Moldbug was influential 10 to 15 years ago. My evidence for this, besides being an old head blog politics guy, is the fact that he’s just now being interviewed by the New York Times
“Yarvin sometimes feels like a hyped baseball prospect I’ve been reading about for years but who still can’t make the opening-day roster--a man with dozens of magazine profiles but no clear wins.” very well-written
My favorite part of the last round of Yarvin coverage was when his girlfriend (?) was telling the reporter that they weren’t just a bunch of weird nerds, they were actually cool kids and then Curtis follows that with “The best way to understand my philosophy is with an extended Lord of the Rings metaphor.”
This intellectual vacuity is the core frustration of the whole....whatever the fuck is happening. Whether Curtis Yarvin is or isn't influential seems somewhat secondary to the larger horror that people like him, shade tree intellectuals whose development topped out at being regional debate team champs and are certain the wonders of the universe are laid bare to them because they know how to make computers do workaday things, constitute the entire intellectual stratum of the ascendant team. Yarvin and Musk are the same guy with different stock options.
Hi Max. I listened to the podcast with the NYT. And quickly tired of this man's self-importance, which he promptly hides behind a totally fake modesty.
But he fits perfectly into the zeitgeist. We are a nation of salesmen, but when you have no factories, you start selling bullshit, pardon the French. Bear with me (I've written a lot about this, here's the summary)
Trump has led the way by co-opting the evangelicals, who were well groomed by their "pastors" with the prosperity gospel (send me $10, God will send you $1,000... a kind of Ponzi scheme with vaporware). This is nothing new, of course, Sister Aimée in the '20s led the way, but these days it's done at an industrial scale... Trump got his racketeering rights and took over the base that was solidly Republican., so the GOP has to follow suit... and a lot of mid-level scammers and other wind machines demanded their turf as well, from guys like Russell Brand (sex abuser) to RFKJr (who took over A. Wakefield's MMR= Autism turf, after seducing eco-lefties)... Yarvin has seen the empty niche: Someone who can somehow offer a pseudo-intellectual explanation... His idea of intellect is "don't commit to anything," and just make a simplistic message sound really smart..
I don't think his pretty eyes have ever gazed onto the Nicomachean Ethics, or Spinoza, or JS Mill. He's a bag of hot air trying to make a buck. He writes well, apparently.
In my most pessimistic moments, I believe that the USA will have to crash totally before the cultish Maga crowd gets the message: They are being scammed and humiliated and they think that it's great. I.e., someone is pissing on their heads and telling them it's golden rain drops.
Fantastic article. I think you really hit it on the head when you talk about how writers and other people with intellectual pretensions are by definition biased towards exaggerating the influence of other intellectuals.
I am an addict in "recovery." Sobriety opened my eyes to how much behavior can be explained through the lens of addiction. People become addicted to all sorts of things. Coke, sex, affirmation...even themselves. Once you frame motivations with an understanding of addiction, so many things snap into very clear focus.
Yarvin is a man nursing grievance and trauma. His Ian Malcolm outfit and unruly hair are all part of the costume of a Chaos Theorist with an accelerationist bent. Climbing over the obstacle of his trauma and verifying his value as a thinker is what he is addicted to. Good lord, the man will use so many words to describe something that ultimately points to his bad experience as a gifted child.
Those supposedly "entranced" by his writing cannot be anything of the sort. I've read samples of Moldbug. You'll find more persuasive grace in the proposition of a dog's bleeding asshole. Those who appreciate Yarvin's yarns are behaving exactly like the type of customer I used to receive as a bartender: They made as if they should leave for the night, but it took but a clever word or two to keep them at my bar and buying another. Vance and Thiel are addicted to power / influence. Any justification will do so long as it dresses the motivation well enough to pass entry into whatever scrutiny they can drum up.
I do think Yarvin is influential, tho. Repackaging old familiar ideas in new and appealing ways is an essential function of propagandists, is it not?
I found the FDR thing kind of amusing, given that if you're looking for the proto-techbro turned technocrat that became president there's a perfect fit for that mold: Herbert Hoover.
Yarvin is a symptom. The rot is the oligarchs who feed off his trite theses. He has captured the likes of Andreesen and Thiel to a dangerous degree, and they have ample power and influence.
Behind the Bastards did a series on Yarvin that was quite good.
I’ve seen his schtick before. 40 years ago, he’s the guy in the dorm who wears all black and had a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook and kept muttering shit about anarcho-capitalism. Then you’d see him at the frat party with his feathered hair, waffle-tie and corduroy blazer doing his best Michael J. Fox impression and the girls still thought he was a dweeb. Put a fork in him; his 15 minutes are up.
Nick Land repackaged the civil society concept, as discussed by Kant and Hegel then formalized by political theory, under the sinister gothic name of The Cathedral. Yarvin picked that up and, as you also say in a way, offered the age-old bonapartist reactionary response to the civil society with a fresh coat of paint. He is influential only in that he's the guy whose words articulate what the Vances and Thiels would've always been doing.
