This may be my favorite headline of at least the month, if not of all time, via Corey Pein at The Baffler: “Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich.”

One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of corporate kiss-assery, which, on one level, it probably was. But Tunney happened to be serious. “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America,” she wrote. “The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”

Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color.

Pein links this concept to broader notions of the “Dark Enlightenment,” which is one of those movements that might only exist on the internet and seems like something concocted by someone who has read a large number of science fiction novels while also only meeting a small number of actual people. Apparently it also has something to do with an unironic appreciation of A Confederacy of Dunces.

I’ll just highlight a few bits of RationalWiki’s description of the movement (if one could call it that), and then hope they go away:

The neoreactionary movement (or just neoreaction; apparently abbreviated NRx), or the dark enlightenment, is a loosely defined cluster of Internet-based political thinkers who wish to return human society to forms of government older than liberal democracy.^[1]

^[1] You know, the forms of government that couldn’t create the Internet.

Neoreactionaries are the latest in a long line of intellectuals who somehow think that their chosen authoritarian thugs wouldn’t put them up against the wall. Possibly using sheer volume of words as a bulletproof shield.