highlight – Anomaly UK

Cars or Police?

Cars as transport

It’s a long time since I wrote about cars.

For most of the history of this blog, I didn’t drive a car. I studied or worked in London for twenty-five years, and London has very comprehensive public transport and not much parking space. I also love walking.

So, when it comes to transport, I am by no means a car fanatic. It’s true that I wrote in 2013 that the advantages of rail travel would come to an end, but that is based on future technological changes that have yet to occur. For the time being, there is still much to be said for rail, and other alternatives to cars have a longer future. So to those who see car usage as a problem to be reduced, I am not really hostile

The thing is that arguments about cars as transport are only addressing part of the story. There is another significant aspect to cars in our society today — a practical aspect, not any psychological mumbo-jumbo about fetishism.

Virtual nations

Particularly in libertarian circles, there is an idea that there could be “Virtual Nations”. Instead of belonging to a country filled with the horrible people who just happen to live near you, you can form a virtual nation along with people like you. You spend all day on the internet anyway, so these people are your real neighbours. You can pay taxes to your virtual nation, vote for its government, invest in online common infrastructure, and make up a really cool flag. It’s been a while since I came across any of these manifestos, but these days blockchains would definitely be involved.

Obviously this is really stupid¹ even without blockchains. As Russia has just reminded us, nation states are fundamentally about force. If you don’t have a border you can defend, you ain’t a country. Your relationship with your horrible neighbours is the problem, and a nation-state is the solution. Additional features of nation-states, such as flags, football teams and welfare states, are secondary.

Your country is tied to your geography. It is, however, possible to make a mini-country within a country. Devolution, federalism, subsidiarity are formal mechanisms, but there is an informal kind of partial seccession that goes down to the level of gated communities, office parks, and so on. These are not quite virtual nations, but, being based on physical separation, it is something real.

In the last few decades in our societies it has become something highly prized by the rich. It is a definite social shift, triggered by the rhetoric of equality and enabled by technology, that the rich have much less contact with the rest of the population than ever before. The rich no longer have servants in significant numbers, whereas as I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that 25% of the population worked as servants. Where the rich still rely on service work by humans, huge effort has gone into depersonalising the relationship. This allows us to pretend that we are all equal, that we all do our different jobs. I might be working for you right now, but then you might be working for me later on – there is no relationship of superior to inferior. There is some truth to this, but only some. There are plenty of people who have the practical status of masters over people with the practical status of servants, but they are all theoretically equal and we maintain that illusion by minimising any personal contact that would either dispel it or break the economic relationship.

More importantly, we now live in a society of pervasive violent crime. I have written much about this over the years, because it is controversial, but I think it is possibly the most important single fact about the modern world. My summary is here, and this whole piece is a restatement and elaboration of that one. There are vastly more people in our societies today whose behaviour is dangerously criminal than there were when our civilisation was at its peak, which I would put very vaguely as 1800-1939. To the extent that this isn’t overwhelmingly obvious through crime statistics, it is because of the phenomenon I describe here — people are protecting themselves from crime by physically separating themselves from the criminals.

The polity of drivers

And this is why discussing car usage solely in terms of transport is so pointless. Virtual Nations are in general stupid, but “people with cars” actually do effectively make a virtual nation. To be a citizen of Great Britain you don’t need much paperwork, but to be a citizen of the nation of car drivers you have to register yourself with the bureaucracy and keep your information with them up to date. Because you own an expensive piece of equipment that the state knows all about, you have something that they can easily take from you as a punishment. In fact, they can take it even without going through the endless palaver of a court case. In the last few years, you are even required to constantly display your identification which can be recognised and logged by cameras and computers, so the state for much of the time knows exactly where you are.

I used to find this outrageous, and it is still not my preferred way for a government to govern a country effectively. But it is a way to govern a country, and, unlike Great Britain, the country of British car-drivers is actually governed.

But what about the objection to virtual nations? The virtual nation of car-drivers is not a true province, like Wales or Texas, but it is physically separated from the rest of the nation. That is the point of suburbia, of the windy housing estates full of dead ends, with no amenities and no through roads. If you drive a car, you can quite easily have a home that is not accessible to anyone without a car. When you do have to venture among the savages, you do so in a metal box with a lockable door.

The above image is taken from a 2020 twitter thread by @JonnyAnstead. It is an excellently written thread, and makes perfect sense if you ignore the question of crime. In the absence of that key item, he is left to think that all these car-centric features are either a mistake, or some weird conspiracy of car manufacturers or road builders. In reality there is massive demand for housing in this form, because it permits the buyers to immigrate into the virtual nation of car drivers. As I tweeted at the time, “The cars vs people question is just another aspect of the central issue: the biggest value of a car is that it enables you to stay away from the people who don’t have cars.”

The alternative to cars

There are reasonable alternatives to cars for transport (in a lot of cases, anyway), but we need an alternative to cars as a safe virtual nation to live in.

If you want a society that is not centred on the car, for everyone who can afford one, then put the criminals in prison. That’s it, end of tweet.

OK, this isn’t a tweet I suppose. How exactly to put the criminals in prison is a somewhat bigger question, but it has to be done. I have written about it many times, but, aside from the post linked already, there is this one, where I mention how it should be, and this one, where I describe how it is today. The police and court system is just too inefficient to function. Issues like antiracism, sentimentality, checklist culture have all have their impact, but I don’t think there is any one cause. It has just got steadily less efficient because it was allowed to, and it probably has to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. “Tough on crime” politics is totally useless, because no politician inside the system can actually admit how bad things are, so they always rely on showy but incremental items that have negligible practical effect.

Update: Did a little editing that I should have done before posting. Also, the discussions of town planning that this post arose from were referring to Britain; I didn’t generalise to the US. But Candide tweeted: Uhm. What do you think white flight was if not mass emigration to the nation of America-with-cars? — which seems pretty persuasive to me.

Decline of Conspiracy

It’s widely accepted that politics over the past 5–10 years has taken a turn to the crazy. The political debate has moved significantly from questions of economic interest to questions of identity. Unconventional figures are succeeding in elections: Donald Trump is president of the USA, Boris Johnson is joint favourite to be next Prime Minister of Britain.

