Evil Nerd Theory Part 3: A Case Study on the Hestia Society

Trad Twitter, the Postrats, and Machine Intelligence from Before the Grave

This is Part 3 in an ongoing series. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here

Tl;dr: some core people in the Neoreactionary movement wiped their presence from the open internet in 2017, but their influence is still visible in three key areas: libertarian technology researchers, traditionalist social media influencers, and postrat twitter. What follows is part infodump and part narrative. This is a story about a very specific group of Evil Nerds. It describes how a secret society of angry transhumanists and racist trads tried to take over the world, and how they might try again. It’s gonna be a long one.

Prelude: Joining the War Against Solar Panels on the Side of the Crows

In March of 2022 I accidentally found myself in a dark place on the internet. Among a lot of ghosts and empty sockets, there were some other creatures that seemed to be either dead or dreaming. Cautious about waking anything up in the ruins of what felt like a lost civilization, I tried to close the tabs and forget about it all. But I had accidentally called something up, and I realized I needed to put it down again. So here in the Liminal Week, at the very top of the year, I’m taking some time to banish what I found there back into the outer darkness, with ridicule and scorn.

It started when the crows attacked the solar panels. “In Japan there is now a minor boom in falconry” wrote twitter user @wrathofgnon that month, “crows are attacking solar power plants with stones, and the only effective way to keep crows away is to deploy falcons. One trained falcon making 60 attack sorties a day can protect 100,000 solar panels from vengeful crows.” This post went viral, and it annoyed me. The author was a well-known anonymous personality that regularly showed up in the parts of twitter that were interested in urban design and architecture, but I thought there was a bigger agenda here. The bio for Wrath of Gnon (WoG) simply reads “Traditionalist,” and his icon is a crop of the Old Testament god from a Genesis scene on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The guy’s vibes have always been off, it seemed like he was into “traditional” social and political pecking orders as much as thatched roofs and public plazas with columns.

I was irked and on Spring Break. Never piss off an academic with research skills and time on their hands. To my pride and shame, I’ve been on twitter since 2007, and anyone who has been around that long knows that here are some easy ways you can get a vibe check for unknown and anonymous accounts there. You can check the likes (yes, I am a member of the Likes Police, we get free Dunkin), you can check the people they follow (“ladies and gentlemen you ask me for a miracle and I give you, the Eff Bee Eye!”) you can see who they engage with in conversation (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974). None of those methods revealed anything reassuring about WoG, they all indicated a lean towards the hard right wing of the political spectrum, but there was nothing blatant or actionable. Luckily there are other more useful advanced techniques to learn more.

You can search their past posts for keywords that are dogwhistles or hate speech signifiers, and if you click “Advanced Search,” you can look at their oldest posts in consecutive order, in discrete intervals, all the way back to the beginning of Wrath of Gnon’s account in August of 2014. People tell you who they are early. With completely anon accounts that have been in existence for a while, you can learn a lot by checking who followed them first, and seeing who they followed first in turn. These lists used to be chronological and scrolling down took you back in time. This feature is disabled now (thanks, Elon), but in 2022 it was a pretty good metric for finding out about a user’s true friends and sometimes even their true names.

This was all from a set of first-pass searches. Warning for what’s ahead: racism, misogyny, ant-semitism and other kinds of hate abound from here on out.

I’d say that this was a “mask off” moment, but really it’s a moment before the mask ever got put on. It’s a moment before anyone involved even realized they might need a mask in the first place.

I found that WoG’s first post (or at least the oldest remaining that hadn’t been deleted, he deletes a lot) was hilariously just a stereotypical “white statue” image, in this case of Socrates. It had a quote from the philosopher alongside the photo, about the importance of physical vitality. The quote might be fake. And in case we didn’t get the point, there is a hashtag: #socrates. This post got traction when it was re-tweeted by notorious fascist reactionary bodybuilding advocate Bronze Age Pervert. That’s a good early leg up.

