The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and NeoreactionShuja Haider March 28, 2017Siena Cathedral as seen through Google’s neural networkThe Genealogy of AmoralityNeoreaction, or NRx, is an esoteric political doctrine of recent vintage. It became the locus of controversy in early 2017, after London art gallery LD50 convened a conference and exhibition featuring NRx ideologues, including Land, white supremacist journalist Peter Brimelow, and Anders Breivik sympathizer Brett Stevens. Protesters forced the gallery to shut down.
But the movement has less lofty origins than the currents of reactionary chic in contemporary art. In an article on Breitbart called “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos identified neoreactionaries as the intellectual vanguard of the movement, noting that they “appeared quite by accident, growing from debates on LessWrong.com.” Thought experiments in dispassionate rationality had led some users of the forum to dark places. Eliezer Yudkowsky has as much patience for it as he did for Roko. “I am actively hostile to neoreaction,” he has written.
Given the hostile work environment, Anissimov left MIRI in 2013. He opened a competing forum that would be more hospitable to neoreaction, the now defunct MoreRight, and started a publishing company. He has since written and self-released books like Our Accelerating Future, A Critique of Democracy, and Idaho Project, “a white nationalist manifesto that integrates futurism, survivalism, and simple common sense into a proposal for concrete action.”
Anissimov is a follower of the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola, whose work, The New York Times has reported, is probably also on Steve Bannon’s bookshelf. Given the prevalence of the alt-right on forums like 4chan, it’s not a great leap from the Californian Ideology to extreme reactionary views. As Angela Nagle has written in Jacobin, the “creative energy” of the alt-right is the product of a synthesis of an “amoral libertine Internet culture” with appeals to white male identity and resentment — not an uncommon demographic in Silicon Valley. Mother Jones has reported that according to neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, Santa Clara County, where Apple and Intel are based, is the largest traffic source for his widely read white supremacist website The Daily Stormer. Anissimov may simply have been the Valley’s foremost innovator.
In contrast, Nick Land took a more serpentine path. A month before the 2016 election, Land made his first appearance as a columnist at The Daily Caller, the right-wing news outlet founded by Tucker Carlson. “Democracy tends to fascism,” he wrote, presenting a series of coy abstractions that betrayed his philosophical roots but withheld his political beliefs.
Land is an unlikely conservative media pundit, and a strange bedfellow of the alt-right. But like Roko, his writing helped bring the monster into being.
An Invasion from the Future“In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad,’” writes Robin MacKay, in the introduction to Land’s essay collection Fanged Noumena. MacKay was Land’s student at the University of Warwick, first encountering him in 1992 through a course called “Current French Philosophy.” He remembers him as a sort of cyberpunk absent-minded professor, “quivering with stimulants” while generating cryptic texts on an “antiquated green-screen Amstrad computer.”
Land had published a single book, a study of Georges Bataille called The Thirst for Annihilation. But the landscape changed in 1995, when Sadie Plant, a self-described “cyberfeminist,” joined the Warwick faculty. Plant established a department called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), dedicated to the study of matters like science fiction, cryptography, jungle music, H.P. Lovecraft, and, of course, French philosophy.
In contrast to the stolid logical procedures of Anglo-American philosophy of the day, the Ccru called their delirious missives “theory-fiction.” They took their cues from the intellectual currents that emerged in the wake of the May ‘68 uprisings in Paris, particularly Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. These works reckoned with the suppression of resistance and the consolidation of state power that followed the fading of the anti-capitalist spirit of the late sixties.
Deleuze and Guattari set out to describe “the most characteristic and the most important tendency of capitalism,” which they called “deterritorialization.” While in traditional societies the “material flow” of production was regulated by the division of the earth, capitalism set it loose. Yet if capitalism liberated production temporarily, it also tried to counteract this tendency by reinstituting forms of “territoriality,” bringing “all its vast powers of repression to bear” on the very forces that drove its unparalleled flows. The path to emancipation, they argued, was not to withdraw from capitalism, but to “accelerate the process.” Lyotard took this tendency in the opposite direction, in what he would come to proudly call his “evil book.” Workers, he said, desire their own oppression. Far from seeking emancipation, they “enjoy swallowing the shit of capital.”
If Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had served up an all-you-can-eat shit buffet in the 1980s, promoting the free market at the expense of the majority of their citizens, the Ccru responded by taking laissez-faire economics to a perverse extreme. They saw capital itself as the protagonist of history, with humans as grist for the mill. “What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” Land wrote in his essay “Machinic Desire.” For Land, the Basilisk was already here.
