hopefully this is alright with @dgerard@awful.systems, and I apologize for the clumsy format since we can’t pull posts directly until we’re federated (and even then lemmy doesn’t interact the best with masto posts), but absolutely everyone who hasn’t seen Scott’s emails yet (or like me somehow forgot how fucking bad they were) needs to, including yud playing interference so the rats don’t realize what Scott is
I looked into this one a while back—I’m pretty sure it’s the explanation Scott launders in “Whither Tartaria?”. Moldbug (2007):
And what has entirely disappeared, as the quotes above should make quite clear, is any sense of a mutually critical aristocratic elite…
There is not even a concept of what it would mean to “succeed” outside this system. There is simply no independent pool of taste.
Alexander (2021):
Best-case scenario, you want a field that talks to itself enough that you get status for impressing other experts with your expertise, not for impressing the public with demagoguery.
But if you talk to yourself too much, you risk becoming completely self-referential, falling into loops of weird internal status-signaling.
Honestly, this kind of involution is already thoroughly discussed within a lot of creative fields (which Alexander admits he hasn’t read, so this is likely still downstream of Moldbug). It’s just that when a poet says something like this, they usually aren’t attributing it to a gigantic 75-year-old New Deal octopus. (Alexander himself leaves it to his commenters to blame socialism.)
Don’t forget the:
- Vile dose of racist ranting.
- Simultanously complaining about the elite, but then saying it’s only because it’s been watered down by the plebs.
- Vile understanding of “poetry” as status marker.
- Not going back further in time than 19th century, and extremely suspiciously marking the “height” of peotry between 1920a to mid-1960s, not at all coinciding with the civil rights act.
Thank you for reminding me how vile Moldbug is ? ^^
