The title of this post is a term that is taking root in a certain corner of the intellectual blogosphere. Dennis Mangan has written about it just today; I first saw it in a post by John Derbyshire about a month ago. That post led me to a four-part series by Nick Land, in which Mr. Land discusses the singular oeuvre of blogger Mencius Moldbug.
If you want to get an idea of what all this is about, read Nick Land’s extended essay: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. There are many links to follow from there, to Moldbug’s place and elsewhere; for example this item from the well-known biology blog Gene Expression.
This is all rather a large and exotic reading assignment, and caveat lector: for some of you, it may turn out to be a “red pill” you can’t unswallow. Others may find their throats constricting at the first taste of it, and won’t be able to get it down at all.
Update: there’s more. Read the rest of Nick Land’s extended essay here: parts 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d, 4e, 4f(inal).
4 Comments
Malcolm, just a quick note to thank you enormously for this post. I am only halfway through Part II of Nick Land’s essay and it is superb – so many of my own half-judged, half-formed, mental fumblings expressed with clarity and learning – and I haven’t even started on Moldbug yet! What a wondrous miracle this internet is.
You’re most welcome, David. (You can thank Al Gore, too, for inventing the Internet.)
Al Gore couldn’t invent a net, he’d fall through the holes unless his wallet saved him!
I swallowed this particular Red Pill quite some time ago. Ran across a Moldbug link on Arnold Kling’s blog about three years ago.
He who hath eyes, let him see…there is something extremely liberating about ceasing one’s efforts to reform the unreformable and just concentrating on producing high-quality reloaded .308.