Parallax Optics and Apostate Gallery (part 1)

A voice from beyond the cyberveil

Parallax Optics runs the online art space Apostate Gallery. He’s one of the smartest guys I’ve ever spoken to and has a lot to say about everything from spree-shooters-as-artists (see my Darryl Cooper interview and “Aesthetics of Violence” piece), Neoreaction, the state of art in the digital age, and the online right. This is part 1, part 2 coming soon. I guarantee you’ve never read anything like this.

Greetings Parallax. I am very happy and privileged to be speaking to you after your untimely departure from twitter. In fact, you can even say I feel “special.” Do you think I’m special?

Well, we’d been discussing the possibility of doing an interview about Apostate Gallery for a while before I got banned from Twitter. So the impetus behind the interview and the reason that I happen to be speaking to you now predates my unceremonious departure / ban.

Indeed, we’d have spoken much sooner but ‘reality’ inevitably supervened and destroyed my capability to align chi with Kairos. In fact, it does so with such monotonic malevolence that, in my more paranoid moments, I can sense the demonic / energetic parameters of the simulation encroaching and circumscribing my capacity to act.

But I digress…

I’m not going to fall into the inelegant trap you’ve constructed of calling you ‘special’ (no-homo), but I do feel that those of us in the ‘sphere’ who have a greater awareness / appreciation of modernism / postmodernism, not only as dialectically entangled historical epochs but also as conceptual paradigms / ideo-scaffolds for certain modalities of thought — including incorporating a certain modern / postmodern sensibility into our own thinking / cultural secretions — are of a somewhat different (and superior) character to the bland / anachronistic ‘trads’ and conservatards who also populate our corner of the Internet / Twitter.

The yearning for a retvrn to a ‘pure’ / naive / phantasmagoric pseudo-past of one’s own inchoate invention / projection — which, ironically, is itself indicative of a latent / unreflexive postmodern sensibility, analogous to the latent neo-religious impulse which animates progressivism / Wokeism — is an anathema to me.

I’m interested in fragmentation, splicing and hybridisation, not cosplay LARPing as an Xtian to conceal / COPE with the fact that you’re terminally INCEL: “Man up and marry the SLUTS!” Obviously, it’s superior to the trans-COPE of “become the girlfriend” but only by degree. Fundamentally, it’s trans-temporal cuckoldry because linear time does’t real.

[Aside: the future is schizophrenic. To navigate it we must became schizophrenics. High-functioning sociopathic-schizoids, inter-spliced with agents of autismo-power. I’m not there yet, but I’m working on it — are you?]

So, the reason I’d been interested in speaking to you in the first place was because I sensed that you, like some other Land-influenced accounts, understand that fundamentally — at an essential / deterministic level — the only way out is through.

This only really makes sense in relation to Land’s post-Kantian, meta-materialist critique of the structure of time — templexity — and the anti-anthropomorphic / post-carbon teleoplexic thing which emerges out of it. I’ll resist the urge to (badly) recapitulate Land’s core thesis of techonomic — aka accelerationist — time here. Instead, I’ll isolate his identification of NRx degenerative-ratchet-dynamics and the auto-propagation of lock-in effects via hyper-networks and ideological / technological selection-mechanics / effects, which cyberneticly flow / cut-flow through them — endlessly territorialising, deteritorialising and reteritorialising in ever-fluctuating loops of twisted-time, as a neo-physical medium in the endocrine system of the Real.

Land equates any sense of ‘progress’ under progressivism with something that is strictly worsening. Specifically, the progressive worsening of a disease, and therefore vehemently rejects progressivism’s ‘moral’ claims to legitimacy via ‘ethical’ endorsement, which are routinely / systemically made / laundered through institutions controlled by progressives.

Land drives the point home here:

The ‘neo-‘ of neoreaction introduces a distinctive idea, or abstract topic: that of a degenerative ratchet.

The impulse to back out of something is already reactionary, but it is the combination of a critique of progress with a recognition that simple reversal is impossible that initiates neoreaction. In this respect, neoreaction is a specific discovery of the arrow of time, within the field of political philosophy. It learns, and then teaches, that the way to get out cannot be the way we got in.

