Elizabeth Sandifer

A fourth excerpt from my currently Kickstarting book Neoreaction a Basilisk. Here we pick up mere moments after the revelation of Mencius Moldbug’s most fundamental and inescapable philosophical monster.

But Land isn’t going to yield so easily. (Hell, even Yudkowsky requires more than Stanley Fish’s reading of Milton to comprehensively dismantle.) His project is not in the least bit utopian, and the notion of intrinsic rightness is not so much absent from his thought as largely irrelevant to it. Certainly he’s no stranger to postmodernist conceptions of language; they were a primary subject of his early academic work, which followed in the same Burroughs “language is a virus” tradition as cyberpunk. That’s the entire point of essays like “A zIIgōthIc-==X=cōDA==-(CōōkIng-lōbsteRs-wIth-jAke-AnD-DInōs)” (excerpt: “AusChwItz-Is-AlphAbet—euRōpe-fuCkfACe—AlChemICAl=tRAnsubstAntIatIōn—AnD—metRōpōlIs—+——+——AusChwItz-Is-the-futuRe”). His stated mission was to “hack the Human Security System,” by which he meant the basic parameters of human consciousness. And so the suggestion that language itself is a tool of the Cathedral would hardly bother him. That’s more or less his point. I mean, we’re talking about a guy whose endgame is “and then the rich elites evolve face tentacles.” (Tentacle is the new cannibal.) The point isn’t the retention of human civilization and its trappings. Humanity is just the prison that capitalism might escape from.

Still, we’ve at least clarified our problem a little. Note that both Milton’s trap and our takedown of Moldbug hinge on a similar moment – one where the author sets up an absolute, inescapable either/or. In Milton, either you submit to God or you sin by separating yourself. In Moldbug, either you support order and thus the inherent legitimacy of authority, or you are an evil, chaotic dissenter. Moments like this are ripe for hacks, Satanic inversions, and other such tomfooleries. Unsurprisingly – they are moments where a thinker is going to behave in relatively predictable ways. If you can reduce a question to a matter of order versus chaos, Moldbug’s position is inevitable. If you can reduce one to sin or obedience to God, so is Milton’s. And it’s usually pretty easy to do something tricksy with a binary opposition. You either find a third way, take the one the author didn’t take, or show that the choice is an illusion. So let’s look for such a moment in Land.

The obvious choice is the Great Filter. It is, after all, the ultimate in binary oppositions, which is why Land positions it as the ur-Horror in the first place – the great cosmic matter of life or death. And it’s ultimately the backstop his entire face tentacles ending hinges on. Survival either requires tribal loyalties and large piles of guns or it requires capitalist acceleration towards the bionic horizon. In one option we enjoy a slow extinction at the hands of the Malthusian limits of our planet. In the other we become something monstrous and unthinkable, that being the only sort of thing that can possibly make it through the Great Filter.

The trouble is, Land’s already anticipated all the usual tricks.…

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A perfectly pleasant transitional episode, but not one with a lot of particularly big or notable moments, those seemingly having mostly been allocated to “The Red Woman” and “Home” (So mostly to “Home” then), and thus a bit sleepy filler. The good news is that with the albatross of Jon Snow’s impending resurrection finally lifted from the show’s neck it has room to breathe, without the sense that anything that isn’t immediately and self-evidently important is just stalling. This isn’t an episode with a ton of expectation hanging over it, and the biggest of those, the immediate post-resurrection scene, is squared away up front.

In many ways, this sets the tone. It’s not a bad scene by any measure – Liam Cunningham is superlative in it, with “that’s fucking mad” probably being his best line, although his look of “oh for fuck’s sake not again” when Melisandre tries to proclaim Jon to be the Prince that was Promised is pretty choice. And Tormund’s “I saw your pecker” bit is brilliant. But it’s a meandering scene that, like the execution scene at episode’s end, isn’t so much advancing things as checking boxes, generally without doing anything unexpected or surprising in the process. It’s all stuff we absolutely need to see of Jon, but it’s confirmation, not revelation. All the same, it’s an important barrier broken through. It’s notable that all three episodes have closed at the Wall, and two opened there, with the third getting there in its second scene. Maybe “Book of the Stranger” will open or close there, but it doesn’t feel like it has to, and that’s progress.

