I decided to look up something that one of the reporters for MSNBC flagged today about Elon Musk (I am sorry I don’t remember the man’s name or have a link yet). It was reported that Elon Musk and other “libertarian” or right wing Silicon Valley billionaires have latched on to anpolitical ideology that Chris Lehmann of The Nation calls “neoreactionarism.” To be honest, I had never heard of neoreactionarism before, but it is a pseudo-intellectual fascist movement that Musk and Peter Thiel have embraced. One ideological plank to neoreactionarism is that the :liberal” media is in cahoots with — wait for it — American intelligence agencies and other political establishments to thrawt the rule of the enlightened technocrat. It is only the rise of a superior technocratic class who will crush the establishment and their middle managers and bring about true freedom to human beings. And it looks like Musk is trying to bring about this political Nirvana at Twitter.
I know. WTF? You are looking at your drink or edible and wondering, “Did someone spike my drugs?” This neoreactionarism tastes like 2,000 year old Franzia in a new bottle!
And it is.
The so called political godfather of neoreactionarism is a schlep by the name of Curtis Yarvin:
In a sanely configured political-media sphere, Curtis Yarvin—the blogger formerly known as “Mencius Moldbug”—would be confined to the fringe Internet discussion boards that originally helped him spring to intellectual life. But Yarvin, the dean of the so-called neoreactionary movement among the Silicon Valley Neteratti, is having another breakout moment, as the restive, grievance-fueled American right careens toward the 2022 midterms. Over at Vox, Andrew Prokop has published an extensive interview with and intellectual profile of Yarvin, who has long and loudly argued that democracy is an outmoded conceit that the American system is well rid of. The next phase of political evolution, he contended in his now-dormant blog Unqualified Reservations and in sporadic commentary since, involves a grateful embrace of dictatorship and/or monarchy, so that the real forces running the world can get the job done without all the pointless and messy shadow play of mass consensus.
Emphasis is mine.
And if you think this doesn’t have a foothold in politics, future Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio has adopted one plank of Yarvin’s ideology. Vance wants to fire most or all government employees because they are enemies of Donald Trump:
In September 2021, J.D. Vance, a GOP candidate for Senate in Ohio, appeared on a conservative podcast to discuss what is to be done with the United States, and his proposals were dramatic. He urged Donald Trump, should he win another term, to “seize the institutions of the left,” fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” in the US government, “replace them with our people,” and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him.
To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. “So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things...
And now this idiot is going to be a senator.
And like virtual all fascist movements, neoreactionarism is full of racism. Here is Yarvin in his own words:
“I am not a white nationalist, but I do read white-nationalist blogs, and I’m not afraid to link to them…I am not exactly allergic to the stuff,” Yarvin writes. He also praises a blogger who advocated the deportation of Muslims and the closure of mosques as “probably the most imaginative and interesting right-wing writer on the planet.” Hectoring a Swarthmore history professor, Yarvin rhapsodizes on colonial rule in Southern Africa, and suggests that black people had it better under apartheid. “If you ask me to condemn [mass murderer] Anders Breivik, but adore Nelson Mandela, perhaps you have a mother you’d like to fuck,” Yarvin writes.
His jargon may be novel, but whenever Mencius Moldbug descends to the realm of the concrete, he offers familiar tropes of white victimhood. Yarvin’s favorite author, the nineteenth-century writer Scot Thomas Carlyle, is perhaps best known for his infamous slavery apologia, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.”“If there is one writer in English whose name can be uttered with Shakespeare’s, it is Carlyle,” Yarvin writes. Later in the same essay Yarvin calls slavery “a natural human relationship” akin to “that of patron and client.”
And Yarvin calls all the so called liberal institutions that prevent a strong man from ruling as “The Cathedral.” And to fight The Cathedral we need to “retire all government employees — RAGE.
As Yarvin envisions it, RAGE is the great purge of the old operating system that clears the path for a more enlightened race of technocrats to seize power and launch the social order on its rational course toward information-driven self-realization. Collateral casualties in this “reboot” will be the nexus of pusillanimous yet all-powerful institutions Yarvin has dubbed “the Cathedral”—the universities, the elite media, and anything else that’s fallen prey to liberal perfidy as the heroic apostles of hard-right digital truth-telling have come wearily to know it.
And seeing as Twitter was seen as being anti-conservative (what a fucking joke), Twitter was part of The Cathedral. I say was because Elon Musk bought it to fight against The Cathedral. Musk is one of those Silicon Valley adherents of Yarvin’s ideology, and he had the money to buy a public company and turn it into a private one. With Twitter being private, Musk can do whatever he wants to with Twitter.
And brother it shows.
Despite all its numerous faults, Twitter did at first allow a public space for anyone to challenge the powerful, especially those powerful folks on Twitter. Now, trolls and bots were also allowed on Twitter, and there was plenty of harassment and bullying. What Twitter needed was a safe space for debate without all the threats from trolls.
But Musk and other conservatives saw moderation rules on Twitter as stifling free speech. Once he bought the company, Musk set all the rules. And it has now became a place where hate can now flow freely. And if anyone complains, Musk gets to boot them off Twitter.
So much for Musk’s ideas of “free speech.”
And this goes with Musk’s adherence to neoreactionarism. He doesn’t really believe that peasants deserve free speech. We just need for Musk to tell us what he thinks and obey him.
And you can see that taking shape with what is left of the workforce at Twitter. Half of the Twitter workforce was fired. And the rest were given an ultimatum to work their asses off to keep their jobs. This is nothing new. What is different is that Musk and other Silicon Valley reactionaries have convinced themselves that they only need a few employees when you have “geniuses” running the company.
You know. The gifted technocrats who are supposed to rule the world. You don’t need all those “middle managers.” The political ideology of neoreactionarism is now being fosted onto a high tech company this time. And this is a twofer for Musk.
As I mentioned before, Musk has struck a blow against THE CATHEDRAL! Twitter is no longer part of that wicked establishment! Hurrah!
Next, Twitter will now become a shining example of neoreactionarism applied to a major corporation! The neoreactionaries are showing us how the new economy will work! Fewer people at a business means those employees will “reach their untapped potential!” No more fat! Lean, mean fighting machine!
I’ve been through that movie before. It was called “downsizing” in the 1990’s. And it just leads to worker burnout, but this is what happens when you view your employees at automatons and not human beings.
But neoreactionarism doesn’t believe that the rest of us should have a say in how things run. That’s democracy, and according to Peter Thiel, “I know longer believe that democracy and freedom are compatible.” And he is also one of those neoreactionaries, and he helped bankroll many of the Republican candidates in the midterms.
I feel for the Twitter employees, but we are seeing what Musk and his ilk want to ram down our throats.
A Final Note : Stuart Stevens ReTweeted This from Jason Kint.