In Urbit's orbit
September 25, 2022 4:52 PM Subscribe
I am clearly far too old and too far from NYC for this article to do anything for me beyond hate web3 even more than I already do.
posted by gwydapllew at 5:13 PM on September 25, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by gwydapllew at 5:13 PM on September 25, 2022 [16 favorites]
It does tie web3 in with Nick Land weirdos, so yes they’re all techno-mysticism fascist grifters, and make clear that they all worship Peter Thiel to a degree that would make Elon Musk cultists blush, which is a ridiculous new level of pathetic.
posted by Artw at 5:42 PM on September 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Artw at 5:42 PM on September 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
One of the night’s DJs, a 24-year-old from Chicago, described how he worked under two different monikers, one for “queer DIY” parties in Bushwick and one for “edgelord” parties in Manhattan like this one. He was in a reading group on the Yarvin-aligned, Deleuze-inspired right-wing theorist Nick Land, he told me, but he felt that the moment for esoteric politics was over. “I can DJ for 25 hours a week but it doesn’t scale. I have to figure out how to make money—it’s time to just be neoliberal now.”The featured article, while... Apparently well intentioned... Does little to contextualize the humans it's following. Like it uses words to describe them but assumes you know who people are who might only exist as pseudonyms and alter egos.
But the quote above brought the whole thing into sharp focus: new-wealthy grifters and the people who sell them things to make them feel important or special.
These were the hangers on at the Grateful Dead concerts selling dangerous acid and t-shirts and early investors in junk bonds who figured out all they had to do was convince the next mark to buy in.
The author, knowingly or not, isn't on the outside looking in.
But I can definitely say Hoon is the kind of thing very bright people who like programming and the smell of their own farts would invent during a never-quite-sobering-up hallucinogen bender.
posted by abulafa at 6:00 PM on September 25, 2022 [8 favorites]
I'm trying to come up with the best mashups:
Temporary Autonomous Zombo.com
Eastern Standard TimeCube Tribe
Mr. Robot Fight Club
The Electric Kool-Aid Beta Test
Wild in the (Wall) Streets
posted by bartleby at 6:04 PM on September 25, 2022 [16 favorites]
Temporary Autonomous Zombo.com
Eastern Standard TimeCube Tribe
Mr. Robot Fight Club
The Electric Kool-Aid Beta Test
Wild in the (Wall) Streets
posted by bartleby at 6:04 PM on September 25, 2022 [16 favorites]
I got about 5% of the way though the article before realizing that this kind of utter nonsense subsists entirely on buzz. Dumb scenes like this need people reading and thinking about them to survive, because they have nothing of real substance to offer. Having arrived at that conclusion, I closed the tab and left the rest unread.
posted by jordemort at 6:07 PM on September 25, 2022 [46 favorites]
posted by jordemort at 6:07 PM on September 25, 2022 [46 favorites]
If you go further you get that the whole Urbit thing was the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, again a weird techno mystical fascist who believes democracy should be replaced by a monarchism of tech bros.
Also he worked on WAP, a thing I did not know. WAP was fucking useless.
posted by Artw at 6:12 PM on September 25, 2022 [8 favorites]
Also he worked on WAP, a thing I did not know. WAP was fucking useless.
posted by Artw at 6:12 PM on September 25, 2022 [8 favorites]
Rich kids play-acting fascist mysticism while actual fascism destroys the world they live in
They're actual fascists.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:13 PM on September 25, 2022 [29 favorites]
They're actual fascists.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:13 PM on September 25, 2022 [29 favorites]
Mr. Robot Fight Club is what I'll go with, thank you.
posted by abulafa at 6:14 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by abulafa at 6:14 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Yeah pathetic dingus fascists are still fascists. The article really softballs that.
posted by Artw at 6:14 PM on September 25, 2022 [16 favorites]
posted by Artw at 6:14 PM on September 25, 2022 [16 favorites]
A species of incelus œconomicus, which is perhaps the true incel
posted by wotsac at 6:34 PM on September 25, 2022
posted by wotsac at 6:34 PM on September 25, 2022
Urbit is such an insanely funny tech project. Like, in the same way that blockchains are a brilliant solution to a problem that virtually nobody had, purporting to be a brilliant solution to a "problem" that holds society together, Urbit is a 20-year-long hyper-ambitious project to create something totally fucking useless that is functionally not even remotely worthwhile even to the diehard-est of Linuxheads. The whole of its utility is that it's just sexy-sounding enough (in a cyberpunk word-vomit kind of way) that, if you're prepared to believe the Emperor is wearing clothes, you'll be totally and utterly wowed by.
In other words, it's the technological equivalent of "Mencius Moldbug's" entire philosophy. Hell, it's the technological equivalent of the name Mencius Moldbug.
I can forgive* Curtis Yarvin for being a pretentious opportunist hack with fascist leanings. What I can't forgive him for is how shoddily and incompetently he does that shit.
*for certain extremely-limited values of "forgive"
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:49 PM on September 25, 2022 [9 favorites]
In other words, it's the technological equivalent of "Mencius Moldbug's" entire philosophy. Hell, it's the technological equivalent of the name Mencius Moldbug.
I can forgive* Curtis Yarvin for being a pretentious opportunist hack with fascist leanings. What I can't forgive him for is how shoddily and incompetently he does that shit.
*for certain extremely-limited values of "forgive"
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:49 PM on September 25, 2022 [9 favorites]
> If you go further you get that the whole Urbit thing was the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin
AKA Mencius Moldbug; I knew that already, so I was very well-primed to nope out on this from the beginning. Even if there is a good idea or two in Urbit (and I'm definitely not saying that there is) it's not worth digging for them because of the the risk of getting the fascism baked into it all over your hands.
posted by jordemort at 6:51 PM on September 25, 2022
AKA Mencius Moldbug; I knew that already, so I was very well-primed to nope out on this from the beginning. Even if there is a good idea or two in Urbit (and I'm definitely not saying that there is) it's not worth digging for them because of the the risk of getting the fascism baked into it all over your hands.
posted by jordemort at 6:51 PM on September 25, 2022
Utterly horrifying and yet so boring. I always wonder why these people who are nominally so smart - that is, i definitely believe that they've read a bunch of books and can program - are all so boring and mediocre. Would you actually, actually want to go to a party with these people? At some kind of tacky trendy bar? Never mind some kind of tacky trendy bar where you have to wear a hat advertising a modeling agency? And you're supposed to be grateful to the modeling agency that they gave you the hat?