Wherever progressivism takes hold, a degenerative ratchet is set to work. It is unthinkable that any society could back out of the expansive franchise, the welfare state, macroeconomic policy-making, massively-extended regulatory bureaucracy, coercive-egalitarian secular religion, or entrenched globalist intervention. Each of these (inter-related) things are essentially irreversible. They give modern history a gradient. Given any two historical ‘snap-shots’, one can tell immediately which is earlier and which later, by simply observing the extent to which any of these social factors have progressed. Leviathan does not shrink.

Within the theory of complex systems, certain phase transitions exhibit comparable properties. Network effects can lock-in changes, which are then irreversible. The adoption and consolidation of the Qwerty keyboard exemplifies this pattern. Technological businesses commonly make lock-in central to their strategies, and if they succeed, they cannot then die in the same way they matured. [The Idea of Neoreaction, emphasis mine]

Under progressivism, the State is a badly / perversely run corporation, which seeks an ideological / economic choke-hold to perpetuate its current state-of/as-being. It deploys mass immigration as bio-weapon against its own people. Meanwhile, the ‘liberation’ / enfranchisement of women acts like sulphuric acid on a motor engine destroying surviving enclaves of patriarchal authority / competence, while installing a defect / defect sexual-reproduction / marriage equilibrium, making precisely the kind of irrevocable bargains that enable social building at scale impossible. Above all, there is an endless drive to ‘equality’ (or equity) as a pretext for State-sanctioned action / levelling, which follows a telos of civilisational homogenisation via the advancement of its control matrix — which increasingly incorporates ‘post-prosperity’ and the systematised dispossession / relocation of resources, across not only fiscal / ‘physical’ vectors / dimensions but also hyper-interconnected ideologically controlled ones: You will own nothing and you will be happy.

As Land demonstrates, network effects lock-in changes, which accelerate the worsening of the progressive disease, while making it impossible to back-out of the system from within the system. Instead, to Exit the system, we need to access the Outside and let the Outside in.

You were suspended for quote tweeting known homosexual James Lindsay. You and i both know he’s incredibly “based” so there must have been some kind of misunderstanding. What was the tweet? Many want to know. But also, there are a number of facelord vultures on twitter like him, Lehnman, Scott Adams, and many others, who grift off both the MAGA movement/ trump supporters and right wing anons in an attempt to gain credibility and ideas. Considering this, do you see anons as a vanguard? Or as sort of ghettoized intellectual and cultural outcasts, doomed to remain in the shadows and have our ideas and authenticity watered-down by clout chasers and political emissaries?

The specifics of my ban aren’t terribly interesting, even to me. Suffice to say that anything which relates, even tangentially, to James ‘Reddit-tier’ Lindsay is lame and gay. What is perhaps more interesting was the statement of intent the ‘known homosexual’ made about his desire to “come after far right anons” just before my ban.

It’s interesting because it relates to the complex ideo-ecology / inter-relationship of anons and facefags, including the parasitic dependancy for ideas / takes many clout chasing facefag vultures have on the anonsphere, which you alluded to above. But it cuts both ways, because under current Regime enforced communication conditions anons also seek to propagate + launder their ideas / critique through facefags — in order to reach a much wider audience and influence certain elements of a more prestigious one — and to contribute, albeit vicariously, to that strata of the discourse.

For practical purposes, it effectively becomes an empirical question, aka a posteriori > a priori, based on shared local-knowledge circulating the anonsphere concerning who’s intentions are ‘good’ — who acts as a gateway to crimethink and leads people to question consensus reality — and who’s intentions are ‘bad’ — who acts as a gatekeeper to crimethink and leads people to accept consensus reality — rather than a strictly theoretical question, concerning the virtues / strategic benefits of each strategy in isolation, since both are always simultaneously in play.

[Aside: of course, it’s further complicated by questions of intentionality vs effect, as well as the fact that someone as awful as (((Ben Shapiro))) can nevertheless — within a consequentialist framework — act as a gateway for one person while simultaneously acting as a gatekeeper to another. Or how his nemesis, Nick ‘Catboy’ Fuentes, who signals crimethink much further to the populist / nationalist Right, might be a Fed / compromised asset, tasked with dragging young people towards precisely the political destination / self-determination where they are destined to be rendered ‘legible’ to the System / made ineffective. Their dissident energy ‘captured’ and used by the Regime to demand an ever greater progressive mandate to implement Woke policy — in the process, pwning them in the most pathetic way possible.]

