Everyone will live under the rule of their sovereign corporation via contract, smart contract, and that whole system will have unchallengeable centralised authority exerted over it. You're listening to The Corbett Report.
Welcome, friends. Welcome back to The Corbett Report. James Corbett here at CorbettReport.com in a conversation that is being recorded mid-December of 2025 on a topic that is of great concern, I know, to everyone in the audience, the technocratic dark state, which just happens to be the name of an entire book that has been written on that topic by today's guest.
Today's guest, of course, you will be familiar with if you have seen our previous conversations, or if you have seen his reporting at Unlimited Hangouts, Off Guardian, other outlets besides, he is, of course, Ian Davis. And I'm sure you're familiar with his work, but if not, this is a good time to get familiar with him. You can do so by going to thetechnocraticdarkstate.com and purchasing a copy of his new book.
Let's bring him on the program. Ian Davis, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Oh, it's my pleasure, James. Thanks very much for inviting me. yes i wish we could talk about happy and uh and and exciting uh news on the good news front but unfortunately we are here talking about the technocratic dark state but we are talking about it because it is an impending and encroaching reality that i think we're all starting to uh understand in various ways so let's start diving into this book and the topics of this book i guess again there are new people tuning
in all the time so some people will be familiar with your work and your background. Some won't. So briefly, who are you and why and how did you become interested in this topic in particular?
Um i'm ian davis of uh journalist and author i live and work in the uk uh i first became interested in this probably when i first started reading uh patrick wood work patrick wood's work um and uh ever since then i've been very interested in the in technocracy and the rollout of technocracy um and the thing that struck me almost immediately upon reading his work initially is that once you start, once you understand what it is and you're aware of how it could be implemented,
it became evident to me pretty quickly that it was being implemented. And so I've kind of followed that progression over a number of years now, probably more than a couple of decades, but I've been writing about it for about a decade.
So yeah, and This is very much about the continuation of that rollout of technocracy, which is not, you know, we often fall, one of the topics that I discuss in the book is that we often fall into the trap of, you know, people want to describe it as communism or people want to describe it as fascism. Technocracy is a distinct and separate ideology, for want of a better expression. And obviously, it's very much based on the rollout of more and more and more technological controls.
And that is precisely what we are seeing. And, you know, one of my impetus for writing the book was that, you know, we are getting to the sharp end of that now. I think it's fair to say that much of the infrastructure that would enable that system to work is now pretty much in place. And we are now at the point where it's really now the game is on to entice us to use it.
All right let's dive into the deep end of this conversation um i suppose we could hold people's hand and lead them along through the concept of what is technocracy in the historical technocratic movement but as you say i i imagine a lot of people have encountered that at some point so far if not from my own work and people might want to start at my questions for corbett on what is technocracy then from your work or the work
of patrick wood at technocracy news i think people should be familiar with that term by now but there's plenty of resources for to catch people up to speed. But as you point out in this book, and as you elaborate in great detail, there is a lot more to this term and associated terms, and including terms that have been developed in the past few decades, not the century old technocracy term.
And there's such a tangled, interrelated web of concepts and topics and names and peoples and ideologies and philosophies that I don't know exactly how to disentangle them in the form of a question. So let me, let me try to smush them all together instead. Ian Davis, who are the neo-reactionaries of the dark enlightenment and why are they trying to accelerate us towards their GovCorp slave state?
Yeah, so the book is very much about the group of Silicon Valley oligarchs, perhaps most famously people like Peter Thiel, Mark Anderson, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison. These people that are supporting and were behind very much financially and, you know, certainly in terms of propaganda in supporting the Trump campaign and in getting Donald Trump into office. And they favour something called the Dark Enlightenment, which was a treatise that was written by a UK philosopher, Nick Land, in 2012.
And that was based upon the kind of musings of a guy called Curtis Yarvin in the US. Not based upon, he certainly cited Yarvin heavily when Yarvin was writing under the pseudonym of Mencius Moldeby. And essentially the idea is that they want to privatise all forms of governance under private corporations, which they would consider to be sovereign corporations.
So these would be multinational corporations that would have the ultimate power, ultimate sovereignty over us, controlling a digitally based system where we would surrender our rights via a smart contract to live in one of their controlled sovereign city states.
