#neoreaction

[altwritewegner]

In Zeiten »anarchokapitalistischer« Staatsoberhäupter, aufstrebender US-Nachwuchspolitiker mit betont illiberalen Ansichten (etwa J.D. Vance, Blake Masters oder Vivek Ramaswamy) und dem Wirken nicht nur wirtschaftlich, sondern auch kulturell und politisch disruptiver Tech-Milliardeninvestoren wie Elon Musk und Peter Thiel kommt oft die Rede von einem neuen Feudalismus oder gar einer »Neoreaktion« (NRx) auf. Was genau soll das sein?

Alles geht zurück auf einen hochbegabten, aber arbeitslosen Informatiker namens Curtis Yarvin (alias Mencius Moldbug) und den antihumanistischen Philosophen des »Akzelerationismus«, Nick Land. Mit meiner kleinen ideengeschichtlichen Analyse kann der deutschsprachige Leser nachvollziehen, wie Yarvin ab 2007 um seine persönliche Auslegung der europäischen Geistesgeschichte eine »Cloud« hochintelligenter Autoren und Denker voller Skepsis gegenüber Demokratie und Liberalismus scharte, und wie der ehemalige Philosophiedozent Land fünf Jahre später darüber den Horizont einer »Dunklen Aufklärung« aufspannte. Ich präsentiere die wichtigsten Figuren der digitalen Reactosphere, erläutere die zentralen Begriffe von Cathedral bis Bioleninism, stelle NRx in den Kontext der intellektuellen US-Nachkriegsrechten und zeige, in welchen Phänomenen wir im Jetzt und Hier das Erbe von Dark Enlightenment und Neoreaction sehen können.

Wer herausfinden möchte, ob überall, wo »Reaktion« draufsteht, auch Reaktion drin ist, und ob das überhaupt erstrebenswert wäre, der sollte spätestens nach der Lektüre von »Neoreaktion und Dunkle Aufklärung« im Bilde sein.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[doedipus]

I spent most of yesterday decluttering my closet bookshelf. deeply frustrating experience, for many reasons, but that's neither here nor there.

one of the lower shelves has a bunch of the books I read in high school, and while I was reorganizing it I ended up rereading the first chapter of one flew over the cuckoo's nest, and man, I think that's still far and away my favorite book I've read. like the prose of it is so fucking wild, it's frenetic and surreal and misanthropic and nauseating in a really compelling way.

usually terms like "psychedelic" are much easier to apply to visual or audio media than print, just because like, it doesn't have to spend as much time in the thinking part of your brain, there's an immediacy there, on some level it's pure sensory input that gets processed by instinct and doesn't have to route through your language unit before it hits your imagination. stu mackensey making a weird noise with a guitar pedal and saying some quasi-nonsense, or SHAFT using mixed media and nonliteral colors while painting the screen with arararagi guts is like, easy mode. your brain wants it. but ken kesey managing to elicit those kinds of feelings purely through written word the way he did is kind of fucking incredible.

I hope someday I can do that.

[duct-taping-zhenguo]

kontextmaschine - Mencius Moldbug roleswap AU

[centrally-unplanned]

Very much enjoyed Tracing Woodgrain's foray into the internet life of jilted ex-rationalist and Wikipedia editor David Gerard. It is of course "on brand" for me - the social history of the internet, as a place of communities and individual lives lived, is one of my own passion projects, and this slots neatly into that domain in more ways than one. At the object-level it is of course about one such specific community & person; but more broadly it is an entry into the "death of the internet-as-alternate-reality" genre; the 1990's & 2000's internet as a place separate from and perhaps superior to the analog world, that died away in the face of the internet's normalization and the cruel hand of the real.

Here that broad story is made specific; early Wikipedia very much was "better than the real", the ethos of the early rationalist community did seem to a lot of people like "Yeah, this is a new way of thinking! We are gonna become better people this way!" - and it wasn't total bullshit, logical fallacies are real enough. And the decline is equally specific: the Rationalist project was never going to Escape Politics because it was composed of human beings, Wikipedia was low-hanging fruit that became a job of grubby maintenance, the suicide of hackivist Aaron Swartz was a wake-up call that the internet was not, in any way, exempt from the reach of the powers-that-be. TW's allusion to Gamergate was particularly amusing for me, as while it wasn't prominent in Gerard's life it was truly the death knell for the illusion of the internet as a unified culture.

