From James C. Bennett’s indispensable book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century (2004), on the genealogy of the Neocameral State (though he doesn’t call it that):

The lowering of transaction costs for international financial activities in the 1960s started to allow major corporations and banks to take advantage of the lower tax and regulatory burdens of tax havens such as the Netherlands Antilles. Corporations became sophisticated consumers of “sovereign services,” in this case, venue of incorporation. In doing so, they built on a trend started by 1920s shipowners, who had increasingly sought Panamanian and Liberian registry for their ships.

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Clippings from this, end-2007 Moldbug Neocameralism essay (with minimal commentary):

It is very hard to show that any new form of government is superior to that practiced now. It is even harder to show that any new form of government is superior to any practiced ever. […] Nonetheless, unless these problems are not just hard but actually unsolvable, innovation in the form of government is possible. … Certainly, the very idea of innovation in government should not frighten you. If it does, there is no point at all in thinking about government. This is conservatism to the point of mental disorder. I simply cannot contend with it, and I refuse to try. If you cannot set yourself outside your own beliefs and prejudices, you are not capable of normal civilized discourse.

Neocameralism is not (simply) reactionary because it has never been fully instantiated up to this time. It is a proposed political-economic innovation.

Let’s start with my ideal world – the world of thousands, preferably even tens of thousands, of neocameralist city-states and ministates, or neostates. The organizations which own and operate these neostates are for-profit sovereign corporations, or sovcorps. For the moment, let’s assume a one-to-one mapping between sovcorp and neostate. […] Let’s pin down the neocameralist dramatis personae by identifying the people who work for a sovcorp as its agents, the people or organizations which collectively own it as its subscribers, and the people who live in its neostate as its residents.

A Neocameral ‘neostate’ is not owned by its residents or its agents. Its ‘monarch’ (or ‘CEO’) is an executive appointment. (90% of all confusion about Neocameralism, and Neoreaction in general, stems from a failure to grasp this elementary point.) Note: ‘subscribers’ (plural). More coming on this immediately.

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NRx repudiates public politics. Turn that around, and it’s the thesis: Politics happens in private.

Specifically — as a political philosophy — NRx advocates the privatization of government. It makes a public case for that, in the abstract, but only for purposes of informational and theoretical optimization. It is not, ever, doing politics in public, but only thinking about it under conditions of minimal intelligence security. Concrete execution of political strategy occurs through private deals.

The currency of such deals was formalized by Mencius Moldbug, as primary (or fungible sovereign) property. It corresponds to the conversion — whether notional or actual — of hard power into business assets. This conversion is what ‘formalism’ means. It’s an important contribution to political philosophy, and political economy, but it’s also a negotiating position.

Cries for (public) Action! will always be with us, at least until things are radically sorted out. They should be ignored. No public action is serious.

The serious thing is the deal, which substitutes for any semblance of revolution, and also for regime perpetuation. Shadow NRx — which acts outside the sphere of public visibility — is a political vulture fund. This blog does not want to know who, or what, it is. Its deep secrecy is the same as its reality. Our concern is restricted to the way it necessarily acts, in compliance with an absolute principle. We ask only: What does the deal have to be like?

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Crypto-core of the XS Moldbug:

Internal security can be defined as the protection of the shareholders’ property against all internal threats — including both residents and employees, up to and certainly including the chief executive. If the shareholders cannot dismiss the CEO of the realm by voting according to proper corporate procedures, a total security failure has occurred.

Thus, any fragment of the security force which remains loyal to the shareholders can use its operational weapons to defeat any coalition of disloyal, and hence disarmed, employees and/or residents. Ouch! Taste the pain, traitors. (Needless to say, the dependence of this design on 21st-century technology is ample explanation of why history has not bequeathed us anything like the joint-stock realm. It was simply not implementable — any more than our ancestors could build a suspension bridge out of limestone blocks.)

(Emphasis in original.)

Crypto-sovereignty is huge (and on the to-do list here). ‘Formalism’ is a place-holder for crypto-architecture. ‘Sovereignty’ means keys.

Daily Kos has exposed the Neoreactionary evil behind the Trump phenomenon. (Yes, it’s terrifying.) So that provoked a trawl through the Googleverse for ‘Neoreactionaries’, turning back up one of the most lucid (and succinct) unaffiliated perspectives on NRx — from January this year — which never got the appreciation it deserves. This is Pearce on the Neocameral idea:

The theory of corporate government goes something like this: if the country, or city-state or whatever, is governed by a corporation that delivers services like — guaranteed safety in public places, guaranteed neutral arbitration of contracts and efficient public transport, and charges residents a fee for these services, and (very importantly) guarantees the right to leave with one’s family and property if one chooses — so long as the corporation delivers on its guarantees, why complain you don’t get to choose the CEO? You can’t choose the CEO of any of the other businesses you have anything to do with, so why would you expect to choose the CEO of this business? Even better, if there are numerous, competing corporate-states, each one can tailor itself to a particular market, attempt to outdo the others with exclusive lifestyle offers (like to get high? I’d bet that BrightonCorp would like to make you an offer…). The wonderful thing about this is that the corporation isn’t answerable to its customers, except through consumer choice, and it is in the direct financial advantage of the rulers to rule well, that is, to satisfy its customer’s demands for personal freedom and security.