At the time, Benjamin Noys took note of this philosophical trajectory, initially calling it “Deleuzian Thatcherism.” Eventually, in his 2010 book The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Critical Theory, he gave it a pithier name, the application of which has been both broadly extended and hotly contested: accelerationism. Noys focused his critique on a particular misreading of Marx as a hybrid technological determinist and catastrophist, which licensed the idea that if the accumulation of capital generates and exacerbates the conditions that lead to its dissolution, then it is the duty of radicals to urge capital to fully realize and hence negate itself. Broadly conceived, the futurist telelogy this term denotes demonstrates the basis for its alignment with the Singularitarian ideology, seeing the exponential growth of technology as the key to the next stage of human species.
In 1997, Plant abruptly resigned her post at Warwick. Land took over. That year, journalist Simon Reynolds wrote a magazine profile of the Ccru, and the Director of Graduate Studies at Warwick’s Philosophy Department denied its existence. There was a procedure that had to be completed to establish a department, requiring paperwork that Plant had never bothered to file.
“Officially, you would then have to say that Ccru didn’t ever exist,” he told Reynolds. “There is, however, an office about 50 metres down the corridor from me with Ccru on the door, there’s a group of students who meet there to have seminars, and to that extent, it is a thriving entity.”
Regardless, the Director promised, “that office will disappear at the end of the year.” Throughout 1997, this nonexistent entity was prolific. MacKay remembers Land living in his office, rarely sleeping. According to philosopher Simon Critchley, Land “produced disciples” by the force of his cult of personality. “You’d go and give a talk at Warwick,” he recollected in Frieze, “and be denounced by people with the same saliva-dribbling verbal tics as Nick and wearing similar jumpers.”
Land eventually began to claim he was “inhabited by various ‘entities,’” named Cur, Vauung, and Can Sah. His work increasingly defied comprehension, sometimes departing from language altogether in favor of invented alphabets and number systems. “It’s another life,” Land told MacKay. “I don’t even remember writing half of those things.”
After the Ccru disappeared, Land disappeared too. He resigned from Warwick in 1998 and resurfaced in the new millennium as a journalist in Shanghai, writing patriotic newspaper op-eds, travel guides, and the occasional theory-fiction.
The afterlife of a self-described “malfunctioning academic” wouldn’t necessarily bear mentioning if not for Land’s unexpected alliance with a different kind of thinker. On April 22nd, 2007, a character named Mencius Moldbug had made his public debut on a blog of contrarian commentary called 2blowhards, with an essay titled “A Formalist Manifesto.”
The Exit Sign“The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology,” Moldbug began. 2blowhards provided only a vague description of the manifesto’s author, formerly a regular in the site’s comments section. He had “made a score in a recent dot-com boom,” allowing him to spend $500 a month on books. Moldbug responded to nearly every reply in the post’s comments. A week later, he had started his own blog, Unqualified Reservations.
His ideology was idiosyncratic, centered on a reverence for Thomas Carlyle, a Victorian-era essayist best-known for his advocacy of the “Great Man” theory of history. He also incorporated measured respect for Austrian classical liberal Ludwig Von Mises and individualist libertarian Murray Rothbard, who were on the right track but didn’t go quite far enough.
Over the course of thousands of words, most of them superfluous, Moldbug moved from “formalism” to “neocameralism,” in tribute to the bureaucratic procedures of Frederick William I of Prussia. Finally, in July 2010, the same week as Roko’s fateful post, libertarian blogger Arnold Kling referred to Moldbug as a “neo-reactionary.” The name stuck.
In his earthly life, Moldbug is Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who is the brains behind a startup called Urbit, the purpose of which evades explanation even for its inventor. Yarvin’s prose is excruciating, but he won a sizeable following for reliably flaunting convention and defying decorum. “Very few of Moldbug’s fans have read anywhere near his entire corpus,” Michael Anissimov admits, but most have noticed his amoral disquisitions on the relative merits of obvious injustices like slavery, and his opposition to democracy in general.
One fan who does seem to have read Yarvin’s entire corpus is Nick Land. In 2012, he took it upon himself to systematize the Moldbug ideology, and with his typical flair for denomination, christened it “The Dark Enlightenment.” His sequence of essays setting out its principles have become the foundation of the NRx canon.
If it’s hard to imagine Milo Yiannopoulos or Tucker Carlson pondering Land’s interpretation of Lyotard, it’s just as hard to comprehend Land’s infatuation with Yarvin. It’s a strange intellectual path that begins with “Current French Philosophy” and settles on a right-wing Silicon Valley blogger whose writing is more Dungeons and Dragons than Deleuze and Guattari. Whatever the cause, Land has gone from prophet to apostle.
