#moldbug

[utilitymonstermash]

The problem with Trump (for folks with contempt for the current ruling class) is he seems to be the heel described by Moldbug, an incarnation of what the regime says it's against.

He doesn't seem to transcend their frame. He merely opposes their values. As long as he's in play, it seems that much harder to find a new, positive vision.

Always and everywhere, the worst way to resist a regime is to inhabit its stage villains. Like most bad choices, this choice is a bad default. It’s as you lived in 15th-century Paris and thought the Church was very corrupt and bad—but there was no alternative. You couldn’t be a cool Enlightenment philosophe or at least just a Protestant. Because it was the 15th century. And there weren’t even words for these things. So you asked your priest: if not God, King and Church, in what would I believe? Who is against God and King and Church? And your priest said: Satan. And so, thinking logically, you became a Satanist. This probably actually happened to you, except it wasn’t a priest but a “guidance counselor.” The way the world works never changes. If some party A asks how it should operate in opposing some opponent B, B’s vision of who its opponents are and how they operate is hardly the place to start! You could start with a clean slate. You could start with any other period in history. Instead you start by literally aping your enemy’s propaganda. The only possible cause of any such choice is laziness and/or immaturity: not promising qualities in an aspiring aristocrat. So while in a way we can’t really blame you for falling into the default, which means falling into a trap, in a way it still is your fault. Not finding Voltaire or even Calvin on the menu, the right response is not to give up and settle for Satan—but to invent Calvin or Voltaire. On one side of the coin, this is an epic challenge; on the other, an epic opportunity.

[isaacsapphire]

Shitty people/writers like Sarah J. Maas and Cassandra Claire are living off royalties and being sold in every place that still sells books because they actually wrote books. Shitty writers/people like various bloggers are impacting American and hence global politics because they wrote.

And the truth is, maybe I could have been that person, if I had actually gotten off my ass and wrote. But we’ll never know, unless I do try, and it may be too late anyways.

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Moldbug's aesthetic

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[sneedfeedandseed]

Interesting how the people who get their lives ruined are only on one side of the political spectrum. Covington and the next non-issue can dominate the news spectrum for ages- remember how CNN doxed someone over a boomer tier meme? And yet, you will never see the same fervor applied to someone on the left. This is true for one simple reason- the left is far far better at organization and institutional control than the right will ever be. When the left wants to protest for gun control or women's rights or whatever the fuck, they have busses running and fancy printed signs within hours. The right can't even have a 20 person rally without getting fucked on by antifa footsoldiers and demonized in the media for it. And yet in theory, CNN and Soros on the left have mirrors in Fox and Koch on the "right". The fundamental difference is that the right wing establishment is too used to hierarchies. Their movements all have leaders and a chain of command, making them too slow to be meaningful in the internet age. On the other hand, ideas spread throughout the left like wildfire, and the institutions simply have to write the next talking point and get the logistics ready. There is no waiting for approval, no focus groups, just GO! This is also why every protest on the left turns into a protest for the entire left, because all the ideas are completely intermixed. The only group on the right with the same spontaneity is /pol/, and they lack any sort of institutional backup. However, the hegemony of the left will cause any attempts to build a reactive right wing network to be met with ostracism, or with violence from antifa footsoldiers who are immune to the rules the leftist institutions have set for the right. Therefore anyone outside the mainstream left who wants to organize in order to change the system (this goes for everyone from poltards to ancaps to anprims to tankies who are a bit too woke on corporate influence for their own good) will have to organize networks of trustworthy, like minded peers in secret, and do everything in their power to accelerate the inevitable collapse of the modern left before they step out of the shadows.

[heraklitismus]

Free speech is much easier to implement under an “absolute” regime that doesn’t leak power — for one thing, if the state has no reason to care what you think, it has no reason to censor you. And its official religion can just be science and truth; since you don’t vote, it has no motivation to delude you. And aren’t you already pretty done with “populism”, anyway?

Moldbug

[utilitymonstermash]

I'm not sure he's wrong. USA's main answer to these pockets of collapse seems to subsidize and route around, see Detroit. If productivity goes up enough, nearly unbounded dysfunction can be subsidized, so long as the cancer doesn't hit any vital organs -- which seems inevitable.

NYC seemed to shake the decay once, maybe that's the template? What does a Guliani figure for SF look like? Is such a thing even viable given demographic trends?

[utilitymonstermash]

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship

...

Right now there's religious pressure on tech companies to conform. Someone on Twitter pointed out that tech censoring Parler isn't a sign of their strength, but of their weakness. Imagine that Mark Zuckerberg decided he personally really disliked BLM, and he was going to censor BLM and any people/organizations/apps that promoted it from Facebook. Do you think he would succeed? Do you think he could stay CEO of Facebook after he was found to be doing this? Mark Zuckerberg and Big Tech in general are as much slaves to the prevailing religion as the rest of us; their "power" is the power to choose between medium vs. high levels of conformity.

Perhaps this "someone on Twitter" has been reading Moldbug because this is one of the things he's been going on about lately.

Big tech has no power at all

The basics of tech censorship and the structure of the cathedral.

Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all

You wouldn’t say that his minions have power. Not that they identify themselves—but no one blames their Facebook ban on the moderators. The power that banned you is not their power; they operate under the dominion of Zuck, the absolute monarch of Facebook. Power is always the ultimate cause of action.

So what is the cause of Zuck’s action? It must be him. He’s the boss, isn’t he? Well… there is no power over him. There is no one who gives the mighty Zuck commands.

That is—there is no monarchical power over him. He has no even more monarchical boss—no Palpatine to his Darth Vader. But there are two other forms of power.

Is there any democratic power over him? We could easily imagine a Facebook election which chose a powerful tribune of the people—or at least, a tribune of the profiles—whose power would override the CEO’s on social-governance issues. This does not exist and no one is asking for it—probably because it would be insane. But maybe fun.

Is there any oligarchic power over him? Well—we can’t be sure. As we observed earlier, while we find it easy to see monarchical and democratic power, which we hate worse than Tolkien’s goblins hated the swords Biter and Beater, we normally do not process oligarchical power as power per se.

Because of this camouflage, we cannot just look at it. We must discover it, carefully as an archeologist.

However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his, but someone else’s.

Why doth Zuck ban shitlords? Is the creator of “Facemash” passionately committed to social justice? Well, maybe. He may have no power, but he is still a bigshot. Bigshots often do get religion in later life—especially when everyone around them is getting it. But—does he have a choice? If he has no choice—he has no power.