This post as a masterpiece. It manages to step on literally everyones toes in the most masterful of ways.
I suggest we use it as a pseudo Turing Test for NPCs as anyone from any “side” who comes away from this post without having had their worldview at least marginally shook is clearly a bot.
Joke aside, the level of non-idealogical thought Mr. Yarvin has put forth is very impressive and powerful. It is a demonstration of not copying what others think, instead using some far more personal set of principles. This has led to a much clear/sharper view. Like a hot knife through butter, here-to-for thoughts are pushed aside creating a new higher view of what is happening, what is power. I have spent much of today reflecting on this view, here are some thoughts.
First, a distinction, consider what power is or really prestige. The NYT has power because it has prestige. But you ask, what is prestige, and why does NYT have it, why would I want it? I figured you would like to know. Prestige is deference, yes like a lord and his vassal, or a mother and her son. They are deferential relationships. No money need change hands. No one needs to be whipped. The NYT reader has respect for the paper, it trusts it, it bears deference to it. So when his majesty sulzberger makes a decree. The readers of the NYT in so far as he defers to prestige, change their minds to align with the NYT. In this power is transitive, as Mr. Yarvin said, it leaks. The NYT reader gets prestige for being an NYT reader. He goes to work and provides informed opinions to his colleagues, they respect him for this because they too respect NYT. Are you beginning to see it? It is like a ladder, or maybe a pyramid. Power flows down, and deference up. Those who want power must gain more prestige. To get prestige, you need to be like the tree, near water. Power smells, like blood in the water, Facebook/Twitter, is losing a lot of blood. (Something we hope will happen to NYT) A power leak is a way to gain prestige. If you have power over Facebook, you get a lot of prestige, as we have seen. You can make big moves. (bye trump)
If you have ever gone to school, you know what prestige & deference are. The popular kid has no formal power, he cannot have a kid suspended at will, or ban him from the cafeteria. Yet he has power. He has prestige. And with prestige comes deference. It doesn't really matter why a kid has prestige, he could be a bully, or the star football player, maybe just a really nice guy who is well liked. What matters is people bear deference, when he speaks they listen, and they change. When he likes you, others like you. When he dislikes you, they dislike you. Why does this happen? Just like the NYT, or the tree by the oasis, power leaks. To be popular, be friends with popular. Power flows down, to get power bear deference to prestige. Suck up to the popular kid, or just make him like you. That's why you couldn't have lunch at the popular table.
Maybe this will help. Money = power, in its own sphere. Anyone who values money pays deference to money. Prestige = ownership. Power is transitive, you use it, it is gone. Prestige, in-so-far as it has scope is not expended when used. What the boss says goes, every time, as long as it is within his scope of deference.
Prestige > power, Ownership > money. Maybe odd terms, but you can get the logic. If you can see this, what Mr. Yarvin is on about, in this and his last post, will make all the more sense. E=mc^2 is true, but not all energy is expended, you see this. For the current power to fall, it must lose its Prestige. I think this will happen, it always does, and too far greater people than currently have it.
This is a short exposition. If you have questions I'll answer them, if you want a more fleshed out post. Well Mr. Yarvin may inspire me to start a blog.
Deference is class. Not the caveman bean counting of Marxist class but class- like Humphrey Bogart. Class recognizes class. Class is talent…
The French Laundry is prestigious because of the perceived talent. Of course he is talented, in 2000, now it runs on the perception of talent. Sure, a new chef in some pop-up favela restaurant may make better food but the elite are not eating at his table, just the Brazilian upper-middle class- eww.
What happens if Chef Liberbitz of The Laundry denies Pelosi a seat at his table? Her political career is done.
As an example, what’s with the immigrants? Simply, the aesthetic elite see no difference between the rust belt resident and a Haitian… they are both disgusting and deserve some quasi-moral philanthropic endeavor which will be decided by the classy international poverty expert invited to the French Laundry and this expert is non-binary, how fancy!?
So why would someone like Tucker Carlson not be invited… he may say the food tastes like shit because he has been to this place in Rio…
This probably a banal point, but this piece made me think of the phenomenon known as the "red-pilled leftist" (see Michael Tracey, Glenn Greenwald, et.al) you know, leftist who get ostracized by the ruling media class. It seems to me they understand they're living in a oligarchy but they are true romantic democrats.
I’m wayyy too late on this one, but if you haven’t read Curtis’ wonderful piece “Coriolanus and the conservatives” it hits the nail on the head for what you’re talking about here.
It seems they always default to the regime though. I don't know how well they can do that and qualify as "redpilled", as far as that means something in the context of a lefty journo.
> if they could blink T-O-R-T-U-R-E at you in Morse code, they would
This is 100% correct, I worked in one of these big tech firms until last fall. The legitimate media skewered them for years mercilessly, regardless of what they did. There are enough Pavlik Morozovs who read those newspapers and listen to those podcasts to turn against them on the inside, too.
Thank you Mr. Yarvin! Your regularity of posting and the quality, is amazing; has been wonderful this past year, short as she has been. You are an inspiration to myself, and I am sure to us all.
Two thoughts come to mind with regards to the “woke” power leak.
One - weak people:
I’ve talked to people who have admitted to supporting the woke narrative because they feel pressure to do so. They don’t actually believe in it, but they lack the backbone to stand up to the people who are exploiting the power leak. Frankly this is just sad.
Two: The government’s woke power leaks:
I believe, a large portion of wokeness stems from the US Government’s (USG) acquisition race laws specifically affirmative action and the 8a program.
The affirmative action power leak is simple, when a federal contractor has one job opening and two equality qualified candidates one minority and one white dude, the minority gets the job because the USG law says so. In fact, sometimes, the federal contractor has to specifically find minorities because they aren’t meeting their quota. In order to deal with this, the federal contractor creates an entire department to comply with the law. The USG, has an enforcement arm that verify compliance. And entire law firms exist to support both entities. This results in an entire sector that is propped up by this power leak. Everyone who is employed in this sector is “feeling the power” every day and working to and ideally grow the power leak.
The first outgrowth of affirmative action is more hidden, in 1978 congress established the "8a program” by extending the Small Business Act of 1958 to include minority set asides - a new, and potentially more powerful leak that the affirmative action power leak. Likely only people who have spent time in the belly of the USG acquistion beast have encountered this. The 8a program is a really neat trick. If your company is a small business and 51% owned by a minority and said minority is not rich or venture funded, then they can apply to the 8a program. If they are accepted into the 8a program, this new company will qualify for up to 100M dollars over 8 years in 8a justified sole-source contracts. What is a 8a justified sole source contract you ask? Traditionally when USG buys something - services or things - the USG has to run a “competitive process” and solicit multiple bids in order to find the lowest price for the services or things they need. A “competitive process” is a total pain, the govie (civilian employed by USG) generally wants to avoid this at all cost and would rather award a sole source contract, which means, they didn’t seek bids for the work. When a govie awards a sole source contract, he mush justify why he did not seek other bids. Sometimes, he’ll write things like these people are the only people in the world who have the skills to build or maintain our totally out dated IT system and training new people is going to cost more. However, when they do this they better be right because, they could end up fired or maybe in jail if they abuse this power. Alternatively, the govie can justify the contract award by essentially writing “company XYZ is a member of the 8a program”. Boom. No risk of getting fired or thrown jail, no need to bother with a time consuming “competitive process”, money is spent and job is done. In many cases, the govies doesn’t even hire the people in the 8a company, rather the 8a company passes the money onto the govie’s “ friends” via a subcontract. This is a win for everyone, mostly. The 8a company takes a chunk of the money and work as a pass-though fee, the govie spends the money he needs to spend. If the work gets done, that’s just a bonus, the most important thing to the govie is that he spends the money, as if he does not his budget will shrink next year. The subcontractor is not exactly happy but they are at least still in business. They have learned that they have to play this game in order to survive so they keep their mouth shut.
