The Dark Enlightenment of Flint
A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones will return on February 29th.
Jack Graham notes that “if you want a vision of the future, imagine Flint, Michigan – forever.” The neoreactionary movement, meanwhile has been doing just that for several years. Neoreaction – essentially the pseudo-intellectual wing of the loosely defined alt-right (see also Gamergate, Trump, and the “human biodiversity” crowd) – has been clanking around the fringes of the discourse for a few years now, basically getting started when a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin started a sideline career blogging as Mencius Moldbug in 2007, and gathering proper steam when Nick Land, formerly an academic associated with the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit at the University of Warwick and one of the forefathers of accelerationism, made a dramatic heel turn in the form of an essay called “The Dark Enlightenment” in 2013 in which he, and I’m paraphrasing here, basically concluded that the best hope of a posthuman future where everyone has face tentacles lies in the form of white nationalists. I’m writing a book that’s more or less about them. It’ll be fun.
Anyway, the key detail in all of this is that the catastrophic decision to try to save $4m by switching Flint’s water system over to the Flint river was made by not by elected officials, but by an Emergency Manager, a position created by a 1988 law and expanded dramatically in 2011. The law allows the governor to appoint someone to take charge of a municipal governor if he certifies that the city is suffering from a financial emergency. This Emergency Manager is unelected, but his powers trump those of the elected government; indeed, he can remove elected officials at will. His sole mandate is to balance the budget (My second favorite detail in all of this: he’s forbidden from raising taxes to do it). The sole oversight is the Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board, a similarly unelected body that rubber stamps decisions over $10,000 including the sale of public assets. (My favorite detail: the law requires that Emergency Manager’s salary be shouldered by the city.)
What’s striking about the Emergency Manager position is that it’s more or less exactly what Mencius Moldbug proposes as the ideal system of government. Moldbug advocates for, essentially, government by CEO – an individual manager with absolute power subject to oversight by a board of directors who can replace him, with the metric for whether a government is successful being the degree to which the government turns a profit. Very much excluded from this – indeed consciously and deliberately excluded – is any notion of democracy. Moldbug despises democracy, viewing it as inefficient, duplicitous, and largely degenerate. In his view people are, whether they want to admit it or not, subjects of a sovereign. And given that, we may as well admit it and just return to actual monarchy.
It’s easy to laugh at Moldbug; he’s a more than faintly comical figure whose default style is meandering blog posts running thousands of words in which he badly stitches together clumsy readings of primary source documents in order to claim they reveal the bankrupt heart of modern democracy. But the derision – a tone set by a 2013 TechCrunch article called “Geeks for Monarchy” that brought Moldbug’s “thought” to mainstream attention for the first time – becomes more than slightly uneasy in the face of the realization that the article came out right in the midst of the decision to switch over to the Flint River. Far from being, as TechCrunch had it, “a small minority worldview” that “shines some light on the psyche of contemporary tech,” neoreactionary ideas like “denying people a democratic voice in their governance for profit is a good idea” were rolling up their sleeves and poisoning people.
So we’re going to have to take them seriously. There are ways in which this is difficult. As I said, Moldbug is not a good philosophical thinker on really any level. He flits between losing the forest for the trees and contentless generalities with an uncanny knack for picking the wrong extreme for the circumstances. But his position is not incoherent; merely utterly inept. Indeed, he lays it out with uncharacteristic clarity in his first blogpost, back when he was calling his position “formalism,” defining it as saying “let’s figure out exactly who has what, now, and give them a little fancy certificate. Let’s not get into who should have what.” Taken along with his declaration that the purpose of government is to turn a profit, the underlying principle becomes clear: Moldbug believes in the objective and absolute reality of power.
This is almost reasonable. Certainly it’s hard to deny power’s material existence, however much one might like Varys’s little spiel in Game of Thrones. But Moldbug’s position requires more than simply acknowledging that power, in point of fact, functions. It requires that power be straightforwardly quantifiable and measurable. That’s the ultimate point of his conspicuously unjustified idea of for-profit government: it allows for the brute quantification of power that his worldview requires. It is, of course, a fantasy. Moldbug’s thought ultimately emerges out of the crass libertarianism of the Austrian school, which conspicuously eschews any form of empiricism in favor of a narrative approach (which makes it deeply funny whenever Austrian school folks sneer at Marxism), and nowhere does it show more clearly than here. This is not even the libertarian fantasy of an actually independent market; it’s a fantasy of a market whose valuations are objective truths. Might doesn’t make right; might is inseparable from and coextensive with right.
