Statist Realism: An Anarchist Analysis of Neoreaction — Part Five, and an Untimely End
In Which Everything Falls Apart
This is likely the untimely end of this series. On that note, Phoebe Edith does our art. She’s great, you should check out her twitter:
The last five years — maybe the last twelve — have felt like interwar period 2.0, and that is now over. Moldbug was only relevant in that space, and — unless the future changes in ways I do not expect — this whole thing won’t be relevant to anyone’s concerns on anything.
I’m pretty sure that I should have reviewed third positionist stuff. That’s the far-right that we will likely be facing. Did you know that even Moldbug wishes that he’d never written this stuff, now? What the fuck is even the point.
The previous parts are here:
I’m literally only publishing this because I already had it written.
If the shareholders cannot dismiss the CEO of the realm by voting according to proper corporate procedures, a total security failure has occurred.
…power over the realm truly rests with the shareholders… Authority is then delegated… down into the military or other security forces. At the leaves of the tree are computerized weapons, which will not fire without cryptographic authorization.
…any fragment of the security force which remains loyal to the shareholders can use its operational weapons to defeat any coalition of disloyal, and hence disarmed, employees and/or residents…
So, obviously, this is idiotic. Even the fucking National Review figured out why:
…what is to prevent me, when I am the Delegate, from secretly manufacturing weapons that lack cryptographic locks and fighting the forces that come to dethrone me? The manufacture will probably look suspicious if all the employees’ movements are being tracked, but who’s going to do the suspecting? Remember, I’m running the realm — its surveillance service reports to me and is led by members of my cabal. We can game the thing out endlessly, but you’ll find that we’re always stuck with our trade-off: Either I have operational control and can become a super-efficient catastrophe, or operational control gets distributed in order to contain me but I’m no longer super-efficient.
And maybe I don’t even need to make new weapons. What stops me from modifying the existing ones so that they fire either by cryptographic authorization or by my sole command? The cryptography can be as strong as you like — information-theoretically secure. We still have to connect it to the firing mechanism somehow: and so what, in principle, prevents my reconnecting that firing mechanism to something else? (Does super-duper highest-tech self-destruct mode kick in? Okay.) Sovereignty over this realm turns out to belong ultimately to technologists. A computer scientist would think this way.
Obviously, at this point, Moldbug’s entire political project looks dead in the water. Not only does it not work — it also betrays its own fundamental principles.
It parts out the sovereign’s power. It’s not the abolition of checks and balances, it’s “what if checks and balances, but based?”.
But power is always already irreducibly divided — an individual cannot ever actually lose the ability to make their own choices, and neither can one ever actually gain the ability to make choices for another. No ruler rules alone: they get others to do as they wish, by convincing them that doing so is what is best for them.
In part three of this series I introduced the idea of the ‘massive institutional network’ — a different view on what Moldbug calls “The Cathedral”. Further, and further damning to Moldbug’s pretensions, I showed that a sovereign joint-stock company would also develop its own massive institutional network.
In part four, I pointed out that democracies in general — liberal and illiberal — tend to be less prone to wars over proper succession, because they have a pre-established method to show which candidate for power has how much support from which quarters, and to (in most cases) put the candidate with the most support in the position of power — from which another candidate would then have to dislodge them.
The thing that would allow the executive of a Realm to develop guns that did not betray him would likely be the cooperation of his own massive institutional network — he would need to support of key figures to be able to obtain or modify the guns in secret, distribute them, and so on. I highly doubt that the loyalties of the soldiers would be an issue — what soldier could possibly be loyal to a faceless group of share-holders? Soldiers are loyal, or disloyal, in relation to their commanders, their principles, their homelands, and so on — things that they know, interact with, and care about.
And so, again, it is revealed how inescapable informal power structures are. They cling to any sort of formal power structure, parasitizing and feeding off of it — while, at the same time, maintaining the illusion of its power and patching the holes in its functioning.
He looks even more ridiculous when he starts fantasizing about what his impossible quasi-monarchies would do:
…let’s… look at what a 21st-century corporate sovereign might actually want to do.
For simplicity and for my own personal amusement, let’s call the realm Friscorp, and say its patch is the present city of San Francisco — pop., about 750,000.
Obviously, Friscorp would like to turn SF into the coolest, most hoppin’, and definitely most expensive city on the planet. Call it a combination of Paris, Monaco, and Babylon. Destroying ugly postwar buildings, for example, and reconstructing them in appropriate historical styles, will definitely be high on Friscorp’s agenda.
There are a couple of interesting things about this statement. Firstly, he just sort-of assumes that everyone would rather deal with traditionalist architecture than modern architecture — to the point that spending what would amount to trillions in demolition and rebuilding, as well as temporarily lost use of prime real estate, would somehow be worth it in the long run. Further, he assumes that a sovereign joint-stock company would be the type to see things that way.
Need I remind you all what sort of organizations are generally responsible for both building and commissioning these sorts of buildings? Yes, that is correct: joint-stock companies. In general, there are very clear economic reasons why top-down architecture — whether Soviet or American — tends to be deeply unpleasant:
He doesn’t address any of these — he just sees it as self-evident that his pet project would, of course, do away with architecture that he does not personally like.
The first and touchiest problem, though, is just deciding who gets to live in San Francisco. Friscorp’s answer is simple: anyone who isn’t dangerous to others, and can afford to live in San Francisco. It is probably also nice if they speak English, but considering the exigencies of the second constraint, they almost certainly will. Friscorp may also import menial laborers, as Dubai does today, but they are not to be confused with the actual residents.
Here we face a slight predicament. There are quite a few people presently in San Francisco who do not meet the second constraint, are pretty iffy on the first as well, and have no labor skills to speak of. What do we do with them? Sell their slums out from under them, obviously; demo everything, spray for roaches, rodents and pit bulls, smooth the rubble out with a bulldozer or two, and possibly a little aerial bombing; erect new residential districts suitable for Russian oligarchs. Next question?
But where do they go? Since their customer-service contract gives them the right of exit, these people — call them bezonians — can of course emigrate to any other realm in the Patchwork. This presumes, however, that said realm is willing to accept them. And why would it be? If our design does not provide for the existence of a large number of human beings whose existence anywhere is not only unprofitable, but in fact a straight-up loss, to that realm, it is simply inconsistent with reality.
Did Moldbug just somehow forget that most of the labor needed to run a society is non-skilled? Almost all of coders and executives currently in San Francisco would, I promise you, notice very quickly if all of the people who provided them with goods and services stopped being around them to do those things.
There’s being anti-socialist, there’s being classist, and then there’s this — if you are a coder (as Moldbug was at the time) then whether or not you happen to like the unskilled laborers all around you is immaterial. You’d still really miss then if they all went away.
And, if you set-up a system in which the vast majority of the workers in the city can’t live close enough by their workplaces to semi-easily commute into them, you will either have a shortage of workers — or, you will have to pay much higher wages.
This doesn’t really detract from the core of any of Moldbug’s points, but it does show what sort of person he is and what sort of blindspots he has.
I was going to have an interlude after this where I discussed what a fascinating figure Moldbug is as an enemy, what his whole deal is, and so on. But it doesn’t fucking matter now.
Two and a half million Americans are going to lose their jobs over the next week, and that’s not even counting freelancers, gig laborers, and so on — that’s just the projected number of people who will be collecting unemployment. By the second quarter of this year, we could have a 30% unemployment rate. And I have to go and figure out what to say to that crowd.
Follow our dumb fucking twitter account for tips on how to survive the Second Great Depression:
