As intelligent media begin to interlock with NRx in a serious way, the fundamental problem it poses emerges ever more starkly into view. Compare the analysis of Moldbug in this technology article by Clark Bianco, focused resolutely upon Urbit (and its substrata), with Adam Gurri’s political-economic critique of Moldbuggian ‘technocracy’ and saltation. Strikingly, the technological and political questions are indistinguishable. In both cases, the central issue is the practicality of ‘hard reboot’, or starting over.

Repeating and responding to a point in his own comment thread, Bianco remarks:

“If you start looking for a way to replace our current centralized, hierarchical, public-identities network naming system (DNS) with a Bitcoin-like decentralized, anonymous-but-reliable identity service, you might well end up on the road leading to Urbit.”

The neo-reactionary stuff on Urbit that seems to be decoration is not. It is the whole point.

I’m not going to try processing this topic right now — it’s too vast. Over the next few months, however, it will be a guiding thread. Most prominently: Can a high-level theoretical engagement with Moldbug as political thinker and provocateur not also be an entanglement with Urbit and technological enterprise? My suspicion is that any such attempted cleavage would fail, or at least fall short of an adequate level of abstraction. In particular, any invocation of neoreactionary political ‘practice’ that ignores the back-to-back project to reboot the freaking Internet is in danger of utter misdirection. (More on all this to come.)

(Thanks to @mr_archenemy for the pointer to the Popehat piece.)

Arthur R. Harrison (@AvengingRedHand) makes the incisive observation: “Well the thing is NRx is a specific kind of post-libertarianism, or it was. Now it seems to be just a name for reaction post-Moldbug.” There could be people who don’t see that as degeneration. In fact, it seems there are.

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

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“The economists are right about economics but there’s more to life than economics” Nydwracu tweets, with quote marks already attached. Whether economists are right about economics very much depends upon the economists, and those that are most right are those who make least claim to comprehension, but that is another topic than the one to be pursued in this post. It’s the second part of the sentence that matters here and now. The guiding question: Can the economic sphere be rigorously delimited, and thus superseded, by moral-political reason (and associated social institutions)?

It is already to court misunderstanding to pursue this question in terms of ‘economics’, which is (for profound historical reasons) dominated by macroeconomics — i.e. an intellectual project oriented to the facilitation of political control over the economy.  In this regard, the techno-commercial thread of Neoreaction is distinctively characterized by a radical aversion to economics, as the predictable complement of its attachment to the uncontrolled (or laissez-faire) economy. It is not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but capitalism — the free, autonomous, or non-transcended economy.

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Multiply the world population by 365 and it comes out as something significantly north of two trillion human days in which to make things happen. It has impressed me, then, to note that roughly 20% of the last year’s Gross Global Occurrence Volume has taken place in the comments threads of this blog. (I received an activity report from WordPress this evening that suggested I thank VXXC, fotrkd, Spandrell, and Thales in particular for being cranked-up comment monkeys.) Tack on the rest of the reactosphere, and what remains of the planet has been fighting over scraps (which we’ll get to later).

The first — tentative and unconvinced — post here went up in mid-February, so Outside in is a creature of 2013. There’s nothing remotely unusual about that. Other 2013 reactionary monster babies include Radish, Anarchopapist and Occam’s Razor (January); Habitable Worlds, The Reactivity Place, and Amos & Gromar (April); More Right (May); Theden (July); Handleshaus and The Legionnaire (August) … which is just to scoop from my regular reading list. The sheer quantity of explicitly reactionary writing has to have surged by at least an order of magnitude this year. This timeline (by Handle) sharpens the contours of the phenomenon (expanded to encompass the burgeoning new genre of excited anti-reactionary push-back). Even if many of the greatest Outer Right blogs preexisted this wave of dark energy, 2013 was surely the year in which Neoreaction really established itself as a thing.

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Morpheus: I imagine that right now, you’re feeling a bit like Alice. Hm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that’s not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Neo: The Matrix.
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
Neo: Yes.
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: [leans in closer to Neo] That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.
[pause]
Morpheus: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. [Opens a pillbox, empties the contents into his palms, and outstretches his hands] This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill [opens his right hand, to reveal a translucent blue pill], the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill [opens his left hand, revealing a similarly translucent red pill], you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. [Neo reaches for the red pill] Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.

— That’s the Wachowski brothers version of Gnostic Platonism, and it gets everything almost exactly right. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (in Book VII of The Republic) tells precisely the same story, but with a cheaper cast, inferior special effects, and less drugs. It’s not surprising that the Dark Enlightenment tends to stick with the re-make, as it goes Neo(reactionary).

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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.)

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.

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Moldbug’s latest has triggered a wave of discussion by emphatically re-stating the long-standing thesis:

America is a communist country.

The supporting argument is richly multi-threaded, and I won’t attempt to recapitulate it here. Its dominant flavor can be appreciated in these paragraphs:

When the story of the 20th century is told in its proper, reactionary light, international communism is anything but a grievance of which Americans may complain. Rather, it’s a crime for which we have yet to repent. Since America is a communist country, the original communist country, and the most powerful and important of communist countries, the crimes of communism are our crimes. You may not personally have supported these crimes. Did you oppose them in any way?

Whereas actually, codewords like “progressive,” “social justice,” “change,” etc, are shared across the Popular Front community for the entire 20th century. They are just as likely to be used by a Cheka cheerleader from the ’20s, as a Clinton voter from the ’90s.

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Moldbug on the progress we have made:

Curiously, two thousand years before anyone had even heard of a“microaggression,” a bunch of old white guys called “the Romans” considered this issue and concluded: de minimis non curat lex.  Literally: “the law does not concern itself with trifles.”  Or metaphorically: no.  No, it is not, and should not be, illegal to be an asshole.  

The Ethno-cladistic thesis, sketchily reconstructed here from Mencius Moldbug’s neoreactionary usage, proposes that relations between cultural systems are captured by cladograms to a highly significant level of adequacy. The limits to this thesis are set by lateral complications — interchanges and modifications that do not conform to a pattern of branching descent — and these are by no means negligible. Nevertheless, actual cultural formations are dominated by cladistic order. As a consequence, cultural theories that assume taxonomic regularity as a norm are capable of reaching potentially realistic approximations, and furthermore offer the only prospect for the rigorous organization of ethnographic phenomena.

The most direct and central defense of the ethno-cladistic thesis bypasses the comparatively high-level religious systems that provide the material for Moldbug’s arguments, and turn instead to the ethnographic root phenomenon: language. Languages simply are cultures in their fundamentals, so that any approach applicable to them will have demonstrated its general suitability for cultural analysis.

I’d try to spin this out melodramatically, but I don’t think there’s really any point:

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