Nice Democracy You Got There.
It'd be a shame if something happened to it...
The visible deterioration of Donald Trump’s cognitive ability on the campaign trail, including babbling, disinhibition, and canceling media appearances has intensified focus on vice presidential candidate and Washington newcomer J.D. Vance. Vance has less political experience than any vice presidential candidate in the last nearly 60 years, has held one elected office for just twenty-some months as of this writing, and none of the 34 bills he personally sponsored became law. Media-and-politics website mediaite.com labeled Vance the Marjorie Taylor Greene of the Senate, “stomping and shouting but getting nothing done.” In his article “Why Trump Chose J.D. Vance,” Time magazine’s Eric Cortelessa suggests that Vance was chosen as “a leading light of the right-wing populist movement spawned by Trump’s rise….” This is at best a nuanced characterization as Vance has an extensive record of critical comments and remarks about Trump, dating back to at least 2016.
In June Vance participated in a Trump fundraiser at the home of David Sacks, who with fellow investors Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, among others, founded PayPal and went on to form other tech firms. Vance met Thiel in 2011 when Thiel spoke at Yale Law School where Vance was a student. Vance subsequently described Thiel’s talk somewhat obtusely as “the most significant moment of my time.” In 2015 Vance became a partner at venture capital firm Mithril Capital, which Thiel had co-founded. Mithril is the fictional precious metal in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, described as harder than steel and more beautiful than silver. As documented by Disconnect.blog’s Paris Marx, Thiel has named at least nine companies after people, places, and things from Tolkien’s world.
Tolkien’s Middle Earth apparently holds an almost mystical appeal to many Silicon Valley denizens. A recent biography of tech mogul Elon Musk reports that on his second date with Canadian musician Grimes, with whom Musk eventually had two children, he quizzed her about Lord of the Rings. Irish Times’ Hugh Linehan suggests that at least part of the appeal is what he terms “small-Shire light touch regulation in opposition to the nanny state of Mordor with its socialized medicine and diversity hires.” Linehan notes that Tolkien himself, a Catholic, “despised” Nazism and anti-Semitism. But the pervasive influence of “Norse mythology, Germanic runes, and Brythonic languages” in Lord of the RIngs “tickle[s] the erogenous zones of white nationalists.” Despite Tolkien’s statement in the preface to the second edition that he “cordially” disliked “allegory in all its manifestations,” readers of the books and consumers of the various media incarnations of his work have highlighted the conflict between “swart, slant-eyed orcs” and dark-complected bad guys, vs. “fair-haired heroes.”
Neoreactionary Syzygy
While it is the world of computer technology and venture capital that brought Peter Thiel together with artificial intelligence researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, fascination with Middle Earth seems to be something they shared. According to the New Yorker’s George Packer, Thiel and Yudkowsky met in 2005 at an event at the Foresight Institute, a Palo Alto nanotechnology think tank. In November of the following year Yudkowsky and George Mason University’s Robin Hanson started the Overcoming Bias blog. It was here, according to chronicler of the neoreactionary movement Elizabeth Sandifer, that blogger Curtis Yarvin, writing initially as Mencius Moldbug, got his early substantive readership, although his contributions were apparently mostly if not exclusively in the comment section.
Yarvin is widely regarded as one of the founders of the neoreactionary political movement (aka NRx). Among the neoreactionary core ideas is what’s been called “neocameralism” – an updated form of the governmental-economic structure used in Prussia in which the state is envisioned as a business that controls a country.
The pseudonym Mencius Moldbug deserves some exploration. Mencius is sometimes referred to as the “Second Sage of Confucianism,” i.e. second only to Confucius himself. Mencius lived in China in the 4th century BCE. Confucius is reported to have said that he loved “the ancient ways,” and viewed his mission as transmitting rather than innovating. Mencius emphasized the value in regarding the legacy of wisdom critically. And whereas a central goal of Confucianism is the cultivation of traditional virtues (benevolence, loyalty), Mencius “stressed reflection based on one’s own innate disposition toward virtue.”