BAP is obviously a powerful and convincing advocate / champion of online anonymity, having gone so far as to say that nothing written by facefags will matter in the future because it’s either riddled with dishonesty or at least tainted by it. The bug-life which exists on that layer of politico-culture-space is dominated by an axis revolving around basic self-preservation and the pursuit of naked self-interest. Meanwhile others, who I won’t name out of respect for their public-facing anonymity, have chosen to transition to faceposting with the aim of contributing to / shifting the discourse in a less — or perhaps more — clandestine / Straussian fashion. In the process, the ones who are more visibly successful reap some of the benefits associated with that world, which inevitably further fuels the hermeneutics of suspicion in the anonosphere, in particular when they ‘partner’ with the WEF or something…

[Aside: but even partnering with the WEF makes sense in the context of drip feeding ideas / counter-narratives to the elites. So the situation on the cyber-ground is complex.]

I’m a fan of decentralisation, of multiple strategies being pursued / trialed simultaneously, selected for / against by different / independent groups and individuals — that’s how we got Bitcoin / crypto, Salo / MPC forums, Unqualified Reservations and Urbit. Creation is a series of interacting heterogeneous processes, not a single homogenous one. Regardless, we — whatever ‘we’ are — don’t control any of the institutions / administrative processes that could actually bestow on us some of the benefits of centralisation / greater ideological orthodoxy.

This means that greater centralisation / centralised dissident coordination brings with it all of the downsides — such as being much easier to target for destruction / subversion because it lacks the tensile strength of decentralised networks / cells — and none of the upsides, like being able to pay your own people to think / organise via control of funding / institutions or instil a sense of discipline necessary to keep people on message.

Retvrning to your question, I absolutely see anons as a vanguard — both /pol/ itically in terms of propagating crimethink and aesthetically / creatively as a scene / sphere. At the apex of anon culture are some incredibly creative individuals / neo-artists such as BAP, Hakan and Menaquinone4. But the real aesthetic power / significance of the sphere is its cumulative memetic energy, which is derived from the anon-SWARM of multipolar-schizoid-resistance to the globohomo Regime / Leviathan — the monolithic tentacular (((THING))) / progressive egregore or hive-mind — which demands total ideological cordyception / NPC-zombification: first of its adherents and second of its enemies, which it enforces it at every available level of political / cultural praxis.

Whatever the sphere is, (un)wisely or not, it’s a two-fingered Pepe salute to the (((Thing))) / progressive egregore and the ideological economy of systemic deceit / mendacity it’s pumping into the Regime sanctioned MSMemetic water supply. Increasingly, in typical communist fashion, in order to live, you need to lie about what’s in front of your own eyes. As Robin Hanson shows us, lying imposes a greater cognitive burden / takes more mental bandwidth than telling the truth. First, because you are tracking two things, lies as well as ‘the truth’ and the non-linear interplay between them which becomes increasingly complex at SCALE. And second, because if you know that you’re lying, not only do you need to be constantly on guard / vigilant about being caught out, you also exhibit more tells and are therefore much easier to catch. It’s significantly easier and more socially rewarding to jettison the ‘truth’ and just go with the flow + mindlessly repeat, endorse and enforce Regime mandated positions / mantras:

“Black lives matter” / “men are women” / “silence is violence” / “love is love” / “poopdick tastes good” / “wear the mask” / “take the jab” / “live in the pod” / “eat the bugs” — and a personal favourite — “believe women” [lol] etc…

But the anonosphere is also a ghetto — how could it not be? It’s a space systematically ghettoised by hegemonic power, which has been forced to evolve it’s own counter-hegemonic, small-pond status system. But that’s what makes it dangerous / toxic to the Regime. It’s evolved a status system based on ugly-truth telling and weaponised ridicule of the Regime’s pretty-lies. And there’s nothing more dangerous to an authority predicated on pretty-lies than ugly-truths turbo-charged with iconoclastic, aesthetic irreverence.

That’s why the sphere’s most energetic and important aesthetic advancements are currently Neo-Dada / surreal / avant-punk / anti-hegemonic interventions, not retrograde ‘trad’-realist ‘revivalist’ visions / fantasies of a retvrn to some ossified aesthetic form / epoch, devoid of humour or pugilistic engagement with the cyber/ cypher-spirit of the now. It won’t always be that way — it won’t be that way if ‘we’ ‘win’ — but that’s how it is right now. And this raw-fact can’t be effectively bypassed, only confronted and engaged with, in order to iconoclastically prepare the aesthetic ground / territory under contestation for whatever comes next.