Then I went deeper. Literally. Scrolling all the way down to the bottom of a huge list of follows is tedious, but hey. The results are somewhat unreliable with older accounts, especially in circles like this. People get banned and/or delete their identities and alternate names, so it’s impossible to know for sure who someone followed first. But as of March 2022, the first person Wrath of Gnon seemed to have followed after creating his account was @nick_b_steves. This was not a name I’d encountered before, and the way his twitter page presented an overly specified anonymity made me really curious. The rest of this story is about what I found when I started to look him up.

The Real Evil Nerds were the Friends We Made Along the Way

To tell this story properly we have to go back in time in real life too.

In 2000, a researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky founded The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SI), a think tank for studying existential dangers in near and far human futures. In 2012 this organization changed its name to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). This came along with a more direct and explicit focus on Artificial Intelligence as the most immanent and formidable threat. Singularity Institute received an early and major contribution from the Thiel Foundation, a philanthropic org headed by far right libertarian Peter Thiel. Thiel was an official Advisor for SI/MIRI from 2006 until 2017. Yudkowsky also co-founded Overcoming Bias, later LessWrong (which is owned by MIRI), along with economist Robin Hanson, to be a forum for “rationalism,” a worldview that seeks to solve current and future human problems by analyzing situations from first principles.

In 2013 a group spins off from LessWrong and forms a more explicitly reactionary blog and discussion forum, called - you can’t make this up - More Right. The founders here are Samo Burja, now a political consultant and researcher interested in long term institutional persistence issues. In 2014 Burja was more interested in things like race and IQ, and the contemporary applications of monarchic authoritarianism and religious law. You can find his More Right archives here. Another co-founder, Andrew Summitt, is now in digital marketing. During the era in question you can find him on twitter in discussion with others about anti-democratic strategies for the Neoreactionary movement (NRx). His More Right archives are here. Erik Mesoy, another co-founder, is now an IT consultant. Here are his More Right Archives. One of the co-founders went by the pseudonym Athrelon. Archives here. And the 5th co-founder was Michael Anissimov. Anissimov’s archives are here.

Michael Anissimov is significant because he was the Director of Advocacy at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute from 2004 - 2006, the 4th person to join the staff. He was later Director of Media there starting in 2010. He left (or was fired, it’s unclear) in 2013 after some of his ideas about Neoreaction came to light. These ideas are probably best represented in his manifesto statement for More Right here.

1. People are not equal. They never will be. We reject equality in all its forms.

2. Right is right and left is wrong.

3. Hierarchy is basically a good idea.

4. Traditional sex roles are basically a good idea.

5. Libertarianism is retarded.

6. Democracy is irredeemably flawed and we need to do away with it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of SI/MIRI, has rejected Neoreaction. Anissimov continues to write about Artificial Intelligence and white nationalism today, on his twitter account and elsewhere.

This is classic Evil Nerd Hierarchy Fetishism. These ideas were popular back then, and unfortunately they are still popular now. In the early ’10s this growing movement found space for discussion at LessWrong, and at Slate Star Codex, a forum and writing page run by a man outed at the New York Times as Bay Area psychiatrist Scott Alexander Siskind. Siskind’s forums are a place where all kinds of people are comfortable, not just Neoreactionaries, but he got so intrigued by the NRx crowd that he wrote up a long article addressing some of their ideas about the past. and he eventually also wrote a more formal post debunking some of their assumptions as well. But in private correspondence he was more forthright, admitting that he thought they were correct about many things.

And then there’s Nick Land. Really the less said about him, the better. You can get most of it on Wikipedia, anyway. He’s a former leftist academic from England who took too much ketamine and turned into an Orange County Republican. He thinks he’s a supervillain. He lives in Shanghai and accidentally locked himself out of his 64k follower twitter account last year. What isn’t in the wiki, and what was a surprise to me, is the degree to which he was directly involved with these circles in the early and mid ’10s. He knows all of these people by name, and talked with them frequently in open channels. He comments on their blogs, and they comment on his. His main site, Xenosystems, was nuked from the web for some reason that I can’t remember right now, but as you can see in the post at the bottom of that archive page, he’s doing things like engaging directly with this essay on NRx strategics by Samo Burja.

Of course there’s also Moldbug, but I’m really not interested in talking about him at all. He’s one of the most long winded and boring writers on the planet. Peter Thiel gave him money, too.

