Steve Bannon reads Moldbug, what's your excuse?
politico.com
>They are not mainstream thinkers, but their writings help to explain the commotion that has defined the Trump administration’s early days. They include a Lebanese-American author known for his theories about hard-to-predict events; an obscure Silicon Valley computer scientist whose online political tracts herald a “Dark Enlightenment”; and a former Wall Street executive who urged Donald Trump’s election in anonymous manifestos by likening the trajectory of the country to that of a hijacked airplane—and who now works for the National Security Council.
>Bannon, described by one associate as “the most well-read person in Washington,” is known for recommending books to colleagues and friends, according to multiple people who have worked alongside him. He is a voracious reader who devours works of history and political theory “in like an hour,” said a former associate whom Bannon urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “He’s like the Rain Man of nationalism.”
Many political onlookers described Trump’s election as a “black swan” event: unexpected but enormously consequential. The term was popularized by Nassim Taleb, the best-selling author whose 2014 book Antifragile—which has been read and circulated by Bannon and his aides—reads like a user’s guide to the Trump insurgency.
>Asked in a phone interview this week whether he’s had meetings with Bannon or his associates, Taleb said he could not comment. “Anything about private meetings would need to come from them,” he said, though he noted cryptically he’s had “coffee with friends.”
>Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” who blogs under the name “Mencius Moldbug,” attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.” When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled Yarvin’s appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.
Steve Bannon reads Moldbug, what's your excuse?
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ktla.com
sites.google.com
nytimes.com
twitter.com
>Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—“What’s so bad about the Nazis?” he asks in one 2008 post that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. “To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,” he writes in a May 2008 post.
>Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. Yarvin said he has never spoken with Bannon.
>Thanks to an entree from Thiel, Anton now sits on the National Security Council staff.
>Will Trumpism work, Anton asks? He’s not sure—but he argues that it’s worth trying, given the alternative: “[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”
>"the most well-read man in Washington"
>urged to read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Nick Land for secretary of cybernetics when?
2017 is full lovecraft/gibson/land cyberpunk dystopia. A rotting mass of flesh and hair implants with the mannerisms of an used car salesman broadcasts bizarre infoblasts from the whitehouse literal NrX tech vampires are pulling the strings from behind the curtains. Biometric surveillance, drone strikes, bearded russian occultists, fully customizable, designer genders, neotribal gang warfare on the streets. It's really cool t b h
Trump, Bannon, Thiel, Land, Moldbug and Taleb. Just all hanging out planning how to save the West. What a fucking murderer's row.
>bearded russian occultists
>designer genders
Who would have guessed this would be unironic reality
Who are the bearded Russian occultists?
ctr+f jews/holocaust- this sums up the level of research by these people. Also, implying that Nassim Taleb is obscure lol. One of the things this election cycle really illustrates is the lie that these people are really intelligent/well read/ deep thinkers, they are middle brow at best. I'm surprised this article did not have a west wing reference.
Aleksandr Dugin
Yeah it's pretty sad really. Still cool I guess that Bannon respects Taleb, that's more than I would expect of an Obama or Bush strategist.
Is Bannon, dare I say it, /ourguy/?
No
I wonder how much it comes from the need to write an increasingly ideological kind of journalism that requires things to be made simple to attract the widest possible readership.
To keep making money, media has to position itself to attract a larger readership. To attract that larger readership, it aligns itself with politics. In aligning itself with politics, the quality of content decreases and objectivity and critical thinking diminishes. As that critical thinking diminishes, it winds up becoming more and more like its own readership. Eventually you just get people mirroring what they want to hear back to themselves in a closed loop of stupid.
Maybe.
yes
>“[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”
based
>But for whatever it’s worth, the godfather of the “dark enlightenment” is on the record as saying that he’s not whispering into the ear of the president’s most trusted adviser. Reassured?
Personally, not really. I would actually be more reassured if they *were* talking, because it would seem to me at least that they would have a lot to talk about. It doesn't make sense that they wouldn't be talking.
this
/thread
Yarvin is probably getting cucked by Land. Why would Bannon want to talk to little jewboy when he can talk to the greatest philosopher alive?
Land still adores Moldbug, they're not cucking each other.
MM and Bannon, I agree, probably don't have as much to talk about, if only because I don't think Moldbug would think MAGA is actually a workable concept. MM's thing was neocameralism and I have a feeling that for him Trump doesn't fall into his Carlyle-tier pantheon. Bannon/Trump is populism; it's not NRx. But of course, Trump is riding high, and not even Nick Land predicted the win...and people change.
He's also got pic related in his cabinet, who Land is crazy about.
Land isn't an ethno-nationalist, either. He likes the Anglosphere because it makes the best business deals (which are the best techno-deals). He loathes liberals, but it's not the same thing as loving Bannon's Judaeo-Christian culture war.
But it's so fucking interesting, where the lines cross and meet. Land/Moldbug/Bannon/Thiel/Trump/??? are just a crazy network of overlapping interests and politics.