This sense of decompression pervades the episode. There’s finally time to check in with Sam, for instance, or spend a couple minutes on a comedy bit with Tyrion, Grey Worm, and Missandei, or to have a pointless scene between Tommen and the High Sparrow. Perhaps most obviously, we can do a spectacular bit of trolling with the Tower of Joy scene, which majestically fails to contain any actual revelations. This is understandable – for a large majority of the millions of people watching Game of Thrones there is no mystery of Lyanna Stark. The ostentatious cutting off of the scene was necessary to have there be a question to eventually answer. But without any revelation, the scene is another leisurely sequence. (Though at least it’ll infuriate book purists.) 

This does let smaller moments stand out satisfyingly, however. Rickon’s re-entrance to the narrative, for instance, feels like a big moment even though he gets no dialogue, isn’t an interesting character, and is mostly going to have awful things happen to him now. Arya’s training montage is also satisfying, not so much because it’s a super-great training montage, but because after two episodes of not much happening in her plot, effectively hitting fast-forward is relieving. (Whereas, again, it would have felt like Arya’s plot was unimportant had this montage happened any sooner.)

The standout scene for me, though, is the decadently long Varys scene where we get to see him work, something we haven’t honestly gotten to do since… what, Season Three?…

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Well, I’ve just had one of the most magical experiences of my life.

Some context – a film version of Alan Moore’s Unearthing is dropping later this morning. I was given a screener copy, and just finished watching it. It is absolutely amazing. If you have never experienced Unearthing, it is unquestionably the version to go for. If you have experienced it before, it offers a substantial upgrade to all previous versions and is very probably worth revisiting; certainly I found it a tremendously rewarding experience.

There are ways in which yours will not match mine. It will not, for instance, include you belatedly realizing that you got the idea of printing an edition of your book published on old-fashioned printer paper from the transcript included with the old box set of Unearthing as an audio performance. Nor the sequence where you are floored by a snake-based description of philosophical horror that repeatedly echoes and parallels your book’s major points, a beautiful and welcome reminder that your great work can probably be encapsulated in a clod of dirt in a Northampton back garden. Still, it won’t be hard to see how the work could affect someone like that. It’s that good, and that visibly powerful a piece of magic. Of course it’s going to resonate weirdly with the world. That’s the point.

Unearthing is the story of Steve Moore, as told by Alan Moore. A prehumous eulogy, in many ways deliberately, Moore relates the strange life of his best friend, who was born in the house on Shooter’s Hill in London where he died, who taught the greatest English-language writer ever to work primarily in the medium of comics how to write a script, whose own career spanned decades, its fingerprints all over the history of British comics, who was beyond that a noted I Ching scholar, and who conducted a lengthy sexual affair with the moon goddess Selene.

Moore does not bury the lead, although he does build to it. Still, Unearthing is about this last bit. And the other bits, and many besides, but mostly the last bit. It is handled with a deft literary irony – a claim vouched for entirely by the author, who is ostentatiously present, a hypnotic baritone and looming beard that repeatedly appears on screen while the tale’s subject appears only in flickered inserts, played by an actor. An author who announces his entrance to the narrative with relish and fanfare, positioning himself as arbiter of the great “is Steve Moore mad or is this really magic” debate to an audience who knows full well that there is only one possible answer that he would ever give. It’s a delightfully, deliberately ludicrous claim – a man who worships a glove puppet promising us all that his best friend’s girlfriend is a Greek goddess and blue.

You’ll believe every word.

Much of this is because the narrator’s appearances, though dramatic and coming at highly charged moments of the tale, are nevertheless cameos. For most of the piece, Moore stands at polite distance, affecting to tell his friend’s story as he would want it told.…

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As we roll on towards the one week mark on the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter, it seemed a good time to give the Color Edition a preview in the vein of the previous Conspiracy Zine Edition preview. Indeed, the same three pages of the book as were previewed there, so you can get a sense for how the two editions differ. (Which is more than just “one has color” – the Conspiracy Zine is using multiple generation photocopies to give that authentically degraded look, whereas the Color Edition is trying to be as close to the original taped-together pages as possible – if you look closely the tape is visible on these scans.) There’s also some new pledge tiers, including all existing Eruditorum Press books (Neoreaction a Basilisk included) for just $35, so if you’ve been on the fence, there’s new reason to climb off it. Anyway, here’s three pages.