But anyway, the meat of the essay is also just extremely amusing; someone spending over a decade on a hate crusade using rules-lawyering spoiling tactics for the most petty stakes (unflattering wikipedia articles & other press). The internet is built by weirdos, and that is going to be a mixed bag! It is beautiful to see someone's soul laid bare like this.

It can be tempting to get involved in the object-level topics - how important was Lesswrong in the growth of Neoreaction, one of the topics of Gerard's fixations? It was certainly, obviously not born there, never had any numbers on the site, and soon left it to grow elsewhere. But on the flip side, for a few crucial years Lesswrong was one of the biggest sites that hosted any level of discussion around it, and exposed other people to it as a concept. This is common for user-generated content platforms; they aggregate people who find commonalities and then splinter off. Lesswrong's vaunted "politics is the mindkiller" masked a strong aversion to a lot of what would become left social justice, and it was a place for those people to meet. I don't think neoreaction deserves any mention on Lesswrong's wikipedia page, beyond maybe a footnote. But Lesswrong deserves a place on Neoreaction's wikipedia page. There are very interesting arguments to explore here.

You must, however, ignore that temptation, because Gerard explored fucking none of that. No curiosity, no context, just endless appeals to "Reliable Source!" and other wikipedia rules to freeze the wikipedia entries into maximally unflattering shapes. Any individual edit is perhaps defensible; in their totality they are damning. My "favourite" is that on the Slate Star Codex wikipedia page, he inserted and fought a half-dozen times to include a link to an academic publication Scott Alexander wrote, that no one ever read and was never discussed on SSC beyond a passing mention, solely because it had his real name on it. He was just doxxing him because he knew it would piss Scott off, and anyone pointing that out was told "Springer Press is RS, read the rules please :)". It is levels of petty I can't imagine motivating me for a decade, it is honestly impressive!

He was eventually banned from editing the page as some other just-as-senior wikipedia editor finally noticed and realized, no, the guy who openly calls Scott a neo-nazi is not an "unbiased source" for editing this page wtf is wrong with you all. I think you could come away from this article thinking Wikipedia is ~broken~ or w/e, but you shouldn't - how hard Gerard had to work to do something as small as he did is a testament to the strength of the platform. No one thinks it is perfect of course, but nothing ever will be - and in particular getting motivated contributors now that the sex appeal has faded is a very hard problem. The best solution sometimes is just noticing the abusers over time.

Though wikipedia should loosen up its sourcing standards a bit. I get why it is the way it is, but still, come on.

[elsandifer]

Does Luigi Mangione have any impact on the implications of Neoreaction a Basilisk?

That really depends on whether he’s a turning point or an aberration.

[lateantiquechud]

To the Illiterate.

READ

[altwritewegner]

ES IST SOWEIT! 🤩

Musk, Thiel, Trump und die rechtslibertäre Versuchung: Viel ist in den vergangenen zehn Jahren über die sogenannte Neoreaction mit ihren Galionsfiguren Mencius Moldbug und Nick Land geschrieben worden. Für den Jungeuropa Verlag durfte ich nun die erste deutschsprachige Einführung und Klärung zum Thema verfassen – vorbestellen kann man ab sofort, erscheinen wird das schöne Stück im Februar!

https://www.jungeuropa.de/detail/index/sArticle/378

[meret118]

In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”

Yarvin, a self-described reactionary and extremist who was 35 years old at the time, clarified that he was “just kidding.” But then he continued, “The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”

He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”

Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.

Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He had also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).

Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin.

. . .

In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.

Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised—and parroted—Yarvin’s ideas. 

. . .

When Vance ran for U.S. Senate in 2022, Thiel spent an unprecedented $15 million on the campaign and persuaded Trump to endorse him (Vance had previously compared Trump to Hitler). In 2024, Thiel led the charge to convince Trump to pick Vance as V.P.

. . .

Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.

More at the link.

------

Are you fucking kidding me?!! Why isn't this leading every news report? Is this well known, and I somehow just missed knowing about this yarvin sociopath? This needs to be exposed like project 2050 is!

It's like republicans are deliberately trying to see if they can find someone worse to put in the oval office each time - nixon, reagan, dumbya, trump, and eventually vance.

[thahxa]

this election season is great because we get to see the creation of what i can only describe as "leftist neoreaction"

[reddragdiva]

"Dimes Square" was a Thiel-funded attempt to make neoreaction hip with the youth. Every word out of it is the worst.