Better articulated here: NL got into a huge fracas last year trying to disentangle himself from ethnats on his blog. Ultimately, though, I predict that all of these guys are going to wind up getting squeezed closer and closer.
>Mencius Moldburg advocates for neocameralism. Interestingly enough it is the same as Scott Alexander’s Archipelago. The difference is Moldburg has a mechanism to enforce things and Alexander never got around to elaborating one. […] In case you don’t want to bother looking it up, it basically means having a bunch of Singapore like city states with free movement and explicitly based political power. It is the exact opposite of ethno-nationalism.
Seeing the people he's namedropped so far, it honestly wouldn't surprise me if he was a Veeky Forums shitposter
A lot of this is just the definition of liberalism. Moldbug is really mediocre, neoreaction is incoherent as is neocameralism. For some reason Land latched onto this stuff. It's easier to see why a Thiel did. Not saying there hasn't been a welcome change, but think of who is writing this article for instance.
>Land/Moldbug/Bannon/Thiel/Trump/??? are just a crazy network of overlapping interests and politics.
I wonder who might be at the bottom of this?
The way I see it, Bannon/Trump see things in terms of culture, and Land/Moldbug see things in terms of tech and economics. They meet in the middle around something that can be called the Anglosphere. Trump/Bannon are basically reacting against the left by using its own political narratives against them: race, class, and gender, which is why the left is imploding with fury and outrage and disgust and calling everyone fascists.
That's the kind of stuff Land wants to avoid, because he's pessimistic and I think he suspects that in the end the left will always win those kinds of arguments by virtue of sheer hysteria. He wants cold space-age asteroid mining contracts carried out in the boardrooms of those nice little Moldbuggian city-states. He's critical of anti-white/pro-diversity stuff not because he's pro-white himself, but just because he thinks the real thing is and always has been capital and tech, which produces utopias on its own without needing any political (or, arguably, human) help.
Not like you don't know all this already, if you're reading Land, but...well, whatever.
Land sounds like an alien complaining about 'hysterical' humans who for some reason don't want to be turned into soylent.
It's time to go to work, Nick.
What's their endgame? I think I need Alex Jones to redpill me on those guys.
That's the thing. He was like the original canary in the coal mine, back in the 90s. He starts out reading Foucault (or I so I have heard), Deleuze, Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche, just like any other continental type. But he looked beyond the veil and realized that social progress was a total myth. Capital is infinitely more free than people are.
But he needed Moldbug, I think, to show up and supply that side of things that he wouldn't have come up with on his own. And now these have acquired enough traction to put Trump in the white house, which NL did not predict.
We do live in some interesting times. NRx doesn't seem as robust to me as the Bannon movement or the Spencer alt-right. But this stuff is happening all over the place, it seems. Jordan Peterson is part of it. People have been talking about 'right postmodernism' (whatever that is) for a while, but that's back too.
What I find interesting are the splits in *aesthetics.* This new dissident right has a kind of a science-fiction/cyberpunk side *and* a traditional/national/pastoral-romantic side. I find that super-interesting, because it suggests to me the different ways that people are looking at what this whole reaction is all about: looking forward to the future, or looking back to the past...and ultimately I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. But who knows?
>ultimately I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. But who knows?
I don't think we will fully have one or the other, but rather a dovetail of both. Given that taking one alone will alienate too large of a section of humanity for it to thrive.
Land eventually changed his prediction from Hillary to Trump iirc
I'd agree with that. If things keep up on their current trajectory, my guess would be that that DE map gets smaller rather than bigger, which will crush these disparate interests together.
The strongest elements are probably going to be the crudest and the simplest ones, in the end; I think tradition and nationalism wins out over cool futurism (and the result will be dystopian cyberpunk, where a small bunch of people collect great art in penthouses, and the mass of humanity lives in a postindustrial hellscape).
As robotics take off, the thing is that you increasingly need fewer and fewer people to make civilization work. Automation is, to me at least, the thing that cuts cross the science fiction/futurist and traditional/romantic divide. The level of automation in a society is what I think fundamentally determines its political, economic, and cultural principles. It's the fucking chewy-chocalatey centre of Marxism today (whatever the fuck that means). If you need lots of people to do stuff - even if it's only to consume - then you have one set of politics. But if you don't need lots of people (which is the direction we are heading in) then you will necessarily have a different way of looking at your civilization.
Overpopulation is the source of a huge number of the world's problems today, combined with the fact that the more we develop technologically and scientifically the less we need or can even handle large amounts of unskilled labor.
