I myself wonder what I am doing on that platform. The reality is people I actually enjoy talking to are mostly online. I have little to nothing in common with anyone in my city, and I live in a big one. Most of my time is spent in group chats. Twitter also allowed me to discover books and ideas I would've never been exposed to otherwise, though this was largely in 2021-2022-2023; I'm glad I caught the tail end. I reserve most effort posting for this cursed site, and still occasionally effort post on twitter out of pure love of the game. It is possible to find good accounts and carve out niche audiences. I won't lie I really enjoy mocking slop posters and won't stop any time soon, but everyone must have one or two vices.
Unrelated but I am envious of how prolific you are in your blog posts.
Wrong. 2021 was already too late. You say it started in 2016. Nope, way before that, the term was coined circa 2008-2012, and had real intellectuals. Since Trump came along it's been slop. 2021 was an acceleration point because you got anti-vaxx and Stop the Steal, but all the insights that could be gained from this movement were already put out there.
The problem with siding with a faction on the basis of it being "high human capital" is that if too many people do this, then it eventually stops being anything more than mediocre human capital. There actually has to be some core truth which people gain something from believing in. Ironically, if you're willing to endorse what you think is true even if it's unpopular, then you should be able to keep endorsing it when it becomes popular (i.e. when it becomes vulgar)
there shouldn't be any difference between something being low status due to it being unpopular and rare, and something being low status due to it being popular and vulgar. Championing--low-status views because you believe in them--is one of the surest signs of honor.
A lot of them, relevantly those of recent affiliation (as well some that reside) are malforming into full-on nazis now, literally; regurgitating “we fought on the wrong side” talking points and the occasional insinuations to potentially violent acts… on platforms such as YouTube of all places. Huge turn off.
The telos of the dissident right was to demolish the progressive worldview first with humor and later with dark, depressing monologues. Upon completing these tasks, and doing so quite well, reactionary thinkers have largely ignored the somewhat more ignoble task of developing unwoke content and curricula.
Put more bluntly, tabula rasa will continue to be unimpeachable orthodoxy until it has been swept from the pages of Biology 101.
The same holds for mathematics, physics and all other intellectual domains.
To this end, I have created the Tom Swift Academy.
Early 2023 was the last time I found Twitter enjoyable. I think once Elon renamed it to "X" is when the app jumped the shark in terms of the quality of the content.
This isn't to say that I loved pre-Musk Twitter or especially the inane censorship. But I've been using that app since the early/mid 2010s personally (albeit very rarely) and since 2021 politically, and it seemed so much more "fun" and interesting to use even in 2021-2023, but more importantly, more informative. The collective IQ of the app was likely around 10 points higher. Nowadays it feels repetitive and dull, and this applies to "DR" or "RW Twitter", but the app in general.
I called Elon Musk or someone like him buying Twitter 3 years ago because the business model of the app (effectively being Bluesky) by that point simply wasn't sustainable, and I don't think Twitter under its current path of being a 3rd world slopfest machine is sustainable either. Either Elon revamps/sells the app, or it dies by the end of the decade at the latest.
This also applies to the rest of the internet, to a lesser degree. Another thing I've noticed is that shock/edgy humor isn't as funny to me anymore because it's overused and repetitive now. But perhaps this is just me growing older.
When the NJP (alt-right splinter spin-off) failed, one of the main figures ranted to the others “you just can’t handle that we were spun up…to get Donald Trump elected…and we’re just the remnants,” or something to that effect. The DR is in the same doldrums of the alt-right post 2016 election, which is a withering away after having served its purpose. It’s not a coincidence that you place the most vigorous periods of intellectual output—everyone hearkens back to the halcyon days of 2016—during the periods of democrat admins. When influence over the popular discourse mattered in direct terms of electoral outcomes. This is not necessarily conspiratorial. Think of it like a salmon letting go after releasing its eggs.
The popular idea that Charlottesville precipitated the alt-right’s collapse is cope too. When you have a political movement who believed it had achieved representation only to find it has no leverage over policy, people just stop trying to pull the lever as a matter of course. They find displacement activities to engage in. Generic cultural criticism, art projects, getting really into theories of collapse (BRICS, environmentalism, dysgenics, AI, etc.), getting a job, whatever really. Although to be fair, the DR is much more closely aligned with the second Trump admin than the alt-right was with the first.
