The Dark Enlightenment

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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby BrandonD » Tue Dec 13, 2016 10:26 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Apr 26, 2016 5:11 pm wrote:People with money do what they want because Democracy, as practiced in Vermont and perhaps elsewhere, is not sufficient to restrain them -- and indeed, actively enables them on many fronts. The rest of us are left to argue about causes and solutions.


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Not sure who said it. Humphrey Bogart, maybe.
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Thu Jan 19, 2017 6:10 am

Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich

Corey Pein May 19, 2014

“Read Mencius Moldbug,” Tunney told her Twitter followers last month, referring to an aggressively dogmatic blogger with a reverent following in certain tech circles.

Tunney’s advice is easier said than done, for Moldbug is as prolific as he is incomprehensible. His devotees, many of whom are also bloggers, describe themselves as the “neoreactionary” vanguard of a “Dark Enlightenment.” They oppose popular suffrage, egalitarianism and pluralism. Some are atheists, while others affect obscure orthodox beliefs, but most are youngish white males embittered by “political correctness.” As best I can tell, their ideal society best resembles Blade Runner, but without all those Asian people cluttering up the streets. Neoreactionaries like to see themselves as the heroes of another sci-fi movie, in fact, sometimes boasting that they have been “redpilled,” like Keanu Reeves’s character in The Matrix—a movie Moldbug regards as “genius.”

“Moldbug.” The name sounds like it belongs to a troll who belches from the depths of an Internet rabbit hole. And so it does. Mencius Moldbug is the blogonym of Curtis Guy Yarvin, a San Francisco software developer and frustrated poet. (Here he is reading a poem at a 1997 open mic.)

According to Yarvin, the child of federal civil servants, he dropped out of a graduate computer science program at U. C. Berkeley in the early 1990s (he has self-consciously noted that he is the only man in his immediate family without a PhD) yet managed to make a small pile of money in the original dot-com bubble. Yarvin betrayed an endearingly strange sense of humor in his student days, posting odd stories and absurdist jokes on bulletin board services, contributing to Wired and writing cranky letters to alternative weekly newspapers.

Yet even as a student at Brown in 1991, Yarvin’s preoccupations with domineering strongmen were evident: “I wonder if the Soviet power ladder of vicious bureaucratic backbiting brings stronger men to the top than the American system of feel-good soundbites,” he wrote in one board discussion.

Yarvin’s public writing tapered off as his software career solidified. In 2007, he reemerged under an angry pseudonym, Moldbug, on a humble Blogspot blog called “Unqualified Reservations.” As might be expected of a “DIY ideology . . . designed by geeks for other geeks,” his political treatises are heavily informed by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas. What set Yarvin apart from the typical keyboard kook was his archaic, grandiose tone, which echoed the snippets Yarvin cherry-picked from obscure old reactionary tracts. Yarvin told one friendly interviewer that he spent $500 a month on books.

Elsewhere he confessed to having taken a grand total of five undergraduate humanities courses (history and creative writing). The lack of higher ed creds hasn’t hurt his confidence. On his blog, Yarvin holds forth on everything from the intricacies of Korean history to contemporary Pakistani politics, from the proper conduct of a counterinsurgency operation to macroeconomic theory and fiscal policy, and he never gives an inch. “The neat thing about primary sources is that often, it takes only one to prove your point,” he writes.

In short, Moldbug reads like an overconfident autodidact’s imitation of a Lewis Lapham essay—if Lewis Lapham were a fascist teenage Dungeon Master.

Yarvin’s most toxic arguments come snugly wrapped in purple prose and coded language. (For instance, “The Cathedral” is Moldbuggian for the oppressive nexus of liberal newspapers, universities and the State Department, where his father worked after getting a PhD in philosophy from Brown.) By so doing, Moldbug has been able to an attract an audience that welcomes the usual teeth-gnashing white supremacists who haunt the web while also leaving room for a more socially acceptable assortment of “men’s rights” advocates, gun nuts, transhumanist libertarians, disillusioned Occupiers and well-credentialed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

When Justine Tunney posted her petition online, the press treated it like comic relief that came from nowhere. In fact, it is straight Moldbug. Item one, “retire all government employees,” comes verbatim from a 2012 talk that Yarvin gave to an approving crowd of California techies (see video below). In his typical smarmy, meandering style, Yarvin concluded by calling for “a national CEO [or] what’s called a dictator.”

“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia,” Yarvin said in his talk. He conceded that, given the current political divisions, it might be better to have two dictators, one for Red Staters and one for Blue Staters. The trick would be to “make sure they work together.” (Sure. Easy!)

...Moldbug is the widely acknowledged lodestar of the movement, but he’s not the only leading figure. Another is Nick Land, a British former academic now living in Shanghai, where he writes admiringly of Chinese eugenics and the impending global reign of “autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy.”

These imaginary übermensch have inspired a sprawling network of blogs, sub-Reddits and meetups aimed at spreading their views. Apart from their reverence for old-timey tyrants, they espouse a belief in “human biodiversity,” which is basically racism in a lab coat. This scientific-sounding euphemism invariably refers to supposed differences in intelligence across races. It is so spurious that the Wikipedia article on human biodiversity was deleted because, in the words of one editor, it is “purely an Internet theory.” Censored once again by The Cathedral, alas.

“I am not a white nationalist, but I do read white-nationalist blogs, and I’m not afraid to link to them . . . I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin writes. He also praises a blogger who advocated the deportation of Muslims and the closure of mosques as “probably the most imaginative and interesting right-wing writer on the planet.” Hectoring a Swarthmore history professor, Yarvin rhapsodizes on colonial rule in Southern Africa, and suggests that black people had it better under apartheid. “If you ask me to condemn [mass murderer] Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to fuck,” Yarvin writes.