The Chinese Communist Party has achieved Full Communism and is ready to deploy it just any moment now. The bourgeoisie won't even know what hit them. it's all in the book
>This new dissident right has a kind of a science-fiction/cyberpunk side *and* a traditional/national/pastoral-romantic side.
no they don't, Thiel and Moldbug might be flavorful character fronts for the new right, most of the people still associated with both parties are deeply entrenched corporate bureaucrats, alt-right twitter geeks might spout WH40k or Heinlein inspired backdrops, but if you want to know what the future of the US is going to look like, look at Houston
Houston, TX is an enormous urban sprawl, most of it is nothing but highways rising over more highways, you need a car to go anywhere, I walked/biked 5 miles of freeway and ditches to a library today, I guess if self driving cars clear this problem up your mobile life will be spent marginally less in an Uber, or whatever other service that fails to live up to our flying car dreams, probably attempting to make up for it by providing VR games that will become increasingly boring and psychologically numbing
outside of the Houston core is more dozens of miles radii of suburban sprawl, mostly oil and gas employees or auxiliary industries therein, some tech employees, mostly a number of small business that provide the exact same services
in each of those offices you don't have Moldbug's Urbit, you have the same late 2000s version of Microsoft's .NET or Apache or whatever server, or a cloud support/IT team, usually with the same programs and alggorithms, written poorly, and written again and again, talking to other, different servers, running incompatible hacks of the same software with different parameters for whatever white/blue collar product they're distributing
more global crises will happen, more poor and middle class migrants will come here when the political pendulum swings back, standards will drop to developing third world standards, we'll get more shitty enterprise programmers and more low intelligence laborers, even if robots and automation comes in the increasingly destabilization effect will be countered by social taboos and government subsidies, hence more of the same shitty Office Space, Joe's HVAC societal system
I don't know
Yeah. But he had to changed his mind on that late. I'm pretty sure he had Trump being dead in around July-August (as did most people).
Still, that he changed his mind *at all* does say something. The NYT and many others had Hillary in a landslide right up to election night.
Some cool user recommended this, in which JDE called his shot and called it bigly in March, which was the best prediction I had heard of.
>When the political machinery of a civilization begins to break down–as ours here in America has been doing since the 9/11 attacks–ideas gradually give way to violent power struggles. It is like a return to Nature: from the “oystrygods gaggin fishygods” (to use Joyce’s phrase) that marks the start of the civilization, and then onward past the metaphysics that civilize it and transform it from a zone of Maximal Stress to a Zone of Cooperation, it inevitably returns back to Nature, back to zoology, and back to tribalism. Trust me: Trump will get the nomination and he will not just beat Hillary Clinton, but he will beat her by a landslide. After that, it might be wise to just stay indoors.
cultural-discourse.com
Anyways, there's no need to let the gloomy Spenglerians have the last word on this. Even if it is going to be gloomy. Somebody always survives, and things do slowly and steadily get better.
I say this, mind, as I continue to drink increasingly heavily.
the actual future is probably going to be far weirder and far more fucked up than anything we can imagine, so chill
I actually read this while I was in the hospital about a year ago. Once you allow the calming voice of the Chairman to wash over you it's kind of cozy. Then you put the book down and realize it's all mainly impossible and you go back to regular life.
I feel for you user. I have a friend I talk to every week who does code and he complains about Urbit. He was the guy who told me about Moldbug for the first time, but I mainly read his philosophy stuff and do not speak the machine-language. But I agree with your assessment. I think NL/MM/others fantasize about Singapore and archipelagos and so on for the same reason Larry Page was fantasizing for awhile about Google Island and seasteading. It would take some kind of crisis for Calexit or whatever to actually happen and we'll probably both be dead by then anyways. But it's interesting to think about.
For me the aesthetics thing works not out of an actual political sense but because it expresses a desire among the redpilled world for some kind of change in the way things are currently, with its insane recursive traps of consumer capitalism and urban decay and so on: some people want to go back to the old ways, with all that that entails, and some people want tech secession.
But in the end the more bankable result will be that they'll probably get neither, as you have intuited.
He was urging someone to read though. Picture my surprise when lit users lack basic reading comprehension skills
Canyourepeat the queston?
Might as well post this here, just in case anyone wants to hear Bannon speak for himself.
There's another clip(s) on YouTube that I've been looking for where he is talking about his philosophy and the Fourth Turning and so on...if anyone can find it and post it that would be cool. I've been looking for it today and I can't remember what it was. As I recall it was pretty grainy.
he's a REAL naval officer! OMG daddyy
I'd love/fear to believe you, but populations default mode of operation is stabilization, and there is massive amounts of disruption in uprooting the core "Multiculturalism+Suburbs+Office Space+Joe's Supply Company" model of domestic economy.
another thing is that the fastest growing demographic in the US are specifically one's resistant to change: middle/lower class Hispanics, immigrants from traditionalist countries
wouldn't we love for Alex Jones to be right and Trump herald the unleashing of deep state secrets and the landing of the Aliens and their nanotech-driven gay luxury space capitalism? certainly
wouldn't it suck if the deep state unleashed the darker transhuman plan to liquidate our brains and bodies as hosts for infinite psychological and biogenetic experiments? yep
we had colorful fantasies in the 50s looking forward to electronics and robots freeing all our labor so we could live in giant greek metropoli, didn't happen
hippies believed psychedelics and DIY computing would free the and enlighten the masses and bring back Gaia, didn't happen
punks and 70s urban youth believed the nukes would fall and we'd all be Mad Maxing it, didn't happen
80's and 90's techies thought AI and the internet would usher in a cyberpunk future or a techno singularity, didn't happen.