My god, if I thought that was the counterculture I'd sign up for church, the Elks and the PTA before close of business tomorrow.
posted by Frowner at 6:55 PM on September 25, 2022 [39 favorites]
My god, if I thought that was the counterculture I'd sign up for church, the Elks and the PTA before close of business tomorrow.
posted by Frowner at 6:55 PM on September 25, 2022 [39 favorites]
It's petty, but of all the obnoxiousness of this circle, it's the appropriation of Borges that pisses me off the most.
posted by phooky at 6:55 PM on September 25, 2022 [19 favorites]
posted by phooky at 6:55 PM on September 25, 2022 [19 favorites]
(I did appreciate "Well, it’s the right political philosophy for Jimmy," though.)
posted by phooky at 6:57 PM on September 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by phooky at 6:57 PM on September 25, 2022 [1 favorite]
Like seriously, the big cool points thing is that someone who wants to sell things to rich people has decided that you are a docile enough brand representative that you can be trusted to display the brand correctly on social media for free and the big bad neoreactionaries all want to get into the I-work-for-free hat party?
Honestly, the main sell that the internet really had to do was convincing people that "building their brand" was cool instead of the weird and creepy intrusion of the corporate into artistic and creative life and it's been all downhill from there. Once you think it's cool that the salesman pals up to you and lets you represent his brand for free, you're lost.
posted by Frowner at 7:06 PM on September 25, 2022 [17 favorites]
Honestly, the main sell that the internet really had to do was convincing people that "building their brand" was cool instead of the weird and creepy intrusion of the corporate into artistic and creative life and it's been all downhill from there. Once you think it's cool that the salesman pals up to you and lets you represent his brand for free, you're lost.
posted by Frowner at 7:06 PM on September 25, 2022 [17 favorites]
Utterly horrifying and yet so boring. I always wonder why these people who are nominally so smart - that is, i definitely believe that they've read a bunch of books and can program - are all so boring and mediocre.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:15 PM on September 25, 2022 [18 favorites]
- Limited purview—they've experienced so little and their perception of culture is so limited that they literally do not recognize how fenced-in they are (and their intake of "real" culture is typically extraordinarily shallow)
- A social attitude where either agreeing upon the "correct" answer or debating the "incorrect" answers are the two baseline kinds of socializing—think boomer nostalgia for Zep or AC/DC or whatever, but it's about everything, up to and including philosophical questions that appeared in XKCD once
- Enough success that they get to create a crude simulacra of whatever things they once desired—sex, travel, nice houses, critical acclaim—and not enough life experience to realize how limited their version of "the ideal" is
- Replicating the sounds that "thinking" makes, much as an AI would, without fully understanding the assignment, mixed with the typical "reactionaries appropriating revolutionary timbres to reinforce the status quo while claiming to be the new revolutionaries" jawn
- What if culture was made up entirely of "entertainments" designed to gamify away all of your attention, mixed with enough people on Hacker News and in New York-based magazines fawning over you that you got to live out the worst possible version of celebrity imaginable
- sadistic glee in knowing that other people are mad at you because you hurt them
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:15 PM on September 25, 2022 [18 favorites]
For years Yarvin lived a hermetic life. Starting in 2004, Google Books made thousands of out-of-copyright books available online, for free; most of Yarvin’s days were spent reading around in forgotten philosophy and economics texts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 2007, under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug, he started a blog called Unqualified Reservations. Over the next nine years he poured out millions of words of pedantic and contrarian musings, the results of his self-directed journey through the digital mausoleum of forgotten writers. If you’ve heard of Curtis Yarvin, it’s likely for this; the blog was the origin point for “neoreaction,” a political theory that rejects democracy and sanctifies the market, combining libertarianism with monarchism to advocate CEO-run corporate city-states. After Trump’s election in 2016, a flurry of reporting linked neoreaction with the alt-right and the sudden shift in the political mood; Yarvin was said to be advising Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulos and other figures of the early Trump era and had, we heard, the ear of Thiel, at whose house he watched the 2016 election returns.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be stillborn?
posted by jamjam at 7:27 PM on September 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
I am on the very outer edge of this “scene,” roped in via autofictional enfants terribles, and am fighting my way out of the whirlpool. But it’s more difficult than I thought; my new employer is heavily reliant on cryptocurrency operations.
posted by infinitewindow at 7:28 PM on September 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by infinitewindow at 7:28 PM on September 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
If you don't like that kind of Hoon, there's a completely different kind.
posted by clawsoon at 7:47 PM on September 25, 2022
posted by clawsoon at 7:47 PM on September 25, 2022
From the article:
Also this is how you get bears.
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:55 PM on September 25, 2022 [4 favorites]
Yarvin describes Urbit’s ownership structure as “standard Lockean libertarian homesteading theory.”What??? Deleuze and Locke? Urbit is like the worst literature review by the most tedious graduate student. And it's like they don't know that state power protects private property, e.g. zoning was developed as a way to protect property values.
Taking a cue from the poststructuralist philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (references to whom are common in Urbit world), Urbit squares the difference between the new left and the new right by taking state power as such to be the enemy, and conceiving of ownership... as an untried solution to its pathological excesses.
Also this is how you get bears.
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:55 PM on September 25, 2022 [4 favorites]
Like all web3 projects, its value is entirely self-referential, driven by buzz and the desire of outsiders to be insiders. As such, I find the article and the author themselves to be deeply complicit, striking a pose of outsider scepticism to juice credibility. Any attention at all is corrupt from the start.
