{"id":23848,"date":"2014-01-20T08:55:10","date_gmt":"2014-01-20T13:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23848"},"modified":"2014-02-04T17:58:08","modified_gmt":"2014-02-04T22:58:08","slug":"sounding-the-alarm-over-the-endarkenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/01\/20\/sounding-the-alarm-over-the-endarkenment\/","title":{"rendered":"Sounding the alarm over the endarkenment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I must not have been paying attention, but according to Jamie Bartlett<\/a>, we should be terrified of a “dark enlightenment” that is sweeping the internet:<\/p>\n

Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It\u2019s called “The Dark Enlightenment”. Its modus operandi is well suited to today\u2019s world. Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism.<\/p>\n

It started, suitably enough, with two blogs. Mencius Moldbug, a prolific blogger and computer whizz from San Francisco, and Nick Land, an eccentric British philosopher (previously co-founder of Warwick University\u2019s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) who in 2012 wrote the eponymous “The Dark Enlightenment”, as a series of posts on his site. You can find them all here<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The philosophy, difficult to pin down exactly, is a loose collection of neo-reactionary ideas, meaning a rejection of most modern thinking: democracy, liberty, and equality. Particular contempt is reserved for democracy, which Land believes “systematically consolidate[s] and exacerbate[es] private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, according to this report, we should be terrified of a bunch of basement-dwelling maladjusted would-be techno-feudalists. The question that immediately springs to mind is “why?” We’re told that they’re “neo-reactionary”, “racist”, and “sexist”. We need to be afraid of them because they have the power to … well, nothing. He’s sounding the tocsin of alarm because he’s discovered that there are people who are wrong on the internet<\/em>!<\/p>\n

Update, 3 February<\/strong>: Scharlach<\/a> created an affinity diagram of the Dark Enlightenment movement, grouped according to their major themes.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>

Click to see the original post.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Update, 4 February<\/strong>: ESR<\/a>‘s take on the affinity diagram linked above.<\/p>\n

Just looking at the map, someone unfamiliar with the players would be justified in wondering if there\u2019s really any coherence there at all. And that\u2019s a fair question. Some of the people the map sweeps in don\u2019t think of themselves as \u201cDark Enlightenment\u201d at all. This is notably true of the light green cluster marked \u201cTechno-Commercialists\/Futurists\u201d at the top, and the \u201cEconomists\u201d connected to it in yellow.<\/p>\n

If I belonged on this map, that\u2019s where I\u2019d be. I know Eliezer Yudkowsky; the idea that he and the Less Wrong crowd and Robin Hanson feel significant affinity with most of the rest of that map is pretty ludicrous.<\/p>\n

Note, however, that one of only two links to the rest is \u201cNick Land\u201d. This is a clue, because Nick Land is probably the single most successful booster of the \u201cDark Enlightenment\u201d meme. It\u2019s in his interest to make the movement look as big and various as he can manage, and I think this map is partly in the nature of a successful con job or dezinformatsiya<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In this, Land is abetted by people outside the movement who are well served by making it look like the Dark Enlightenment is as big and scary as possible. Some of those people lump in the techno-futurist\/economist group out of dislike for that group\u2019s broadly libertarian politics \u2013 which though very different from the reactionary ideas of the core Dark Enlightenment, is also in revolt against conventional wisdom. Others lump them in out of sheer ignorance.<\/p>\n

So, my first contention is that Nick Land has pulled a fast one. That said, I think there is<\/em> a core Dark Enlightenment \u2013 mostly identifiable with the purple \u201cPolitical Philosophy\u201d group, but with some crossover into HBD and Masculinity and (possibly) the other groups at the bottom of the map.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the record, I don’t think I’ve got a dog in this fight … I only recognize the names of nine of the linked sites, and most of those are of the recognize-the-name sense, not the familiar-with-the-content sense.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I must not have been paying attention, but according to Jamie Bartlett, we should be terrified of a “dark enlightenment” that is sweeping the internet: Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It\u2019s called “The Dark Enlightenment”. Its modus operandi is well suited to today\u2019s world. Supporters are dotted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53],"tags":[127,58,99,303,546],"class_list":["post-23848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-internet","tag-racism","tag-sexism","tag-viewing-with-alarm"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6cE","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23848"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24148,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23848\/revisions\/24148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}