To your point though, the strivers and “normies” entering the scene was a deliberate strategy in accord with Yarvin’s fashionability theory of elite, and probably there’s a tie-in with Thiel’s Giradian mimetic desire there as well. It was physically instantiated via the Dimes Square scene, which I believe is representative of the kinds of people you lament, and which well-meaning idiots on twitter, e.g. the character “Basil” have grossly misinterpreted as “The System” trying to “turn the frogs gay” on the basis that it brought together NYC liberals and racist twitter posters. In reality it was simply a means of creating a permission structure for fashionable NYC liberal types to be openly pro-Trump. It seems to have worked. I don’t know. Maybe you could crunch the numbers on that.
There is something seriously wrong with this hipsteresque self-soothing ritual where everyone cries that “the downstream normies have taken our toy”. Or upset over Elon ruining our play area, being that he has single-handedly done more to popularize and legitimate the the DR than anyone. “Stagnation of ideas” mattering at all is laughable as well considering the basis of the movement is at bottom just the repudiation of prevailing liberal rule. The point of any dissident milieu is not to generate novelties ad infinitum for the pleasure of its members, but to popularize a core set of ideas to effect policy changes. If that wasn’t your intention then you were “doing it for free,” so to speak.
John Derbyshire's 'From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013' was published in 2015 as the sequel to a 2013 volume, with Derbyshire even having @DissidentRight as his X-handle; Derbyshire 'came to fame' in 2012 with his version of "The Talk" and subsequent fallout.
The DR would thus appear to antedate 2016 as both an entity and a title, with its reaction to Romney's challenge of Obama (Obamaphone, '47%', " If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon Martin") in 2012 being the rough inflection point where the 'online right' palpably diverged both from mainstream conservatives and (to a lesser extent?) paleo-conservatives, thereby coalescing somewhat from what had been various silos of thought; though it may be irrelevant, this was a time where very many intelligent/motivated/ahead of the curve people had smartphones and were thus 'always online', unlike 2008, and yet most people did not, unlike 2016.
Or is Derbyshire's 'Dissident Right' a false friend? He seems rather too much in the Dalrymplean, NRx-periphery vein for that.
It seems to me that 2016 was when NRx's star faded. by virtue of certain of its predictions being realised (I recall reading Yarvin's words to the effect of "the media would fall into the trap of any candidate willing to pick up the ball of hostile publicity and run with it" well in advance of Trump) and the 'Alt-Right'-flavour of DR took centre stage, in part due to it making a convenient target. I think humour more than ideas was the main attraction by that point, even if you class FBI Crime Statistics.jpg as an 'idea', what with 'Nimble Navigators', 'Meme Magic' and the like, and the 'Swamp/Deep State' replacing (or becoming confused with) the 'Cathedral'.
Then the Alt-Right shuffled back out of the spotlight post-2017, with it and NRx as atrophied flanks of a genericised DR which took a form in 2018 that, with the conspicuous addition of an 'anti-conspiracy' picket post-2020, (15-minute cities, WEF etc., likely a product of both the virus and the election), is recognisable today.
As an outside observer of these spheres working from memory, I welcome correction on any points by someone more clued-in; if Derbyshire is (or was) a Dissident Right figure, dating the beginning of the DR is already done by him, who seems to have coined the term in 'From the Dissident Right I', specifically 'Who Are We?—the "Dissident Right"?' from May 10th 2012, Vdare (though he applies it so as to give coherence to a pre-existing movement).
I myself wonder what I am doing on that platform. The reality is people I actually enjoy talking to are mostly online. I have little to nothing in common with anyone in my city, and I live in a big one. Most of my time is spent in group chats. Twitter also allowed me to discover books and ideas I would've never been exposed to otherwise, though this was largely in 2021-2022-2023; I'm glad I caught the tail end. I reserve most effort posting for this cursed site, and still occasionally effort post on twitter out of pure love of the game. It is possible to find good accounts and carve out niche audiences. I won't lie I really enjoy mocking slop posters and won't stop any time soon, but everyone must have one or two vices.
