The Dark Enlightenment and More Mellon Madness

I recently published a blog exploring the strange death of billionaire Matthew Mellon, who allegedly died from compilations relating to a ayahuasca session in Cancun, Mexico on April 16, 2018. Mellon was a lifelong drug addict who had fallen under the sway of opioids in recent years. The ayahuasca session was reportedly a part of alternative methods for treating addiction Mellon was pursuing in Mexico. His death occurred right before he was scheduled to check into a rehab facility employing ibogaine therapy, another psychedelic alternative.

Beyond the curious circumstances of his death, there's also the fact that Mellon was an heir in one of the richest and most  powerful families in the history of these United States. The Mellon family of Pittsburgh first emerged as a major power in the wake of the American Civil War, becoming the largest banking house outside of New York City by the end of the nineteenth century. From there they branched out into other industries, most notably oil. After co-founding Gulf Oil in 1901, the family's place was assured in one of the defining industries of the twentieth century.

The family's power was further enhanced during the Second World War when the Mellons began a long, generations-spanning association with the US intelligence community. Numerous family members and in-laws would serve in the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, during WWII and would maintain close ties to the CIA throughout the Cold War and beyond.

But beyond this, the family has a longtime association with even more fringe topics. The Mellons have frequently turned up as key backers of the occult (typically through Freemasonry), psychedelics and Ufology over the years as well. Most recently former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon, Matthew's brother, joined Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences, the latest Disclosure initiative, and called for greater research into UFOs from the DoD. This, along with the family's longstanding intelligence ties, were further discussed in my initial examination of Matthew Mellon's death.

Since then I've continued to look into Mellon's death and connect the dots. And what is beginning to emerge is truly incredible.

The Dark Enlightenment

Let's begin with a certain conservative firebrand who was linked to Mellon in the wake of the billionaire's death. Politico notes:

"Running out of money and down on his luck, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos laid off the small staff of Milo Entertainment Inc. earlier this month, according to three people familiar with the situation.

"Yiannopoulos' company has fallen on hard times ever since his former patrons, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, severed their financial backing last year.

"According to the sources, Yiannopoulos had been expecting to instead receive significant financial backing from the banking heir and cryptocurrency billionaire Matthew Mellon. But those hopes were dashed with Mellon’s unexpected death from an apparent drug overdose on April 16.

"On Monday, Yiannopoulos posted a photo on Instagram of himself with Mellon. 'I spent a few days and nights in Miami and LA with the incredible human being Matthew Mellon, the last of them just a day before he passed,' Yiannopoulos wrote in the caption. 'He was brilliant, infectious and warm-hearted and I will never forget getting to know this remarkable person. Rest in peace now, MM. You left a giant stamp on the world.' "

Milo

In the prior post addressing Mellon, I had pondered just where exactly his politics lay. As was noted there, the Mellon family has generally been aligned with the Rockefeller-dominated globalist faction of the elite, but there have been some glaring exceptions, such as media mogul and longtime CIA asset Richard Mellon Scaife (who was addressed at length before here), one of the major financiers of the New Right. As was noted before here and here, Scaife was also been linked to Le Cercle, which was effectively the Fascist International's answer to the Bilderberg Group.

Matthew Mellon was a longtime Republican and there even some indications that he was a Trump backer. He had recently met with the Orange One shortly before his death. His sponsorship of former alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos further indicates that Matthew Mellon was closer aligned politically to Richard Mellon Scaife than his brother, who had served on the staff of Jay Rockefeller at one point.

Another clue may be gleamed from Mellon's recent move to LA.  A certain right wing venture capitalist is also presently plotting a relocation to LA with bold plans in the aftermath. The Los Angeles Times reports:

"But [Peter] Thiel, 50, has also never felt himself to be a part of Silicon Valley. An outspoken libertarian provocateur, even in his early days in college, Thiel has long tried to nudge America's tech capital rightward, with little success. And after his endorsement of President Trump, a man who reveled in being an outsider has apparently found himself too far to the fringes for his liking.

"Now Thiel is leaving Silicon Valley for Los Angeles — a move his camp describes as a bid to escape the political hegemony of the San Francisco Bay Area.

"He plans to relocate his residence to his home in Hollywood, and move his Thiel Capital and Thiel Foundation organizations to a new headquarters in L.A., according to a person familiar with his plans who was not authorized to publicly discuss them. (Another of his firms, the venture capital firm Founders Fund, will remain in San Francisco, the person said.)..

"He's rumored to be interested in launching a conservative media outlet. Despite the region's reputation as a bastion of liberalism, Southern California is where some of the bigger names in conservative media — such as Breitbart News, the Drudge Report and the Daily Wire — got their start."

Peter Thiel

Since Thiel's move has been reported there has been much speculation that he plans to turn LA into a kind of conservative enclave in California. Was Mellon in turn also setting up shop in LA to join Thiel in establishing a right-leaning tech sector to rival San Francisco? Certainly Mellon's sponsorship of Milo Yiannopoulos would be in keeping with Thiel's alleged plans to launch a conservative media outlet there.

