Of late, I've become fascinated (and more than a little disturbed) by a particularly bizarre branch of the "
alt-right" sometimes referred to as the
Dark Enlightenment, or simply NRx (neo-reactionary). Incidentally (or not), this curious ideology together brings Silicon Valley, the dark side of geekdom and of course Lovecraft in what might be one of the most dystopian of imagined futures.
The Dark Enlightenment and/or NRx can mean different things to different people, but certain characteristics seem to be reoccurring amongst the various ideologues: contempt for democracy, an obsession with technology and capitalism in equal measures, libertarian ethos taken to their logical extreme, a thinly veiled approval for eugenics, and a sense that the darkest of imagined
cyberpunk futures is something to aspire towards. It is generally agreed that the two principal visionaries behind this particular ideology are
Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) and
Nick Land.
Mr. Moldburg and the Eye of Thiel
Geekdom and Lovecraft in particular weigh heavily on both men, while Yarvin is very much a creation of Silicon Valley. Before becoming a neo-reactionary blogger, Yarvin was a computer scientist with degrees from
John Hopkins,
Brown, and
UC Berkeley. Naturally, he was based out of San Francisco. Despite the ultra-liberal image of the tech heartlands, there are indications that the Valley has a small but influential
alt right underground.
Yarvin routinely incorporates elements of geekdom into his writings. Lovecraft made an appearance early, in the first part of Yarvin's
A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations. There, Yarvin riffs on the introduction Darren Staloff’s
The Making of an American Thinking Class by quoting the professor's prose while replacing several phrases with references to
Miskatonic University,
Cryptomenysis Patefacta,
Unaussprechlichen Kulten,
and the "mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred."
Inevitably,
Cthulhu would turn up in Yarvin's writings.
A gentle introduction... names drops him no less than ten times. Amusingly, Yarvin likens the high priest of the
Great Old Ones to his concept of "The
Cathedral." The Cathedral in turn can be defined loosely as a consensus of progressive opinion outlined by the universities, the media, and the civil service. It is given a religious description because it has become a kind of theology. In 2019, a planet destroying alien high priest is as apt a description for the mainstream consensus as one is apt to find.
Yarvin clearly knows his geekdom, which has led some to question the seriousness of his ideology. To be sure, there is an air of a
LARP lark about Mr. Moldburg.
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| Yarvin |
Which is why it is important to remember that Yarvin has received support from none other than
Peter Thiel, who is a
major investor in Yarvin's startup, Urbit. Nor is Yarvin the only neo-reactionary ideologue that Thiel has sponsored. He is also a major backer of the
Seasteading Institute, founded by would-be neo-reactionary
Patri Friedman (who is also the grandson of Noble Prize winning economist
Milton). Elsewhere, Thiel was also a backer of the
Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which neo-reactionary blogger Michael Anissimov had
previously worked at as a media director.
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| Patri Friedman (top) and Michael Anissimov (bottom) |
But beyond sponsoring the Dark Enlightenment, Thiel himself is also
a major ideological influence. Both Yarvin and Nick Land have cited a
2009 essay by Thiel for
Cato Unbound in which the billionaire famously declared "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" as a major inspiration. The influence may swing both ways as well, for it has been argued that a 2012 lecture at
Stanford by Thiel displayed traces
of Yarvin's themes.
Is Thiel's sponsorship for neo-reactionary ideologues and influence on the movement evidence that it is a kind of vehicle for his own personal beliefs? Certainly, this is not beyond the realm of extreme possibility, and that is a terrifying prospect.
As I noted recently, Thiel is at the absolute vanguard of the far right, along with the
Mercer and
DeVos-
Prince families. What's more, Thiel and the after-mentioned families appear to be major players in a vast private intelligence network behind both
Trump and
Brexit.
In the above-linked blog, I detailed the ties between the Mercer family and the
SCL Group/
Cambridge Analytica, which could be likened to a private, digitalized
Psychological Warfare Executive.
