Chiming in to say, first of all, that I've love this blog. Reading these articles with my morning coffee has been a refreshing morning ritual. It's witty and incisive and so on.
Decided to chime in on this article in particular as it's far more on the practical end as opposed to the far-sighted political engineering side of things- This problem of speech is one I run into daily.
I'm a millennial, grown up during the old, wild days of the internet, and with artistic pretensions.
I've always had to engage in this sort of balancing act, between my desire for free and transgressive expression, with the growing practical necessity of staying out of the regime's crosshairs as society becomes more authoritarian.
It's clear, that on some level, the 'gauche' character of shitposting is something that can easily help reinforce power, and that serious, informative 'urbane' discussion is being choked out by the weeds of all these aforementioned '-speaks'. But at the same time, there's that Nietzsche quote about having chaos within you and dancing stars - What I loved about the olden days, was the ability to pivot between urbane discussion and irreverence, the high-brow and the-low brow, as different modes. In my private chats with close friends, we strike a comfortable balance between the two, but in public (we live in a society!), things tend either towards brainless limbic system reactionary chatter, or towards the regime's definition of 'polite intellectual discussion' -i.e. having a stick up your ass.
I'm typing this out quickly because I have other things to attend to today, so maybe I'm not thinking things all the way through, but basically, I want the order and stability that makes sane discussion possible, but I also don't want to have a stick up my ass forever.
I completely agree. Curtis' rules make total sense, but if we stuck to them 100% of the time we'd miss out on a lot - life would become sterilized. I'm not an artistic type, but I don't want to die with my song stuck in my throat either. It's a shitty situation to be in.
My gosh I felt like I just read a well-written version of my own thoughts.
If it means anything, know that there’s another disgruntled millennial that spends most of his professional week smiling at inane comments spewing from the lib normie lumpenPoltiktariat. Journaling has been a great pressure release valve, but like-minded community (spouse, friends) IS a magic bullet in all of this.
I guess you don't remember the days before the internet, a conversation is possible with real friends offline. Where are the real friends? Blame "urban" decay and decline.
You can be artistic and transgressive in lots of ways and lots of areas and groups without getting in the crosshairs of the regime - you just have to pick your spots and not everything has to be political
I get what you’re saying, and on an artistic level, blatantly polemic kind of stuff tends to be pretty shallow anyway.
But, having spent years of my life in the progressive camp, developing my own skills in ketman, I’ve picked up a keen sense for the the subtle political symbolism inherent in every little banal detail of life-
Sometimes I’ve concern trolled progs and it ends up going completely over their heads because they haven’t developed an advanced level of cynicism
But then, you encounter a high level prog inquisitor, who has developed a keen and penetrating intellect, and the ultimate arbitrariness of the ideology becomes much more apparent- Once they sense your lack of faith, all bets are off, every little statement, bit of hearsay, bit of artistic ambiguity can be reinterpreted in the new context of outing the heretic
Of course, the corollary to this, is that they are predators and prefer to expend their energy chasing large prey. I’m a small fish now, but I know that every small success makes you a bigger target
Well Nihilist Pepe, if you’d like to embark on the meaningful action of friendship then you have my axe! Perhaps we could start the monthly zoom vent session for people who read this blog.
Clubhouse looks interesting. Anything we cultivate as Curtis suggests and I agree would have to be urbane and as far away from anything like fed posting as possible. We have all been drawn to this blog. It would just be fun to get to know one another on a more personal basis. Perhaps one day we could organize something like a bass fishing trip / hike / excursion. Nothing like a political organization or protest. Certainly, respect that powers at be.
If this sounds like something people want to cultivate then maybe Clubhouse would be the place to do it. We would need invites though if anyone has any.
I like anyone else is new to Clubhouse, I have invites but haven't figured out how send them yet. As far as fiends, never been able to go from net to friends, I think this is utopia. By the way do you know how to get in touch with CY/MM, he wrote that he gets emails from people?
I would love to join on whichever platform. I am on urbit as well but not incredibly proficient in its operation. I would love to use this as an opportunity to become more so. Also I would be happy to commit the resources required to set up a truly top of the line hosing system/vm for such a group if anyone would like to help with technical expertise
A harmless bookclub of quokkas has been created. 5 people or so. I had posted my ig, but deleted it so it wasn’t chilling in the comment section here. We’d have to coordinate somehow to sync in real life. Everyone in the group has been chill and it’s been fun getting to know each other.
I love the spirit of this comment. Every person here shares, at very least, a small but nontrivial set of experiences in the modern world. Regardless of their location within the confines of the western first world, the relevant environmental expressions of power and the unvarying tangible conditions of modern life will have touched them. The products of those conditions and the temperamental, intellectual, and spiritual traits whose shared possession unites us here are unique experiences. Speaking for myself they are experiences which I share with nobody who I have ever known and which I would find enormously valuable to discuss or simply to know them to be common knowledge in a given conversation
So Arthur, have you found a venue for all of us to talk, or set anything up yet? If not add me on wickr me. It’s a secure chat plate form and my username is oonun. We can make a group there for now until we find a more public venue
Yes, though I'm still not clear entirely on what it means. Near as I can tell, in slogan form passivity would mean: "don't be the bad guy they want you to be." E.g., in a Christian society, just be passively non-Christian -- don't be a Satanist.
Except in the context of the grand subtitle of this blog (please take a look there) this is a rather a severe angle. Especially when it is drawn from the treasures of the sparkling erudition, that conveniently omits all the examples to the opposite.
Despite all that, I agree with the overall premise, hello Lev Tolstoy...
Not wanting kittens to die, I gifted a friend a subscription, so that he could read it. Two-dimensional urbane chatter is fine, but sometimes a gentleman needs actual conversation. Let’s see how he likes it.