The real question is: Is there nothing more to New York now than such scenes (when the preponderance of such scenes is a symptom of decline)? Where has the real center of gravity shifted, where real change is being hatched? Because it's as obvious as a mouthful of cat diarrhea that Urbit is not it.
posted by fatbird at 7:56 PM on September 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
The real question is: Is there nothing more to New York now than such scenes (when the preponderance of such scenes is a symptom of decline)? Where has the real center of gravity shifted, where real change is being hatched? Because it's as obvious as a mouthful of cat diarrhea that Urbit is not it.
posted by fatbird at 7:56 PM on September 25, 2022 [5 favorites]
Seeing Yarvin revived as somehow adjacent to some hip circle is really darkly funny if you ever looked at his blog to see what the fuss was about when there was a fuss uh ten plus years ago:
links Thomas Carlyle’s defense of slavery did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?
I mean it’s such bet they don’t teach that in school stuff. It’s framed as persuasive writing but I don’t see how it would ever work on anybody who isn’t already a right-leaning Libertarian computer guy.
Urbit itself is such pure programmer masturbation that I almost have to respect it but that also makes it really funny to see these writers and art guys who somehow got drawn into this circle to the extent that they are now very excited about owning Urbit address space. Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now sort of shit.
posted by atoxyl at 7:58 PM on September 25, 2022 [4 favorites]
links Thomas Carlyle’s defense of slavery did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?
I mean it’s such bet they don’t teach that in school stuff. It’s framed as persuasive writing but I don’t see how it would ever work on anybody who isn’t already a right-leaning Libertarian computer guy.
Urbit itself is such pure programmer masturbation that I almost have to respect it but that also makes it really funny to see these writers and art guys who somehow got drawn into this circle to the extent that they are now very excited about owning Urbit address space. Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now sort of shit.
posted by atoxyl at 7:58 PM on September 25, 2022 [4 favorites]
Wait, is this the same vibe shift that none of us were going to survive?
...because that article and this article both make me feel like I'm suffering brain damage with every sentence I read. Like krokodil, but as written words instead of badly-made desomorphine from Yakutia.
posted by aramaic at 8:04 PM on September 25, 2022 [6 favorites]
...because that article and this article both make me feel like I'm suffering brain damage with every sentence I read. Like krokodil, but as written words instead of badly-made desomorphine from Yakutia.
posted by aramaic at 8:04 PM on September 25, 2022 [6 favorites]
Also he worked on WAP, a thing I did not know. WAP was fucking useless.That was surprising to me as well but in a way it makes sense: if you thought WAP was a better replacement for the web but weren’t sufficiently introspective about the failures, you’d probably think Urbit could work, too.
posted by adamsc at 8:26 PM on September 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
The hilarious thing about this article is that it mentions Dasha only in passing and Anna not at all, and they are gonna be so mad about that. Total vocal fry meltdown on the podcast. You go off to BFE Texas to hang with Alex Jones, you make yourselves too down-market to be considered the muses of Dimes Square anymore.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:40 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:40 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
At least the writer of TFA was kind enough to mention Dimes Square early, so that I didn't waste any more of my time on that shit.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:48 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:48 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Well, I'm fucking tired of these pieces that make "being fascist" out to be some sort of quirky, simultaneously glamorous and harmlessly laughable aesthetic sensibility à la the NYT Style section. The authors inevitably seem to invite us to chuckle, bemused, as if watching a play from behind bulletproof glass. We-- the great many people who are materially threatened by fascism, by the reactionaries-- are fully erased from the picture. The picture painted is always a bizarre, antiseptic fantasy of fascism without victims, one where we have the leisure to do nothing more than point and snicker because there are no stakes.
posted by dusty potato at 9:59 PM on September 25, 2022 [31 favorites]
posted by dusty potato at 9:59 PM on September 25, 2022 [31 favorites]
Huh aramaic beat me to it. I also had trouble with this. I am not a stupid person, I'm fairly confident of that, but I felt stupid reading this. Like reading some 60s/70s gonzo journalism but under the influence of something that ruins your cognition at the same time.
Maybe terrible people deserve to be written about with terrible prose style, I don't know.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:05 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
Maybe terrible people deserve to be written about with terrible prose style, I don't know.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:05 PM on September 25, 2022 [2 favorites]
I got about 20% into the article and gave up. It felt like a Thomas Pynchon/Nel Stephenson mashup, but not as interesting.
I'm in the tech industry and generally find tech things interesting, but this didn't seem to have much to do with the real world.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 10:19 PM on September 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
I'm in the tech industry and generally find tech things interesting, but this didn't seem to have much to do with the real world.
posted by DrumsIntheDeep at 10:19 PM on September 25, 2022 [3 favorites]
goddamn it they've stolen one of my favorite borges stories and used for fascism. fuckers.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:09 AM on September 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by kaibutsu at 12:09 AM on September 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
I run some twitterbots that post procedurally-generated abstract art on a regular timer. Which was great until crypto bros decided that was the new hotness (slightly colder than ugly numbered profile pictures). As soon as you get follows and retweets within that corner of the userbase, it starts spreading, and if you don't block them the proportion of crypto bullshit in your notifications increases exponentially.
Anyway, I had gotten reasonably good at identifying crypto accounts to block but when mysticism accounts started showing up it was a bit more confusing. A few of them don't directly mention any crypto buzzwords but are really into misusing unicode, quantum woo, astronomy pictures... did they just like to look at pretty patterns while appropriating Buddhism / getting high, or was this a new head of the crypto hydra?
This thread seems to provide the connection I was missing, so, thanks, I hate it.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:37 AM on September 26, 2022 [13 favorites]
Anyway, I had gotten reasonably good at identifying crypto accounts to block but when mysticism accounts started showing up it was a bit more confusing. A few of them don't directly mention any crypto buzzwords but are really into misusing unicode, quantum woo, astronomy pictures... did they just like to look at pretty patterns while appropriating Buddhism / getting high, or was this a new head of the crypto hydra?
