious what network he’s referring to. We are accelerationists. He calls Nick Land, who wrote the Dark Enlightenment, one of the saints of techno optimism, you know, so it’s pretty clear what this network of immensely wealthy and powerful individuals have in their minds.
And it’s also pretty clear how influential they are in the Trump administration.
GR: I know that in 2020, Pronomos Capital, a venture capital firm backed by Peter Thiel, and that man you mentioned, Mark Andreessen, they established the low tax, low regulation, nascent city state called Prospera on the island of Roatán in Honduras. And there are plans to build 10 such freedom city states across America.
How will these cities, you just maybe describe if you could, how these cities will help to transform the larger area and ultimately the technate?
ID: Well, the idea is that these would be a kind of autonomous areas within the US where there would be no regulation or no federal regulation. And that the people that are in charge of it, the oligarchs that are running it would have autonomy to basically set their own regulatory framework, which is likely to be pretty much nothing, and enable them to do whatever they like within their city states, which they’re calling freedom cities. Now, this hasn’t gone down very well in Honduras.
The current government is trying to stop Prospera from going ahead. But there are legal wranglings involving the World Bank, which are, which there are clauses in the contract, which these techno oligarchs are using, and they’ve launched an $11 billion lawsuit against the government of Honduras, which is sufficient to bankrupt it. So, I mean, the idea of the freedom cities, I think, will probably be what we in the UK call industrial parks.
I don’t know what you call them in the States. But, you know, areas like Silicon Valley, where there’s a lot of investment in technological development, but the view is definitely that they will bring a job, you know, that the sales pitch, if you like, for them, is that they will onshore jobs is that they’ll bring new vitality to American technological industry, that they will create wealth for the surrounding area, that, you know, these will be hubs of activity. That is very much the sales pitch.
But what they are as well, and, you know, I don’t know quite how this would work, you probably know better than I how this would work from a constitutional perspective. It is literally ceding US territory to the exclusive control of technological oligarchs. Now, I’m not quite sure how that would work within the confines of the constitution.
I don’t know that it would. I mean, it doesn’t seem that I don’t see how that could work. But that’s basically what they are.
And, you know, whether in the future, undoubtedly, the plan is that they would also become, you know, urban areas. And one of the places where people would also reside and live, which would place them under the control of these oligarchs that have got free hand to do whatever they like. And, you know, I think it’s if we look at things like, you know, Trump spoke about the potential, the possibility of the US expanding its interests in Greenland.
Well, the reason for that is not that I would suggest not that Donald Trump has got any concept of why the US might want to expand its interest in Greenland. It’s because the same network, you know, with Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, also the investors of Coinbase, which was an accelerated startup under, you know, these terms accelerators are used everywhere. One of them is the Y Combinator accelerator.
So these are investment startup vehicles. Coinbase is one of those that came out of the Y Combinator accelerator that they want to build one of these freedom cities on Greenland called Praxis. So that’s why I would suggest that the US administration has kind of made tentative kind of statements about being interested in expanding its interests on Greenland.
So, you know, I think it’s evident that that what they have in mind. And I think that one of the difficulties that we have in discussing this issue is that we don’t even really have the terms. I mean, you know, I mean, GovCorps comes from the from the Dark Enlightenment.
Obviously, Technates comes from the original Technocracy Inc model of technocracy. So, you know, they’re combining these ideas. So, I mean, the notion of the Gov-Corp Technate is, you know, is something that we can use, hopefully, to describe the kind of city states that they have in mind.
GR: Yeah. OK, well, in terms of bringing all of this into fruition, I mean, I think you asked your average citizen, they’re not going to be keen on seeing their democracy replaced by technocracy. They’ve got to be, I guess, yield, make yields of some sort.
And I suppose one of the mechanisms they could do that is through our use of currency, digital currency, which apparently, as you’ve written, you’ve said that it’s a lot of this currency could be used to, well, we can keep track of people’s expenditures, because it’s out in the open. And it can even be programmed in some way. And I think one of the reasons that people voted for Trump is because he was going to stamp it out and he would prohibit the establishment, issuance and circulation and the use of the CBDC, the Central Bank Digital Currency, within the jurisdiction of the United States.