(As a relevant aside, the Wikipedia entry on the Dark Enlightenment — top Google hit for ‘Neoreactionaries’ — is nowhere near as bad as I would have guessed. Its three external links are to Moldbug, Hoppe, and — for criticism — Alexander (plus). Difficult to grouch convincingly about that.)

This is huge:

The most intriguing secrets of the “war on terror” have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. They’re about the mammoth private spying industry that all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. […] Surprised? No wonder. In April, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was poised to publicize a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies. But the report was inexplicably delayed — and suddenly classified a national secret. What McConnell doesn’t want you to know is that the private spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated the CIA and is running the show. […] Over the past five years (some say almost a decade), there has been a revolution in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing. Private companies now perform key intelligence-agency functions, to the tune, I’m told, of more than $42 billion a year. Intelligence professionals tell me that more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) — the heart, brains and soul of the CIA — has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. …

Of course, read it all, but especially:

Outsourcing has provided solutions to personnel-management problems that have always plagued the CIA’s operations side. Rather than tying agents up in the kind of office politics that government employees have to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing permits them to focus on what they do best, which boosts morale and performance.

Under the conditions of a ruined public sphere, trends to the commercialization of government are re-routed around the back. When the time is right for the dismantling of the terminally deteriorated Cathedral Empire — a.k.a. ‘the International Community’ — its power structures will default to the Deep State, which is already undergoing business re-organization. Identify the private agencies who at that point will own the only chunks of security apparatus still working, and you know who’s political ideas will matter. It follows, naturally, that it would be unrealistic to expect these directors to be voluble about their thinking, or anything else. They’re not politicians. That’s over.

The public sphere is already dead. It’s time now to shift all serious attention into the dark.

(Thanks to VXXC for the WaPo link.)

A reminder of where NRx came from:

Let me quickly explain my reactionary theory of history, which comes from reading weird old forgotten books such as the above. Note that this theory is quite simple. Depending on your inclinations, you may regard this as a good thing or a bad thing.

In order to get to the reactionary theory of history, we need a reactionary theory of government. History, again, is interpretation, and interpretation requires theory. I’ve described this theory before under the name of neocameralism, but on a blog it never hurts to be a little repetitive.

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‘Coincidentally’ a number of seemingly unrelated social media stimuli have conspired to recall this today:

Note: “Politics closest to me” comes from the original creator of this diagram (I’m still not sure who that is). The politics closest to me are located in the top right corner of the gray box, where it disappears into the blackness of the Outside.

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Yes, the Baffler piece was comically bad. The title tells you everything you need to know about
the level it’s pitched at. Apparently NRx is based in San Francisco and Shanghai because it hates Asian people, but if it just read some Rawls (and “role-played the part of the peasant”)
it could sort itself out. Nydrwracu has the most appropriate response. Mike Anissimov takes the trouble to do a decent review. Klint Finley’s brief remarks about it are far better than the piece itself. Crude stereotypes triumph again: “The Baffler Foundation Inc., P.O. Box 390049, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA.”

The sociological construction of neoreaction was incompetent, but interestingly so. Entirely techno-commercialist in orientation, with an emphasis upon Silicon Valley, it was extended to include Justine Tunney, Balaji Srinivasan, Patri Friedman, and Peter Thiel. The picture is paints daubs of an American tech elite peeling off into neoreaction isn’t very convincing, but it’s certainly extraordinarily attractive.

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First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it certainly isn’t anything post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than Neocameralism apprehended in its most abstract features, through the coining of a provisional and dispensable term. (It allows for an acronym that doesn’t lead to confusions with North Carolina, while encouraging quite different confusions, which I’m pretending not to notice.)

Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*, to a disciplined discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take place. Its abstraction is introductory, in accordance with something that is yet to be re-started, or re-animated, in detail. (For existing detail, outside the Moldbug canon itself, look here.)

The excellent comment thread here provides at least a couple of crucial clues:

nydwracu (23/03/2014 at 6:47 pm): Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions like that [on the specifics of social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-nationalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the patchwork and find out. …

RiverC (23/03/2014 at 3:44 am): Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in this light, a ‘political system system’, it is not a political system but a system for implementing political systems. Of course the same guy who came up with it also invented an operating system (a system for implementing software systems.)

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