Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www.newyorker.com/maga...
Doesn't seem to work? It's the pay walled site.
Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
11–20 of 453 posts
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#12It's pretty sad that loonies like this get a platform at all.
The ultimate irony is that New Yorker in this case is writing an article about him, mocking his views...yet legitimizing them at the same time by associating their name with this kind of person at all.
How is this guy different from any other of the thousands moderately-successful tech people with an obscure hobby project (Urbit). Just because of his far-out-there views?
The only fascinating thing here is the phenomenon that no matter what nonsense you come up with, someone on the Internet will agree with you, think it's a good thing, and maybe even form a fan club.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#13Why are big media outlets suddenly sharing this guys ideas?
Because the folks in power are suddenly endorsing them?
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#14Why are big media outlets suddenly sharing this guys ideas?
Because the Vice President of the US is a devotee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_1#%E2%80... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:JD_Vance/Archive_2#Politi...
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#15The society of Snow Crash is a dystopia, not something we should want to implement.
The biggest mistake the Cyberpunk authors made was making their dystopia look so cool and then assuming we’d actually read the book.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#16Why are big media outlets suddenly sharing this guys ideas?
engagement
That's the only thing they value anymore.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#17[flagged]
Please don't post glib dismissals here.
It's not that glib, it's a point made in the article.
> He found more of a community on Usenet, a precursor to today’s online forums. But even in groups like talk.bizarre, where intellectual peacocking was the norm, he stood out for his desire to dominate.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#18I mentioned this previously, but I frequently think back to Gibson's "Jackpot" -- a cross-lashed, polycausal catastrophe: Lots of bad little things accumulating, building up a certain momentum.
I think that even as far back as 2009, an astute observer would have noticed that society is beginning to burn through its seed corn.
In some places, things are now getting extremely acute: https://www.neilobrien.co.uk/p/the-confluence?r=h8x
There's no way out but through, which means that politics are going to get extremely weird. Moldbug/Yarvin is one manifestation of this, and quite a benign and even harmless one. He's foppish and playful more than he is scary.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#19The society of Snow Crash is a dystopia, not something we should want to implement.
There’s an epic battle raging between Gibson’s Cyberpunks and Clarke’s Spacefarers.
The former seems to be winning.
Re: Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America
#20Scott Alexander also recently had a take on Curtis Yarvin’s recent actions: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out The gist of it is that he had interesting ideas on political systems in the past, but that his current ideas are nonsense, and in fact his old work explains exactly why his new work is nonsense.
Ironically, the quality of Scott's work has taken a markedly sharper nosedive in the last decade than the quality of Yarvin's work.