Cyberpunk Intensifies [TE]
Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 51 seconds. Contains 2972 words
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges.
That’s trenchant as in digging and edges as in the far corners of our maps.
This is a newsletter about fringe culture and the weird people and ideas who populate it.
And I fucked up.
This isn’t going to be my usual thing about not writing enough or trying to come up with a new plan for this whole newsletter thing at the keyboard.
I fucked up in a related but different way: I underestimated the reactionary silicon valley billionaires and avoided dishing about their worst theorists and well, now they’re basically in charge of the United States with Elon Musk messing with all kinds of IT systems in menacingly vague ways.
Not that I think I could have changed that, but I’m not sure I’ve even mentioned Curtis Yarvin here and while I’ve gotten a few requests to go into the deep work of Nick Land, we’ve only touched on him a few times.
So… bad form.
Today we’re going to have an overview of who I’m talking about and what they’ve been doing because it’s a lot clearer if you can see it from a distance.
It’s going to be quick and dirty.
The Specter of the French Revolution
We’ve discussed before how Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke was influenced by his horror at the perversion of nature embodied by the French Revolution starting in 1789. Burke is widely regarded as the founder of Conservatism as a modern ideology.
Along with a Jesuit Priest named Abbé Augustin Barruel, especially with his work Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, Burke set a foundation for a pervasive fear that has more or less defined reactionary politics since:
The belief there is a secret conspiracy of all powerful egalitarians out there subverting the natural hierarchy and thus natural law and these heretics must be destroyed to restore Natural Law.
This is the fear underpinning great swaths of reactionary politics ever since. In many guises, such as anti-freemasonry and anti-popery in the 19th century to anti-Semitism, and the more modern moral panics against political correctness and wokeness in the 20th.
It’s more complex than that of course. Ex. Anti-Semites would say they are only tricking people with promises of egalitarianism.
But for the context we need here today that’s good enough.
What we’re talking about is the premise-threat inherent in Liberalism as a political ideology. We don’t have time for a full discussion of that so we’re going to speed run it.
Political Liberalism is the ideology that won the European Enlightenment as the best way to broker power in an age where capital was ascendant.
It’s core themes are: Free Markets, Individual Rights, Private Property, Limited Government, Equal Citizenship Under the Law, Popular representation, Pluralism/Tolerance, and Expansion of Inclusion.
Liberalism came about as the excesses and corruption of the deeply hereditary pre-capitalist economics ran headlong into the early industrial revolution and widening trade and wealth seized under colonial expansion into the “New World”.
It’s proven itself a fairly sturdy and resilient system of social control. Highly adept at producing wealth and funneling it to Robber Barons and other magnates.
But Liberalism, as any constellation of compromises, is often uncomfortable. It means trading lesser pleasures for greater ones and accepting that others will win some of the time.
It’s never as good at providing freedom as it promises and its contradictions can be profound: Slavery under the US’ constitution is an obvious example. When times are good it often overpromises and has to cut back when they don’t work out so well.
There are many other good examples. Settler colonialism is another. You have to exist under colonialism to get your rights!
But we’re not really talking people with, uh, legitimate problems with Westphalian Nation States, we’re talking about minor winners who resent being denied more control.
If you’re the right kind of affluent, rich enough to get whatever you might need, but still bound by obligations, you see a different kind of failing within Liberalism:
You’re forced to share.
Fascist Bloggers
My original version of this essay included a meandering and incomplete discussion of the development of the milieu that produced our antagonists here Curtis Yarvin (Aka Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land.
Spotting cracks in the political economy of the Enlightenment are nothing new. In fact, this is something that Yarvin and Land have deeply in common with their enemies on the far left: Marx, Rosa Luxemburg. Antonio Gramsci, Theodore Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school, Frantz Fanon, and many others discussed the ways the ruling class used people’s beliefs to bend workers to their interests.
As well as many who wouldn’t necessarily call themselves far-left, but who made deep critiques of Liberalism and the Enlightenment themselves: Fredrick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr, and WEB Du Bois all come to mind.
Let’s talk about the core of their beliefs:
They’re both functionally monarchists obsessed with race science, maximizing economic extraction, and preventing the democratic mob from stopping any of that.
They elide this by using weird language, humor, philosophical dressing, appealing to their desired audience’s vanity, and sometimes pointing out real problems before reframing them to lead people to their conclusions.
Now I’ve set myself an absurd challenge: How to summarize two wildly prolific thinkers who have written a couple million words between them that I’ve barely read in years.
Well, for one I’ve been mainlining them for a few days now. From Yarvin’s “recent” substack Grey Mirror and Nick Land’s old essay on the Dark Enlightenment.
Land has written *checks* fuck, like 7 more books since the last one of his I read was published?
Not great.
What I’m going to do instead of trying to give a full context is take you behind the curtain and explain the wizard’s trick.