I just hope I don’t run out of friends before I run out of money. That’s no way to build a leitkultur.
"To be a dissident is to abandon, voluntarily or involuntarily, any intention of using power in the present regime—being relevant, making a difference, creating change, etc."
That's one of the reason I have subscribed here. To read such lines and think: Hey! I haven't said it that way, I even may not have thought it this way, but doesn't that feel so naturally right? In a way that I could have come up with this myself long ago?
I don't share Curtis' belief that the regime will necessarily fail, but I still agree with his Code of Dissident Speech—and more specifically, his focus on personal flourishing. Don't waste your life fighting for or against the regime.
Anyway, I don't think USG will fail for the same reason Industrial Society is so pernicious to the health of mankind: it is capable of "solving" the problems it creates by pushing drugs (legal or illicit) on the population, so that they cannot realistically push back. Can you imagine *industrial society* failing at this point? I can't.
Ask yourself, which is more likely in your lifetime? (a) USG fails at governing and is replaced by a monarchical "sovereign corporation" OR (b) USG fails at governing—and subsequently adopts the Brave New World solution of giving everyone free pot and oxy and Only Fans bucks to keep them from revolting? (To USG, the suicides of their previous clientele are a feature, not a bug.)
Like the Unibomber, my money is on (b)…which means that the Code of Dissident Speech is basically a no-op in our future history. It literally doesn't matter what dissident elites do (or don't do) in modern society today because *industrial society* is actually, fundamentally, what is driving things forward. (From my perspective, Wokeness is a symptom, not a cause, of our present discontent.)
It's fashionable in Silicon Valley to claim that "software is eating the world"—while Industrial Society laughs maniacally in the background.
California rolling "brown-outs," the Texas event just now, and China's infrastructural insecurity whitepilled me out of believing this. The industrial machine is ultimately untenable for human organizing, and it will fail. Though that failure will be catastrophic, at least it will be catastrophic *for itself.* You just can't have more and more intersecting, inter-supporting parts, and not expect damage to anyone of those parts to not send shockwaves into the rest of the system. It isn't designed to work independently and fail-safely.
If USG does that, they'll just get outcompeted and/or die a slow death. I mean it's kind of happening already, though I don't see a new hegemon emerging any time soon.
We're ALREADY half way through a USG regime change—today we have two parallel legal systems, the vestigial Constitutional one, and the shiny new "Civil Rights Act" one. (When they conflict—and they do, frequently—guess which one always wins?)
But our current in progress regime change is NOTHING like what Curtis anticipates. It's mostly peaceful, gradual, etc. It's literally viewed as *progress*—even by Curtis! So tell me: why should we expect USG failure when we've seen macro-evolution happen to it twice (FDR and CRA) in the last 100 years, both cheered on by virtually the entire population? (And certainly both have unanimous popularity today…)
As long as Industrial Society provides the goods, USG will stay alive. Only when Industrial Society fails (and I cannot see it failing) does USG have any risk of itself failing. Be serious: it ain't happening.
30% of women today are on some kind of mood stabilizer because their lives are so shitty, so option (b) is already here. Furthermore, *drugs don't make Industrial Society dysfunctional* which is why I reject any argument that USG/Industrial Society will be out-competed. By who? When? How? China is the only realistic option in 2021, and they'd prefer to flip-the-script and make US their wage slaves, manufacturing goods to ship back to THEM. Reverse-colonialism FTW.
I'd love to see people healthy again, but I see literally no mechanism whereby that happens when all failures can be "solved" by creating and administering more drugs.
I believe I can change your mind on that point if you are willing to devote some time to reading at least the most important 50% of a single work. This book summarizes the a significant portion of the points which I believe are integral to predicting the future of industrial society. It is truly a masterwork and I am grateful to all of the people who were involved to its creation. https://www.amazon.com/Modernity-Cultural-Decline-Biobehavioral-Perspective/dp/3030329836
I am willing to share the pdf file or an audiobook of the content which I created myself with Amazon Polly.
I think that the type of population homomgenization by geographic segmentation of the shared space of a mixed group is a powerful idea in proportion to the quantities and areas involved. On the small end you get something very similar to more or less every pre-modern imperial capital, with cities divided into various ethnic districts with low dispersion (I think Curtis has mentioned this but I’m not sure). On the large end you have actual Balkanization. The one thing Whig i
So what is your thought about Solzhenitsyn? His writings were both intended to be truth and persuasive. He pointed out the hypocrisy and immorality of the regime. It seems to me that making fun of the regime, ridiculing them, is the most effective way of removing their patina of morality and making plain their naked power-lust. Though Solzhenitsyn did not live to see the regime change he precipitated, without him I would not be surprised if the USSR would be still in existence today. Not everyone needs to be a Solzhenitsyn, but it's very useful if someone is. Similarly, it is relatively easy to flourish in the USA today, but it was impossible to flourish in the USSR without being a member of the Party. Since the direction of the USA is to be slowly morphed into the USSR via the China Road, what good will "flourishing" do, when the means of flourishing will be slowly removed or constricted as the 20s continue?
This is an excellent point. Currently all attempts at creating a samizdat press have been coming under attack or co-opted. Nevertheless, there are technologies being developed that are very resilient to attack, Gab being the obvious one, followed now by Telegram, Signal, Element, and PeerTube. In one of the more ironic twists in our little universe, it is now Russia that is creating and providing platforms for dissidents of the regime in the West, especially payment platforms. The current regime seems hell-bent to provoke a war with Russia, but even though they are all subhuman intelligences, they have to know even at some gut level that the Russian military will kick the feminized Western military's ass when operating on Russian soil.
All "dissident WWW platforms" follow the fundamental algorithm of the mousetrap -- the bait-and-switch:
1) The cheese: platform co. presents itself as "freedom-loving", "alternative", "uncensored".