And the accelerationism part of it is a tactic that they use because one of the things that Lan spoke about in the Dark Enlightenment and one of the ideas that the neo-reactionaries have promoted quite heavily is that you could use an economist called Joseph Schumpeter. He identified something that he called creative destruction.
He identified it as a facet of capitalism i.e it was a it was something that it was this the destruction of one market to be replaced by another market due to technology so as technology moves forward so an easy example to give is the horse and cart gets replaced by the automobile so there's a technological advance and that's obviously ended the market for the horse and cart and created the new market for the automobile now Schumpeter saw that as an effect of capitalist innovation
and technological innovation what the neo reactionaries see it as is a tool to be used to.
To destroy markets and create new ones but they also recognize that monopolistic control of markets comes with socio-political power you are able to exert that through through control of major markets so they therefore thought that it's they if you could use creative destruction through a very aggressive investment or venture capital strategy, which they called accelerationism, which would enable you, they think,
to basically change sociopolitical structures as well through this form of aggressive application of technology. And they see that people like Thiel and Musk see that as kind of the aggressive application of venture capitalism, in what they call disruptive technology.
So if I've got it straight, essentially they're attempting to apply creative destruction to the state itself in order to de-territorialize the political landscape, in order to re-territorialize it with their dream of a GovCorp state of some sort. Yeah. So they often talk about this notion of governance as a service. One of the themes of the book is basically deception. So they've piggybacked on what we might perhaps consider to be quite traditional libertarian concepts such as decentralisation.
Which they would call de-territorialisation, so literally de-territorialising the reach of a market or, in their view, a socio-political system or structure or government, so you de-territorialise that. And then, you know, so a lot of libertarians would look at that and think, well, this notion of decentralisation is good, you know, Even small-c conservatives would think that was good. You know, more localised governance is a good idea.
But then they speak about, as you rightly say, re-territorialisation, which is once you've created this kind of network of de-territorialised sovereign corporation. Yavin talked about a patchwork of realms. So what he means is these islands of sovereign territories, territories of nation states controlled by a sovereign corporation, but they would then be linked together to form a network.
One of the formative writers in the in the neo-reactionary writers this guy called Balaji Srinifazan wrote something called the network state where he spoke about re-territorialization exerting centralized control over the network and that's where we need to be very careful about the way that they use language because they talk in kind of libertarian terms and often are self-styled libertarians.
You know, Thiel has openly, you know, styled himself as a libertarian, and certainly he has been assisted in that endeavour by the media. But what they are suggesting is the antithesis of any kind of libertarian principle that you can think of. Because they are talking about exerting centralized sovereign authority. With no chance of any kind of, you know, even representative democratic oversight such as that is. But, I mean, even that they want to do away with.
Everyone will live under the rule of their sovereign corporation via contract, smart contract. And that whole system will have unchallengeable centralized authority exerted over it. So it is the opposite of libertarianism. Right. I think the tip off that this isn't quite libertarian in nature is the fact that the CEOs of these gov corps are going to be techno kings, which let me check my anarcho-capitalist book.
No, I don't think that that term is one that should be used for anyone who actually believes in human liberty.
Yeah no i mean they i mean it's another reason for writing the book is that they use so much jargon they use esopian language to to so that they can make in jokes to each other that other people don't quite cotton on to so you know one of the reasons that i that one of the things i talk about is that it was just an exchange on x with between elon musk and this guy called gulaine Verdon who runs this thing called the E-accelerationist movement which is kind of like a.
More tech not even more technological based wing of the neo-reactionary movement, and you know looking at it from the outside you wouldn't necessarily spot what what they were saying but Ghislaine Verdon said building the network state on Mars now so you need to know what the network state is all about first to know what that what they're talking about.
Building the network stake on Mars, where Elon Musk then comes back and says, technocracy, quite kind of question mark, and Verdun comes back and says, count me in. So, so another interesting quote from Verdun, he said, if you knew what I was building, you would make it illegal. Or you are words that affect on paraphrasing. If you knew what I was building, you wouldn't allow it or something like that. So and there's all these little these terms that they use.