This thread seems to provide the connection I was missing, so, thanks, I hate it.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 12:37 AM on September 26, 2022 [13 favorites]
I didn’t get far enough in to reach the part mentioning Borges, so I’m thankful for that. With luck and the right degenerating neurons I’ll forget I ever read anything about these pretentious twats.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 12:59 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 12:59 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
There's something really basic that I don't get, and I did read the article: Urbit uses existing infrastructure, yes? Like phones and computers and cell towers and satellites and fibre and copper and and and. So... how is it said to be free of the internet?
Can someone explain this to me like I'm an OSI 7-layer model?
posted by inexorably_forward at 1:13 AM on September 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
Can someone explain this to me like I'm an OSI 7-layer model?
posted by inexorably_forward at 1:13 AM on September 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
If you thought WAP was a better replacement for the web but weren’t sufficiently introspective about the failures, you’d probably think Urbit could work, too.
Yeah, reading that Curtis Yarvin made his fortunes on "the shittiest attempt at mobile web browsing" and "cool MTV-logo graphics" sorta gives the game away: his ponderous markets-over-democracy nonsense isn't even some John Galtian (or Peter Thiel-ian) belief in Big Movers pushing society forward, it's the dumbest hackiest flavor of tech success dumping millions of words into the blog he kept because he was to dull to even think of a bigger dream than "post." And his grand vision for society was just dystopian ramblings mixed with self-congratulation.
The picture painted is always a bizarre, antiseptic fantasy of fascism without victims, one where we have the leisure to do nothing more than point and snicker because there are no stakes.
The tricky thing with covering this "cultural fascism"—stuff like this and Dimes Square, which is directly connected with alt-right tech moguls and espouses anti-democratic views but is made up of people who consider themselves far superior to the Charlottesville/January 6th hoi polloi—is that it is shockingly, unthinkably vacuous. On some level, this whole "scene" is propped up by rich libertarians who want to cosplay "glamorous" "youth" "culture," and can afford to invent a shoddy parallel universe that lets them have precisely that. The libertarians are fascist because they don't like government regulations, and are so psychotically lazy that they'll destroy the nation in order to protect their banal interests, but the group this article is about is somehow less substantial even than that. This is a group that only exists because they have enough money that they can afford this lackluster circlejerk, and because they're so incredibly dull that they can't even imagine glittering it up.
There's no "secret underbelly." There isn't even a ritual goat sacrifice. The shrewdness or cunning in this circle runs entirely in the direction of grift: some of the people involved here are aware that it's a bullshit racket, and some are so dumb that they "believe" in the social movement, but that is the sum total of the culture. The absolute savviest people in this entire scene are the ones like Dasha Nekrasova, who's parlaying this whole thing into bit roles on Succession and an opportunity to meet some celebs. But the people really bankrolling this are just looking for ways to generate the new Bitcoin. The only two sentences in this whole piece that matter are these:
It's hard to directly connect the people here to the fascist movement they both appropriate and bankroll, because so little of what they do involves forethought or direct intention. You'd think otherwise, because Yarvin's over there yammering out a hundred novels' worth of pseudo-thought, but the subtext is that these are bored, disaffected dorks with nothing better to do and no imagination. If you're a bored disaffected white man and you don't have a few million dollars, you riot in Charlottesville or trigger a mass shooting, but these people can afford to playact at podcasts and tech start-ups and philosophy, so they do that instead.
It's the subtext of the whole "free thinker" movement: they call themselves groundbreaking, but what they mean is they're not actually interested in other thinkers. And it just so happens that if you don't care about any group of people but your own, and you don't want anybody else to tell your group what to do, and you react to any and all criticism by declaring your critic a new enemy, your politics wind up being a byproduct of... well, reaction. And you conveniently find yourself hating any system (like "democracy" or "working government") that would dare to impose itself over your own feeble conception of freedom or power.
Call it the capitalist spin on the banality of evil. It's grifts all the way down. The philosophy is a grift, the politics are a grift, the fascism is a grift. The Handmaid Christians are grifting the technocrats, the technocrats are grifting the Handmaids, and the whole coalition works together because the only real political move they ever have to make is "gum up the works, gum up the works, gum up the works." Gum up the elections, gum up the courts, gum up the senate. There is no "next," there is no grand vision for a brand-new dictator-led America, because there doesn't need to be: all they need is dysfunction, because then they can keep running their grifts, whether the grift is patriarchy or bored apes.
Some of the neo-reactionary sorts loudly fetishize violence, but that's just cosplay to them too. Violence is nice to blog about, but they're about as into actual violence as Richard Spencer's jaw. They don't care about violence, though, and aren't perturbed when it's perpetuated by people who share their politics, so the modern American dysfunction of random shootings and extremist outbursts suits them just fine. That is, so long as it never happens in their backyard—they'd bolt as quickly as Alex Jones bolts when his fans approach him in a diner. But that's why they invariably wind up huge fans of police states, even as they decry every other function of government. A cop on every corner, so that their loud endorsements of violence can take place in places where no violence would ever be expected.
So yeah, that "fascism without victims" thing you mention is the tricky part of writing about this so-called scene, because "fascism without victims" is pretty much the core nature of this scene. These people are two or three degrees removed from the would-be alt-right stormtroopers: they're the playthings and pets of the rich grifters who endorse the shitty politicians and fund the propaganda networks who push for anti-democratic measures and whip up the base into a murderous frenzy. They get cited as its philosophical and cultural inspirations, but that's a lie: Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon like to talk about the philosophy of Mencius Moldbug for the same reason that Jeffrey Epstein funded a think tank, i.e. sheer affordable vanity. And again, the only two variations of people here are people too dumb to realize that this is a scam, and people who know full well that they're here to cash out. (It's hard to tell which camp Yarvis himself is in, but, despite his being a major figurehead, he strikes me as the kind of guy who's genuinely so dumb that he saw MTV logo graphics as portents for the revolution.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:38 AM on September 26, 2022 [25 favorites]
Yeah, reading that Curtis Yarvin made his fortunes on "the shittiest attempt at mobile web browsing" and "cool MTV-logo graphics" sorta gives the game away: his ponderous markets-over-democracy nonsense isn't even some John Galtian (or Peter Thiel-ian) belief in Big Movers pushing society forward, it's the dumbest hackiest flavor of tech success dumping millions of words into the blog he kept because he was to dull to even think of a bigger dream than "post." And his grand vision for society was just dystopian ramblings mixed with self-congratulation.
