#Moldbug

[isaacsapphire]

Shitty people/writers like Sarah J. Maas and Cassandra Claire are living off royalties and being sold in every place that still sells books because they actually wrote books. Shitty writers/people like various bloggers are impacting American and hence global politics because they wrote.

And the truth is, maybe I could have been that person, if I had actually gotten off my ass and wrote. But we’ll never know, unless I do try, and it may be too late anyways.

[utilitymonstermash]

The problem with Trump (for folks with contempt for the current ruling class) is he seems to be the heel described by Moldbug, an incarnation of what the regime says it's against.

He doesn't seem to transcend their frame. He merely opposes their values. As long as he's in play, it seems that much harder to find a new, positive vision.

Always and everywhere, the worst way to resist a regime is to inhabit its stage villains. Like most bad choices, this choice is a bad default. It’s as you lived in 15th-century Paris and thought the Church was very corrupt and bad—but there was no alternative. You couldn’t be a cool Enlightenment philosophe or at least just a Protestant. Because it was the 15th century. And there weren’t even words for these things. So you asked your priest: if not God, King and Church, in what would I believe? Who is against God and King and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so, thinking logically, you became a Satanist. This probably actually happened to you, except it wasn’t a priest but a “guidance counselor.” The way the world works never changes. If some party A asks how it should operate in opposing some opponent B, B’s vision of who its opponents are and how they operate is hardly the place to start! You could start with a clean slate. You could start with any other period in history. Instead you start by literally aping your enemy’s propaganda. The only possible cause of any such choice is laziness and/or immaturity: not promising qualities in an aspiring aristocrat. So while in a way we can’t really blame you for falling into the default, which means falling into a trap, in a way it still is your fault. Not finding Voltaire or even Calvin on the menu, the right response is not to give up and settle for Satan—but to invent Calvin or Voltaire. On one side of the coin, this is an epic challenge; on the other, an epic opportunity.

[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.

[fraseris]

you can say a lot of things about life, and many people have, but it is indisputable that things are crazy

[selfmaderibcageman]

i think i;m already tired of ironic khive posting. she did apparently call trump retarded in 2022 though. maybe the most based thing shes ever done

[lateantiquechud]

[finalaudreythespiritswithin]

turbo-online rationalists (but i repeat myself) all think they have this deep intuitive understanding of all fields of human endeavor on account of being enlightened logical stem geniuses but what this all apparently cashes out into is like "democrat with strong feelings about iq heritability" or "ron paul guy but also canadian"

[sinistersinister]

i wanna fuck the spooky ghost and i am always reading fanfiction, i don't get to pull rank about: steven universe adults, soyjack posters (even ironic ones), people who say 'adulting,' people who believe in astrology or the mbti

i need to remember humility even though i'm hot now.

[utilitymonstermash]

I'm not sure he's wrong. USA's main answer to these pockets of collapse seems to subsidize and route around, see Detroit. If productivity goes up enough, nearly unbounded dysfunction can be subsidized, so long as the cancer doesn't hit any vital organs -- which seems inevitable.

NYC seemed to shake the decay once, maybe that's the template? What does a Guliani figure for SF look like? Is such a thing even viable given demographic trends?

[prokopetz]

I maybe it's I'm going insane do to to recent events but i have become completely disillusioned about the cyberpunk movement being truly "punk", given it ended up giving us moldbug, nick land, Elon Musk and the modern culture of silicon valley. I could be wrong though. i just can't help but think overwise.

Cyberpunk was never a social movement; anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is selling something. There's an argument to be made that it was, at one time, a legitimate artistic and literary counterculture, but if so, it's one that had largely exhausted its cultural relevance by the early 1990s, and it's been running on pure vibes ever since. This isn't to say that there haven't been individual works in the last thirty years of cyberpunk media that are worth examining, of course, but as a genre? It's not accidental that contemporary cyberpunk has mutated into an exercise in 1980s retrofuturism – that's about the last time cyberpunk literature as a whole had anything interesting to say.

[nostalgebraist]

Trying to picture how myself from early 2015 would react if I told him that 10 years later, he'd be freaking out and doomscrolling the news because

"Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, acting through the new federal organization 'DOGE,' are trying to implement Mencius Moldbug's plan to 'reboot the government' by mass-retiring government employees"

[feotakahari]

Me talking to Ludwig von Mises.

you guys understand that theory is intended to be descriptive of the real world, helping to map and understand its complexities by looking at it, and is not axiomatic fact that proves itself ipso facto correct, right? right????

[lateantiquechud]

holy fucking shit

[dostoyevsky-official]

in the age of extremes hobsbawm looks to explain the constant attempts at popular fronts between liberals, communists, socialists, and on the street, anarchists, from the interwar to the postwar, the Allies, and the popular governments before the onset of the cold war. his response is a line that's stuck with me for years: the difference between them and their enemies is that they all come out of the enlightenment, approve it, and want to extend its principles further, in their way; their enemies break with, rejecting it entirely.

the people we are against aren't conservatives, they're reactionaries. they break with the enlightenment and they're proud of it. they say so explicitly: see BAP, moldbug, thiel, etc., this is their presidency, the Vance presidency. there is no parliamentary procedure in the politics of moderation and contestation the way it's been attempted for the last decade to put them down. they need to be treated as enemies, ruthlessly

[collapsedsquid]

OK I thought the dystopian vision I would point to was obvious, I'm talking about about that "Sovereign Individual" stuff, or the stuff you can read about with GM Tamas or Quinn Slobodian. With moldbug these technocratic centrist journalists get a frisson of semi-terrified excited about how he wants to "end democracy" which they're not really keen on either, all they can think of is various ideas of dictatorship, that's not the real risk here. The real risk is found more in the survival bunkers ahd private cities they want to found, the "sovereign individuals" they want to be, the "Great Reset" they want to initiate, the inside-out concentration camp, the little archipelago of technofeudalist hells they want to make the world into.

[kaiasky]

i am yknow. cautious about the degree to which "weird=online=bad" is currently being thrown around in the mainstream liberal usa politisphere. sure, right now it's directed at jd vance for being a moldbug supporter who makes disparaging comments about women not having kids. but yknow, come next contested democratic primary i feel like 'whose supporters are ~weird~' is half-likely to turn toxic in a really predictable way.

ultimately like. if you have a politics then it's pretty obvious the difference between "transgender furry" and "christian conservative politician" but im not convinced that most democrats have a particularly strong politics beyond aesthetics so embracing a politics of disgust--hm! well.