Curtis Yarvin aka Mencius Moldbug

Clicking around in archives from this era, it’s easy to see many of the same names show up, in the posts and in the comments. But in early 2013, this group found a kind of center, coalescing around Nick B. Steves, the same person who was an early (if not the first) follow of Wrath of Gnon. Like Xenosystems, Nick B. Steves’ first blog is now wiped from the open internet, but in the early ’10s, he was actively working to build a coherent community here, at what he called The Reactivity Place. These guys are all friends (mostly, more on that later) and the best way to make and keep friends on the internet is always to signal boost the stuff that they do, even when your friends are a bunch of racist nerds. The most effective method that Steves seemed to use for this was his ongoing tradition of posting “This Week in Reaction.” He did this consistently for years, first at The Reactivity Place and later at Social Matter (more on that later too). Here’s a representative roundup. Note that this post includes support for racism and homophobia just within the first few paragraphs.

And here is a quick illustration of how these conversations work, in this case, how a key concept in Neoreaction was formed in this discursive mode, and along the way, how Wrath of Gnon got his name. A May 2015 post from Nick B. Steves about conceptual strategies brings a lot of commentary. And one of Steves’ friends with the handle survivingbabel asks “And who speaks for reaction?” Steves’ reply is “Nature… or Nature’s God… or both.” Nick Land responds to that simple comment with a whole post of his own.

“‘Nature or Nature’s God’ is an expression of special excellence, extracted (with subtle modification) from America’s Declaration of Independence. For Steves, it is something of a mantra, because it enables important things to be said in contexts where, otherwise, an interminable argument would first need to be concluded.”

“‘Nature or Nature’s God’ is not a statement,” Land says, getting visibly excited, “but a name, internally divided by tolerated uncertainty.” He goes on, sweating profusely, “NoNG, Nong, No — surely, no. These terms tilt into NoNGod and precipitate a decision. The ‘God of Nature or (perhaps simply) Nature’ is Gnon, whose Name is the abyss of unknowing (epoche), necessarily tolerated in the acceptance of Reality.”

“Gnon is no less than reality,” he concludes, falling over in his chair, “whatever else is believed.”

So Gnon, for these guys, is the ultimate alibi for their own fear, anger, and deeply abiding sadness. It’s nature! Or nature’s god! I’m not racist, nature is! Darwin and all that! I’m not angry, the universe is! It’s wrathful in fact.

The Gang Forms a Club

In late 2013, the pace started to pick up. Nick B. Steves codified a “Reactionary Consensus,” enshrining their belief if in:

- Hierarchy

- Deep Heritage

- Sex Realism

- Race Realism

Which is all a lot of ways to say how scared and angry they are at people who are different from them. They also have unelaborated and sometimes more esoteric bullet points:

- Microeconomics

- Subsidiarity

- Plain Justice

- Anti-Politics

- Anti-Democracy

- Freedom

This all sounds very “under-workshopped.” Like “Subsidiarity” is just a fancy way of saying “Federalism,” and being anti-democracy is just an acknowledgement that most people think your ideas are bad and they don’t like you. But at least they can be friends with each other, right? And in order make sure everyone was on the same page, Steves and friends wrote up a “Reactionary Oath” that says most of the things you’d expect it to.

“I am here not trying to establish a single Reactionary order or polis, which, I think we are agreed, would of necessity have an explicit (and at least mildly enforced) state religion. What I am trying to do is ally reactionaries of various prior metaphysical commitments to the necessary work in the interregnum. Japan was effectively reactionary for most of her history, reasonably well ordered, and it had nothing explicitly to do with Christ or Christianity. Better a godless Japan than a Jesus-luvin Baltimore.”

Nick, if you’re reading this, keep the name of my city out of your mouth.

Land and Steves and others made a handy diagram to show how Neoreactionary thought exists at the intersection of three major cultural modes: traditionalism (especially the religious kind), technocapitalism, and ethnonationalism. It’s very telling that they mis-spelled “hierarchy” at the center of their own foundational graphic.

The Neoreactionary Trichotomy

This would guide strategy moving forward, as they could use this diagram to organize existing resources, but also to recruit new participants from each of the subbranches. They would actively try to redpill the normies. 