His jargon may be novel, but whenever Mencius Moldbug descends to the realm of the concrete, he offers familiar tropes of white victimhood. Yarvin’s favorite author, the nineteenth-century writer Scot Thomas Carlyle, is perhaps best known for his infamous slavery apologia, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.” “If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare’s, it is Carlyle,” Yarvin writes. Later in the same essay Yarvin calls slavery “a natural human relationship” akin to “that of patron and client.”

As I soldiered through the Moldbug canon, my reactions numbed. Here he is expressing sympathy for poor, persecuted Senator Joe McCarthy. Big surprise. Here he claims “America is a communist country.” Sure, whatever. Here he doubts that Barack Obama ever attended Columbia University. You don’t say? After a while, Yarvin’s blog feels like the pseudo-intellectual equivalent of a Gwar concert, one sick stunt after another, calculated to shock. To express revulsion and disapproval is to grant the attention he so transparently craves.

Yet the question inevitably arrives: Do we need to take this stuff seriously? The few mainstream assessments of the neoreactionaries have been divided on the question.

Sympathetic citations are spreading: In the Daily Caller, The American Conservative and National Review. Yet the conservative press remains generally dismissive. The American Spectator’s Matthew Walther calls neoreactionism “silly not scary” and declares that “all of these people need to relax: spend some time with P.G. Wodehouse, watch a football game, get drunk, whatever.”

TechCrunch, which first introduced me to Moldbug, treats the “Geeks for Monarchy” movement as an Internet curio. But The Telegraph says, yes, this is “sophisticated neo-fascism” and must be confronted. Vocativ, which calls it “creepy,” agrees that it should be taken seriously.

The science fiction author David Brin goes further in his comment on a Moldbug blog post, accusing the blogger of auditioning for the part of Machiavelli to some future-fascist dictator:

The world oligarchy is looking for boffins to help them re-establish their old – pyramidal – social order. And your screeds are clearly interview essays. “Pick me! Pick me! Look! I hate democracy too! And I will propagandize for people to accept your rule again, really I will! See the fancy rationalizations I can concoct????”

But your audition materials are just . . too . . . jibbering . . . loopy. You will not get the job.


As strange as it sounds, Brin may be closest to the truth. Neoreactionaries are explicitly courting wealthy elites in the tech sector as the most receptive and influential audience. Why bother with mass appeal, when you’re rebuilding the ancien régime?

Moldbuggism, for now, remains mostly an Internet phenomenon. Which is not to say it is “merely” an Internet phenomenon. This is, after all, a technological age. Last November, Yarvin claimed that his blog had received 500,000 views. It is not quantity of his audience that matters so much as the nature of it, however. And the neoreactionaries do seem to be influencing the drift of Silicon Valley libertarianism, which is no small force today. This is why I have concluded, sadly, that Yarvin needs answering.

If the Koch brothers have proved anything, it’s that no matter how crazy your ideas are, if you put serious money behind those ideas, you can seize key positions of authority and power and eventually bring large numbers of people around to your way of thinking. Moreover, the radicalism may intensify with each generation. Yesterday’s Republicans and Independents are today’s Libertarians. Today’s Libertarians may be tomorrow’s neoreactionaries, whose views flatter the prejudices of the new Silicon Valley elite.


...Srinivasan ticked through the signposts of the neoreactionary fantasyland: Bitcoin as the future of finance, corporate city-states as the future of government, Detroit as a loaded symbol of government failure and 3D-printed firearms as an example of emerging technology that defies regulation.

The speech succeeded in promoting the anti-democratic authoritarianism at the core of neoreactionary thought, while glossing over the attendant bigotry. This has long been a goal of some in the movement. One such moderate—if the word can be used in this context—is Patri Friedman, grandson of the late libertarian demigod Milton Friedman. The younger Friedman expressed the need for “a more politically correct dark enlightenment” after a public falling out with Yarvin in 2009.

Friedman has lately been devoting his time (and leveraging his family name) to raise money for the SeaSteading Institute, which, as the name suggests, is a blue-sea libertarian dream to build floating fiefdoms free of outside regulation and law. Sound familiar?

The principal backer of the SeaSteading project, Peter Thiel, is also an investor in companies run by Balaji Srinivasan and Curtis Yarvin. Thiel is a co-founder of PayPal, an original investor in Facebook and hedge fund manager, as well as being the inspiration for a villainous investor on the satirical HBO series Silicon Valley. Thiel’s extreme libertarian advocacy is long and storied, beginning with his days founding the Collegiate Network-backed Stanford Review. Lately he’s been noticed writing big checks for Ted Cruz.

He’s invested in Yarvin’s current startup, Tlon. Thiel invested personally in Tlon co-founder John Burnham. In 2011, at age 18, Burnham accepted $100,000 from Thiel to skip college and go directly into business. Instead of mining asteroids as he originally intended, Burnham wound up working on obscure networking software with Yarvin, whose title at Tlon is, appropriately enough, “benevolent dictator for life.”

California libertarian software developers inhabit a small and shallow world. It should be no surprise then, that, although Thiel has never publicly endorsed Yarvin’s side project specifically, or the neoreactionary program in general, there is definitely a whiff of something Moldbuggy in Thiel’s own writing. For instance, Thiel echoed Moldbug in an infamous 2009 essay for the Cato Institute in which he explained that he had moved beyond libertarianism. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote.