Yarvin is wrong to say that fashion simply flows from the elites downwards, even if that’s the dominant mode of ideo-transmission / trendsetting and uptake. This is linear Newtonian logic in a post-Einsteinian universe swarming with feedback governed by deterministic chaos. Nothing is linear and all relations — including / especially memetic relations — are cybernetic. Every elite / ideological management system presupposes / invents its own counter-elite / management system, which either arrises as a faction within itself that it uses to defect on itself, or which invades it from the Outside, or which it auto-collapses into by hitting an escape-valve triggered by unsustainable complexity / diminishing returns reaching system critical level.

So the ghetto can invade the palace — but only if ghetto-vanguard mimetics possess the requisite energy to swim upstream and infect the palace — and only if the Gods of Cybernetics favour it.

The anonosphere has a wide range of subgroups that are loosely affiliated on certain ideological grounds but also far apart from each other on some issues that are seen as irreconcilable, to the point where many reject the idea that it's a “movement.” Do you see “right wing twitter” as a movement, or simply individuals who are batted about by the tides of what is trending?

I conceptualise the anonosphere as precisely that — a sphere — not a movement. In fact, it’s best conceptualised as a ‘sphere in motion’ something which has movement but which is not a movement per se. It’s a cyber-space-network of vanguard pol/cultural theory, a constellation of hyper-condensed mimetic signifiers, which seeps / bleeds into the wider political and cultural discourse.

Under post-postmodernism / information capitalism, which is routed through NWO / GAE managerial regulatory-corporate-communism, individuals, groups and ‘movements’ are all terminally battered about by what’s trending, both by waves generated in wider politico-cultural EVENT-space, and from happenings / trends within their own memetic milieu.

Anons on Twitter are part of the same ‘attention economy’ as everyone else — it’s just that instead of supporting The Current Thing™ they seek to oppose it. But opposition to the current thing doesn’t mean they are any less susceptible to clout chasing via engagement with current events — feeling the need to ‘have a take’ — which translates into shifting their cognitive attention / the focus of their account according to the weather of the MSM news cycle.

This can get boring, but it isn’t necessarily / automatically a bad thing. Twitter isn’t the place for ‘serious’ long-form engagement (that’s Substack, nigga). Instead, it provides a space for an emergent counter narrative to whatever script / agenda is being pushed by the MSM in the current moment, which is inevitably reinforced by ‘expert’ evidence / opinion + locked in by (((fact))) checkers. Apart from the anon trolls, everyone talking is on the Regime’s payroll. The more prestigious the voice / institution, the more critical you should be regarding their claims and the more sceptical / cynical you should be about their motives. When you really understand this, the effect is actually quite sinister / chilling.

Now let’s discuss the apparent ‘irreconcilability’ of thought-currents / political tendencies on the Right. Back in the heyday of Xenosystems, Spandrell proposed a trichotomous division of NRx ideological space, which became know as the Spandrellian Trichotomy. The tripartite division related to the different kinds of people active within NRx and which dominant belief or concern / proclivity constituted the ideological foundations of their preferred successor regime.

The 3 overarching groups / ‘tribes’ Spandrell identified were: God worshiping / fearing Theonomists (religion as tribe), HBD / race centric Ethno-Nationalists (race as tribe), and social-Darwinian / market-capitalist Techno-Commercialists (too synched up with atomisation to be a tribe). Neoreaction emerged at the centre of a Venn Diagram of the synthesised / hybrid-concerns / beliefs of these 3 groups or tribes.

However, a substantive enduring / synthesis remained illusive. Overtime, each NRx subgroup defected / returned to the mean of its dominant beliefs / core tribal interests. Individuals resorted to using identity politics in the pursuit of individual status via tribal / group status dynamics, working within their tribe to shift ‘core’ NRx tenets in its preferred direction rather than pursuing greater ideo-integration / synthesis. We are currently seeing the same kind of phenomena of ideological identity / status politics playing out in the Twitter anonosphere. This is happening in the absence of a centralised authority to control / corral it + with insufficient financial incentives to coordinate things fiscally instead.