In his Reactionary Oath, Nick B. Steves said it was a pledge of faith to “an as yet unnamed reactionary institution.” In 2014, Steves announced the formation of a new organization, The Hestia Society, and a new blog to go along with it, Social Matter. The Hestia Society is meant to be the new flagship institution for the Neoreactionary movement. Tantalizingly, the “Members” page from their original launch never seems to have been archived. But we do know that Michael Anissimov, formerly of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, was a member, because he was later very publicly kicked out and blacklisted. Which is another very funny persistent failure mode for this group and their alliances. Disagreeable by nature, they can’t stop infighting. Despite their oaths or whatever, these people are constantly denouncing one another and creating schisms, fights, and tantrums.

In 2015, the Hestia Society announced it was formally assuming leadership of the NRx movement. Nick Land gave his blessing here.

Here’s a quick breakdown of known members and affiliates. First, this list, from 2015. Hadley Bennett is Jonah Bennett, who was on the staff of the news outlet Daily Caller, (there is more information about the Hestia Society at that link too) and also used the pseudonym Aimless Gromar. Bennett has distanced himself from this past and he has since gone on to work at Longtermist Rationalist EA group Leverage Research. Leverage Research has been accused of cultlike activities, and it was also funded by Peter Thiel. They are super weird. Bennett later co-founded Palladium Magazine, with Wolf Tivy. Wolf Tivy seems to be another founding member of the Hestia Society, under the pseudonym Warg Franklin. Fellow nerds will remember that Wargs are giant Wolfs in the Lord of the Rings universe.

This post from a former Hestia Society member calls him “wolf tivy/warg franklin” and says “Warg is one of the head people of Hestia.” Nyan Sandwich appears to be another pseudonym used by Wolf Tivy, according to his archived former personal website, nyansandwich.info. For more crossover, Scott Alexander Siskind quotes and credits “Warg Franklin” here for an essay that is now credited here to “Nyan Sandwich”: Capturing Gnon. (It’s in Part VI of the Slate Star Codex post, Scott needs an editor even more than I do.) Note that “Nyan Sandwich” picks up the conversation in the comments section as if he had been addressed directly. Here’s Warg Franklin from his blog The Future Primaeval writing about his fears that Black population growth in Africa could overrun the rest of the world soon. Warg’s complete work on Future Primaeval, along with other authors, can be found here. Nyan Sandwich’s work is more prolific, and includes tons of comments he’s left on the homepages of other people in the network, but the core of his own writing output can be found here.

Other Hestia members at the time include Daily Caller columnist Henry Dampier. And Anton Silensky rounds out this list of “Fellows” from June of 2015. Here he is writing about cultural history, and on Warg Franklin’s blog writing about Walt Disney. These two have been the hardest to find more info about, and they seem to have gone permanently dark after 2017.

Then there is “The Official Hestia Hall of Fame.” Number one is Moldbug, but really who cares about him? Number two is Nick B. Steves, “Nick B Steves has been one of our most important figures in holding the community together, defining norms, and making this thing work as a group of civilized men.” Lol. Number three is Nick Land. Number Four is simply “Jim,” aka James A. Donald, who is uniquely racist and misogynist, even for this crowd. Here’s a typically nasty post from the era in question: “Nazism and Antisemitism is PC.” You can find more of writing listed under his full name here. Here he in conversation with Nyan Sandwich and Samo Burja talking strategy. Number five is Karl F. Boetel. Boetel runs Radish Magazine (they’re bitter and underground, get it?), where he writes about, among other things, bringing slavery back.

And there’s The Duck, or “jokeocracy,” Rosie Gray at The Atlantic tried to contact many of these protagonists for her excellent and comprehensive article about NRx from 2017. Moldbug gave her a juvenile troll reply. Steves disparaged her IQ. The Hestia/NRx “Code of Conduct” written by Steves includes “Don’t talk to the press about Neoreaction,” and has a link to the Hestia Society Contact page That page refers all interested parties to The Duck’s twitter page. The Duck has deleted all of his tweets, and his account now says he’s returning in January 2024. I’m pretty sure he also tweets as Andrew Quackson. Here he is being quoted by Wrath of Gnon only days after WoG created his own account.