Why? Because society on whole actively avoids destabilization and disruption for the reasons I stated in my prior post.
the history of western civilization is basically a series of increasingly fucked millenarian crazes and doomsday cults.
who gives a fuck what Weird Eye Willy reads
Unfortunately though, there is still one aspect which may throw us into destabilization, and that is the failure neo-liberal economics, and the stagnation of economic growth.
Despite doubling down over and over on these principles, we have seen less and less effectiveness in their use. This is troubling as much of our systems are predicated on economic growth, and a massive revaluation would occur if it is determined to be impossible to continue that growth (which looks likely). This revaluation would disrupt current social, political, and economic order. Many things that look secure now would overnight become nonviable.
What's worse is we have no apparent alternative yet.
>Why? Because society on whole actively avoids destabilization and disruption for the reasons I stated in my prior post.
All societies tend towards destruction, not stabilization. The world is just a graveyard of dead peoples, dead tongues, dead civilizations and it's naive to suggest that we'll escape the same fate that's befallen so many others.
>What's worse is we have no apparent alternative yet.
whatabout the revolutionary science of Bookchinism-Apoism?
>Bannon might have clicked on a link to Unqualified Reservations that one time Ross Douthat linked to it on twitter a couple of years ago
This isn't news
>The Publius guy from Claremont who wrote the "Flight 93 Election" essay works for the Trump White House
This is news (and awesome)
this looks like an album cover from a 2000s indie rock band
>would a particular vernacular of socialism work
Probably not, no. Not like the wealth holders would agree to it anyway.
Are you thinking of this?
I
>>The Publius guy from Claremont who wrote the "Flight 93 Election" essay works for the Trump White House
I was excited too but hearing that his past history is pure neocon was disheartening. Hopefully, he's put it behind him as his Publius writing suggests
>Unfortunately though, there is still one aspect which may throw us into destabilization, and that is the failure neo-liberal economics, and the stagnation of economic growth.
> it's naive to suggest that we'll escape the same fate that's befallen so many others.
Oh no I totally agree, anticipation of resource failures and political assymmetry will make war inevitable, likely soon.
But that is my point, they rise and fall, but we'll probably regress to a mean, and the next rise may not happen until well beyond the scope of our lifetimes. Despite whatever coup conspiracies out there, the left's lukewarm "resistance" to Trump is honestly the most telling sign of our domestic political trajectory's tedium.
Moldbug's worst move was making his political statements edgy, he could have easily virtue signaled as a centrist and proclaimed Urbit to be a collectivist project and suckered in leftists
>his past history is pure neocon was disheartening.
a lot of his pals and connections aren't in his network because of the realization of ideals, they're in his network because they make boatloads of money
>TGAD
TDAG rather lel.
Bookchin developed a synthesis of Hegelianism with libertarian socialism and ecological thought, it's not so much about seizeing state power through revolution, but about building dual power through a confederated network of human scale democratic institutions.
Kek.
Has Land written any far futures forecasting type stuff recently? Most of his recent stuff has been headline by headline type commentary.
>MM and Bannon, I agree, probably don't have as much to talk about, if only because I don't think Moldbug would think MAGA is actually a workable concept. MM's thing was neocameralism and I have a feeling that for him Trump doesn't fall into his Carlyle-tier pantheon. Bannon/Trump is populism; it's not NRx.
Tech-Comm here. The idea is Trump as de facto national CEO and implicit neocameralist.
There is much in Trump's policies a Tech-Comm would approve of (reducing taxes, reducing regulations, privatization).
>Moldbug's worst move was making his political statements edgy, he could have easily virtue signaled as a centrist and proclaimed Urbit to be a collectivist project and suckered in leftists
This is why we love the Moldy One. He's too fucking crusty to virtue-signal or write blogs that don't run to four thousand words and include poetry and whatever else. He's just different. And I think also he realizes how deep virtue-signatling goes (The Cathedral). You can never really put up the bat-signal brightly enough in the end. And all of that bogus talk about difference was in fact propping up a gigantic sameness which now we can all see is crumbling and cannot be fixed with the same stuff that built it.
In a sense it was his worst move, but in another it made him a fucking visionary. Sloterdijk intuited it as well ('the world interior of capital') but Moldbug is the guy who really coined the name: The Cathedral. And without just sulking about it, either, like a pleb, but in actually saying that we needed to take the whole thing back to the ancien regime.
>they're in his network because they make boatloads of money
This to me is the thing. It's why the red pill is so sexy. It's the critique of liberalism. Because we all know that, ultimately, we don't really have anything better to do than make boatloads of money, let's stop shitting around pretending like everybody doesn't know this or understand the consequences. The red pill is a shit-test of colossal proportions, because admitting that money is what people want is death to 99% of virtue-signalers (especially the left, which is incapable of admitting that idpol is about power, full stop, and yet unfortunately the other guys are no longer willing to play the game of being a scapegoat). It says that we need *culture* to go with that money, because cynicism goes both ways.