Honor Levy is the latest Dimes Square neoreactionary that The Cut did a puff piece on for unclear reasons. https://archive.is/SqSv5

Here's actual text from her actual fucking book. It's "Ready Player One" for race scientists. https://archive.is/WE3Nb

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

The Cut piece just happens to mention how Levy interviewed Curtis Yarvin on her podcast

Brock Colyar at The Cut should know fucking better but shows no evidence of capacity for such

the NYT review: "There is an interesting sense here of young people brought up amid a war — a cultural one." you can tell this guy's been saving that line for a special occasion

filing Levy high on the list of Thiel's crimes

[collapsedsquid]

Love that "Existential Risk" is enemy #1 on Andressen's list, Yud is the source of neoreaction but also just a cringelib

[centrally-unplanned]

Me: having a lot of discussion in the comments of the TW post about Scott Alexander, the Ratsphere, Neoreaction, Human Biodiversity, Pinochet & Milton Friedman somehow, maybe I should make that a top-level po-

Also me:

[elsandifer]

You do know, you are going to shorten your lifespan if you keep getting high, don't you?

So, several points here.

Fuck you, stop being a cop.

That’s not even well-supported by the science.

Lifespan is not an inherent good. I’m decidedly pessimist-sympathizing, but even beyond that I would much rather live to 70 and have a life I’m happy with and during than live to 90 miserably.

You do not know me, the extent, frequency, or nature of my substance use, or what medical conditions might be relevant to my substance use, and thus anything about the risk/benefit calculations I have made around this topic.

For what it’s worth, neither TARDIS Eruditorum nor Neoreaction a Basilisk would have happened outside of cannabis use. This is not in any way to suggest that cannabis is essential to creative work—it’s plainly not. But those two specific works were shaped in specific ways by it.

Seriously though, fuck you, stop being a cop.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on NrX? Do you agree that they basically reverse enginered marxism, but are too emberasssed to admit it do to their surface level dislike and signaling to anti-comunists?

NRx is Marxist in narrative structure but with a different protagonist: the owner rather than the worker. But since the actual protagonist of Marxism turns out to be the intellectual-bureaucrat rather than the worker, I don't see as big of an ethical difference as you might expect. NRx, too, might end up having a secret protagonist. I should quote the peroration of Reality Spammer's essay cited in my last response:

Nick Land at this point must certainly have earned the title of the most important philosopher of the past half-century. Everyone now is thinking in relation to accelerationism. In the context of the growth of acceleration, neoreaction, the dissident right, is Elon like the Stalin to Nick Land’s Marx? Elon of course almost certainly does not know who Land is. But they share the same triad of objects of zeal — a sense that the industrial process must intensify in an uninterrupted way, racism, and a joy in spreading irreverence as far as possible. Racism, this all-too-human passion as old as man, becomes the weapon to dismantle the human plane, by accelerating its internal differences until it breaks. The emergence of this pure demonic theater of simulacra where the formality of a public sphere once lingered is its shattering into entropic fragments as it splits apart, a spiral into radio static and catatonic schizophrenia.

On this account, NRx uses race the way Marxism uses class: to start "a war inside society" (per Boris Groys) that they hope to win. I'm not entirely sure this is how it's going to work, though, even as NRx seems more and more poised to get its way with the rise of a figure like Milei and the potential or even likely return of Trump amid the atmosphere of Elon's X. Is the left really so terminally depressed, so self-immolationist, that it now understands "irreverence" and "racism" as inextricably synonymous? Did Bakhtin laugh in vain?

The peroration of Land's own epochal "Dark Enlightenment" manifesto derives its indeed right-Marxist vision of our immanent self-transcendence via self-conscious speciation from a series of novels by Octavia Butler that I admittedly haven't read. (I browsed through them. I like Butler—Kindred and "Bloodchild" in particular, and I did find those two texts sort of reactionary—but the Xenogenesis books Land cites seemed a little pulpier than I wanted to deal with. I suspect such subject matter might require a prose style akin to Bradbury's, Delany's, or Ballard's, more visionary and iridescent. Dick and Herbert, whom I also admire among science fictionists, have the same plain-prose problem.)[*]

Is the famously racist NRx then an Afrofuturism, given that I claimed 10 years ago that it was also a queer theory? (Consider also the gender accelerationist blackpaper, which renders NRx a trans theory.) Why assume that dismantling the "human plane" must lead by logic to racism? Maybe it will lead to the disarticulation of race, as surely as it's led to the disarticulation of gender. (When I was in grad school, everybody blamed humanism for creating racism!)