I appreciate your dedication and a lot of your writing/ shedding light on these seemingly niche ideologies, but his falls quite short of convincing me of yarvins lack of influence. The way that elon and doge are acting for one reason, but then there's all the mass firings and dismantling of entire departments, elon speaking for long periods of time instead of trump etc. there seem to be a lot of signs that he has significant influence, whether or not there is actual contact with him personally vs a tweaked version of his ideas being implemented by powerful people who believe in his ideas, or that see them aligning enough to build a strange coalition (yarvin+vought=vance elon+trump=yarvin aka, they kinda go together and make sense, especially after seeing the new polices). i think even for the right yarvins ideas would be pretty distasteful, so when claim the fact that trumps campaign didn't seem particularly yarvinist, my answer would be, well it wouldn't be would it? at least not on full display. the way the campaign in the first trump campaign and the following ones used online targeted advertising to change the way people feel and funnel them into camps, is very algorithmic, very tech bro, very yarvin. my hunch is that the powerful people around trump have used the fact that trump's not actually very ideological, but instead just power hungry and massively insecure, and have used that to manipulate him into helping them carry out their goals - i'm talking about elon, vance, vought etc. and as long as trump gets to be god king, and maintains the right to fire them at will, amass more power etc, he's all in,which is extremely yarvinist. if this was an actual blog post and not just a comment i would pull up quotes from interviews with musk and trump in the oval office, and video where trump allows elon to talk forever - i think for trumps ego he would need to feel like that was part of the plan, and even maybe his idea for that to fly. to me, it kinda makes sense when i think of business people - they're not afraid to take other peoples ideas if it benefits them and as long as you don't challenge their power they might even let you in. i think that's why bannon is so pissed at the new direction the admin is taking - he was the one with the ideas & when they didn't secure trump another victory, he found others who would.
i love that snip where they are finding out that the president is the chief executive and think that means the position was modeled after CEOs rather than the other way around. obviously these are people who were never shamed for their ideas, and we're all poorer for that
Moldbug was influential 10 to 15 years ago. My evidence for this, besides being an old head blog politics guy, is the fact that he’s just now being interviewed by the New York Times
🥁
“Yarvin sometimes feels like a hyped baseball prospect I’ve been reading about for years but who still can’t make the opening-day roster--a man with dozens of magazine profiles but no clear wins.” very well-written
The Jared Kelenic of right wing politics if you will. (Mariners joke)
perhaps one of the most "I bet this hits so hard if you're stupid" internet writers
My favorite part of the last round of Yarvin coverage was when his girlfriend (?) was telling the reporter that they weren’t just a bunch of weird nerds, they were actually cool kids and then Curtis follows that with “The best way to understand my philosophy is with an extended Lord of the Rings metaphor.”
"I’m sick of this fucking guy." The six most refreshing words I've read this week.
This intellectual vacuity is the core frustration of the whole....whatever the fuck is happening. Whether Curtis Yarvin is or isn't influential seems somewhat secondary to the larger horror that people like him, shade tree intellectuals whose development topped out at being regional debate team champs and are certain the wonders of the universe are laid bare to them because they know how to make computers do workaday things, constitute the entire intellectual stratum of the ascendant team. Yarvin and Musk are the same guy with different stock options.
Hi Max. I listened to the podcast with the NYT. And quickly tired of this man's self-importance, which he promptly hides behind a totally fake modesty.
But he fits perfectly into the zeitgeist. We are a nation of salesmen, but when you have no factories, you start selling bullshit, pardon the French. Bear with me (I've written a lot about this, here's the summary)
Trump has led the way by co-opting the evangelicals, who were well groomed by their "pastors" with the prosperity gospel (send me $10, God will send you $1,000... a kind of Ponzi scheme with vaporware). This is nothing new, of course, Sister Aimée in the '20s led the way, but these days it's done at an industrial scale... Trump got his racketeering rights and took over the base that was solidly Republican., so the GOP has to follow suit... and a lot of mid-level scammers and other wind machines demanded their turf as well, from guys like Russell Brand (sex abuser) to RFKJr (who took over A. Wakefield's MMR= Autism turf, after seducing eco-lefties)... Yarvin has seen the empty niche: Someone who can somehow offer a pseudo-intellectual explanation... His idea of intellect is "don't commit to anything," and just make a simplistic message sound really smart..
I don't think his pretty eyes have ever gazed onto the Nicomachean Ethics, or Spinoza, or JS Mill. He's a bag of hot air trying to make a buck. He writes well, apparently.
In my most pessimistic moments, I believe that the USA will have to crash totally before the cultish Maga crowd gets the message: They are being scammed and humiliated and they think that it's great. I.e., someone is pissing on their heads and telling them it's golden rain drops.