The name Moldbug looks like a joke of some kind. It’s tempting to impute a connection to the role-playing-game Undertale, which includes a character “Moldbygg.” The Undertale Wiki describes Moldbygg as an enemy that the protagonist encounters in the third area they traverse, known as Waterfall. Moldbygg is described as emerging from the bottom of the screen shooting bullets at the protagonist's soul. As tempting as these analogies are, they can’t apply to Yarvin’s Moldbug, as the game was not created until 2015.
Another cultural reference with which Moldbug resonates, that is more promising, is Goldbug, from the Edgar Allan Poe story The Gold Bug. Here “gold bug” is both the title of the story as a whole, and an artifact central to that story – a scarab made of gold that when dropped through the left eye of a skull hidden in a particular tree will locate a buried treasure. Cryptography is a crucial component of the tale, as the leading character finds and deciphers a cryptogram revealed to refer to a treasure buried by Captain Kidd. Also it’s probably worth noting that commentators including the Poe Museum have labeled Poe’s treatment of a formerly enslaved black character as reflecting “racist minstrel stereotypes.”
In 2007 Yarvin started his own blog – Unqualified Reservations. After Thiel suffered significant financial losses in 2008 and 2009, his investments seem to have shifted to projects that in Packer’s words “had less to do with financial returns than with utopian ideas.” Thiel became the largest contributor to Yudkowsky’s Singularity Institute – a think tank founded in 2000 that purports to be preparing for the time when computers can create “smarter” versions of themselves, and wants to ensure that that process is “human friendly.”
In 2009 Yudkowsky started the Less Wrong blog, which claims the somewhat presumptuous goal of “improving human reasoning and decision making,” and is rife with Tolkien references. Among them Yudkowsky declares Lord of the Rings a literary work vastly superior to the bible. Yudkowsky is an autodidact, as his Wikipedia entry will tell you. The entry is the subject of debate in the Wikipedia Talk (i.e editor/contributor discussion) section. One controversial item is the claim that Yudkowsky scored 1410 on the SAT. While it might make sense in the abstract for someone with no academic credentials past eighth grade to cite their SAT score as evidence of intellectual prowess, the source of the information on the page is apparently ultimately Yudkowsky himself, which is a Wikipedia no-no. There’s also a discussion of Yudkowsky having been identified as a “decision theorist,” which some editors questioned as a professional description. As of this writing the entry refers to Yudkowsky as “a writer on decision theory.”
In addition to being a Lord of the Rings devotee, Yudkowsky is apparently a serious Harry Potter fan, having authored a 1000-page-long work of fanfiction titled Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which the New Yorker describes as “an attempt to explain Harry’s wizardry through the scientific method.” In the book Dumbledore confesses to owning twenty copies of Lord of the Rings along with three complete sets of Tolkien’s collected works, and amuses Harry with a brief role-play of Gandalf’s “You cannot pass.”
In 2011 Peter Thiel awarded $100,000 to 18-year old John Burnham as part of his Thiel Fellowships where recipients are encouraged to skip college and go directly into business. The idea that attracted Thiel initially was apparently mining asteroids, but Burnham ended up working with Yarvin on a distributed computing project. The two co-founded Tlon, named for the Borges story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbius Tertius (about which more below), and named their product Urbit. Galen Wolfe-Pauly, Tlon’s CEO, clarified to The Verge that Thiels’ venture capital firm Founders Forum funds Urbit, but that Thiel is not personally involved.
Urbit is marketed as a grand reimagining of distributed computing, but as of this writing appears primarily to provide functionality similar to usenet. In what seems part pretension and part longing for a science fiction community, Urbit has named the elements of its network hierarchy after astronomical entities. Primary nodes are galaxies; there are 256. Galaxies contain stars; there are approximately 65,000 stars; a star is connected to planets; there are approximately 4 billion planets. Urbit also supports comets, which are described as unlimited entities, but with some access restrictions. And there is also the concept of moons, which are (surprise!) associated with planets, and like them limited to a total of about 4 billion. A planet corresponds to “a unique digital identity,” and can be thought of as more-or-less corresponding to an individual computer.
The choice of Tlon as the corporate name seems similarly grandiose. The Borges short story published in 1940 describes the discovery of what is initially regarded as an imaginary world, but eventually understood to be the intentional creation of a secret society that over centuries has come to influence the real world. A key theme of the story, which has been categorized as speculative fiction and metafiction, is George Berkeley’s notion that “reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas.”