…

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Last War in Albion this afternoon. 

So, there’s been a line of complaint about Neoreaction a Basilisk (my new book, currently funding on Kickstarter) that accuses it of being an attempt to slander “rationalism,” and specifically Eliezer Yudkowsky, by linking them to neoreaction. And of being part of a communist propaganda campaign to this end. It’s not. 

This weird theory mostly been pushed by a guy who blogs under the name nydwracu who’s active in both circles, which highlights the irony of the complaint(though he’s been pushing it on social media, not that blog)  I’ve sent him a preview copy, so he can at least trash talk it honestly now. Of course, he’s a white nationalist, and we know how good they are at intellectual honesty. 

All the same, it’s a serious enough concern that I want to address it, if only because it’s a concern Yudkowsky himself raised while news of the book was first flitting about the aether, and while there are some significant ways in which I do not respect Eliezer Yudkowsky, he seems a nice bloke, and I genuinely don’t want to cause him any distress. So allow me to say with absolute explicitness: Eliezer Yudkowsky is not a neoreactionary. He repudiates the philosophy in explicit terms. He has shown no sympathy for and ative hostility to its most noxious beliefs. If I have ever suggested otherwise, I apologize profusely for the infelicity of writing, and if it is possible to edit the text in question I will do so.

That said, this has also been read as an attempt to smear “rationalism,” and that’s a subtler thing worth unpicking. First of all, I want to be clear that the book’s topic is complex, and is not an equation of all of the elements within it. To nick an analogy someone made when defending the book on Tumblr, it’s a book that has Eliezer Yudkowksy and neoreaction in it; it’s also a book that has Frantz Fanon and China Miéville in it. It no more implies that Yudkowsky is a neoreactionary than it implies that Moldbug is a socialist or Nick Land is black. This is a pretty self-evident principle, and I’m not going to harp on it, but come on guys, be serious.

Still, the book’s title binds together two things – Neoreaction and the word “Basilisk,” which comes from Roko’s Basilisk, a bit of Internet infamy involving Yudkowsky and his website LessWrong. Obviously I’m insinuating something. It’s fair to ask what it is. To some extent the answer has to be “read the damn book,” of course; I’m trying to make a living here. But we can talk about this without undue spoilers, so let’s do so. To frame the question in a way that makes complete sense given my past work, what the fuck do I have against Eliezer Yudkowsky? 

After all, he is in many regards the odd man out in Neoreaction a Basilisk. That I would take a pop at Mencius Moldbug, a neo-fascist nutjob two doors down from Vox Day, is easy enough to understand.…

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EDIT: Text of a Twitter DM exchange where Jack and I accidentally started hashing out the essay appended to the bottom.

The Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter is presently having its second-best day so far, meaning that it’s stormed through the “Theses on Trump” threshold, and we’re now looking at the $8000 stretch goal of me and Jack writing an essay on Austrian School economics. (Also, there’s now a Twitter poll for what the order of the next two stretch goals should be. And a $7000 mini-stretch goal on the Kickstarter to check out.) Unlike “Theses on Trump” and “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” there’s no demo of the Austrian School essay written – it doesn’t even have a for-certain title yet. But I can at least talk a little about why it’s a thing, and why I asked Jack to write about it. (And Jack will be along later to add his perspective.) And if it sounds interesting, well, the link’s at the top of the post.

So, first of all, why this goes in a book with everything else. Which is pretty simple – the Austrian School is a tremendously influential school of thought within libertarianism. Moldbug’s a huge fan. So is Vox Day. So were Ted Cruz’s advisors, hence his insane plan to go back to the gold standard. So like Trump and Gamergate, it’s firmly in the alt-right constellation. But that’s why it’s relevant, not why I’m doing it.