On one hand, the infighting is frustrating because it’s immature and transparently more about in-group / out-group status dynamics than ‘irreconcilable’ differences — even though these do exist — which is obviously self-indulgent / childish when you’re this far from power and your enemies want you dispossessed, servile or dead. On the other hand, our weaponry is primarily memetic so ‘the truth’ is much more valuable territory than a ‘big tent’ of warm, agreeable bodies. If arguing with each other on Twitter is really the only methodology available to inch us closer to the truth, then so be it. But on a practical level, it does come at the cost of even basic group coordination / cohesion.

One subgroup of the anonosphere is the idea of an “art right,” a term I’ve seen Yarvin use. I’ve also seen this term rejected. What do you think of the term? It’s quite clear that fresh and authentic ideas require creativity, and a creative milieu will of course spawn art and artistic creations. The Passage Prize was one instance of the “Art Right” being promoted from within, and I think things like this are very good, in fact indispensable. Would you agree?

I loath the term the ‘Art Right’ because it’s appallingly unaesthetic. Worse, it registers as an onomatopoeic throwback to the Alt-right, which, critically, was not only defeated as a ‘movement’ but has been terminally timestamped with the date of its death at Charlottesville. [Aside: that’s not to imply that the Alt-right — such as it even existed as anything more than MSM amplified phantom opposition — had any chance of actually succeeding given how effortlessly it was killed.]

I have a lot of respect for L0mez and the judges of the Passage Prize, even Gio. But coming from the art world, I’m a little bit allergic to open submission salons as a purported vector of creativity. I’ve been to too many bad salon exhibitions over the years, which are typically beset with quality / consistency issues and problems with overarching curatorial framing — if there is any — not synchronising / matching up with the works actually on display. This has nothing to do with the Passage Prize, or with focusing on art / creative work coming “out of the Right”, since the same curatorial issues / ratio of quality-to-swill applies in general to open salon exhibitions — it’s basically an Iron Law.

However, I understand the Passage Prize did receive a significant number of interesting / fully realised submissions across all categories. I know Zero gave over a month of his time to reading and considering every single fiction entry, which is testament to how seriously he took his role and his respect for the project. And regardless, viewed as a generative / networking event, my sense from the outside is that the Passage Prize was a success — vastly more successful than Apostate Gallery has been on a networking / event front. But I’m still wary of employing that kind of model for Apostate, which is condemned to walk a more lonely, esoteric / quixotic path into the Regime’s heretical gas chambers…

In future iterations, I think the Passage Prize could rethink / expand out of the dissident-year-book mode of display it opted for this time around — no doubt for good economic / curatorial reasons. A problem with this format, in my opinion, is that it ossifies something which is dynamic — in part because of the conceptual effect of anthologising it but also because of the inevitable production time-lag. It will also arguably need to avoid — or embrace?! — becoming something like the dissident BAFTA’s, which could be interesting, but I think something like that was already tried explicitly a few years ago by KWA / Kantbot + failed to take root.

But there’s a vast amount of potential in curating and exhibiting dissident art / content. The challenge for anyone who seeks to do so is to approach it in a way that amplifies its power / potency — as opposed to diminishing its power / potency — and never to deliberately neuter / sanitise it for your own mercantile ends or to gain ‘prestige’ from the mainstream.

I’ll give you an example…

Apostate Gallery has recently (re)published Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World, an autobiography-cum-manifesto, which has been heralded as the Incel Mein Kampf. Whatever you think of Elliot Rodger — cringe-nerd crybaby or based-misogynist slayer — MTW provides the definitive INCEL account of how internalised sexual rejection metastasises into the autismo-drive / desire for transcendental retribution.

Apostate’s MTW edition is limited to 22 copies, one for each year Elliot endured being “a kiss-less virgin rotting in loneliness”. The act of republishing MTW reframes / reimagines Elliot Rodger as an artist — an interdisciplinary artist, whose autobiographical multimedia practice spanned text, video and audience participatory performance — incorporating every aspect into a unified whole / crypto-proposition of his terminally frustrated life as an artwork. Seen via these aesthetic optics, The Day of Retribution was the predestined culmination / final resolution of a ‘lifework’ in which Elliot Rodger used Hyperstition to MKUltra himself into performative murder-suicide.

The fact that The Day of Retribution was not only perpetrated by a unique autismo-persona — possessed of an ‘uncanny valley’ charm — but enshrined / contextualised by a unique aesthetic vision and ‘ethical’ theory, gave it a particular resonance — a unique frequency among spree-killers, which operates as its aesthetic signal.