This isn't an endorsement of NRx, and I don't dispute the personal racism of some of the people involved, but I'm not persuaded by the equation between tech accelerationism and white supremacism. There's as much reason to think it could go the other way. Here the specifically racist libertarians mirror the Afropessimists as well as the Marxists. But it's not necessarily how the resolutely optimistic Frederick Douglass, for example, would have thought about it when he saw technological development as part and parcel of individual equality: the camera disclosing the soul in every skin.

(I know my critics think I am too cavalier on the subject of race. I just think it's going to disappear. I don't think it stands a chance. Reality Spammer says, "There is a sense in which 'everyone is racist' is simply an analytic a priori." And there's a sense in which it's not. NRx's biological racism won't work, not only because race is a construct, but because biology is too. Science waits upon art and magic; leave Steve Sailer to his golf course. From Melville's repeated image of the oceangoing vessel as Anacharsis Cloots delegation of universal humanity to Morrison's concluding vision of the Black Madonna onshore awaiting such ships of holy fools to dock in Paradise, this is an American prophecy.)

Reality Spammer is right, I suppose, about the vulgarity of Ye, Elon, etc., but, leaving aside the eloquence of the vulgar (as if "beautiful big titty butt-naked women" played no role at the root of the human imagination), there is a world elsewhere, even in right-wing world. The queer-femme wing of the new right is reading Gone with the Wind, sure—I've never read it myself—but they're also promoting Pamela, the first novel to sentimentalize, aestheticize, and universalize bourgeois hegemony, and so the secular type and pattern of all future individual liberation narratives, not excluding Douglass's. This is something like what I had in mind 10 years ago when I said we'd know if there was anything to neoreaction if it went from black to pink, aesthetically speaking, from Gothic to sentimental, from Lovecraft to Joyce. Another recent favorite of this group, Poor Things, a socialist novel written by a Scottish nationalist, was converted for the atopic-utopic purposes of global cinema into a post-woke porno-libertarian fable. It ends in the multiracial queer paradise of a walled garden, secured in part with the earnings of sex work to refuel the professionalization of a new cadre of techno-experts symbolized by Bella's journey from one type of working girl to another.

The "human" is not a self-evident category, even if I'd prefer to travel under its banner myself. The neoreactionaries, like their soixante-huitard precursors, were only anti-humanists insofar as the human was a Hegelian synonym for the state (and antonym therefore both of the individual and of empire, a word Blake, Shelley, and Whitman used without negative connotation to signify a post-national world-polity). What the human might become in an age of accelerated techno-capital is unclear—if such acceleration even works; if we don't regress all the way back to the forest, the desert, and the cave in the conflagration of the rules-based international order, victims at last of Enlightenment's dialectic—but why should we forfeit our species's name at the very hour of the potential triumph of our species-being as the aesthetic angel-animal who is both subject and object of its own thought? As the first review of my latest novel tells us, "the 21st century isn’t likely to become any less weird."

"There are no sides," the defeated white witch admonishes her successor of imperial realpolitik at the end of Dune Part Two. (How's that for a reversal of the moralistic speech concluding The Two Towers? Herbert's Cold War realism portends no less of a Republican victory than did the reanimation of Tolkien's World War II moralism two decades ago, but how different are today's Republicans?) I am personally ready for anything. Or at least I'm trying to put on a brave face. I have read Arendt and Adorno, not to mention Ruskin and Thoreau, and have every single fear about these developments everybody else does. Still, NRx might turn out to be a humanism after all, and therefore neither especially new nor meaningfully reactionary.

We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.

____________________

[*] In Land's Compact articles on the English canon, he was so magnanimous as to promote Butler, alongside some nameless "Jews and Scots," into a DEI English "para-canon." Seeking to establish the paradox of a people-who-are-not-a-people, the maritime liberalism-imperialism of an "out-breeder culture," he identifies the central revolutionary dialectic within English literature, which can be described ethnically as Anglo vs. Norman, politically as left vs. right, religiously as Nonconformist vs. Anglo-Catholic, or aesthetically as Romantic vs. Classical, with the latter side relegated always to the role of ineffectual (indeed sabotaged) brake on history's runaway train. As I hinted in my most recent Invisible College lecture, you can use even Jane Austen to stage a global revolution. To this revolution are we "Jews and Scots" summoned, those of us who have spiritually interbred with this literature which was not the literature of our forefathers—my forefathers had no literature, you see, and so I had no choice—whether we are the Pole Conrad, the Dutch-American Melville, the African-American Butler, or the Italian-American Pistelli.