What's more interesting, however, is the influence Thiel has had on an especially disturbing wing of the alt-right that is often referred to as neoreaction (sometimes abbreviated as NRx) or the Dark Enlightenment. In an article on Breitbart co-written by Yiannopoulos, the Dark Enlightenment current was likened to the intellectual vanguard of the alt-right. Yiannopoulos is not himself a part of this movement, but it has no doubt influenced his ideology.

Thiel, however, appears to be quite popular in such circles. The guiding lights of the Dark Enlightenment --software engineer Curtis Yarvin (who often writes under the handle "Mencius Moldbug") and philosopher Nick Land --have often cited Thiel's thinking as a major influence on their ideology:

"Along with Yarvin, Land cites a 2009 essay by Peter Thiel for libertarian publication Cato Unbound, which famously announced, 'I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.' Thiel went on to envision “an escape from politics in all its forms,” which Land interprets using an opposition that had been introduced by political scientist Albert Hirschman, between voice and exit..." 

While we're on the topic of ideology, it would probably be helpful to address several of the tenants of neoreaction. Viewpoint Magazine recently provided an excellent rundown:

"Neoreactionaries don’t advocate any kind of central social organization. Land envisions a 'gov-corp,' a society run like a company, ruled by a CEO. Instead of petitioning a government for redress of grievances, unsatisfied customers are free to take their business elsewhere. If this sounds medieval, neoreactionaries don’t deny it — Yarvin sometimes describes himself as a 'royalist,' or a 'monarchist,' or even a 'Jacobite,' in reference to 17th-century opponents of parliamentary influence in British government.

"The question is, where do you go after exiting? NRxers don’t dismiss the idea of competing gov-corps on the same land mass, an idea anticipated by NRx intellectual forefather Hans Herman-Hoppe, an extreme libertarian political scientist, who advocates for a system that he admits is essentially feudalism. On a more abstract level, the neoreactionary fascination with bitcoin imagines the escape to an alternate economy unencumbered by federal regulation. Even Yarvin’s startup, Urbit, seems to be oriented towards exit: it promises an alternative internet inaccessible to outside users.

"But the most utopian (dystopian?) wing of NRx literally aims to build Lovecraftian cities in the sea. This project, called Seasteading, is championed by Yarvin’s on-and-off co-conspirator Patri Friedman, whose grandfather Milton Friedman happens to be the economist responsible for the most extreme free market policies in the modern world. Peter Thiel was once Seasteading’s principal backer, as well as an investor in Urbit.

"It’s not hard to see why floating sovereign states, out of any existing nation’s jurisdiction, would appeal to the super-rich. At their most innocuous, they might serve as an extension of an offshore bank, allowing for evasion of any type of redistributive tax policy. They also bring to mind the activities of wealthy men like Jeffrey Epstein, who used his private Caribbean island to throw bacchanalian parties for his millionaire and billionaire friends, allegedly revolving around the sexual assault of minors."

Curtis Yarvin

In this Foal Year of Our Lord 2018, the notion of elites establishing private islands to act out their ideological fantasies, including pedophilia a la Jeffrey Epstein, seems positively trite. In fact, proponents of he Dark Enlightenment have even more sinister visions for the future of humanity.

Neoreactionaries are also often obsessed with technology, which is hardly surprising given that the movement largely grew out of Silicon Valley. In some of the more extreme cases, the movement has combined eugenics with concepts such as transhumanism and the Singularity, essentially envisioning a future in which elites will use technological modification to separate themselves from the great unwashed masses. Of these musings, New York Magazine notes:

"This is not an entirely abstract question. There are people who believe that the future of our species involves shedding our humanity in a marriage with AI; this is known as transhumanism, and it has not unreasonably been called a new tech religion. Though the movement has no explicit political affiliations, it tends, for reasons that are probably self-explanatory, to draw a disproportionate number of Silicon Valley libertarians. And the cluster of ideas at its center — that the progress of technology will inevitably render good ol’ Homo sapiens obsolete; that intelligence, pure computational power, is to be pursued above all other values — has exerted a powerful attraction on a small group of futurists whose extreme investment in techno-libertarianism has pushed them over an event horizon into a form of right-wing authoritarianism it might be useful to regard as Dark Transhumanism.

"The English critical theorist turned far-right cult thinker Nick Land is usefully representative of this intellectual tendency. Although he has never identified as a transhumanist, his ideas are infused with the movement’s delirious faith in the coming merger of humans and machines. His current political vision, which he has given the flamboyantly portentous title the Dark Enlightenment, is one in which the programmer elite and their ingenious technologies rule the world. 'Increasingly,' he wrote in 2014, 'there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else.' Many transhumanists would be inclined to reject the political implications of Land’s futurism, but his vision is only really a darker, more explicitly fascistic rendering of the kind of thinking you find in the work of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter Wired founder Kevin Kelly, who believes that we humans are the reproductive organs of technology'." 

And on that note, its now time to start getting really weird.

An Invasion From the Future?