Well, what's in the name? As you point out, it may be an aside, but as you point out in the book, Doge has multiple potential meanings. And the Doge father himself, Musk, seems to have embraced that term for reasons that we I don't know if we know exactly. But what are some of the speculation around that term? Well, yeah, it could be that he's referencing the Dogecoin, which was a meme coin that was that was I mean, the interesting part of the Dogecoin for me is that it was literally a parody.
Mean coin. It was a parody. It was a joke. The two guys that put it out did it for a laugh. But through his social media reach, Musk took the value of that coin, I think, up in 2014. It was 2020. No, in 2021, he took it to, I think, a market cap of something like, I don't know, I can't remember now. It was either 14 million or 14. It was an exorbitant market cap that they managed to get for this coin, which was a joke.
But the interesting thing about that is that Musk's team, and I'm very much one of the things I talk about, is that these people are representative of networks. They're not, they're characters. They're not, you know, obviously Musk is an individual, but he's representative of a network. But his team knew that they could just say things online and have a massive market influence on the valuation of a fake product.
And I think that then subsequently you see Musk doing that in a much broader context. So, for example, in the UK, you know, sticking his oar in to suggest that, you know, for political reasons, suggesting that, you know, perhaps we should have a revolution in the UK, a violent revolution, this kind of thing. So he understands the impact of his words. So Doge could be a reference to that. But obviously, the Doge was also the appointed head of the mercantile Venetian Republic.
And the Venetian Republic is a model island city-state.
Peter Thiel is very much, he was sort of very interested in seasteading, i.e. Reclaiming the oceans and building kind of autonomous city-states in the oceans, which if you look at if you think about um venice of old um that was a load of islands in the middle of the middle of the sea well swamp actually but i mean it was it was nonetheless it was you know you can see that there are parallels there so maybe doge was again one of these in jokes that they like to uh they like to uh throw
around amongst themselves and doge elon i I mean, even Elon's name was famously part of a Werner Von Braun story about the leader of Mars was called Elon. Anyway, what's in the name, I suppose. But getting more to the heart of this ideology and what is really being talked about here. What role does AI play in the plans of these accelerationists?
Well, you know, a very prominent member of this group, Mark Anderson, who's kind of one of the partners of Anderson Horowitz, which is arguably, is it the biggest technology venture capitalist firm? It might, if it isn't, it's up there with the biggest. He said that AI is our philosopher's stone. So the notion being that, you know, the Philosopher's Stone, the elixir that changes matter from one substance to another, you know, the idea that it is transformative.
So it's a metaphor for transformation. And they are absolutely convinced that AI is the transformative elixir that they can use to bring about what Peter Thiel said was the end of politics in all its forms. Again, you know, ostensibly on the surface, something that, you know, libertarians might support But what he means is replacing it with autocratic rule, that's what he means So it's not quite as libertarian as it first sounds.
But yeah, so they see AI as the key to transforming the world But again, again, going back to deception, which is thick, it goes throughout the whole kind of neo-reactionary kind of perspective. You know, when land first came up with the dark enlightenment, the assumption was that the singularity was going to happen. The singularity being the point at which technology, you know, becomes self-perpetuating and surpasses humans' ability to adapt to it.
That's an assumption that lies at the heart of the dark enlightenment and therefore, we must be adapted to cope with the singularity. So they are transhumanists. They're all very avid transhumanists.
So that's why we see people like Thiel and Musk investing so heavily in things like, you know, neural interfaces and that kind of thing, that kind of technology, because they believe that the only way we can survive the forthcoming singularity, singularity, which inevitably AI is going to produce, then, you know, then we need to be transformed into kind of genetically enhanced cyborgs. This is their belief system.
I'll get to belief in a moment because I did question that in the book, but nonetheless. So AI for them is this magic, magic thing, this magic entity that's going to make everything brilliant. But if you, look at the development of AI, we are some way off it becoming the kind of sentient entity that they think it's going to be.
There are many, many hurdles that have to be overcome first before it even becomes what they call theory of mind AI, which would be the next step along that path if we head in that direction. There are things like catastrophic forgetting problems that it has. You sometimes hear the term brittle AI. There are massive technological problems that have yet to be solved to even get us to progress beyond basically LLMs, which are just big calculators. So, their whole premise is based upon assumption.