Regardless of whether or not the people involved in this situation agree or disagree with the motive of the 8a program, the power leak is useful to them, it helps them them do their job. Now, the executives who oversee the 8a program are 100% woke and they and all their employees in their office and contractors who support them (not the 8a members) are also 100% woke and every day they work to expand the size of the 8a program by increasing the the programs budget and preaching the woke narrative. The 8a companies, they hit a type of lottery, if the minority owner isn’t a retard, they will average make $250k/yr over the next 8 years and split the 8% profit with their non minority partner of the 100M. Netting them $6 Million. After their 8 years are up, they’ll probably sell to Lockheed Martin for like 15 mil pocketing another 7.5M. Bringing their total compensation to $13.5M over eight years. It should go without saying, but all of the people getting rich or having they career progress in this environment continue to advocate for the woke narrative.
So what does this all mean, these power leaks leak tens of billions of dollars per year to support the work narrative. Any new race based set aside expands the leak. Sadly the corona stimulus and platinum plan include this sort of thing. If these leaks were plugged, the volume of the woke narrative would drastically decrease.
Maybe you’re right on some level, but, having been a relatively woke individual myself as recently as 2018, I can say that for a lot of people, it just feels virtuous to be woke. That’s it.
For anyone interested, I realized that this relates to the "policy" and "position" concepts that Yarvin presents in his post "The political amplifier". I explain more over there.
" There is no market at all for pro-Facebook journalism. The concept is ridiculous. "
It wasn't always. I remember 2008, and all those glowing pieces about how the young, forward-looking Obama campaign was using exciting technologies like "Facebook" to mobilise activists and get his message to a wide audience, bypassing nasty old things like party fundraising establishments.
Can't somebody put this to music? I could have taken a swing at it myself in the alternative timeline where I actually became a recording engineer instead of a software engineer
Ok, this is an interesting way to look at it. Facebook is a _generator_ of power, but does not _wield_ it, so the power is not its own. I agree with the sentiment - Zuck is a cuck. I don't take the idea of rolling back section 230 very seriously either (and not just because it wouldn't hurt Facebook much, though it would hurt everybody else as a side-effect).
Not that it matters in the moment, but hypothetically how would one fix a power leak like this? From the zuck perspective, how do you seal the pipes and send the little journos scurrying off to some other pond. For some scrappy underdog competitor like Parler it's not even obvious that they generate power, which is why the "cathedral" just goes right over their head to their hosting and payment processing providers and has them crushed like insects. But the press can't threaten Facebook's host. It is its own host. It's extremely unlikely the press could threaten its bank either. It could support unraveling 230, but Facebook could afford this, so that's not it.
The press could try to make Facebook seem very uncool, but this stopped being a problem a long time ago. The press represent the adults, so whatever they say is cool becomes lame for the kids; whatever they say is lame becomes cool for the kids. In any case, while Facebook is very lame, grandma thinks it's cool and if you want to talk to grandma or see what she had for lunch you have to do it on Facebook. So the kids are still on Facebook. Facebook owns both the adults and the kids demos.
There were lots of skirmishes between the press and wider analog media versus the tech media about a decade ago. The analog media felt threatened, which indicates the tech media had power, and it seemed at that point like tech could crush analog any time it wanted. Just cut them out of search results, shadowban them on Facebook and Twitter, watch them wither on the vine. The press played the victim here - variously demanding to be elevated above "fake news" sources and that they be granted royalties for every link and excerpt on Google News, Facebook News, etc. But then something strange happened and tech gave them everything they wanted. Was it infiltration? Cathedral double-agents? Did they get invited to the oligarchic table?
Much remains unexplained here. What is the mechanism that creates the power leak, and how might it have been prevented or how can it be undone?
Greetings from eastern european compound! Zuck, are you reading this? You can do it! It's not as bad as it looks. We will host your servers on our cozy little land. When the soviets were in power here all those decades ago, some of you made sacrifices to support our freedom to think.
Now the tables have turned and we will return the favor! This time it is easier! The truth is that neomonarchical systems are the future and as free thinking men we are going to propagate this important truth; it can not be silenced, not by an empire in decline at least. If any person of importance within the US government considers what I say to be dAnGErouS and HaTEful discourse, I defy that person to launch a full scale nuclear attack to silence me.
Would Curtis deny that Hollywood is, or at least used to be, an important part of the polycentric institutional oligarchy he mentions?
I ask because I see the video game industry as the New Hollywood, and AGDQ as possibly a cooler meeting of "progressive" minds than Burning Man. What do kids know about the French Revolution? Why, what they learned from playing Assassin's Creed Unity. What about futurism? Cyberpunk 2077. Modern Warfare? COD: Modern Warfare. I think the collective memeset of modern video games is really powerful and deserves to be mentioned in any discussion of power.
On the other hand, a possibly overrated attempt to gain power by the tech industry is all these new-fangled decentralised chat platforms like Secure Scuttlebutt and, well, Urbit. Since we already have Twitter and Facebook, and Youtube and Twitch, and Medium and Substack, there's already a shit-tonne of ways for different kinds of people to keep in touch and discuss stuff. I feel as though it's more powerful to create content that people will want to talk about, than to create yet another means of discussing it. IMO.
Still, it's ironic that the creator of Urbit is downplaying the potential of the tech industry to accumulate power, or change the balance of power, by creating stuff.
1. I think he would agree that Hollywood is important but movies don't have anywhere near the same impact as a publication that focuses on politics and current events.
2. Gamers are low-status and don't matter.
3. Alternative platforms serve as cooperation hubs, but yes, action > words.
Hollywood is just another conduit of power and has always been abused by the press - the yellow press, the critics, etc. They're in the same position as Facebook, not in the same position as the New York Times.
I remember thinking, for example, that, if you want to increase the number of women and minorities in tech jobs, you need to create "propaganda" in the form of film and TV that presents those tech roles as possible for women and minorities. And how do you make Hollywood produce such propaganda? Pressure. Can they refuse? Have they refused? No, but they're doing their jobs half-assedly. Perhaps, they are not scared enough
Gamers themselves are just ordinary people nowadays. I mean it's extremely mainstream to be a gamer. But what would, say, 4chan be without the existence of video games? That's like taking a baby's rattle away. And are you going to deny the political importance of 4chan and its ilk?
Or check the trending topics on Twitter. Nine times out of ten there'll be something video game related. If you want to change how people think, release a great video game.
The thing about modern video games is that they are simultaneously an entertainment genre, a source of memes, and a (if facile) study of history and culture. It's actually kind of wholesome if Halo multiplayer rules the world and not Samantha Power, because of that multiple valence.
> Gamers themselves are just ordinary people nowadays.
In other words inconsequential. I'm suprised you're considering mass movements after you've been reading Moldbug and perhaps other NRx authors. You don't need the demos, the demos is lazy and stupid. You need a dedicated elite. Like Lenin's idea of a vanguard party. That works. 'Everyone all together now' doesn't work beyond 3 people.
> I mean it's extremely mainstream to be a gamer.
Exactly. It's just like asking Netflix viewers to overthrow their regimes because they saw Friends.
> But what would, say, 4chan be without the existence of video games?
/v/ is a containment board. There's plenty of chan culture that's not focused on vidya and wifus. What about /fit/, /sci/, /pol/, /lit/, /g/, /his/, etc. 4chan is a hub for edgy misfits with strange personalities. Gamers are one faction. Not even necessarily even the biggest one, considering the GG purge that made most of them more intense ones go to infinity chan. Newfag.
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> Or check the trending topics on Twitter. Nine times out of ten there'll be something video game related.
I don't have twitter. I advise you to block all social media and limit your web usage to purposeful productive work and project development. Use LeechBlock.
