4 things a week: Unreasonable conversations

1. World

I’ve been think about two conversations I had over the weekend and the parallels to be drawn between them. The first was about Curtis Yarvin. For those who don’t know who he is, he’s an anti-democratic writer who believes America should be run by a monarchy. Not so much a king on a throne, but run as a company with a CEO. The other conversation I was involved in was the declining state of many towns in the UK.

So what’s the connection?

There are cities in the UK; Stoke, Blackpool, even areas of London that are struggling. Public transport, industry and housing issues and bureaucratic and restrictive systems with poor communication between organisations and departments making any progress slow and diluted mean these cities are increasingly underserving their residents. And that’s because they have evolved over many years, passed from one local councillor and mayor to the next, each with a short window to try and make a difference and increasingly putting bandaid over bandaid to fix the short term crisis and not addressing the long term issues or planning for the future.

If you were a Silicon Valley investor living in one of these cities you’d have a solution. You would be drawing up plans to scrap the failing town altogether and start again with a brand new city with a name like California Forever - a ridiculously named plan for a new town in Solano County, California, created because a bunch of rich white men feel that San Francisco is a bit old and tired; not worth fixing and easier to build anew. It’s people like these who follow the beliefs of Curtis Yarvin; a man who’s friends include the likes of Peter Thiel; cofounder of PayPal with Elon Musk.

Curtis’s ideas of how a city should be run are most likely very similar to his ideas on government which have appeared to be the playbook for JD Vance and Trump as they have taken over office. His suggestions for what a would-be American autocrat should initiate include something called R.A.G.E (retire all government employees) in a federal bureaucracy purge and a fundamental tear down of the existing administrative levels of power. He also advocates for the silencing of liberal media and university organisations who he believes are at the heart of progressive liberalism propaganda. Sound familiar?

This idea that, just as a failing company might be better off being liquidated and replaced than restructured, the American Government should be completely broken apart and rebuilt from scratch is, at least in the way he lays it out, absurd. Saying that a Caesar-like ruler would work in 2025 is as useful as implying that we need to revert back to the early ideas of the internet. It’s too late, people got too open minded and things got too complex. Even if you did manage to take the entire system apart, which might be feasible in time, fundamentally in both the government and the city; it comes down to leadership. Who makes the decisions? Curtis seems to interchangeably use the term monarch and CEO. To me those mean completely different things. The monarch’s duty is to serve the people. The CEO’s job is to serve the interest of the business. I do believe the CEO model would run more efficiently. Company name: America. Company mission: make it great again. But who defines great?

That being said; what if you got it right? What if there were systems in place to ensure the company was run ethically and fairly. What if there was a great visionary CEO and a B Corp style evaluation to hold up standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability. You have to question how much might be achieved? In both the U.S. and Stoke-on-Trent. Or is to even consider it too anti-democratic?

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