The Duck is Pax Dickinson. He says it was performance art. Dickinson is the former Chief Technology Officer at Business Insider. Dickinson was a headlining speaker at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in August of 2017. According to this (still active) complaint in the Charlottesville circuit court, Dickinson was one of the co-organizers of the event, at which dozens of people were injured and counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed on August 12th.

On August 17th, The Hestia Society removed its website from the internet. Steves abandoned his blog at The Reactivity Place in June of that year and made it private and password protected a few months later.

Here’s Nick Land upbraiding Pax Dickinson about his sloppy strategy on the ground in Charlottesville.

Epilogue 1: Based and Wrathpilled

In February of 2017 Wrath of Gnon gave an interview to alt-right journalist Brett Stevens. Stevens calls WoG a “meme-master.” At the time, Wrath of Gnon was best known for posting image macro memes with quotes from conservative, libertarian, and even fascist figures. He was also doing more posting about traditional architecture and urbanism.

There’s a good collection of more of these, with an enlightening discussion, here.

Strangely, mixed in among the prominent figures like Spengler, Evola, Chesterton, and Mishima, are other much more obscure writers now familiar to us from this Neoreactionary network: Laliberte, Anissimov, and Nick B. Steves - Even Brett Stevens himself. These were posted on twitter and on tumblr. Stevens asks WoG about the memes and their origin story. Wrath of Gnon replies:

“I had been skimming the outer fringes of the “reacto-sphere,” but I think I was influenced in taking the step to participate more actively by a few people, and a few memes. … I saw a way to present (to the general public) very “politically incorrect,” almost caustic ideas, in a fun setting. It took me a few weeks of experimenting to realize that I needed two more vital ingredients: a pinch of gravitas (which I got from relying mostly on very old literature) and beauty. Beauty is the beginning of all things good, and goodness is the beginning of all beautiful things. At the very same time I was reading NRx, I read Bryce, MM, Sailer, Jim, Nick Land etc., and the rest is (well documented) history.”

This perfectly captures the doomy wistful sad affect of the classic Evil Nerd. Wrath of Gnon is frank here about what he is doing and how:

“Here is where the allegory of the Red Pill comes in handy. I have, by now, a pocket full of them, and the more I give out, the more I seem to carry around. It is a self-feeding fire: every conversion is the seed of a dozen more, and the anecdotes of these “red-pillings” are moralizing tinctures indeed.”

Wrath of Gnon mixes his reactionary moralizing tinctures with a base of traditional architecture and urban design, this is the type of “beauty” that he’s settled on over the years. His account arose to prominence at around the same time that the Hestia Society was recruiting people in graphic design and outreach. And WoG acknowledged that “deconstruction” was a powerful weapon in the Culture Wars he wanted to fight. He also refers to others in the network as “brother” in tweets going back to the first month of his activity on twitter. He’s clearly involved with the core group here.

Today, in 2024 (gah I really started writing this thing last year, didn’t I?) the trope of the trad twitter account posting old buildings with a vaguely fashy aura and a white marble statue avi is pretty well known. Sarah Manavis wrote about this phenomena for New Statesman back 2018. Some accounts like The Cultural Tutor have more than a million followers, while Wrath of Gnon only has about 150k. But he was the first, and more people should know about his ideological origins and goals, and his brothers.

Epilogue 2: Silicon Nemesis

Here’s pop musician Grimes and others partying with Samo Burja at the launch party for a Palladium Magazine issue last year.

Burja, we remember, is one of the co-founders (along with Mike Anissimov from MIRI) of the cleverly named LessWrong spinoff, More Right, back in 2013. This provided him with a venue to write about the benefits of religious law, monarchy and autocracy, race and IQ, and to strategize about how the Neoreactionary movement could advance their racist, sexist, hierarchy fetish agenda and undermine democracy. (By the way, Long Now Foundation, why is this guy one of your research fellows? I’ve given a greater percentage of my net worth to your organization than Jeff Bezos has (yes, I did the math) and I’m member number 263. WTF?) It’s not surprising to see Samo Burja rolling with some of his old friends in the core Neoreactionary social circle. Burja is on the Editorial Board at Palladium along with Wolf Tivy, who seems to have used the pseudonyms Nyan Sandwich and Warg Franklin while writing for NRx blogs. Wolf Tivy co-founded Palladium Magazine along with Jonah Bennett, who was definitely a member of the core group under the names Hadley Bennett, Hadley Bishop, and Aimless Gromar.