> It's actually kind of wholesome if Halo multiplayer rules the world and not Samantha Power, because of that multiple valence.
That's a lot of words for gay.
Entertainment is passive low-intensity masturbation with no orgasm.
Entertainment trumps press politcs. The political party of CNN and MSNBC dont care about anything. While maga thinks that burning down the cathedral is winning, all of its enemies have evacuated. Their politics is baseless. They have no hill they'd die on and just go wherever they can be passive and easy. Sheep arent territorial. Drugs, alcohol, TV evading anything that challenges their opinions.
the cathedral is what schools of fish. The fish are who im referring to. NYT/CNN are just like Big Tech in that they leak power to these fish or at least they seem to. Its highly coordinated, without a coordinator. Instead of coordination around a principle, personality, or policy, it is all about desire for power/entertainment. Fickle.
The thing in Urbit's favor is that, since it's decentralized by design, since users can escape any host that decides to censor them, there is really no power to leak. There's no Zuckerberg to wield power through. If people are discussing wrongthink on it, there's nobody who can really put a stop to it.
So when someone writes an article entitled "People are discussing wrongthink on Urbit!!11!!", they will have some sort of action in mind, some way to "make a difference" or "speak truth to power" or whatever they tell themselves. Like, you know, censoring people or making bots to auto-report them to the FBI.
People don't want to know that people are discussing wrongthink somewhere, they want to _do something about it_.
And if there's really nothing that can actually be done about this on Urbit (by design), there's little satisfaction to writing or reading such pieces. So journalists and their readers will find some other target that they can make dance.
Seems only partially correct. Most alt-tech sites like Parker, Gab and Hatreon have been viciously attacked and banned. That said, 4chan earns a lot of ire, and is still huge, but journalists never actually seem to do anything about it.
IMHO, the continued reliance of the "dissidents" on Visa, Paypal, AWS, etc. is a puzzler.
The "attacked and banned" folks ought to at least *try* hosting in e.g. Moscow and accepting subscription fees in Bitcoin, before going into "resistance is futile" prostration and to the bottle.
Sadly, AFAIK the West only has an East. The kind to which e.g.
Martin and Mitchell went off to drink themselves to death in obscurity.
But it hasn't got a West -- in the sense of e.g. "the place from which bootleggers will smuggle in jeans and forbidden cassettes" and "to which an American Belenko can fly his F-35 at two metres above seawater, defect, and happily eat delicious cat food from a supermarket where his jaw drops from the sheer abundance of tinned foods every time."
This make me wonder about the relative size of Facebook vs 4chan and I found: Facebook - 2.7 billion monthly active users, 4chan - 22 million monthly active users. Could be wrong, I clicked the first link with a number for each.
Dead souls - you're right! Zuckerbuger and Dorsey are just our modern-day Charon. They both have a hallow dead look and live at the mercy of more powerful gods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon
I wonder what Curtis would say about this. I think Hollywood’s influence has lessened and media companies’ has grown— fewer people watch movies now, and the new ones mostly suck.
Dude this post was incredible. I'd vaguely heard of you but as someone who's been trying to figure out the woke thing consider me an instant fan.
The press clearly has the most power. The only reason Biden's approval rating sunk is that some of the media actually hit him on the Afghanistan. All of a sudden magically he loses 10% approval. All the NPCs needed to dislike Biden was the media being semi critical of him for three weeks. Going by that example CNN could probably destroy the Democrats in one day if they wanted if they really went to town and opened the floodgates on things like the Durham report, Hunter's laptop etc. They are basically at the mercy of the press. The press could also end covid quickly if they started promoting pro-freedom message.
Maybe the best way to describe the woke is a relatively small group of psychopaths being orbited by sheep and cowards, politicians trying to get re-elected, corporations trying not to get cancelled, media trying to impress viewers, all of him internally realize in some ways "this group of psychopaths is scary. I should do what they say". They are complimented by a much larger group of people who's main mission in life is to be perceived as normal and have convinced themselves normal is supporting the left wing establishment, in addition to also sharing some of that fear of the psychos.
You did a good job distinguishing the press owner (Sulzberger, for example) but you might want to clarify that point further if you do any follow up on the subject. If I know you as well as I do, you certainly will touch this subject again.
Because the semi-obvious rejoinder is that Bezos bought the 2nd most prestigious newspaper in the country, if not the world (FT or Guardian might outrank it, Beeb might still outrank any of those despite not being a dead-tree institution, but we're quibbling).
I can keen your rebuttal to that: That Bezos might have bought WaPo with the idea that then he would have power - he even got to change the slogan to "Democracy Dies in Darkness" (and now participates in snuffing the lamps out, not only all across Europe, but the First World), but he doesn't get to exercise any meaningful power over it. As in: lets say he tried to reverse course, took editorial control and began to order his employees there to take a different tack. He replaced the Editorial page with the kind of people Ron Unz hosts, or with the columnists from Taki Mag. The thing that would happen is a total hissy-fit revolt, monkey poo-flinging, and either Jeff would reverse his decision, say he was only kidding, apologize for the prank and promise never, ever to do it again, and sign some sort of WaPo version of the Magna Carta cementing his humiliation, OR there would be a massive defection, La Prensa style, and WaPo would end up with as much prestige as the Washington Times has had (probably even less) or the Washington Examiner (probably even less). He's smart enough to see several moves ahead, so of course he doesn't do anything so self-defeating. He lets the WaPo staff become who they are. He makes sure to hire people who fit in, but even moreso (probably he doesn't do that, even - he probably makes no hiring decisions whatsoever, even for the top jobs there - he knows better). He has ownership, but not control - which is something you pointed out long ago: the converse is the way the Modern Structure exercises power (control, without formal ownership. Of course, if you control something you effectively own it; pwn it. It's yours. Regardless of what the title deed says. But you don't have to accept any responsibility for failure, and you get to hide your power over said thing. Because, after all, Bezos owns it and he has all the money - it says right there in the legal documents and bank accounts - so of course...)
Anyhow I think some people will miss this, accidentally or "accidentally on purpose" like several of your regular commentators (the tggp-type) from back in the day typically did.
It’s even simpler than that. The WAPO isn’t a place for Bezos to control the narrative; that’s impossible. It is, however, one of the world’s greatest sources of PRESTIGE. This is more true the less Bezos interferes with it— the less his ownerships appears to affect their “responsible journalism— so exercising control is completely against the reason for buying it; why would he do that?
"Zuckerberg could no more block this power flux than he can block a lightning bolt."
This statement is hyperbolic, in the same way that Yarvin's previous statements re the Supreme Court have been (but more so since Zuckerberg is a single man).
If Zuckerberg really wanted to, he could allow free speech on Facebook. He'd lose some employees and be a pariah, but he wouldn't lose his company, nor would any organ of the formal government go after him (in the US). It's true that he has very strong incentives to go with the flow, but he's not replaceable in the way that e.g. a moderator is.
Everything conceivable would go wrong for him. The bad press would be never ending, and Facebook would rapidly become a 4chan of social media (not bad for us, but bad for investors). The board might not revolt, as Zuck is the majority shareholder, but expect a lot of them to quietly “retire.” Employees would become harder to hire, to say nothing of those who would immediately quit. Most brutally, in a manner similar to the US Government, internal issues and company secrets would leak to the press at a faster and faster rate, eventually delegitimizing Facebook entirely.
He'd suffer for it, but the point is that (at present) no one could stop him if he did decide to reverse course. So describing him as a passive conduit of the Cathedral is not accurate.
No one could stop him if he were willing to suffer his company to be destroyed and himself to become a low-status pariah. Then again nobody can stop you from committing any crime you want provided you are willing to suffer prison or execution. Coercion is a spectrum.
#DeleteFacebook, the whole blame campaign for 2016, Cambridge Analytica, all the leaks and blows in the past 5 years. Hating Facebook becomes a meme, something you do as casually and uncontroversially as complaining about the traffic. This takes a financial toll, and a psychological toll, too.