2) The mouse: Weev, Curtis, et al. get accounts, grow to depend on the convenience and the subscription income.
3) The spring: i.e. the mousetrap snaps closed. Crackdown on "hate speech", moderators, hellbanning, "deplatforming".
What'd be wrong with using an actually p2p protocol for chitchat? Even ye olde IRC? And why is anyone still concerned with "payment platforms" given as Bitcoin is still anything but dead after eleven years!! of openly kicking the wasp hive?
Every "online platform" is a project of someone who *wants to own you*. It is carefully cultivated dependence.
Maybe there's a better way. Why re-make all the mistakes from the other social media platforms? Why not make something better?
I've been kicking this idea around about building a better news reader from scratch. Recently, on one of my podcasts (Blocked and Reported) they mentioned a very similar idea called https://ground.news/about
It's very close, but my idea is to use news feeds from diffbot or gdelt, to aggregate news and then use gpt-3 to summarize and cluster news stories and then generate a view of the news cycle that shows you what everyone is talking about. Instead yet another social media trace, it would be a news cycle aggregator/display that would highlight the differences.
Of course you'd have all the chat features, but the primary attraction is not yet another social media site but a whole different thing.
I disagree. Gab has been deplatformed multiple times and has built a very resilient capability. Signal is an open-source, standards-based end-to-end ecrypted chat application. Element is a matrix-based p2p end-to-end encrypted chat application. PeerTube is a p2p video application. No technology is immune to attack, so indestructibility is not and cannot be the goal. The goal is being resilient in face of attack, like IP routing was initially designed for. In Taleb's terms, technologies that are "antifragile" and where users have "skin in the game." Where users are customers and not the product. As far as Bitcoin is concerned, I am a huge fan of the technology, but it is far too volatile to be used as a payment method, and given that to use it to buy a gallon of milk one has to use an exchange and these exchanges are controlled by the banks and government, relying on bitcoin is probably the worst thing you can do, as anyone the regime doesn't like can be deplatformed from the exchanges instantly and without warning. Sure, the deplatformed person still has the bitcoin and it may be "worth" a ton of dollars, but how is that going to buy him a cup of coffee?
If a chat program demands that you trust a service provider, it isn't simply "not immune to attack", but is ipso facto an active mousetrap, i.e. was built from day one to gather compromat, snitch secrets, and provide a playground for provocateurs.
Also must nitpick re: Bitcoin -- it is entirely possible to use it for practical work without ever coming into contact with an Official exchange company. It requires having friends, however.
The problem with solutions like Signal and Telegram is that even if we assume complete good faith, your phone number is as good as your name if not better in terms of doxing you. I am actually not that paranoid about their motivations as such - they try to control a platform in order to have a business, Occam's razor and all that.
Russia’s good ol useful idiots tactic. Putins army is garbage, and they know very well that they can’t compete. Do you think imperial Russia or the ussr would just give up parts of Armenia to the Turks ? Would they need to use paramilitary forces to “invade Ukraine” ?
The Russian army is only good for bombing third rate countries and beating protesters
AFAIK the modern-day Russian army is largely for "frat hazing" and the May parade.
However if speaking of Putin, several years ago he issued an interesting ex cathedra statement -- where he promised that there will not be another 1941: specifically, that any future invader will find the war brought home to him "within 30min, or your money back" via SLBMs.
If even a fraction of the pertinent hardware plausibly works, this is a credible threat. If not, then not. One can suppose, given that no "spreading democracy a la 1941" yet took place in the 2020s, that Washington presently buys it.
Solzhenitsyn did live to see the fall of Communism. He died in Russia in 2008 and was buried at Donskoy monastery after an elaborate service. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was among the mourners.
Observe that Solzhenitsyn is famous in the Anglo world, but Shalamov (for English folks, a sampling: https://shalamov.ru/en/ ) is not. Despite having considerably greater literary talent than Solzhenitsyn, and having sat seventeen years in the innermost circle of gulag hell. Very simple reason: Shalamov refused to have any contact with CIA et al., and made it very clear that he will not accept USG.Nobels or any such thing. Whereas Solzhenitsyn & co. were quite happy to play the "we speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues!" game.
Shalamov is pure doom porn though, you bet he wouldn't cooperate with CIA otherwise he would not be writing what he was writing. He was not useful to anybody, even himself. This goes in the way of flourishing.
Shalamov was, during life, and remains today useful to everyone who is tired of court jesters' attempts to dress up in likable costumes the tumour that is power.
Well, saying that he is not useful to anyone was perhaps a hyperbole. It should not be taken literally, obviously. But my point is, my impression was that his aspirations were fundamentally far worse than Solzhenitsyn's, like he saw no redemption in what happened to him, did not strive to do much in a way of analysis or practical advice, and his stories were almost like pure revenge porn, like I'm gonna show everybody what a whore you are behind closed doors, sovetskaya vlasot. Plus, I think the dude had actual physical mental problems and spent his latter days in a psych ward, which might have colored this grim and defeatist outlook. Sure, his works are documents of a particular kind of experience that happened, and that's priceless. But... I would not go as far as to canonize this guy as some sort of saint. He was a leftie in his youth, he was a junkie, to borrow Moldbug's frame. His 15 year prison journey began because of him telling the interrogators that the Party was going way too far to the right!
The Solzhenitsyn counterpoint was the first thing I thought of as well. Last year I read Live Not By Lies and thought it was a difficult but ultimately necessary protocol to follow in order to keep my sanity and pride in the current regime.
Reading this post and CY’s recent posts on ketman strike me as a totally different tactic. Honestly it feels more cowardly, but much more likely to result in actual flourishing.
I’m leaning towards ketman as a better strategy for surviving professional and flourishing personally.