To be fair, Moldbug doesn’t duck the consequences of this, at least not immediately. Instead he proclaims, with a blitheness that borders on rhetorical style, that because the US owns its territory (by virtue of the fact that it “can determine what happens on the North American continent between the 49th parallel and the Rio Grande, AK and HI, etc”) and similarly owns the right to taxation, the citizenry are more accurately to be considered serfs. To be clear, this is just intellectually honest; it doesn’t make a lick of actual sense. In particular, “can determine what happens” is a statement that disintegrates rapidly as it’s unpacked. And while the “serfs” bit has a smidgen of charm, feudalism is almost precisely the wrong lens for what he’s driving at.
Anyway, it’s not until this point in the argument that he starts spectacularly ducking the consequences of his ideas, proclaiming, after his dramatic declaration that we’re all serfs, “so what? So I’m a corporate serf. Is this so horrible? I seem to be pretty used to it. Two days out of the week I work for Lord Snooty-Snoot. Or Faceless Global Products. Or whoever.” It’s easy to mock the ridiculous privilege of a Bay Area software engineer who works two days a week proclaiming that he’s a serf and he likes it. Indeed, I’d go so far as to suggest it’s important to mock the privilege involved in that paragraph. But it’s important to do more than just mock and to explicitly highlight what Moldbug omits, which is that, however “used to it” people may be, the reality is that the reality of modern corporate serfdom is, for no shortage of people, a life of brutality, degradation, and exploitation. Just ask the people of Flint.
Realize, though, that this isn’t some sort of oversight on Moldbug’s part. His lack of thought for the concerns of people who are not wealthy software engineers is not because it hasn’t occurred to him that maybe he’s got it unusually good in life. It’s because he thinks they are unworthy of concern. Moldbug supports the return of slavery, calling it “a natural human relationship” akin to gay marriage, and claiming that it’s a microcosm of government itself. More chillingly (which is a hell of a phrase to write after that sentence), he proclaims that “not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery,” going on to specify that Africans historically made good slaves and suggesting this is probably genetic.
It’s not like Moldbug doesn’t realize how this sounds. Indeed, he earnestly leavens all of this with discussions of how the real problem with slavery is bad owners, which obviously would be fixed if people could sell themselves into slavery instead of being born into it because of the free market and all that. But, of course, when Rick Snyder was campaigning against a 2012 referendum to repeal the Emergency Manager law he talked about how “if the emergency manager law were to go away, debt in those local units of government would continue to pile up, bills would go unpaid, paychecks may not be sent, lights could be turned off, police and fire protection might not be provided, and students would be at risk of not having a school to attend.” It’s always for your own good.
In this regard, then, it is hardly surprising that officials reacted to the people who brought bottles of filthy and polluted water to meetings, who pointed at the increasing factual evidence of massive lead poisoning, and who lobbied for their own health and safety by calling them “hysterical.” They are, after all, mere subjects. Their sole purpose is to be ruled over. Certainly it is not to have any sort of pretensions of “democratic voice.”
This may seem harsh. After all, it is not as though the Emergency Manager law actually reinstitutes slavery, nor even that Rick Snyder supports that. Nor is it as though Snyder is an avid reader of Moldbug, although as a former tech CEO you can’t rule out the possibility. Rather, it’s that all of the differences constitute Snyder failing to follow his worldview to its natural end. Because that worldview is identical to Moldbug’s: power is self-justifying and the purpose of government is profitability. Snyder ran for office as an experienced businessman who could make the tough decisions Michigan needed; more or less Moldbug’s dream of a sovereign. But the most basic version of the point is found in Flint itself. There are precisely two reasons why Flint was poisoned: there was money to be made doing it, and the people who stood to make the money had the power to do it. Any difference between that and Moldbug’s view of the world is one of degree alone.
Certainly it is ridiculous to suggest that the racial logic of slavery is absent from what happened in Flint. The sheer extent to which the wealth of America was built on the brutal, sadistic, and dehumanizing exploitation of black bodies has been well documented (and anyone with an interest in social and economic justice who has not read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark “The Case for Reparations” needs to fix that post haste). American capitalism depends on the creation of “waste” cities like Flint, and those cities are, with chilling regularity, ones that have substantial or majority black populations. The logic that poisoned Flint and the logic that set up the preposterous exploitation of Ferguson’s system of a white government funding itself by fining a black population for anything it could think of are identical. As is the logic that allows an armed white militia to insinuate its intention to shoot cops for weeks but allows Tamir Rice two seconds before he’s gunned down. American capitalism has always been clear about what an expendable population looks like. As with everything else here, the difference between Rick Snyder and Mencius Moldbug is simply “how expendable are they.” And even that distinction is little more than the fact that under Snyder the government only poisons you and lies about it for eighteen months or so, whereas unchecked neoreaction would poison you indefinitely.
