UnseriousAcademic

Hello everybody, after a lengthy delay, my talk to the University of Sidney about Neoreaction and the ways I tried to map its various communities, is now available.

Please ignore the coughing. My keynote slides were very dusty.

I want to make the case to my employer that we should drop Twitter/X as a promotional channel. I could go drawing together the various examples of disinfo spreading, instating CSAM posters, rise of content inciting violence etc, but I thought I'd check to see if someone hasn't already been tracking this. The sooner I can pull the info together the better but I don't have time right now to go compiling it myself.

Anyone know if there's a site, wiki, resource, thread etc that could set me up?

The benefits of crypto are self evident, thus it is necessary to build an elaborate faux education system to demonstrate them.

I'm sure there will also be some Network Fascism in there for good measure.

Revered friends. I wrote a thing. Mainly because I had a stack of stuff on Joseph Weizenbaum on tap and the AI classroom thing was stuck in my head. I don't know if it's good, but it's certainly written.

With Yarvin renewing interest in Urbit I was reminded of this paper that focuses on Urbit as a representation of the politics of "exit". It's free/open access if anyone is interested.

From the abstract...

This paper examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking – that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular – on contemporary political debates manifest in ‘architectures of exit’...While technological programmes such as Urbit may never ultimately succeed, we argue that these, and other speculative investments such as ‘seasteading’, reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were, perhaps, prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual."

Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I've refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I'd post to say the very final installment is done.

I got a bit weird with it this time as I felt like I had an infinite amount to say, all of which only barely got to the underlying point i was trying to make. So much that I wrote I also cut, it's ridiculous.

Anyway now the series is done I'm going to move on to smaller discrete pieces as I work on my book about Tech Culture's propensity to far-right politics. I'll be dropping interesting stuff I find, examples of Right Libertarians saying ridiculous things, so follow along if that's your jam.

The cost of simply retrieving an answer from the Web is infinitely smaller than the cost of generating a new one.

Great interview with Sasha Luccioni from Huggingface on all the ways that using generative AI for everything is both a) hugely costly compared to existing methods, and b) insane.

Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the "Tech Right" as they're being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there's more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.

Hello all,

TLDR: I've written some stuff about tech ideology via the TV show Devs. It's all free, no paid subs etc. Would love it if anyone interested wanted to take a look - link is to my blog.

Longer blurb: Firstly if this is severely poor form please tell me to do one, throw tomatoes etc.

I'm a Sociologist that focuses on tech culture. Particularly elite tech culture and the far right. I started off writing about the piracy cultures of the 2000s and their role in the switch to digital distribution back in 2013. Just by virtue of paying attention to tech ideology I've now ended up also researching far right extremism and radicalisation and do a lot of data analysis with antifacist orgs. I also used to flirt around in the Sneerclub post-rat spaces on reddit and twitter a few years back too.

Anyway, I've been researching NRx and the wider fashy nature of tech since 2016 but because of "issues" I've not yet got much out into the world. I'm working on a book that more closely examines the way that the history and ideologies in tech culture play well to far right extremism and what it might say about the process of radicalisation more generally.

However, because I'm tired of glacial academic publishing timelines I've also started a research blog called Unserious Academic and for my first project I use the Alex Garland TV show Devs to illustrate and explore some of the things I know about tech culture. I've put out three parts so far with a fourth one ready for Monday. I'm not looking for paid subs or anything, all free I just figured some people might be interested.

I also desperately need a place where people know what a neoreactionary is so I can more easily complain about them so I'd like to hang around longer term too. Thanks for your time!