For the last ten years or so, I have been (unknowingly) practicing ketman myself. This works great for me in modern America because the US isn't that bad these days. Ketman would not work in a country like the USSR, which is more-or-less the goal state for the Ruling Class. As a nominal member of the ruling class myself, there will come a time after which I will not be able to continue with my work without crossing a moral boundary. After that, who knows? There are numerous people not in the Ruling Class for which modern America is a dystopian nightmare, however, and it is these people I fear for most of all. One never knows ahead of time what the exact tipping point is for regime change, but having tens of millions of white men vilified; imprisoned in their homes; fed a diet of opiates, booze, and intersectionality; all while being heavily armed, does not bode well for the regime in the medium term.
One thing that surprises me is that in a lot of ways, CY is our Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn's primary achievement was his identification of the full and complete nature of the Soviet regime: who they are, what they did (and continued to do), and why. For that he was vilified. While the Soviets were agitated about Solzhenitsyn's agitation, it was his writings they feared the most. CY can reject politics and political activism all he wants, but his writings (along with those of a few other intellectual dissidents--I'm thinking primarily of Angelo Codevilla) are the modern American Gulag Archipelagos. The problem with our ruling class is that they are completely feckless and incompetent at censorship, plus they themselves don't know the nature of their own regime. 99% of the Ruling Class really do think they are implementing "law and order" and "faithfully executing the laws" and "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" without once having the presence of mind to look around them at the abject tyranny they are instituting in the name of "progressivism" or "The Great Reset" or "Fighting Climate Change." CY dares to name the nature of the regime.
Solzhenitsyn didn't live to see regime change? And most certainly Solzhenitsyn and the dissidents had very little to do with the regime change. And it is very easy to see, they were/are completely absent from the new Russia power map.
Solzhenitsyn's reputation would fare better if he didn't have a mass grave full of skeletons in his closet. In his homeland, he is political poison for any party. I don't think he ever was urbane.
I think this precedent was set when ol' yarvy deleted one of my comments on an early post for dropping the first r in the book title. It wasn't a typo curtis!!
“Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.”
Bit off topic but thought I'd share - Texas is allowing private cities to operate, one is being developed as we type and scheme. Wondering the ramifications of suddenly privately operated "Live, Work, Play" cities sprouting all over our glorious Slobovia and how it might tweak our framework if at at all. (https://images1.loopnet.com/d2/ppFwD5BvYVIf0l3BLcrgAq1q1FCgoTnmYNLl_R5Lk98/document.pdf)
IIRC Texas isn't the only state in the process of implementing this. This really does smell like high-ranking dissidents throwing their weight around behind the scenes. Maybe something good will actually come of this, though it might just be yet another way to get more migrants in.
> Texas isn't the only state in the process of implementing this
A lot of states have laws in place to pass off road and utilities development to builders, maintained by HOA fees. Gov't likes it because they get property taxes, but don't provide services. (Reminds me a lot of Argentina, actually.)
I believe they are the most far along, fundraising is almost closed on the development side... Interesting to see how this fits into the concept of patchworks and what 'real' power these proto-Night Cities will be able to enforce - especially keen to see how the first stabbing victim is treated, and conversely any public backlash.
CY should move his blog out of "politics: category on substack, no way to compete with noise. This blog is culture/philosophy/history/literature/technology. I recommend moving to culture, philosophy or history. Either of those.
Chiming in to say, first of all, that I've love this blog. Reading these articles with my morning coffee has been a refreshing morning ritual. It's witty and incisive and so on.
Decided to chime in on this article in particular as it's far more on the practical end as opposed to the far-sighted political engineering side of things- This problem of speech is one I run into daily.
I'm a millennial, grown up during the old, wild days of the internet, and with artistic pretensions.
I've always had to engage in this sort of balancing act, between my desire for free and transgressive expression, with the growing practical necessity of staying out of the regime's crosshairs as society becomes more authoritarian.
It's clear, that on some level, the 'gauche' character of shitposting is something that can easily help reinforce power, and that serious, informative 'urbane' discussion is being choked out by the weeds of all these aforementioned '-speaks'. But at the same time, there's that Nietzsche quote about having chaos within you and dancing stars - What I loved about the olden days, was the ability to pivot between urbane discussion and irreverence, the high-brow and the-low brow, as different modes. In my private chats with close friends, we strike a comfortable balance between the two, but in public (we live in a society!), things tend either towards brainless limbic system reactionary chatter, or towards the regime's definition of 'polite intellectual discussion' -i.e. having a stick up your ass.
I'm typing this out quickly because I have other things to attend to today, so maybe I'm not thinking things all the way through, but basically, I want the order and stability that makes sane discussion possible, but I also don't want to have a stick up my ass forever.
I completely agree. Curtis' rules make total sense, but if we stuck to them 100% of the time we'd miss out on a lot - life would become sterilized. I'm not an artistic type, but I don't want to die with my song stuck in my throat either. It's a shitty situation to be in.
My gosh I felt like I just read a well-written version of my own thoughts.
If it means anything, know that there’s another disgruntled millennial that spends most of his professional week smiling at inane comments spewing from the lib normie lumpenPoltiktariat. Journaling has been a great pressure release valve, but like-minded community (spouse, friends) IS a magic bullet in all of this.
+1 for the constanza ref.
I guess you don't remember the days before the internet, a conversation is possible with real friends offline. Where are the real friends? Blame "urban" decay and decline.
You can be artistic and transgressive in lots of ways and lots of areas and groups without getting in the crosshairs of the regime - you just have to pick your spots and not everything has to be political
I get what you’re saying, and on an artistic level, blatantly polemic kind of stuff tends to be pretty shallow anyway.