And just look at Parler this week: that is what Facebook is afraid of. There are already plenty of hipsters who wouldn't want to associate with Facebook. And once you become a pariah, nobody wants to stand next to you except for those you'd rather not stand next to, yourself
"Just look at Parler" is almost as ridiculous as saying Google is held in check by the threat a domain registrar will pull google.com. They would push a Chrome update and replace the entire DNS in two days if that happened, or just threaten people behind the scenes into crushing whoever stepped out of line.
Facebook would have no problems hosting Parler. There is no equivalence here.
Zuck, like most people, probably cares more about his social standing than anything. Worth adding this one to the list: if he took a stand, his wife might divorce him and take the kids.
Even if the odds are only 1 in 10 that his life as *he* knows it would end, that would be enough to keep most people from rolling the dice, especially after watching Parler get nuked *pour encourager les autres.*
This could almost be a litmus test to separate genuine and cardboard oligarchs.
The real deal doesn't give a rat's arse re: anything that any Reich court orders. Instead builds e.g. own navy, like L. R. Hubbard; or converts his dough to BTC and moves to [redacted], like [redacted]; purchases, say, a working 941 Akula with complete set of rockets; and in general behaves like a sovereign -- rather than like whatever pliant toad was "president" of e.g. I. G. Farben in 1943.
Google and Facebook both own their own servers. Google already owns domain registrars and its own app store. Facebook could easily purchase a domain registrar if it needed to. If either wanted to, it could easily keep its services running and accessible to normies on its own.
They own their servers, but they don't own their users nor their employees. The #DeleteUber campaign was very effective. So was #DeleteFacebook. I used to have interesting friends on Facebook before 2017, but they left the platform after the media blitz. What do you think would happen if Facebook or Google went full-on Pirate Bay on us? They are not irreplaceable
It's possible that patching the power leak would (with time) stop the media attacks. Even if it didn't, the same social-monopoly which keeps right-normies from leaving en masse would keep left-normies from leaving en masse.
Long term the media could promote some other platform and that could eventually become the default social space. But that doesn't change the fact that Zuckerberg has stable individual power on the scale of years at least.
More plausibly: he'd suffer a "tragic racecar accident" or plane crash etc. and his replacement *will* play ball.
Or, alternatively, will be "epsteined". (And for that matter, we groundlings still don't know for *what* exactly Epstein was epsteined. And not likely to ever find out.)
As Curtis himself wrote a decade ago, "death is cheaper, quicker, easier, more permanent, and more persuasive than persuasion."
How elites deal with top-level defectors is entirely the same today as it was in 1957, and -1957, and will be entirely the same in 3057.
The rarity of radioactive teapots, poisoned umbrella syringes, etc. in the current "civilized world" is on account of their tame, proactively-compliant "bonsai kitten" elites -- rather than some kind of magical shift in the fundamental game rules.
In the long term that would be an issue, but Congress is slow and unwieldy. There'd be no danger (as things stand now) of a "sudden" attack from the formal government.
I can tell you for a fact that Facebook the company does not want to censor. It doesn’t actually align with the values of its leaders, and it’s tremendously expensive because it tries to be fair as much as is practical. I don’t have such faith in any social network created by a government.
I'm not saying you're wrong. They do seem to have been constrained in the past only by what they didn't have to do to stay in power. But at least you're countersignalling here: in Yarvin's narrative Facebook's power is leaking to the press, not the government.
Full court press. Facebook grew something out of nothing, and now can provide more jobs to lawyers therefore it leaks power to the government that they didnt have before. The press is just the K-9 unit of the cathedral that sniffs out and barks at any higher intellect. Theres no leashes on the dogs, so the law just follows the dogs.
Maybe one final thought: I recently checked out Parler and CloutHub, and I see that those things can't succeed. They are 99.99% composed of marginal characters, not any sort of elites at all. I felt repulsed by what I saw. Yes, I am convinced that cultivating a dissident intelligentsia is the only way to move forward. Who's going to do it, though?
I agree completely that in this power ecosystem of government, big tech, people and journalists, that the prestige journalist/press seems to be the most ever present bad actors and ideological enforcers and seem to somehow have the highest trust or power over the public and the other power players. They’re the most protean and elusive, and seem to have nothing really to hold them accountable in any really significant way. I Do think their mission of channeling the political energy of the masses for their bidding will be significantly harder with trump out of the picture. He was the Vince Macmahon/ric flair of politics and there’s no possible way they can create a more perfect heel if they tried. By reinforcing the stereotypes so perfectly, he gave those institutions so much more prestige capital. When are people most United? When there’s a serious enemy? Aftermath of 9/11, ww2 etc. this is different since the enemy is internal, but if there’s one thing the left is completely cohesive about its The Trump threat. As ridiculous as the majority of the criticism he’s drawn has been, he is almost perfectly indefensible to these people. If there’s any hope I have of reducing the power of the press, then that’s the thing I’m optimistic about. Of course if people keep attacking capital buildings, you’ll just have “Muslim terrorists” 2.0 that you can justify doing anything you want to so much rests on how much the “revolutionary” right plays into that trap. It’s a war of attrition but they have the upper hand, they get ten times as much mileage or political power out of genuine right wing extremism as the right does from instances in the opposite spectrum. That will be lower with no orange guy.
This post as a masterpiece. It manages to step on literally everyones toes in the most masterful of ways.
I suggest we use it as a pseudo Turing Test for NPCs as anyone from any “side” who comes away from this post without having had their worldview at least marginally shook is clearly a bot.
Hi, I am bot.
Joke aside, the level of non-idealogical thought Mr. Yarvin has put forth is very impressive and powerful. It is a demonstration of not copying what others think, instead using some far more personal set of principles. This has led to a much clear/sharper view. Like a hot knife through butter, here-to-for thoughts are pushed aside creating a new higher view of what is happening, what is power. I have spent much of today reflecting on this view, here are some thoughts.
First, a distinction, consider what power is or really prestige. The NYT has power because it has prestige. But you ask, what is prestige, and why does NYT have it, why would I want it? I figured you would like to know. Prestige is deference, yes like a lord and his vassal, or a mother and her son. They are deferential relationships. No money need change hands. No one needs to be whipped. The NYT reader has respect for the paper, it trusts it, it bears deference to it. So when his majesty sulzberger makes a decree. The readers of the NYT in so far as he defers to prestige, change their minds to align with the NYT. In this power is transitive, as Mr. Yarvin said, it leaks. The NYT reader gets prestige for being an NYT reader. He goes to work and provides informed opinions to his colleagues, they respect him for this because they too respect NYT. Are you beginning to see it? It is like a ladder, or maybe a pyramid. Power flows down, and deference up. Those who want power must gain more prestige. To get prestige, you need to be like the tree, near water. Power smells, like blood in the water, Facebook/Twitter, is losing a lot of blood. (Something we hope will happen to NYT) A power leak is a way to gain prestige. If you have power over Facebook, you get a lot of prestige, as we have seen. You can make big moves. (bye trump)
If you have ever gone to school, you know what prestige & deference are. The popular kid has no formal power, he cannot have a kid suspended at will, or ban him from the cafeteria. Yet he has power. He has prestige. And with prestige comes deference. It doesn't really matter why a kid has prestige, he could be a bully, or the star football player, maybe just a really nice guy who is well liked. What matters is people bear deference, when he speaks they listen, and they change. When he likes you, others like you. When he dislikes you, they dislike you. Why does this happen? Just like the NYT, or the tree by the oasis, power leaks. To be popular, be friends with popular. Power flows down, to get power bear deference to prestige. Suck up to the popular kid, or just make him like you. That's why you couldn't have lunch at the popular table.