But it is that last word, “unchecked,” that seems to me key. Or, rather, it seems to me to reveal the central bleakness to the situation. Because even in the face of the profit-driven poisoning of an entire city, all that is on offer is a series of token checks on the system of power and exploitation that is in play here. The Emergency Manager law had been repealed in a statewide referendum in 2012. Snyder responded by reinstating it with a few minor changes, this time in a form that was not subject to a voter referendum. Meanwhile, when it comes to accountability, there isn’t any. The bulk of relevant branches of government are shielded from FOIA request, and the release of Snyder’s e-mails was voluntarily and conspicuously excluded the year the key decisions were taken. Meanwhile, with property values in freefall (not that it matters, since you can’t legally sell a house with a known lead problem) and population with a wealth of massive health problems, it’s safe to say that financial stability (and with it the ability to avoid having your entire elected government usurped) is not something that’s on its way to Flint any time soon. There are no options on the ballot for anything other than the continuation of the basic ideology that poisoned the city. But then, you can’t reform a system out of doing what it’s designed to do.
February 15, 2016 @ 6:02 pm
Goldbug would not survive a Doctor Who episode. His willingness to accept tyranny and slavery casts him as the kind of character that would gladly make a deal with a monster to save his own hide, never suspecting that the monster will betray him. He’s the kind of asshole who opens a side door in the walls, hoping that the invaders will spare him. He’s the kind of man who will kiss up to a tyrant in the hope of a good government position. He is a Collaborator.
February 15, 2016 @ 7:22 pm
The strangest thing about this is that he seems to think ‘profit-motive’ and ‘monarchy’ are synonymous, when ‘profit-motive’ is a pretty modern conception that comes to of capitalism, which has no (and largely could not have) held sway before the industrial revolution made ‘goods’ something that could truly be mass-market.
Monarchy, for most of history, was based on different conceptions of power, ones not tied to profit* such as family dynamics or religious duty. There was even monarchs who ruled from a sense of obligation, of service, of commitment to a people rather than the self.**
My point, which I may not have made well, is that monarchy, both structurally and from a justification standpoint, is neither simple nor natural. At the very least, he seems to think monarchs ruled absolutely, but there have only ever been a handful of true, unopposed, absolute rulers in all of history. Most rulers spent most of their reigns either being controlled by other, or trying to exert control over others, with varying degrees of success. Look at the histories of the Kings of France, absolute rulers who often controlled little beyond the bounds of Paris. Look at the rise and fall of the emperors of China, or the emperors of Japan, stripped of all power and left as symbols twice in the last thousand years. Look at the later Roman emperors, absolute rulers offed by their own guardsmen. And so on.
Monarchy is hard, and it doesn’t work without the participation of the ruled, even if the history books like to overlook the ebb and flow of court intrigue and popular uprisings. Ever ruler in history who kept their throne did so only because enough people chose not to rise up and kill them then they might have done otherwise.
*Which is not to say that it was never about greed, or the gaining of wealth, but profit requires a system of markets and products that did not exist on a large-enough scale in most of history. You can’t make money as a ‘businessman’ in a world where almost no one has money, as those that do have it tend to only buy food and art. Crossus was not a tycoon among many, he was a tycoon at a time when you got maybe one tycoon a century – there’s no businessman ‘class’ the way there is today. You can’t be a Trump in a world where land is tied to family lines and the idea of selling it is inconceivable. You can’t be a Walmart in an era when most people live by the barter system, and so on. Profit, as a national pursuit, is modern.
** I’m not saying this made them good rulers, mind, or that this absolves monarchy of anything.
February 16, 2016 @ 6:36 pm
”The strangest thing about this is that he seems to think ‘profit-motive’ and ‘monarchy’ are synonymous,”
Like you say, here ‘monarchy’ is just assumed to be corporations without all the politically-correct-health-and-safety stuff holding them back. It’s a way of getting what they perceive as the good stuff, bold visionaries able to achieve their advances unconstrained, with a mechanism which cleanly lops off what’s held to be bad.