But, having spent years of my life in the progressive camp, developing my own skills in ketman, I’ve picked up a keen sense for the the subtle political symbolism inherent in every little banal detail of life-
Sometimes I’ve concern trolled progs and it ends up going completely over their heads because they haven’t developed an advanced level of cynicism
But then, you encounter a high level prog inquisitor, who has developed a keen and penetrating intellect, and the ultimate arbitrariness of the ideology becomes much more apparent- Once they sense your lack of faith, all bets are off, every little statement, bit of hearsay, bit of artistic ambiguity can be reinterpreted in the new context of outing the heretic
Of course, the corollary to this, is that they are predators and prefer to expend their energy chasing large prey. I’m a small fish now, but I know that every small success makes you a bigger target
Right. What even counts as “badspeak”? Is criticising beloved beliefs of the regime “badspeak”? If so, what is even the point?
I think Moldbug probably means something closer to “fedposting”... I doubt he’d like his entire blog to be branded *gauche*.
If anyone is interested in being friends let me know. Good friends make life easier.
This philosopher Macmurray once said "All meaningful knowledge is for the sake of action, and all meaningful action for the sake of friendship"
Well Nihilist Pepe, if you’d like to embark on the meaningful action of friendship then you have my axe! Perhaps we could start the monthly zoom vent session for people who read this blog.
There is some closed group on Reddit, but not sure how and what it is. Also I noticed CY joined Clubhouse.
Clubhouse looks interesting. Anything we cultivate as Curtis suggests and I agree would have to be urbane and as far away from anything like fed posting as possible. We have all been drawn to this blog. It would just be fun to get to know one another on a more personal basis. Perhaps one day we could organize something like a bass fishing trip / hike / excursion. Nothing like a political organization or protest. Certainly, respect that powers at be.
If this sounds like something people want to cultivate then maybe Clubhouse would be the place to do it. We would need invites though if anyone has any.
I like anyone else is new to Clubhouse, I have invites but haven't figured out how send them yet. As far as fiends, never been able to go from net to friends, I think this is utopia. By the way do you know how to get in touch with CY/MM, he wrote that he gets emails from people?
If you'd like to toss one my way feel free.
Not sure, you could try the email associated with the substack. graymirror@substack.com.
There is a Gab group, which is rather inactive at the moment, but could be interesting if more people joined. https://gab.com/groups/13943
I think a trustworthy IM group is important. Any preferences in that regard? I suggest anything on this list, preferably under 'P2P' or 'Decentralized': https://www.privacytools.io/software/real-time-communication/
Also, let's keep this discussion to supporter-only comment sections, shall we?
Yes on supporter only. This will be my last mention of it.
What about Urbit?
I would love to join on whichever platform. I am on urbit as well but not incredibly proficient in its operation. I would love to use this as an opportunity to become more so. Also I would be happy to commit the resources required to set up a truly top of the line hosing system/vm for such a group if anyone would like to help with technical expertise
Do you use Urbit? I have an Urbit instance on a reliable vps, I've considered creating a chat group there.
Just followed you on Instagram
Woo! Great photos
A harmless bookclub of quokkas has been created. 5 people or so. I had posted my ig, but deleted it so it wasn’t chilling in the comment section here. We’d have to coordinate somehow to sync in real life. Everyone in the group has been chill and it’s been fun getting to know each other.
Hey, my name here is temporarily my ig handle. Can you find me that way?
I love the spirit of this comment. Every person here shares, at very least, a small but nontrivial set of experiences in the modern world. Regardless of their location within the confines of the western first world, the relevant environmental expressions of power and the unvarying tangible conditions of modern life will have touched them. The products of those conditions and the temperamental, intellectual, and spiritual traits whose shared possession unites us here are unique experiences. Speaking for myself they are experiences which I share with nobody who I have ever known and which I would find enormously valuable to discuss or simply to know them to be common knowledge in a given conversation
So true! You and many other people here have valuable things to discuss! Apodosis, we shall embark on the quest to get to know the people of this blog! https://media.giphy.com/media/HfJdu4HABDU3e/giphy.gif
So Arthur, have you found a venue for all of us to talk, or set anything up yet? If not add me on wickr me. It’s a secure chat plate form and my username is oonun. We can make a group there for now until we find a more public venue
https://me-download.wickr.com. My WickrID is oonun
Sent you a message
Oh also I honestly don’t care about giving my actual name/phone number out once were off public comments
Hello, well screw those LA people and come join our cool quokka book club.
Most exciting about this post is the implication that Curtis actually reads the comments.
Maybe. Or maybe he’s worried about people like Will Wilkinson reading the comments.
I think this is a defensive move and we need to make sure he is not worried all the time and still can get this income.
I think that too. I also think, so far, that the commenters here have been on very good behavior.
Although truth be told he has been preaching passive "reaction" long before this stretch. Questionably even before the election.
Yes, though I'm still not clear entirely on what it means. Near as I can tell, in slogan form passivity would mean: "don't be the bad guy they want you to be." E.g., in a Christian society, just be passively non-Christian -- don't be a Satanist.
Except in the context of the grand subtitle of this blog (please take a look there) this is a rather a severe angle. Especially when it is drawn from the treasures of the sparkling erudition, that conveniently omits all the examples to the opposite.
Despite all that, I agree with the overall premise, hello Lev Tolstoy...
Of course he does. He is far too much of a narcissist not to. And I do not mean this in any disparaging way whatsoever.
Verily! Tis a great and noble ideal which our verbose Polaris hath quoth! Evermore!
Too olde?
Not wanting kittens to die, I gifted a friend a subscription, so that he could read it. Two-dimensional urbane chatter is fine, but sometimes a gentleman needs actual conversation. Let’s see how he likes it.
I just hope I don’t run out of friends before I run out of money. That’s no way to build a leitkultur.
"To be a dissident is to abandon, voluntarily or involuntarily, any intention of using power in the present regime—being relevant, making a difference, creating change, etc."