So on one level, Apostate is simply republishing MTW. But on another level, the act of republishing / reframing Elliot Rodger’s pean to violent retribution is a conceptual artwork in its own right, designed to amplify the content and transpose it into the contemplative aesthetic space of contemporary art — where it can continue to resonate via a relational engagement with the symbolic order of the domain of the CAW.

As Apostate Gallery moves beyond the initial proof-of-concept stage, its exhibition programme will become increasingly ambitious — less focused on curating / aestheticising existing ‘artworks’ and more focused on commissioning / contributing to the production of new ones, which I’m looking forward to with a deep sense of malevolent anticipation.

Apostate Gallery is in a position to be an important focal point for the Art right. Its mission statement claims it is an attempt to subvert, or at least offer an alternative to, the ideological conformity and stagnation of today's art world. It seems to me to be both a collection of existing creations from around the web as well as a forum for new work, commentary, and a preservation of internet memes. Do I have that about right?

The original intention of Parallax Optics blog had been to persuade open minded artists / creative people, such as myself, to abandon the Neoreligion of the contemporary art world (CAW) — call it progressivism / Universalism / Wokeism or whatever — and accept the Copernican bargain / pact of heretical truth + pursuant dissidence against the Regime — in order to reject the (((Thing))) which utterly ideologically pwnes you.

The infernal proposition / creative gambit is that, as an artist, in order to speak the truth you must first accept the gnosis that you inhabit a world constructed out of a tapestry of lies. Therefore, in order to escape the thought-reservation / concept-prison, you must first open your soul to apostasy and embrace the creative act of becoming a heresiarch.

In my opinion, compared to what it's ultimately capable of, Apostate Gallery is currently running at 2% of its potential. And that 2% has primarily been about establishing proof-of-concept — which isn’t nothing but it certainly isn’t enough to feel anything other than a sense of work to be done. I regard Apostate Gallery as an aesthetic particle accelerator capable of accelerating aesthetic particles out of the anonsphere and colliding them with the orthodox / hegemonic art ecology of the CAW. But this isn’t something to be undertaken lightly. The only other gallery which tried anything similar, LD50, self-immolated in the process — burning up on contact with the forces of the Regime.

Archiving our knowledge / culture is an extremely important and urgent task. Not only do we exist under the omnipresent threat of an Orwellian Regime using Woke-corps to electronically erase us and delete our knowledge reservoirs / digital cultural history — which is the current protocol for eradicating crimethink / controlling information flow / access in an oligarchic-pseudo-democracy — but the Internet, our domain and creative zone, is undergoing / suffering from data-rot metastasising on a horrific scale. What once appeared solid has melted into air…

But I’d hate Apostate Gallery to become merely an archive for extant Internet memes — that’s never been the intention. Somewhere like Chadnet already performs an archival function infinitely better than Apostate ever could / would want to. Apostate’s decision to foreground archival artworks during its initial exhibition program was in part an expediency to ensure aesthetic quality. It was also a way to stake a curatorial claim on the memetic territory via acts of selection, conceptual framing and exhibition. These ‘artworks’ were already important / inscribed with significance — things which had played on my mind for several years — sometimes for obvious reasons sometimes for inscrutable ones. They were the kinds of artworks I wanted to associate Apostate Gallery with and use to encourage viewers to think about what constitutes ‘art’ and what art coming ‘out of the Right’ — via an unflinching engagement with the Real — could be, once the scales of progressivism had been lifted from their eyes.

I’m disgusted by much of what passes for ‘art’ in the CAW but I’m under no illusion about how much further the sphere has to go to challenge its aesthetic / creative hegemony. Creative energy on the Right remains nascent / inchoate and although some incredible work has already taken place our greatest artists / artworks are yet to come. Apostate Gallery exists to herald them.

The first thing that drew me to Apostate was the Xenosystems writings by Nick Land. As far as I know, this is the only place on the web where these writings are collected and in my humble opinion, they are his best writing. What significance does Nick Land hold for you personally and for a project like the Apostate Gallery?

Xenosystems, another casualty of cyber-attacks / metastasising data-rot, was an important place / hub for me since its inception in 2013. I followed Nick Land over from his old Urban Future blog, which was bizarrely hosted / sequestered on a Shanghai lifestyle magazine called That’s Mag. There, Land would write incredible / strange, incongruous essays, asking questions like “is genocide that bad, really?”, which got weirdly juxtaposed alongside recipes for Moon Cookies and other expat lifestyle ephemera. But there were only about 3 regular commentators, so when Xenosystems launched and incorporated a functional comments section it was a real game changer. Overnight, the user dynamic went from transmitter > receiver to something much more collaborative / combative transforming Xenosystems into a key node in what became Neoreaction.