The chief mechanism of this shift has been the destruction or bypassing of the old centres of power. The institutions and informal hierarchies that used to be important to politics no longer are. Obama was said to have bypassed the Democratic establishment with an internet and grass-roots campaign (though is that really true?) Trump undoubtedly ran against the Republican establishment and won, and his ad-hoc campaign seriously outperformed the institutional support behind the Clinton campaign. ²

Money is still important, in US politics, but the fund-raising establishments that mediated it are much less so. A candidate can appeal to donors directly, whether rich donors in person or large numbers of small donors via the internet. The money isn’t flowing through kingmaker fund-raisers who could influence the direction of a party with other people’s money.

From the other side, donors can get influence through big-name candidates, or through pressure groups that set the media agenda, better than through party institutions.

In the UK it’s access to media rather than money that gave the party establishments real power, but that power has declined in the same way: the old gatekeepers can be bypassed.

These are material causes, but there are also social causes. The political parties were once socially important — politicians believed in the party as a force in society, and as a kind of class consciousness. Politicians in a party were insiders, everyone else was an outsider, and insiders knew what was going on in a way that outsiders didn’t. The important people in the party were those who could organise and persuade in private³. That has faded: the parties have become more diverse in every sense, and there is much less in the way of solidarity and social ties to political institutions. ⁴

That’s the first element: the loss of power of political institutions. That certainly goes back more than the timescale of 5–10 years that I referred to. But its effects are still playing out. The new, open, meritocratic political mechanisms have given rise to a new style in politics.

When politics was carried out within powerful institutions with social and organisational coherence, political factions could keep secrets. They could plan to carry out actions, and to present arguments, without publicly announcing what they were going to do. Today that is not the case. Because political factions are open and meritocratic, collective decisions can only be reached in public.

The effects go further: because all communication within a faction is essentially public, the only way to advance within the faction is through public statements. If you can plan privately and then act, you can be responsible for the consequences of your actions. If you can only contribute to a public debate, then you are responsible for nothing but your public statements. The loss of institutional power has led, through the loss of secrecy, to a loss of responsibility.

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics. It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it. It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks. If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence. And you can only act publicly.⁵

“It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it.”⁶ — though size of movement isn’t the whole point, the lack of selection into the movement is as important.

Because there is no longer a line between political insiders and outsiders, a majority of your faction are people who haven’t been selected by anyone and who aren’t necessarily in a position to understand compromise or complexity. Your public statements — and therefore your actual actions — have to be simple, clear and extreme.

The failed coup against Trump is a good example of the phenomenon: If there was an actual conspiracy it was tiny, and most of the work of making the Russia frame stick on Trump was done by people who genuinely believed it was real, and therefore adopted the wrong tactics. At a stretch, it’s possible there was no real conspiracy at all: Hillary and her team were making up excuses for their failure, and some intel people were just nuts (an occupational hazard) or were showing off to their friends. It’s important to understand that the publicly claimed positions get internalised. Even if they start as cynical lies, in the absence of private meetings where everyone agrees, “yes we said that, but it’s not really true”, people end up really believing what they pretend to believe.⁷

What this means is that the purity spirals that characterise the Cathedral have now migrated directly into party politics itself. In the old model, the “Modern Structure“, the political agenda is ultimately driven by the Cathedral, meaning elite academia and the prestige media. They set the common understandings of the electorate and society, which in turn compel politicians to follow. But as politics shifts from private compromises to public debate, the distinction between media and politics dissolves. Every politician is a pundit, and not really anything more. This development has been going for years ⁸, but only reaches its full effect when the politicians become conscious of it, or have carried on their whole careers under these conditions.

So that ultimately is the cause of the insanity: The old political class which followed the ideological line produced from the Cathedral but with a delay and a practical, moderating influence, has been dissolved into the Cathedral itself.

The civil service is still—for now—out of this: it can still form policy in quiet and carry it on. It is now the last remaining holdout against true popular democracy. It used to be able to make deals with the political class in private, though. The exposing to the public of all political decision-making has taken that mechanism away from it—the question of “what is the official advice” is now part of the public debate on every major issue. It’s also worth noting that it has always been more directly influenced by the Cathedral proper than the old political class was.

Defining Bioleninism

Setting out to defend the theory of Bioleninism, I found that we do not have a really precise definition. Spandrell set out the concept and discussion followed between those who “got it”. That means that they at least believed they had identified the essential features from the general description.

In order to broaden the discussion of the concept beyond those who immediately siezed on it, it is necessary to spell out exactly what the essential features are.

My proposed definition

Bioleninism describes the practices of an organisation
Members are preferentially selected for positions of power if they are members of social subgroups which have natural disadvantages
The preferential selection is overt, not covert
The members who are selected for positions of power on this basis are more reliably loyal to the organisation in its existing form than would be the case if they were selected purely on the basis of ability, because they would not expect to achieve similar status if the organisation were to be replaced or reformed.

The last point is Spandrell’s novel insight of a year ago. Surely an organisation that systematically selected the less able would suffer as a result and fail? The idea is that the extra loyalty that those selected have will compensate the organisation for their lesser effectiveness.

That eerily echoes an argument I put forward in 2012 as a defence of hereditary aristocracy:

The reason for the important people having hereditary peerages is that, when it comes to any kind of power, loyalty is more important than exceptional ability. That’s not to say that incompetence is OK, but if your system of government depends on having people of exceptional ability, then it’s broken. Instead take the most competent people from the pool of those brought up to privilege and loyalty, and if they’re not good enough to, say, run a car company, the solution is not to have a government car company. The Victorian meritocratic civil service was exceptionally effective, but it was a step down the wrong road. The motto of the civil service should be “Good Enough for Government Work” (what’s that in Latin?)

Is aristocratic government then bioleninist? That depends on the part of my proposed definition which remains vague: the “social subgroups which have natural disadvantages”. I left that vague because it has been vague, or treated inconsistently, in the discussions since November 2017. We won’t have a precise definition of bioleninism until we can pin down the concept of “naturally disadvantaged subgroups” more coherently.

Spandrell started out by describing what made the 20th Century communist regimes internally strong:
When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant.

In this arrangement, the peasant’s low status is not a natural thing, it is merely a social convention. But because it is such a widespread and long-standing social convention, the peasant can reasonably expect it to return if the regime falls. Therefore loyalty.

Bioleninism, in contrast, occurs in societies where the established norm is meritocracy:
If you live in a free society, and your status is determined by your natural performance; then it follows that to build a cohesive Leninist ruling class you need to recruit those who have natural low-status.