Thiel’s eponymous foundation funds, among other things, an institute to advance the ideas of a conservative Stanford academic, René Girard, under whom Thiel studied as an undergraduate. In 2012 Thiel delivered a lecture at Stanford that explained his views regarding the divine rights of Silicon Valley CEOs. The lecture did address some of Girard’s ideas about historical “mimetics,” but it also contained a heavy dose of Moldbuggian thought. Thiel says:

A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable. We are biased toward the democratic-republican side of the spectrum. That’s what we’re used to from civics classes. But the truth is that startups and founders lean toward the dictatorial side because that structure works better for startups.

Might a dictatorial approach, in Thiel’s opinion, also work better for society at large? He doesn’t say so in his Stanford lecture (although he does cast tech CEOs as the heirs to mythical “god-kings” such as Romulus). But Thiel knows where to draw the line in mixed company. Ordinary people get so “uncomfortable” when powerful billionaires start talking about the obsolescence of participatory government and “the unthinking demos,” as he put it in his Cato essay. Stupid proles! They don’t deserve our brilliance! “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom,” Thiel wrote.

It is clear that Thiel sees corporations as the governments of the future and capitalists such as himself as the kings, and it is also clear that this is a shockingly common view in Thiel’s cohort. In a 2011 New Yorker profile, George Packer wrote:

Thiel and his circle in Silicon Valley may be able to imagine a future that would never occur to other people precisely because they’ve refused to leave that stage of youthful wonder which life forces most human beings to outgrow . . . . He wants to live forever, have the option to escape to outer space or an oceanic city-state, and play chess against a robot that can discuss Tolkien, because these were the fantasies that filled his childhood imagination.

Packer is perhaps too generous to his subject. But he captures the fundamental problem with these mouthbreathers’ dreams of monarchy. They’ve never role-played the part of the peasant.


More at: https://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 29, 2017 1:21 pm

The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction

Shuja Haider March 28, 2017

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Siena Cathedral as seen through Google’s neural network



The Genealogy of Amorality

Neoreaction, or NRx, is an esoteric political doctrine of recent vintage. It became the locus of controversy in early 2017, after London art gallery LD50 convened a conference and exhibition featuring NRx ideologues, including Land, white supremacist journalist Peter Brimelow, and Anders Breivik sympathizer Brett Stevens. Protesters forced the gallery to shut down.

But the movement has less lofty origins than the currents of reactionary chic in contemporary art. In an article on Breitbart called “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos identified neoreactionaries as the intellectual vanguard of the movement, noting that they “appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com.” Thought experiments in dispassionate rationality had led some users of the forum to dark places. Eliezer Yudkowsky has as much patience for it as he did for Roko. “I am actively hostile to neoreaction,” he has written.

Given the hostile work environment, Anissimov left MIRI in 2013. He opened a competing forum that would be more hospitable to neoreaction, the now defunct MoreRight, and started a publishing company. He has since written and self-released books like Our Accelerating Future, A Critique of Democracy, and Idaho Project, “a white nationalist manifesto that integrates futurism, survivalism, and simple common sense into a proposal for concrete action.”

Anissimov is a follower of the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola, whose work, The New York Times has reported, is probably also on Steve Bannon’s bookshelf. Given the prevalence of the alt-right on forums like 4chan, it’s not a great leap from the Californian Ideology to extreme reactionary views. As Angela Nagle has written in Jacobin, the “creative energy” of the alt-right is the product of a synthesis of an “amoral libertine Internet culture” with appeals to white male identity and resentment — not an uncommon demographic in Silicon Valley. Mother Jones has reported that according to neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, Santa Clara County, where Apple and Intel are based, is the largest traffic source for his widely read white supremacist website The Daily Stormer. Anissimov may simply have been the Valley’s foremost innovator.

In contrast, Nick Land took a more serpentine path. A month before the 2016 election, Land made his first appearance as a columnist at The Daily Caller, the right-wing news outlet founded by Tucker Carlson. “Democracy tends to fascism,” he wrote, presenting a series of coy abstractions that betrayed his philosophical roots but withheld his political beliefs.

Land is an unlikely conservative media pundit, and a strange bedfellow of the alt-right. But like Roko, his writing helped bring the monster into being.

An Invasion from the Future

“In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad,’” writes Robin MacKay, in the introduction to Land’s essay collection Fanged Noumena. MacKay was Land’s student at the University of Warwick, first encountering him in 1992 through a course called “Current French Philosophy.” He remembers him as a sort of cyberpunk absent-minded professor, “quivering with stimulants” while generating cryptic texts on an “antiquated green-screen Amstrad computer.”

Land had published a single book, a study of Georges Bataille called The Thirst for Annihilation. But the landscape changed in 1995, when Sadie Plant, a self-described “cyberfeminist,” joined the Warwick faculty. Plant established a department called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), dedicated to the study of matters like science fiction, cryptography, jungle music, H.P. Lovecraft, and, of course, French philosophy.

In contrast to the stolid logical procedures of Anglo-American philosophy of the day, the Ccru called their delirious missives “theory-fiction.” They took their cues from the intellectual currents that emerged in the wake of the May ‘68 uprisings in Paris, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. These works reckoned with the suppression of resistance and the consolidation of state power that followed the fading of the anti-capitalist spirit of the late sixties.

