Chinese workers dismantle the 2010 World Expo UK Pavilion aka the “Seed
Cathedral,” a high-tech apparition moaning “ecological sustainablity” which
now haunts the ex-Expo grounds…
Fascinating (as almost always) chatter (no, not “chatter,” heavy matter but yet… chatter) from the neoreactionaries as they anticipate with mixed thoughts and feelings their moment in the “klieg lights.” Techcrunch’s Geeks for Monarchy, Moldbug a Yarvin (and a San Francisco poet), something like hyperrational paranoia (the neo- in the term, the red pills in the script — cliché upgraded some endless times to meme meme meme meme meme meme meme and in the NR imagination a means of splitting any proposed “us,” and in particular the U.S., cleaving right at spot where “all men are created equal,” the feature a bug after all, they crow, because, you know, because HBD, yeah you know me) – it fascinates, much like snakes (red apple falls).
A smugly horrified bit in Salon can hardly be far behind, one supposes.
Fun to follow, fun like sci-fi come alive. (And well, isn’t it?)
Shanghai has this neoreactionary set, see? (Nick Land, Spandrell [apparently in Japan, actually, but with a Shanghai connection], a commenter Manjusri, who else?). How do I know? I’m in Shanghai. I’m online. That aside, given the thin distribution of the network of what — offhand-guessing 40-some? — “neoreationary” bloggers globally (the scare quotes a nod to their fascinating project to figure out what they’re doing and what to call it), this must say something about the kind of place this is, this Shanghai, this China, right now. (The universe’s nicest Dark Lord is fascinating on this latter subject on his day-job blog, as well.)
Shanghai, hypercapital of Expat-Asian-reaction, network node closing and breaking and closing circuits with Bay and Valley, DC exurbs, wherever else? Sure, why not.
Time to return to The Diamond Age. It’s just two years shy of its 20th anniversary and it’s saying ever more about the kind of singular place this is, this refracting Shanghaied world where everything happens again and again, sometimes, even faster and then all at once, I suspect. Perhaps, but who, whom, where, what, when, why? Stephenson needs a study—Cryptonomicon too. Put that on the project list.
Hyperrationalist paranoia, style of an age? (Side effects of paranoia: the prophet and the sage).
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It’s not like it’s this assault on an actual Cathedral; it’s something like the opposite. (Though you could swap in “the Cathedral” for “the Catholic church,” “Inauguration Day” for “Easter day of the Holy Year”, and “Equality” (perhaps) for “God” and you’d pretty much have it in a far tighter nutshell).
Though pits, scores, cracks, warps, and heavy oxidization distort and twist and obscure the reflections in the funhouse mirrors, this “outer right” does indeed mirror the farther left; after all, Moldbug/Yarvin in his own phrase “is pretty much the anti-Chomsky. (As a broad generalization, UR’s stance in any controversy will be the opposite of Chomsky’s.)” It’s not just flipped, but it is.
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Ideas not to be pursued any further:
Isolate vocabulary
Conceptual poem 1: serial poem made of controlled vocabulary drawn from the “reactosphere” in manner roughly of Kunin’s “value-neutral Paradise Lost,” Folding Ruler Star.
Conceptual poem 2: search engine-sculpted poem using the same.
Call it all The Cathedral, of course. Dedicate it to its own undoing.