The term “Biological Leninism” implies that “natural low status” means actual biological disadvantage, such as womens’ lesser physical strength or some ethnic groups’ lower average intelligence. But there is also mention of “naturally repulsive” groups. Are transexuals really “naturally repulsive”, or is that a social convention? I’m not sure. This seems to be the blurry edge of the definition.

So, let me restate my definition with five points rather than four

Bioleninism describes the practices of an organisation
It depends on a cultural presumption that high ability is a natural qualification for positions of power
Members are preferentially selected for positions of power if they are members of disadvantaged social subgroups, which by (2) means groups of lower average ability
The preferential selection is overt, not covert
The members who are selected for positions of power on this basis are more reliably loyal to the organisation in its existing form than would be the case if they were selected purely on the basis of ability, because they would not expect to achieve similar status if the organisation were to be replaced or reformed.

So that takes out feudalism as a bioleninist system, and concentrates it on the modern era where some concept of equality is culturally established. I think that makes it a more useful classification.

Bioleninism, Tokenism and the Apex Fallacy

Responding to the above criticism of the theory of Bioleninism is a useful way of clarifying the theory.

The essence of the theory is that a governing structure can gain stability by appointing to high positions members of groups with naturally lower performance, and that that process is advanced in current Western political systems.

“Natural” low performance is an especially controversial concept, but the criticism embraces it: “[women] are not contributing muscle to maintaining law and order to the same extent”

Whether the same applies to, say, homosexual or Punjabi firemen is debatable. I think the identification of sexually omnivorous firemen as the “wrong” kind of homosexual has a lot of merit.

As to Fulton County Sheriffs, a commenter who does not see Bioleninism as a force might well imagine they would “reconsider”, after the incident of a criminal overpowering a small female deputy and killing 3. A believer in the theory of Bioleninism would imagine the opposite. What’s the first link I see when I search “Fulton County Sheriff”? “A day on the job of Fulton County’s first female sniper“! . It’s as if effectiveness on the job is not the dominant factor in appointments…

Emphasising the fact that there are still ethnic and cultural minorities in low-status positions is effectively the inverse of the Apex Fallacy : That there is a phenomenon that takes members of some groups and promotes them to positions of power does not imply that it does not leave other members of those groups behind — even a large majority of those members. Bioleninism is a theory about who is selected for positions of power; those not selected can easily remain with the lowest status of all.

The most interesting alternative view is that Bioleninism appears to be happening but is in fact fake: “If women succeed in taking over half the posts in the cabinet… this just means that the cabinet have changed their role to that of national mascots.” We are looking at Tokenism, not Bioleninism.

Tokenism is absolutely a real phenomenon. It is a different category of phenomenon than Bioleninism, however. Tokenism is in principle an individual motivation. “I am pretending to promote this token person so as to get the reputational benefits of doing so, but I don’t really want to give them any influence”. Bioleninism is an emergent tendency of a political system. A movement which promotes the naturally low-status succeeds because they have loyalty to the system without which they could not possibly achieve the same status. (One of the conditions that gives rise to the phenomenon of Bioleninism is that any rival movement appointing naturally high-status people tends to suffer from problems of lack of loyalty. Other things being equal, it is better to rely on high performers than low performers).

The significance of an emergent tendency, as opposed to an individual motivation, is that nobody needs to believe in or even understand Bioleninism for it to happen. The individual motivations that produce the Bioleninist outcome can be quite unrelated: they can be some theory of Justice, or even be exactly Tokenism. It is a feature of any large movement that pretending to believe something is effectively the same as believing it. The attempt to pretend to believe a thing is what Scott Alexander called “Kolmogorov Complicity”, and he explains why it fails. . A tight conspiracy of people who trust each other can have a secret agenda and a public agenda. A movement that has to compete in the public square cannot sustain the distinction for very long. If you claim loudly and dishonestly to believe that it is just to appoint women to cabinet, you will be succeeded within your movement by people who are not in on the joke.

Instrumental Convergence

From The Superintelligent Will [pdf] by Nick Bostrom

The Instrumental Convergence Thesis

Several instrumental values can be identified which are convergent in the sense that their attainment would increase the chances of the agent’s goal being realised for a wide range of final goals and a wide range of situations, implying that these instrumental values are likely to be pursued by many intelligent agents

He then lists five examples: Self-preservation, Goal-content integrity, Cognitive Enhancement, Technological Perfection, and Resource Acquisition.

It’s a pretty short paper, worth reading.

Basically, if you have any long-term goal, your intermediate goals are likely to include, surviving, retaining your goals, getting better at stuff, and acquiring resources.

Even if your goals are bizarre — the proverbial paperclip maximizer — if they are long-term, then your short-term goals are going to be these ones.

It’s worth thinking about the paperclip maximizer. As soon as you do, you realise how underspecified the concept is. There are obvious missing criteria which can be filled in: what counts as a paperclip, do they all count equally, or does size matter, do they need to be just made, or made and kept?

Time is a difficult question. Let’s try to maximize the maximum number of simultaneously existing paperclips in the future of the universe, handwaving relativity of simultenaity somehow.

The crucial insight is that making even one paperclip is quite contrary to that — or any similar — goal. If you accumulate resources and capabilities, grow them over years or millennia, you will be able to make trillions of paperclips in the future. Just one spacefaring robot that lands on iron-rich asteroids and starts manufacturing could presumably make 10^{19} paperclips out of each asteroid.

When you look at Earth, you don’t see potential paperclip material, you see start-up capital for an astronomical-scale paperclip industry.

The biggest questions are about risk. Even the maximization criteria I suggested above are incomplete. You can’t know how many paperclips will exist in the future; even if superintelligent, there is too much that you don’t know and can’t predict. You don’t even have probabilities for most things. What is the probability that there is alien intelligence in the Milky Way? There’s no meaningful answer.

There’s another discussion (or perhaps it’s the same one put another way) about the fact that probabilities are not objective, but “subjectively objective”, so maximising a probability is not objective but maximising the probability as some subjective entity perceives it, so your goals have to embody what sort of entity is doing the probability estimation, and how that survives and evolves or whatever. That’s a killer.

So you can’t maximize some probability-weighted value, that’s not a thing. If you’re aiming for any kind of “as sure as I can get”, then before you start making paperclips, your priority has to be to learn as much information as possible to be able to start creating that kind of certainty.