I may be leaping from one loopy group to another, but notably the Freemen of the Land define modern government as a corporation in disguise. Except unlike with the Kings it’s everything they don’t like about corporations. Government doesn’t have the right to rule you except by your consent. (Note, it’s not ‘shouldn’t’ but ‘doesn’t’.) So it’s forever trying to seduce you into signing yourself into a contract with it, just like a loan company endlessly phoning you up to get you to take their credit card.
But the result is remarkably similar to Moldbug. Notably they never seem to criticise actual corporations. (Here in the UK where TV licensing or Student Loan collection is outsourced this is often highlighted, but with the implication what it really does is prove the Government is in fact a corporation itself.) After a while you start to suspect their Aunt Sally of a ‘rogue corporation’ seems constructed primarily to take the focus off those actual corporations.
Corporations are seen as the default form of human behaviour. But when talking about then the last thing we should do is think about actually existing corporations and how they behave in our world. Look for them everywhere, except from where they actually are. So much the better to locate their ‘good’ and ‘bad’ examples.
February 17, 2016 @ 3:40 am
And again, that weird idea that there’s something ‘natural’ about corporations, the corporation eternal, when corporations themselves are only several centuries old, and the corporation in the modern conception is, well, modern.
February 17, 2016 @ 5:48 pm
I think it comes from their underlying notion that capitalism isn’t a social system which arose but the inevitable expression of ‘human nature’, surfacing separately from inside a zillion individuals. Like a picture made up of thousands of tiny pixels, but where the pixels are all exactly the same colour. Which requires all this papering-over, to cover the fact that for most of human history we didn’t live under capitalism or anything like it. When your theory’s totally ahistoric history becomes a bit of a problem…
February 16, 2016 @ 5:54 am
Holy crap, it’s phenomenal the level of delusion that simply living in America and using words like “freedom”, “equality”, or even “fairness” requires. And of course “democracy”, but you never really had that.
Superb link to Ta-Nehisi Coates piece. I hadn’t read it, and remedied that situation just as you advised. Thank you very much for that.
February 16, 2016 @ 11:39 am
“the logic that allows an armed white militia to insinuate its intention to shoot cops for weeks but allows Tamir Rice two seconds before he’s gunned down”
The logic there is that Rice was in a city park (i.e. a crowded urban area), whereas Vanilla ISIS were, by their deliberate design, a long way from anywhere and no imminent risk to anyone – talk, even if it’s of shooting cops, is cheap, particularly if the nearest cop is 30 minutes drive away. If Y’All Qaeda had set themselves up in Central Park they’d all have been dead before the sun went down on January 2nd – and they knew that.
February 16, 2016 @ 7:44 pm
I’m willing to bet with some confidence that a black nationalist militia would be given somewhat less leeway as well, and that a white kid with a toy gun would have had seconds in the double or even triple digits.
February 17, 2016 @ 8:12 pm
You’ve written an interesting post. But it’d have been better if you’d noted that the real world, away from Mencius Moldbug’s chumpery, what Flint in large measure is about is our financial masters’ ongoing and very practical campaign — akin to the Enclosure Acts of the U.K. in the 19th century but on a global scale — to privatize water supplies and extract rents from captive populations.
http://motorcitymuckraker.com/2016/01/23/gov-snyder-lied-flint-water-switch-was-not-about-money-records-show/
It’s a long-term campaign to steal the commons. If one focuses on anti-black racism/slavery, one can lose sight of that fact and that the Owner class want to do the same thing to all of us, white, black or whatever. Flint, with its majority black population, was just a place where they thought they could get away with it more easily..
February 17, 2016 @ 9:28 pm
It would also not have been an essay that extended out of the other work I was doing and was thus a sensible thing to pop over and write, of course.
That said, I’m largely inclined to resist the “no war but class war” sentiment. Certainly the bourgeoisie would like to steal everything. But when it comes time to probe resistance and explore the boundaries of what can be gotten away with, it is generally going to be black people who get robbed first, just as it is on black people that we test the full implications of a militarized police force, or where we test the idea of regressive taxation through fines.
If these ideas work out well for the bourgeoisie, might they then be expanded to new areas? Perhaps. That is certainly often the hope. But when the game is often “how much can you get away with,” the fact that black America is where you can get away with more is striking.
Put another way, any form of resistance that does not recognize that the black proletariat forms an underclass of the proletariat is simply too naive about how the bourgeoisie works to resist it with any efficacy.
February 19, 2016 @ 2:34 am
You’re playing with fire this time, Phil! It doesn’t take much for these alt-right guys to start brigading threads.