They're assuming that these things are going to happen. At the same time, whilst warning about the potential risks of the singularity, all of their companies and all of their investment and all of their kind of technological drive is... They're pushing us as hard as they possibly can, accelerating us towards trying to create the thing that they're warning us against. So it's just, you know, I suppose if there is one major theme of the book,
it is deception. It is the degree of deception that these characters are taking us through. I would say another major theme of the book is the quest for control. And the quest for control of humanity down to the genomic level and everything else, and that can be accomplished technologically in a number of different ways. And a lot of these different characters have different things to say about it.
One key aspect of that is control of the economy down to the economic atomic level, aka the monetary level.
And of course in that regard we have to look at a character like Peter Thiel who of course was known as one of the co-founders of PayPal along with Elon Musk but Thiel had his own particular vision for PayPal and what it was going to accomplish which I think is now being accomplished through stablecoin and other means CBDC world that we're stepping into so can you tell us a little about that vision for how the economic life of the GovCorp will be managed at the base level.
Yeah. So, I mean, when when PayPal was first set up, Theo, around the same time, Theo said that the purpose of it was to create what he called, quote, a new world currency. And not shortly after that, I may be getting my years mixed up, but it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't long after he said that. Then he also said that a sovereign, a sovereign currency destroys nation states. I'm paraphrasing that slightly, but it was it was words to that effect.
So he knows that monetary control has total control over, I mean, let's be honest, he knows that it has control over pretty much everything. So he set about creating, and he was also, I think this is an important thing, he was an active serving board member on what was then Facebook, but now Meta, when Meta launched LibraCoin, which was a, the point of it was that it would be a stable coin at a time when Meta had 2 billion users.
And one of Meta's now dropped this kind of PR logo or PR quick that it uses. But it used to be its PR message was move fast and destroy things, which is the epitome of accelerationism. That is what dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary accelerationism is all about. So when they launched LibraCoin, the notion of creative destruction is that you use technology to create a paradigm that... That requires some sort of fracturing new response.
So LibraCoin, which Theo was very, obviously he was sitting on the board, and so was Anderson, actually. LibraCoin, when they launched it, they knew it was going to fail. They had no expectation of LibraCoin succeeding. That's quite clear from documents that Meta themselves have published, that they knew it wouldn't work.
So why did they do it? Well, because what it meant was that they had to create a regulatory environment, a new monetary regulatory environment for the management of privately issued currency. So the notion of a sovereign state is that it cannot work unless it has the authority to issue its own currency, and that will be a programmable digital currency.
So so LibraCoin is a is a really good example of how these guys operate because because they they created a threat that required well I mean it's also working in partnership with regulators as well that's also a big part of it so it's not as if they're working in opposition but they create a threat requires regulatory change that culminates ultimately in the Genius And the Genius Act enables for the first time really since we first had a record,
well certainly since the IMFS came out of Bretton Woods, for the first time we have these privately issued currencies being. Distributed globally in the monetary system. Now, I cannot stress what a massive, massive change that is to our international monetary and financial system. That is enormous.
If you're going to allow, you know, we supposedly have a quote unquote fiat monetary system, and now through the Genius Act, private companies, and there's an aspect of them circumvent in the US Constitution here to do this, because the US Constitution gives Congress the power to, and therefore, the people, supposedly, the power to oversee the issuance of money, but not now.
Because they've said that they're not a national currency, therefore private companies like Tether have got the ability effectively to issue the dollar. They've been given that power. Now, that is huge. That is huge. But of course, as you say, they're working hand in glove with those regulators who are keeping them in control, who are now literally stewarding over them through the SEC and the Treasury and the various branches of the government are working hand in glove with these people.
And we're getting closer and closer to the encirclement of this technocratic dark state around all of us, whether we know it or not. So let's break it down for people. What does the average day-to-day life of not a citizen, but a customer of this future GovCorp state actually look like for the average person?
So firstly, you know, When Land wrote The Dark Enlightenment, one of the things that really stood out for me was he said that our, meaning us, normal, you know, the people, that our sovereignty would be treated with derision. So we have none. You would have none in the network state or under a sovereign corporation.
