The founders of the Internet may have been slightly hippy-like, but they were mostly government-funded and fairly government-friendly. Cutting a deal with the Department of Commerce seemed like a pretty good idea to them at the time.

The core Bitcoin developers are cypherpunks who do what they do because they don’t trust governments or the global banking system and are trying to build a distributed and autonomous system, one that is impervious to regulation and meddling by anyone at any time. At some level, Bitcoin was designed to not care what regulators think.

ADDED: More Internet / Bitcoin comparison.

In and around the NRx (highlights): Steel anarchism (and response). This opaque but intriguing stuff is also, probably, relevant. An epic delve into global complexity. The Gutenberg shock. A Watsoned world (background), further comment. The propertarian alternative (more, and more). Democracy on display (plus a reminder).

Race war round-up: between two worlds (more tightrope walking). Integration from the left: “It’s impos­si­ble for a white per­son to believe in cap­i­tal­ism and not believe in racism,” Mal­colm said in a 1964 dis­cus­sion. “You can’t have cap­i­tal­ism with­out racism.” — which simplifies things. Cut the riot shaming. Blame the cops, or Obama, or leftist race politics, or black family breakdown, or befuddlement, or idiots. “The real message of Ferguson: we are [seeing multiculturalism itself] go up in flames. A polity where the Chief Executive has to address the people over a local law enforcement matter is fatally unstable.” Let it burn. The unsaid. The anti-MLK.

America’s half-hidden welfare state. Bubbelology.

Sanity in Thailand, India (+), and HK. Insanity in Sweden, and Venezuela. Spandrell does Japan.

Anti-corruption (for example).

Faustian restlessness. World’s cutest minorities watch: Gypsies, and Somalis. Asians need to whine more. Demopocalypse. Criticizing goofy communists is probably antisemitic (relevant). Sperg power. Some bonus wind-up material.

Sex realism. Gender-bent Berlin.

The end.

Reviews of Swift and Lind.

Time is running out.

Talking transhumanism (includes Anissimov). Omohundro on the blockchain.

… there are now near five hundred people in Dobbo of various races, all met in this remote corner of the East, as they express it, “to look for their fortune;” to get money any way they can. They are most of them people who have the very worst reputation for honesty as well as every other form of morality,—Chinese, Bugis, Ceramese, and half-caste Javanese, with a sprinkling of half-wild Papuans from Timor, Babber, and other islands, yet all goes on as yet very quietly. This motley, ignorant, bloodthirsty, thievish population live here without the shadow of a government, with no police, no courts, and no lawyers; yet they do not cut each other’s throats, do not plunder each other day and night, do not fall into the anarchy such a state of things might be supposed to lead to. It is very extraordinary! It puts strange thoughts into one’s head about the mountain-load of government under which people exist in Europe, and suggests the idea that we may be over-governed. […] Here we may behold in its simplest form the genius of Commerce at the work of Civilization. Trade is the magic that keeps all at peace, and unites these discordant elements into a well-behaved community. All are traders, and know that peace and order are essential to successful trade, and thus a public opinion is created which puts down all lawlessness.

NRx typically strays much too far from this insight.

Reactotwitter is lurching into sheer delirium (as *ahem* forecast). To begin with, it seems no longer to concur on what it begins with:

Evola outranks Moldbug. The accomplishments and credentials of the former are far higher.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) February 17, 2014

(Not in my army.)

It’s time to choose your own tradition and slap an NRx sticker on it. Is anyone envisaging any limits to this:

@Outsideness @MikeAnissimov Whose ideas have more specifically influenced NRx? At this point, it's whoever influences its writers.

— Bryce Laliberte (@AnarchoPapist) February 18, 2014

@AnarchoPapist @MikeAnissimov Since there are no entry controls, this is a formula for complete intellectual anarchy. (OK, Mad Max it is.)

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 18, 2014

@Outsideness Moldbug isn't here. Neoreaction is a free for all of our own making.

— Michael Anissimov (@MikeAnissimov) February 18, 2014

So NRx is a formless anarchy telling the world how to put itself in order? Actually, I think this is probably right, and theoretically interesting, but it clearly needs thinking about. How can there imaginably be an ‘entryism’ threat when command control is a teeming chaos? What does this example of radical disorder suggest?

Here’s the NRx anarcho-chaos already pouring through the pipe:

@MikeAnissimov @AnarchoPapist @Outsideness I respect Moldbug, but he is one of many. We all have our voice – we can and should add our ideas

— Anti Democracy Blog (@antidemblog) February 18, 2014

Everyone has a voice, and we respect that … oh wait …

[Some intriguing hints elsewhere on twitter that Urbit might eventually sort this shrieking insanity out.]

ADDED: Occam’s Razor puts things in sensible perspective.