Blogger Shiv J.M. has observed that, in touting their wares, the problems that Urbiters boast of solving can be reduced to category errors in their problem descriptions. For instance, in an Urbit blog post titled Urbit for normies the writer declares:
Because Urbit isn’t centralized or owned by any one company, there’s no incentive for it to dominate your life. Your Urbit isn’t designed to spy on you, get you addicted to clicking its buttons, manipulate your emotions to gain attention, or nudge you to buy something. Your Urbit is a simple, customizable, permanent place for you to do all your computer-based tasks with your friends in absolute privacy.
This, Shiv J.M. observes, confuses the Internet with commercial products like Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs, etc. And, as he notes, “You can already deploy anything you like with as much or as little control as you like to an endless array of large and small hosts today.” Moreover, as of 2016 185 of the 256 galaxies were allocated to corporate Tlon, Tlon employees, or urbit.org which at the time was also controlled by Tlon. Similarly more than half of the stars were then controlled by the same three groups.
Dark Enlightenment
In 2012 British philosopher Nick Land emerged on what would become the neoreactionary scene. Land had taught philosophy at the University of Warwick on the outskirts of Coventry, UK. Toward the end of the previous century so-called analytic philosophy was the dominant flavor taught in the UK and the US – people like Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and so on. Land’s department at Warwick University bucked that trend, focusing particularly on 20th century French philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. Among the perspectives shared by these thinkers is the view that philosophy is not fundamentally distinguishable from other forms of writing, such as literature or fiction. Land’s term for this phenomenon was “theory-fiction.”
In 1995 with historian and cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, Land organized the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), which became a base of operations. The activities and writings of CCRU members “smeared the line between the real and what they called the ‘hyperstitional’: fictions that make themselves real through collective practice.”
Amphetamine consumption became an increasingly important component of CCRU activities, with several members eventually having breakdowns. Land himself became obsessed with occult numerology and eventually did “go mad,” in the words of his student Robin Mackay, although Land would eventually document the experience. He emerged in Shanghai, China some time prior to 2010, and on Christmas Day 2012 posted his long essay Dark Enlightenment, which has become a kind of manifesto of the neoreactionary movement for some. Much of Dark Enlightenment is commentary on the writings of Moldbug – not without some criticism, but also what Elizabeth Sandifer in her essay Neoreaction a Basilisk, calls “prettifying,” which seems to include not only stylistic cleanup, but also locating Moldbug’s statements in the canon of (mostly) western philosophy, which constitutes something of an upgrade.
Land declares Moldbug’s formative influences “Austro-libertarian” (see references to Murray Rothbard in WriteToLeft’s “Thirty Years Culture War”), while acknowledging that “that’s all over.” Land quotes Moldbug:
…libertarians cannot present a realistic picture of a world in which their battle gets won and stays won. They wind up looking for ways to push a world in which the State’s natural downhill path is to grow, back up the hill. This prospect is Sisyphean, and it’s understandable why it attracts so few supporters.
Land finds in Moldbug a “Hobbesian” view of sovereignty. Hobbes asserted that political legitimacy did not depend on how a government came to power, but only whether it can protect its citizens. Elaborating on Moldbug’s neocameralism (see above), Land declares:
… [I]t is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state ‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will remain in the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue.
And yet, Elizabeth Sandifer notes, nowhere in his long essay does Land explicitly endorse Moldbug. Moreover, the only place that Land uses the pronoun “I” is in his commentary on Moldbug’s response to British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, “How Dawkins Got Pwned.”
In his book Dawkins argues that the existence of an omnipotent God would violate the laws of probability. While agreeing with Dawkins’ general explanation of religion, Moldbug accuses him of “vestigial monotheism.” He segues from a description of an “optimal memetic parasite,” to a discussion of the Protestant Dissenters in England, highlighting that while they were eventually marginalized there, like all good parasites they escaped – in this case to America, eventually to become (in his view) the source of “all legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today….”