Unrelated but I am envious of how prolific you are in your blog posts.
>Unrelated but I am envious of how prolific you are in your blog posts.
I appreciate your complement.
I don't appreciate your creative way of spelling "compliment" >:^(
Wrong. 2021 was already too late. You say it started in 2016. Nope, way before that, the term was coined circa 2008-2012, and had real intellectuals. Since Trump came along it's been slop. 2021 was an acceleration point because you got anti-vaxx and Stop the Steal, but all the insights that could be gained from this movement were already put out there.
The alt-right started before 2016, but the use of the term "DR" and the people associated with it are newer.
You’re right. I always thought DR was just rebranding of the alt right but maybe it makes sense to treat it as its own thing.
The problem with siding with a faction on the basis of it being "high human capital" is that if too many people do this, then it eventually stops being anything more than mediocre human capital. There actually has to be some core truth which people gain something from believing in. Ironically, if you're willing to endorse what you think is true even if it's unpopular, then you should be able to keep endorsing it when it becomes popular (i.e. when it becomes vulgar)
there shouldn't be any difference between something being low status due to it being unpopular and rare, and something being low status due to it being popular and vulgar. Championing--low-status views because you believe in them--is one of the surest signs of honor.
A lot of them, relevantly those of recent affiliation (as well some that reside) are malforming into full-on nazis now, literally; regurgitating “we fought on the wrong side” talking points and the occasional insinuations to potentially violent acts… on platforms such as YouTube of all places. Huge turn off.
The telos of the dissident right was to demolish the progressive worldview first with humor and later with dark, depressing monologues. Upon completing these tasks, and doing so quite well, reactionary thinkers have largely ignored the somewhat more ignoble task of developing unwoke content and curricula.
Put more bluntly, tabula rasa will continue to be unimpeachable orthodoxy until it has been swept from the pages of Biology 101.
The same holds for mathematics, physics and all other intellectual domains.
To this end, I have created the Tom Swift Academy.
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/tom-swift-academy
Would you like to know more?
Early 2023 was the last time I found Twitter enjoyable. I think once Elon renamed it to "X" is when the app jumped the shark in terms of the quality of the content.
This isn't to say that I loved pre-Musk Twitter or especially the inane censorship. But I've been using that app since the early/mid 2010s personally (albeit very rarely) and since 2021 politically, and it seemed so much more "fun" and interesting to use even in 2021-2023, but more importantly, more informative. The collective IQ of the app was likely around 10 points higher. Nowadays it feels repetitive and dull, and this applies to "DR" or "RW Twitter", but the app in general.
I called Elon Musk or someone like him buying Twitter 3 years ago because the business model of the app (effectively being Bluesky) by that point simply wasn't sustainable, and I don't think Twitter under its current path of being a 3rd world slopfest machine is sustainable either. Either Elon revamps/sells the app, or it dies by the end of the decade at the latest.
This also applies to the rest of the internet, to a lesser degree. Another thing I've noticed is that shock/edgy humor isn't as funny to me anymore because it's overused and repetitive now. But perhaps this is just me growing older.
I think it's better referred to as the “New Right"
When the NJP (alt-right splinter spin-off) failed, one of the main figures ranted to the others “you just can’t handle that we were spun up…to get Donald Trump elected…and we’re just the remnants,” or something to that effect. The DR is in the same doldrums of the alt-right post 2016 election, which is a withering away after having served its purpose. It’s not a coincidence that you place the most vigorous periods of intellectual output—everyone hearkens back to the halcyon days of 2016—during the periods of democrat admins. When influence over the popular discourse mattered in direct terms of electoral outcomes. This is not necessarily conspiratorial. Think of it like a salmon letting go after releasing its eggs.
The popular idea that Charlottesville precipitated the alt-right’s collapse is cope too. When you have a political movement who believed it had achieved representation only to find it has no leverage over policy, people just stop trying to pull the lever as a matter of course. They find displacement activities to engage in. Generic cultural criticism, art projects, getting really into theories of collapse (BRICS, environmentalism, dysgenics, AI, etc.), getting a job, whatever really. Although to be fair, the DR is much more closely aligned with the second Trump admin than the alt-right was with the first.