Growing evidence has emerged that Thiel's
Palantir Technologies collaborated with this network.
Naturally, Palantir takes its name from from a
communications devise depicted in the
Lord of the Rings trilogy. Given that these devices were later taken over by
Sauron, the name is rather apt. Palantir is a big data analytics outfit that is known to work closely with the Department of Defense and
US intelligence community. Of late it has gained
much controversy over its collaboration with ICE, but its mining of data as a means of surveillance has been ongoing for years now.
Nor is Palantir the only defense-related company Thiel has ties too. Another curious entity is
Carbyne, an Israeli company which officially provides high tech solutions to emergency centers fielding 911 calls and such like. In carrying out these duties Carbyne is given access to a caller's GPS, camera and other private information, which critics have alleged
creates a high potential for abuse. These claims are further substantiated by the presence of numerous former Israeli intelligence officers among the shareholders and employees. Company director Pinchas Berkus, for instance, is the former head of the elite
8200 Unit.
The Israelis aren't the only ones with intelligence ties linked to Carbyne either. Present on the company's advisory board is
Michael Chertoff, a former director of the Department of Homeland Security and co-author of the
Patriot Act. After leaving government with the
Bush II regime, Chertoff went into the private defense industry, starting his own "risk management" group with a former CIA officer and became the chairman of the mega British defense contractor
BAE Systems.
Else, a co-founder and shareholder of Carbyne is another former Israeli intelligence officer,
Lital Leshem. Leshem is also an executive director at Frontier Resources Group, a subsidiary of
Frontier Services Group. FSG was of course founded by
Erik Prince, whose FSG concern
also appears in the SCL/Cambridge Analytica network.
And then there's former Israeli prime minister and highly decorated general
Ehud Barak. Barak was also a major investor in the company, bu with a curious source for his funding:
Jeffrey Epstein. In 2015, Barak
formed a startup company called Sum for the sole purpose of investing in what became Carbyne. Reportedly, much of the capital for Sum was provided to Barak by Epstein.
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| Ehud Barak |
This certainly puts Thiel in some curious company. Thiel is not only an investor in Carbyne, but also has a Palantir co-founder, Trae Stephens, on the
company's advisory board.
Clearly, Thiel is well represented in the private intelligence racket. But under Trump, he has begun to make inroads with the official US intel community as well.
Reportedly, Thiel himself was offered a leadership role on the influential
President's Intelligence Advisory Board, but turned it down. He did, however, land former employee and
reputed acolyte Kevin Harrington on the
National Security Council. Harrington occupied a senior post from the get go and was reportedly
bumped up further in recent days.
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| Kevin Harrington |
Thiel has clearly emerged as a major player, with extensive ties to both the US intelligence community and the president himself. Indeed, he was likely at the forefront of the private initiatives to get Trump into the White House. And of course, there is the curious fact that he was a major investor in the Israeli firm Carbyne, along with Jeffrey Epstein. This is more tangible evidence that Epstein's network was part of the broader effort to put Trump into power. Thiel appears to have been at the center of these efforts.
And this is the man who is a crucial backer of the founder of the Dark Enlightenment and other major proponents. Of course, Thiel himself was clearly a major ideological influence as well, which at a minimum contributed to his support for the ideology. Even more sinister is the prospect that Thiel himself was the engine behind the Dark Enlightenment, with Yarvin and others simply being used to put things out there that Thiel himself did not wish to be directly associated with. It would certainly be interesting to know how far back Yarvin's relationship with Thiel goes.
A Land Darkly
My concern with this piece, however, is with Lovecraft's influence on the Dark Enlightenment, and that is nowhere more evident that with the movement's other founder, former
Warwick University professor Nick Land. While Yarvin may have been the originator of NRx, it was Land who elevated it to the level of a true philosophy. This is hardly surprising, given Land's background as a philosophy professor.