Land’s sole use of “I” occurs in what Sandifer calls a “rhetorical aside” – a parenthetical passage in which Land imagines the reader recoiling in anticipation of a discussion of race:
(As the sound, decent person I know you are, having gotten this far with Moldbug you’re probably already muttering under your breath, don’t mention race, don’t mention race, don’t mention race, please, oh please, in the name of the Zeitgeist and the dear sweet non-god of progress, don’t mention race …)
In fact, Moldbug first cites Dawkins citing Thomas Huxley’s declaration “… in a contest which is to be carried out by thoughts and not by bites. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.” Dawkins distances himself from Huxley’s remark, claiming to have cited it only “to illustrate how the Zeitgeist moves on.”
Moldbug examines the term fraternism, which he uses as a term of art meaning “all neohominids are born equal.” (Neohominid is Moldbug’s word for “hominids now liviing on Planet Three.”) He labels fraternism a Universalist principle, defining Universalism as “nontheistic Christianity,” which he also refers to as “Einsteinian religion.” Fraternism, in his analysis, is a central principle of Universalism. He then launches into a convoluted argument that there is no reason to believe in fraternism.
Land amplifies this:
Even if progressive-universalistic beliefs about human nature are true, they are not held because they are true, or arrived at through any process that passes the laugh test for critical scientific rationality. They are received as religious tenets, with all of the passionate intensity that characterizes essential items of faith, and to question them is not a matter of scientific inaccuracy, but of what we now call political incorrectness, and once knew as heresy.
To sustain this transcendent moral posture in relation to racism is no more rational than subscription to the doctrine of original sin, of which it is, in any case, the unmistakable modern substitute. The difference, of course, is that ‘original sin’ is a traditional doctrine, subscribed to by an embattled social cohort, significantly under-represented among public intellectuals and media figures, deeply unfashionable in the dominant world culture, and widely criticized – if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the critic is advocating murder, theft, or adultery. To question the status of racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is to court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse suspicions of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery apologetics to genocide fantasies….
Moldbug christens the institutions that comprise “mainstream academia, journalism and education” the Cathedral. The Cathedral is central to what Sandifer calls Land’s “Satanic inversion” of Moldbug, noting that where Modbug is a monarchist, Land is a philosophical pessimist. “Without a taste for irony,” Land writes “Moldbug is all but unendurable, and certainly unintelligible. Vast structures of historical irony shape his writings, at times even engulfing them.” Yet eventually Land seems to accuse Moldbug of being, in Sandifer’s words, “insufficiently willing to take the plunge into white nationalism.”
Land:
It is extremely convenient, when constructing ever more nakedly corporatist or ‘third position’ structures of state-directed pseudo-capitalism, to be able to divert attention to angry expressions of white racial paranoia, especially when these are ornamented by clumsily modified nazi insignia, horned helmets, Leni Riefenstahl aesthetics, and slogans borrowed freely from Mein Kampf.
With the observation that “As reactionaries go, traditional Christians are considered to be quite cuddly,” Land turns to Moldbug’s “sanitized white nationalist blog reading list, consisting of writers who – to varying degrees of success – avoid immediate reversion to paleo-fascist self-parody.” Ironically the age-of-treason.blogspot.com blog, which Land links to the acronym Tanstaafl (“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”) displays a message that it has moved to age-of-treason.com, and then a network error. Land labels the now unidentified blogger’s writing as “pitifully constricted.”
Having spent the first half or so of his essay building up Moldbug’s thesis, as Land revs up for a conclusion, what emerges is that his complaint is that Moldbug does not go far enough. As Sandifer puts it, “Land’s real problem here is that the noxious idiocy of white nationalists is actually his favorite thing about them, just because it’s so utterly horrifying to the liberal consensus.”
At the end of the essay Land quotes at length John H. Campbell of UC Berkeley who is associated with the neo-Nazi group National Vanguard. The Campell article that Land references is focused on “positive” eugenics, which Campbell envisions as intentional genetic engineering aimed at raising “the quality of human genetic heritage,” eventually producing a new species.
Land concludes his essay: “When seen from the bionic horizon, whatever emerges from the dialectics of racial terror remains trapped in trivialities. It’s time to move on.”
No, Lord of the Rings is not philosophy
In the late 90s the term hyperstition emerged from the CCRU at Warwick University, as a portmanteau of hype and superstition. Joshua Carswell who has presented at symposia at the University of Warwick and contributed to its Journal of Philosophy suggests that “the earliest available concrete definition” of hyperstition is in a CCRU journal from 1999:
Element of effective culture that makes itself real, through fictional quantities functioning as time-travelling potentials. Hyperstition operates as a coincidence intensifier….
