Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Neoreactive Web Resources

The biggest risk that neoreaction runs is that it becomes a cool buzzword that people appropriate for themselves without actually, themselves, being substantive people capable of adding to the useful knowledge of the group.

This is what tends to happen to internet communities and intellectual communities in particular: the river of stupidity overwhelms everything else, results in a lot of dumb people running around waving the term around as if they understand it, and thereby drowning out all substantive discussion with their attention-getting gibberish.

In terms of tactics, one mistake is to over-rely on social media services for communication.

The biggest problem with these is that they don’t generate an archive of correspondence, articles, papers, and books that can be easily accessed by people in the future. The strength of social media is in it’s being easy to use, that they’re the way regular people interact with the web, and that they can draw a lot of attention to a website in a short period of time.

It’s good at attracting momentary attention, but terrible at building durable resources. Similarly, without paying for consistent placement with advertising, it’s useless for building a brand (in non-commercial terms, a reputation).

Social media is largely irrelevant to search engines

While social apps have some indirect impacts on search engine rankings, they have much less of an impact than relevant links between permanent websites which are themselves readable, unique resources that provide visitors with an enjoyable learning experience.

If you want to contribute to your favorite blogs, have more time than money, and don’t want to blog regularly, you should instead focus on a single topic, write about it well, and link out to the websites and resources on the right using anchor text terms that indicate what the page you’re linking to is about.

Social media services like Facebook and Twitter essentially do an end-run around the telos of the web. The intention of its creators was to make a set of common protocols to facilitate sharing credible knowledge.

Search engines like Google use links (among other metrics) to determine which websites to send users to. The more relevant links between websites, along with the higher quality of those sites, increases their overall visibility to searchers looking for more information.

If you have a choice between linking to someone with a social media service like Twitter or Facebook, or linking to a website through a blog that’s at least of reasonable quality (even if it has few readers), a link that’s also on a blog will carry more weight unless you have a substantial number of friends, followers, and other similar social subscription metrics.

While these tools are not entirely politically neutral, and are biased in favor of progressives through various means, one of the biggest challenges that conservatives writ large face is a lack of understanding and concern with using new technologies to their advantage.

The outrage cycle is a waste of brainpower

The media outrage cycle is used to shift attention back and forth between properties that make money off of ad network display advertising. What that means is that the site makes money for every visitor that loads their advertising JavaScript. When a site isn’t interesting enough to attract recurring visitors, it has to invent new outrages that travel by social media to encourage more people to load their tracking codes.

This is a waste of the reader’s time, and one of the reasons why what some advertising experts call ‘junk publishing’ has laid waste to the hopes of many companies who had hoped to earn more returns from their websites. The left in particular has ceded a large portion of its intellectual credibility to encourage more people to load their JavaScript.

If you find yourself wasting a lot of time discussing the latest progressive outrage, know that it’s an activity best enjoyed in moderation.

If you link to outrage bait, try to use a website like unvisit or use nofollow tags on your links to prevent your links from passing any relevance to search engine bots to the target page.

Areas that need more attention

Permanent resources like the “Human Biodiversity Bibliography” are good examples to follow. Relatively static websites like that one can be quite useful. If you can make a resource that can guide a new person through a difficult topic, you are performing a good service to the community.

There is also no reason to sign your name to such resources if you are private. If you are looking for a good intellectual project to work on during your nights and weekends, creating such references for various relevant topics is a good use of your time that doesn’t involve having to get up on the big stage of the internet and put on a show.

Wiki-style encyclopedia reference sites can also be useful, and tend to attract links at a higher rate than other site types, further making it possible to carve public opinion in a way that serves your ends.

There’s also a lack of high quality directories for blogs, books, important archival papers, and easily accessible eBook archives of larger blogs. Such resources can help us to attract more motivated, intelligent people to our sphere.

There’s also a lack of a central library website for republishing out of copyright books in accessible formats, with readable summaries and promotions for each title. Some of this can be handled in a decentralized fashion, with multiple websites providing a torrent magnet link to an archive.

Goofy photos and memes published on free services are great at attracting hordes of morons, but I think most of my readers would prefer that those people stay elsewhere. If you want to post propaganda pictures, customize your own using tools like GIMP, and include links on the pictures to larger, more relevant resources. Cross-post the pictures on a permanent website that you control (not a Facebook page, which can be banned at a whim).

