Is there a word for an ‘argument’  so soggily insubstantial that it has to be scooped into a pair of scare-quotes to be apprehended, even in its self-dissolution? If there were, I’d have been using it all the time recently. Among the latest occasions is a blog post by Charlie Stross, which describes itself as “a political speculation” before disappearing into the gray goomenon. Nothing in it really holds together, but it’s fun in its own way, especially if it’s taken as a sign of something else.

The ‘something else’ is a subterranean complicity between Neoreaction and Accelerationism (the latter linked here, Stross-style, in its most recent, Leftist version). Communicating with fellow ‘Hammer of Neoreaction’ David Brin, Stross asks: “David, have you run across the left-wing equivalent of the Neo-Reactionaries — the Accelerationists?” He then continues, invitingly: “Here’s my (tongue in cheek) take on both ideologies: Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism!”

Stross is a comic-future novelist, so it’s unrealistic to expect much more than a dramatic diversion (or anything more at all, actually). After an entertaining meander through parts of the Trotskyite-neolibertarian social-graph, which could have been deposited on a time-like curve out of Singularity Sky, we’ve learnt that Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party has been on a strange path, but whatever connection there was to Accelerationism, let alone Neoreaction, has been entirely lost. Stross has the theatrical instinct to end the performance before it became too embarrassing: “Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists, the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical!” (OK.) Curtain closes. Still, it was all comparatively good humored (at least in contrast to Brin’s increasingly enraged head-banging).

Continue Reading

My Dark Enlightenment / horrorist T-shirt suggestion:

You don’t want to see this

(Prompted by Alrenous)

ADDED: Alrenous suggests (in the thread below) — Dark Enlightenment. You just don’t want to know.
‘Know’ is definitely superior from a technical point of view, but I’m still caught up in the quasi-cinematic drama of media sensationalism.

(… and tinkering with the initial offering, I’m wondering whether it’s worth the extra word to go to: You really don’t want to see this.)

Sensation — media nourishment — is situated on a border. It tells the inside something about the outside, and is shaped from both sides. The outside is what it is, which might not be perceptible, or acceptable. The inside wants relevant information, selected and formatted to its purposes. Sensation is therefore where subject and object meet.

… that’s an attempt to express preliminary sympathy for Matt Sigl’s situation, caught between an uncanny thing and a definite agenda. Concretely; research collides with editing, with Sigl’s brain as ground zero. The encounter of Neoreaction with the media is a peculiarly vicious one, with the sensations to match.

Crudely speaking, Neoreaction is disgust at the media condensed into an ideology. While generally contemptuous of the human fodder making up modern democracies, Neoreaction principally targets the media-academic complex (or ‘Cathedral’) for antagonism, because it is the media that is the real ‘electorate’ — telling voters what to do. This foundational critique, on its own, would be enough to ensure intense reciprocal loathing. Of course, it is not on its own. Neoreaction is in almost every respect the Cathedral anti-message, which is to say that it is consistently, radically, and defiantly ‘off-message’ on every topic of significance, and is thus something unutterably horrible. Yet utterance — it now seems — there has to be …

Continue Reading

Konkvistador (@SamoBurja): “I am in favor of persuading certain kinds of high IQ people. I am against doing dialectics with Progressives.”

We are not looking for agreement. We’re working to raise the level of explicit disagreement to a pitch we can split over.

Dialectics is the alternative to Dynamic Geography. Debating escape is not to escape.

There are hints of a theme here:

From a TC piece comment by ‘Bah': “Neoreactionaries should really move to North Korea, it’s much closer to what they want for the world.”

David Brin: “Some of you know the experiment to which he refers. North and South Korea.”

Charlie Stross (in his own comment thread): “The reason I think the reactionaries are full of shit is because we have a modern-day poster child for the hereditary king of a nation that embodies all their declared virtues: Kim Jong-Un.”

(Moldbug responds to this ‘analysis’. Much more by others on the TC thread.)