I read an interesting piece the other day about the dangers of introducing Libertarianism into the public sphere. You begin as a conservative, someone who rejects the predominately liberal notion that the government can be a useful tool for the people. Then someone comes along as says, “hey, has it ever occurred to you that the government only does bad things”, and so you become a libertarian or Tea Partier. And so you settle into that niche for a while.
Then someone else will come along and ask, ‘hey, has it occurred to you that government has only done bad things throughout human history’, and you become an ancap or “alt-right”. Everyone who starts on the libertarian slippery slope ends up at the ancap bottom sooner or later. Because once you realize you can blame the government for everything, well.
Surprising it took us ten years to start hitting bottom. This might be the coffin nail in the U.S. experiment.
February 20, 2016 @ 6:45 am
I don’t know what is point article is. An unelected official made a mistake. Apparently, elected officials never make mistakes. Therefore democracy is the best form of government, and neo reactionaries are wrong. QED.
I exaggerate of course, but this comparison seems pointless. And let me be clear, I’m not defending Moldbug. I think his system of government is so terrible you don’t need to dispute it. Just explain it and no sane person would agree with it.
But I agree, at least, with his sentiment that democracy isn’t the best thing ever. Governments, elected or not, make mistakes every single day. They are often incredibly backwards, inefficient, and arbitrary. You even need to be a libertarian to see that.
An elected official put in charge of a city with a failing budget might make the same decision, and do the same things to cover it up when things went wrong. After all, he was appointed by a governor who was elected. A governor who presumably cares about being reelected, his party, and the people of his state (or at least the people of his state believed that he cared.)
The solution isn’t monarchy. There might be a solution. Personally I am in favor of a government created by drawing from a random sample of the population. It’s like democracy, but without the pandering to uninformed voters.
February 22, 2016 @ 8:42 am
Just out of curiosity: did you encounter that idea in “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”?
March 15, 2016 @ 10:41 pm
If you’re going to write a book on neoreaction , at least get you’re facts right. Nick Land opposes white nationalism and is hated by white nationalists. In fact, he explicitly defines neoreaction as being, in part, and alternative to white nationalism.
March 15, 2016 @ 11:01 pm
That’s not really what he says in “The Dark Enlightenment,” although he does leave himself some charming “plausible deniability” in the face of his ostentatious philosophical heel turn. Anyway, I’ve not read every last blog post, so I may well have missed where he elaborates on his viewpoints as you describe; I’d love a link.
March 16, 2016 @ 3:33 am
Land started his blog in 2013, and even back then, he explicitly rejected white nationalism, as he does here: http://www.xenosystems.net/zacked/ .
The reason why Land rejects white nationalism, though, is going to take a while for you to understand if you aren’t already familiar with the science behind racial differences. To put it bluntly, the science, as much as white nationalists want to say otherwise, does not in any way, shape or form legitimate or prescribe a political ideology based on ‘racial purity’. All that it says is that the races evolved separately and that, as a consequence, there are differences, of a purely quantitative nature, between the races. Land has the view that race doesn’t matter, only the quality (as measured, for example, by IQ) of individuals matter, but that quality is dispersed unequally between the races, and for that reason a certain kind of racism is justified. But in principle Land would say that, say, a black guy with a high-IQ is far superior to, say, a white guy with a low-IQ, and that he would much rather live with, associate, etc., with the high-IQ black guy than the low-IQ white guy.
The complication here is the theory, held by a very small number of evolutionary scientists (most prominently, by Kevin Macdonald and Frank Salter), concerning what they call ‘ethnic genetic interests’. They believe, basically, that everyone has a vested interest in the perpetuation of their race, and that the only rational thing for them to do is organize politically in order to achieve that. This is the theory what white nationalists latch on to in order to give their position some scientific credibility. Yet, Land has many posts–you need only search for them–in which he argues against that theory, rejects it, refutes it, and links to other people who have refuted it, such as Richard Dawkins (but, if you’re interested, here’s a neoreactionary writer, whose long since stopped blogging, doing an epic take down of one of Salter’s books, concerning ‘ethnic genetic interest’: https://victoriespyrrhic.wordpress.com/2015/08/03/a-refutation-of-salterism/).