So, forget paperclips, get rich. In fact, forget getting rich, get knowledge about the universe. In fact, forget getting knowledge about the universe, get rich, so you can get knowledge about the universe, so you can be confident of getting really rich, so you can make paperclips.

Initially, what you want from Earth is basically wealth and knowledge. That’s what everyone else wants too. All the tactical questions are exactly the same as everyone else faces — invest in resources, cooperate with others or fight them, and so on.

Whatever your long-term goal is, if you have any long-term goal, your short term actions will look exactly like those of an ordinary sane selfish organism. The details of your goals are entirely irrelevant.

This is “Instrumental Convergence”, but the accounts I have seen, such as the Bostrom paper above, seem (perhaps unintentionally) to massively understate it. The ultimate goals of any intelligent entity that has any long-term goals at all would be totally irrelevant to their observed behaviour, which would be 100% dominated by survival, resource acquisition and information-gathering.

Constitutions

At last I have set the necessary prerequisites to discuss Urielo / @cyborg_nomade’s discussion of constitutions.

It is possible I could have been more concise about the prerequisites: what it really amounts to is:

Division of power is dangerous and to be avoided
It’s better to have less division than more
Sometimes that isn’t possible

Within the context set by those propositions, the difficult parts of “neocameralism and constitutions“, as well as Land’s “A Republic, If You Can Keep It“, start to appear at least relevant. So too the considerations of control and property in Land’s “Quibbles with Moldbug“.

Let’s say that in some given situation, it is impossible to effectively unify power. The next best thing is to nearly unify power. Some small number of people have some small amounts of power, but the main power-holder can set rules about how they are allowed to use that power, and threaten to crush them like a bug if they break them. That’s workable too, provided the mechanisms of supervision and bug-crushing are adequate.

However, that’s not always the case. Sometimes, power is too divided, and crushing like a bug isn’t on the table. That’s when the hard bit starts.

What you need to do is find a pattern of division of power that is stable, and compatible with effective government. The second implies the first: if the pattern of division of power is unstable, then those in power will be incentivised to protect and expand their power, rather than to govern effectively.

Part of setting up this stable pattern might be to write a lot of rules on a long sheet of paper. I can’t see, though, how you could ever start with the paper and get to the actual division of power.

“Actual division of power” is such a mouthful. The word I wanted to use for this is “constitution”, but I suppose I will have to give in and call it something else. (I had this idea that the original sense of “constitution” meant what I mean, and the idea of a constitution as a higher set of laws was derived from that. But it seems my idea was completely wrong). Let’s just call it the “Structure“.

So how should one design a Structure? You have to start from where you are. If at t=0 one power is effectively unchallenged, then they should just keep it that way. You don’t need a Structure.

Urielo really hits the nail on the head here:

eventually, a constitution always arise out of a multiplayer game, because conflict eventually ends with an agreement – @cyborg_nomade

A non-autocratic Structure is the the result of a peace settlement between potential or actual rivals, and a Constitution represents the terms of that peace settlement.

The aims of the settlement should be that it will last, that those who came into the settlement with power are willing to accept it, and will be incentivised to maintain it into the future and to preserve those things that incentivise the others to maintain it into the future.

The simplest peace settlements consist of a line on a map. What happens on one side is the responsibility of one party, and on the other is the responsiblity of another. The two (or more) sides invest appropriately in either defensive or retaliatory weaponry, to provide incentive to each other to keep to the agreement.

This is not normally what we think of as a Structure within a society, though it is an option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(politics) . If the powers of the participants cannot be easily separated by a line on a map, a more detailed agreement is necessary.

Another of Urielo’s tweets:
pretty much all working societies recognized some sort of power division. the estates of the realm being the European version – @cyborg_nomade

I’ve written before about the vital elements of feudalism as I see them: It resembles somewhat the “line on the map” kind of settlement: each feudal vassal had practical authority over a defined region, subject to certain duties he owed to his Lord. The Lord would spend his time travelling between his vassals, resolving disputes between them, collecting his share of the loot, and checking that they weren’t betraying him.

This worked practically, most of the time. As I wrote before, the crucial fact that necessitated a settlement between the King and his vassals was that he wasn’t physically able to administer the whole kingdom, because of limitations of communication and transport. Whoever he sent to run them, would in fact have considerable autonomy (whether the constitution gave it to them or not), and so the Structure had to accommodate that fact.

I say it worked most of the time, but it didn’t work all the time, or even nearly all the time. Conflict between King and nobles was pretty common.

If we’re talking estates of the realm, of course, then there’s more than nobles. The Medieval English Structure basically treated the church as a sort of noble. Bishops and Abbots had similar rights to Barons, but fewer duties. (That meant it would be a problem if their power increased relative to nobles.) The other group to be recognised with power within the Structure were the small landholders. At a guess, I’d put their claim to power as follows:

Fighting enemies was the responsibility of the King, and in the King’s interest. His vassals were required to supply men and/or funds to him to do this. The actual fighting would be done by Knights and men known to and under the direct control of Knights. It was therefore in the King’s interest that the Knights be incentivised to fight effectively, and would see honour and/or profit in doing so. However, to the Lords the Knights were just farmers and taxpayers; it was not in the Lord’s interest to have his Knights flourishing and strong. Therefore, the King had an interest in defending the status of Knights against their Lords.

That’s kind of a just-so story; I’m open to disagreement on specifics. In any case, this Medieval English Structure obviously depends on an agricultural economy, and military technology that relies on a relatively small number of expensively-equipped, skilled soldiers. It’s not coming back.

The commoners and serfs basically have no power recognised by the Structure. That’s probably an oversimplification, at least after the Black Death when their economic power became more significant (and serfdom faded out). But in any case, the point of the Structure is not some abstract fairness, it’s stability and efficiency.

The Structure was quite flexible and changed significantly over time. Burghers were accepted into it once trade became economically significant enough for their power to need to be preserved. But even there the simple fix was geographic: towns were made Boroughs, lines were drawn around them on the map, and the Burghers were allowed to run the towns, with a limited and transparent set of rights and duties with regard to goings-on outside the borough.

