Doctor Gno¶
One thing has to be granted to Pein’s sub-adolescent article (casually dismissedhere) — it has triggered some interesting anguish. This interpretation of (techno-commercial) Neoreaction as Bond villainy is especially notable. Unlike Pein, Izabella Kaminska demonstrates at least a little genuine wit. More importantly, she latches onto Silicon Valley Secessionism as a (scary) cryptopolitical project, of real significance. Her references are excellent (the story is built around a number of slides extracted from this landmark talk, by Balaji Srinivasan, entitled Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit).
The elegance of this project rests upon its combination of simplicity and radicality, captured in its essentials by the formula E > V (Exit over Voice). It advances the prospect, already in motion, of a destruction of (voice-based) politics through the techno-commercial innovation of exit mechanisms. It is beginning to drive progressives insane.
The fundamental point couldn’t be clearer: We don’t want to rule you. We want to escape you.
Of course, the whole Cathedral agenda is to drive this message back into unintelligibility, by swamping it in tedious leftist BDSM political dialectics, as if the issue were a struggle for dominion. In this regards, the monarchist memes prevalent within NRx play a distinctly prog-friendly role.
Among Srinivasan’s slides, there is one headed A continuum of valid approaches: From private islands to settling Mars. It contains the note: “And the best part of this: the people who think this is weird, who sneer at the frontier, who hate technology — they won’t follow you out there.”
Progressives know how to argue about kings (however ineptly). What they have no idea how to argue with — what cannot be argued with — is flight.
Silicon Valley Secessionism is the best battlefield we have.
ADDED: Urban Future record of a related Twitter kerfuffle.