During his time at Warwick, Land became involved with a student-run research group dubbed the "
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit" (Ccru). This peculiar group was established in October of 1995, when self-described "
cyberfeminist"
Sadie Plant joined the faculty at Warwick. Land co-founded the Ccru with Plant and several others. Its relationship with Warwick was always rather ambiguous, however. It was active on the campus between 1995 and 1997, but was officially shuttered after Plant resigned her post in '97. At the time, some school officials claimed the
Ccru never even existed.
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| Sadie Plant |
It continued on, in some form or another, for at least six additional years. Land had resigned from Warwick himself by '98, and would continue the group in a room above the Leamington Spa Body Shop for a few more years. Drugs had always been a major influence on the group, but by this point in time they had become epidemic. As such, the post-Warwick Ccru has been described as
"quasi-cultish, quasi-religious."
This is hardly surprising, given its pursuits. The Ccru's purpose was to study a host of arcane topics --French philosophy (especially of the
Deleuzian school),
jungle music, science fiction (unsurprisingly, cyberpunk was a huge influence, especially
Gibson's
Neuromancer),
cryptography, the occult (the group was especially fond of the
kabbalah and
Crowley, who was born in the same city that Warwick University is located in),
rave culture,
cybernetics, and, of course, Lovecraft. From this heady brew emerged a cyber-age version of "
Accelerationism."
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| an emblem designed by the Ccru |
First conceived of by French philosophers in the wake of
May of '68, the Ccru
laid the foundation for the popularization of this particular philosophy in the English speaking world during the twenty-first century. The Ccru's version of accelerationism essentially called for the rapid speeding up of capitalism and technology in equal measures. In theory, this would lead humanity towards some type of techno-utopia resembling notions of the
Singularity. By unleashing capital, silly relics of the past such as national borders could be dissolved. This would, in theory, release human potential and speed up technological advances. Ominously, some proponents believed that this would eventually liberate human potential
from the human form all together.
Land certainly subscribed to these beliefs. As I noted before
here, Land had happened upon the notion during his Ccru days that capitalism was the creation of an artificial intelligence from the future, which in turn had used the market to gradually assemble itself over the centuries. This would end with the glorious usurpation of humanity by this new intelligence. And Land apparently believed that we should be doing everything within out collective power to speed up this copious process. Whether this is still the case is unknown to this researcher, but he is still insisting on the
similarities between capitalism and AI.
This was not the only strangest notion Land happened upon during this era either. At the height of the Ccru days, Land began heavily abusing "the sacred substance amphetamine" and subsisting on little to no sleep. During his final days at Warwick, he became known for amphetamine-addled lectures, which at times Land delivered while laying on the floor and accompanied by a jungle soundtrack. Eventually, he came to believe that he was being inhabited by various entities, which he dubbed "Cur," "Vauung," and "Can Sah."
Predictably, Land had a breakdown by the early part of millennium. He disappeared from public life all together for a time, and relocated to Shanghai. Nor was he the only Ccru that danced to close to the flame. Many members would struggle with depression for years afterwards. One of the most prominent members,
Mark Fisher, eventually committed suicide in 2017, reportedly over concerns that Britain
had entered into "stasis."
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| Mark Fisher |
Throughout all of this, Lovecraft weighed heavily on Land and has continued to do so. Together with the Ccru troop, Land developed the notion of "hyperstition." Combining superstition with hyper, this concept is difficult to define. It has
been described as that which is "equipoised between fiction and technology." In a sense, this is simply describing science fiction in its earliest incarnations. At least one former Ccru affiliate described Land's hyperstition as "
quasi-Lovecraftian mythologies."
Reportedly, Land came to believe that the
Necronomicon itself was being sent back in time from the future, piece by piece, beginning with its appearances in Lovecraft's fiction.