“This cannot be allowed to stand. This is like finding out a serial-killing child molester is in charge of your local little league team. This is not a case of tolerance. This is a case of metaphorical pitch-forks and torches. … this, the ‘Neoreaction’, is a definite threat, and should be faced.”

(Some impressive push-back is already occurring in the comments thread over there.)

ADDED: Charlie Stross jumps in (sadly unable to resist the “but North Korea” is already a Neoreactioanry utopia” killer argument).

Films and television shows have allowed Americans to imagine what life would be like without all the institutions they had been told they need, but which they now suspect may be thwarting their self-fulfillment. We are dealing with a wide variety of fantasies here, mainly in the horror or science fiction genres, but the pattern is quite consistent and striking, cutting across generic distinctions. In the television show Revolution, for example, some mysterious event causes all electrical devices around the world to cease functioning. The result is catastrophic and involves a huge loss of life, as airborne planes crash to earth, for example. All social institutions dissolve, and people are forced to rely only on their personal survival skills. Governments around the world collapse, and the United States divides up into a number of smaller political units. This development runs contrary to everything we have been taught to believe about “one nation, indivisible.” Yet it is characteristic of almost all these shows that the federal government is among the first casualties of the apocalyptic event, and—strange as it may at first sound—there is a strong element of wish fulfillment in this event. The thrust of these end-of-the-world scenarios is precisely for government to grow smaller or to disappear entirely. These shows seem to reflect a sense that government has grown too big and too remote from the concerns of ordinary citizens and unresponsive to their needs and demands. If Congress and the President are unable to shrink the size of government, perhaps a plague or cosmic catastrophe can do some real budget cutting for a change.

The essay captures a critical dimension of disintegration within the ‘reactionary camp’, dividing those who seek to co-opt the Cathedral-Leviathan managerial elite to a more realistic (or tradition-tolerant) political philosophy, and those who — far more numerously and inarticulately — are invested in the hard death of the regime. The latter (immoderate) position, it appears, is genuinely and even shockingly popular. Swathes of mass entertainment production are able to thrive on the basis of its seductive nightmares. (Is pulp catastrophism the economic base that will support neoreactionary contagion?)

Reading the Cantor essay alongside Jim Donald’s epochal Natural Law and Natural Rights essay is highly suggestive. A common thread running through both is the centrality of vigilantism to the popular Right. The purpose of Natural Law, Donald argues, is not to demand justice from a higher authority, but to neutralize the interference of any such authority in the pursuit of justice by decentralized agencies. Natural Law protects the right to legitimate vengeance, ensuring that individuals are not inhibited in their exercise of self-protection. When the State is seen to operate primarily as a social force defending criminals against retaliation, it loses the instinctive solidarity of the citizenry, and dark dreams of Zombie Apocalypse begin to coalesce.

Given the survivalist ethic in all these end-of-the-world shows, they are probably not popular with gun control advocates. One of the most striking motifs they have in common—evident in Revolution, Falling Skies, The Walking Dead, and many other such shows—is the loving care with which they depict an astonishing array of weaponry. The Walking Dead features an Amazon warrior, who is adept with a samurai sword, as well as a southern redneck, who specializes in a cross-bow. The dwindling supply of ammunition puts a premium on weapons that do not require bullets. That is not to say, however, that The Walking Dead has no place for modern firearms and indeed the very latest in automatic weapons. Both the heroes and the villains in the series—difficult to tell apart in this respect—are as well-armed as the typical municipal SWAT team in contemporary America.

Among the attractions of Zombie Apocalypse, in this construction, is the disappearance of the State as an inhibitory factor in the social economy of retaliation. The Zombie-plagued world is a free-fire zone, in which no authorities any longer stand between the armed remnant and the milling hordes of decivilization. Whatever the odds of the fight to come, the right to vigilante and counter-revolutionary violence has been unambiguously restored, and this is deeply appreciated — by opaque popular impulse — as a return to natural order. The State had taken sides against Natural Law, so that its catastrophic excision from the social field is greeted with relief, even if the cost of this disappearance is a world reduced to ashes, predominantly populated by the cannibalistic undead.

There’s  a ferocity to this that will be worked. It’s best to be prepared.

Unless some force can, against considerable odds, reinstitute hierarchy … we will have more fluidity, more equality and therefore more anarchy to look forward to. This is profoundly disturbing, because civilization abjures anarchy. … without order — without hierarchy — there is nothing.

Perhaps, in the field of international relations, Kaplan is more Moldbug than Moldbug, presenting an uncompromisingly hardline reactionary model of world order, completely undisturbed by domestic considerations or even the slightest hint of libertarian descent. If sovereignty is conserved globally, as well as nationally, a worldwide Patchwork order looks as improbable as a stable constitutional republic, and exit options evaporate. Scale-free Moldbuggian analysis could prove more than a little blood-chilling.