Deleuze and Guattari set out to describe “the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism,” which they called “deterritorialization.” While in traditional societies the “material flow” of production was regulated by the division of the earth, capitalism set it loose. Yet if capitalism liberated production temporarily, it also tried to counteract this tendency by reinstituting forms of “territoriality,” bringing “all its vast powers of repression to bear” on the very forces that drove its unparalleled flows. The path to emancipation, they argued, was not to withdraw from capitalism, but to “accelerate the process.” Lyotard took this tendency in the opposite direction, in what he would come to proudly call his “evil book.” Workers, he said, desire their own oppression. Far from seeking emancipation, they “enjoy swallowing the shit of capital.”

If Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had served up an all-you-can-eat shit buffet in the 1980s, promoting the free market at the expense of the majority of their citizens, the Ccru responded by taking laissez-faire economics to a perverse extreme. They saw capital itself as the protagonist of history, with humans as grist for the mill. “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” Land wrote in his essay “Machinic Desire.” For Land, the Basilisk was already here.

At the time, Benjamin Noys took note of this philosophical trajectory, initially calling it “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Eventually, in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory, he gave it a pithier name, the application of which has been both broadly extended and hotly contested: accelerationism. Noys focused his critique on a particular misreading of Marx as a hybrid technological determinist and catastrophist, which licensed the idea that if the accumulation of capital generates and exacerbates the conditions that lead to its dissolution, then it is the duty of radicals to urge capital to fully realize and hence negate itself. Broadly conceived, the futurist telelogy this term denotes demonstrates the basis for its alignment with the Singularitarian ideology, seeing the exponential growth of technology as the key to the next stage of human species.

In 1997, Plant abruptly resigned her post at Warwick. Land took over. That year, journalist Simon Reynolds wrote a magazine profile of the Ccru, and the Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick’s Philosophy Department denied its existence. There was a procedure that had to be completed to establish a department, requiring paperwork that Plant had never bothered to file.

“Officially, you would then have to say that Ccru didn’t ever exist,” he told Reynolds. “There is, however, an office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with Ccru on the door, there’s a group of students who meet there to have seminars, and to that extent, it is a thriving entity.”

Regardless, the Director promised, “that office will disappear at the end of the year.” Throughout 1997, this nonexistent entity was prolific. MacKay remembers Land living in his office, rarely sleeping. According to philosopher Simon Critchley, Land “produced disciples” by the force of his cult of personality. “You’d go and give a talk at Warwick,” he recollected in Frieze, “and be denounced by people with the same saliva-dribbling verbal tics as Nick and wearing similar jumpers.”

Land eventually began to claim he was “inhabited by various ‘entities,’” named Cur, Vauung, and Can Sah. His work increasingly defied comprehension, sometimes departing from language altogether in favor of invented alphabets and number systems. “It’s another life,” Land told MacKay. “I don’t even remember writing half of those things.”

After the Ccru disappeared, Land disappeared too. He resigned from Warwick in 1998 and resurfaced in the new millennium as a journalist in Shanghai, writing patriotic newspaper op-eds, travel guides, and the occasional theory-fiction.

The afterlife of a self-described “malfunctioning academic” wouldn’t necessarily bear mentioning if not for Land’s unexpected alliance with a different kind of thinker. On April 22nd, 2007, a character named Mencius Moldbug had made his public debut on a blog of contrarian commentary called 2blowhards, with an essay titled “A Formalist Manifesto.”

The Exit Sign

“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology,” Moldbug began. 2blowhards provided only a vague description of the manifesto’s author, formerly a regular in the site’s comments section. He had “made a score in a recent dot-com boom,” allowing him to spend $500 a month on books. Moldbug responded to nearly every reply in the post’s comments. A week later, he had started his own blog, Unqualified Reservations.

His ideology was idiosyncratic, centered on a reverence for Thomas Carlyle, a Victorian-era essayist best-known for his advocacy of the “Great Man” theory of history. He also incorporated measured respect for Austrian classical liberal Ludwig Von Mises and individualist libertarian Murray Rothbard, who were on the right track but didn’t go quite far enough.

Over the course of thousands of words, most of them superfluous, Moldbug moved from “formalism” to “neocameralism,” in tribute to the bureaucratic procedures of Frederick William I of Prussia. Finally, in July 2010, the same week as Roko’s fateful post, libertarian blogger Arnold Kling referred to Moldbug as a “neo-reactionary.” The name stuck.

In his earthly life, Moldbug is Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who is the brains behind a startup called Urbit, the purpose of which evades explanation even for its inventor. Yarvin’s prose is excruciating, but he won a sizeable following for reliably flaunting convention and defying decorum. “Very few of Moldbug’s fans have read anywhere near his entire corpus,” Michael Anissimov admits, but most have noticed his amoral disquisitions on the relative merits of obvious injustices like slavery, and his opposition to democracy in general.

One fan who does seem to have read Yarvin’s entire corpus is Nick Land. In 2012, he took it upon himself to systematize the Moldbug ideology, and with his typical flair for denomination, christened it “The Dark Enlightenment.” His sequence of essays setting out its principles have become the foundation of the NRx canon.

If it’s hard to imagine Milo Yiannopoulos or Tucker Carlson pondering Land’s interpretation of Lyotard, it’s just as hard to comprehend Land’s infatuation with Yarvin. It’s a strange intellectual path that begins with “Current French Philosophy” and settles on a right-wing Silicon Valley blogger whose writing is more Dungeons and Dragons than Deleuze and Guattari. Whatever the cause, Land has gone from prophet to apostle.