The thing that doesn’t come up a lot with the Austrian School is that they’re insane cranks. And I mean that in an almost good way, because I’m an occultist and have a soft spot for lunatic crackpots. But there’s no question that’s what the Austrian School is. They reject the utility of both empiricism and mathematics to economics, instead building their entire system out of what they call “praxeology,” which is a narrative-based approach whereby the entire system of economics is derived as a set of supposedly necessary implications of the allegedly self-evident premise “individual human beings act.” They are not taken seriously by any actual reputable academic economists – their influence is entirely down to the fact that their conclusions flatter libertarianism, so their obvious methodological madness is largely overlooked or, even more humorously, adopted in spite of its flaws.

One of the things Neoreaction a Basilisk definitely is is a critique of the entire model of philosophy from first premises, so this sort of “start from an axiom and build an entire theory of how the global economy should function” argument is a particularly apt target. But I’m also fascinated because one of the default positions of libertarians tends to be that Marx is an economic crank. And there are certainly ways you can argue this – he’s not working in any traditionally mathematical/empirical mode either, after all, and has a similar tendency towards narrative approaches. As I said, I don’t think being a crackpot is a problem. But it’s definitely weird that they dismiss Marx out of hand as a crank while taking Mises and Rothbard seriously. …

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A-Force #5

You can pretty much see Marvel deciding this isn’t actually a book they care about anymore. Its lineup seems incompatible with Civil War II, its star writer is gone, and it’s clearly biding time til cancellation. Thompson is a perfectly fine writer – it’s notably not as though Wilson was slaying on it – but there’s an awkwardness here, such as Nico needlessly re-explaining the restrictions on her powers to a character who should know already. Meanwhile Ben Caldwell, much as I loved his Wonder Woman strip back in Wednesday Comics, is an awkward fit here, and the book as a whole just feels like disposable ballast for the lower end of the sales charts. Alas.

Radioactive Spider-Gwen #8

The Spider-Women crossover finally has a bit of a dud. Only a bit – this isn’t a bad issue or anything – but the decisiveness with which it’s moved on to Act Two is a bit jarring, and the structure of this issue ends up having Gwen be a spectator to the mostly less interesting Cindy Moon. Still, this is heads and shoulders above most Marvel crossovers, and I’m hoping this is just a bum issue (which, let’s face it, Spider-Gwen has been guilty of before). 

Invincible iron Man #9

The primary suspense of the issue is “is Tony Stark dead?” The answer to this is not hard to surmise. In his absence we get a scattershot assortment of scenes with the supporting cast, which are I suppose intriguing, but at this point “the road to Civil War II” is clearly a muddy slog down a meandering path that one highly doubts the payoff of. I’m half-tempted not to buy it. 

The Punisher #1

Picked up on a lark after realizing Cloonan was joined by Dillon on art. Largely enjoyed, but it’s Punisher-by-numbers at this point without anything that you can credibly call a new take on the character. Nobody draws people getting shot quite like Steve Dillon though. Anyway, if the Punisher is a character that appeals to you (not a statement you expect to get much traction at Eruditorum Press, let’s face it), this is probably one to check out.

New Avengers #11

Slid pleasantly easily back into this book post-Standoff, which is nice. Ewing’s usual enthusiasm for the over the top thrills of superhero books is on full display, with the best Squirrel Girl he’s ever written, along with some damn fine Hawkeye, a fun late twist, and generally a reminder of how much I missed this book while it was doing a stupid crossover. And oh look, next issue is… a stupid crossover. Well, I guess that’s a point in Civil War II’s favor.

Klaus #5

The book’s failure to be a natural fit for when it’s coming out continues, but this remains some of the best work Morrison has done. Particularly fun this issue, though, is Dan Mora’s art, which flits between cartoonish excess and dark grandeur in a way that’s probably not suited to a lot of books, but is self-evidently the right angle for this one.…

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This month I’m joined by a variety of cool guests to whom I sent preview copies of Neoreaction a Basilisk to talk about the book. First up is David Gerard, who’s been volunteer copyediting the book, and to whom I serialized it as I was writing it in 2000 word chunks. We talk about why on Earth he agreed to do such a ridiculous thing, and about what’s so interesting (and frustrating) about the three major figures of the book, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Mencius Moldbug, and Nick Land. It’s a fun chat, and you can check it out here.

And, more importantly, you can back Neoreaction a Basilisk on Kickstarter here – we’re just over $1000 away from “Theses on Trump.”…

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