That's one of the reason I have subscribed here. To read such lines and think: Hey! I haven't said it that way, I even may not have thought it this way, but doesn't that feel so naturally right? In a way that I could have come up with this myself long ago?
Thanks, Curtis. You have a friend here.
I don't share Curtis' belief that the regime will necessarily fail, but I still agree with his Code of Dissident Speech—and more specifically, his focus on personal flourishing. Don't waste your life fighting for or against the regime.
Anyway, I don't think USG will fail for the same reason Industrial Society is so pernicious to the health of mankind: it is capable of "solving" the problems it creates by pushing drugs (legal or illicit) on the population, so that they cannot realistically push back. Can you imagine *industrial society* failing at this point? I can't.
Ask yourself, which is more likely in your lifetime? (a) USG fails at governing and is replaced by a monarchical "sovereign corporation" OR (b) USG fails at governing—and subsequently adopts the Brave New World solution of giving everyone free pot and oxy and Only Fans bucks to keep them from revolting? (To USG, the suicides of their previous clientele are a feature, not a bug.)
Like the Unibomber, my money is on (b)…which means that the Code of Dissident Speech is basically a no-op in our future history. It literally doesn't matter what dissident elites do (or don't do) in modern society today because *industrial society* is actually, fundamentally, what is driving things forward. (From my perspective, Wokeness is a symptom, not a cause, of our present discontent.)
It's fashionable in Silicon Valley to claim that "software is eating the world"—while Industrial Society laughs maniacally in the background.
California rolling "brown-outs," the Texas event just now, and China's infrastructural insecurity whitepilled me out of believing this. The industrial machine is ultimately untenable for human organizing, and it will fail. Though that failure will be catastrophic, at least it will be catastrophic *for itself.* You just can't have more and more intersecting, inter-supporting parts, and not expect damage to anyone of those parts to not send shockwaves into the rest of the system. It isn't designed to work independently and fail-safely.
If USG does that, they'll just get outcompeted and/or die a slow death. I mean it's kind of happening already, though I don't see a new hegemon emerging any time soon.
We're ALREADY half way through a USG regime change—today we have two parallel legal systems, the vestigial Constitutional one, and the shiny new "Civil Rights Act" one. (When they conflict—and they do, frequently—guess which one always wins?)
But our current in progress regime change is NOTHING like what Curtis anticipates. It's mostly peaceful, gradual, etc. It's literally viewed as *progress*—even by Curtis! So tell me: why should we expect USG failure when we've seen macro-evolution happen to it twice (FDR and CRA) in the last 100 years, both cheered on by virtually the entire population? (And certainly both have unanimous popularity today…)
As long as Industrial Society provides the goods, USG will stay alive. Only when Industrial Society fails (and I cannot see it failing) does USG have any risk of itself failing. Be serious: it ain't happening.
30% of women today are on some kind of mood stabilizer because their lives are so shitty, so option (b) is already here. Furthermore, *drugs don't make Industrial Society dysfunctional* which is why I reject any argument that USG/Industrial Society will be out-competed. By who? When? How? China is the only realistic option in 2021, and they'd prefer to flip-the-script and make US their wage slaves, manufacturing goods to ship back to THEM. Reverse-colonialism FTW.
I'd love to see people healthy again, but I see literally no mechanism whereby that happens when all failures can be "solved" by creating and administering more drugs.
I believe I can change your mind on that point if you are willing to devote some time to reading at least the most important 50% of a single work. This book summarizes the a significant portion of the points which I believe are integral to predicting the future of industrial society. It is truly a masterwork and I am grateful to all of the people who were involved to its creation. https://www.amazon.com/Modernity-Cultural-Decline-Biobehavioral-Perspective/dp/3030329836
I am willing to share the pdf file or an audiobook of the content which I created myself with Amazon Polly.
Sure, I'm happy to read it (or listen, either way). Can you post a download link here?
I got you https://dl.zici.fr/dl/1614412422-2/Matthew_Sarraf_Michael_Anthony_Woodley_of_Menie_Colin_Feltham_-_Modernity_And_Cultural_Decline__A_Biobehavioral_Perspective_2019_Palgrave_Macmillan_-_libgen-lc.pdf
Should work for 24hrs. Let me know what you think
Did you get a chance to check it out?
I haven't, and for personal reason, I'm having to step away from politics.
Yeah, I’m not sure what actual beef Yarvin has with the way things are run, other than the intellectual dishonesty.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'industrial society' here actually.
https://hyperculture.substack.com/p/taming-industrial-society-part-1
I think that the type of population homomgenization by geographic segmentation of the shared space of a mixed group is a powerful idea in proportion to the quantities and areas involved. On the small end you get something very similar to more or less every pre-modern imperial capital, with cities divided into various ethnic districts with low dispersion (I think Curtis has mentioned this but I’m not sure). On the large end you have actual Balkanization. The one thing Whig i
I caved to the grift. Ok Yarvin, dance clown!
“help you flourish and grow excellent.”
Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan really will save us
The first part of this article marks, I believe, your ascension from writer into *sage*.
So what is your thought about Solzhenitsyn? His writings were both intended to be truth and persuasive. He pointed out the hypocrisy and immorality of the regime. It seems to me that making fun of the regime, ridiculing them, is the most effective way of removing their patina of morality and making plain their naked power-lust. Though Solzhenitsyn did not live to see the regime change he precipitated, without him I would not be surprised if the USSR would be still in existence today. Not everyone needs to be a Solzhenitsyn, but it's very useful if someone is. Similarly, it is relatively easy to flourish in the USA today, but it was impossible to flourish in the USSR without being a member of the Party. Since the direction of the USA is to be slowly morphed into the USSR via the China Road, what good will "flourishing" do, when the means of flourishing will be slowly removed or constricted as the 20s continue?