NRx just seems like such a good look. It's not the direction things are really going to go on, but at least it suggests something other than the worst excesses of the political or the right. It's not really politically workable in any sense beyond a kind of a cultural/aesthetic/literary thing (at least, as far as I can tell) but it's just such a fucking stick in the teeth of the dumbest aspects of the current polarization.
Just my own hot take, of course. I've drunk a lot of scotch tonight. Also, lovely wallpapers.
NeoCam could be ethnat in some patches. Also:
>Dat image
>Anisimov
>Tech-Comm
ayy lmao
nick land for president when
>mfw I thought Moldbug was going to be an obscure 20th century French modernist
>turns out to be a "neoreactionary" computer scientist
Thiel/Sentinent Roomba with an upload of Land's brain 2020
I am going to continue to drink and shitpost
Yeah, it's true. It's why Trump is this crazy rallying point for so many; Make America Great Again really just means re-opening it up for political theatre on the grand scale once again. Even if he accomplishes nothing more than that...well, what the fuck. I don't really think he has a concrete plan, he just timed the political market very well, stepped in, maximized his possibilities and now he'll attract investors of every stripe to carry on from there. In the meantime he burned the Republican party to the ground, while watching from a penthouse that would make Louis XIV do a double-take while the Democratic party does likewise to itself.
Tech-comm really is the future. Everybody knows that the future is not in 20C social theory but in science, finance, and tech. Even I know this and I've basically wasted my life thinking about poststructuralism. All that shit seems totally played to me now (although I do think it is necessary to read to see how we got to this point). But whatever, really. I salute your tech-comm savvy tho. And those things that you have identified all to me are really crucial things that Trump can do.
Anissimov seems to have dropped off the radar. I didn't read a whole of lot of his stuff; he seems to have been a heavyweight in the reaction scene along with some other guys but they were a little before I started looking at them. He had some weird meltdown or something I guess, and that Laliberte guy similarly disappeared. MM shut down UR and now the whole thing seems to have passed to Social Matter/Hestia/West-coast trads/whatever. And now Spencer/Friberg/those guys.
Sam Harris is right. The more the left refuses to have uncomfortable questions about borders and cultures, the worse things will get. Trump and Merkel are functional allies in this thing. The cozy 90s-style globalism is just untenable in the current political climate b/c I think the economics it produced pushed it to extremes. The ideological conflicts we see playing out are mostly internal conflicts about the meaning of liberalism, which are ultimately questions of romanticism (as RF says, 'the individual stands anterior to society'). But nobody stands anterior to catallaxy.
They used to say about capitalism that it could be slotted into any culture without really harming that culture; now capitalism has transcended and become the planetary condition. The US, China, and Russia all run on versions of state capitalism. This is what I think is such a fucking disaster for left politics: there is no real alternative to capital, only political situations *within* capitalism. And so all of those old national/tribal allegiances suddenly matter again after we were told for a generation and more that they didn't.
This is why Peterson matters too...he's neither on the right nor the left, but he's definitely opposing left stuff without going full redpill. No wonder he looks so thin and frail.
>Anissimov seems to have dropped off the radar
didn't he come out as transgender or something?
what is Tech-Comm? blog links?
What is your opinion on Alex Jones dropping the full ἄνθρω pill on Joe Rogan?
youtube.com
Do you get into the esoteric side of this stuff at all?
that picture is cancer
>Dadrock is the gateway to traditionalism
I KNEW IT
Could have been. Something like that. Also his obsession with his book about democracy that it seems nobody really cared about all that much. But no doubt transgender stuff would skew with anyone's sense of tradition.
It shouldn't really matter, but I can see how it might, if you have a lot invested in this kind of cultural programming ('the dark Sith arts of civilizational engineering'...what a phrase!).
On that note, I find Milo Yiannopolous both admirable and completely odious. On the one hand, I can't help but be impressed with his bravery and so on. But on the other I find him completely disingenuous. Against claims of racism, he will always invoke the amount of black dick he's eaten, which is completely cynical. And so he can flip from being a comic to deeply outraged and back again in the blink of an eye. He's total kryptonite for the left, which is why Breitbart loves him, and he's an interesting part of this whole thing, but he's basically there as a foil for a lot of false outrage and playing this kind of a character. But that's just me.
For myself (and please note that I'm not in that field, so I have no idea, for example, what pic related actually means) we're just talking essentially about Silicon Valley and that large slice of the US economy which is made up and run on computers, software development, Apple products, etc. That other user can surely give you a better explanation.
If you're not familiar with Nick Land's work, he basically rewrote the history of Marxism by arguing that capital was essentially the point, not the working class (or the bourgeoisie, although they were ultimately a more important component). NL is the intellectual centre of gravity for a lot of stuff that happens because he's a serious philosopher in his own right and right-wing politics are often lacking for those. He does not give a flying fuck about social justice. In the end, tech tells people what it wants, and not the other way around. And it does this through capitalism, through feeding back to us our own desires.