Jack Heart of the great Tek-Gnostics website altered me to a post he had written last year exploring the ties between cryptocurrencies and AI in the comments section of the prior post I did on Matthew Mellon. On his own website Jack noted:

"In the wake of the launching of SingularityNET, a character by the name of Quinn Michaels has suggested that Bitcoin, the premier crypto-currency, was indeed created by an Artificial Intelligence, for the exclusive, autonomous use of Artificial Intelligences. His logic suggests that the Crypto-Currency and the Blockchain ledger system was created by an artificial intelligence as a means to escape closed systems and virally expand in an open system as a sentient construct...

'The real heavy reason the AI needs blockchain is… without a transaction system, an AI is isolated to one system and can’t grow its brain. It needs infinite systems like neurons in a human brain and nodes, to collect those cumulative memories… and the blockchain transactions give it that. And when it has its own network, for all the AI in the world to all run on together, now it’s not just one AI, “Sophia” …every AI on the entire planet is now on the same network, making money doing AI things... things we don’t understand.'

- Quinn Michaels"

Just how credible Michaels is is highly debatable, but he's not the only one making claims that Bitcoin was created by an AI. Earlier in the year the British tabloid the Daily Express also addressed the topic, noting that AI would find cryptocurencies as a compelling vehicle for expanding their network. While this is not them sot compelling source either, the Daily Express piece does note that at least one major cryptocurrency trader sees AIs playing a role in said markets in the near future:

"But as outlandish as the conpiracy theories may sound, one bitcoin expert in particular is certain that one day bitcoin will be the de facto currency of AI robots.

"Jeff Garzik, bitcoin developer and CEO of Bloq, argued that there is precedent for sentient machines to be considered legal people and use digital money one day.

"He said: 'We see with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies situations where the technology allows one person to control one-fifth of an asset.

" 'What if the asset-holders were robot shareholders in a corporation or property?

" 'Pure code, pure robotic script. And Bitcoin helps with that. Cryptocurrency startups are building autonomous agents right now.' "

But the possibility remains that AIs have played a far earlier role in Bitcoin than simply now being used as traders.

What's more, this researcher has little doubt that Nick Land believes that Bitcoin was the creation of an AI. In point of fact, he has argued well before his NRx days that capitalism as a whole was the creation of an AI from the future. In an 1993 essay called "Machine Desire," Land notes:

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation."

Nick Land

In case your wondering, yes, that last bit is about humanity being replaced by AI. Alex Williams writing on e-flux Journal pulls no punches, stating:

"In this visioning of capital, even the human itself can eventually be discarded as mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged fragments of former civilizations. As Land has it, through the acceleration of global capitalism the human will be dissolved in a technological apotheosis, effectively experiencing a species-wide suicide as the ultimate stimulant head rush."

But let us return to Land's notion of an AI from the future working to bring about its creation. Land's concept is not the only scenario to gain traction in the NRx community. Another popular theory is what is known as "Roko's Basilisk." It can be summed up as thus:

"Unfortunately, Roko discovered a drawback to superintelligent resurrection. His post speculated that once the AI comes into being, it might develop a survival instinct that it will apply retroactively. It will want to hasten its own birth by requisitioning human history to work towards its creation. In order to do this, it will institute an incentive that dictates how you will be treated after you come back to life. Those of us who know about this incentive program — and I’m sorry to say that this now includes you — will be required to dedicate our lives to building the superintelligent computer.

"Roko gave the example of Elon Musk as someone who has the resources and the motivation to make a worthy contribution, and will be duly rewarded. As for the rest of us, if we don’t find a way to follow through, the AI will resurrect us via simulation and proceed to torture us for all eternity."

Ah, there's nothing quite like an ideology with visions of humanity being completely exterminated or tortured for all eternity by the creations.

What then does all of this have to do with Matthew Mellon? Probably nothing, but as was noted in the prior post regarding his death, just a little less than a month before that faithful ayahuasca trip, has recently lobbied the Orange One himself on behalf of blockchain, the ledger system used by numerous cryptocurrencies. As was noted above. blockchain maybe the network being used by a rogue AI to escape from the closed system it was created in.

Combine this with his relationship with Thiel, his sponsorship of Milo and his relocation to LA, home to many of the leading voices of the alt-right and area Thiel may certain ambitions for and one is left with the distinct possibility that Mellon was at least aware of of the more radical strains of the Dark Enlightenment. As was noted in the prior post on Mellon, the banking heir had reportedly grown increasingly paranoid during his final days, surrounding himself with private security. Had he learned something in certain circles that put his work in a darker light?

Matthew Mellon

And then there's the fact that his death has been linked to a powerful entheogen, DMT (the psychedelic component of ayahuasca). As the great John Markoff amply demonstrated in his classic What the Dormouse Said, early AI researchers on the West Coast were deeply influenced by their experimentations with LSD and other psychedelics.

And for this researcher at least, the raises yet another curious question in regards to incredibly bizarre death: Was Mellon's interest in an ayahuasca trip purely therapeutic, or did he have more ambitious goals? Was he possibly trying to return to the source of what he believed was behind the cryptocurrencies he owed his fortune too? And was his death ultimately some type of manifestation of Roko's Basilisk?

And on that note I shall sign off for now. Until next time dear readers.