There have been some positive trends lately which I’ve noticed. Skyaugusta has started working on the ‘Southern Reactionary’ concept, with a particular focus on the history and culture of the southern US.

Similarly, Neocolonial (whom I believe is in New Zealand) is working on applying general ideas from neoreaction (which derives from the  practice of digging-up of old books and censored knowledge) to the particular political situation of rural and remote areas. [ED: He’s actually in Tasmania.]

Specialization and subsidiarity are the best ways to defuse needless competition and conflict. It also makes the political phenomenon more challenging for outsiders to grasp, because it occludes more of the connections where they might be any. Certain local or specialized applications of the same body of thought can also serve as better cover than operating under the ‘neoreactionary’ brand.

There are certainly some others which I’m missing. There’s a lively South Slavic contingent of both expatriates and natives over there, along with some Canadians in different regions, but they tend to speak in the similar Anglo-Universal mode that most of the rest of us do.

The phenomenon of the manosphere, which should be familiar to most of you, is a good demonstration of this. Pick up artists selling scripts for seducing women who hang around in bars is a saturated market that looks like a power law curve, with a few big names controlling the market, and then countless smaller ones trying and failing to replicate the success of the people at the top.

To be at all useful, these people have to differentiate what they do for people, specialize their knowledge, and pick an area which isn’t over-saturated with producers. This piece on specialization, SEO, and the manosphere by Thumotic, who occasionally comments and links to this blog, is a good primer.

The previous two grafs are basic Adam Smith, but most people who read the theory don’t understand how to apply it in life, so it bears some repeating.

Market control tends to have a power law distribution. When you see a mature market, unless you can find a critical flaw in the market leader that you can exploit and disrupt, you want to carve off a slice possessed by the market leader and make it belong to you and your team. Anything else, and you’re probably fighting over scraps with other professional scrappers.

This illustrates the importance of specialization, relevance, and localization. If you can differentiate what you’re writing about and doing from what others are doing, you become more useful to the community writ small and the community writ large. It’s a lot easier to get a grasp on a small area of knowledge or physical territory than it is to try to tackle the whole of everything.

Mitosis gets the job done. The more that people try to create an enormous, undifferentiated internet cult, the less functional that that cult becomes, and the more that people focus on power jostling over actually making any substantive progress in either understanding or application. This also makes it a whole lot simpler to form functional hierarchies. It’s pointless to try to stop the power jostling, because that’s what men do.

From a correspondent in Mountain View comes a description of a company headed towards an unfortunate fate.

My employer is flirting with a left singularity.

Google is a left-wing organization, in two ways. First, its founders and executives support left-wing politicians, left-wing causes, left-wing fads.

But Google is also left-wing in another, non-political manner, in its style of internal speech and debate. The hallmarks of the left — holiness competition, the vanguard of the people, no one more extreme is an enemy — are present whenever anyone discusses a non-political subject that is relevant to the company.

As long as you advocate in favor of Google’s goals (“focus on the user” is a popular phrase, and can be used to justify pretty much anything), you can criticize any product, even call out executives by name.

Go on o’er and read his post and some of the others.

One of the reasons why I became motivated to begin writing again was this long debate on Foseti’s now-mothballed blog.

To simplify, the arguments were split between:

• those who wanted neoreaction to remain a small community of amateur scholarly correspondents uninterested in general influence
• people who were interested in forming an influential political sect, which would require propaganda
• those who saw merit in both approaches

The discussion was partly sparked by the style of Radish and the retirement of Moldbug from active blogging.

Going back to the comments on Foseti’s post, I was more persuaded by the arguments that Contemplationist, Spandrell, Surviving Babel, and Jim put forth than the others.

My general take on writing is that it is best used to provide information, to entertain, and to persuade other people. Writing for the public, which is what a blog does, necessarily means influencing members of that public.

There’s an alternative to writing for the public called “writing e-mails and letters,” which is more private and more effective at persuading people one-by-one besides.

Contemplationist wrote:

Lets also remember that Moldbug’s mission was to convert the Brahmin young, which is absolutely possible with a hipster intellectual attitude (I’ve done it myself).
The 60s counterculture was not supported by the old progressives. We can certainly create a reactionary counterculture. Culture is supreme.
What would be a simple example? Formal Fridays for one. Dress old school. Behave old school. Don’t take shit from women. Be the aristocrat if you can.
Also, as AnomalyUK has noted, we just need some threshold of intelligent common people to be aware that they know someone who holds the opinion for example that “the Queen would rule better than the Parliament.”
I see all of this as very doable.

Neovictorian recently wrote an article about how this sort of thing has impacted his attention span (with some direct reference to my work) along with some reference to the broader mass media, of which I’m a small part.

He and Bruce Charlton absolutely have a point in that. To the extent that you already agree with most of what’s being said, you should refocus your attention on bringing your real life in line with your changed beliefs rather than expending too much of your attention reading entertaining neoreactionary propaganda.

If you need to taper off your addiction, just skim headlines, read weekly round-ups like the ones published by Nick B. Steves or Free Northerner, or use an RSS reader to decrease the amount of time that you waste keeping up with the volume of production.

I’m a propagandist. I don’t really try to dress myself up as anything else. I do get repetitious sometimes, because repetition is necessary to get the desired effect. My writing is often derivative and makes no attempt to conceal that.

Part of the motivation that I have to write is also just to share what I’m reading with other people so that it doesn’t stay locked up in my head, which it otherwise would. No one is obligated to read what I write. Thousands of people do find it useful and interesting.

A lot of the writers who churn out of the reactosphere burn out because:

• their work responsibilities become too heavy
• they need to earn more money, which requires more of their attention
• they stop enjoying it
• they dislike the new people coming in to the space
• they dislike the additional effort needed to grab reader attention
• they become frightened of the risk involved in participating

All of these are valid reasons to stop writing.

My general goal is to support the growth of that reactionary counterculture which was napkin-sketched some years ago. I can’t guarantee that it will succeed or that I will succeed. I’m not a prophet. It might turn out to be really mediocre, and it may very well be my fault if it does.

And when I produce bad work, or make a bad argument, or include a factual error, I expect to be criticized for it.

Achieving those goals (which some people have judged to be impossible) requires developing staying power and uneven competitive advantages compared to the dominant progressive culture. One-off efforts achieve little because sustained effort is what keeps a culture alive and growing.

A lot of people who could contribute more instead prefer to invent countless reasons about why they shouldn’t contribute at length, sometimes over a period of months, or spend time explaining why what’s being contributed deserves endless scorn from critics who are themselves too frightened to contribute much of anything themselves.

I’ve called this tendency the negative pose, and it’s common on the internet in which it’s easy and pleasurable to construct that kind of entertaining-but-mostly-useless persona.

Not to be too self-help-y, but the only way to make sure that a difficult task actually is impossible is to declare it to be impossible before it’s even attempted. I don’t really put much stock in declarations like that, because it’s usually just an excuse to avoid discomfort or danger, unless there’s an accurate theoretical reason why something is impossible.

Creating a counter-culture is doable. It’s just difficult.