Maybe this will help. Money = power, in its own sphere. Anyone who values money pays deference to money. Prestige = ownership. Power is transitive, you use it, it is gone. Prestige, in-so-far as it has scope is not expended when used. What the boss says goes, every time, as long as it is within his scope of deference.
Prestige > power, Ownership > money. Maybe odd terms, but you can get the logic. If you can see this, what Mr. Yarvin is on about, in this and his last post, will make all the more sense. E=mc^2 is true, but not all energy is expended, you see this. For the current power to fall, it must lose its Prestige. I think this will happen, it always does, and too far greater people than currently have it.
This is a short exposition. If you have questions I'll answer them, if you want a more fleshed out post. Well Mr. Yarvin may inspire me to start a blog.
Deference is class. Not the caveman bean counting of Marxist class but class- like Humphrey Bogart. Class recognizes class. Class is talent…
The French Laundry is prestigious because of the perceived talent. Of course he is talented, in 2000, now it runs on the perception of talent. Sure, a new chef in some pop-up favela restaurant may make better food but the elite are not eating at his table, just the Brazilian upper-middle class- eww.
What happens if Chef Liberbitz of The Laundry denies Pelosi a seat at his table? Her political career is done.
As an example, what’s with the immigrants? Simply, the aesthetic elite see no difference between the rust belt resident and a Haitian… they are both disgusting and deserve some quasi-moral philanthropic endeavor which will be decided by the classy international poverty expert invited to the French Laundry and this expert is non-binary, how fancy!?
So why would someone like Tucker Carlson not be invited… he may say the food tastes like shit because he has been to this place in Rio…
This probably a banal point, but this piece made me think of the phenomenon known as the "red-pilled leftist" (see Michael Tracey, Glenn Greenwald, et.al) you know, leftist who get ostracized by the ruling media class. It seems to me they understand they're living in a oligarchy but they are true romantic democrats.
I’m wayyy too late on this one, but if you haven’t read Curtis’ wonderful piece “Coriolanus and the conservatives” it hits the nail on the head for what you’re talking about here.
It seems they always default to the regime though. I don't know how well they can do that and qualify as "redpilled", as far as that means something in the context of a lefty journo.
Only insofar the regime is operating as a democracy. At least with GG and MT, I consider some of the finest whingers of our time.
> if they could blink T-O-R-T-U-R-E at you in Morse code, they would
This is 100% correct, I worked in one of these big tech firms until last fall. The legitimate media skewered them for years mercilessly, regardless of what they did. There are enough Pavlik Morozovs who read those newspapers and listen to those podcasts to turn against them on the inside, too.
And thank you, sir, I finally feel seen
Thank you Mr. Yarvin! Your regularity of posting and the quality, is amazing; has been wonderful this past year, short as she has been. You are an inspiration to myself, and I am sure to us all.
Two thoughts come to mind with regards to the “woke” power leak.
One - weak people:
I’ve talked to people who have admitted to supporting the woke narrative because they feel pressure to do so. They don’t actually believe in it, but they lack the backbone to stand up to the people who are exploiting the power leak. Frankly this is just sad.
Two: The government’s woke power leaks:
I believe, a large portion of wokeness stems from the US Government’s (USG) acquisition race laws specifically affirmative action and the 8a program.
The affirmative action power leak is simple, when a federal contractor has one job opening and two equality qualified candidates one minority and one white dude, the minority gets the job because the USG law says so. In fact, sometimes, the federal contractor has to specifically find minorities because they aren’t meeting their quota. In order to deal with this, the federal contractor creates an entire department to comply with the law. The USG, has an enforcement arm that verify compliance. And entire law firms exist to support both entities. This results in an entire sector that is propped up by this power leak. Everyone who is employed in this sector is “feeling the power” every day and working to and ideally grow the power leak.
The first outgrowth of affirmative action is more hidden, in 1978 congress established the "8a program” by extending the Small Business Act of 1958 to include minority set asides - a new, and potentially more powerful leak that the affirmative action power leak. Likely only people who have spent time in the belly of the USG acquistion beast have encountered this. The 8a program is a really neat trick. If your company is a small business and 51% owned by a minority and said minority is not rich or venture funded, then they can apply to the 8a program. If they are accepted into the 8a program, this new company will qualify for up to 100M dollars over 8 years in 8a justified sole-source contracts. What is a 8a justified sole source contract you ask? Traditionally when USG buys something - services or things - the USG has to run a “competitive process” and solicit multiple bids in order to find the lowest price for the services or things they need. A “competitive process” is a total pain, the govie (civilian employed by USG) generally wants to avoid this at all cost and would rather award a sole source contract, which means, they didn’t seek bids for the work. When a govie awards a sole source contract, he mush justify why he did not seek other bids. Sometimes, he’ll write things like these people are the only people in the world who have the skills to build or maintain our totally out dated IT system and training new people is going to cost more. However, when they do this they better be right because, they could end up fired or maybe in jail if they abuse this power. Alternatively, the govie can justify the contract award by essentially writing “company XYZ is a member of the 8a program”. Boom. No risk of getting fired or thrown jail, no need to bother with a time consuming “competitive process”, money is spent and job is done. In many cases, the govies doesn’t even hire the people in the 8a company, rather the 8a company passes the money onto the govie’s “ friends” via a subcontract. This is a win for everyone, mostly. The 8a company takes a chunk of the money and work as a pass-though fee, the govie spends the money he needs to spend. If the work gets done, that’s just a bonus, the most important thing to the govie is that he spends the money, as if he does not his budget will shrink next year. The subcontractor is not exactly happy but they are at least still in business. They have learned that they have to play this game in order to survive so they keep their mouth shut.
Regardless of whether or not the people involved in this situation agree or disagree with the motive of the 8a program, the power leak is useful to them, it helps them them do their job. Now, the executives who oversee the 8a program are 100% woke and they and all their employees in their office and contractors who support them (not the 8a members) are also 100% woke and every day they work to expand the size of the 8a program by increasing the the programs budget and preaching the woke narrative. The 8a companies, they hit a type of lottery, if the minority owner isn’t a retard, they will average make $250k/yr over the next 8 years and split the 8% profit with their non minority partner of the 100M. Netting them $6 Million. After their 8 years are up, they’ll probably sell to Lockheed Martin for like 15 mil pocketing another 7.5M. Bringing their total compensation to $13.5M over eight years. It should go without saying, but all of the people getting rich or having they career progress in this environment continue to advocate for the woke narrative.
So what does this all mean, these power leaks leak tens of billions of dollars per year to support the work narrative. Any new race based set aside expands the leak. Sadly the corona stimulus and platinum plan include this sort of thing. If these leaks were plugged, the volume of the woke narrative would drastically decrease.
Maybe you’re right on some level, but, having been a relatively woke individual myself as recently as 2018, I can say that for a lot of people, it just feels virtuous to be woke. That’s it.
For anyone interested, I realized that this relates to the "policy" and "position" concepts that Yarvin presents in his post "The political amplifier". I explain more over there.
" There is no market at all for pro-Facebook journalism. The concept is ridiculous. "
It wasn't always. I remember 2008, and all those glowing pieces about how the young, forward-looking Obama campaign was using exciting technologies like "Facebook" to mobilise activists and get his message to a wide audience, bypassing nasty old things like party fundraising establishments.
I miss when Mr. Yarvin used to write poems, so here is a poem I wrote for him.
__On Moldbuggery in 2021__
Who needs a good critic when you've got haters?
The forthright alt-right got woke so, "See ya later!"
Assaulting the capitol, staging a coup
But forgetting what Luttwak would have had them do
And indeed, they forgot about Ludwig von Mises
Who'd soon have decried their A Tartism, Jesus!