You would agree a contract, a smart contract, to live there, to live in one of these sovereign states, and you would hand over all your individual sovereignty to the CEO, Techno King of the sovereign state. And you would agree to accept governance as a service. You would have to put all your assets and everything, your assets, even your rights, everything, into a smart contract structure that would be placed onto a unified ledger, which would be controlled by the founders of the sovereign state.
And thereafter, anything that you were permitted or allowed to do would be controlled by AI. That would be done through the oversight of your digital rights and your digital assets. When they've set up, and everyone would, you know, you would need to use the sovereign currency that is issued by the sovereign corporation, which you agree to live in.
And the whole idea of governance as a service, which is what they're talking about, is that if you didn't like it, you would be free to leave and go and live somewhere else, you know, and buy a governance service from somebody else, from another provider. But sure, because they've got no concept of humanity, well, I would strongly argue that they intensely dislike humanity.
But because they've got no concept of the human condition, and they think that everybody has the means to just get up and leave where they live and go and live somewhere else, which for very many reasons, billions of us don't, be it we don't have the financial means to do it, or be it that we've got friends and families that we support and we don't want to leave, or be it that this is our home, we don't want to leave. Their only offer to us would be, if you don't like it, get out.
That is it. That is the full extent of what they think about how they would control us. So we would be controlled. I mean, when one of the lawyers that was involved in rolling out this potential freedom city in Iceland called Praxis.
He said that, won't it be great, all our assets will be online, everything will be controlled, will be policed by AI robots, will be policed by, and there'll be no, so hence there'll be no crime, because it'll be great, because if you step out of line, uh ai will immediately identify you and they'll send around the robots to uh to uh get you know to do whatever put you in prison to the extent that that land who is the kind of the kind of leading kind of thinker if you can say that um uh
behind this kind of ideology that they've adopted, he said that, I've lost my train of thought he said that it escapes me now I won't, Moving on. Ian, befitting a book on the technocratic dark state, I mean, this is a dark subject with a dark vision for humanity as you lay out there. And obviously you go into so much more detail on all the different aspects of this in the book and the various characters behind these ideas and who are pushing these ideas, et cetera.
Not just the well-known ones like the Teals and the Musks and the Ellisons, but the lesser-known ones like the Arvins and the almost unknown ones like the Nick Lanz and others. But there is quite a cast of characters here that you go through. But as I say, it is obviously a dark subject. Thankfully, you do not end the book on a dark note. So let's try to see if we can grasp something of a, well, I want to say light note here, but something along those lines.
Towards the end of the book, you write, despite what we've been systematically indoctrinated to believe, International financial institutions do not control money. Oligarch investors do not control technological development. Governments do not control populations. Only deception, coercion, and the use of force keep us mired in these myths. We do not have to believe in any of these mythological control mechanisms. Ian Davis, what is the way out of this technocratic dark state?
Well, very interesting, actually. I just attended a protest in the UK standing against digital ID. But the reason that I attended a protest, which is very unusual for me because I don't believe in protesting against something you can't change, namely the government, is that this wasn't about that. This was about non-compliance. This was about encouraging people not to comply with the rollout of things like digital ID. Digital ID is, if you like, the gateway into this system.
Once we've adopted digital ID that could potentially be linked to programmable digital money, then that's when technocracy will start to have a massive controlling influence over our lives. And we simply don't have to use it. The infrastructure has already been erected around us, but it is of no value if we don't use it. So there are just very simple things that, I mean, it's perhaps been said ad nauseum, but it's true nonetheless.
If we focus on using things like cash, if we keep our use of digital ID products like bank cards, like payment cards, like store cards to an absolute minimum, if we keep that to a minimum if we trade with each other if we if we you know put the brakes on or at least try to make things as awkward as possible for those that are demanding things like taxes from us i'm not advocating not paying tax because obviously that can get you in a lot of trouble illegally but that
doesn't mean that we have to to jump through every hoop in order to pay it we can do things like say well do you have an alternative and try and retard the roll out of these these things as much as possible if we do that hopefully that will give us some time to look at things like lawful and legal challenges constitutional challenges that will that will certainly show people or certainly show them that we're not going to adopt these these systems and that is essential.