The general goal should be to make better information more accessible to poach the best quality people possible from the progressive media culture. You want to skim their best, and leave them with their worst.

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‘More Right’ Responds to Brin

After about a year, Michael Anissimov at More Right has responded to science fiction author and screenwriter David Brin’s attack on Neoreaction.

The key passage:

I stand by these statements. Aristocratic systems are more fiscally stable. They are more decentralized and less susceptible to failures of the central government. This is exactly the kind of “antifragile” governance our chaotic modern world needs. The current system is highly susceptible to catastrophic failure. We need less federal and state spending, and more local spending. It’s a question of resilience. Communities will shape their own fates; not have their fates shaped by compulsory entanglement with the federal and state governments. As for governance, private government is more reliable and predictable. Let others take their chances with public government. We’ve seen what public government can do, and we don’t like it.

Most of the positions advocated within the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ are, in fact, moderate positions when considered in historical context, even completely non-controversial. The only context in which they are radical is in the current one, in which radicals who share David Brin’s point of view enjoy a temporary perch of influence atop what was once (but is no longer) the largest economy in the world.

It should be noted that Taleb’s book, Antifragile, earned a $4 million advance from a mainstream publisher and was a New York Times best-seller. That book is more closely in accord to what neoreactionaries write about than it is in accord with universal-enlightenment-democracy advocated by a figure like Brin or Francis Fukuyama.

Compared to Taleb, as Anissimov writes, most Dark Enlightenment writers are ‘fringe figures’ in the contemporary sense, but when compared to the historical norm, it’s representing the ordinary, mainstream position in the European tradition.

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The Outer Right Coalition

The outer right has no coalition, even if it appears all of  its component organizations are coordinating.

Part of the reason for this is egoism, but part is also a negotiating gambit among the people who resist forming alliances.

Generally, people writing and speaking on these issues have a special interest. They want to make sure that their special interest will not be downgraded if they collaborate with other people who either don’t share that interest, or don’t have that interest as their foremost concern.

To form a useful coalition, each of its members has to be willing to put aside some of their pet issues for some time, at least in the particular context of presenting a united front on a single issue, even if it’s temporary.

Part of the reason why Europe and its descendants have been so successful relative to other parts of the world is the unusual cultural capacity of Europeans to devolve and delegate authority to lower levels, to set strategic goals at a high level and then to use a high-trust culture to enable people closer to the ground to act on their own initiative.

In return, broadly spread property rights enable greater shares in the profits, as risk is similarly shared throughout the population.

Property rights are always present, even in the most despotic societies, although the sphere of protection that they represent is more restricted. Even in despotism, property rights are enforced within the limits of the imperial palace. When property rights are spread throughout society, recognized as social norms, and enforced predictably, the society can be more active and responsive to changing conditions. Decision making loops can become tighter and faster, rather than being regulated by a single decision loop in the imperial capitol.

Setting up a structure that is capable of making faster, better-informed decisions than the competition is an effective way to crush a competitor, no matter how small the starting point is. If you can make 1,000 effective decisions in the same time that it takes the competitor to make 1, then the defeat of the competitor is almost inevitable.

A culture based on decentralized leadership will defeat a consensus-based culture routinely, because reaching consensus takes exponentially greater amounts of time depending on the scale of the organization that must be brought to consensus.

For the outer right to become an effective force in politics, people need to be able to bargain without giving up the essence of what they want to preserve. Without the need to appeal to an entire society of hundreds of millions, it’s possible to form more effective groups that don’t require the surrender of every important point in the pursuit of winning an election.

It’s much easier to build a smaller culture of millions from the defectors of the mass-culture than it is to try to go after an entire mass-culture at once which has no interest in defection.

The aim shouldn’t be to form a counter-culture, but to create a viable alternative culture with all the trappings of a self-sustaining culture. Once that is on solid footing, then the other components fall into place. Counter-culture defines itself as the opposite of the culture that it opposes, ceding the opposition the frame of discussion immediately. A competing culture defines itself, with its opposition to the neighboring culture being a secondary matter.

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