In my opinion, Land is one of the most original / innovative, far sighted and nihilistically cold + anti-human philosophers of our time or any other, which should be sufficient to merit his ideas unwavering cognitive respect, engagement and attention — if not necessarily agreement.

I’d been aware of Land for a long time, since my undergraduate degree, but I only ‘rediscovered’ him — essentially, that he was still alive and living in China and blogging — after an Accelerationism event at Goldsmiths College in 2010. During the event, academic / establishment vultures picked over the bones of what was positioned as the carcass of Land’s anti-vitalist accelerationism, while attempting to reappropriate / reroute elements of it towards a Leftist praxis — which subsequently reached its retarded apogee in Fully Automated Luxury Communism (never go full retard).

[Aside: I left the event absolutely convinced that Land was dead, since none of the academic grave-robbers spoke about him in such a way that it even felt possible he could still be alive. But a few days later, I met up with my old postgrad theory tutor, a friend of Land’s, who told me Nick isn’t dead, but they wish he was dead. The next day I found Urban Future, which was exactly the corrective I needed — something I’d been looking for without knowing it — to all the the leftist ideological bias / bullshit polluting academic theory and occluding the Real.]

Out of the Goldsmiths ACC discussion / Fanged Noumena publishing event and increase in academic attention, spiralled everything that led to L/acc, U/acc and ultimately R/acc. The latter would have been extraneous but for the fact that prevailing identity politics rapidly turned U/acc into crypto-L/acc — with added gender / tentacle dysmorphia — which necessitated advent of the R/acc counter-marker, out of self-respect as much as theoretical distinction.

In my opinion, Xenosystems essays such as Hell-Baked and Meta-Neocameralism are some of the most lucid attempts to ground NRx in the cosmic reality of a blind-idiot God sifting-that-which-works-from-that-which-does-not-work in the butcher’s yard of the Real — optimising for intelligence via adaptive survival within a matrix of competition / reproductive death games, with the ultimate prize consisting of generative evolutionary transcendence, but never any prospect of release from the pressure cooker of evolutionary selection dynamics / arms races and the need to keep ‘winning’ just to stay in the game.

All of this strikes me — coldly and dispassionately — as correct, and therefore real and true. I must be some kind of weirdo-freak, because the I find the ‘truth’ an incredibly powerful elixir and something which it’s possible to get really high on. Overtime, I became addicted to tripping-out on the truth. When I was younger / more aggressive, I used to push it pretty hard on my friends IrL. Now I’m older / colder, I primarily circulate it online amongst other anons, as though it were some sort of shared currency.

Ultimately, Apostate Gallery stands with Copernicus, Galileo, Machiavelli, Land, Moldbug, BAP and other incessant speakers of truth-to-power. It refuses to be corralled into the feminised / castrato-group-think of Regime sanctioned ‘art’, which revolves around the production / propagation of (((truths))) it legitimates / controls. In other words, Apostate Gallery refuses to be pwned.

But as a pitiless purveyor of political realism, Apostate advocates free thinking for the few not the many. A finite number of naturally inclined / predisposed cognitive risk-takers, an incipient counter-elite gestating anonymously online. It doesn’t naively ‘believe’ in free speech as either a terminal value or practical reality. In practice, speech is always limited both by norms, which gives rise to ‘norm-violations’, enthusiastically seized upon and punished by NPC apparatchiks; and circumscribed by Lèse-majesté — essentially, that which offends power by telling power what power doesn’t want to hear.

However, even more effective than explicit cracking down / use of force against its enemies is how the Regime implicitly — and actually — pre-emptively starves its would-be enemies of energy / status / MSM oxygen / financial incentives for effective opposition, in advance of any action on their part, by rigging the incentive-deck of a System it not only controls but instantiates.

The matrix of control is therefore most fully articulated / instantiated — not reactively at the moment of offence — but in its precognitive inception of the neutering of the impulse to offend / challenge the System via anything other than the forms / leftist-entropic direction it legitimates precisely to further propel it towards its final telos of totalised rule in Hell.

[Transmission terminated]

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