The Dark Enlightenment Goes Hollywood
Alien: Earth suggests that corporations replacing governments is no longer fringe—maybe not even dystopia, but natural selection.
Alien: Earth (FX) opens in 2120: world governments have collapsed, and five mega-corporations rule Earth like feudal lords. The formidable Weyland-Yutani Corporation controls the Americas, young upstart Prodigy and its barefoot childlike CEO rules “New Siam” in Asia, and so on. The show clearly wants us to be horrified by this, in addition to the show’s titular monsters. Democracy collapses! Corporate dystopia! Citizens as assets! But here’s the uncomfortable question Alien: Earth accidentally raises: would this really be worse than the governments we already live under?
This isn’t just Hollywood sci-fi speculation. There’s a real-world intellectual movement called the Dark Enlightenment whose chief theorist, Curtis Yarvin (AKA Mencius Moldbug), has long argued that governments should function more like corporations, with clear hierarchies, efficiency, and accountability instead of the messy chaos of elections. What was once an obscure, edgy blog niche is now circling mainstream power. Peter Thiel has said he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and author of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, considers him an influence. Vice President J.D. Vance has publicly described Yarvin as a friend. When the people building tomorrow’s technologies and laws are openly skeptical of democracy, we should take that seriously.
In a nutshell, the Dark Enlightenment argues that states should be run as joint-stock companies led by a CEO—clear hierarchy, efficient execution, and minimal electoral churn. While critics of corporate rule usually compare it to an idealized democracy, many of the world’s citizens today live under authoritarian strongmen, military juntas, failing kleptocracies, war zones, refugee camps, and ungoverned regions. According to Freedom House, around 40% of the world’s population currently lives in such “not free” political systems. Now imagine if a hypothetical tech and communications company called BrilliantFreeTech ran North Korea or Myanmar, or stepped in to help fragile states, like Somalia or Afghanistan. Would human rights improve? Probably. Would people have internet? Definitely. Economic opportunity? Almost certainly. The grim truth is that in many cases, corporate rule could in some contexts plausibly outperform failed or predatory states. (Even U.S. trust in our own federal government is only ~22%.)
How might this actually happen, though? Corporate governance wouldn’t begin by overthrowing functioning states. It would spread into places where the government is already weak. Somalia’s federal institutions remain fragile; Afghanistan is authoritarian. Corporate logistics and communications might work better than government services, though obviously with human rights tradeoffs. At the poles, governance exists—the Antarctic Treaty System, UNCLOS, national EEZs—but climate and commerce are stressing those regimes, creating space for de facto corporate rule over operations.
And then there’s space. Companies like AstroForge aren’t waiting on UN treaty-making; they’re moving under national laws that recognize rights to extracted resources (the 2015 U.S. statute; Luxembourg’s 2017 law) and the nonbinding Artemis Accords—which endorse resource utilization—while the 1967 Outer Space Treaty still forbids any claim of sovereignty. In that gap, governance will look like contracts, “safety zones,” and operational control by whoever runs the landing sites, logistics, and networks. Bezos and Musk wouldn’t be sovereigns in law, but they could become de facto rule-makers wherever their systems pay the bills and keep people alive.
History isn’t silent on this point: chartered firms like the East India Company and Hudson’s Bay exercised taxation, courts, and force—proof that corporate sovereignty is administratively feasible, and a warning about extraction.
Antitrust advocates like to remind everyone, sometimes quite militantly, that competition is good for markets, prices, and consumers. What’s striking is that corporate rule could introduce competition into governance itself. If your government sucks today, you’re stuck until the next election—if there is one. But in a corporate-sovereign world, dissatisfied ‘citizens’ could—where exit is actually feasible—move to a different brand of governance; the catch is that exit isn’t free: passports, capital controls, property, community ties, and language create high switching costs, and ‘voice’ (representation, due process) may be thin.
Picture ‘Apple World’ (seamless minimalism), ‘Amazon World’ (logistics with worker surveillance), ‘Tesla World’ (green futurism mixed with occasional chaos), ‘Google World’ (total algorithmic governance at the expense of art), ‘Microsoft World’ (boring, reliable utilities that need complete rebooting from time to time). Each of these fictional worlds represents a different trade-off between efficiency, control, and rights. But today, we already make similar trade-offs—ceding privacy and autonomy to corporations in exchange for services and convenience. The real choice is between the messy, often brutal reality of current states (genocidal regimes, failed states, paralyzed democracies), and the potential efficiency of corporate governance (hierarchies optimized for performance, accountable not to citizens but to shareholders).
None of the above is utopia. But Alien: Earth reminds us that corporate sovereignty is no longer science fiction—it emerges wherever governments fail and corporations step in. The Dark Enlightenment frames this not as dystopia, but as a plausible evolutionary pathway where state capacity erodes and corporate capacity fills the gap. That’s what makes it so provocative—and so dangerous.