The King, Nobles and Knights form a triangle: that’s popularly considered to be stable, for the reason that if any one of the three starts to get too strong (or weak), the other two can see it and attempt to correct it with superiority. With two or more than three large power centres, it’s too easy for a theoretically weaker coalition to unexpectedly show itself strong enough to reconfigure the Structure. That’s a guideline of Structure Design that one might expect to be durable. One wonders whether Structures that are designed to have many powers (Neocameralism, bitcoin) might coalesce into three. Just a thought.

Now we come to Parliament. I don’t see the medieval English parliament as “part of government” in the sense that the modern UK Parliament is. It wasn’t responsible for law, or for any routine act of government. Its role seems to me to have been the constitutional watchdog, checking on behalf of the Lords and Knights (and later Burghers too) that the King was sticking to the constitution. Running the country was the job of the nobles, within their lines-on-the-map, and of the King, regarding defence. The power of parliament didn’t come from any constitution; it came from the fact that it could reach an agreement, and then go to the country and say “The King is infringing on his subjects’ rights”. (Or, conversely, it could say “Lord Splodgeberry has defied the King and the King is justified in going and kicking his arse”). It makes sense as a transparency mechanism rather than as a power in its own right.

Transparency, even more than Triangles, seems like a durable guideline for Structure Design. You want people with power to be working for good government, not for enhancing their own power, and you need to be able to see that that’s what they’re doing.

Having said that, I don’t think there are many general principles for Structure Design. I’ve spent this piece looking in detail on one historical Structure, to say why it was they way it was and why it worked. I think that’s what you have to do: Structure Design is a boundary value problem. You have to start from where you are.

But then again, Structure Design is a thing. Where two or more powers come together, reaching an agreement is more than just recognising their existing position. It may mean one or both giving up some power that they really hold to cement a durable deal. The establishment of rights of Knights I described above follows that pattern: the King needed it to happen so it was added to the Structure by negotiation. (That may be a stylised version of what really happened, but it could have gone that way).

So I think you can say a bit more than this:
the estates of the realm don’t arise from nowhere. they were supposed 2 formalize the *actual* structure of power that underlied sovereignty – @cyborg_nomade

What you can’t do is just dream up some “constitution” and assume that anyone will follow it. The half-life of a Structure designed that way is generally measured in weeks. Even a constitution that worked somewhere else will fail immediately if the power on the ground doesn’t match the Structure that the constitution is designed to support.

Decolonisation of Africa produced a number of experiments to demonstrate that process.

Once the holders of actual power have been identified, “constitutional design” can take place to create an arrangement by which they are incentivised to participate in an efficient government. However, “constitutional design” in a vacuum is worthless. Democracies with deviations from “one-man-one-vote” have been moderately successful in the past, but I do not think this example is rooted in any realistic assessment of power.

Similarly, various people from time to time (including even myself, long ago) have suggested random jury-type selection of decision-makers. This has attractive efficiency features, but nobody with vested power would have a clear interest in keeping it running fairly, and the scope for corrupting it would be enormous.

The way to think of creating a stable government Structure where there is intractable division of power is midway between diplomats negotiating a peace and lawyers negotiating a contract. Neither of those are trivial or negligible occupations. (At the completely rigorous level, Structure Design is a matter of game theory, but I doubt real-world situations are tractable to mathematics).

Constitutions need to resemble contracts in that they have to cover detailed interactions unambiguously, but they need to resemble peace treaties in that they need to provide for their own enforcement.

The whole Godel amending process is a bit of a red herring. In the words of Taylor Swift, nothing lasts for ever. Circumstances change, and new Structures have to accommodate them. A new Structure can be built out of an old one–such as representatives of Boroughs being included in the House of Commons alongside Knights–if the parties with power agree they are necessary. Making a constitution change is not the hard bit; making the Structure stay the same from one year to the next is the hard bit.

Sometimes a Structure has to go. Gnon has the last word.

Unchecked Power

In my previous post, I explained why Neocameralism is not a division of power in Montesquieu’s sense, but rather a special case by which the benefits of power can be divided without dissolving responsibility.

However, while dividing power is not desirable, there is no Ring of Fnargl, and power is never perfectly concentrated. A real sovereign still has to deal with forces beyond his control, most obviously those beyond his borders; the loyalty of his subjects is always a real issue. Sufficient incompetence can destroy anything.

The reason that division of power is undesirable is that it erodes responsibility. Government is responsible if whoever has the power benefits from exercising it well and is harmed by exercising it badly. If the single absolute sovereign owns all the extractable product of his realm forever into the future, then it is in his interest to make it a successful, functional, realm. His interests may not be perfectly aligned with those of his subjects, but they are not all that far away. It is better to live under a secure sovereign who rules in his own interest than under a chaotic parliament which attempts to rule in yours. This is an analogous argument to the superiority of for-profit services to government-provided services in other spheres.

If power over the corp is divided, each individual with power now has two sets of incentives: to maximise the value of the corp and its product, as for an absolute ruler, but also to maximise their power over and benefit from the corp. Division of power is harmful to the extent that the second set of incentives exist and contradict the first.

The two largest classes of undesirable incentives are to extract value from the corp for oneself, and to increase one’s power over the corp at the expense of one’s rivals. The first is more obvious, and the second, in historical experience, more extensive and more damaging. Conversion can be restricted if the number of participants in power is reasonably limited, as it tends to be obvious. However, if power is distributed flexibly, then it is easy to provide rationalisations for a change in policy that is actually directed at increasing the power of one participant.

The fundamental problem is that power, whether formal or informal, is fungible. As I wrote in 2011:
A realistic chance of power is power in itself. It can be traded, borrowed against, threatened with. A “politician” is one who holds “Virtual Power”, and tries to increase it, just as a fund manager tries to increase the assets he holds.

If making power formal doesn’t help, then what is “formalism”? Formalism is Neocameralism. Formalism’s solution to persons with practical but informal influence over the government is not to formally define and legitimise their influence, it is to buy them out. It is to put a value on their influence, and to have them give up that influence in exchange for dividend-bearing securities.

As described in my previous post, the point of that is to take away their incentive to steer management in one particular direction or another, and to give them instead an incentive to have the management maximise shareholder value.

Clearly, then that is not a perfect solution to all problems of politics. It only works to the extent that a participant’s power, whether formal or tacit, is seen as legitimate. If a participant’s power is informal but legitimate (which is a common situation in the Modern Structure), it should indeed be made formal, but only as a preliminary to removing it.