Another concept that Land and his Ccru cohorts became obsessed with was the notion of "
theory-fiction." In essence, it help that the writing of theory could fictionalize and produce reality. Such a notion would have had quite an appeal in the '90s, when imagined cyberpunk futures were beginning to become the reality. Now, we're effectively living in a cyberpunk novel. William Gibson, in essence, took scientific theory concerning future technologies, fictionalized it, and provided a template for our present reality.
The same could be said of Lovecraft, who was clearly more knowledgeable
concerning the occult than scholars would have you believe. His fictionalized mythos, in turn, arguably did as much to mainstream the occult in popular culture as anyone, with the possible exception of Crowley. And Crowley himself frequently resorted to fiction to expand upon his theories.
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| Crowley |
Naturally, Land himself has written horror fiction as well, and it is firmly in the Lovecraftian camp. He seems to have first taken up this interest during the late '90s, when he wrote
The Origins of the Cthulhu Club. This work was
allegedly the first time he rolled out the hyperstititon concept. His Lovecraft obsession has continued in recent works such as 2014's short story
Phyl-Undhu and 2015 novella
Chasm. Indeed, it would seem that when Land isn't championing the Dark Enlightenment, he is crafting neo-Lovecraftian weird fiction.
Conclusions
Let us then return to the quote that opens this piece, which concerns emerging AI as being something akin to the Great Old Ones of Lovecraft's fiction. This is a notion that Nick Land has been prophesying about since roughly the mid-1990s. But is this something that we should really be concerned about? After all, Land is still largely a fringe figure.
Peter Thiel, however, is not. And while Thiel has never been directly linked to Land, he has certainly supported other such fellow travelers, as was noted above. And this raises some truly disturbing prospects.
The scientific community is often seen as progressive and forward looking. This is especially true of the tech sector. And yet
William Shockley, the alleged inventor of the
transistor (which essentially laid the foundation for the modern computer revolution), dedicated much of his later life to the rehabilitation of eugenics (noted before
here). Thiel himself made his fortune investing in tech companies such as
PayPal and
Facebook. He is now one of the principal patrons of the alt-right, along with hedge fund manager
Robert Mercer. Before delving into finance, Mercer was a computer scientist who worked for IBM for decades. As I noted before
here, he contributed to the development of AI in this capacity.
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| Robert Mercer |
These men are a far cry from the Christian fundamentalists who are often associated with the far right, and arguably far more unsettling. After all, men like Thiel and Mercer have the resources and potentially the inclination to bring about the post-human future envisioned by men like Land. This is precisely why I find many of the scientific-related revelations concerning Epstein so unsettling.
In many ways, Jeffrey Epstein was already practicing what many of the NRx ideologues had been advocating. One such instance is the whole
"seasteading" movement which Thiel has become a principal patron of. As I noted before
here, one of its leading proponents was the above-mentioned Patri Friedman. Seasteading proposes building floating, sovereign city
city-states in the ocean. These entities would be beyond the reach of the United States government, or any other for that matter. A return to the model of the city-state, a small entity more easily manageable than a chaotic nation-state, has
long appealed to neo-reactionaries.
Of course, Jeffrey Epstein had been using his own private island,
Little Saint James, as a lawless playground for millionaires and billionaires alike for years. While he surely wasn't the originator of such a notion, the possibility is strong that Epstein's efforts inspired the seasteading community in some capacity. Patri Friedman was involved in a
transhumanist foundation
supported by Epstein, after all.
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| Jeffrey Epstein |
There are even far more ominous overlaps, most notably via the scientific community. Of course, many neo-reactionaries are obsessed with AI and related notions such as transhumanism/
human augmentation, and the Singularity. This is hardly surprising, given the background that many of the proponents have in tech and Silicon Valley in particular.
Epstein clearly had a keen interest in these things as well. He was a major backer of pioneering AI researcher
Marvin Minsky, who was also a
crucial scientific adviser to Epstein. It was Minsky who put Epstein into contact with another young and upcoming AI researcher,
Joscha Bach. Bach had been involved in the transhumanist outfit,
humanity +, that also featured budding neo-reactionary Patri Friedman and funding from
Epstein himself. Epstein also funded
Ben Goertzel, the former chairman of Humanity +, the founder and CEO of SingularityNET, and a prominent AI researcher.