If anyone finds the variant of Neoreaction espoused here indistinguishable from Juche, I’m just going to suck it up.

Samo Burja initiates a structured discussion on the subject.

If the Neoreaction is not a popular movement, a political party, a church, an organization, or even in any strong sense one thing, what is it? I’m assuming that if it is more than a fight over a name, it is at least a coalition, integrated by a shared enemy, and some common references.

The only canonical scripture I am able to identify is the Unqualified Reservations corpus. This is certainly not ‘gospel’ for anyone, but it constitutes the distinctive intellectual heritage of those who identify positively with the neoreactionary current. Neoreaction has to be at least tenuously ‘Moldbuggian’ if it is not to dissipate entirely into noise. There are, however, already many Moldbugs, and there will be still more.

Burja writes: “Splitting will happen. People will disagree. And they will leave.”

Leave what? (That, I think, is his question.)

And if splitting is intrinsic to what the Neoreaction is? (That is mine.)

“The thing is, now that I have been made aware of the phenomenon, I see it everywhere …”

Continue Reading

A protracted to-and-fro on Twitter with Michael Anissimov has exposed some deliciously ragged and bleeding faultlines in the Neoreaction on the question of capitalism. There were a number of parties involved, but I’m focusing on Anissimov because his position and mine are so strongly polarized on key issues, and especially this one (the status of market-oriented economism). If we were isolated as a dyad, it’s not easy to see anybody finding a strong common root (pity @klintron). It’s only the linkages of ‘family resemblance’ through Moldbug that binds us together, and we each depart from Unqualified Reservations with comparable infidelity, but in exactly opposite directions. (As a fragmentationist, this fissional syndrome is something I strongly appreciate.)

Moldbug’s Neocameralism is a Janus-faced construction. In one direction, it represents a return to monarchical government, whilst in the other it consummates libertarianism by subsuming government into an economic mechanism. A ‘Moldbuggian’ inspiration, therefore, is not an unambiguous thing. Insofar as ‘Neoreaction’ designates this inspiration, it flees Cathedral teleology in (at least) two very different directions — which quite quickly seem profoundly incompatible. In the absence of a secessionist meta-context, in which such differences can be absorbed as geographically-fragmented socio-political variation, their raw inconsistency is almost certainly insurmountable.

Continue Reading

Klint Finley at Tech Crunch suspects something is going on:

Incidentally, Thiel’s Founders Fund is one of the investors in Srinivasan’s company Counsyl. The co-founder of Yarvin’s startup Tlon was one of the first recipients of the Thiel Fellowship. Anissimov was the media director of the Thiel-backed Machine Intelligence Institute (formerly known as the Singularity Institute). It’s enough to make a conspiracy theorist’s head spin, but I’m not actually suggesting that there’s a conspiracy here. I don’t think Peter Thiel is part of some neoreactionary master plot — I don’t even necessarily think he’s a neoreactionary. But you can see that a certain set of ideas are spreading through out the startup scene. Neoreactionary ideas overlap heavily with pickup artistry, seasteading and scientific racism (more on that later), and this larger “caveman cult” has an impact on tech culture, from work environments to the social atmosphere at conferences.

[You might know Yarvin by another name]

No one’s exactly saying it’s a fiendish plot …

ADDED: Scharlach is following developments (here, and here). More from Amos & Gromar, and Anarchopapist.

I’m under a sacred obligation to review Bryce Laliberte’s ebook What is Neoreaction? Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the Phenomena of Civilization. Thankfully, this solemn duty was not specifically scheduled. Working towards its accomplishment is a thought-provoking process, which is a good thing.

As a trivial matter, I’m forced to ask: Is that supposed to be ‘phenomena’? ‘Phenomenon’ would be more stylistically persuasive, even if the plural is defensible on conceptual grounds. That kind of side-issue, however, is symptomatic self-distraction. There are serious questions at stake here, and elusive ones.

Continue Reading