Top all-time · #2217
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Curtis Yarvin
Personal blog · graymirror.substack.compoliticsphilosophy
Curtis Yarvin writes Gray Mirror, a personal blog at graymirror.substack.com about politics and philosophy. Since 2020, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “The Inflation Economy”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
46mentions?
11recommend?
34HN people?
2020–2026first – last linked?
Sometimes recommended · 11 of 38 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Curtis Yarvin's Substack for essays on power, institutions, big tech, free speech and Covid, often as provocative reading. Commenters point to it as a starting point for his wider ideas.
- Recommended for · 11 comments
- Called worth a quick read and a good starting point, a clear description of moderation, and a prediction that was right.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 38 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A portal to the next regime. Click to read Gray Mirror, by Curtis Yarvin, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- /6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-10-11
- /p/4-principles-of-any-next-regime2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-10-12
- /p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-15
- /p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-28
- The Inflation Economy2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-25
- /p/the-butterfly-revolution2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-10
- /p/3-descriptive-constitution-of-the2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-12-02
- /p/big-tech-has-no-power-at-all2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-05
- How to Regulate the Tech Platforms2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-19
What Hacker News says?
>The hobbit is simply embarrassed into compliance by his elven betters. The ideas he believes become a dangerous mental disease. This diagnosis is written into history. The sooner he gives up this nonsense, the better. To help convince him, we'll make this idea quasi-illegal. The sooner he gives it up, the less his life will suffer. Eventually he can be fired for staying an idiot. Everyone will agree that he deserve…
Comment linking /p/vae-victis
on “How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler”Submitted 2020, the Year of Everything Fake as a story · 27 points
HN discussionRead the Bufferfly Revolution by Curtis Yarvin (April, 2022) > We’ve got to risk a full power start—a full reboot of the USG. We can only do this by giving absolute sovereignty to a single organization—with roughly the powers that the Allied occupation authorities held in Japan and Germany in the fall of 1945. > Trump himself will not be the brain of this butterfly. He will not be the CEO. He will be the chairman of…
Comment linking /p/the-butterfly-revolution
on “DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data”Submitted Open Letter to Paul Graham as a story · 25 points
HN discussion> things that are luxuries have decreased greatly in cost That's because we govern as if public luxury is the supreme law. Luxus populi suprema lex. Curtis Yarvin talks about it here: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/4-principles-of-any-next-r...
Comment linking /p/4-principles-of-any-next-regime
on “America's 1% Has Taken $50T From the Bottom 90%”Submitted The Inflation Economy as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI like this description of the problem and the suggestion: > Today on Twitter, as on most social media, justice works in a roughly Stalinist style. The normal penalty is permanent execution. There is no transparent explanation for why an account is executed, before or after the execution. It has simply “violated the Twitter rules.” The public rules are extremely abstract and could theoretically justify almost any ex…
Comment linking /p/the-twitter-coup
on “Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company”Submitted Curtis Yarvin on Techno-Optimism as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is a related article: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech... The first part is about politics, if you only care about the tech part, you can jump to the following headlines: - Encrypted clients - Protocol extraction and unauthorized clients - The secure personal server - Technology is hard, actually
Comment linking /p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem
on “Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech (2019)”Submitted Paul Graham's Error as a story · 4 points
HN discussionCurtis Yarvin has new, much-more-concise explanation of the "cathedral" and domininant power ideas up on his Substack that's worth a quick read: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the... ( An oligarchy inherently converges on ideas that justify the use of power. ) I think it's as good of an explanation as any for why old-academy classical liberalism is losing (and will continue to lose): truth…
Comment linking /p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral
on “Silicon Valley’s Safe Space”Submitted “Circling” and Nerd Society as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI totally understand. And so many tech bros misunderstand. Its not a problem with the tools and its not the money. Artists have extensive experience going hungry. So have I. I doubt many tech bros and technocrats know what starving feels like. Real hunger. But I digress. Its how the tech is being wielded. Its not just: can the robot imitate a nice picture. Its: artists are deprecated. And it mistakes artifice and ar…
Comment linking /p/the-butterfly-revolution
on “I built an open source AI tool to find my autoimmune disease”Submitted How to Regulate the Tech Platforms as a story · 4 points
HN discussion>though I don't know how you want to argue that the world isn't mostly run by capitalist forces. Again, if this is something you want to question I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere. I believe that the world is primarily run by academia and journalists, and this is best described as a clerical oligarchy. In 1890 the US was definitely a capitalist/commercial oligarchy, in 2020 the US is definitely not one and is…
Comment linking /p/3-descriptive-constitution-of-the
on “Godot maintainer removes controversial satirical piece from documentation”Submitted Gray Mirror of the Nihilist Prince as a story · 3 points
HN discussionread curtis yarvin, find the weaknesses in his arguments, and use those weaknesses against their ideology. for start, he thinks FDR was a dictator but the only reason FDR had such power was because the support of labor and some parts of capital. he would know that if he was a historian instead of LARPing as one. so organizing and supporting the labor movement would be a good place to start, since a organized labor c…
Comment linking /p/the-pleasure-of-error
on “Announcing the data.gov archive”Twitter has no power in this censorship. The power passes through them, but it is not their power because they have no choice. And it's not coming from the government either. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/big-tech-has-no-power-at-a...
