Thiel is being pilloried especially since his unenviable performance with Ross Douthat - but I strongly think this is a disservice to the quality and interestingness of his ideas

Kojève writes that in the universal and homogeneous state at the end of history only two people are completely and actually satisfied: the Head of State (‘Napoleon’), who acts, and the Sage who comprehends those actions (‘Hegel’—thus ‘Revelation = Napoleon + Hegel’). But precisely because of the homogeneity of the state, where the Head of State is in fact a cipher of the state as a whole and their concrete person is interchangeable with any other citizen, every member participates in their actions, which are ‘étatique’, actions of the state as such.

See also Strauss’ correspondence with Kojève published in On Tyranny

The more probable the apocalypse becomes, the less we talk about it.

• “I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning” by René Girard
• “The Great Illusion” by Norman Angell
• “A Short Tale of the Antichrist” by Vladimir Soloviev

Catala is a domain-specific programming language designed for deriving correct-by-construction implementations from legislative texts.

President Xi has gained another nickname: ‘chief accelerationist’.

For there simultaneously occurs upon the earth a very important, inevitable phenomenon that is beneficial in many respects and unfortunate in many others: stratification

They operate by coding and territorialization upon the earth; they proceed simultaneously by code and by territoriality. The strata are judgments of God; stratification in general is the entire system of the judgment of God (but the earth, or the body without organs, constantly eludes that judgment, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialized).

The shock of the hammer and the anvil broke his arms and legs at the elbows and knees, which until that moment he had not possessed. In this way, he received the articulations specific to the new human form that was to spread across the earth, a form dedicated to work…. His arm became folded with a view to work

AUTHORS & CONTRIBUTORS: Mikkel Bindslev, Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Amy Ireland

Tradition is not solely, or even primarily, the maintenance of certain dogmatic beliefs; these beliefs have come to take their living form in the course of the formation of a tradition. What I mean by tradition involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’. … We become conscious of these items, or conscious of their importance, usually only after they have begun to fall into desuetude, as we are aware of the leaves of a tree when the autumn wind begins to blow them off—when they have separately ceased to be vital. Energy may be wasted at that point in a frantic endeavour to collect the leaves as they fall and gum them onto the branches: but the sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe.

We can generalize this by saying that no regime can rule unless that regime is strong. The historical birth of democracy—both in the Greek world, and the English world—was not a consequence of democratic philosophy, but rather of popular strength—if that word can bear the marriage of determination and ability.

We see that early in a democratic period, the real power of democracy (the power of the mob) greatly exceeds its formal power. Late in the cycle, this disparity inverts: the formal power of democracy exceeds its real power. Its peaceful, apathetic voters are not only a not mob—they are not even a crowd. These “last men” are too soft to even lift the swords of the primitive and violent ancestors who created their powers.

So those powers must and will be taken from them. In a monarchy where the king is weak, the king will be managed. In a democracy where the voters are weak, the voters will be managed. In no such country can vox populi be vox dei. God is not managed.

What has emerged is not, of course, the pleasant liberal world order Fukuyama himself envisaged in the ethereal sunset of the 1990s. The end we are facing is something else—the wholly technicised world, in which mass politics has retreated into irrelevance behind the closed doors of quarantine and hyperregulated biological control. As governments retreat into arcane committees, freed of direct political accountability, information war is waged through Internet phantoms and flickering conspiracies. This is, in some sense, precisely a reflection of the cybernetic world imagined in the 1990s, though a reflection seen through haze and moonlight

1. cryptocculture is now available via DNSLink on IPFS at ipfs://ipns/cryptocculture.com.
2. Links in the archive are being re-added to IPFS, an IPFS cluster pinset will soon be published with the full archive. Links provided in this document include the ipfs:// protocol prefix, so you will need to be running a browser capable of resolving them, or resolve them yourself.
3. New versions and distribution schemes will be periodically added to /#addresses in the footer of this document.

If all novelty in politics is driven by aesthetic induction, we should search not for pristine reflections, but for cyphers.

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end, a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil,” without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?—This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!

I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won’t be able to produce most of our electronics because it depends on a very complex supply chain that we won’t be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).

The fast rate of progress we’ve seen since the advent of electronics happened in very specific conditions that won’t be there post-collapse, so we can’t hope to be able to bootstrap new electronic technology as fast we did without a good “starter kit” to help us do so.

Imagine an Internet where every packet is cryptographically protected from source to destination against espionage and forgery, getting an IP address is as simple as generating a cryptographic key, core routers move data without a single memory look up, and denial of service is a term read about in history books. Finally, becoming an ISP is no longer confined to the mighty telecoms, anyone can do it by running some wires or turning on a wireless device.

Yggdrasil is a proof-of-concept to explore a wholly different approach to network routing. Whereas current computer networks depend heavily on very centralised design and configuration, Yggdrasil breaks this mould by making use of a global spanning tree to form a scalable IPv6 encrypted mesh network.