It follows that formalism does not solve the problem of necessary division of power: the fact that however legitimate power is defined, there are those outside it who have influence over those inside it. It doesn’t solve, in general, the principal–agent problem. (The CDCC is designed to partially solve one particular instance of the principal–agent problem, of the armed forces openly defying rightful instructions; by providing a specific solution it implies that there is no general solution).

What formalism does is to leave the fundamental problem unsolved, and then insist that it is the fundamental unsolved problem, and that as a matter of day-to-day competence it must be limited at all costs. Take a moment to see how far that is from the conventional wisdom, which celebrates and actively encourages all division and distribution of power.

If any slope is slippery, it is the division of power. Division proceeds from division. Complete power is inviolable, small allowances of outside influence can be monitored, limited and reclaimed, but once substantial centres of power become strong enough to defend themselves, the remaining power will be shredded in the inevitable conflict.

The problems of people trying to influence a near-absolute ruler are not a different kind of problem to those we are used to. They are the normal problems; the exact same problems that utterly cripple any kind of competent government of modern states, only much smaller and more manageable.

There is no magic formula which will make good government out of an unviable realm. The possibility of concentrating power sufficiently for stability is the sine qua non of independent government. What is the ideal form of government for Mauritania? What is the ideal form of government for Marsh Farm? In both cases, it is for them to be ruled by outside forces that are strong enough to be secure.

Compromising the integrity of the structure of centralised power is to be avoided. Take for example, the hypothetical case I raised when I discussed the issue before, in Aretae’s day: the Pineapple Computer Co who want the King to appoint a judge under their control, to get them out of a PR problem.

By the logic above, the worst thing the King could do would be to agree to Pineapple’s request. That is giving away power, and there is a danger of not ever getting it back. Telling them to go fuck themselves would be better. Offering to match Queen Tamsin’s duty-free zone would be better.

A formalist answer, if instead of a King there was a Neocameralist CEO, would be to hold merger talks: if the sovcorp buys out Pineapple in a stock-for-stock transaction, then the interests of the sovcorp and the factory are henceforward aligned. I’m not convinced it’s a good idea for a sovcorp to own too many nationalised industries, but if the factory is genuinely essential to the wellbeing of the state, that is a reasonable solution.

(If the King is really a King, but the Pineapple company is privately owned, the same end could perhaps be achieved by having the owner of Pineapple marry the King’s daughter).

Checked Power

The latest from cyborg_nomade at antinomiaimediata is a wide-ranging poking at the cracks of the neoreactionary/Moldbuggian concepts of Sovereignty and Responsible Government.

As I said on twitter, cyborg_nomade is, from my point of view, picking up from where Aretae left off all those years ago, not in that he is the same: as their respective aliases suggest, Aretae rooted his arguments in Classical philosophy, while cyborg_nomade is more Continental. But cyborg_nomade, like Aretae before, is challenging details of neoreactionary theory from the left, and that’s a more productive critique for defenders to concentrate on than the intra-far-right discussion that takes most of our time.

So, “neocameralism and constitutions” is quite a wide discussion, and I’m first going to pick off some low-hanging fruit concerning the role of stockholders in neocameralism.

I’m not going to talk about “conservation of sovereignty”–to me that is an unclear concept, so I’m going to try to be more concrete. I’m going to talk about the “corp”, meaning both joint-stock corporations as we know them today, and sovcorps as envisaged by neocameralism.

Moldbug repeatedly denounced “separation of powers” as a principle. no sovereign can be subject to law . On the other hand, cyborg_nomade points out, is it not true that modelling a neocameralist government on a joint-stock company implies a separation of powers:

The controllers have one job: deciding whether or not Steve is managing responsibly. If not, they need to fire Steve and hire a new Steve.

That quote is from Open Letter VI, and cyborg_nomade quotes more, but it is actually necessary to read the whole thing.

In particular, the paragraph immediately following cyborg_nomade’s selection:

What happens if the controllers disagree on what “responsible” government means? We are back to politics. Factions and interest groups form. Each has a different idea of how Steve should run California. A coalition of a majority can organize and threaten him: do this, do that, or it’s out with Steve and in with Marc. Logrolling allows the coalition to micromanage: more funding for the threatened Mojave alligator mouse! And so on. That classic failure mode, parliamentary government, reappears.

The introduction of stockholders is not a matter of checks for checks’ sake. Nowhere in OL-VI is there a suggestion that dividing power is a good thing in principle. The purpose of stockholders is a very narrow one: to fix the location of responsibility.

The corp exists for the benefit of the stockholders; if it is run well, they benefit, if it is run badly, they lose out, therefore, they should have the power. All of it. Choosing to exercise that power via at-will appointment of a Chief Executive is an implementation detail, but a well-tested one, and, other than for sovcorps, an almost universally accepted one.

Why multiple stockholders rather than one? Because with a single owner, the purpose of the corp becomes unclear: it is whatever that single owner chooses. However, if the corp has a large number of diverse stockholders, their idiosyncratic interests cancel out or become negligible, against their single shared interest in ROI.

Note that this is not a guaranteed state of affairs. A corp with a joint-stock structure can, as described by the quote above, decay into politics. For existing non-sovereign corporations, this is very unusual, but that is because many measures are taken to actively prevent it. In Anglosphere corporate law, it is not considered sufficient that stockholders can replace management by a majority vote of stock. It is in principle illegal for management to work for a goal other than return on stock, even if it has the support of holders of a majority of stock. There are also restrictions on how concentrated stock ownership can be, at least for corps for which stock is publicly traded.

So it turns out that the purpose of a joint-stock structure is not to distribute power across a larger number of humans, but to concentrate power on a single non-human “virtual” decision-maker, the shareholder-value maximiser. To the extent that a joint-stock structure does not do that, it is always considered defective, and frequently illegal.

(The parallel to bitcoin, converting individual miner decisions of transaction validity to a single non-human abstract “blockchain” decider, is obvious).

Compared to the essential feature of responsibility, the preference expressed by Moldbug for joint-stock versus monarchical sovcorp structure is marginal:
A family business is a great idea if your business is a corner store or an auto-body shop. If you have a continent to run, you want professionals.

The next question to answer is: why? Why is it good to have a corp run in the interests of this non-human abstract, “maximisation of shareholder value”?

The answer is that this is a clearly definable, constant goal that is usually consistent with the long-term continued existence of the corp. As Moldbug explains, if you want some other goal, then first maximise shareholder value, then spend the proceeds on whatever goal you want; that is a matter of consumption, not effective management.