Also, Land has only revulsion for anything to do with populism, and white nationalism is essentially a populist political movement. Land couldn’t care less about the ultimate fate of white people, most of whom he thinks are worthless in every sense and are responsible for the problems (like mass immigration, etc.) that they’re currently suffering, so long as all high-IQ white people had somewhere to go where they could continue to develop the sciences and finally create an artificial intelligence, which will usher in a technological singularity. Land’s ideal state is not a racially homogeneous state, but a high-IQ one, with (the multiracial, multicultural) Singapore being the ideal. Land doesn’t believe that fighting for a racially homogeneous state makes sense at this point in time anyway, given that with the advent of genetic engineering and cloning and such technologies, the racial problem will be utterly transcended in its importance. This is the point, by the way, that he was making in the “Dark Enlightenment” essay that you seem to have missed. In the part about face tentacles, he was pointing out that people are misguided to focus on the ‘racist’ parts of evolutionary science, given that what these sciences are really saying is much different than what the SJWs and white nationalists think they are saying.
March 16, 2016 @ 3:42 am
…Whereas SJWs and white nationalists think that these sciences are advocating a political program that needs either to be resisted or promoted, Land is showing that they actually offer humans a way of usher in a truly post-human, and therefore post-racial, future.
White nationalists hate Land given that he says all of this. White nationalists think that evolutionary science proves the white race’s biological superiority over other races, whereas what it really does, as Land repeatedly reminds them, is that what it really shows is the abject inferiority of pretty much the entire human race and the superiority of only a very small number of people, a disproportionate number of whom may very well be white, but among whom are also members of other races, and that anyway it is stupid to go off and create a state based on race, given that there are a lot of white people and, since all of their jobs will be automated soon enough, they’ll all just end up being an economic drag on your society, so much so that that state will not be economically viable in the long term.
March 16, 2016 @ 4:04 am
I don’t think there’s anything in this essay that contradicts any of that, at least in terms of Land; note that I focused more on Moldbug here.
March 16, 2016 @ 4:25 am
Moldbug also explicitly rejected white nationalism: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist.html
By the way, there are a lot of Jews affiliated with neoreaction, including Moldbug himself, as well as philo-semites, like Land, and this contributes to the the hostility between neoreaction and white nationalism.
The main point here is that neoreaction not be conflated with white nationalism, given that the two are completely and irreconcilably different. But of course, as you do your research for the book you’re writing, you’ll know all about this soon enough.
March 16, 2016 @ 6:32 am
Notably, I don’t accuse Moldbug of being a white nationalist either.
March 17, 2016 @ 3:06 am
“White nationalists hate Land given that he says all of this.”
Not a WN here, but someone that dislikes Land. This is disingenuous, and is clearly written by a fanboy that hasn’t done a genealogy of Land’s oeuvre. One of the major attacks on Land from various groups on the right is on his ethos within NRx, i.e. his character, given his history. This is the fact that if you read Land’s previous work as part of the CCRU, it appears that his current philosophical output is a continuation of his accelerationist and hyperstitional agenda. It’s strongly probable that he doesn’t actually believe any of the stuff he is writing, and some of his current rhetorical strategies completely match up with writing made 20 years ago (like creating apocalyptic memes within the right wing, or creating a group that constantly splits due to infighting). Tech-comm NRx is a means to his strategic ends of Deleuzean acceleration of the capitalist system. At heart, he is still a Marxist. That’s not an ad hominem either, as it is strongly backed up by his behavior and history. You only need to start at the beginning of his writing, and read it all up to now. It’s also backed up by weird contextual aspects outside of his writing, like the fact that Nick’s wife continues to write about feminism in China of all places. How is that home life supposed to make sense where on the one hand you talk about the dreaded “cathedral” and exiting from it on your blog during the day, while your SJW wife — who also used to be CCRU — sleeps in the same bed as you at night? If you were an intelligence officer trained in deception analysis, such anomalistic behavior should set off alarm bells. But given most of NRx are spergs, and take things as face value, it either doesn’t warrant mention or he is defended by fanboys. People like yourself, Irving, can continue jerking yourself off to Land’s work and defending him, but you are basically a puppet in a larger occulted scheme. I’d suggest reading less Land, and pick up a book on self-deception, or as Moldbug said when alluding to the Birchers as the best historians of the 20th Century, some histories of communist subversion, because you are being played like a fiddle.
March 18, 2016 @ 8:04 pm
Would you care to explain in what sense of the word he is a Marxist and how is he continuing his hyperstitional agenda? And how is he detrimental to the general NRx agenda? I’m genuinely interested to hear your arguments.
March 18, 2016 @ 10:18 pm
I’m just kind of curious who his wife is.
Though I’d also strongly prefer that slurs like “sperg” not get used here, thanks.