To your point though, the strivers and “normies” entering the scene was a deliberate strategy in accord with Yarvin’s fashionability theory of elite, and probably there’s a tie-in with Thiel’s Giradian mimetic desire there as well. It was physically instantiated via the Dimes Square scene, which I believe is representative of the kinds of people you lament, and which well-meaning idiots on twitter, e.g. the character “Basil” have grossly misinterpreted as “The System” trying to “turn the frogs gay” on the basis that it brought together NYC liberals and racist twitter posters. In reality it was simply a means of creating a permission structure for fashionable NYC liberal types to be openly pro-Trump. It seems to have worked. I don’t know. Maybe you could crunch the numbers on that.
There is something seriously wrong with this hipsteresque self-soothing ritual where everyone cries that “the downstream normies have taken our toy”. Or upset over Elon ruining our play area, being that he has single-handedly done more to popularize and legitimate the the DR than anyone. “Stagnation of ideas” mattering at all is laughable as well considering the basis of the movement is at bottom just the repudiation of prevailing liberal rule. The point of any dissident milieu is not to generate novelties ad infinitum for the pleasure of its members, but to popularize a core set of ideas to effect policy changes. If that wasn’t your intention then you were “doing it for free,” so to speak.
John Derbyshire's 'From the Dissident Right II: Essays 2013' was published in 2015 as the sequel to a 2013 volume, with Derbyshire even having @DissidentRight as his X-handle; Derbyshire 'came to fame' in 2012 with his version of "The Talk" and subsequent fallout.
The DR would thus appear to antedate 2016 as both an entity and a title, with its reaction to Romney's challenge of Obama (Obamaphone, '47%', " If I had a son he'd look like Trayvon Martin") in 2012 being the rough inflection point where the 'online right' palpably diverged both from mainstream conservatives and (to a lesser extent?) paleo-conservatives, thereby coalescing somewhat from what had been various silos of thought; though it may be irrelevant, this was a time where very many intelligent/motivated/ahead of the curve people had smartphones and were thus 'always online', unlike 2008, and yet most people did not, unlike 2016.
Or is Derbyshire's 'Dissident Right' a false friend? He seems rather too much in the Dalrymplean, NRx-periphery vein for that.
It seems to me that 2016 was when NRx's star faded. by virtue of certain of its predictions being realised (I recall reading Yarvin's words to the effect of "the media would fall into the trap of any candidate willing to pick up the ball of hostile publicity and run with it" well in advance of Trump) and the 'Alt-Right'-flavour of DR took centre stage, in part due to it making a convenient target. I think humour more than ideas was the main attraction by that point, even if you class FBI Crime Statistics.jpg as an 'idea', what with 'Nimble Navigators', 'Meme Magic' and the like, and the 'Swamp/Deep State' replacing (or becoming confused with) the 'Cathedral'.
Then the Alt-Right shuffled back out of the spotlight post-2017, with it and NRx as atrophied flanks of a genericised DR which took a form in 2018 that, with the conspicuous addition of an 'anti-conspiracy' picket post-2020, (15-minute cities, WEF etc., likely a product of both the virus and the election), is recognisable today.
As an outside observer of these spheres working from memory, I welcome correction on any points by someone more clued-in; if Derbyshire is (or was) a Dissident Right figure, dating the beginning of the DR is already done by him, who seems to have coined the term in 'From the Dissident Right I', specifically 'Who Are We?—the "Dissident Right"?' from May 10th 2012, Vdare (though he applies it so as to give coherence to a pre-existing movement).
The piece is archived here: https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/john-derbyshire-who-are-we-the-dissident-right/
> "the old alt-right that died after the Charlottesville rally"
This is a silly thing to say. The dissident/alt-/anti-establishment/far-right has always been here, no matter what other people have called it.
We got families and jobs, that’s what happened.
God, family, country. In that order.
Not to worry, we’ll be back.
“It was infiltrated and co-opted by Jews” fixed it for you