See, both Yarvin and Land have this evil sorcerer reputation laundered by the media’s attempts to explain them and the movement that cribbed their notes.
It’s not magic though.
It’s a bit closer to a cognitive brute force hack on social networks than mind control. What do I mean?
The image journalism often spins of them, particularly Yarvin is that his writing changes people into his acolytes. But this betrays the often superficial approach most take to him.
Disclaimer: While I’ve read several hundred thousand words Yarvin has written he’s written several times that. I largely lost personal interest in following him in the middle of the Trump administration when it seemed like the alt right ideological movement was breaking up and Qanon was taking center stage.
Frankly, I fucked the analysis there up. See, I undervalued a single fact: Yarvin’s patron has been Peter Thiel and he has more or less infinite money and time for fucking democracy. So while the general idea was contained, it was contained within a highly motivated and growing group of silicon valley leaders speed running your libertarian to fascist pipeline.
But even with that, I am oddly well qualified to analyze Yarvin and Land.
First, let’s start with the uncomfortable fact: I could have been either of these guys. I also had a serious libertarian streak, read a bunch of ancap garbage, and had a worldview built on trauma-induced misanthropy. Like Yarvin, I’m an autodidact. Like Land, I’m a big fan of theory-fiction.
Hell, the reason I found Land in the first place is I’d built an entire system of thought around criticizing the demonic nature of corporations and the people I shared that with said it sounded like Nick Land. Obviously, I had to learn more about the guy.
I came to a lot of the same images and ideas he did.
The only reason I didn’t go down the libertarian to fascist pipeline is that I started noticing a lot of, uh, shit thinking in what I was reading. I ran into anti-feminist tracts from the John Birch Society and started asking some questions and found they were basically just making up their own feminism to demonize.
And once you start seeing lies, delusions, and hypocrisy in libertarians, well it’s been 20 years and they’re still completely full of shit. Even by the standards of a political party in the US.
And there’s not a political party in the US I’d stop to piss on if they were on fire.
The point of all this is, if you (wrongly) compare this kind of thinking to a disease, I’ve got a well tested resistance to it.
It’s not a disease though.
The Great And Powerful Oz and His Amazing Friends
If you were the wrong kind of teenage boy online in the late 00s, you probably grew up with edgelord humor, fragile vanity around your intelligence, and a crippling need for validation.
This is the kind of guy I was and like many of us, I ended up on sites like Something awful and 4chan. Oddly, the nascent manosphere’s focus on self help was accidentally liberating for me. Right as things were getting interesting (we’ll come back to this) on the Internet, I started spending a lot less time online and a lot more reading esoteric shit and went on a mad quest for love and enlightenment.
On the tail end of that I was introduced to David Icke at a vipassana meditation retreat.
And as I reintegrated from my crazy years I’d find more and more vendors for crazy and forbidden wisdom, mostly through friends. That’s how I came across Jordan Peterson before he blew up. It’s why the rise of the alt right didn’t surprise me.
The point is, if you’re in the right spaces people will just hand you forbidden knowledge. Things you’re not supposed to know. And especially if you’re young and insecure that feels fucking awesome.
I remember reading Crowley’s the Book of the Law for the first time. It was gibberish because I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about but it felt so cool. As did finding people who knew more than me and hoovering up their insights into the great beast.
Now, I was never a Thelemite (the religion he created), but I did go to their parties and rituals for a few years and I got a better sense of the kind of people were into it and shifted elsewhere.
OK, that’s hiding that they kicked me out and stopped inviting me.
I made fun of Crowley during a ritual and they suddenly got all Catholic on me.
The point of all this is even for someone fairly, uh, solitary, like me socializing in occult circles pointed me to all kinds of information I wouldn’t have found on my own.
Radical politics is much the same: Cliques of cliques and people trying to do shit without having the social part get in the way.
So when I found the rationalists at Less Wrong in 2011 or so, I was more or less prepared for it. And while LW’s founder Eliezer Yudkowsky and many of his pals repudiated Neoreaction eventually, Less Wrong was one of the higher profile ways you could find to Unqualified Reservations, Yarvin’s blog.
I initially dismissed Yarvin as just someone else with a blog and more opinions than sense (one relates!). But people kept bringing him back up and within a few years it was clear he had a following who really, desperately wanted to do some shit.
But for a bit there it was all kind of theoretical.
At the time I was a progressive liberal and he was just kind of noxious. It’s one of those things I think is really the best “defense” against this: I’d read enough of the books he had that I could tell when he wasn’t sharing the whole picture or was tightly ignoring some basic facts that undermined his whole point.
And I saw people I knew radicalized by him.
I started avoiding them.
And I started being very aware when someone would bring his ideas into conversation. I started avoiding them.
