Nick Land believes that digital superintelligence is going to kill us all. In San Francisco, his followers ask: What if, instead of trying to stop an A.I. takeover, you work to bring it on as fast as possible? In the spring of 1994, at a philosophy conference on a run-down modernist campus in the English Midlands, a group of academics, media theorists, artists, hackers, and d.j.s gathered to hear a young professor give a talk at a conference called "Virtual Futures." It was ten o'clock in the morning, and most of the attendees were wiped out from a rave that had taken place in the student union the night before. But the talk--titled "Meltdown"--was highly anticipated. The professor, Nick Land, was tenured in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, at the time one of the top philosophy programs in the U.K. Land had gained a cult following for his radical anti-humanism, his wild predictions about the future of technology, and his erratic teaching style. Soon, his academic presentations would become increasingly "experimental"; at a conference in 1996, he lay on the floor, reciting cut-up poetry in what an attendee described as a "demon voice" while jungle music played in the background.

In the spring of 2014, a trans-anarchist Google engineer petitioned the White House to arrest our national decline. The plan was snappy: "1. Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, was an avatar of technocratic liberalism. Two decades earlier, as the largely unknown C.T.O. of Sun Microsystems, he helped Bill Clinton set up the first White House Web site, and, by the time of the Obama Administration, he served as Silicon Valley's unofficial consul to the Democratic Party. Schmidt was not himself a company "founder," a technologist's most regal credential, but he had performed as an able steward: when Larry Page and Sergey Brin struggled to reconcile their competing visions for Google's first corporate jet--Brin wanted a California king bed, Page did not--Schmidt negotiated a compromise. He was sensible and civic-minded. He was the adult in the room.

There is wide speculation among readers about just how serious Yarvin is, including from his most prominent reader. "Vast structures of historical irony shape his writings, at times even engulfing them," says Nick Land. "Vast structures of historical irony" is a rather generous description of what's known on the internet as "shitposting." Know Your Meme defines the term as "a range of user misbehaviors and rhetoric on forums and message boards that are intended to derail a conversation."

Readers of The Right Stuff long knew that founder "Mike Enoch" had two main interests: technology and white supremacy. Posts on the neo-Nazi site have included discussion of "a new blogging platform built on node.js," while other less techie content has alluded to the "chimpout" in Ferguson, putting Jews in ovens, and Trump's "top-tier troll" of Jews on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In January, Enoch was outed as Mike Peinovich, a Manhattan-based software engineer. His unmasking highlighted a lingering question about the racist far-right movement that rose to prominence with Donald Trump's election: What support might the so-called alt-right have among techies? Ever since I began investigating the extremist groups lining up behind Trump last spring, several of their leaders have made big claims to me about an alt-right following in Silicon Valley and across the broader tech industry. "The average alt-right-ist is probably a 28-year old tech-savvy guy working in IT," white nationalist Richard Spencer insisted when I interviewed him a few weeks before the election.