The Machine in the Garden (c. 2025)

Written By Geneva Tolentino

Transcending Yarvin & the Broligarchy, and Skating to the Puck

Hello everyone!

Unity consciousness experiences become truly transformative when they soak into our material lives- when the realization of oneness is so thorough that it informs our economies, our governance, and the way we treat each other. This week, I’m deviating from my general writing on mantra, tantra, psychedelics and love and art, and hearkening back to when I was a tech CEO (even a Thiel Fellows advisor) in the Bay Area. I write today about a post-federalist future— one that acknowledges the necessary undoing of the old system, but rejects the first bid on the table from the Yarvinists (yes, like Musk and Thiel). Instead of the post nation state government as corporation, we can invite a future that integrates technocracy with reverence, intelligence with care, and innovation with deep respect for all humans and the Earth itself. And imagine a transition that has more of a surgical cutover to a more functional, transparent, and participatory—without mass destabilization, war, or economic freefall. SO, If you’re not into this topic, I will be back next week with more embodied spirituality conversations.

All love, All the time,

Christine Marie

Invitations and Offers for April and May

For me, the eventual failure of the U.S. federal government, as we have known it, has been obvious for nearly two decades. Every interaction I’ve had with that behemoth—except for the National Parks and the Weather Service—has been bloated, impersonal, adversarial, and a drain on creative pursuits. And then, of course, there’s all the ways it spends money in direct violation of my personal values: the insane resources going to world-destroying weaponry, the utter incompetence in protecting our children and cities from unchecked violence- and a creeping bureaucratic inertia that seems incapable of solving even basic human problems like housing access and healthcare.

And yet—until recently, it stood on some poetic ideals that I deeply value. The promise (however imperfectly fulfilled) of equal treatment under the law, of due process, of some shared commitment to the commons. Even if the system was flawed, there was at least this idea of fairness to hold onto. Yet, lately, even this is failing. So, no—I’m not a fan of this current order.

But I am even less of a fan of what is trying to take its place: the rise of cruelty as strategy, dishonesty as policy, a complete lack of transparency, more entrenched favoritism, cronyism, the suppression of dissent, the destruction of shared reality, and the deliberate dysregulation of the collective nervous system, leaving millions of people in economic precarity and existential unease.

So I’ve been zooming out. What is really up here.

Many people I know are totally apathetic about the current moment, and it’s not just fatigue. I’ve come to see that this is because noone wants what we have, therefore we can’t muster the fight to “save” the system that’s being dismantled. And, more importantly, there’s been no alternative presented to rally behind.

Leo Marx (not that Karl guy), in The Machine in the Garden (1964), traced an enduring pattern in human history—one where technological and political power intrude upon the pastoral ideal. From Virgil to the Romantics to now, the Machine, whether in the form of industrialization, centralized control, or technological acceleration, has always presented itself as the inevitable future, disrupting the world of organic, self-sustaining life. The Garden—once a literal agrarian dream, but now a metaphor for human-scale governance, localism, and relational intelligence—has always had to decide: resist, adapt, or be consumed. I experience this partiality to the Machine as the depth of ingratitude- in a world where so much beauty has been given, all of the Machine is a derivative of the Garden, and the natural world of LIFE is so completely jaw droppingly amazing- how could anyone favor the Machine.

But back to this moment:

The nation-state has been mismatched to global realities for a long time. The forces that actually shape the world—corporations, financial networks, technological infrastructures, ideological power structures—haven’t been confined to national borders for decades. At the same time, global corporations in their current form, have no real accountability to place-based governance. So, I don’t see any clear path to relocalization with participatory responsibility of transnational actors, except through disruption and collapse. And yet, collapse is not the endpoint.

I believe we are at a threshold moment, and feel the incredible transition that is possible. I feel excitement about what could be built. And along with this: an urgent need for caution and a massive awakening to a more compelling vision.

The Machine is making its bid for permanence.

For decades, the centers of power that once rested in democratic institutions have shifted to transnational networks of capital, data, and corporate sovereignty. Those who govern no longer need the consent of the people. They need capital. They need infrastructure. They need control over the flow of information. And the traditional mechanisms of resistance—voting, protests, civic engagement—have proven insufficient against the scale of the shift.

Into this moment steps the idealogy of Curtis Yarvin, a man with a vision for the world after democracy. Yarvin, a former software engineer turned political theorist, does not argue for reform. He argues for liquidation—for the total replacement of democratic governance with a model that functions like a corporation. A nation should be run like a startup, with a CEO at the helm, unburdened by bureaucracy, oversight, or the inefficiencies of public will. A country should be optimized, not debated over. There is no room for negotiation, for compromise, for the illusion of power-sharing.

His ideas have spread through Silicon Valley’s libertarian aristocracy, through the same men who tell you they hate government but are the first to take its contracts, who insist the free market is the ultimate solution while quietly extracting billions in subsidies, who claim democracy is too slow while making billions selling snake-oil solutions to crises they helped create.

