When the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the "Manifesto of Futurism" in the pages of the Parisian "Figaro" in 1909, he ignited not only the imagination of the artistic avant-garde, but also symbolically threw a match to the foundations of the then social and cultural order. Calls to "destroy museums, libraries and academies of every kind" and to decisively sever ties with the past represented a real radical rebellion at the time — fierce resistance to the established traditions and values of the past. Unfortunately, Marinetti's words did not remain only in the domain of artistic provocation. His futurism, with its militant enthusiasm and contempt for the past, found fertile ground in an ideology that would soon grow into fascism. And we all know how that story ended.
illustration: u. mitrovićSURVEILLANCE PYRAMID: Illustration created with the help of the Google Gemini program
More than a century later, some new "futurists" — led by tech billionaires, transhumanists, right-wing ideologues, and "big reset" advocates — similarly want to overthrow the existing order and its institutions, but not in the name of art, but in the name of technology, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and global digital and financial control. And they, like Marinetti, believe that the future cannot be born without a decisive break with the past — only that today's museums are servers, and libraries are data to be rewritten, deleted or locked behind an encrypted code. Universities are, like a century ago, exposed to attacks by ambitious ideological "dark people". Some of that pattern can also be recognized here in Serbia these months, in the brutal way Vučić's government and its machinery treat students and universities.
In the context of the new, dark future that may be looming over all of humanity, it is difficult to ignore the American President Donald Trump — today's most visible proponent of the idea that key social, state (and even global) institutions should be fundamentally reshaped. His open conflicts with universities in the USA, which he accuses of ideological bias and inciting division, are part of a wider campaign in which, under the pretext of fighting "poisoned institutions", academic autonomy is undermined, and education is turned into a space for political reckoning.
However, it is not only universities that are under attack. In America, an invisible network of ideologues, investors and technocrats is taking shape, gathered around a vision that aspires to a deep and systemic transformation of society based on centralized control, technological dominance and new forms of authoritarian power. At its center are controversial figures such as Curtis Jarwin, Peter Thiel and Nick Land — networked in an ideological direction known as the "Dark Enlightenment". This "neo-reactionary movement", also known by the abbreviation NRx, represents a political-philosophical direction that directly questions the fundamental values of the Enlightenment — democracy, equality, universal human rights. Its most prominent theorists advocate a return to authoritarian forms of government, centralized governance based on new technologies, and a complete rejection of "rule by the masses." Because of this, digital platforms and the large technological corporations that control them, today act like private fiefdoms, which led to the appearance of the term "techno-feudalism" - the dark "heir" of capitalism deprived of any democratic and civil control.
...DARK MONARCH: Illustration created with the help of the ChatGPT program
The spokesman for the movement is software engineer and blogger Curtis Jarvin, also known by his pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, who in his texts explicitly calls for a "great reset" of the American political system — including the dismantling of the bureaucracy and the establishment of a techno-feudal order, in which the state would function like a corporation, and the president would have the role of executive director — "CEO" with full powers. This is completely in line with the position of Elon Musk, one of the most exposed representatives of this ideological trend and the richest man in the world, who in 2020 told the "Wall Street Journal" that "the government is simply the biggest corporation." In early 2025, he briefly headed Trump's newly formed Department of Government Effectiveness (DOGE), which will be discussed a little later.
In the era of disaffected digital capitalism, one figure nevertheless stands out as a key patron of the "ideological innovators" of the NRx movement — Peter Thiel, billionaire and co-owner of PayPal and the controversial Palantir, a data surveillance and analytics company that has signed contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the Pentagon to develop artificial intelligence in next-generation weapons systems. Thiel, otherwise a longtime mentor and financier of Trump's Vice President JD Vance, believes that the US is going through a period of decline and that only radical technological leaps and transhumanist experiments can reverse that fate. He openly questions democratic principles and claims that "freedom is incompatible with democracy." This sentence has become the program motto for an entire generation of ideologues who aspire to a more "efficient" model of governance — in which the techno-elites in Silicon Valley and capitalist ideologues from the right of the political spectrum are the silent architects of the new state structure.
It is Thiel's company, Palantir, that symbolizes a new kind of power — a combination of high technology, security services, and private control over the data of millions of people. Critics describe it as a tool to establish a "digital panopticon" — a system of total surveillance that surpasses even the most repressive regimes of the past. It is no coincidence that, when Trump signed an executive order in March ordering all government agencies and departments to share data on US citizens, he chose the company Palantir to manage this megadatabase.
Another important character in this "dark" puzzle is Nick Land, the British philosopher who invented the coin. Dark Enlightenment. As one of the movement's leading ideologues, he predicts the end of humanity as we know it and the rise of posthuman, techno-authoritarian systems ruled by capital and machines. In his vision, the classical humanist ideal of man as a rational, moral subject comes to an end. According to him, human beings should be overcome through technical, biological and technological transformations that lead to the emergence of posthuman entities — beings that overcome all our human limitations so far.
During and after Donald Trump's first term, this ideology was no longer confined to the margins of the Internet and the blogosphere. Certain ideological protagonists of the movement Dark Enlightenment, including Vice President Vance, former advisor Steve Bannon, and current director of policy planning at the State Department, Michael Anton, significantly influenced the formation and implementation of Trump's political worldview. In his second mandate, the aforementioned DOGE was formed (Department of Government Efficiency) — a department that functions according to the model of the most "capitalist" private corporations, completely outside the scope of normal controls. Since February, cuts by DOGE have led to the layoff of nearly 300.000 civil servants, acting as a direct implementation of Curtis Jarwin's "strategic plan" known by the acronym RAGE (Retire All Government Employees), who advocates mass removal of civil servants and their replacement by "loyalists". It could be said that Curtis Jarwin and Nick Land create the theoretical and philosophical framework, while Peter Thiel, Musk and others provide institutional and financial support, and the Trump administration implements certain principles of NRx ideologues.
Therefore, this movement of dark enlighteners is not just another "school of thought", but a project of systemic transition towards a post-democratic society, where management is entrusted to elite "engineers of reality", while citizens are reduced to a mass of passive subjects, whose access to information and the market is conditioned and strictly controlled. A very real political experiment is at work: the merging of big capital, technology and authoritarian ambition — under the guise of "efficiency", but with the clear aim of concentrating power in the hands of a few. In the eyes of the new techno-political ideologues, democracy is seen as outdated software that no longer fulfills its function. In their opinion, it's time for a system reset and installation of a new order. But the key question remains: Who is actually writing that code—and in whose interest?