Along with Yarvin, Land cites a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel for libertarian publication Cato Unbound, which famously announced, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel went on to envision “an escape from politics in all its forms,” which Land interprets using an opposition that had been introduced by political scientist Albert Hirschman, between voice and exit. The terms describe the ways of exercising rights in a society with which a citizen has grievances; voice is participation in a democratic process that can lead to reform, while exit is the departure to a different society. A provisional example Land offers is white flight, the mid-century exodus of affluent caucasian families to the suburbs.
Neoreactionaries don’t advocate any kind of central social organization. Land envisions a “gov-corp,” a society run like a company, ruled by a CEO. Instead of petitioning a government for redress of grievances, unsatisfied customers are free to take their business elsewhere. If this sounds medieval, neoreactionaries don’t deny it — Yarvin sometimes describes himself as a “royalist,” or a “monarchist,” or even a “Jacobite,” in reference to 17th-century opponents of parliamentary influence in British government.
The question is, where do you go after exiting? NRxers don’t dismiss the idea of competing gov-corps on the same land mass, an idea anticipated by NRx intellectual forefather Hans Herman-Hoppe, an extreme libertarian political scientist, who advocates for a system that he admits is essentially feudalism. On a more abstract level, the neoreactionary fascination with bitcoin imagines the escape to an alternate economy unencumbered by federal regulation. Even Yarvin’s startup, Urbit, seems to be oriented towards exit: it promises an alternative internet inaccessible to outside users.
But the most utopian (dystopian?) wing of NRx literally aims to build Lovecraftian cities in the sea. This project, called Seasteading, is championed by Yarvin’s former business partner Patri Friedman, whose grandfather Milton Friedman happens to be the economist responsible for the most extreme free market policies in the modern world. Peter Thiel was once Seasteading’s principal backer, as well as an investor in Urbit.
It’s not hard to see why floating sovereign states, out of any existing nation’s jurisdiction, would appeal to the super-rich. At their most innocuous, they might serve as an extension of an offshore bank, allowing for evasion of any type of redistributive tax policy. They also bring to mind the activities of wealthy men like Jeffrey Epstein, who used his private Caribbean island to throw bacchanalian parties for his millionaire and billionaire friends, allegedly revolving around the sexual assault of minors.
The path of exit doesn’t end at the water’s edge. Though you won’t hear him promoting NRx rhetoric, Elon Musk is committed to the idea in his own way, keeping one eye on Mars and one underground.
“A Prophetic Warning”Yarvin has given the ideology of his enemy – that is, contemporary liberal society itself – an even longer series of names than he did his own: “progressivism,” “crypto-Calvinism,” “universalism,” “demotism,” and so on. The term that he adopted permanently, though, is “the Cathedral.” It first appeared in the fourth installment of his fourteen-part series “An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” which, along with the nine-part “Gentle Introduction” and the seven-part “How Dawkins Got Pwned,” is considered his major statement.
Michael Anissomov’s more succinct Neoreactionary Glossary defines the Cathedral as “the self-organizing consensus of Progressives and Progressive ideology represented by the universities, the media, and the civil service.” It’s named for a religious structure because that, according to Yarvin, is what it is. It’s a descendent of the Puritan church, functioning to suppress dissent from its orthodoxy of egalitarianism and democracy, which Yarvin calls the Synopsis.
Mild-mannered Curtis Yarvin must have been surprised, then, when the Cathedral’s attentions landed squarely on his alter ego Mencius Moldbug. In the weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Politico reported that according to an unnamed source, Yarvin has “opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary.” The claim remained unverified, as Yarvin “does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story.”
Vox managed to interview Yarvin later that day. “The idea that I’m ‘communicating’ with Steve Bannon through an ‘intermediary’ is preposterous,” he said. “I have never met Steve Bannon or communicated with him, directly or indirectly.” A few days later, The Atlantic asked Yarvin about his alleged intermediary. He claimed it was Twitter user @BronzeAgePerv, whose profile describes him as a “Nationalist, Fascist, Nudist Bodybuilder!”
Yarvin’s evasiveness makes it hard to tell whether he’s hiding something, or just trolling. But it’s no surprise he reserved the majority of his contempt for The Atlantic, which, in the original Dark Enlightenment sequence, Nick Land called the “core Cathedral-mouthpiece.” The Atlantic went on to speak to Land, who was his usual self. “NRx was a prophetic warning about the rise of the Alt-Right,” he said.
NRx has gotten some attention before. A piece in Techcrunch in 2013, The Baffler in 2014, and The Awl in 2015 have all offered surveys of the ideology. The mainstream media took notice of one particular event, when Yarvin was disinvited from the Strangeloop tech conference after the organizers discovered his blog. Breitbart’s Allum Bokhari wrote an article in his favor, arguing that Yarvin’s politics are “abstract.” There is wide speculation among readers about just how serious Yarvin is, including from his most prominent reader. “Vast structures of historical irony shape his writings, at times even engulfing them,” says Nick Land.