Yay. But, you know, instead, he’s bringing in things, there’s the tether backed by Howard Letnik’s, Cantor Fitzgerald and perhaps other stablecoins that, but this sort of thing would give the United States an advantage internationally that they were losing now that the U.S. dollar isn’t so hot anymore and people are moving to the BRICS and other such mechanisms. So I guess I have to ask you, I mean, does this not provide any advantage to the digital currency that I just mentioned, I mean, as opposed to the CBDC?
ID: Yeah, I mean, I think CBDC, Central Bank Digital Currency and stablecoins such as tether are all forms of tokenized assets or, you know, they’re tokenized money in this case, tokenized currency.
So they’re, from that perspective, they’re not dissimilar. You know, Central Bank Digital Currency and a stablecoin are technologically very similar. When Trump made the executive order, obviously, as you quite rightly say, he’d been elected promising that he would not allow the development of Central Bank Digital Currency.
And sure enough, that’s one of the first executive orders he made, you know, was stipulated that. But the same executive order also massively deregulated and promised to invest billions in the development of stable coins. Now, any digital currency, such as a stable coin or Central Bank Digital Currency, can be programmed using things called smart contracts.
So there are certain different models. There’s payment versus payment and there’s payment versus delivery. But different types of smart contracts can be written into the code of any transaction using any kind of digital currency.
So, for example, you know, you could write in a digital contract that says that, you know, the funds won’t be released until the recipient has received delivery. So that would be payment versus delivery, a simple contract written into the software. But you could also use it for other things.
So, for example, if we consider what happened in Canada, where the banks restricted people’s access to, for example, funding the truckers’ protests, that required government legislation and government partnership with the payment providers and the banks. They needed to agree that the individuals would not be able to do this because, obviously, that’s seizing people’s control over their funds. In a digital currency world, you could just program that into the money.
So if you’re using a digital wallet, you will have your digital currency, whether it’s a stable coin or CBDC, makes little difference. You will have your digital wallet with your digital currency in it. Well, that currency, the currency in your wallet can be programmed so that you know, if you’re a Canadian, for example, you can’t make a payment in support of, for example, a protest movement that you wish to support.
You literally you try to make the transaction and your currency literally won’t work. You can’t, you know, say physically, you can’t digitally achieve that, that your money can be utterly controlled. So, you know, your money could be geo-fenced.
So it doesn’t work outside of certain areas. So, you know, when we’re thinking about things like, I mean, if we take, for example, a freedom city, you could issue a currency inside a freedom city that only works in that freedom city. So when an individual has got that currency in their wallet and they move outside of the freedom city to try to, you know, transact elsewhere, they won’t be able to because the money won’t work.
So the level of potential social engineering that is, and bearing in mind, this needs to be linked to digital ID as well, but the potential level of social engineering that is inherent to these, this tokenized, digital tokenized kind of currency identity, the world that we are being rapidly propelled into, the world which people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk want us to accept the potential for social engineering is unparalleled. It’s like nothing that we have ever experienced before in terms of government control of populations. We really are talking, you know, in a highly individualized, probably AI-managed social control system.
GR: In order to avoid these sorts of outcomes of, you know, socially engineered, so on, what can we actually do? Is there any hope that we can reverse the course towards this technocratic nightmare?
ID: Well, I don’t think we can stop those that hell-bent on constructing it from constructing it. They’re definitely doing that. But we don’t have to participate.
You know, there’s no reason why we have to go along with it. So for example, at the moment, people are going to airports and having their irises scanned so that they can fly. But what they don’t know, if just a little bit of research and a little bit of thought, you would also know that there are slower, less convenient, but, you know, that you don’t have to have your irises scanned.
So currently, refuse to have your irises scanned. So there are lots of things that we can do to slow down this process and to resist it. Using cash, for example, you know, paying for everything that you possibly can with cash so that we keep cash.
So, you know, there are lots of things that we can do. But unfortunately, I don’t personally, I mean, I don’t think that the ballot box is the place where we can make those kind of changes.
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