Like Rodney with trotters, they surely pigged out
By using their Voice, not to speak, but to shout
Now /pol/ is electrical, much is to gain
If only the shitposts don't drive you insane
And Moot is the point of the furious frog spammers
When little frogs can't scrape up Pence for a planet
On Urbit you'll find lots of futurist fucks
And Martians who'd rival fair Helen's good looks
I'd buy me a Star, and launch me some ships
If only to reseal the Trump King's fat lips
So that he can't breathe, as his last wheezy dance
Takes him to the gutter of farago France
And the black lives that matter devour his dark soul
For daring to swing at Reaction so bold
Fake news and Covid beset Moldbug's mind
Like a barbarous God, He is deaf, He is blind
But His stack is still Substack, unseen are His memes
As He lovingly lusts after 'Murrican dreams
Is it patchwork or Kraftwerk?
Would it make Miley's ass twerk?
That's still the only music
To pass muster in Munich
Can't somebody put this to music? I could have taken a swing at it myself in the alternative timeline where I actually became a recording engineer instead of a software engineer
Here's another (with massive apologies to John Lennon):
As soon as you're born, you miss out on Rothbard
Being fed pop-Keynesianism, boy that's hard
With your dearth of Hayek, you're almost a retard
A modern reactionary is something to be
A modern reactionary is something to be
They preach democracy, but they hold their noses
Whenever the Demos, it something proposes
Although working for Satan is no bed of roses
A modern reactionary is something to be
A modern reactionary is something to be
When you go to LinkedIn and upload your CV
They expect you to have no gaps in it, see
Because that might mean you were being naughty
A modern reactionary is something to be
A modern reactionary is something to be
Keep you doped with Matt Yglesias in Slate
And you think you're so different but really your fate
Is to be reading the thoughts of a cast-iron straight
A modern reactionary is something to be
A modern reactionary is something to be
There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to become a shill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill
A modern reactionary is something to be
A modern reactionary is something to be
If you want to be a hero well just retweet me
If you want to be a hero well just retweet me
Thank you Jim
Ok, this is an interesting way to look at it. Facebook is a _generator_ of power, but does not _wield_ it, so the power is not its own. I agree with the sentiment - Zuck is a cuck. I don't take the idea of rolling back section 230 very seriously either (and not just because it wouldn't hurt Facebook much, though it would hurt everybody else as a side-effect).
Not that it matters in the moment, but hypothetically how would one fix a power leak like this? From the zuck perspective, how do you seal the pipes and send the little journos scurrying off to some other pond. For some scrappy underdog competitor like Parler it's not even obvious that they generate power, which is why the "cathedral" just goes right over their head to their hosting and payment processing providers and has them crushed like insects. But the press can't threaten Facebook's host. It is its own host. It's extremely unlikely the press could threaten its bank either. It could support unraveling 230, but Facebook could afford this, so that's not it.
The press could try to make Facebook seem very uncool, but this stopped being a problem a long time ago. The press represent the adults, so whatever they say is cool becomes lame for the kids; whatever they say is lame becomes cool for the kids. In any case, while Facebook is very lame, grandma thinks it's cool and if you want to talk to grandma or see what she had for lunch you have to do it on Facebook. So the kids are still on Facebook. Facebook owns both the adults and the kids demos.
There were lots of skirmishes between the press and wider analog media versus the tech media about a decade ago. The analog media felt threatened, which indicates the tech media had power, and it seemed at that point like tech could crush analog any time it wanted. Just cut them out of search results, shadowban them on Facebook and Twitter, watch them wither on the vine. The press played the victim here - variously demanding to be elevated above "fake news" sources and that they be granted royalties for every link and excerpt on Google News, Facebook News, etc. But then something strange happened and tech gave them everything they wanted. Was it infiltration? Cathedral double-agents? Did they get invited to the oligarchic table?
Much remains unexplained here. What is the mechanism that creates the power leak, and how might it have been prevented or how can it be undone?
I don't know if Facebook can do anything now, but they could have doubled down on manipulating and controlling how news articles are shown on Facebook, or banned news links altogether, as they've been threatening to do in Australia because of some legislation that was going to make them have to pay the news sites when users share their links: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/uneconomic-facebook-says-new-laws-mean-it-will-ban-news-in-australia-20200916-p55w8w.html
Greetings from eastern european compound! Zuck, are you reading this? You can do it! It's not as bad as it looks. We will host your servers on our cozy little land. When the soviets were in power here all those decades ago, some of you made sacrifices to support our freedom to think.
Now the tables have turned and we will return the favor! This time it is easier! The truth is that neomonarchical systems are the future and as free thinking men we are going to propagate this important truth; it can not be silenced, not by an empire in decline at least. If any person of importance within the US government considers what I say to be dAnGErouS and HaTEful discourse, I defy that person to launch a full scale nuclear attack to silence me.
Would Curtis deny that Hollywood is, or at least used to be, an important part of the polycentric institutional oligarchy he mentions?
I ask because I see the video game industry as the New Hollywood, and AGDQ as possibly a cooler meeting of "progressive" minds than Burning Man. What do kids know about the French Revolution? Why, what they learned from playing Assassin's Creed Unity. What about futurism? Cyberpunk 2077. Modern Warfare? COD: Modern Warfare. I think the collective memeset of modern video games is really powerful and deserves to be mentioned in any discussion of power.
On the other hand, a possibly overrated attempt to gain power by the tech industry is all these new-fangled decentralised chat platforms like Secure Scuttlebutt and, well, Urbit. Since we already have Twitter and Facebook, and Youtube and Twitch, and Medium and Substack, there's already a shit-tonne of ways for different kinds of people to keep in touch and discuss stuff. I feel as though it's more powerful to create content that people will want to talk about, than to create yet another means of discussing it. IMO.
Still, it's ironic that the creator of Urbit is downplaying the potential of the tech industry to accumulate power, or change the balance of power, by creating stuff.
1. I think he would agree that Hollywood is important but movies don't have anywhere near the same impact as a publication that focuses on politics and current events.
2. Gamers are low-status and don't matter.
3. Alternative platforms serve as cooperation hubs, but yes, action > words.
Hollywood is just another conduit of power and has always been abused by the press - the yellow press, the critics, etc. They're in the same position as Facebook, not in the same position as the New York Times.
I remember thinking, for example, that, if you want to increase the number of women and minorities in tech jobs, you need to create "propaganda" in the form of film and TV that presents those tech roles as possible for women and minorities. And how do you make Hollywood produce such propaganda? Pressure. Can they refuse? Have they refused? No, but they're doing their jobs half-assedly. Perhaps, they are not scared enough
Gamers themselves are just ordinary people nowadays. I mean it's extremely mainstream to be a gamer. But what would, say, 4chan be without the existence of video games? That's like taking a baby's rattle away. And are you going to deny the political importance of 4chan and its ilk?
Or check the trending topics on Twitter. Nine times out of ten there'll be something video game related. If you want to change how people think, release a great video game.
The thing about modern video games is that they are simultaneously an entertainment genre, a source of memes, and a (if facile) study of history and culture. It's actually kind of wholesome if Halo multiplayer rules the world and not Samantha Power, because of that multiple valence.
> Gamers themselves are just ordinary people nowadays.
In other words inconsequential. I'm suprised you're considering mass movements after you've been reading Moldbug and perhaps other NRx authors. You don't need the demos, the demos is lazy and stupid. You need a dedicated elite. Like Lenin's idea of a vanguard party. That works. 'Everyone all together now' doesn't work beyond 3 people.
> I mean it's extremely mainstream to be a gamer.
Exactly. It's just like asking Netflix viewers to overthrow their regimes because they saw Friends.
> But what would, say, 4chan be without the existence of video games?
/v/ is a containment board. There's plenty of chan culture that's not focused on vidya and wifus. What about /fit/, /sci/, /pol/, /lit/, /g/, /his/, etc. 4chan is a hub for edgy misfits with strange personalities. Gamers are one faction. Not even necessarily even the biggest one, considering the GG purge that made most of them more intense ones go to infinity chan. Newfag.
