Conversation

I think it’s fair to declare left accelerationism a failed project and pure wishful thinking. Only the og Nick Land right accelerationism is coherent, and Yuk Hui called it… it’s coherent mainly as an unhappy consciousness. And that’s now endemic in SV.
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This 2017 guardian long read remains the best general outsider introduction to this current of thought. Feels like this thing peaked in 2017 in the exhilaration of Trump’s ascent, and it’s been a steady descent into growing unhappiness since for believers
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This stuff has been growing so dominant in my social graph neighborhood, I suspect that the only thing that kept me basically immune is that I’m fundamentally not a westerner in some essential way. There’s Asian echoes of this but it’s basically a western end-of-history malaise.
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I’d even say it’s a malaise that’s specific to Christian heritage cf Holland’s Dominion hypothesis, which feels like the Christian-west strand of the end-of-history story.
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Hmm. Did a second close read of piece today and it strikes me as actually a sort of delayed-schedule alt-end-of-history thesis. Still in a Hegelian spirit but not the Fukuyama version.
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This line of thought is actually more interesting than the psychoanalysis of NRx. In the process of showing that NRx notion of a world process universalism is ill-posed rather than merely incomplete/derailed-by-PC, the piece effectively argues there is history left in the tank 🤔
A good tldr of this broad argument is that the decline of the west is a kind of regional arrested development that’s been mistaken for the end of history because the coercive universalizing tendency that started with colonialism was mistaken for an actual viable universalism
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But the argument as it stands is incomplete since it’s a sort of non-constructive analytical proof. The case in its favor is primarily the circumstantial evidence of actual global divergence esp China
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Ie the divergence indicates the presence of residual factors in the world process not explained by the universalizing tendency of the European historical process
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There’s probably pre-western historical forces in non-western parts of the world that are reasserting themselves after a long period of quiescence, and explain some of the divergence. But they are not obvious to me.
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So to recap, NRx (US branch, not Land) got co-opted in its adolescence by alt-right chan-Trumpism and Thiel and Anton-Claremont crowd backed it even though it wasn’t ideal, and now Thielverse has seeded a mini-media empire and young guard careers to launch rebranded “New Right”
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I suspect “New Right” is the brand that they’ll roll with. “NRx” has too much baggage, “alt-right” is both tarnished by corruption track record and too low-brow. Thielverse sounds too cult of personality and is now inaccurate due to more big names joining. Nice sanitized reboot.
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Reminds me of Modi’s rise from pariah due to Gujarat riots in 2002 to gradually sanitized/laundered image emphasizing “effective administration” and Prime Ministership in 2014, and then the current maturation of the Sangh Parivar Industrial Complex and muscle flexing. 20y arc.
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The specifics are different, but the interacting potentials are similar. If this has same time constants, I’d date the beginning at ~2009 and a maturation around 2029. Whether they actually can go the distance might rest on how well New Rightism does in 2022 election cycle.
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The New Right media machine growth has been quite impressive. I count at least half a dozen declared and undeclared publications within it (Quillette, Palladium etc) that are trying to establish an intellectual voice and style distinct from the Fox/Breitbart world.
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For now they still need old media, even if hostile, hence this Vanity Fair type piece, but soon they’ll hit independent escape velocity. I’d predict ~2023. Right now it’s still precarious. Still feels like “IDW++” network of cells rather than stand-alone institutional landscape.
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If they actually win Twitter (though Musk, like Trump, is a temperamental independent, and dangerous to count on for steady ideological alignment), they’ll get a decade’s worth of leveling up in a week. No wonder it smells like a high-stakes thing behind the shitpost theater.
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The big development in the last 6 months is that this thing now not only has a name/shape, it has enough of a predictable political API that other groups can do deals with it. Which means if they win a few elections they “IPO” and get normalized. Like Tea Party a decade+ ago.
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There’s a tension between this political normalization (and the normies with normie incentives and mortgages and desire for incremental agendas it will attract) and incumbent radical fantasies of de facto monarchism and cameralist CEOs etc. Keep an eye on that.
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The big environmental difference now is they have the Supreme Court effectively in the bag for a few decades. Time for more ambitious agendas. Especially once old guard like McConnell who created the new playing field die off or retire. Same thing happened for Modi.
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Half of the challenge for Modi’s rise to power was simply waiting for Vajpayee, Advani etc to exit the stage. They kinda hated his guts but were too old to resist his takeover.
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This meme is a pretty good tldr of the state of play. If this thing gets where it wants to, you get hypernormalization cranked up to 11, not a simon saris trad utopia some seem to be imagining. I would not have predicted this endgame ~2013 when I first started tracking it
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In a way it’s a relief to see this morph into a legible entity that lends itself to ordinary analysis I’ve rarely tweeted about it publicly to avoid Streisand-effecting it, though it’s been a big topic in my cozywebs for a decade (the outer rings of which are now ~30% New Right)
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I wonder if this dissipation of a decade-old mystique in the harsh light of open political activation will have consequences. 🤔 Once the badass allure of illegible transgressive heterodoxy is gone, you’re just signing up for a new t-shirt, hat, and annual subscription tote bag.
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Maybe they’ll do a big NFT collection drop where you get to choose between statue head, powdered wig, tradlife, and anime pfps Programmable to display either “based” or “coldness be my god” as a tagline 🤔 Life is a bitch and then you become the cathedral
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