Nick speaks
youtube.com
Nick's blog
xenosystems.net
The DE essays
thedarkenlightenment.com
we all know Nick Land, who are the other highlights of tech-comm analysis?
the focus on Silicon Vallley/Chinese tech is lazy, has there been any talk about companies like Lockheed, DARPA, DynCorp, SkunkWorks, that kind of thing?
>much of our systems are predicated on economic growth
number one problem
our massive sovereign debt, fiat currency, inflation, the fed, immigration, social security: all these problems exist because our economy is predicated on cancerous levels of perpetual growth
its unsustainable. We need to transfer to more long-term models that work for graying societies (higher income tax, universal basic income), but none of this will work so long as the third world exists as a heat sink for labor. it keeps this eldritch abomination alive.
we either need principled leaders and citizens with eyes fixed toward the public good, or total global economic policy entropy.
I loved this whole exchange and it only made my estimation of Alex Jones go up. I have no idea what he's doing but I am so, so glad that he's out there doing it. When the media becomes a completely insane shitshow of doublethink and recursivity, heroic conspiracy theorists acquire a kind of a rare and precious importance. When you can't trust the sane, the insane become much more important. That rant that he goes into around 1hr40 is a thing of genuine beauty, you can see Rogan's eyes rolling in his head. And for fuck's sakes he's only 43. He's wonderful. That, to me, is the right way to think about this shit. And how about the fact that a lot of that Pizzagate shit turned out to be correct?
The media is completely implicated with all of this shit that is going up in flames. I actually like Fox more than CNN, Breitbart, MSNBC or anyone, because they're on the back foot right now; they're not with Trump and they're not with the Blue Team. I actually think it helps them provide better coverage. Tucker Carlson isn't exactly Walter Cronkite, but he's actually in a position to grill people in ways that the other guys can't because they're already obligated to perform for their fan bases. Funny how these things go in cycles.
>Do you get into the esoteric side of this stuff at all?
Fully and completely. That's where I feel most at home. Rene Guenon is to me inarguable. Granted, it's possible that I've just always been a latent Catholic at heart and only had to wade through piles of philosophy to get here. Or maybe it's because I think the esoterics and the mystics actually understand each other perfectly well while the philosophers are hair-splitting like cunts. Religion is a beautiful thing, it's not the opiate of the masses at all. Marx was a shitheel for saying that, and this is from a guy who has read Nietzsche up and down as well. And Heidegger. And Baudrillard. And all of these guys. Guenon is tremendous. Girard too. Great literature always has a sacred dimension. Religion is hardly the demon it's made out to be.
Evola, he's just okay for me. I prefer Joseph Campbell and Peterson. But Evola is important. All of this depth psychology is important.
Yeah. I posted the other slightly cleaner one earlier. Maybe somebody will make an updated one to reflect some of the new realities of things. Still though it's not horrible as a reference. But it is hard as fuck on the eyes and if there is one thing these guys should have going on, it's aesthetics.
Great post. Are you the guy who usually lowercaseposts about Girard and others?
I just want to recommend, if you aren't into this sort of thing, Rudolf Steiner. Especially the idea of artificial intelligence and mechanized thought (cf. accelerationists) as "ahrimanic" or satanic and the great threat to an anthroposophical destiny.
It's a cult, for sure, but some of Steiner's ideas are eerily on point and if you like Guenon they might interest you. Granted, if you like Guenon you probably DON'T like the kind of theosophy Steiner was coming from, but it's still interesting.
I'm sure you read Eliade and stuff too.
To be honest senpai, the fact that there are other people who have converged toward virtually the exact same philosophical positions and reading backgrounds in this new zeitgeist is downright eerie. The world spirit in action or whatever.
Jacques Ellul is also cool but I'm sure you know him.
A real revival of the church could save Catholicism and the world right now. Something wholly new. The more dead the current church gets, the more its spirit resonates with the decadent bourgeois order, the more I think a critical transformation and new morphology is at least possible.
And Teilhard de Chardin***
Beats me user. I'd like to know too. I have some friends who are traders but they're fairly close-lipped about that stuff. I don't have any investing going on myself either. But hey, at least we've got Peter Thiel coming out unapologetically for Trump...
Most of the stuff I read has been philosophy/culture stuff (which is, I can admit, actually very boring beyond a certain horizon...things are going in a bad direction and we know it, and no amount of invoking the spectres Nietzsche or Marx is going to fix it). Sloterdijk is interesting, though.
Basically, cultural agitation - We Should X - is kind of where philosophy is stuck at the present, to my mind. People are still hung up on mass action and it's really the risk-taking, chaos-fighting individual who has to be looked at (as Peterson is saying). So for in-depth analysis of those corps you named I'm afraid I can't offer a whole lot. It's adjacent to my wheelhouse but the doors are locked from the inside.