We provide a crisp, operational definition of desirability that allows us to quantify the dating hierarchy and measure, for instance, how far up that hierarchy men and women can reach for partners and how reach is associated with the likelihood of getting a response.

two heterosexual groups, contain- ing adult males unfamiliar to the other group, were merged. The two groups fought, and the smaller group was defeated. The alpha and beta males of the defeated group were singled out for repeated attack and both showed signifi- cant drops in circulating levels of testosterone. Both males were removed from the group during the first day, but testosterone levels did not recover to baseline levels for several days. The alpha male of the victorious group, on the other hand, showed a significant rise in testosterone, which was apparent only on the day following the merger.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and although I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing

All energy is of a sexual nature, not mainly, but exclusively, and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing, it is absolutely no longer good for anything; it is the same for men. When the sexual instinct is dead, writes Schopenhauer, the true core of life is consumed; thus, he notes in a metaphor of terrifying violence, “human existence resembles a theatre performance which, begun by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes.”

What is the point of maintaining a body that no one touches? And why would you choose a nice hotel bedroom if you have to sleep there alone? I could only, like so many who had finally been defeated despite their sniggers and their grimaces, bow down: immense and admirable, undoubtedly, was the power of love.

Frost and Harpending, Evolutionary Psychology, 13 (2015), have argued that the increasing use of capital punishment across the Middle Ages in Europe altered the genotype, helping to create a less violent and generally more law-abiding population. Developing this insight, we hypothesise that the same system of violent punishments would also have helped to genotypically create a more religious society by indirectly selecting for religiousness, through the execution of men who had not yet sired any offspring.

prime factorization, merkle trees, eliptic-curve cryptography, public keys, proof of work, and synthetic-time are the ideological currents of the future

Labor market changes made men less marriageable, they concluded. There were fewer available men, because unemployment was associated with a rise in incarceration or mortality from drugs and alcohol. The men who were left were less desirable, because they lacked income and were more likely to drink to excess or use drugs.

Economists often downplay cultural factors, Mr. Hanson said. “We think about marriage in a laboratory setting, and ignore the role of churches and bowling leagues and community organizations,” he said. “When you have job decline in a big way, that fabric unravels. So even if you bring the jobs back, once the damage is done, it might take a while to repair.”

And it makes perfect sense that a dangerous place to be is one for which you have no mental map, for then you’d be unable to find food, water, or a mate.

It gives a working definition of being lost: the inability to make the mental map match the environment.

Spiders do not seem to be cognitively limited, displaying a large diversity of learning processes, from habituation to contextual learning, including a sense of numerosity

We argue that in social species, interorganismal gene-gene interactions, which in previous literatures have been termed social epistasis, allow genomes carrying deleterious mutations to reduce via group-level pleiotropy the fitness of others, including noncarriers. This fitness reduction occurs by way of degradation of group-level processes that optimize the reproductive ecology of a population for intergroup competition through, among other mechanisms, suppression of free-riding. Such damage to group regulatory processes suggests a hidden role for the accumulation of behavior-altering “spiteful” mutations in the dynamics of the demographic transition—these mutations may have contributed to the maladaptive outcomes of this process, such as widespread subreplacement fertility

i suspect that cyberspace exists because it is the purest manifestation of the mass (masse) as Jean Beaudrilliard described it. it is a black hole; it absorbs energy and personality and then re–presents it as spectacle

people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management

the rhetoric in cyberspace is liberation–speak. the reality is that cyberspace is an increasingly efficient tool of surveillance with which people have a voluntary relationship

Dat is a new p2p hypermedia protocol. It provides public-key- & sha256-addressed file archives which can be synced securely and browsed on-demand. Dat supports streaming updates and partial on-demand replication, and has plans for versioned URLs and efficient compaction.

i wish ipfs had better overall tooling/support - oh well, here’s another hope

A prospective mate’s number of past sexual partners had a large effect on participants’ willing- ness to engage in a relationship with them

One-SD increase in childhood general intelligence (15 IQ points) decreases women’s odds of parenthood by 21–25%

Sprawling beneath public cyberspace lies the labyrinthine underworld of the Datacombs ghost-stacks of sedimented virtuality, spiralling down abysmally into palaeodigital soft- chatter from the punch-card regime, through junk-programming, forgotten cryptoccultures, fossil-codes and dead-systems, regressively decaying into the pseudomechanical clicking- relics of technotomb clockwork. It is deeper still, amongst the chthonic switchings, cross-hatchings, and spectral- diagrammatics of unborn abstract-machines, that you pick-up the Main-Flatline into the Crypt.