Pre-Trump, I thought he was a weird loser harmlessly theorizing evil shit in his basement.
But that’s because I didn’t know fuckall about Peter Thiel’s support. Basically, one of the founders of paypal has spent a lot of time and money promoting Curtis Yarvin and has built up an entire reactionary movement in silicon valley out of it.
The Koch Brothers for the 21st century.
And now the figurehead of that movement is in charge of a substantial amount of US infrastructure quasi-legally.
Liberals will argue it’s illegal, but like a golden retriever playing basketball, if nobody’s willing or able to enforce rules against it, it’s fair play.
So… what’s the trick?
Yarvin’s prose is dense, meandering, and peppered with the kinds of cultural and philosophical references that make him difficult reading if you’re not from his milieu.
He does your usual shitposting joking about worse things than he actually believes, and regularly builds ideas specifically to frame his enemies in very specific ways.
(Though he seems to use that much less on gray mirror than his first blog, perhaps he feels he’s past irony).
All of this is a kind of a lure.
If you share his biases, or even if you just don’t know enough about the subjects to see where he’s obviously lying, his rhetorical style is complex enough that you’ll eventually agree with him about one thing.
And if you do that and accept his framing about it, and follow his chain of logic uncritically, as most of us do when someone is agreeing with us, you might start thinking in his ideas on that issue.
And once you’ve got one, you see things a little more his way. And if you’re in a community where he’s “in”, you’re going to pick things up without needing to read him and reading him becomes a kind of exegesis of scripture. The kind of forbidden knowledge that plays hell with the religious trauma of many superficial atheists generated by the new atheist movement.
It’s just a feedback loop.
And because he’s written over a million words on Unqualified Reservations, if you want to be intellectually honest you have to read at least much of it if not all if it before forming an opinion, right? You want to be reasonable, right?
How can you judge someone on only part of their ideas?
Well, if word 500 and word 10,000 are equally shit, you probably should just leave the sewer.
Yarvin wants to convince petty tyrants they’re righteous for inflicting tyranny because they can.
No shocker he found an eager voice among billionaires who won the paypal lottery and needed to find something else to do.
It’s all a matter of vanity and bias and resentment.
If Yarvin can get you thinking about Liberalism as a big demiurgic cult here to unfairly take what’s rightfully YOURS, well, you’re going to see every increment of that cult in action as proof you’re being oppressed.
If you imagine everyone you’re fighting as brainwashed drones you don’t have to think about them at all. You don’t have to care when they’re killed.
As I write this, the super bowl just started.
I mention that because as a bit I’ve decided to support the Eagles (go birds!). As I wrote a joke about that a few hours ago I started thinking of all the bad things I know about Football as a sport and unbidden in my mind the phrase, “Getting concussions is my god-given right as an American!”
Now, that’s a joke. But it’s next to indistinguishable from actual nationalistic propaganda and I’ve heard plenty of football fans say about as much to support the game anyway.
I bring this up as a living example of the artifacts of what actual, hardline propaganda does to the way you think.
Or to pick another relevant example: “It’s my right as an American not to give a shit about anything that happens in Canada.”
Another joke, but also not really one.
This is hardened nationalist propaganda coming out of my brain. Fully unthinking.
This is one of those places where Yarvin takes something that is true and frames it with lies. Liberalism is taught in schools, it’s taught in propaganda.
But Liberalism isn’t “the left”.
It’s just the Enlightenment philosophy most able to wield power for the last 150 or so years.
Part of how it’s done that is recuperating and neutralizing radical struggles. Taking people who its institutions murdered and turning them into symbols of why the system is right and works.
Martin Luther King Jr is an easy example: His last speech was given as part of his poor people’s campaign trying to build cross racial solidarity economically to build an America that met some more of its promises and not just handing power over to the rich.
And the FBI literally tried to get him to kill himself. And then he was murdered in what we must assuredly assume was an unrelated circumstance.
Fair enough, after all. King was one of the most hated men in America in 1968.
Perhaps Yarvin would point this as proof of the duplicity of democracy and the purity of the CEO-King. Men will literally reinvent Pharaohs rather than going to therapy.
As if lying kings wasn’t a cliche thousands of years old. It’s in the bible!
But I’m losing track here.
Fuck all these guys is really the bottom line.
Wrapping Up
I’m leaving this raw because frankly, that’s how I feel.
There will be more Trenchant Edges. I’ve been working on UFO stuff in the background, and that may be next.
But I don’t think I’ll say more.
I will have to sink my teeth more deeply into Land and Yarvin relatively soon. But in some ways the urgency of that is false. I’m half just mad at myself, tbh.
Anyway, I’m going to go watch Kurosawa’s The Throne Of Blood.
Y’all take care.
-SF
What's your game play for alternative scripts to unfold?
Merci! “We’re reading Yarvin, so you don’t have to.”