The picture painted is always a bizarre, antiseptic fantasy of fascism without victims, one where we have the leisure to do nothing more than point and snicker because there are no stakes.
The tricky thing with covering this "cultural fascism"—stuff like this and Dimes Square, which is directly connected with alt-right tech moguls and espouses anti-democratic views but is made up of people who consider themselves far superior to the Charlottesville/January 6th hoi polloi—is that it is shockingly, unthinkably vacuous. On some level, this whole "scene" is propped up by rich libertarians who want to cosplay "glamorous" "youth" "culture," and can afford to invent a shoddy parallel universe that lets them have precisely that. The libertarians are fascist because they don't like government regulations, and are so psychotically lazy that they'll destroy the nation in order to protect their banal interests, but the group this article is about is somehow less substantial even than that. This is a group that only exists because they have enough money that they can afford this lackluster circlejerk, and because they're so incredibly dull that they can't even imagine glittering it up.
There's no "secret underbelly." There isn't even a ritual goat sacrifice. The shrewdness or cunning in this circle runs entirely in the direction of grift: some of the people involved here are aware that it's a bullshit racket, and some are so dumb that they "believe" in the social movement, but that is the sum total of the culture. The absolute savviest people in this entire scene are the ones like Dasha Nekrasova, who's parlaying this whole thing into bit roles on Succession and an opportunity to meet some celebs. But the people really bankrolling this are just looking for ways to generate the new Bitcoin. The only two sentences in this whole piece that matter are these:
Urbit presents itself—at least, conceptually—as one of the most ambitious internet companies in existence. It aims to do to digital “real estate” what Bitcoin wants to do to money.Thiel and a16z invest in Urbit because, if it suckers enough people, then it'll generate billions of dollars worth of cons. Full stop. And, as a byproduct, they get a lameass conference full of the dumbest "intelligent" people on the planet, all of whom will revere them as gods and maybe score them a little coke.
It's hard to directly connect the people here to the fascist movement they both appropriate and bankroll, because so little of what they do involves forethought or direct intention. You'd think otherwise, because Yarvin's over there yammering out a hundred novels' worth of pseudo-thought, but the subtext is that these are bored, disaffected dorks with nothing better to do and no imagination. If you're a bored disaffected white man and you don't have a few million dollars, you riot in Charlottesville or trigger a mass shooting, but these people can afford to playact at podcasts and tech start-ups and philosophy, so they do that instead.
It's the subtext of the whole "free thinker" movement: they call themselves groundbreaking, but what they mean is they're not actually interested in other thinkers. And it just so happens that if you don't care about any group of people but your own, and you don't want anybody else to tell your group what to do, and you react to any and all criticism by declaring your critic a new enemy, your politics wind up being a byproduct of... well, reaction. And you conveniently find yourself hating any system (like "democracy" or "working government") that would dare to impose itself over your own feeble conception of freedom or power.
Call it the capitalist spin on the banality of evil. It's grifts all the way down. The philosophy is a grift, the politics are a grift, the fascism is a grift. The Handmaid Christians are grifting the technocrats, the technocrats are grifting the Handmaids, and the whole coalition works together because the only real political move they ever have to make is "gum up the works, gum up the works, gum up the works." Gum up the elections, gum up the courts, gum up the senate. There is no "next," there is no grand vision for a brand-new dictator-led America, because there doesn't need to be: all they need is dysfunction, because then they can keep running their grifts, whether the grift is patriarchy or bored apes.
Some of the neo-reactionary sorts loudly fetishize violence, but that's just cosplay to them too. Violence is nice to blog about, but they're about as into actual violence as Richard Spencer's jaw. They don't care about violence, though, and aren't perturbed when it's perpetuated by people who share their politics, so the modern American dysfunction of random shootings and extremist outbursts suits them just fine. That is, so long as it never happens in their backyard—they'd bolt as quickly as Alex Jones bolts when his fans approach him in a diner. But that's why they invariably wind up huge fans of police states, even as they decry every other function of government. A cop on every corner, so that their loud endorsements of violence can take place in places where no violence would ever be expected.
So yeah, that "fascism without victims" thing you mention is the tricky part of writing about this so-called scene, because "fascism without victims" is pretty much the core nature of this scene. These people are two or three degrees removed from the would-be alt-right stormtroopers: they're the playthings and pets of the rich grifters who endorse the shitty politicians and fund the propaganda networks who push for anti-democratic measures and whip up the base into a murderous frenzy. They get cited as its philosophical and cultural inspirations, but that's a lie: Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon like to talk about the philosophy of Mencius Moldbug for the same reason that Jeffrey Epstein funded a think tank, i.e. sheer affordable vanity. And again, the only two variations of people here are people too dumb to realize that this is a scam, and people who know full well that they're here to cash out. (It's hard to tell which camp Yarvis himself is in, but, despite his being a major figurehead, he strikes me as the kind of guy who's genuinely so dumb that he saw MTV logo graphics as portents for the revolution.)
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 1:38 AM on September 26, 2022 [25 favorites]
A-also: this is the antidote: Neoreaction a Basilisk
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM on September 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM on September 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
Urbit uses existing infrastructure, yes? Like phones and computers and cell towers and satellites and fibre and copper and and and. So... how is it said to be free of the internet?
Back when I was in middle school, a bunch of my dork friends and I launched one of those free phpBB forums and called it our own. Maybe like three of us each posted nine hundred times a day, and felt like such badasses for doing it. I guess the equivalent nowadays is launching a Discord server, but Discord is more of a corporate product, so it doesn't have the edgy groundbreaking-ness that phpBB used to.