In 2022 Wolf Tivy used Palladium as a platform to reminisce about quitting his job to go to the gym and chase girls:

“When I wasn’t lifting and courting, I was building a network of intellectuals interested in problems of governance from beyond the established liberal democratic paradigm. I didn’t know why it was interesting. In fact, I thought it was a vice. ‘This is bad for your career,’ said the little wage-slave voice in my head, ‘you should be focusing on more lucrative projects.’

The little voice was wrong. It was through those intellectual networks that I got my next job and built the social capital which allows me and my friends the freedom to pursue the important problems we have been tasked with. You’re reading one result: Palladium Magazine.”

Palladium Magazine seems to be the result of an encounter Tivy had with a mysterious benefactor:

“The next job I got was unorthodox. Someone had asked one of my friends to refer them to the most ambitious, open-minded, and public-spirited people he knew. He introduced me. The job would give me the freedom to pursue what was most important. I was a fit, but I felt I hadn’t been unemployed long enough yet.

I debated with my collaborators over the next year or so. Is this what we really wanted to do with our lives? Or should we get safer hobbies like drunken rock climbing? If we were in, we should be in with our whole lives and deaths, and with all our resources, because this stuff can’t be pursued by anything less than the whole person. We were in. We moved from around the world to the center of the universe in California. Once there, we got jobs where we could pursue our project full time.”

Palladium Magazine is a project from the American Governance Foundation, a nonprofit that doubled its budget in 2022, to $1.6 million. Their tax filings list only one contributor, whose name is redacted. Tivy is the President of AGF, and Burja is Director. AGF also runs the Center for Strategic Translation, a strange organization that’s dedicated to sussing out Chinese political and economic strategy by surfacing obscure policy documents.

It’s a cliche to invoke Peter Thiel’s name at times and places like this, so I’ll just again remember that he was the key early funder of the Singularity Institute, that hired Anissimov as employee number four, became the Machine Intelligence Research Institute to study the threats of Artificial Intelligence, and hosted LessWrong, where many of these guys seem to have met in the first place. Bennett worked for Leverage Research, also a futurist organization interested in AI threats, also Thiel backed. Thiel apparently funds Palladium. The most recent issue is titled “Silicon Nemesis,” and is themed around the threats and opportunities presented by Artificial Intelligence. Grimes, who is now Palladium’s “Futurist-in-Residence” is on the cover, and shows up inside in an interview conducted by Samo Burja.

“I’m curious where it goes next though,” Grimes tells Burja, about AI research.

“I feel like I’m seeing things that are gesturing towards the future I want. Engineers are amazing problem solvers, and setting their minds to solving systemic cultural problems has yielded some good results. Some people have done it really well. The amount of incredible young people I meet in this city who are or were Thiel Fellows scouted and funded by Peter Thiel is really cool. Whatever your political opinions are, that’s just a beautiful thing. I wish more people with resources would do the same.”

Epilogue 3: Mods are Asleep, Postrats

Another thing that Nyan Sandwich and Warg Franklin share, besides seeming to be the likely pseudonyms of Wolf Tivy, is an interest in Postrationalism. Here’s Warg’s take. And here’s Nyan’s. Twitter user Eigenrobot (also known as Samuel Henly, apparently) put together a useful syllabus on Postrationalism here. Briefly, Postrationalism emerged on forums like LessWrong and Slate Star Codex out of a shared recognition that the dominant “rationalist” framework and consensus there didn’t capture all of the necessary aspects of human existence. Things like the power of rituals and narrative were not easily reducible to rational models and methods, so the nerds went and re-invented religion from first principles.