There's the old 3% thing, about 3% of the population can change everything. If enough of us do that, then we can start building better parallel systems that we can use that are not going to involve us subjecting ourselves to total technological control. Because that's what they're trying to foist upon us. So, you know, and another important thing that I stress throughout the book is none of this is new.
This is not new. The only aspect of this that is new is the technological capability that they now have at hand. Other than that, you know, for example, Land talks about this concept of hyper-racism, which is just eugenics. It's just eugenics. The basic concept of the sovereign state is one tiny class ruling everybody else. And that's just oligarchy. That is thousands of years old. So this is nothing new. They're just reinventing the wheel.
But unfortunately, and this is why it's so important, this is why it's pressing, they do now have the technological ability to do things that they have hitherto only dreamed possible. So, you know, that's the problem, the acute problem that we've got now. But if we don't adopt that technology or if we, you know, and we already have adopted most of it. Most of us have already adopted the things that could be used to control us, our fondle slabs, as you are very wisely and fond of saying. Yeah.
We don't have to use them we can there's nothing to stop we don't just because we've got them now doesn't mean that we are i used to have a smartphone i don't have a smartphone anymore it's that simple you know so so we if we if we reject this stuff they can't control us with it because it they won't they won't have access to us isn't it we can't comply our way out of this because we know that the path of least resistance and the one that
will be set before us is the one that leads us to directly into the moths of this technocratic dark state. So we have to go the other way and that will involve non-compliance. And you end, I think, quite appropriately with a quotation from Etienne de la Boite. So I will let people delve into that at their own leisure. I hope that they do get this book. It is a lengthy volume. There's a lot of detail in here that we can only begin to scratch the surface of in a conversation like this.
But Ian Davis, what would you like people to take away from this book? I refer to these people in the book as neo-nerds because, you know, they refer to themselves as techno-kings. They refer to themselves as CEOs of sovereign corporations. This is all self-aggrandizing, power-grabbing, and it is an illusion. They're just human beings, just like the rest of us. They've got a plan that they want to subject us to.
Once we are aware of that plan, which is the point of the book, once we can see it and once we understand it, their power is gone because then we can do what we need to do in order to reject their system. And if we reject their system, there is very little, other than just brute force, there is very little that they can do about it. They're not all powerful. They're not all seeing. They're a very small group. They're one class of people. And there are billions of us.
And I have now remembered that land quote. And this is quite salient. And what he said was that if we were going to not exit, if we tried to oppose their diktats, then all that would demonstrate is our semi-criminal proclivities. So he believes, and the neo-reactionaries believe, that they have the right to rule us, and anyone that objects to their rule is a criminal.
These are not the kind of people that we should ever allow to have significant influence over our lives And we don't have to, that's the point. Well said. Yes, yes, Elon might call himself the Dogefather, but we know what he really is, him and his ilk. So yes, calling things by the right name. Let's call them for the neo-nerds they are and laugh them into the dustbin of history. I hope people will pick up a copy of this book. I think there's a lot in here that is worthy of study and note.
It is The Technocratic Dark State and it is at the technocraticdarkstate.com. That link will, of course, be in the show notes for this if people need it. But finally, Ian, I'd note that you are being published here by Papercut Publishing House. Tell us about that. Yeah, no, Papercut Publishing, that's Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin's new publishing house. I'm honored to have been the first book that they're publishing.
They're also planning to roll out Papercut Magazine, which, and I applaud that as well because obviously everything we're talking about is digital control and they are very wisely moving into physical media and I fully support that and they've got a lot of very exciting projects underway so please check out Papercut Publishing and of course Unlimited Hangout as well where there's a lot more information about Papercut there and you know they've got, I couldn't support their intentions more.
We need to distribute physical media because in the short term, the likelihood is that many of the digital channels that we've currently got open to us will be shut down. But then, obviously, we'll adapt and we'll create new ones. But physical media is going to be increasingly important, I believe. I definitely think that that is the way that things are going.
So I'm glad to see this is a real deal physical book that will be available in the real world offline so that people can actually do reading at any time. Anyway, let's leave it there for today. Ian Davis, thetechnocraticdarkstate.com. Thank you very much for your time today. Thank you very much, James. It's my pleasure.