USSR had an outside. Solzhenitsyn & co. had an emigre press to be printed by, e.g. "Posev" (still, lol, exists, and has a WWW! http://www.possev.org)
And let's not forget the folks who "benevolently" printed dissident lit to be smuggled in, handed out Nobels, etc.:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/doctor-zhivago
What's the current-day equivalent against USG?
This is an excellent point. Currently all attempts at creating a samizdat press have been coming under attack or co-opted. Nevertheless, there are technologies being developed that are very resilient to attack, Gab being the obvious one, followed now by Telegram, Signal, Element, and PeerTube. In one of the more ironic twists in our little universe, it is now Russia that is creating and providing platforms for dissidents of the regime in the West, especially payment platforms. The current regime seems hell-bent to provoke a war with Russia, but even though they are all subhuman intelligences, they have to know even at some gut level that the Russian military will kick the feminized Western military's ass when operating on Russian soil.
All "dissident WWW platforms" follow the fundamental algorithm of the mousetrap -- the bait-and-switch:
1) The cheese: platform co. presents itself as "freedom-loving", "alternative", "uncensored".
2) The mouse: Weev, Curtis, et al. get accounts, grow to depend on the convenience and the subscription income.
3) The spring: i.e. the mousetrap snaps closed. Crackdown on "hate speech", moderators, hellbanning, "deplatforming".
What'd be wrong with using an actually p2p protocol for chitchat? Even ye olde IRC? And why is anyone still concerned with "payment platforms" given as Bitcoin is still anything but dead after eleven years!! of openly kicking the wasp hive?
Every "online platform" is a project of someone who *wants to own you*. It is carefully cultivated dependence.
Dominic Suciu1 min ago
Maybe there's a better way. Why re-make all the mistakes from the other social media platforms? Why not make something better?
I've been kicking this idea around about building a better news reader from scratch. Recently, on one of my podcasts (Blocked and Reported) they mentioned a very similar idea called https://ground.news/about
It's very close, but my idea is to use news feeds from diffbot or gdelt, to aggregate news and then use gpt-3 to summarize and cluster news stories and then generate a view of the news cycle that shows you what everyone is talking about. Instead yet another social media trace, it would be a news cycle aggregator/display that would highlight the differences.
Of course you'd have all the chat features, but the primary attraction is not yet another social media site but a whole different thing.
I disagree. Gab has been deplatformed multiple times and has built a very resilient capability. Signal is an open-source, standards-based end-to-end ecrypted chat application. Element is a matrix-based p2p end-to-end encrypted chat application. PeerTube is a p2p video application. No technology is immune to attack, so indestructibility is not and cannot be the goal. The goal is being resilient in face of attack, like IP routing was initially designed for. In Taleb's terms, technologies that are "antifragile" and where users have "skin in the game." Where users are customers and not the product. As far as Bitcoin is concerned, I am a huge fan of the technology, but it is far too volatile to be used as a payment method, and given that to use it to buy a gallon of milk one has to use an exchange and these exchanges are controlled by the banks and government, relying on bitcoin is probably the worst thing you can do, as anyone the regime doesn't like can be deplatformed from the exchanges instantly and without warning. Sure, the deplatformed person still has the bitcoin and it may be "worth" a ton of dollars, but how is that going to buy him a cup of coffee?
Signal is likely a honeypot (despite being supposedly "open", see e.g. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2018/08/signal/ )
If a chat program demands that you trust a service provider, it isn't simply "not immune to attack", but is ipso facto an active mousetrap, i.e. was built from day one to gather compromat, snitch secrets, and provide a playground for provocateurs.
Also must nitpick re: Bitcoin -- it is entirely possible to use it for practical work without ever coming into contact with an Official exchange company. It requires having friends, however.
The problem with solutions like Signal and Telegram is that even if we assume complete good faith, your phone number is as good as your name if not better in terms of doxing you. I am actually not that paranoid about their motivations as such - they try to control a platform in order to have a business, Occam's razor and all that.
Russia’s good ol useful idiots tactic. Putins army is garbage, and they know very well that they can’t compete. Do you think imperial Russia or the ussr would just give up parts of Armenia to the Turks ? Would they need to use paramilitary forces to “invade Ukraine” ?
The Russian army is only good for bombing third rate countries and beating protesters
AFAIK the modern-day Russian army is largely for "frat hazing" and the May parade.
However if speaking of Putin, several years ago he issued an interesting ex cathedra statement -- where he promised that there will not be another 1941: specifically, that any future invader will find the war brought home to him "within 30min, or your money back" via SLBMs.
If even a fraction of the pertinent hardware plausibly works, this is a credible threat. If not, then not. One can suppose, given that no "spreading democracy a la 1941" yet took place in the 2020s, that Washington presently buys it.
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/07/25/the_barbarians_in_the_bay_russias_nuclear_armed_drone_submarine_115493.html
"Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend."(tm)(r)(c)(Curtis?)
you must be kidding, internet is samizdat X 1mil.
Solzhenitsyn did live to see the fall of Communism. He died in Russia in 2008 and was buried at Donskoy monastery after an elaborate service. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was among the mourners.
https://www.rt.com/news/solzhenitsyn-laid-to-rest/
Observe that Solzhenitsyn is famous in the Anglo world, but Shalamov (for English folks, a sampling: https://shalamov.ru/en/ ) is not. Despite having considerably greater literary talent than Solzhenitsyn, and having sat seventeen years in the innermost circle of gulag hell. Very simple reason: Shalamov refused to have any contact with CIA et al., and made it very clear that he will not accept USG.Nobels or any such thing. Whereas Solzhenitsyn & co. were quite happy to play the "we speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues!" game.
