Poseidon Awoke has a great post up about the class characteristics of neoreaction. It’s bound to generate a lot of discussion. Much of it is irresistibly persuasive. You’ll want to read it.

I have a few quibbles — Vaisyas aren’t ‘activists’ (because business isn’t politics), and the Catholic slant of NRx is more complicated than this essay makes it out to be (because cladistics). These kind of qualifications aren’t decisive in themselves.

The decisive reservation has to do with the social function of code specialists. Perhaps this tweet makes the point best:

Prose is just code that doesn't compile. (Ignore if you're not a tech entrepreneur).

— Naval Ravikant (@naval) May 30, 2014

‘Silicon Valley’ changes the meaning of ‘Brahmin’ — if we’re still going to use that word. Most simply, the long-established distinction between literate and industrial elites loses its security in the epoch of programming, or digitization. NRx washes back from a social horizon at which the sign and its operationalization have become de-segmented, necessitating a seismic re-configuration of class identities.

The Brahmin priest caste, like the digital elite, specializes in signs, but they are signs of exhortation, rather than of intrinsic efficiency. Is not the Cathedral precisely a name for that apparatus of signs — (non-STEM) academia, media, bureaucracy, politics … — which cannot in principle ever compile? The Cathedral is a secular religion, which has to preach because it does not work.

When NRx insists upon a division within ‘progress’ between techno-economics (which works) and socio-politics (which decays), it opens a rift that splits the Brahmins, rather than further separating them from social inferiors. NRx, at its core, is a ‘Brahmin’ civil war.

From here (via):

it always was a little absurd, but it’s seriously absurd now