Prestige Machines
Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2025 4:21 pm
In the 1930s people believed history could be controlled.
In Germany Adolf Hitler imagined a world where nations were living organisms each struggling toward a hidden destiny. Germany he thought had a soul wounded but not dead. If only someone could awaken its mythic will the people would march together into greatness.
At the same time across the Atlantic wealthy American industrialists were inventing a new kind of power. The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations quietly funded universities professors and research institutes. They believed that ideas could be planted like seeds in the minds of young elites and that decades later these ideas would govern the world.
Two projects very different. One used spectacle myth and force. The other used networks prestige and patience. Both were built on the same dream that history has a center and someone can find the lever.
Hitler built his machines in stone and light. At Nuremberg Albert Speer designed colossal cathedrals of searchlights that carved the sky into vertical walls. The crowds stood beneath them tiny but unified as if absorbed into a higher purpose. These were not just rallies. They were acts of theatre designed to dissolve the individual into the collective and to make people feel not think.
Today the machines are different. Now the spectacle is subtle. A TED stage. A magazine cover. A blue checkmark. Curtis Yarvin a programmer in Silicon Valley believes that modern power hides in these signals. If you capture the institutions that define what is high status the universities the media the cultural gatekeepers you control the reality everyone lives inside. Yarvin calls this prestige. It decides who matters. It tells us what is true.
The cathedrals of light have been replaced by cultural factories. They work in silence producing meaning.
But something strange has happened. The Rockefeller strategy worked. Their ideas spread through universities and media until they reshaped the Western world. But they did not stop there. They mutated.
The same networks that envisioned a rational orderly liberalism also birthed the counterculture of the 1960s radical individualism neoliberal globalization and eventually the algorithmic chaos of today. Soft power works but it does not obey commands. Ideas slip the leash.
Meanwhile Yarvin believes the liberal machine has grown fat decadent and weak yet somehow still untouchable. Silicon Valley billionaires he says are rich but politically powerless. They dream of disrupting the world but when faced with the status hierarchies of elite culture they retreat. Their institutions their magazines their think tanks their universities barely exist. He imagines a new network of patronage seeding outside prestige. A parallel hierarchy that bypasses the old one. A quiet revolution.
But there is a problem. Prestige only works if everyone agrees on who has it and that consensus is breaking apart. Universities are losing authority. Legacy media brands are collapsing. Social platforms fragment reality into billions of personalized feeds.
The cathedrals of light worked because everyone saw the same light. The Rockefeller networks worked because everyone wanted the same credentials. Now no one agrees on what matters. TikTok teens live in worlds unrecognizable to their parents. Memes become political movements. Alternative realities bloom and clash online each with its own heroes its own myths its own truth.
The prestige machines are breaking and nobody knows what replaces them.
This is where another vision appears. Alain de Benoist a French philosopher writing in the 1980s rejected the dream of one universal destiny. He saw a future not of empire but of multiplicity a world where different cultures traditions and myths coexist without collapsing into one grand narrative.
It was a provocation because for centuries power has depended on singularity. One flag. One story. One destiny. But now fragments multiply. In this world no single elite can decide the meaning of history. No leader can awaken one universal will. No institution can monopolize prestige.
Instead power circulates. Myths compete. Futures diverge.
This vision is unsettling. Hitler promised clarity through unity. Yarvin promises clarity through networks. Both whisper the same thing history has direction inevitability meaning.
But the deeper truth may be stranger. There is no center anymore. Meaning is dissolving into a thousand experiments small worlds built by small groups each inventing its own myths and aesthetics each creating its own stage where its signals matter.
The future may not belong to those who seize the machine but to those who step outside it.
And yet the temptation remains. To find the lever. To believe that someone somewhere still drives the story.
But what if history has no driver.
What if it never did.
In Germany Adolf Hitler imagined a world where nations were living organisms each struggling toward a hidden destiny. Germany he thought had a soul wounded but not dead. If only someone could awaken its mythic will the people would march together into greatness.
At the same time across the Atlantic wealthy American industrialists were inventing a new kind of power. The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations quietly funded universities professors and research institutes. They believed that ideas could be planted like seeds in the minds of young elites and that decades later these ideas would govern the world.
Two projects very different. One used spectacle myth and force. The other used networks prestige and patience. Both were built on the same dream that history has a center and someone can find the lever.
Hitler built his machines in stone and light. At Nuremberg Albert Speer designed colossal cathedrals of searchlights that carved the sky into vertical walls. The crowds stood beneath them tiny but unified as if absorbed into a higher purpose. These were not just rallies. They were acts of theatre designed to dissolve the individual into the collective and to make people feel not think.
Today the machines are different. Now the spectacle is subtle. A TED stage. A magazine cover. A blue checkmark. Curtis Yarvin a programmer in Silicon Valley believes that modern power hides in these signals. If you capture the institutions that define what is high status the universities the media the cultural gatekeepers you control the reality everyone lives inside. Yarvin calls this prestige. It decides who matters. It tells us what is true.
The cathedrals of light have been replaced by cultural factories. They work in silence producing meaning.
But something strange has happened. The Rockefeller strategy worked. Their ideas spread through universities and media until they reshaped the Western world. But they did not stop there. They mutated.
The same networks that envisioned a rational orderly liberalism also birthed the counterculture of the 1960s radical individualism neoliberal globalization and eventually the algorithmic chaos of today. Soft power works but it does not obey commands. Ideas slip the leash.
Meanwhile Yarvin believes the liberal machine has grown fat decadent and weak yet somehow still untouchable. Silicon Valley billionaires he says are rich but politically powerless. They dream of disrupting the world but when faced with the status hierarchies of elite culture they retreat. Their institutions their magazines their think tanks their universities barely exist. He imagines a new network of patronage seeding outside prestige. A parallel hierarchy that bypasses the old one. A quiet revolution.
But there is a problem. Prestige only works if everyone agrees on who has it and that consensus is breaking apart. Universities are losing authority. Legacy media brands are collapsing. Social platforms fragment reality into billions of personalized feeds.
The cathedrals of light worked because everyone saw the same light. The Rockefeller networks worked because everyone wanted the same credentials. Now no one agrees on what matters. TikTok teens live in worlds unrecognizable to their parents. Memes become political movements. Alternative realities bloom and clash online each with its own heroes its own myths its own truth.
The prestige machines are breaking and nobody knows what replaces them.
This is where another vision appears. Alain de Benoist a French philosopher writing in the 1980s rejected the dream of one universal destiny. He saw a future not of empire but of multiplicity a world where different cultures traditions and myths coexist without collapsing into one grand narrative.
It was a provocation because for centuries power has depended on singularity. One flag. One story. One destiny. But now fragments multiply. In this world no single elite can decide the meaning of history. No leader can awaken one universal will. No institution can monopolize prestige.
Instead power circulates. Myths compete. Futures diverge.
This vision is unsettling. Hitler promised clarity through unity. Yarvin promises clarity through networks. Both whisper the same thing history has direction inevitability meaning.
But the deeper truth may be stranger. There is no center anymore. Meaning is dissolving into a thousand experiments small worlds built by small groups each inventing its own myths and aesthetics each creating its own stage where its signals matter.
The future may not belong to those who seize the machine but to those who step outside it.
And yet the temptation remains. To find the lever. To believe that someone somewhere still drives the story.
But what if history has no driver.
What if it never did.