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Anti-populist movement seeks new followers

The End HAS GONE!
The End HAS GONE!

INTERNET — The Neoreactionarian movement, a kind of minarchist libertarian hybrid with false historic parallels to monarchies of the past, is seeking new followers and has re-branded itself for mass appeal. In a world where big government bureaucracy is a bad thing, vanguard intellectuals want to turn back the clock to a simpler time where there were not nations but simple family dynasties. The concept of the polis or the res publica, a kind of abstract governance placing the state in the hands of a larger body of people, “a public thing,” to Neoreactionarians, has only hindered the development of “high culture,” economy, and spiritual aspirations of human progress despite generating second-rate monarchist imitators again and again in art history. But they are not producing richly contemplative texts such as Saint Augustine’s City of God or Plato’s Republic, works with other intellectuals as the target audience — they are blogging, tweeting, and answering questions on ask.fm so they can convert you and everyone you love to the side of the Neoreactionarian populist monarchist uprising. Chances are, you already believe in many of the Neoreactionarian tenets and you’re just waving the wrong flag because you, simpleton, know no better. Either that, or they’re poor imitators of imitators, a typical blogger brand of spiraling confusions between messages and audiences as if those two things were separable or even “in the final analysis” of this one writer, identical.

Riker Asimov told someone on ask.fm who asked whether Neoreactionarians wanted to appeal to intellectuals or the general public, “Sure, it seems like an essential contradiction that we want our message of beneficent machiavellian monarchies to be consumed by the masses even as we disguise the formlessness of our superficial — yet outrageously provocative and intellectual — movement in seeming obscurity even as we expose it in the most public way possible. I love to read stories of Frederick II of Hohenstafuen spreading propaganda saying he was the emperor who would precede the apocalypse. That’s the kind of populism that drives monarchies through the roof and sparks never ending wars with the new Anarchopapacy. This is the third age, where no Christian shall need a church, for Christ will live in the heart of every man and woman behind my banner! Protestantism is third age Christianity, the first being the age of Yahweh the hateful father, the second of Christ the forgiving son, and the third that of every human on earth as consummate priest and interpreter needing no authority or gentle shepherd. Saint Francis was the second coming of Christ who ushered in the third age, although Luther was the one with the balls to file the paperwork. And Francis, namesake of the second Christ, has ascended to the papacy and is surely the Antichrist, bringer of material equanimity even as he condemns legalized marijuana, the holy plant rightly seen by Rastas as facilitating and democratizing divine translation![pullquote]” . . . think of all those who have had conversions while in the grips of a nightmare freakout on hallucinogenic drugs, only to forever swear off drugs because of the orthodoxies imposed by the church found in this conversion”[/pullquote] Through vigorous intellectual activity, meditation, and so on, a greatly expanded section of humanity has reached the third age — not quite but in sight of freedom from the bounds of the material world and ascendant into this ideal realm of Mind (Notion, Idea), approaching that Marxian singularity that is in no way Hegel’s ‘stood on end’ or even something entirely different as posited by Althusser, non est aurum vulgi, marriage of the split mind ceremony presided by Christ — but we can imagine a fourth age yet in which the usage of entheogens — which must be consecrated by orthodox rituals to consistently act as more than mere hallucinogens — such as marijuana, LSD, DMT, Ayahuasca, et al will be administrated by the church rather than condemned. Drugs have been declared heterodox, heretical, by Pope Francis because of the threat they pose to established orthodoxy. Terrence McKenna rightly said that drugs are the only way to consistently replicate spiritual, mystic, experience, and think of all those who have had conversions while in the grips of a nightmare freakout on hallucinogenic drugs, only to forever swear off drugs because of the orthodoxies imposed by the church found in this conversion. I am the emperor of the fourth age, the age after the apocalypse has taken place! I am primate of the church of the fourth age in which all of humanity will join Christ with soul through the entheogenic communion through which anyone of any social class will freely receive the ritual and chemicals which can with extraordinarily consistent results, generate an irrational narrative ethos and way-of-being which in a way transcends pairs of opposites or accesses the mystic through its essential paradox. We have a communion that works every time, and even the most hard working of laborers can find divine translation without decades of Voodoo Buddhist practice. Find your way out of the pre-apocalypse wasteland and join us in the fourth age!”

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False hashtag campaigns aim to diminish feminists

Most 4chan hoaxes are not very successful because they are balanced too far towards "truthfulness" and don't contain enough bunk to strike the balance which can create that peculiar perplexity.
Most 4chan hoaxes are not very successful because they are balanced too far towards “truthfulness” and don’t contain enough bunk to strike the balance which can create that peculiar perplexity.

INTERNET — 4channers have recently astroturfed several false hashtag campaigns targeting feminists — campaigns which stand in stark contrast with 4chan’s usual targets in celebritydom. A false hashtag campaign is one which purports to be a grassroots movement, but is designed to divide and disrupt those it falsely represents. Examples of false hashtag campaigns originating with 4chan include #freebleeding (burn your tampons, ladies!) and more recently #endfathersday, but #cut4bieber represented Justin Bieber fans mortifying their flesh in order to draw Bieber away from his hedonistic pot-toking lifestyle. The false hashtag is a marketing tool picked up as a continuation of 4chan’s collective and ongoing hoax efforts, but these efforts have only recently been aimed at diminishing the power of feminists.