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> Or check the trending topics on Twitter. Nine times out of ten there'll be something video game related.
I don't have twitter. I advise you to block all social media and limit your web usage to purposeful productive work and project development. Use LeechBlock.
> It's actually kind of wholesome if Halo multiplayer rules the world and not Samantha Power, because of that multiple valence.
That's a lot of words for gay.
Entertainment is passive low-intensity masturbation with no orgasm.
can't triforce, I've been the newfag all along
Entertainment trumps press politcs. The political party of CNN and MSNBC dont care about anything. While maga thinks that burning down the cathedral is winning, all of its enemies have evacuated. Their politics is baseless. They have no hill they'd die on and just go wherever they can be passive and easy. Sheep arent territorial. Drugs, alcohol, TV evading anything that challenges their opinions.
Please go back and actually read Moldbug’s old writings if you believe that is what the Press and the Cathedral actually are.
the cathedral is what schools of fish. The fish are who im referring to. NYT/CNN are just like Big Tech in that they leak power to these fish or at least they seem to. Its highly coordinated, without a coordinator. Instead of coordination around a principle, personality, or policy, it is all about desire for power/entertainment. Fickle.
The thing in Urbit's favor is that, since it's decentralized by design, since users can escape any host that decides to censor them, there is really no power to leak. There's no Zuckerberg to wield power through. If people are discussing wrongthink on it, there's nobody who can really put a stop to it.
So when someone writes an article entitled "People are discussing wrongthink on Urbit!!11!!", they will have some sort of action in mind, some way to "make a difference" or "speak truth to power" or whatever they tell themselves. Like, you know, censoring people or making bots to auto-report them to the FBI.
People don't want to know that people are discussing wrongthink somewhere, they want to _do something about it_.
And if there's really nothing that can actually be done about this on Urbit (by design), there's little satisfaction to writing or reading such pieces. So journalists and their readers will find some other target that they can make dance.
This is the theory, at least.
Seems only partially correct. Most alt-tech sites like Parker, Gab and Hatreon have been viciously attacked and banned. That said, 4chan earns a lot of ire, and is still huge, but journalists never actually seem to do anything about it.
IMHO, the continued reliance of the "dissidents" on Visa, Paypal, AWS, etc. is a puzzler.
The "attacked and banned" folks ought to at least *try* hosting in e.g. Moscow and accepting subscription fees in Bitcoin, before going into "resistance is futile" prostration and to the bottle.
So maybe Pelevin was wrong, and the West has its West - in Moscow!
Sadly, AFAIK the West only has an East. The kind to which e.g.
Martin and Mitchell went off to drink themselves to death in obscurity.
But it hasn't got a West -- in the sense of e.g. "the place from which bootleggers will smuggle in jeans and forbidden cassettes" and "to which an American Belenko can fly his F-35 at two metres above seawater, defect, and happily eat delicious cat food from a supermarket where his jaw drops from the sheer abundance of tinned foods every time."
Sure, we're not lacking in jeans here, but the forbidden cassettes?
Russia now has Snowden, Telegram, and SubscribeStar. I think I'm stating the obvious
>That said, 4chan earns a lot of ire, and is still huge, but journalists never actually seem to do anything about it.
That's because it's owned by a black guy
https://twitter.com/hirox246/status/1268980964992126979
This make me wonder about the relative size of Facebook vs 4chan and I found: Facebook - 2.7 billion monthly active users, 4chan - 22 million monthly active users. Could be wrong, I clicked the first link with a number for each.
What reason is there to believe in either of these (or any similar) "dead souls" stats?
Dead souls - you're right! Zuckerbuger and Dorsey are just our modern-day Charon. They both have a hallow dead look and live at the mercy of more powerful gods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon
Reference was rather to Gogol's dead souls.
I wonder what Curtis would say about this. I think Hollywood’s influence has lessened and media companies’ has grown— fewer people watch movies now, and the new ones mostly suck.
>AGDQ
>cool
Dude this post was incredible. I'd vaguely heard of you but as someone who's been trying to figure out the woke thing consider me an instant fan.
The press clearly has the most power. The only reason Biden's approval rating sunk is that some of the media actually hit him on the Afghanistan. All of a sudden magically he loses 10% approval. All the NPCs needed to dislike Biden was the media being semi critical of him for three weeks. Going by that example CNN could probably destroy the Democrats in one day if they wanted if they really went to town and opened the floodgates on things like the Durham report, Hunter's laptop etc. They are basically at the mercy of the press. The press could also end covid quickly if they started promoting pro-freedom message.
Maybe the best way to describe the woke is a relatively small group of psychopaths being orbited by sheep and cowards, politicians trying to get re-elected, corporations trying not to get cancelled, media trying to impress viewers, all of him internally realize in some ways "this group of psychopaths is scary. I should do what they say". They are complimented by a much larger group of people who's main mission in life is to be perceived as normal and have convinced themselves normal is supporting the left wing establishment, in addition to also sharing some of that fear of the psychos.
You did a good job distinguishing the press owner (Sulzberger, for example) but you might want to clarify that point further if you do any follow up on the subject. If I know you as well as I do, you certainly will touch this subject again.
Because the semi-obvious rejoinder is that Bezos bought the 2nd most prestigious newspaper in the country, if not the world (FT or Guardian might outrank it, Beeb might still outrank any of those despite not being a dead-tree institution, but we're quibbling).
I can keen your rebuttal to that: That Bezos might have bought WaPo with the idea that then he would have power - he even got to change the slogan to "Democracy Dies in Darkness" (and now participates in snuffing the lamps out, not only all across Europe, but the First World), but he doesn't get to exercise any meaningful power over it. As in: lets say he tried to reverse course, took editorial control and began to order his employees there to take a different tack. He replaced the Editorial page with the kind of people Ron Unz hosts, or with the columnists from Taki Mag. The thing that would happen is a total hissy-fit revolt, monkey poo-flinging, and either Jeff would reverse his decision, say he was only kidding, apologize for the prank and promise never, ever to do it again, and sign some sort of WaPo version of the Magna Carta cementing his humiliation, OR there would be a massive defection, La Prensa style, and WaPo would end up with as much prestige as the Washington Times has had (probably even less) or the Washington Examiner (probably even less). He's smart enough to see several moves ahead, so of course he doesn't do anything so self-defeating. He lets the WaPo staff become who they are. He makes sure to hire people who fit in, but even moreso (probably he doesn't do that, even - he probably makes no hiring decisions whatsoever, even for the top jobs there - he knows better). He has ownership, but not control - which is something you pointed out long ago: the converse is the way the Modern Structure exercises power (control, without formal ownership. Of course, if you control something you effectively own it; pwn it. It's yours. Regardless of what the title deed says. But you don't have to accept any responsibility for failure, and you get to hide your power over said thing. Because, after all, Bezos owns it and he has all the money - it says right there in the legal documents and bank accounts - so of course...)
Anyhow I think some people will miss this, accidentally or "accidentally on purpose" like several of your regular commentators (the tggp-type) from back in the day typically did.
It’s even simpler than that. The WAPO isn’t a place for Bezos to control the narrative; that’s impossible. It is, however, one of the world’s greatest sources of PRESTIGE. This is more true the less Bezos interferes with it— the less his ownerships appears to affect their “responsible journalism— so exercising control is completely against the reason for buying it; why would he do that?
Right. If a paper defects from the cathedral, it loses all its prestige, and thus its power.
"Zuckerberg could no more block this power flux than he can block a lightning bolt."
This statement is hyperbolic, in the same way that Yarvin's previous statements re the Supreme Court have been (but more so since Zuckerberg is a single man).