Along with Yarvin, Land cites a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel for libertarian publication Cato Unbound, which famously announced, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel went on to envision “an escape from politics in all its forms,” which Land interprets using an opposition that had been introduced by political scientist Albert Hirschman, between voice and exit. The terms describe the ways of exercising rights in a society with which a citizen has grievances; voice is participation in a democratic process that can lead to reform, while exit is the departure to a different society. A provisional example Land offers is white flight, the mid-century exodus of affluent caucasian families to the suburbs.

Neoreactionaries don’t advocate any kind of central social organization. Land envisions a “gov-corp,” a society run like a company, ruled by a CEO. Instead of petitioning a government for redress of grievances, unsatisfied customers are free to take their business elsewhere. If this sounds medieval, neoreactionaries don’t deny it — Yarvin sometimes describes himself as a “royalist,” or a “monarchist,” or even a “Jacobite,” in reference to 17th-century opponents of parliamentary influence in British government.

The question is, where do you go after exiting? NRxers don’t dismiss the idea of competing gov-corps on the same land mass, an idea anticipated by NRx intellectual forefather Hans Herman-Hoppe, an extreme libertarian political scientist, who advocates for a system that he admits is essentially feudalism. On a more abstract level, the neoreactionary fascination with bitcoin imagines the escape to an alternate economy unencumbered by federal regulation. Even Yarvin’s startup, Urbit, seems to be oriented towards exit: it promises an alternative internet inaccessible to outside users.

But the most utopian (dystopian?) wing of NRx literally aims to build Lovecraftian cities in the sea. This project, called Seasteading, is championed by Yarvin’s former business partner Patri Friedman, whose grandfather Milton Friedman happens to be the economist responsible for the most extreme free market policies in the modern world. Peter Thiel was once Seasteading’s principal backer, as well as an investor in Urbit.

It’s not hard to see why floating sovereign states, out of any existing nation’s jurisdiction, would appeal to the super-rich. At their most innocuous, they might serve as an extension of an offshore bank, allowing for evasion of any type of redistributive tax policy. They also bring to mind the activities of wealthy men like Jeffrey Epstein, who used his private Caribbean island to throw bacchanalian parties for his millionaire and billionaire friends, allegedly revolving around the sexual assault of minors.

The path of exit doesn’t end at the water’s edge. Though you won’t hear him promoting NRx rhetoric, Elon Musk is committed to the idea in his own way, keeping one eye on Mars and one underground.

“A Prophetic Warning”

Yarvin has given the ideology of his enemy – that is, contemporary liberal society itself – an even longer series of names than he did his own: “progressivism,” “crypto-Calvinism,” “universalism,” “demotism,” and so on. The term that he adopted permanently, though, is “the Cathedral.” It first appeared in the fourth installment of his fourteen-part series “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” which, along with the nine-part “Gentle Introduction” and the seven-part “How Dawkins Got Pwned,” is considered his major statement.

Michael Anissomov’s more succinct Neoreactionary Glossary defines the Cathedral as “the self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service.” It’s named for a religious structure because that, according to Yarvin, is what it is. It’s a descendent of the Puritan church, functioning to suppress dissent from its orthodoxy of egalitarianism and democracy, which Yarvin calls the Synopsis.

Mild-mannered Curtis Yarvin must have been surprised, then, when the Cathedral’s attentions landed squarely on his alter ego Mencius Moldbug. In the weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Politico reported that according to an unnamed source, Yarvin has “opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary.” The claim remained unverified, as Yarvin “does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story.”

Vox managed to interview Yarvin later that day. “The idea that I’m ‘communicating’ with Steve Bannon through an ‘intermediary’ is preposterous,” he said. “I have never met Steve Bannon or communicated with him, directly or indirectly.” A few days later, The Atlantic asked Yarvin about his alleged intermediary. He claimed it was Twitter user @BronzeAgePerv, whose profile describes him as a “Nationalist, Fascist, Nudist Bodybuilder!”

Yarvin’s evasiveness makes it hard to tell whether he’s hiding something, or just trolling. But it’s no surprise he reserved the majority of his contempt for The Atlantic, which, in the original Dark Enlightenment sequence, Nick Land called the “core Cathedral-mouthpiece.” The Atlantic went on to speak to Land, who was his usual self. “NRx was a prophetic warning about the rise of the Alt-Right,” he said.

NRx has gotten some attention before. A piece in Techcrunch in 2013, The Baffler in 2014, and The Awl in 2015 have all offered surveys of the ideology. The mainstream media took notice of one particular event, when Yarvin was disinvited from the Strangeloop tech conference after the organizers discovered his blog. Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote an article in his favor, arguing that Yarvin’s politics are “abstract.” 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.


More at: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/28 ... oreaction/
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Mar 29, 2017 1:31 pm

I have to admit a certain lingering tendency to reactively defend Land. Mostly because 1) he introduced me to the idea of time-printing as the natural successor to 3D printing, and 2) I am super sympathetic to the deadened languid bullshit of the milieu in which he was operating.

I still think his work can be used to chart a futurist anarchist course with regards to the eventual extinction of phenotypical difference as the most essential grounds for subjugation and how to think preventively against those novel new grounds for subjugation which are yet to emerge. Probably I'm full of shit here but still need to return to this germ of an idea. Also, I liked his book on Bataille.
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 29, 2017 1:40 pm

I dunno... something about him stinks, badly:


No Platform for Land: On Nick Land’s Racist Capitalism and a More General Problem


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We invite the New Centre for Research and Practice, if they are to retain any credibility as a critical institution, to end their course taught by Nick Land (ongoing through March and April 2017). That students have paid for this course is not a problem they should be burdened with; a refund, whole or in part, would be the appropriate recompense.

