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The society of Snow Crash is a dystopia, not something we should want to implement.
It's more The Diamond Age than Snow Crash. The "Patchwork" of Yarvin and Land maps pretty neatly to Stephenson's Clades -- micronations as voluntary societies.
I think/hope we will see something similar to voluntary societies in the future. Nation states are too heterogenous to row in the same direction. Stronger ethics are needed
Why are big media outlets suddenly sharing this guys ideas?
Like a precocious undergrad who just discovered set theory and thinks he’s king of the… uhh sovereign corporation?
Lots of literary references though. Borges, of course gave him Urbit/Tlon[0], and wrote some racially spicy stuff in his day. Pretty sure Nock is a reference to a controversial libertarian thinker[1]. I bet you could find more anti-Semitic, pro-slavery and anti-democratic Easter eggs if you looked.
Clearly though, in person he managed to rub elbows with some pretty influential people… also like Ms Rand.
On that, he's not wrong!
I 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-c…
> He's foppish and playful more than he is scary. This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
I 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-c…
> society is beginning to burn through its seed corn This is mostly true in the US, where a defining characteristic of the population is a belief that we cannot do better or have more, that things will always continue to get worse, and that everyone is out to take advantage of you all the time. Other countries continue to invest in the future. China, among others, do not suffer the current American fatalism.
There's also been lots of stories about bank closures and Chinese citizens losing their money.
Additionally, China, like the US and many other world powers, is a totalitarian authoritarian government which is hostile towards its people. Whether China has high-speed monorails or not, they continue to slide backwards as a country into the dark ages, increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
The society of Snow Crash is a dystopia, not something we should want to implement.
Especially that whole ‘listening to reason’ thing .. Well. I dunno, actually. In some ways, I do want The Feed. But in other ways, I definitely don’t want Drummers. Okay, some aspects of Drummers.
Scott 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.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's foppish and playful more than he is scary. This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy? We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's foppish and playful more than he is scary. This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy? We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> He's foppish and playful more than he is scary. This is a very unwise stance to take. Peter Thiel has teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to implement this plan. This is why A16Z and Musk put Trump in power, it is precisely to implement this plan.
Musk is on the outs. And what if there is no grand conspiracy? We're extremely far from any of Yarvin's "plans" at any rate. Yarvin's most cherished plan was to create a shadow university called the "Antiversity" -- a sort of repository of all truths unbeholden to politics and fads. Is this a bad idea? Which other Yarvin ideas scare you so?
What if, indeed... and what if they even publicly announced their conspiracy and outlined their exact plans in full?
Direct texts:
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade...
https://www.project2025.org/playbook/
Summaries:
https://www.aclu.org/project-2025-explained
https://democracyforward.org/the-peoples-guide-to-project-20...
Implementation tracker: