Letting stuff like this out and giving it a non-crackpot, non-tinfoil-hate, non-Hitler face would be profoundly destablizing. Once the AP Style Guide names this source as formally unreliable and unquotable, you can bet people will be interested. Llike intellectual bitcoin, it may not be easy to control once it reaches critical mass.

I mean this came up at the DC meetup: Harvard gives Richwine a PhD. Distinguished professors, at least one a devout Leftist signs off on the dissertation. Richwine is one of the club, a card-carrying member of The Cathedral… one of the Holy Us. No. Problemo.

Richwine goes to Heritage… decidedly not the Cathedral… well not exactly not the Cathedral, but the outer party (Outer Courts) of the Cathedral. Richwine’s opinions, perfectly cool, perfectly legitimate, perfectly scientific, perfectly within bounds of civil discourse with the Hallowed Halls of Harvard, are suddenly way too hot for Heritage to handle. He’s “Richwined”. (Note: his dissertation probably would not have been deemed acceptable to second tier university faculty… in this the second tier schools are a lot like Heritage.)

What if there was a place for card-carrying members of The Cathedral to really play. I.e., to bring the natural diversity of opinion which (we have ample evidence) does exist within the inner santum of the Cathedral out to the bright light of day… but in doing so skipping the outer courts of the Cathedral entirely, and into the outer darkness, where no one gives a fsck about pretty lies?

I mean the medieval universities were hotbeds of dissent from the then dominant ideology (Catholicism, neat). You could say stuff (even believe stuff) there that you could never get away with anywhere else. The inner sanctum of the Cathedral, the Universities, which all others try to emulate, perform precisely that same function. They’re cool with stuff.

If you could build Dark Academia to be strong enough to start tearing at the mainstream narrative, i.e., create a diversity of opinion which the West hasn’t seen in at least 40 years, on select issues…. well that would be really something… something which could arise to unseat the Cathedral, or at least get a lot of very comfortable professors to feel the how powerless it is to lose control of the narrative.

Agreed, I’m thinking more of use cases, not the particular technology required. Birch is just one potential solution. A custom cryptographic component would probably be wise for whatever solution were imagined.

The problems with any such scheme are almost entirely social. If potential members can’t read the content, it’s hard to attract a sufficient number of participants, or achieve escape velocity in the first place. Secondly, good potential users are unlikely to wait to comment unless the forum is already of unusually high quality.

Attempts to design attractive new fora in which the social problems are ameliorated are likely to fail because were this easy, they would already exist.

This is why secret fraternities and occult orders are founded, why mystery cults flourished in the Classical world, and why the Qabbala was once restricted to 40 year olds. I have been thinking about meta-cultural evaluation metrics; “How is dangerous knowledge withheld from the masses?” feels like a good one. The Cathedral’s PR response is “no legitimate line of inquiry will ever be restricted” (but of course the reality is that any line of inquiry that jeopardizes Universalism will be swiftly excised from respectable discourse.)

Reaction’s answer needs to be different. Michael Anissimov’s very compelling apologia for reaction makes a strong case for the absolute necessity of hierarchy. With dangerous knowledge embedded in dangerous technology and potentially available to the masses, civilization demands a realistic control mechanism. We’re all Grand Inquisitors now.

In the lowercase-f sense, there are a few Evolians, but that seems to be all.