Shalamov is pure doom porn though, you bet he wouldn't cooperate with CIA otherwise he would not be writing what he was writing. He was not useful to anybody, even himself. This goes in the way of flourishing.
Shalamov was, during life, and remains today useful to everyone who is tired of court jesters' attempts to dress up in likable costumes the tumour that is power.
Well, saying that he is not useful to anyone was perhaps a hyperbole. It should not be taken literally, obviously. But my point is, my impression was that his aspirations were fundamentally far worse than Solzhenitsyn's, like he saw no redemption in what happened to him, did not strive to do much in a way of analysis or practical advice, and his stories were almost like pure revenge porn, like I'm gonna show everybody what a whore you are behind closed doors, sovetskaya vlasot. Plus, I think the dude had actual physical mental problems and spent his latter days in a psych ward, which might have colored this grim and defeatist outlook. Sure, his works are documents of a particular kind of experience that happened, and that's priceless. But... I would not go as far as to canonize this guy as some sort of saint. He was a leftie in his youth, he was a junkie, to borrow Moldbug's frame. His 15 year prison journey began because of him telling the interrogators that the Party was going way too far to the right!
The Solzhenitsyn counterpoint was the first thing I thought of as well. Last year I read Live Not By Lies and thought it was a difficult but ultimately necessary protocol to follow in order to keep my sanity and pride in the current regime.
Reading this post and CY’s recent posts on ketman strike me as a totally different tactic. Honestly it feels more cowardly, but much more likely to result in actual flourishing.
I’m leaning towards ketman as a better strategy for surviving professional and flourishing personally.
Am I taking the easy way out?
For the last ten years or so, I have been (unknowingly) practicing ketman myself. This works great for me in modern America because the US isn't that bad these days. Ketman would not work in a country like the USSR, which is more-or-less the goal state for the Ruling Class. As a nominal member of the ruling class myself, there will come a time after which I will not be able to continue with my work without crossing a moral boundary. After that, who knows? There are numerous people not in the Ruling Class for which modern America is a dystopian nightmare, however, and it is these people I fear for most of all. One never knows ahead of time what the exact tipping point is for regime change, but having tens of millions of white men vilified; imprisoned in their homes; fed a diet of opiates, booze, and intersectionality; all while being heavily armed, does not bode well for the regime in the medium term.
One thing that surprises me is that in a lot of ways, CY is our Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn's primary achievement was his identification of the full and complete nature of the Soviet regime: who they are, what they did (and continued to do), and why. For that he was vilified. While the Soviets were agitated about Solzhenitsyn's agitation, it was his writings they feared the most. CY can reject politics and political activism all he wants, but his writings (along with those of a few other intellectual dissidents--I'm thinking primarily of Angelo Codevilla) are the modern American Gulag Archipelagos. The problem with our ruling class is that they are completely feckless and incompetent at censorship, plus they themselves don't know the nature of their own regime. 99% of the Ruling Class really do think they are implementing "law and order" and "faithfully executing the laws" and "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" without once having the presence of mind to look around them at the abject tyranny they are instituting in the name of "progressivism" or "The Great Reset" or "Fighting Climate Change." CY dares to name the nature of the regime.
Solzhenitsyn didn't live to see regime change? And most certainly Solzhenitsyn and the dissidents had very little to do with the regime change. And it is very easy to see, they were/are completely absent from the new Russia power map.
I've been looking for you & I finally found you.
I don't want to share my old FB moniker, but we were 'friends' there for a long time until I deleted all my social media accounts.
Are you on MeWe? If so, give out your handle if you don't mind & I'll PM you there.
Solzhenitsyn's reputation would fare better if he didn't have a mass grave full of skeletons in his closet. In his homeland, he is political poison for any party. I don't think he ever was urbane.
“If it’s not PC, it’s not urbane”
Does that mean you will no longer be using “retarded” or “gay” (as in this post)?
I wonder if that’s a flex on Yarvin’s part? He’s being the change he wants to see (monarchy)!
Alternatively, maybe every time he uses “gay”, he’s using it in its pre-1921 meaning? Same with “retarded”?
Ah shit. I just used “flex”.
I think this precedent was set when ol' yarvy deleted one of my comments on an early post for dropping the first r in the book title. It wasn't a typo curtis!!
Permaculture :
“Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.”
Our intrepid host was discussed yesterday (Feb 22) on the Lex Fridman podcast (with Eric Weinstein): https://youtu.be/ifX_JnBfxTY?t=5335
All these verbal gymnastics just to admit that the has a point without admitting it.
Bit off topic but thought I'd share - Texas is allowing private cities to operate, one is being developed as we type and scheme. Wondering the ramifications of suddenly privately operated "Live, Work, Play" cities sprouting all over our glorious Slobovia and how it might tweak our framework if at at all. (https://images1.loopnet.com/d2/ppFwD5BvYVIf0l3BLcrgAq1q1FCgoTnmYNLl_R5Lk98/document.pdf)
IIRC Texas isn't the only state in the process of implementing this. This really does smell like high-ranking dissidents throwing their weight around behind the scenes. Maybe something good will actually come of this, though it might just be yet another way to get more migrants in.
> Texas isn't the only state in the process of implementing this
A lot of states have laws in place to pass off road and utilities development to builders, maintained by HOA fees. Gov't likes it because they get property taxes, but don't provide services. (Reminds me a lot of Argentina, actually.)
I believe they are the most far along, fundraising is almost closed on the development side... Interesting to see how this fits into the concept of patchworks and what 'real' power these proto-Night Cities will be able to enforce - especially keen to see how the first stabbing victim is treated, and conversely any public backlash.
CY should move his blog out of "politics: category on substack, no way to compete with noise. This blog is culture/philosophy/history/literature/technology. I recommend moving to culture, philosophy or history. Either of those.
This is an etiquette blog now.
That’s so damn funny