This week I sit down with Eruditorum Press’s resident gothic Marxist, Jack Graham, and have… basically exactly the conversation you’d expect us to have about Neoreaction a Basilisk. Horror philosophy, Marxism aplenty, Moldbug’s failed Marxism, eschatology. We get the Hugos in there too. It’s a doozy – as fine and entertaining a slice of Sandifer/Graham as you’ll listen to. Well, “slice” is perhaps a bit dainty for a two-and-a-half hour podcast. But you get the point.

At the time of posting, incidentally, we’re $23 away from Jack getting brought on for an essay. And while Jack is of course too Marxist to ever vulgarly advertise, I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m giving him a healthy chunk of the money between this stretch goal and “Theses on Trump.” So if you want to corrupt Jack’s principles with filthy lucre, this is probably your last chance. Soon I’ll be pocketing it all again so I can give it to lizard people.

Anyway, here’s the podcast. …

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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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