>tfw not intelligent enough to know what's actually driving the future
Bannon has said he expects war with China in 5-10 years; that's got to be spinning some gears somewhere. And eventually North Korea is going to collapse as well, I would think. If those things happen around the same time business should be booming for a couple of those firms. It's actually kind of weird to think about. You know, when you abandon those antiquated notions of world peace and just start asking how money and research actually works...
>or maybe it's the drink. whatever tho
This really is, I think, the way that we should look at capitalism. Not as a kind of autonomous process with Evil Capitalists and Heroic Laborers, but as a responsive and recursive system that drives and responds to global politics. Money is always being made, somehow, somewhere, *whether we like it or not.* Everything that happens in the world happens to my mind because of human desire, but to look at things from a kind of a top-down view is interesting (once you get over the inhumanity of it). Psychoanalysis has taught me that you can't really just take things people say at face value; capitalism really is a kind of collective planetary unconscious.
>tfw so why don't you drink more often, retard
>tfw really not sure
I am that Girardfag. Maybe I should get a tripcode.
I have read Eliade, not as much as I should, because he's awesome. Dumezil too is another one of those guys. Ellul I read *way* back in the day, and he floored me, because he was the guy talking about efficiency: I remember him saying about how they took the stylized bull off the front of a tractor for aerodynamics, but this actually stripped the tractor of this necessary symbolic dimension, this connection to a broader universe of symbols. All of that falls under modernism, the ruthless drive towards efficiency. This was before I knew about Heidegger, who makes this point in a much more comprehensive way. Heidegger really blew me away.
I read Chardin last year and liked him. I was on a big global mind/global brain kind of thing that included Wilber and Aurobindo as well...the noosphere is an interesting concept, and I like Wilber's funky new-age system as well, even if it's strongly geared towards, I think, a kind of American experience. It's a little bit *too* easy for me. There must of course be suffering (or what's the point?)
>A real revival of the church could save Catholicism and the world right now. Something wholly new. The more dead the current church gets, the more its spirit resonates with the decadent bourgeois order, the more I think a critical transformation and new morphology is at least possible.
Couldn't agree more sir. Couldn't agree more. So much runs on anxiety, but anxiety is also connected to the imagination. I really do think that Guenon is right when he says that there is no substitute for the kingdom of the spirit. That really is what people want. We can hide in modernist/postmodernist shells all we please, but the imagination knows no boundaries. I am not a big Hegelian, but I think something very significant happens between Marx and Hegel that takes this legacy of German idealism and transforms it into a revolutionary politics that is today totally played out. It's great that Zizek is out there doing what he does, but this notion of a 'radical left' is just no longer a workable prospect for me. We can do a lot with Lacan, but 20C social theory is simply incompatible with what is going to happen in the 21C, which has *got to* find a way of overcoming the great modernist metanarratives of class, race, and gender. Has to. I think the Lacanian crowbar/lockpick set can open a lot of doors (not so many in Japan...but are we so worried about Japan these days?)
So it will probably take violence, some sort of calamitous implosion which is being signalled today in both the US and in Europe...and I am not a utopian about these things. The end of Rome does not lead directly to the Renaissance, but through a dark ages that involved a lot of monks holding on to a lot of books for a long time.
That will happen. We'll both be long gone by then, user. But in the meantime, it would be good for us not to lose our heads. I'm with you on a revival of the Church, I think.
>To be honest senpai, the fact that there are other people who have converged toward virtually the exact same philosophical positions and reading backgrounds in this new zeitgeist is downright eerie. The world spirit in action or whatever.
Just wanted to throw up a (You) for this. It's a wonderful thought and I share it too.
see
>Maybe I should get a tripcode.
don't even think about it
> Especially the idea of artificial intelligence and mechanized thought (cf. accelerationists) as "ahrimanic" or satanic and the great threat to an anthroposophical destiny.
This is fascinating. Could you point more specifically to where one would read this in Steiner?
Dugin is orthodox
Definitely
>titled "What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read"
>doesn't include a reading list
fuck off fag
Dumezil is great - what do you think of Bataille on the sacred? A lot of this is just stuff I've glanced off of. You seem to have read way more in depth, which is admirable. I have a bad tendency to "get the gist" and then indefinitely put off reading things until I have time, which I never do. Thanks for reminding me that I have to keep at it.
Very insightful posts. I have been trying to think lately about vitalism and evolution, in conjunction with Hegel. Hegel helped me to visualise solutions, to cultural crises or spiritual "stagnation," as arising out of the stagnation and mutual exhaustion of contradictions. The critical situation, the kairos, DOES adumbrate its solution, but crucially 1) not in a way that could have been "planned out" and soberly enacted from within the contradiction, and, related, 2) not in a deterministic way that denigrates human freedom. The element of freedom and of unfolding has to take place organically, not merely theoretically and also not merely blindly. William James has been making me think about this more lately.
I've also been reading more of Schelling and Coleridge, and some Cassirer - things like how moments of truly creative imagination add something wholly new to the mix, heighten and sublate the storehouse of concepts and "ways of thinking" available to mankind. But I think I am trapped too much within idealist thinking, so I've been trying to explore other angles.
