Neoreaction a Basilisk

eBook, 356 pages

English language

Published by Eruditiorum Press.

ASIN:: B0782JDGVQ

(1 review)

On the ugly fringes of the Internet lurks the future of far-right jerks. They are called “neoreactionaries” or, more fancifully, the “Dark Enlightenment,” a term coined by Nick Land, an expatriate British exacademic philosopher cyberpunk horror writer whose unexpected turn towards far-right politics electrified a bunch of people on Reddit. He was inspired by the works of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger famed for calling for Steve Jobs to be made king of California and tasked with maximizing profit for the state, and also for claiming that black people make good slaves. Moldbug is more usually known as Curtis Yarvin, a Bay Area software engineer who got his start as a writer in the comment section of Overcoming Bias, a transhumanist blog featuring, among others, the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing …

On the ugly fringes of the Internet lurks the future of far-right jerks. They are called “neoreactionaries” or, more fancifully, the “Dark Enlightenment,” a term coined by Nick Land, an expatriate British exacademic philosopher cyberpunk horror writer whose unexpected turn towards far-right politics electrified a bunch of people on Reddit. He was inspired by the works of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger famed for calling for Steve Jobs to be made king of California and tasked with maximizing profit for the state, and also for claiming that black people make good slaves. Moldbug is more usually known as Curtis Yarvin, a Bay Area software engineer who got his start as a writer in the comment section of Overcoming Bias, a transhumanist blog featuring, among others, the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing malaria, and who freaked out once when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him. The confluence of these facts may or may not be the doom of humanity. And just wait til we work in Thomas Ligotti, Alan Turing, William Blake, Frantz Fanon, China Miéville, and Hannibal Lecter.

Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.

1 edition

Wolfgang Wopperer reviewed Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer

An intense exploration of the alt-right's horrors

5 stars

Constantly switching between causal histories, close readings and caustic remarks, Sandifer fearlessly explores how (and why) we're fucked – how the the alt-right's (and, more fundamentally, capitalism's) lack of empathy and sheer stupidity are creating a "cratering shitstorm in which the human race seems hell-bent on going extinct".

When Sandifer traces the alt-right's recent (Gamergate) and ancient (Austrian Economics) history, the book is most readable; when she assembles an army of intellectual comrades to dismantle neo-reactionary narratives and rhetorics, it is most exhilarating (and exhausting). Horror and historical materialism are our main guides, crude psycho-analytical exegesis is more of a bonus and thankfully marked as such.

For me, the book achieves a rare confluence of intellectual rigour and rugged empathy, actively wielded weirdness and precisely channeled rage. Pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will by way of William Blake and Alan Moore.