I thought this was an excellent statement of the problem, though perhaps it didn’t stick the landing. This author is clear-eyed about the shape of our discontent. Yet, like the rest of us, he had few answers for what to do about it.
Still, the first step is understanding you have a problem, and maybe just understanding it is enough to get started.
One of the difficulties I’ve noticed is that it’s very difficult to spend any length of time pointing out this central insight (the undesirable character of our new and unaccountable “control society”), because of its proximity to the New Right. And you can’t get caught saying there’s a grain of truth to the dark enlightenment, because It’s too easy to be confused for a clever fascist hiding a more odious and primitive agenda. This establishes a sort of containment zone that prevents you from straying too close to the barriers, pre-empting the conversation we really should be having. If you stray too close to the edges, alarm bells go off and people assume your real goal is far more nefarious.
And yet, as annoying as this ‘thought barrier’ is, you really have to lay the blame for it at the feet of the New Right people. It’s not the left’s fault that they went way off the deep end. You get the sense that if the Curtis Yarvin-style dark enlightenment voices had just stayed in their lane and limited their criticism to the world they actually understood (the internet - its power and its foibles), they could have created a reasonable counter culture. Hey, the decentralized bureaucratic forces that shape our lives have no basis for accountability! That’s refreshing! We can take that somewhere!
But no, instead, they disappeared up their own asshole and came out the other end as catholic monarchists. And it was their boosting of a populist megalomaniac that has now put us on a ridiculous, idiotic path of self-immolation. (And won’t it be rich at the end of this to hear them complain that we never tried Real Monarchism?) Any wisdom about the insidious nature of headless disaggregated power is now lost - aliased by the Frankenstein monster that is the current administration, stupidly and cynically assembled by them in their grimoire laboratory.
Still, the first step is understanding you have a problem, and maybe just understanding it is enough to get started.
One of the difficulties I’ve noticed is that it’s very difficult to spend any length of time pointing out this central insight (the undesirable character of our new and unaccountable “control society”), because of its proximity to the New Right. And you can’t get caught saying there’s a grain of truth to the dark enlightenment, because It’s too easy to be confused for a clever fascist hiding a more odious and primitive agenda. This establishes a sort of containment zone that prevents you from straying too close to the barriers, pre-empting the conversation we really should be having. If you stray too close to the edges, alarm bells go off and people assume your real goal is far more nefarious.
And yet, as annoying as this ‘thought barrier’ is, you really have to lay the blame for it at the feet of the New Right people. It’s not the left’s fault that they went way off the deep end. You get the sense that if the Curtis Yarvin-style dark enlightenment voices had just stayed in their lane and limited their criticism to the world they actually understood (the internet - its power and its foibles), they could have created a reasonable counter culture. Hey, the decentralized bureaucratic forces that shape our lives have no basis for accountability! That’s refreshing! We can take that somewhere!
But no, instead, they disappeared up their own asshole and came out the other end as catholic monarchists. And it was their boosting of a populist megalomaniac that has now put us on a ridiculous, idiotic path of self-immolation. (And won’t it be rich at the end of this to hear them complain that we never tried Real Monarchism?) Any wisdom about the insidious nature of headless disaggregated power is now lost - aliased by the Frankenstein monster that is the current administration, stupidly and cynically assembled by them in their grimoire laboratory.