Urbit is basically the ne plus ultra of launching your own forum for all your friends. It's "free of the Internet" in the sense that it offers its own messaging software, its own forums, its own group management... but you don't just have to get it in web site form. You can also download their dumb dipshit operating system and turn your whole computer into a special secret little forum where you hang out with your friends. (Only, instead of getting to pick a username, you're assigned a random string of characters like—I am not making these up—~tadreg-listuc or ~sovmyl-davsyx. Urbit developers establish themselves in this hierarchy with usernames that are half as long, such as ~lapdeg.)
If you, like me, enjoy this kind of useless bullshit, you can conveniently test-drive Urbit yourself with a single click and no registration by going here. I highly recommend it, because it is extremely dumb: just an absolute Russian doll of some total dorks trying to recreate very basic computer-y things and doing it in the lamest, most half-assed ways imaginable. It's the computer equivalent of your one friend's D&D campaign that he spent 10 years developing that nobody will play because he insists that the first 8 sessions consist of pure loredump monologue.
If you type "help" into its terminal, it responds with a string like "<1.lqz <* <232.mmf 51.qbt 123.ppa 46.hgz 1.pnw %140>]>," which I also didn't make up. If you want to join aUsenet Urbit group, you are told: "Enter either a web+urbitgraph://link or an identifier in the form ~ sampel-palnet/group." They have a whole web page dedicated to bragging about how they developed a revolutionary interface called Landscape, which is... a bunch of square icons that you click. You know how there are those vaguely right-wing architecture Twitter users who loudly go on about "returning to tradition"? Well, Urbit wants us to forget every UX development since approximately Windows 95.
It is, in my opinion, deeply fucking funny, not only because it is dumb on every conceivable level but because it could only have been developed this much with investment money from a bunch of equally-dumb people. Absolutely nobody involved in this is a "rock star developer." The more you know about computer science, the funnier this all gets. (That extends way under the hood, because Urbit is built on top of multiple layers of custom-developed technology, none of which serve any meaningful functional purpose.)
The punchline is that all this took more than two decades to develop. The only reason it's not considered vaporware is that literally nobody gives a shit that this exists. And if you want an insight into both the kind of dumbass who'd think that any of this was worth this and into just how incompetent of a thinker Yarvis is, you can read his 5,000-word-long farewell post, and marvel at just how frequently it dips into useless grandiose space metaphor and/or completely shoehorned-in racism. Or you can just skip to the very end, where Yarvis compares himself not just to Satoshi but to Rimbaud.
Basically, it really is a shame about all the fascism and decline, because it interrupts what rightfully ought to be the main story here, which is that Yarvis and Urbit are not just pretty stupid—they are gloriously fucking dumb. Except, again, for all the fascism, which is also fucking dumb but in a much less funny way.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:12 AM on September 26, 2022 [35 favorites]
Back when I was in middle school, a bunch of my dork friends and I launched one of those free phpBB forums and called it our own. Maybe like three of us each posted nine hundred times a day, and felt like such badasses for doing it. I guess the equivalent nowadays is launching a Discord server, but Discord is more of a corporate product, so it doesn't have the edgy groundbreaking-ness that phpBB used to.
Urbit is basically the ne plus ultra of launching your own forum for all your friends. It's "free of the Internet" in the sense that it offers its own messaging software, its own forums, its own group management... but you don't just have to get it in web site form. You can also download their dumb dipshit operating system and turn your whole computer into a special secret little forum where you hang out with your friends. (Only, instead of getting to pick a username, you're assigned a random string of characters like—I am not making these up—~tadreg-listuc or ~sovmyl-davsyx. Urbit developers establish themselves in this hierarchy with usernames that are half as long, such as ~lapdeg.)
If you, like me, enjoy this kind of useless bullshit, you can conveniently test-drive Urbit yourself with a single click and no registration by going here. I highly recommend it, because it is extremely dumb: just an absolute Russian doll of some total dorks trying to recreate very basic computer-y things and doing it in the lamest, most half-assed ways imaginable. It's the computer equivalent of your one friend's D&D campaign that he spent 10 years developing that nobody will play because he insists that the first 8 sessions consist of pure loredump monologue.
If you type "help" into its terminal, it responds with a string like "<1.lqz <* <232.mmf 51.qbt 123.ppa 46.hgz 1.pnw %140>]>," which I also didn't make up. If you want to join a
It is, in my opinion, deeply fucking funny, not only because it is dumb on every conceivable level but because it could only have been developed this much with investment money from a bunch of equally-dumb people. Absolutely nobody involved in this is a "rock star developer." The more you know about computer science, the funnier this all gets. (That extends way under the hood, because Urbit is built on top of multiple layers of custom-developed technology, none of which serve any meaningful functional purpose.)
The punchline is that all this took more than two decades to develop. The only reason it's not considered vaporware is that literally nobody gives a shit that this exists. And if you want an insight into both the kind of dumbass who'd think that any of this was worth this and into just how incompetent of a thinker Yarvis is, you can read his 5,000-word-long farewell post, and marvel at just how frequently it dips into useless grandiose space metaphor and/or completely shoehorned-in racism. Or you can just skip to the very end, where Yarvis compares himself not just to Satoshi but to Rimbaud.