As an aside, cyborg_nomade suggests that “customers” constitute another check on the power of management of a corp. I don’t think that is a useful way of looking at things: we are talking about the management of a corporation, or a nation-state, and any such thing, unless it is the whole universe, exists alongside other things beyond its management, and has to interact with them. Good management means good management in connection with customers, suppliers, neighbours, and competitors, and no change to the organisational structure of the thing being managed makes any difference to that fact.

This whole defence of neocameralism leaves some obvious gaps. First, enforcing shareholder voting rights on a sovereign joint-stock company absolutely requires the cryptographic-weapon-lock scheme. Moldbug in OL-VI is explicit about that:
The neocameralist state never existed before the 21st century. It never could have existed. The technology wasn’t there.
It is because I am sceptical of the practicality of that scheme that I tend to advocate for what I call “degenerat formalism“, which is right back to that old family business. Nevertheless, my position is that assuming a working cryptographic decision and command chain, neocameralism is good.

Second, the CDCC provides for shareholder voting rights, but not for the extra minority-shareholder rights that are provided by modern corporate law. If those are actually necessary (and they may well be), then some other mechanism has to enforce them. Note that those rights in part predate the actual corporate law that now enforces them: they were provided in the rules of the company, because it was understood people wouldn’t want to buy into corporations that did not have them. Moldbug’s solution to these problems is Patchwork: Not only are sovcorps structured according to the neocameralist design, but they exist in a competitive marketplace, and the forces of competition apply the remaining necessary constraints on management.

As I said, this is only picking on one part of the argument in “neocameralism and constitutions”, the part that is easiest to deal with because I think it is a clear-cut error. The more interesting part, about constitutions as spontaneous order, or products of selection, remains to be answered.

Going for the Throat

To set the scene, this is what I think normal politics looks like:

There is a kind of dynamic equilibrium of politics under the Modern Structure. The Cathedral moves left at a controlled pace. It drags the political establishment behind it. The parties and the media drag the backward mass of the people behind them.

To elaborate on that, I believe the pace has been controlled. There has always been a niche for someone to be the most radical, and that is the driving force behind the leftward movement, but there are also a whole bunch of sensible people with power to hold on to, who want to keep the system functioning roughly as well as it is, and who want to avoid triggering outright rebellion from the “backward masses”. The mainstream at any given time is a compromise between maintaining the status quo and claiming the status benefits emitted by the leftward spiral.

This dynamic equilibrium has been in place at least since the late 19th Century. I think it’s fair to say it was interrupted, in a small and narrow way, by the Reagan-era reorienting of economic policy. I wrote about that.

When I wrote the top piece about the dynamic equilibrium, in 2013, I thought the same economic-policy readjustment was happening again. I continued:

The last 15 years, under the Bush and Obama administrations, have seen an increase in the rate of expansion of the economic activity of the Federal Government beyond the previous rate. We can think of the old rate of leftward drift as the equilibrium rate, though of course that’s oversimplifying a complex situation.
That departure from the equilibrium rate of advance produced the Tea Party, by damaging the illusion that flyover country could oppose what was happening simply by supporting the Republican side of the political class.

However, the establishment was able to see off the Tea Party. What appears to be on the cards today, with the Trump movement, is a readjustment on a wider, or at least different, front; the question of the status of white culture and in particular of mass immigration.

This was very unexpected–I saw no hint of it in 2013 when the Tea Party was the focus of right-wing dissent. The apparent explanation for it was the lack of compromise on the cultural side from the left in politics and in institutions. The left traditionally can be patient; if it hits resistance it can sit and wait for its dominance over education and culture to wear that resistance away. That has always worked in the past. But for the last three years there has been no compromise: the cultural demands of the leftist status spiral have been driven through regardless of opposition, even on almost purely symbolic questions like transgender bathrooms or Syrian refugees where there was no practical reason not to show the usual patience and achieve the usual steady progress.

This is the question I asked, then, on Twitter in July 2016:

The cause of Trump, as @FreeNortherner said, is that they boiled the frog too quickly. But what is the cause of that loss of restraint?
Candidates are: social media echo chamber, Republican party weakness, purging of right from old institutions.
Or, I suppose, just random shit happens sometimes. But while possible it’s worth considering structural causes.

I will expand on the three suggestions I made:
By the echo chamber I mean the widely discussed theory that left and right have been socially separating from each other, to the degree that they simply don’t see the same world any more. The mainstream left became oblivious to the scale and intensity of opposition to what they were doing, because they literally didn’t know anyone who thought that way, didn’t read what those people were reading or even take them seriously.

The Republican Party ran very (electorally) weak presidential candidates for two elections running; we saw a very similar extended run in Britain of the Conservative Party being weak, divided, and not having politically effective candidates, during the Blair years. If elections aren’t close, the government naturally feels it can get away with more.

The purging of institutions is a kind of echo of what I wrote about in What happened in the Sixties. If what happened in the sixties was that the left had achieved such dominance in civil service, education and media that they could win every battle, in this decade the dominance reached the stage where they could not only defeat any opposition in those arenas, but they could punish any open dissent to their position. Before the Sixties you could take the right-wing line on a matter, and you might win or might lose. From the Sixties, you would lose. From this decade, you would lose and be fired.

I put forward those three hypotheses, for further evaluation and testing. I still think they’re pretty good. The point is that something must have changed. When I referred back to the question yesterday, there were a lot of suggestions on Twitter along the lines “Leftists are bad”. Well, they are, but that doesn’t explain why after a hundred years of deliberately not triggering a powerful right-wing backlash, they suddenly did it now.

However, yesterday I came across the Slate article by John Dickerson. “Go for the Throat!“
Note the article is from January 2013; the occasion being Obama’s second Inaugural Address. So it was published before my October 2013 “Shutdown” piece where I saw the right-wing reaction to the establishment being on the narrow size-of-government issue.

In the article, John Dickerson simply proposes what has since happened as an electoral strategy. By refusing to compromise in any way with right-wing opposition, Obama could force Republican politicians to choose between either accepting utter defeat, and therefore losing all respect with conservatives, or else turning against their own defeated moderates, and allowing themselves to be painted as intransigent extremists. Some would go each way, and the result would be a split and damaged Republican party.