Epstein also funded Goertzel's open source AI project
OpenCog as well. Goertzel had also been the research director at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which received funding from Thiel and produced neo-reactionary blogger Michael Anissimov, a former media director there.
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| Ben Goertzel |
Of course, Epstein was also an investor in the above-mentioned Carbyne, along with Thiel. As such, this whole network seems rather incestuous. What's more, the NRx crowd would surely approve of the motives behind Epstein's philanthropy. He had alleged that mainstream foundations were failing science because they had become
too "politically correct." Epstein was quick to point out that he supported diversity, but of ideas, and not people.
Besides AI and some of the fringe ideologies surrounding it, Epstein had another clear scientific passion:
genetics. I've already dealt with this topic a bit before
here, but even more information has come out since that post. In point of fact, Epstein spent much of this decade
investing in genetic research. Specifically,
Epstein sought to analyse and sequence human DNA. In time, this would be used to build a database. In theory, this database would have been sold to drug companies for a tidy profit, but given the man's apparent interest in eugenics, one has to wonder.
And that brings me to one of Land's darkest visions. In the
final section of his landmark
Dark Enlightenment essay, Land singles out University of California biologist John H. Campbell, whom he hails as a "prophet of monstrosity." This is as apt a description as any for a man who may have given away the endgame of the elite Epstein represented. His notions
have been described as thus:
"Reasoning that the majority of humankind will not voluntarily accept qualitative population-management policies, Campbell points out that any attempt to raise the IQ of the whole human race would be tediously slow. He further points out that the general thrust of early eugenics was not so much species improvement as the prevention of decline. Campbell’s eugenics, therefore, advocates the abandonment of Homo sapiens as a 'relic' or 'living fossil' and the application of genetic technologies to intrude upon the genome, probably writing novel genes from scratch using a DNA synthesizer. Such eugenics would be practiced by elite groups, whose achievements would so quickly and radically outdistance the usual tempo of evolution that within ten generation the new groups will have advanced beyond our current form to the same degree that we transcend apes."
Was Epstein's venture into human DNA studies such a foray? Were the proceeds of his child sex trafficking being used to bring about a godlike elite that would fundamentally cease being human? The great
Christopher Knowles has been warning against such developments
on The Secret Sun for years. The Epstein revelations should make it clear that Mr. Knowles' warnings are no longer mere speculation, but are presently ongoing amongst the darkest corners of the deep private. Much of it is happening openly among prestigious scientific institutes, but I suspect a man like Epstein would be needed to further the more sinister aspects.
Land himself is coy about how he perceives these developments, but he clearly seems to believe that what is emerging will resemble something out of Lovecraft. He
remarks: "For racial nationalists, concerned that their grandchildren should look like them, Campbell is the abyss. Miscegenation doesn’t get close to the issue.
Think face tentacles."
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| Nick Land |
Land has speculated about both an AI and the
Necronomicon from the future meddling in our current world. But this researcher can't help but think of a more chilling scenario: What if it is the Great Old Ones themselves who are melding in the present from the future. And what if accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment are one such bid to harness capitalism and technology towards one obvious end: their own creation and a distinctly post-human future. Are Lovecraft's demonic space gods then our own future when a tendril-faced elite final sever all ties to humanity and Earth as a whole? Certainly, I suspect such a notion has passed through Land's mind. And he may well be okay with such an outcome.
But the real question is, are men like Epstein and Thiel concerned with such an endgame? Based on circumstantial evidence, such a possibility can not be dismissed. And that is something that is truly horrifying to contemplate. This is why, as I've suggested
before, that Epstein's child sex trafficking is not the darkest abyss. Rather, it is what the funds from this endeavor were being used to sponsor. And that may well be the birth of the Great Old Ones.