Fantastic article. I think you really hit it on the head when you talk about how writers and other people with intellectual pretensions are by definition biased towards exaggerating the influence of other intellectuals.
I am an addict in "recovery." Sobriety opened my eyes to how much behavior can be explained through the lens of addiction. People become addicted to all sorts of things. Coke, sex, affirmation...even themselves. Once you frame motivations with an understanding of addiction, so many things snap into very clear focus.
Yarvin is a man nursing grievance and trauma. His Ian Malcolm outfit and unruly hair are all part of the costume of a Chaos Theorist with an accelerationist bent. Climbing over the obstacle of his trauma and verifying his value as a thinker is what he is addicted to. Good lord, the man will use so many words to describe something that ultimately points to his bad experience as a gifted child.
Those supposedly "entranced" by his writing cannot be anything of the sort. I've read samples of Moldbug. You'll find more persuasive grace in the proposition of a dog's bleeding asshole. Those who appreciate Yarvin's yarns are behaving exactly like the type of customer I used to receive as a bartender: They made as if they should leave for the night, but it took but a clever word or two to keep them at my bar and buying another. Vance and Thiel are addicted to power / influence. Any justification will do so long as it dresses the motivation well enough to pass entry into whatever scrutiny they can drum up.
I thought of this classic tune upon reading this: https://youtu.be/vwKm-6OWsaI?si=egr39q277lP04m3Z.
I do think Yarvin is influential, tho. Repackaging old familiar ideas in new and appealing ways is an essential function of propagandists, is it not?
I found the FDR thing kind of amusing, given that if you're looking for the proto-techbro turned technocrat that became president there's a perfect fit for that mold: Herbert Hoover.
Yarvin is a symptom. The rot is the oligarchs who feed off his trite theses. He has captured the likes of Andreesen and Thiel to a dangerous degree, and they have ample power and influence.
Behind the Bastards did a series on Yarvin that was quite good.
I’ve seen his schtick before. 40 years ago, he’s the guy in the dorm who wears all black and had a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook and kept muttering shit about anarcho-capitalism. Then you’d see him at the frat party with his feathered hair, waffle-tie and corduroy blazer doing his best Michael J. Fox impression and the girls still thought he was a dweeb. Put a fork in him; his 15 minutes are up.
Nick Land repackaged the civil society concept, as discussed by Kant and Hegel then formalized by political theory, under the sinister gothic name of The Cathedral. Yarvin picked that up and, as you also say in a way, offered the age-old bonapartist reactionary response to the civil society with a fresh coat of paint. He is influential only in that he's the guy whose words articulate what the Vances and Thiels would've always been doing.
I appreciate your dedication and a lot of your writing/ shedding light on these seemingly niche ideologies, but his falls quite short of convincing me of yarvins lack of influence. The way that elon and doge are acting for one reason, but then there's all the mass firings and dismantling of entire departments, elon speaking for long periods of time instead of trump etc. there seem to be a lot of signs that he has significant influence, whether or not there is actual contact with him personally vs a tweaked version of his ideas being implemented by powerful people who believe in his ideas, or that see them aligning enough to build a strange coalition (yarvin+vought=vance elon+trump=yarvin aka, they kinda go together and make sense, especially after seeing the new polices). i think even for the right yarvins ideas would be pretty distasteful, so when claim the fact that trumps campaign didn't seem particularly yarvinist, my answer would be, well it wouldn't be would it? at least not on full display. the way the campaign in the first trump campaign and the following ones used online targeted advertising to change the way people feel and funnel them into camps, is very algorithmic, very tech bro, very yarvin. my hunch is that the powerful people around trump have used the fact that trump's not actually very ideological, but instead just power hungry and massively insecure, and have used that to manipulate him into helping them carry out their goals - i'm talking about elon, vance, vought etc. and as long as trump gets to be god king, and maintains the right to fire them at will, amass more power etc, he's all in,which is extremely yarvinist. if this was an actual blog post and not just a comment i would pull up quotes from interviews with musk and trump in the oval office, and video where trump allows elon to talk forever - i think for trumps ego he would need to feel like that was part of the plan, and even maybe his idea for that to fly. to me, it kinda makes sense when i think of business people - they're not afraid to take other peoples ideas if it benefits them and as long as you don't challenge their power they might even let you in. i think that's why bannon is so pissed at the new direction the admin is taking - he was the one with the ideas & when they didn't secure trump another victory, he found others who would.
i love that snip where they are finding out that the president is the chief executive and think that means the position was modeled after CEOs rather than the other way around. obviously these are people who were never shamed for their ideas, and we're all poorer for that
Too influential for a Dark Elf who can't read history, or Tolkien for that matter.
https://open.substack.com/pub/heyslick/p/the-dark-elves-fallacy-neoreactionaries?r=4t921l&utm_medium=ios