Basically, it really is a shame about all the fascism and decline, because it interrupts what rightfully ought to be the main story here, which is that Yarvis and Urbit are not just pretty stupid—they are gloriously fucking dumb. Except, again, for all the fascism, which is also fucking dumb but in a much less funny way.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 2:12 AM on September 26, 2022 [35 favorites]
made up of people who consider themselves far superior to the Charlottesville/January 6th hoi polloi
You can imagine the crushing disappointment of someone who gets intoxicated on reading Julius Evola and imagines their manly bros setting the world to right like Spartan warriors....then they meet the real-world manifestations, and they're all Duck Dynasty cosplayers and Q-Anon shamans.
posted by gimonca at 2:45 AM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
You can imagine the crushing disappointment of someone who gets intoxicated on reading Julius Evola and imagines their manly bros setting the world to right like Spartan warriors....then they meet the real-world manifestations, and they're all Duck Dynasty cosplayers and Q-Anon shamans.
posted by gimonca at 2:45 AM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
OK, I did almost spit out my beer at "I do regret making 0 true and 1 false" from the farewell post.
posted by inexorably_forward at 2:58 AM on September 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
posted by inexorably_forward at 2:58 AM on September 26, 2022 [8 favorites]
i guess the dark side of elite overproduction and status redistribution is that it unites the intellectual dark web and the dark enlightenment.[1,2] greg egan, for one, warns against solipsism. maybe entertaining the Narcissism of Minor Difference is an escape from disappearing up their own asses?[3]
posted by kliuless at 4:19 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by kliuless at 4:19 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
This seems like the description of a court with an absent monarch — there is a spigot of money pouring out, and the courtiers all cluster around looking for cash and patronage, and the largest courtiers pass on some of each to their own clients. I would bet that most of the people there don’t believe much of what they are saying, but they try to say it in novel ways, hoping to climb to the next tier.
Most likely, the spigot will dry up at some point, and the courtiers will scramble to find the next court to ply their wares. I wonder why Fante put them in Hell; it seems they are already there.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:24 AM on September 26, 2022
Most likely, the spigot will dry up at some point, and the courtiers will scramble to find the next court to ply their wares. I wonder why Fante put them in Hell; it seems they are already there.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:24 AM on September 26, 2022
Wait, the article wasn’t fiction? Ooh no.
posted by umbú at 7:37 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by umbú at 7:37 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
It's amusing that for all the technohype and philosophical posing, the real currency is social. "Is it cool," the girls asked. If you can't make the in-crowd, create a crowd of your own and maybe some sucker will invite you to an in-crowd party.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:50 AM on September 26, 2022
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:50 AM on September 26, 2022
Of all the tediously weird web-adjacent 90's people to still be regarded, even to a limited extent, as a deep thinker it has to be Nick fucking Land?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:55 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:55 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I can't believe I let this melt my brain so early in the day, so early in the week.
posted by shenkerism at 9:07 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by shenkerism at 9:07 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think perhaps many of you overestimate the intellectual seriousness of 1930s fascism. This sort of shit is part-and-parcel of fascism, as are the hangers-on, wannabes, con-artists, and shills.
This is part of what fascism is. At its core, it's a deep and opportunistic cynicism, harnessing disaffection and anger for profoundly anti-democratic purposes. Are white guys carrying tiki torches more serious? More earnest? More dangerous?
There's something clownish about all of fascism, but that doesn't make it any less a threat.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:36 AM on September 26, 2022 [28 favorites]
This is part of what fascism is. At its core, it's a deep and opportunistic cynicism, harnessing disaffection and anger for profoundly anti-democratic purposes. Are white guys carrying tiki torches more serious? More earnest? More dangerous?
There's something clownish about all of fascism, but that doesn't make it any less a threat.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:36 AM on September 26, 2022 [28 favorites]
OK, I did almost spit out my beer at "I do regret making 0 true and 1 false" from the farewell post.
One of the funniest things about Yarvin's attempt to build an internet that he effectively owns and that everybody has to pay him money to be on is that the programming language it runs on has no decrement function. Want to subtract? Write your own function for it.
Dude's so far up his own ass he's seeing daylight through his teeth.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
One of the funniest things about Yarvin's attempt to build an internet that he effectively owns and that everybody has to pay him money to be on is that the programming language it runs on has no decrement function. Want to subtract? Write your own function for it.
Dude's so far up his own ass he's seeing daylight through his teeth.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:49 AM on September 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
> This is part of what fascism is. At its core, it's a deep and opportunistic cynicism, harnessing disaffection and anger for profoundly anti-democratic purposes.
this evil, it is banal and tedious?
posted by kliuless at 10:23 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
this evil, it is banal and tedious?
posted by kliuless at 10:23 AM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
The absolute savviest people in this entire scene are the ones like Dasha Nekrasova, who's parlaying this whole thing into bit roles on Succession and an opportunity to meet some celebs.
Think the chronology is a little bit backwards here. She kinda rode the Bernie wave originally (though Anna K., her podcasting partner, was already a sort of wannabe Paglia provocateur on Twitter) which put a spotlight on her film work which got her into some mainstream media… a bit. They’ve leaned more and more into the right-wing stuff since then because they decided that’s the hot scene or whatever.
posted by atoxyl at 10:55 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Think the chronology is a little bit backwards here. She kinda rode the Bernie wave originally (though Anna K., her podcasting partner, was already a sort of wannabe Paglia provocateur on Twitter) which put a spotlight on her film work which got her into some mainstream media… a bit. They’ve leaned more and more into the right-wing stuff since then because they decided that’s the hot scene or whatever.
posted by atoxyl at 10:55 AM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]
Are white guys carrying tiki torches more serious? More earnest? More dangerous?
Fascism includes the cult of action, of violence, of war, physicality, right? Just by going outside, the tiki torchers could be considered more menacing and dangerous than the idly partying programmers and podcasters.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:56 AM on September 26, 2022
Fascism includes the cult of action, of violence, of war, physicality, right? Just by going outside, the tiki torchers could be considered more menacing and dangerous than the idly partying programmers and podcasters.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:56 AM on September 26, 2022
Although this is from a different time and social milieu, I can't help thinking of Who Goes Nazi. I feel like the overarching themes still hold
posted by treepour at 11:26 AM on September 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
posted by treepour at 11:26 AM on September 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
I spent a couple years in college writing about how the software project I was working on with some other people would change the world and remake the internet. I did *eventually* realize that trendy artsy websites (not that I was any good at that) and writing barely coherent fawning prose about vaporware was taking time away from actually helping to build the thing.
Thank God we were pre Bitcoin (and pre social media), etc. and Libertarians were still just weird nerds.
So a few years ago I of course became a bit interested in Urbit, but never actualy waded far enough through the many words of their own special philosophical universe of meaning actually get to a point where I could just start using it.
posted by thefool at 12:09 PM on September 26, 2022
Thank God we were pre Bitcoin (and pre social media), etc. and Libertarians were still just weird nerds.