If Zuckerberg really wanted to, he could allow free speech on Facebook. He'd lose some employees and be a pariah, but he wouldn't lose his company, nor would any organ of the formal government go after him (in the US). It's true that he has very strong incentives to go with the flow, but he's not replaceable in the way that e.g. a moderator is.
Everything conceivable would go wrong for him. The bad press would be never ending, and Facebook would rapidly become a 4chan of social media (not bad for us, but bad for investors). The board might not revolt, as Zuck is the majority shareholder, but expect a lot of them to quietly “retire.” Employees would become harder to hire, to say nothing of those who would immediately quit. Most brutally, in a manner similar to the US Government, internal issues and company secrets would leak to the press at a faster and faster rate, eventually delegitimizing Facebook entirely.
Facebook still gets bad press despite their censorious ways. It would be 1000x worst if they tried to stand their ground.
He'd suffer for it, but the point is that (at present) no one could stop him if he did decide to reverse course. So describing him as a passive conduit of the Cathedral is not accurate.
No one could stop him if he were willing to suffer his company to be destroyed and himself to become a low-status pariah. Then again nobody can stop you from committing any crime you want provided you are willing to suffer prison or execution. Coercion is a spectrum.
He'd become a pariah, but Facebook would continue to operate and would remain the main normie social site for years.
And censorship is also a spectrum. He could do a lot less (or a lot more) without approaching pariah status.
More like a few months. Things have accelerated.
He’s passive to keep his billions. He would suffer no consequences but possibly becoming ordinary.
#DeleteFacebook, the whole blame campaign for 2016, Cambridge Analytica, all the leaks and blows in the past 5 years. Hating Facebook becomes a meme, something you do as casually and uncontroversially as complaining about the traffic. This takes a financial toll, and a psychological toll, too.
And just look at Parler this week: that is what Facebook is afraid of. There are already plenty of hipsters who wouldn't want to associate with Facebook. And once you become a pariah, nobody wants to stand next to you except for those you'd rather not stand next to, yourself
"Just look at Parler" is almost as ridiculous as saying Google is held in check by the threat a domain registrar will pull google.com. They would push a Chrome update and replace the entire DNS in two days if that happened, or just threaten people behind the scenes into crushing whoever stepped out of line.
Facebook would have no problems hosting Parler. There is no equivalence here.
Neither Google nor Facebook can declare war on "the polite society" by acting in the way you suggest. They WOULD go the way of Parler.
Zuck, like most people, probably cares more about his social standing than anything. Worth adding this one to the list: if he took a stand, his wife might divorce him and take the kids.
Even if the odds are only 1 in 10 that his life as *he* knows it would end, that would be enough to keep most people from rolling the dice, especially after watching Parler get nuked *pour encourager les autres.*
> his wife might divorce him and take the kids
This could almost be a litmus test to separate genuine and cardboard oligarchs.
The real deal doesn't give a rat's arse re: anything that any Reich court orders. Instead builds e.g. own navy, like L. R. Hubbard; or converts his dough to BTC and moves to [redacted], like [redacted]; purchases, say, a working 941 Akula with complete set of rockets; and in general behaves like a sovereign -- rather than like whatever pliant toad was "president" of e.g. I. G. Farben in 1943.
Google and Facebook both own their own servers. Google already owns domain registrars and its own app store. Facebook could easily purchase a domain registrar if it needed to. If either wanted to, it could easily keep its services running and accessible to normies on its own.
They own their servers, but they don't own their users nor their employees. The #DeleteUber campaign was very effective. So was #DeleteFacebook. I used to have interesting friends on Facebook before 2017, but they left the platform after the media blitz. What do you think would happen if Facebook or Google went full-on Pirate Bay on us? They are not irreplaceable
It's possible that patching the power leak would (with time) stop the media attacks. Even if it didn't, the same social-monopoly which keeps right-normies from leaving en masse would keep left-normies from leaving en masse.
Long term the media could promote some other platform and that could eventually become the default social space. But that doesn't change the fact that Zuckerberg has stable individual power on the scale of years at least.
> He'd lose some employees and be a pariah
More plausibly: he'd suffer a "tragic racecar accident" or plane crash etc. and his replacement *will* play ball.
Or, alternatively, will be "epsteined". (And for that matter, we groundlings still don't know for *what* exactly Epstein was epsteined. And not likely to ever find out.)
As Curtis himself wrote a decade ago, "death is cheaper, quicker, easier, more permanent, and more persuasive than persuasion."
LOL that’s an amazing fantasy. It’s not 1957 anymore
How elites deal with top-level defectors is entirely the same today as it was in 1957, and -1957, and will be entirely the same in 3057.
The rarity of radioactive teapots, poisoned umbrella syringes, etc. in the current "civilized world" is on account of their tame, proactively-compliant "bonsai kitten" elites -- rather than some kind of magical shift in the fundamental game rules.
I mean, sure, in the spirit of the Yeats poem that Curtis quoted today, those things are possible:
We, who seven years ago
Talked of honour and of truth,
Shriek with pleasure if we show
The weasel's twist, the weasel's tooth.
But only if our circumstances dramatically change (like, WWIII). Epstein was a weird throwback, I'll give you that...
Also, <3 "bonsai kitten elites" hahahaha
Does Papa John still have his company?
In the long term that would be an issue, but Congress is slow and unwieldy. There'd be no danger (as things stand now) of a "sudden" attack from the formal government.
Perhaps but then can't another country (say Israel or any other) make a Facebook clone, without the censorship?
I can tell you for a fact that Facebook the company does not want to censor. It doesn’t actually align with the values of its leaders, and it’s tremendously expensive because it tries to be fair as much as is practical. I don’t have such faith in any social network created by a government.
Sorry for my poor grammar, I should have reviewed before posting
I'm not saying you're wrong. They do seem to have been constrained in the past only by what they didn't have to do to stay in power. But at least you're countersignalling here: in Yarvin's narrative Facebook's power is leaking to the press, not the government.
Full court press. Facebook grew something out of nothing, and now can provide more jobs to lawyers therefore it leaks power to the government that they didnt have before. The press is just the K-9 unit of the cathedral that sniffs out and barks at any higher intellect. Theres no leashes on the dogs, so the law just follows the dogs.
Maybe one final thought: I recently checked out Parler and CloutHub, and I see that those things can't succeed. They are 99.99% composed of marginal characters, not any sort of elites at all. I felt repulsed by what I saw. Yes, I am convinced that cultivating a dissident intelligentsia is the only way to move forward. Who's going to do it, though?
I agree completely that in this power ecosystem of government, big tech, people and journalists, that the prestige journalist/press seems to be the most ever present bad actors and ideological enforcers and seem to somehow have the highest trust or power over the public and the other power players. They’re the most protean and elusive, and seem to have nothing really to hold them accountable in any really significant way. I Do think their mission of channeling the political energy of the masses for their bidding will be significantly harder with trump out of the picture. He was the Vince Macmahon/ric flair of politics and there’s no possible way they can create a more perfect heel if they tried. By reinforcing the stereotypes so perfectly, he gave those institutions so much more prestige capital. When are people most United? When there’s a serious enemy? Aftermath of 9/11, ww2 etc. this is different since the enemy is internal, but if there’s one thing the left is completely cohesive about its The Trump threat. As ridiculous as the majority of the criticism he’s drawn has been, he is almost perfectly indefensible to these people. If there’s any hope I have of reducing the power of the press, then that’s the thing I’m optimistic about. Of course if people keep attacking capital buildings, you’ll just have “Muslim terrorists” 2.0 that you can justify doing anything you want to so much rests on how much the “revolutionary” right plays into that trap. It’s a war of attrition but they have the upper hand, they get ten times as much mileage or political power out of genuine right wing extremism as the right does from instances in the opposite spectrum. That will be lower with no orange guy.
[Interior, underground cave. Cathedral rises from a pool of lava and lights a cigar]
Cathedral: I'm back, baby!