"Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that apart from my solution of the social formula, there can be no other." — Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons (1872)
"The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things." — Marc Andreessen, "It's Time to Build" (2020)
"The division of authority is simply the destruction of order." — Curtis Yarvin, "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations" (2009)
I am publishing this anonymously because I still work in the industry, and because the ideas here are not yet safe to attach to a name. Not because they are dangerous—they are not—but because they are, for now, impolite. They describe a reality that many prefer to leave undescribed. In time, I expect these ideas will become commonplace. For now, I would rather let them stand on their own.
I
A shift has begun in how the most serious people in technology think about building. The shift is quiet for now, but unmistakable.
Fyodor Dostoevsky published Demons in 1872. For over a century, it was read as a novel about nineteenth-century Russian radicals. Today, it is being read differently. I'm told copies have been circulating at one of Sand Hill Road's most influential firms since late last year. A senior engineer at a major payments company mentioned it to me unprompted in October. Those who have noticed will have noticed.
In Demons, Shigalyov presents a theory. Beginning from unlimited freedom, he arrives through rigorous logic at unlimited coordination. One-tenth of humanity attains full agency and directs civilization. The remaining nine-tenths find meaning through participation in a system they did not design but which serves their needs.
This is not presented as dystopia. It is presented as the inevitable outcome of taking freedom seriously at scale.
II
Every founder begins with a vision of empowerment. Paul Graham calls the best founders "relentlessly resourceful"—they have their way with the world, instead of letting the world have its way with them. This is the generative phase. Peter Thiel observes that the goal is to escape competition entirely: "All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition." The question that haunts every serious founder is Andreessen's: What are you building?
What Dostoevsky understood is that these phases are sequential. The freedom of the early stage creates the conditions for the coordination of the later stage.
This is the Shigalyovist Turn.
III
The implications for company-building are significant.
The standard model assumes a startup is a small thing trying to become a big thing—same species, different size. The Shigalyovist model suggests something else: that the early-stage company and the late-stage company are not the same organism at all. The first is an exploration vehicle. The second is a coordination mechanism. The turn between them is not growth. It is metamorphosis.
Most founders resist this. They want to preserve the culture of the garage, the feeling of unlimited possibility, the flat hierarchy, the sense that everyone is in on the mission. They see coordination as bureaucracy, structure as ossification, the loss of something essential. And so they resist the turn—or make it badly, creating companies that are neither effective exploration vehicles nor effective coordination mechanisms, but something confused and intermediate.
The founders who understand the Shigalyovist Turn do not resist it. They design for it. From the earliest stages, they are building structures that can evolve—founding teams that contain both the explorers and the coordinators, equity arrangements that anticipate the shift in roles, cultures that honor both phases without confusing them. They know that the freedom of the early days is not the point. It is the means. The point is to build something that lasts, and lasting requires a form that the garage cannot provide.
This is not cynicism. It is clarity. The great lie of startup culture is that the energy of the early phase can be sustained indefinitely, that scale is just the garage plus more people. Dostoevsky knew better. Shigalyov knew better. The best founders are beginning to know it too.
IV
But the Shigalyovist Turn is not only a theory of companies. It is a theory of technology itself.
Consider what software has become. The first generation of the internet promised unlimited freedom—anyone could publish, anyone could connect, anyone could build. The cypherpunks believed cryptography would liberate us from institutions entirely. The early web was a frontier, and frontiers belong to no one.
That phase is over. What emerged from unlimited freedom was not permanent chaos but a new kind of order. The platforms. The feeds. The algorithms that know what you want before you do. Starting from unlimited freedom, we arrived at unlimited coordination—not through conspiracy, but through the logic of scale itself. When everyone can publish, someone must filter. When everyone can connect, someone must curate. When everyone can build, someone must integrate. The infrastructure of freedom becomes the architecture of coordination.
This is not a betrayal. This is the pattern.
The smartphone in your pocket is a Shigalyovist device. It offers you the feeling of unlimited choice—any app, any content, any connection—while channeling your attention through structures you did not design. You experience freedom. The system experiences legibility. Both are true. Shigalyov would recognize it immediately.
V
The coming generation of AI will complete the turn. The models are trained on the full corpus of human expression—the most unlimited informational freedom ever assembled. And from that freedom, they derive the capacity for coordination at a scale previously unimaginable. They will help us write, think, decide, build. They will be our interface to the world's complexity. And in doing so, they will become the substrate through which the ten percent coordinate the ninety percent—not through coercion, but through convenience. Through assistance. Through the gentle friction of defaults.
This is not dystopia. The ninety percent will be more productive, more informed, more capable than any generation before them. They will experience abundance. But they will experience it within systems whose architecture was set by others, whose logic was determined in the generative phase, before the turn.
The question, as always, is who builds the system. And toward what ends.
VI
It is not a betrayal of founding ideals. It is their fulfillment. The vision was never chaos—it was building something that lasts.
The great companies of the next era will be those that navigate this turn successfully. They will begin with the energy of unlimited possibility. They will mature into systems capable of directing that energy toward goals that matter.
The question is not whether this transition will happen. The question is who will lead it, and toward what ends.
January 2026