Carswell notes that the phrase “fictional quantities” also occurs in the 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, which was a collaboration of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, both influences on Nick Land more generally. Carswell concludes, however, that the phrase is roughly equivalent to “narratives,” and there is no “unique relevance” to its appearance in Anti-Oedipus.
The “most substantial element of the definition, from a philosophical standpoint” according to Carswell is the assertion that hyperstition is “an element of effective culture that makes itself real.” Carswell suggests that in common usage narrative constitutes an exchange in which the “epistemological value,” i.e. the knowledge exchanged, is “attributed to the teller, not that being told.” But if hyperstition “makes itself real,” then the transaction changes – the narrative “speaks for itself." Hyperstition can also be “implemented into … political strategies,” and lead to “mak[ing] the future an active historical force in the present,” An example cited with some frequency by NRxers is the term “cyberspace,” which first appeared in 1984 in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, and by the mid-90s had become a key popular image of the emerging technologies of the Internet. Culture theorist Macon Holt has suggested, “The intense romance and excitement conjured up by Gibson’s concept have (unintentionally) shaped the future that became our present as an idea virus.”
A related term that emerged from CCRU is “theory-fiction.” (See above.) Theory-fiction is defined as not just the intersection of theory and fiction, but “a dissolution of the two categories. Fiction doesn’t just ‘contain’ theory, but produces it.”
One of the characteristics of 20th century French philosophy – the “continental philosophy” that the University of Warwick turned to instead of analytic philosophy (see above} – is a perspective that views philosophy as not fundamentally distinct from other forms of writing. This can be seen in an extreme form in Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, which questions fundamental conceptual distinctions traditionally made in Western philosophy. While this shift in perspective affects a range of categories of human thought and activity, one effect is to call into question fixed boundaries between genres of writing, such as philosophy, literature, and other forms. Gilles Deleuze, an acknowledged influence on Land, wrote that “concept creation” was the core function of philosophy:
The exclusive right of concept creation secures a function for philosophy, but it does not give it any preeminence or privilege since there are other ways of thinking and creating, other modes of ideation that, like scientific thought, do not have to pass through concepts. We always come back to the question of the use of this activity of creating concepts, in its difference from scientific or artistic activity. Why, through what necessity, and for what use must concepts, and always new concepts, be created? …So long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is called something else.
In Deleuze’s categories science creates prospects, and art creates percepts and affects, but as the quote above shows, he acknowledges that phenomena called something other than philosophy might create concepts.
And here we finally get an inkling of the obsession of the drug-infused thought-lords of Silicon Valley with Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Blade Runner, etc. If Elves are immune to illness and stop aging when they reach their prime maybe we can too….
For myself, I prefer Iris Murdoch’s rather straightforward distinction between philosophical and literary writing, first noted in an interview on the BBC-TV program Men of Ideas, October 28, 1977, and subsequently edited for inclusion in Bryan Magee’s book, Men of Ideas, published in 1978.
Philosophy aims to clarify and to explain, it states and tries to solve very difficult highly technical problems and the writing must be subservient to this aim. One might say that bad philosophy is not philosophy, whereas bad art is still art. There are all sorts of ways in which we tend to forgive literature, but we do not forgive philosophy. Literature is read by many and various people, philosophy by very few. Serious artists are their own critics and do not usually work for an audience of ‘experts’. Besides, art is fun and for fun, it has innumerable intentions and charms. Literature interests us on different levels in different fashions. It is full of tricks and magic and deliberate mystification. Literature entertains, it does many things, and philosophy does one thing.
Epilogue
Both Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land have pointed in their writing to a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel posted on the Cato Unbound website – a project of the Cato Institute – in which Thiel declares "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” For Land it’s not just incompatibility, “Democracy consumes progress. When perceived from the perspective of dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the democratic phenomenon is general parasitology.” For Vance, one suspects the crucial factor is that Thiel continue to sign the checks.
The original title of this article was "But Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?" -- a reference to Philip K. Dick’s 1968 science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in post-apocalyptic San Francisco, switched to Los Angeles for the movie Blade Runner based on it. See “Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real,” in Scientific American.