The results showed that male students judged all three behaviors to be more morally acceptable than female students did. Further analyses showed that this gender difference was moderated by the level of physical attractiveness

Socialism has typically been a nostalgic diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism, finding its eschatological soap-boxes amongst the relics of precapitalist territorialities

At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening

strongly suspected that the flu virus might boost our desire to socialize. Why? Because it spreads through close physical contact, often before symptoms emerge—meaning that it must find a new host quickly

the flu shot had the effect of nearly doubling the number of people with whom the participants came in close contact during the brief window when the live virus was maximally contagious

toxoplasmosis studies via a thread and @SeverEnergia

The institutional embarrassment certainly stems from Jorjani’s reactionary views on culture, which he outlines in Prometheus and Atlas, the book based on his dissertation. But the parade of oddities that appear in the book — including, but not limited to, sorcerers, precogs, ancient aliens, telepathy, and the sunken city of Atlantis — are equally disconcerting.

These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars.

not so fast williams & srnicek, it would seem the politics of the nation-state is still capable of ridiculing your politics.

In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.

perhaps for the left this is true, but since this was written in 2013 the right has captured a sense of political imaginary, of political futurism.

Thirty years of neoliberalism have rendered most left-leaning political parties bereft of radical thought, hollowed out, and without a popular mandate. At best they have responded to our present crises with calls for a return to a Keynesian economics, in spite of the evidence that the very conditions which enabled post-war social democracy to occur no longer exist. We cannot return to mass industrial-Fordist labour by fiat, if at all.

The new social movements which emerged since the end of the Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy

i had forgotten that w&s accuse land of being a neoliberal, i wonder how he responds to the accusation:

However Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration.

twitter uses such a ridiculous amount of data, i figure i can send a very basic chat client and an entire archive +1 years worth of “tweets”/links here for a very cacheable < 1 mb

if you’re new here, this is a link blog i’ve run for a while, many months now. i removed it from my twitter account in december, and wasn’t sure exactly what to do with it. given recent no-platforming events, i think this is probably the place i should be investing a journaling process into vs. twitter.

to cryptocculture!

cybergothic exists as a web of sinister rumour, haunting a subterranean soft-labyrinth which it calls the ‘crypt’. buried deep within the primal sediment of the infoplex, and shrouded in a crawling-fog of digital camouflage, it isn’t easy to find, but there are clues.

– cybergothic hyperstition

United States officials believe Mr. Putin wants to damage the image of American democracy to make it less attractive to Russians and their neighbors.

MOIRARI AND THREAD OF LIFE, oil painting, 2014,

Let loose the oligarchic takeover of the real by machine intelligence

↳Georges Dumézil

↳Proto-Indo-European religion

↳Vesta and Janus

↳Spengler on cities

We modeled the evolution of multiple female mate preferences for multiple male traits (ornaments) by Fisher’s runaway process by using a standard quantitative genetic model (11–13). In this model, sexual selection on male ornaments is generated by female mate preferences. A runaway process then ensues because of the genetic coupling of female preference with the male ornament (14). Both female preferences and male ornaments can become exaggerated in a negative (smaller than natural selection optimum) or positive (larger than natural selection optimum) directions.

1. Economics is about what individuals do: not classes, not “correlations of forces”, but individual actors. This is not to deny the relevance of higher levels of analysis, but they must be grounded in individual behavior. Methodological individualism is of the essence.
2. The individuals are self-interested. There is nothing in economics that inherently prevents us from allowing people to derive satisfaction from others’ consumption, but the predictive power of economic theory comes from the presumption that normally people care about themselves.
3. The individuals are intelligent: obvious opportunities for gain are not neglected. Hundred-dollar bills do not lie unattended in the street for very long.
4. We are concerned with the interaction of such individuals: Most interesting economic theory, from supply and demand on, is about “invisible hand” processes in which the collective outcome is not what individuals intended.

…

Well, as I understand it that is what evolutionary economics is all about. In particular, evolution-minded economists seem to want the following:

1. They want to get away from the idea that individuals maximize. Instead, they want to represent decisions as the result of some process of groping through alternatives, a process in which it may take a long time to get to a maximum - and in which the maximum you find may well be local rather than global.
2. They want to get away from the notion of equilibrium. In particular, they want to have an approach in which things are always in disequilibrium, in which the economy is always evolving. Latterly there have also been some economists who want to merge evolutionary ideas with the Schumpeterian notion that the economy proceeds via waves of “creative destruction”.

For later migrations from the Pontic steppe during the LNBA, however, we estimate a dramatic male bias, with ~5-14 migrating males for every migrating female. We find evidence of ongoing, primarily male, migration from the steppe to central Europe over a period of multiple generations, with a level of sex bias that excludes a pulse migration during a single generation.

Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.

Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

When times are hard, and we feel at the mercy of forces many times more powerful, don’t we, in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in imagination, in wish, to the Badass - the djinn, the golem, the hulk, the superhero - who will resist what otherwise would overwhelm us?

1. Links have notes. Expect minor editorial comments in the future. These are direct-linkable via the ‘#’ link above.
2. We are now cryptocculture.