So a few years ago I of course became a bit interested in Urbit, but never actualy waded far enough through the many words of their own special philosophical universe of meaning actually get to a point where I could just start using it.
posted by thefool at 12:09 PM on September 26, 2022
(Upon finishing the article, by the way, it does also read a bit like the mostly fabricated cyberpunk crap from magazines the 90s.)
posted by thefool at 1:38 PM on September 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by thefool at 1:38 PM on September 26, 2022 [3 favorites]
Absolutely nobody involved in this is a "rock star developer.
they are gloriously fucking dumb
Well, it’s kind of classically smart guy dumb, no? It’s a core of FP hypernerds, spearheaded by a self-promoting crank who wanted to make it willfully esoteric, and then some hangers-on who probably don’t understand the half of it.
posted by atoxyl at 1:51 PM on September 26, 2022
they are gloriously fucking dumb
Well, it’s kind of classically smart guy dumb, no? It’s a core of FP hypernerds, spearheaded by a self-promoting crank who wanted to make it willfully esoteric, and then some hangers-on who probably don’t understand the half of it.
posted by atoxyl at 1:51 PM on September 26, 2022
I’d hate to work with any of these people but I’m sure some of them understand computer science. They are just the sort to take “who can do the most computer science” as a competitive endeavor.
posted by atoxyl at 1:55 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by atoxyl at 1:55 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
In order to achieve the genocidal ambitions I see as the taproot of fascism's appeal among followers and leadership alike, previous generations of fascists have been obliged to build vast machineries of death into their policies and programs of government,
.
But these guys don’t need that because enormous genocide is baked into Global Warming.
All they have to do is make sure that the huge excess death tolls of changing climate have relatively less impact on them, their followers, and their preferred ethnic groups.
Why would Peter Thiel have moved to New Zealand except as a refuge and redoubt against what’s coming? He and his fellow travelers will need to take over the government, but I think that's within their reach.
Perhaps that accounts for the malaise of dreary hopelessness that seems to pervade the Urbit community as portrayed in this piece. Maybe it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm when you’re begging for a berth on the Ark.
posted by jamjam at 2:34 PM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
.
But these guys don’t need that because enormous genocide is baked into Global Warming.
All they have to do is make sure that the huge excess death tolls of changing climate have relatively less impact on them, their followers, and their preferred ethnic groups.
Why would Peter Thiel have moved to New Zealand except as a refuge and redoubt against what’s coming? He and his fellow travelers will need to take over the government, but I think that's within their reach.
Perhaps that accounts for the malaise of dreary hopelessness that seems to pervade the Urbit community as portrayed in this piece. Maybe it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm when you’re begging for a berth on the Ark.
posted by jamjam at 2:34 PM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]
While I couldn't finish this article. I'd 100% watch an episode of Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan about these morons.
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:57 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by elwoodwiles at 2:57 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]
I'm morbidly interested in Oh No Ross and Carrie doing an undercover investigation into this specific steaming pile of poo and also into the broader web3 grift scene
posted by treepour at 4:14 PM on September 26, 2022
posted by treepour at 4:14 PM on September 26, 2022
Pairs with this, about some of the same crowd:
My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritualposted by grobstein at 4:18 PM on September 26, 2022 [5 favorites]
There were others telling me to kill myself. It was an orgy of vitriol. “Can’t you see how ridiculous you people look to literally anyone outside this place?” I asked the crowd. But who cares what other people think, they responded, caring about what this all looks like just reveals my philistine small-mindedness—I only care about what other people think, not about true art “that comes from the heart.” Yarvin said that I was on the side of the hegemonic order, the side of “Mastercard,” and that when the choice is whether to take the side of Mastercard, the correct choice is always the opposite. The denunciations continued.
treepour's link to a 1941 Harpers Magazine essay "Who Goes Nazi" is worth clicking on!
Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.posted by spamandkimchi at 4:27 PM on September 26, 2022 [9 favorites]
The fuck is this shit?
posted by eagles123 at 8:44 PM on September 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
posted by eagles123 at 8:44 PM on September 26, 2022 [7 favorites]
My Own Dimes Square Fascist Humiliation Ritual
This essay seems as bizarrely performative as the events it describes, especially when it gets to stuff like this:
It may be worth remembering that fascism and the artistic avant-garde have joined forces at some very dangerous times in history, e.g. Futurism. This scene sounds like it will implode like a rotting fruit due to its internal toxicity but, as others have pointed out, the fascists who look like buffoons at first often succeed and end up killing millions.
posted by treepour at 11:12 AM on September 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
This essay seems as bizarrely performative as the events it describes, especially when it gets to stuff like this:
I said that Peter and Betsey underestimated who they were messing with, and that since my writing has been blowing up, since it’s proceeding from expressing an adequate idea of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things, the piece I’d write about this would be bigger than the movie itselfThis whole scene seems like it's about blurring the lines between the performative self and the actual self and no one really knowing what's going on and it all being a big in-joke at the same time, with a big dollop of fascist edgelord-ism as the primary catalyst.
It may be worth remembering that fascism and the artistic avant-garde have joined forces at some very dangerous times in history, e.g. Futurism. This scene sounds like it will implode like a rotting fruit due to its internal toxicity but, as others have pointed out, the fascists who look like buffoons at first often succeed and end up killing millions.
posted by treepour at 11:12 AM on September 27, 2022 [6 favorites]
> It may be worth remembering that fascism and the artistic avant-garde have joined forces at some very dangerous times in history, e.g. Futurism.
fwiw...
The Jetsons, Now 60 Years Old, Is Iconic. That's a Problem.
posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM on September 30, 2022
fwiw...
The Jetsons, Now 60 Years Old, Is Iconic. That's a Problem.
posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM on September 30, 2022
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A perfect farce, the ultimate lark, for our historical moment
posted by your postings may, in fact, be signed at 5:03 PM on September 25, 2022 [11 favorites]