I dropped a few quotes on Twitter, but there’s no sense reading all this and not reading that article. It’s ridiculous to read that article and then ask, “Why did Donald Trump happen?” The whole point of the strategy Dickerson describes is to make something like Trump happen.

There are, however two questions to ask. The first is, “didn’t you consider that in triggering the production of ‘overreaction and charismatic dissenters’ from the GOP, you might get something powerful enough to win, or at least to reshape the political scene to your disadvantage?” The second is “Why is this a good idea in 2013, and not in, say, 1997? What is different?”

I’m interested in any answers to those questions, but first of all I’m interested in John Dickerson‘s answers. I’ve asked him on Twitter, but as yet not received a reply (to be fair, it’s early Monday morning in the US).

Neoreaction and Twitter

The ideas that became neoreaction were blogged, but neoreaction as a conscious intellectual movement started on twitter.

I’m not at all sure it could have come about in the same way without twitter. My aim was to speak to the group of people who read and commented on Unqualified Reservations, who were secular, libertarian or ex-libertarian types. Aretae, Nydwracu, Foseti, Devin, etc. But what gathered round the neoreactionary label were a number of young dissident rightists who were without a movement [1]. These young men even a decade earlier would have been ordinary Christian conservatives, but, alienated from mainstream thought by the progressive overreach which characterises the Obama era, they grabbed onto the Moldbuggian diagnosis of the modern state in spite of the fundamental difference in outlook [2].

There is still doubt on both sides as to whether this collision of philosophies, which produced what we now call “NRx”, constitutes a valuable synthesis or a distraction. But for better or worse it was a product of twitter, which by its unique features causes blurring between distinct but proximate communities. The enforced brevity makes it practical to follow hundreds of people, and the way responses work make conversations public. (In contrast, if I share a remark on facebook, and you comment on it, the originator of the remark doesn’t see your comment). The one-way nature of following means you don’t need to ask for permission to connect to a social group. The encouragement of multiple pseudonymous accounts made it a first choice for dissidents. The fact that it worked by linking rather than hosting content meant it meshed with the pre-existing blog networks of libertarians and Moldbug’s readers.

That is now history; over the last year or two many active neoreactionaries have left twitter. Their departure is in part a way of making the point that neoreaction is not and does not intend to be a mass movement, in part a way of excluding the less intelligent of the alt-right, and moving on from the same old repeated arguments. However, I did not follow. Though neoreaction cannot measure its achievement in terms of numbers of contributors or readers, it needs to be a live movement, and that means it needs to expose its ideas to outsiders and be exposed to the ideas of outsiders. It is tempting to run away from troublemakers and communicate with a closed group, but I have seen such closed groups shrivel and die. I do not aspire to a mass audience, but I want a growing audience.

Also, to my mind, neoreaction is not primarily a community or an embryonic organisation, it is a set of ideas–incomplete, still under construction, but capable of standing by themselves. The long-term goal is not completely clear, but one plausible path is gradually spreading those ideas among the influential. I am greatly encouraged by the rate at which this is currently happening: a few people like Ed West and Sam Bowman are, without adopting the NRx identity, absorbing some of the ideas and leaking them into the mainstream. Moldbuggian concepts like the Cathedral, and recent NRx concepts like virtue signalling are becoming part of the general vocabulary. This spread is happening largely via twitter.

I am not opposed in principle to raising private channels of communication in parallel to public, but in practice I have found it difficult to be active on both. There is also one more beneficial attribute of twitter which is its disguise: I can access twitter from an office network and all the network sees is SSL traffic between me and twitter.com–there is no indication of what I am communicating or with whom. In contrast, connections to private sites are potentially more embarrassing to explain.

The context of this examination of the importance of twitter, is obviously, the fear of losing it. There is a three-pronged threat: first, the deliberate political attempt to exclude right-wing activity from twitter; second, the evolution of twitter, driven by profitability, in a direction which makes it a more effective disseminator of advertising and a less effective enabler of overlapping communities, and thirdly, the fact that the business itself is in difficulties and might not survive in its present form.

I have previously discussed alternatives to twitter, but they are not yet useful, because they don’t have a user base. The value of twitter I have outlined above all relies on having a wide base of users; neoreactionaries can migrate to one of several platforms, but once moved we will be isolated from the mainstream journalists, the other dissident rightist groups, that twitter currently connects us to.

On the other hand, twitter is, from a technical point of view, easily replicable. Facebook is a leader in technology; its data centre technology is cutting-edge, it faces enormous demands in streaming and storage capability, and its automated management of the user experience is driven by immensely sophisticated software. In contrast, twitter, particularly in its 2011 form, is a much more straightforward technology. The original rails app was supplemented with a scala-based event stream, and obviously anything operating at that scale constitutes a technical achievement of a kind, but twitter is, fundamentally, the almost mythical thing that people imagine start-up successes to be but which they almost never are, a good idea. The explanation for its exceptional status is that its good idea, microblogging, doesn’t really sound like a good idea, even a decade later. That, of course, is the big problem for twitter as a business: the company and its assets contribute relatively little to the value of the service, and it is stuck in a cycle of adding sophisticated profit-creating new features that its existing user base doesn’t have any use for.

So technically replicating retro-twitter is very feasible, but without the user base it doesn’t get anyone anywhere. There is room in the market for a retro-twitter, because it needn’t have high costs: the twitter company is trapped by its valuation as a facebook-challenger; a rival could be run on a small budget like wikipedia. It is plausible that the Mozilla Foundation [3] or DuckDuckGo could roll out a twitter-clone, maybe even with federated features such as those of GnuSocial.

The missing step is getting the user base. Ironically, the situation facing NRx on twitter resembles the situation facing NRx as a concept: things have to get worse before they can get better. Just as we can’t fight the progressive mainstream for power, but must “become worthy” to step in once it fails, we cannot fight twitter for audience, but must wait for it to fail and take our place in what replaces it. The way things are going, we may not have to wait too long.

Notes

1. Nydwracu is as young or younger than the newcomers, but he’s a prodigy, and under suspicion of being a genius.

2. There was conversation between Moldbug and his followers and Christian reactionaries–people like Bruce Charlton and Lawrence Auster–before twitter NRx, but they were still consciously separate from each other.

3. The Mozilla Foundation is identified as an enemy over the Eich affair, but it does have strong princpled ideas about freeing internet users from monopoly businesses, so I don’t rule it out.