Sublime

If Reddit and 4chan are the juveniles, Taki’s Mag is the adult in the room.

The term Alt-Right was not yet a thing, certainly not like it would become within a few short years. The biggest and most innovative name by far in this internet scene was Mencius Moldbug, the pseudonym of programmer Curtis Yarvin. Moldbug’s blog was called “Unqualified Reservations,” and it was as remarkable for its radical ideology as for Yarvin’

While we often think of terms such as “big data” and “algorithms” as being benign, neutral, or objective, they are anything but. The people who make these decisions hold all types of values, many of which openly promote racism, sexism, and false notions of meritocracy, which is well documented in studies of Silicon Valley and other tech corridors.

Then by dismissing views as “outdated” and “pseudoscientific,” the left hopes to give the impression that there is nothing more to say, that these views are absurd and downright evil—and that this is something “everyone” agrees on.

It was designed to see what you could do to data to make it rise and fall at faster and faster rates in ways that resembled the decline in collective attention

But they have nonetheless grown up with an acute consciousness of having an externalized double—a digital double, an idealized identity that is partitioned from their “real” selves and that serves as a role they must perform for the benefit of others if they are to succeed. At the same time, they must project the unwanted and dangerous parts of the

The figure of the feminist killjoy teaches us how the minimization of harm and the inflation of power often work together.

Conspiracy influencers perform what I have come to think of as a doppelganger of investigative journalism, imitating many of its stylistic conventions while hopping over its accuracy guardrails.