Nick Land promotes racism, in its eugenic, ethnonationalist, and cultural varieties, and yet he continues to be feted in art and theory scenes. As the crisis lurches into the Frog Twitter presidency, the New Centre for Research and Practice hosts Land for a suite of eight seminars; Urbanomic, the experimental small-press, announces a reprint of Fanged Noumena, the Land collection that hooked-in his philosophy fan club; and an academic conference is advertised, in terms all too flattering, on Land’s ‘ferocious but short-lived assault’.

Is it that these institutions and projects are wittingly racist? No, they strike us more as Land’s ‘useful idiots’, enhancing the reputation, credibility, and reach of a far right racist while imagining his presence in their scenes furthers different agendas. Sure, they make the odd noise against his racism, when challenged, but it peeves them to do so, their hackles rise; racism is an irritant, the assumed radicalism of their projects seemingly absolving them of mundane responsibilities to investigate further, to reflect on their role, to cut Land loose. Instead, their cutting-edge philosophy morphs into liberal commonplace as they deflect opposition to the content and aims of Land’s racism and the means of its circulation and traction into abstract defense of the free play of ideas, of ‘reflect[ing] the landscape of contemporary thought’, of ‘working with controversial thinkers’. One wonders if this kind of philosophy reaches any point at which the content of an idea provokes critical opposition?

It is suggested that lack of critical attention to Land’s racist scene allowed it to proliferate unchecked, that, as the New Centre puts it, ‘the political left’s dismissal of right accelerationism and neoreactionary thought [i.e. the Land camp] is one of the many reasons as to why we are seeing an unchallenged rise of fascism and white nationalism in Europe and North America’. Quite so, they are right to highlight this lapse of attention. Though they have missed the logical conclusion of their observation: that we should critically oppose all the means by which far right racists rise and gain credibility, including when the means locate themselves on ‘the left’ or within experimental philosophy.

We are accused of not reading Land, of a failure to understand him, but the only defense we can see of those who are yet to cut loose from Land is that this failure of understanding lies with them. So let us clarify a little with some brief exposition of Land’s far right racism. We hope it will also be of use to others concerned about the spread of the far right under cover of esoteric philosophy.

Nick Land advocates for racially based absolutist micro-states, where unregulated capitalism combines with genetic separation between global elites and the ‘refuse’ (his term) of the rest. It’s a eugenic philosophy of ‘hyper-racism’, as he describes it on the racist blog Alternative Right, or ‘Human Biodiversity’ (HBD). Here, class dominance and inequality are mapped onto, explained, and justified by tendencies for the elite to mate with each other and spawn a new species with an expanding IQ. Yes, this ‘hyper-racism’ is that daft – and would be laughed off as the fantasy of a neoliberal Dr Strangelove if it didn’t have leverage in this miserable climate of the ascendant far right. Regarding the other side, the domain of the ‘refuse’, Land uses euphemism to stand in for the white nationalist notion of a coming ‘white genocide’: ‘demographic engineering as an explicit policy objective’, ‘steady progress of population replacement’, is the racial threat he describes on the bleak webpages of The Daily Caller.

It is claimed Land has a superior philosophy of capitalism (‘accelerationism’ – you’ve heard of it – the topic of his New Centre course). But like the Nazis before him, Land’s analysis of capitalism produces and is sustained by a pseudo-biological theory of eugenic difference and separation: the redemptive productive labour of well-bred Aryans, for one, the escalating IQ of an inward-mating economic elite for the other. There’s no ‘philosophy’ here to be separated from Land’s far right ‘politics’; the two are interleaved and co-constituting. ‘More Capitalism!’ has always been the essence of Land’s supposedly radical critique, from his early philosophy at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) to now. Hence it’s little wonder that his philosophy is inseparable from the racism that has always accompanied capitalism as an integral dynamic – from chattel slavery and the blood-bath of colonial expansion, to the passive slaughter of migrants in the Mediterranean and Black populations at the hands of the police, their mundane exposure to death calibrated to the crisis of the labour form. Land’s oh so virulent assault on the ‘Human Security System’, as he framed it in CCRU days, thrilling those who thought him the transvaluation of all values, is revealed to be the latest in a long and monotonous line of tropes that would disqualify the life of particular humans – the working class, minorities, and other ‘refuse’. For hyper-racists can rest assured, the elite’s ‘Human Security System’ is to be bolstered, by capital accrual and the proliferation of hard micro-borders.

That Land’s chosen people are internally homogeneous global classes of high ‘socio-economic status’ and not exclusively ‘white’ should not be the distraction he intends; the physical and psychological violence of racism has its own sorry architecture, but it has always closely partnered with the production and perpetuation of class privilege and pleasure. And inevitably, more traditional racist tropes of fear, hatred, and ridicule of Black people and Muslims, of ‘cucks’ (as the alt-right call those who would live without ‘race’ boundaries), feature with enough regularity in Land’s blog and Twitter (Outside in, @Outsideness, @UF_blog) that his ideas can merrily slop around on social media with the full gamut of racisms.

Take an example, posted on the day Land gave his third seminar at the New Centre, as if to rub their noses in it. On 19 March he tweeted favourably to a rabidly racist blog that explained German crime rates as the result of the supposed innate propensities of ‘races’ (and not, as anyone with a critical philosophy of capital knows, a result of racism, insecurity, and poverty); ‘Blessings from the Maghreb’, Land captioned it, with a wit worthy of Nigel Farage. Another chimed in to this dreary taxonomy of racial types with the observation that the Chinese ‘are impeccably well behaved’, to which Land’s response: ‘90% of my racism is based on that fact’. Don’t be mistaken to think the latter is some kind of light-hearted humour, for Land adopts – and teaches his junior interlocutors by example – a calculated ambiguity to his racism, all the better to broaden the milieu within which his odious ideas can circulate unchallenged.