Here’s a 2011 post on LessWrong that seems to be one of the earliest invocations of the term. That comment references Nick Tarleton, who was a Software Engineer and Visiting Fellow at SI/MIRI.

Eigenrobot, in his syllabus, however attributes key significance to someone else, “Sarah Perry is the most important postrationalist writer.” Perry writes under her own name, and under the name Sister Y. Nick b. Steves, in a review of her book for The Reactivity Place, called Sarah Perry “… one of the brightest minds in the nascent neoreaction.” This group included some of Perry’s work in its central collection of online NRx writing, “The Best of Neoreaction.” Sarah Perry also shows up on the list of guests in the Hestia Society’s now deleted podcast series, Ascending the Tower.

By her own admission in an interview, Sarah Perry spent this period interacting with a lot of people in the NRx movement. “And of course at that time (2011-2015ish) I was talking to a lot of neoreactionaries who rejected democracy.” Here she is discussing strategy and signaling with Wrath of Gnon on twitter. “I think it's good to avoid all legible signaling,” is a general principle among the Postrationalists. This tendency plus an interest in maintaining “high decoupling” (willingness to entertain ideas on their own terms, apart from context) and “high openness” (an interest in concepts that society has already pre-judged as taboo), leave the Postrat community vulnerable to bad actors with an ideological agenda. They might even get murdered by deepfates.

This is a good explainer on Postrats and twitter here. Sarah Perry credits, as some foundational examples of Postrat thinking, this post from Darcey Riley, where Nyan Sandwich is jumping into the comments section. She also links to this early piece by Warg Franklin.

Oh and here is Wrath of Gnon making an image macro meme out of a Sarah Perry quote:

Conclusion: Stop It.

As researcher and writer Katherine Dee has it, “everything’s fallen into a fandom model.”  (Dee says more about this here.) One of the only recordings I could find of Nick B. Steves’ voice is on this livestream recording here. Listening to it put the cultural network I was tracing here into a new context - these guys are in some sense just giant nerds. In this recording, they are nerding out on Christian doctrine and Donald Trump, but if you blur your eyes at the content and just attend to the form, it could be about anything: giant robot anime, trains, the Marvel cinematic universe, cryptocurrency, theoretical physics … these Evil Nerds are a lot of things, but they are also a fandom.

Okay, this is winding up and I’m in a good mood, so here’s my final bit. My own fandom tendency has lately latched on to the 2005 era Doctor Who reboot, which is a world about as ideologically far from NRx’s hierarchy fetishism as you can get. There’s a scene at the end of Series 3 Episode 13 where the protagonists seem trapped by a guy who wants to take over the world, but instead of getting scared, they just start laughing at him. They flatten the attempt at world dominance with a world-spanning story, and it’s a good one. Spoilers: The Doctor had thought that he was the last of the Time Lords, but he finds out that this Evil Nerd named The Master is one too. The story gives The Doctor his agency back and corners the baddy while shouting, “You know what I’m going to say! You know what I’m going to say!” The would be dictator collapses and The Doctor banishes him with the words of power in his ear: “I forgive you.”

So this is the deal. Stop it. And make amends. Get good, nerds. Especially, cut it out with the race and IQ stuff. That’s really all you think you’ve got. You are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out. It’s tedious. You think you have access to some dark unspoken secret, hidden since the foundation of the world. You have no analysis that takes into account the way race is constructed as a set of categories, and no understanding of the way that IQ was similarly built and instrumentalized. You are also lacking any sense of how both of these things have been used by power. Your phase space needs a dimension that accounts for power, and while you’re at it, add a moral vector through as well. In general, stop trying to reduce the relationship between humans and the world down to a single dimension. The next move is really simple: be nice to people who are different than you. They are not trying to take anything away from you. As The Doctor puts it, “There’s no such thing as an ordinary human!” Try to understand difference in other terms besides hierarchy. I know it’s hard, but you’re very very smart, right?

~

If you read this far, thanks, and congratulations or sorry that happened to you. This has been Evil Nerd Theory Part 3. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 is here.

Special thanks to Dave Troy and others for valuable contributions to this research. For more on NRx, I highly recommend Elizabeth Sandifer’s book, Neoreaction a Basilisk.