Peter Thiel, Musk, Balaji Srinivasan, the PayPal mafia, the venture capital elite—many do not believe in rule by the people. Thiel has openly stated that democracy and capitalism are incompatible, that progress requires breaking the will of the public. Musk, who positions himself as a rogue genius, envisions a world where the few, the wealthy, the "competent" are in charge. Srinivasan, with his vision of the Network State, argues that governance should be a private, opt-in service, like a gym membership—ignoring the history of what happens when the powerful are not bound to a shared social contract.

One problem with all of this, beyond the sheer hubris, is that it is brittle. Silicon Valley believes its own press. It believes the myth of the lone genius, the grand disruption, the move-fast-and-break-things ethic that has gutted industries, displaced millions, and left us with a world where IMHO nothing works quite as well as it used to. It is a place where 90% of startups fail, but the cult of “optimization” continues unfazed. These are the same people who created WeWork, Theranos, Uber's perpetual money-burning model, the current political grifting disaster of Trumpian memecoins and crypto fraud, the delusion of Meta’s Metaverse—but they are convinced that, somehow, they should be entrusted with the future of governance.

The Machine assumes that the world can be engineered like code, that all problems are technical ones, that human relationships, histories, cultures, and spiritual traditions are inefficiencies rather than the essence of what makes us human.

Much is lost in this world view, as there are a thousand ways of knowing that have nothing to do with efficiency and code. The ways that wisdom moves through a body, through land, through relationship, through story. The ways of governance that are not about control and extraction, but about mutual tending. The ways that do not demand speed but thrive in slow perception and sinking in and deep listening. The ways that recognize that we are not just a sum of parts, but part of a living intelligence.

"Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade."- Donna Haraway

The Garden is being erased, not just physically but epistemically. If the Machine is an operating system, the Garden is a mycelial network, deeply relational, adaptable, resistant to capture. The Machine sees it as inefficient, but the Machine can’t seem to see that it is part of the Garden, and wholly dependent on it.

What replaces the dying nation-state does not have to be another brittle hierarchy. It does not have to be another machine that feeds on us while telling us it is inevitable. It can be a governance model that is decentralized, adaptive, transparent, and regenerative, where people start building small, functioning prototypes of new ways of governing and living, not at the scale of empire but at the scale of what actually works. People might simply opt out of pouring their time and brilliance into strengthening a Machine that does not serve them, and instead use their gifts to make governance present and direct, and part of daily life, to make corruption impossible, and to make the mechanisms of power clear and accountable in real time.

There’s an opening here: who gets to design what comes next?

The option that’s moving the fastest is a world where power isn’t held by governments, but by corporate monarchs, venture-backed sovereigns, and billionaire “thought leaders” who believe democracy is an inconvenience. They have tremendous resources, and are actively building alternatives where governance is private, where citizenship is a privilege granted by wealth, where rulers are chosen by capital rather than consent. But rule by the few, for the few, enforced by technology and money, isn’t the only option. We’re not just handing the world over to those who mistake wealth for wisdom.

Rather, we need change with kindness, and an orderly transition. Replace it first: a neat and precise cutover. Build something better than the idea of a CEO-state, something better than the stagnant muck of federalism, something better than the false choice between anarchy and authoritarianism that seems to be on the table now

So, if authoritarian technocracy doesn’t sound so great to you, then let’s get onto a more compelling design: a governance model that is self-correcting, alive, able to evolve without being hijacked. One that includes a distributed, transparent ledger systems and direct representation. A system that prevents consolidation—where power can’t congeal into the hands of a few; where every decision is visible, every process legible, and corruption cannot take root; one which moves at the speed of reality—able to adapt, self-correct, and adjust without breaking under the weight of ideology or inertia.

Look: Yarvin, Thiel, Musk, and the Silicon Valley governance crowd are not invincible, nor are they entirely wrong. But their model is built on aesthetic, illusion, and ideological seduction—not real durability. Their greatest weakness is not that they are malicious (although very very empathy deficient and racist and misogynistic AF)- but that they are woefully incomplete. All of us who have been present in venture-backed startup world, are keenly aware of the failure rate. Note that many of the same billionaires pushing “startup governance” have actually never successfully built a self-sustaining system—only hype cycles, bubbles, and exits before the collapse. Many of their experiments fail the moment they hit reality.

I don’t like the proposition of small government libertarianism, or a handover to corporate monarchs. I like the surgical removal of a failing bureaucracy, without the tumult of war, collapse, and authoritarian takeover. One that is done with precision and care, and consideration for the most vulnerable among us. We build for a resilient, responsive future, not one of control. I’m not seeing anything in the political sphere that comes close to the needed magnitude of evolutionary genius that can meet this moment, without separation, disrepect demonization.

That’s what we can summon now, together.

Nothing is outside of the whole. This movement is a response to a broken system- it needs an even more compelling one to counter it, not a preservation instinct. The Machine can be put in service to life. We can create a system that is efficent, yes, but also more elegant, more functional, more alive. One that places all of in a future of collective joy, that works for more of the beings on Earth.

—CMM, Chennai, 3/13/2525

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Geneva Tolentino
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