Then there’s Land’s broader neoreactionary scene. For instance, he converses with Brett Stevens on Twitter as interlocutor, not opponent, and the two spoke as part of the ‘neoreaction conference’ (Stevens’ description) at LD50 in summer 2016. Stevens is a self-declared white nationalist whose ideas influenced Anders Breivik and who, in turn, praised Breivik’s murder of 77 people for, in Stevens’ eyes, being an attack on ‘leftists’: ‘I am honored to be so mentioned by someone who is clearly far braver than I,’ Stevens wrote of Breivik. ‘[N]o comment on his methods, but he chose to act where many of us write, think and dream’.

It is surely apparent from all this that any appeal from Land or his advocates to ‘free speech’ is a dissimulation, willed or accidental, that aids his efforts to extend the reach of his racism. It’s only those at the greatest remove from the violent impact of racism who don’t see that ‘free speech’ is repeated by the alt-right to such a degree – always front and centre in their profile – that it has become integral to their reproduction and dissemination. As ever, the art scene and liberal media have trouble seeing what’s right in front of their eyes. Look at Frieze’s recent effort, the magazine’s will to promote ‘free speech’ taking the form of a stacked ‘survey’ about the anti-racist shutdown of LD50, with an unbalance of three to one of those unable to fathom why it’s ill advised to give far right racists and their apologists a free pass through east London, the art world, and the university.

It has been said that we should learn from Land’s purportedly well-honed critique of the cognitive ecosystem of ‘the left’, the rather limited view that those who would overcome the violence, exploitation, and tedium of capitalist society are all just whingers. But the readiness of people to be impressed by this point suggests they may already be on the slippery slope to the right. For it would take little effort to find a wealth of critical work from radical theory and practice – from feminism, post-colonial theory, anti-racism, queer theory, Marxism, critical theory, communism – on the limitations of our scenes. That has always been a feature of radical currents, the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, where ‘all’ includes the standpoints from which that critique is made (in contrast to the drab inviolate principles of the far right: bourgeois individuality, race, nation). Undoubtedly, this critical capacity needs honing. Sustained critical and experimental engagement with this conjuncture and our limitations is sorely wanted, for there is much worse in the world today than Nick Land. But part of that critique should be opposing the presence of Land and his ilk in experimental scenes, rejecting the idea that we have anything to learn from these narcissistic, racist identitarians – nothing except how they came to proliferate so unopposed.

And that is a lesson for the future too. As the crisis deepens, we will be seeing more of these far right ideas disseminated under cover of ‘controversy’ and ‘free speech’; right wing ‘solutions’ camouflaged with leftist flavours; reactionary conservatism masquerading as techno-futurism; left wing scenes adopting right wing metaphysics; fantasies of social collapse arming the status quo, etc. Not that we’ll have to look too hard. Nick Land openly declares his racism, and yet critical institutions continue to promote him. Can they ride out opposition to Land and sail again on philosophical waters untroubled by the realities of class exploitation and racism? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely. Instead, we invite them to ditch their positive association with Land, before their credibility is tested beyond repair.

SDLD50


https://shutdownld50.tumblr.com/post/15 ... nds-racist
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby liminalOyster » Wed Mar 29, 2017 8:37 pm

He seems kind of fetid at times for sure. But Nick Land's mind has, at least at times over the past two decades, vibrated with genuine novelty. The irony of no-platforming him is just too much, IMHO. I don't mean to give him undue credit but wouldn't Antifa types be similarly interested in no-platforming Bataille, Nietzsche or Heidegger if they showed up today?
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 29, 2017 9:38 pm

Don't you think that's a bit of a stretch, even just rhetorically? I mean neither Bataille, Nietzsche nor Heidegger promoted Alt-Right/NRx type racist/sexist/fascist agenda or anything, did they? Meanwhile, the LD50 Gallery was clearly serving as a front/vehicle for fascists and extreme reactionaries.



liminalOyster » Wed Mar 29, 2017 7:37 pm wrote:He seems kind of fetid at times for sure. But Nick Land's mind has, at least at times over the past two decades, vibrated with genuine novelty. The irony of no-platforming him is just too much, IMHO. I don't mean to give him undue credit but wouldn't Antifa types be similarly interested in no-platforming Bataille, Nietzsche or Heidegger if they showed up today?
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Mar 30, 2017 6:41 am

It's a stretch, for sure, if it implies any equivalency between Land and those three. But Land's work did begin with a gleeful lunge in to the profane not a Stormfront pamphlet. I think that's worth remembering especially when he's being no-platformed. Heidegger was far worse, I think: incorporating specific terms from The Protocols of the Elders of ZIon into an intellectual attack on Judaism, in the Black Notebooks.
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 8:24 am

I didn't know all that about Heidegger! That is really fucked up.

I will admit to having complicated feelings about how the anti-fascist impulse plays out in the world. I've never punched a Nazi or anything remotely like that. I have protested speaking events (Oliver North, AIPAC, Bush) but have never been part of any focused effort to shut such things down. That said, I do consider the Alt Right and others of their ilk to represent a network of odious conspiracies which should be strongly opposed.

A key principle to me is doing less harm. That means if and when boycotts and shut downs,or any other oppositional tactics go down, it should do the least harm possible. For me that means simply sharing information and analysis that is anti-fascist, for which I am thankful to many researchers and thinkers who have furthered such work.