Hoaxcraft is something that few 4channers grasp even as they occasionally succeed, but it seems increasingly inspired by impossible ends — the expressed intent to guide conversations about women on the internet. This is not to say that there are no political consequences of a hoax, but they fall very far from the mark.

Narrative has an internal power, a power which reproduces itself, and the special power of the hoax is in the peculiar perplexity it creates — “Can this be real?” It is not worth telling for its deceptive, truthful-looking quality but rather for striking a seemingly contradictory balance between real and bunk. The misunderstanding that the hoax can somehow divide or disrupt a conversation about feminism is naive. This is maybe as simple as the mistake that the meaning (or effect) of an act is reducible to the author’s intentions.

The hoax will be read at face value and also immediately dismissed by some — this is not a division created by the hoax, and those who are fooled are anything but a symptom of stupidity endemic within a certain group. Anyone can be hoaxed at any time, given a certain narrative. Where the perplexity evaporates and its meaning falls either to true or false, the hoax loses its power, and this always happens. Hoaxes are incredibly transparent, especially ones which can only be injected into the collective consciousness by the combined power of a large group of people. Those who remain fooled haven’t been mind-controlled by the hoaxers any more than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion created anti-semites or HAARP hoaxes cause people to line their bedrooms with grounded Farraday Cages.

No matter how the hoax is read it does anything but devalue or divide feminism. This misunderstanding is maybe as simple as the common mistake that a multitude of meanings somehow constitute an absence of meaning. These hoaxes bring color, fun, something silly, something fruitful to talk about on an otherwise boring day despite their more sinister intentions.

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Snark-centered art movement swallows internet

Macaulay Culkin's Pizza Underground shocks desensitized internet masses.
Macaulay Culkin’s Pizza Underground shocks desensitized internet masses.

For a piece of art to be popular on the internet today, a spark of novelty injected into the hopelessly derivative and easily recognizable is a prerequisite. The recursive “meta” wink and nudge, an unusual (especially ephemeral) medium, or a clever pun playing on the day’s top story are all bonuses. I was excited to hear Macaulay Culkin’s band, Pizza Underground, playing parodies of the Velvet Underground interlaced with references to Papa John’s and Pizza Hut, but behind the pizza masks and amateur covers, there’s desperation. There is an overabundance of content. From strained Maoist analyses of the Saiyan homeworld in Dragon Ball Z to Our God is an Awesome God (dubstep remix), there has never been quite so much banality.

In Cory Doctorow’s Makers this aesthetic event is played out not on Reddit or Twitter, but in a fictional 3d-printing boom. The short-lived economic surge it triggers, dubbed New Work, causes high levels of employment where the little guys creating this stuff make tons of money. Ultimately, this tide of derivative 3d printed junk recedes into a marginal nostalgia ride curated by users. Then the ride becomes very popular, only to be sabotaged and brutalized by a crazed Disney executive, desperate to keep his job. This is dangerous fiction, a place where friendly corporate entities battle mean old monopolists. Here, the tangible is as easily reproducible as the digital, so it stands in for it. The theme ride that takes users through an ever-changing algorithmic arrangement of 3d printed relics is like the front page of Reddit, or YouTube, but in the book it is a loosely organized not-for-profit collective run by a bunch of lovable guys where the upvoting and downvoting mechanisms bring out subtle narratives instead of sex, lies, and fatal epic fails. At times it is an absurd caricature of the conflict between rising internet entertainment powerhouses and aging entertainment industries given over entirely to depicting the likes of Google as a ragtag band of subversive and incidental freedom fighters. In the real world, it’s hard to see Google’s monopolistic, opaque advertisement partnership scams as a possible career path for millions — they cut this infallible publication off without giving any reason or recourse for appeal. Even the marginal utopia in Makers seems derivative, so full of brand names and buzzwords I wonder if Doctorow is getting product placement checks along with the income he gets for advising cryptography salesman, even as he suggests children aren’t “digital natives” unless they learn to use crypto. I suppose science fiction has never been the most lucrative industry, but one can at least hope for the kind of world depicted in Makers, one where infinitesimally cheap reproduction would benefit the creators of original content rather than those with a monopoly on the means of reproduction.

A photograph of a vacation bungalow in an exotic location showed off its glass floors — pristine windows into a perfectly lit pond full of gorgeous fish. This was one of the most upvoted images of the day, the perfect photography as much as the interesting architecture inspiring tens of thousands of happy clicks. However, in the comment section for this photograph, users upvoted less flattering images of the same ramshackle hut where there were no fish or glowing lights in the water. The artistry of the photographer, in the eyes of many commenters, was not even a possibility — the image was obviously doctored in photoshop (and that’s not an art to appreciate, either).

This is a milieu of snark. Nickelodeon WebHeads has children pressing buzzers in a game show, rewarding the kid who nails the precise moment some poor sap is maimed for life in a hilarious video. Best to be just another mark in the daily parade of glyphs referencing a set of popular characters, arranged in every permutation and medium imaginable. Each novel click is another grain of sand on a pile of ennui too big to fit in the Death Star, the Tardis, King’s Landing, or…