Comment linking /p/big-tech-has-no-power-at-all
on “Twitter sees jump in govt demands to remove content of reporters, news outlets”You can also sign up to Curtis Yarvin's Substack and read the kind of thinking that Thiel likes to surround himself with: https://graymirror.substack.com/
Comment linking /
on “Palantir is extending its reach even further into government”https://graymirror.substack.com/p/its-easy-from-here
Comment linking /p/its-easy-from-here
on “Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America”https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-great-coup-of-2021 >Once power loses its mask, once censoring dissent because it makes a mockery of the government is not just what power is doing, but actually what power says it’s doing, we enter a new stage of history—because serving this power is openly humiliating to the servant. Or at least, to any servant of intelligence, wisdom, conscience and character. >At this stage,…
Comment linking /p/the-great-coup-of-2021
on “Facebook Says It Is Removing All Content Mentioning 'Stop the Steal'”Other people are thinking along the same lines: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech...
Comment linking /p/tech-solutions-to-the-tech-problem
on “RSS as a Facebook alternative”Huh. I didn't even know that Trump was on Facebook, I should get out more. Looking at this, I don't know what the justification for banning is but like most political decisions I guess you don't want to watch the sausage getting made. https://m.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/?ref=page_internal&... Future historians will look back at the brilliance of building near-monopoly platforms by inviting one and all for free,…
Comment linking /p/big-tech-has-no-power-at-all
on “Facebook's Trump ban upheld by Oversight Board, for now”You are completely correct, I didn't mean to argue against the Dems, just noting that I hear this critique raised against them a lot. >Arguably by the same reasoning, republicans benefit from legal abortion and their finally getting Roe v Wade reversed was terrible for their electoral performance. Indeed, the far-right has raised exactly this criticism of overturning Roe v Wade: >If you have limited energy and a lim…
Comment linking /p/you-can-only-lose-the-culture-war
on “Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders”Thank you for that! I didn't know about Yarvin nor List. I will try to find out more. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/implementing-market-balanc...
Comment linking /p/implementing-market-balanced-trade
on “Growing trade deficit is selling the nation out from under us (2003) [pdf]”I recommend reading Curtis Yarvin's recent writing on this exact topic [1]. [1]: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk
Comment linking /p/there-is-no-ai-risk
on “Microsoft president: Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024”I'd say one example would be Curtis Yarvin: https://graymirror.substack.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin Also Nick Land: https://zerophilosophy.substack.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Land
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Why is Substack so popular?”I'm reading this now, I think it's from a book he's working on now: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/4-principles-of-any-next-r... Compared to what passes for intellectualism nowadays (especially from those running the show, or at least advertised as doing so), this guy seems like he's not just on a different level, but from a completely different dimension. I don't agree with the final conclusions he draws, or at…
Comment linking /p/4-principles-of-any-next-regime
on “Everything I know about elite America I learned from Fresh Prince and West Wing”Absolutely, this is basically neo-reactionary kind of stuff but from a deep metaphysical perspective. Another author worth checking out is Curtis Yarvin who is much more focused on material/realpolitik concerns. This is a good one to start with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRQO3VbJsMw He also has a substack but the focus is much more narrow than what you get in these interviews. It's intended to be a modern vers…
Comment linking /
on “Everything I know about elite America I learned from Fresh Prince and West Wing”> the idea is deeply terrible, and implements a sort of feudal network with kings, lords and peasants (galaxies, stars, planets) That’s what we have today, except it’s profoundly more disturbing. Urbit would be like if you were under the care of Facebook, but you genuinely owned your data. Facebook just routed connections for you if you weren’t already connected to someone. And you retain the ability to move from Fa…
Comment linking /p/how-to-regulate-the-tech-platforms
on “Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit”