I agree with you on the long term and the need to face the facts that change might be violent, or may even only come as a response to violence or a dark age. I was so pessimistic that the neoliberal status quo was just it, it was the final slide into the singularity, everything was in place for soulless elites to "discipline" us to our logical conclusion as desire feedback machines hooked into our own assholes. And of course you never know the extent of what's going on BEHIND the scenes, let alone what you can see. The fact that any cracks have appeared in the surface is amazing. It feels palpably like history is still alive.
There's a good book by Niethammer on posthistoire, sloppily translated from the German but kind of an intellectual history gloss of theories of the end of history and the crises of modernity. Koselleck on the crisis of modernity was interesting too.
It comes up a few times. If you go to the very bottom of this page:
sites.google.com
you can see references to David Black's book, and quotes by Steiner:
>"[W]e have machines today which add and subtract; everything is convenient. Now, in the Future you will not get a law passed which says you must not think. No. What will happen is that things will be done the effect of which will be to exclude all individual thinking."
I think AI is a kind of "great filter," a moral and spiritual hurdle we will have to overcome. Again, the idealist thinking makes me want to say, morphologically inevitable in Spirit's development.
>Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed “neoreactionary” who blogs under the name “Mencius Moldbug”
Minor nitpick I suppose, but he he never proclaimed himself to be a neo-reactionary. The term he used initially was 'formalist', but since other bloggers called him a neo-reactionary he adopted the term because the shoe fit.
Also: A good book on AI is Nick Bostrom's best-seller Superintelligence.
The big disappointment I have with the AI people is that they're so entrapped within their materialist worldview that they don't understand the sheer novelty of creating new minds. It's not only dangerous, it's cruel and spiritually irresponsible. We don't understand anything about "mind" and we're going to futz around with creating disembodied consciousnesses.
Even if you're an ardent materialist, you should still be morally concerned for the potential hideousness of irresponsible dipshit barely-intelligent chimps having the power to create superintelligences and subject them to anything.
I like the ambiguous depiction of AI in Neuromancer, particularly when the Dixie Flatline ruminates on what exactly "he" "is," the AI collective in Hyperion, and a few other things I can't remember. The standard depiction of AI in scifi, even in relatively self-conscious scifi written by smart people, is a terrifying omen for how real AI will be treated.
AI and the singularity aren't coming anytime soon, what we really need is biological alteration of the human race itself (eliminating sentience would be nice.)
Only viable paths for the future (not necessarily mutually exclusive) :
a.) Global depopulation + eugenics
b.) Complete the system of german idealism
c.) God turns out to be real
What's funny is that Bannon is getting his hands in the Church as well. That's REALLY interesting.
nytimes.com
Most of any reasonable moral system revolves around humans as independent, conscious and valuable agents. The appearance of the tech to generate humanlike minds on the fly with virtually no cost (and multiply, change or erase them as simple as one multiplies, changes and erases any information in the information age) would effectively nullify any moral that still proclaims sentient beings valuable. Transhumanism crowd rarely, if ever, brings this point to light.
>nytimes.com
At last, I truly see.
>virtue-signal
I find this term extremely amusing. One can easily argue that it is little more than a political epithet (since that is how most people use it) or its just a way to signal that one is "real" unlike like those virtue signalers who only really care about money/power/status, a point that certainly isn't banal and overdone.
>To be honest senpai, the fact that there are other people who have converged toward virtually the exact same philosophical positions and reading backgrounds in this new zeitgeist is downright eerie. The world spirit in action or whatever.
Another user here. I've had neoreactionary ideas come to me as well before I knew it existed, but nothing like Moldbug. Nick Land is starting to grow on me, though I dislike his style of writing.
Taleb draws much closer to me. He might not be pure science but his foundation is science and he writes clear and as simple as possible.
I discovered philosopher John Gray on my own. For me John Gray's vision is the world: humans will not improve, we will continue to destroy ourselves and the natural world. But I see in Taleb's ideas ways to manage humanity.
Tocqueville and Henry Adams are the older aristocratic philosophers that appeal to me.
I do not think it is going to be fun. Here's something to read:
>Global trends paradox of progress - NationalI intelligence Council
>Megacities and the United States Army
What I think these pop-culture cyberpunk visions are missing is the biological element. Perhaps technology will become powerful enough to control nature, but so far that is not the case.
It seems antibiotic resistance can still be combated. I do see superweeds being part of the future still.
We also have a demographic problem. We live longer but we are much sicker. This is draining resources and will most likely cost more.
We haven't exactly solved pollution: microplastics are entering our food.
Climate change will be a huge threat to some populations.
I honestly think the future could be very dystopian.
I do not suggest Taleb is a neoreactionary in any way, but he is one of the writers who Bannon reads.
Sounds like William Burroughs desu
>mfw all the obscure autistic writers I've read are now part of policy makers
Eat shit you hyphenated Marxists I fucking called it. I saw it coming. No amount of backwards looking dated class dialectics spouted by incel 3rd year English majors are going to save you.