I have no problem with the proposition that the LD50 Gallery is very bad news. Nick Land will become more or less of a target as he aligns himself more or less with Alt-Right circles. it's really up to him to a large degree and his work of 20 years ago does not erase the damage that he is doing to his own reputation, near as I can tell.
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Mar 30, 2017 8:57 am

Land carefully destroyed his academic and professional reputation a long time ago. Also he's kind of a tool. I'm not defending any fascist tendencies in his oeuvre. I just humbly think he remains interesting, if only as a parable but definitely an intellectual cut above some asshole like Richard Spencer. I do want to see where he takes his project, but that is different than admiring it. I just want him to have a platform. If he starts making political calls for violence, I imagine I will stop caring to hear what he has to say.

I wanted to see the LD50 show but didn't make it there. Mostly the images I saw online were relatively benign. Nonetheless, I personally don't see how galleries can/should entirely avoid such content. If it were truly propaganda, then sure. But Trump's election itself hinged more on sort of profane aesthetics. So I don't understand how protesting a gallery show - which might be thought of as a containment strategy - makes any sense when it is largely showcasing a stream of images that is already proliferating online.

Above all else there's just something really fucking weird going on with this whole thing of shock/awe aesthetics given the piece you posted on LD50 and thinking of it in relation to Pizzagate which, although clearly Trump-allied at least, actually assumes shock value imagery is evil/satanic and declares war on art itself, pretty much. My first take is that all this has something to do with anxieties about assimilating queerness in order to solidify white male-ness against brown invaders. But I'm too lazy to really think hard about it.
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 9:43 am

Third Positionism, skinhead Zionism, Milo, National Anarchism, the LD50 Gallery, the Alt-Right, Michael Moynihan, Boyd Rice, Death in June, Wolves of Vinland, Augustus Sol Invictus, racist Asatru, etc. all represent a not-fully veiled agenda for fascoid elements: duplicitous entryism. It is fascinating, but rather like studying a disease under a microscope, it is important not to spread the deception and misdirection these folks specialize in.

The lessons that can be learned, especially about the fuzzy borders between State and non-State actors, the pervasiveness of reactionary elements in our societies, the ongoing struggles to end old patterns of domination and abuse, those are some of the important things. Above and beyond everyday anti-fascist organizing, of course.
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 2:01 pm

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Behind the Internet's Anti-Democracy Movement

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is reportedly a reader of neoreactionary political theory. A tour through the pro-authoritarian philosophy gaining visibility on the right.


White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has been in contact via intermediaries with Curtis Yarvin, Politico Magazine reported this week. Yarvin, a software engineer and blogger, writes under the name Mencius Moldbug. His anti-egalitarian arguments have formed the basis for a movement called “neoreaction.”

The main thrust of Yarvin’s thinking is that democracy is a bust; rule by the people doesn’t work, and doesn’t lead to good governance. He has described it as an “ineffective and destructive” form of government, which he associates with “war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.” Yarvin’s ideas, along with those of the English philosopher Nick Land, have provided a structure of political theory for parts of the white-nationalist movement calling itself the alt-right. The alt-right can be seen as a political movement; neoreaction, which adherents refer to as NRx, is a philosophy. At the core of that philosophy is a rejection of democracy and an embrace of autocratic rule.

The fact that Bannon reportedly reads and has been in contact with Yarvin is another sign of the extent to which the Trump era has brought previously fringe right-wing ideologies into the spotlight. It has brought new energy into a right that is questioning and actively trying to dismantle existing orthodoxies—even ones as foundational as democracy. The alt-right, at this point, is well-known, while NRx has remained obscure. But with one of the top people in the White House paying attention, it seems unlikely to remain obscure for long.

Yarvin’s posts on history, race, and governance are written in a style that is detached and edgy, to say the least. “What's so bad about the Nazis?” he asked in a blog post in 2008, writing, “we are taught that the Nazis were bad because they committed mass murder, to wit, the Holocaust. On the other hand... (a): none of the parties fighting against the Nazis, including us, seems to have given much of a damn about the Jews or the Holocaust. (b): one of the parties on our side was the Soviet Union, whose record of mass murder was known at the time and was at least as awful as the Nazis'.”

“It should be obvious that, although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin wrote in 2007. In a 2009 post about the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s defense of slavery, he argued that some races are more suited to slavery than others.


Continues at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... nt/516243/
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Mar 30, 2017 3:18 pm

I wish my side had won and installed their own dark horse mastermind - the mirror image of Bannon but corresponding instead with maybe Negri Tiqqun and Agamben.

TBT, Relevant:

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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby American Dream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 3:56 pm

Do you think that Milo and Land can coexist happily with Tiqqun and Agamben within a radical social practice?
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Re: The Dark Enlightenment

Postby liminalOyster » Thu Mar 30, 2017 4:14 pm

American Dream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 8:56 pm wrote:Do you think that Milo and Land can coexist happily with Tiqqun and Agamben within a radical social practice?


Milo? No of course not. He has no mettle. I should say that I'm really not that familiar with Land since he resurged after disappearing for awhile. The neoreaction stuff mostly starts there, right? But no I don't think he's any model for practice at all. I just think/sense that he has said some interesting things about temporality and about futurism. That's mostly all I really like about him, as I think about it. Although I do also think the heavy Deleuzian underpinnings of his early experimentation is a good corrective to resurgent 60s revolutionary philosophy and I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the decolonial thinkers you've mentioned (in other threads) are sometimes overtly anti-continental philosophy.
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