By all appearances, a populist revival is sweeping the globe, from rural heartlands to digital spaces and political rallies. It is a movement claiming to reclaim the nation from the grasp of corrupt elites, transnational bureaucracies, and decaying liberal democracies. But look closer, and the image distorts.
What presents itself as grassroots rebellion is often being driven by figures and ideologies that despise the very foundations of populist thought: individual liberty, local self-governance, the rule of law, and constitutional restraint.
The ideological force at work behind this sleight of hand is technopopulism—a mutation of traditional populism incubated in the philosophical engine of the Dark Enlightenment, where thinkers like Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) reframe democracy not as a safeguard of freedom, but as a failed experiment that must be replaced by algorithmic governance and executive rule.
In this warped mirror, populists are no longer the champions of liberty—they are foot soldiers for a new, data-driven ruling class.
The Bait: Populist Language, Libertarian Aesthetics
Technopopulism emerged through Silicon Valley corridors and NRx blogs, but it found a global audience by weaponizing the language of populism: anti-elite rhetoric, calls to restore “order” and “competence”, and celebrations of “free markets” and “free speech.”
Figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Balaji Srinivasan don the populist mantle while proposing visions in which freedom is redefined as submission to optimized systems, where code becomes law, and where traditional political authority is replaced with tech-stack sovereignty.
Yarvin explicitly denounces democracy, calling for a monarch acting like a corporate CEO. Thiel has praised the “beauty” of a post-democratic Singapore. Srinivasan envisions replacing nation-states with “Network States” governed by digital platforms and biometric entry keys.
The Switch: From Liberty to Order
Traditional populism—whether American, Hungarian, or Indian—rests on sovereignty of the people, preserved through limited government, inalienable rights, and rule of law. It resists centralized control.
But technopopulism flips the script. Sovereignty is inefficient. Rights are flexible. Rule of law is optional—if the algorithms work better.
Technopopulists promise a “new golden age,” but only if we surrender the old architecture of liberty. They frame autocratic governance as a feature, not a bug—so long as it’s “efficient” and “technologically sophisticated.”
This is not a restoration of freedom. It is the soft coup of the digital elite, masquerading as rebellion.
Network States: The Technocratic Utopias of the Right
Nowhere is the deception clearer than in the rise of so-called “Network States.”
Promoted by Balaji Srinivasan and bankrolled by Thiel-affiliated capital, these are digital startup societies that aim to gain political recognition and replace traditional governments. Projects like Próspera (Honduras) and Praxis aren’t citizen-led movements—they are venture capital experiments where unelected founders design governance from the top down, in other words, a Technocracy.
These entities promise freedom from bureaucracy. In reality, they offer private sovereignty ruled by unaccountable, arch-technocrat billionaires, with little regard for the communities they displace.
The Parallel of Globalists and Anti-Globalists
While populists cheer the downfall of the “liberal order,” they are unknowingly embracing a technocratic mirror image of the very system they oppose.
Both global technocrats (UN, WEF, EU) and anti-globalist technopopulists (Thiel network, Dark Enlightenment, etc.) believe:
The future belongs to digital systems
Constitutional democracy is obsolete
Efficiency outweighs rights
Governance should be optimized, not debated
In both visions, the common man loses. He may be told he has a voice, but in practice, his behavior is engineered through smart grids, carbon scores, or blockchain sovereignty. Whether it’s called “sustainable development” or “startup citizenship,” the effect is the same: technocratic control disguised as empowerment.
The Irony of the “Freedom Stack”
In software development, the phase “full stack” refers to the customer facing application plus the back-end database configuration and processing. The use of “Freedom Stack” is appropriate except in reality it is a “Slavery Stack.”
Perhaps the most tragic irony is that many liberty-minded citizens have been duped into building their own chains. Populists fail to see that they are helping replace one end-to-end surveillance regime with another, trading government overreach for Technocrat omniscience.
Technopopulism presents compliance as liberty: “You’re free… as long as you don’t trigger the algorithm.”
Conclusion: The Rebellion That Wasn’t
The Dark Enlightenment hasn’t just critiqued democracy. It has infiltrated and redirected populist energy into a project that retains populist aesthetics but implements technocratic governance.
The result is a hollowed-out resistance movement, waving liberty flags while marching toward a hyper-digitized, corporately governed future.
Populists are not reclaiming the republic—they are birthing its replacement. And until this deception is exposed, technocracy will rise unchallenged, wearing the very clothes of freedom it seeks to destroy.
Patrick Wood is a leading and critical expert on Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Agenda 21, 2030 Agenda and historic Technocracy. He is the author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation (2015) and co-author of Trilaterals Over Washington, Volumes I and II (1978-1980) with the late Antony C. Sutton.
