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$14,815
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On the ugly fringes of the Internet lurks the future of far-right jerks. They are called “neoreactionaries” or, more fancifully, the “Dark Enlightenment,” a term coined by Nick Land, an expatriate British exacademic philosopher cyberpunk horror writer whose unexpected turn towards far-right politics electrified a bunch of people on Reddit. He was inspired by the works of Mencius Moldbug, a pseudonymous blogger famed for calling for Steve Jobs to be made king of California and tasked with maximizing profit for the state, and also for claiming that black people make good slaves. Moldbug is more usually known as Curtis Yarvin, a Bay Area software engineer who got his start as a writer in the comment section of Overcoming Bias, a transhumanist blog featuring, among others, the work of Eliezer Yudkowsky, a crank AI scholar who thinks preventing his ideas for sci-fi novels from becoming reality is more important than preventing malaria, and who freaked out once when a computer program from the future threatened to hurt him. The confluence of these facts may or may not be the doom of humanity. And just wait til we work in Thomas Ligotti, Alan Turing, William Blake, Frantz Fanon, China Miéville, and Hannibal Lecter.
Neoreaction a Basilisk is a work of theoretical philosophy about the tentacled computer gods at the end of the universe. It is a horror novel written in the form of a lengthy Internet comment. A savage journey to the heart of the present eschaton. A Dear John letter to western civilization written from the garden of madman philosophers. A textual labyrinth winding towards a monster that I promise will not turn out to be ourselves all along or any crap like that.
Accidentally composed by acclaimed cultural critic Philip Sandifer (TARDIS Eruditorum, The Last War in Albion) it is initially only available in limited and 100% Kickstarter-exclusive editions. And what happens to it after that is basically up to you.
Want to know even more about the book? Well, I've posted five excerpts on my blog.
Neoreaction a Basilisk itself is written and, barring layout of the physical book (which I’ll start working on the moment we hit goal) ready to send out. But I’d like to go through and add a set of footnotes and citations, write a couple essays on loosely related topics, and do a more traditional, permanent edition. So basically, I’m selling some weird special editions via Kickstarter to fund that.
EBOOK EDITION
OK, so this one is admittedly not really a weird special edition so much as a nicely formatted ebook of Neoreaction a Basilisk in the format of your choosing.
CONSPIRACY ZINE EDITION
Now we get into the interesting ones. A print edition, with pages lovingly hand-taped together and photocopied in the style of 80s zines. (And then scanned in and published via a reputable print-on-demand company because we’re not in the 80s anymore thank God.)
Preview of the Conspiracy Zine Edition
COLOR EDITION
Instead of third generation photocopies of my taped together pages, this edition will consist of high resolution color scans of the taped-together pages subsequently photocopied and artily degraded for the Conspiracy Zine edition.
SIGIL EDITION
Printed on a single ream of continuous-feed printer paper (the kind with the holes on the side), every copy of this edition will be signed, and have a 100% unique sigil drawn on it. What will the sigil do? Launch it and find out.
ORIGINAL PLATES
An edition of one - I will put the original taped-together pages in a box and send them to you. Perfect for people who want to conduct magickal rituals to undermine the very purpose of the book.
Meanwhile, if we surpass the goal and hit some of the stretch goals, this is what I’d like to add to the book.
$4000: The Blind, All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate - ACHIEVED!
A look at the strange, furiously torturous circles of logic that constitute the bulk of Gamergate, their paranoid scale, and their relationship to the aggressively faceless anonymity of chan culture. From Vox Day to Vivian James, a look at Gamergate in the tradition of “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons.”
$6000: Theses on Trump - ACHIEVED!
Because every leftist critic’s got to have a Trump piece, my humble contribution to the genre. The sort of think-piece that notes, “he likes his women like he likes his buildings: big and decorated in gold.” And that’s still only the fourth thesis.
$7000: "Theses on Trump" on the Blog - ACHIEVED!
At this threshold, I'll post the final version of "Theses on Trump" to Eruditorum Press. An October surprise to end all October surprises, I reckon.
$8000: Austrian School Economics (guest starring Jack Graham) - ACHIEVED!
Come on. You know you want me and Jack Graham doing an analysis of the economic philosophy of Ted Cruz. Seriously, this is great stuff - a school of economics heavily influential in libertarian thought that rejects the applicability of empiricism and math to economics in favor of a textual argument from first principles in which all of economic thought is a series of necessary implications of the allegedly self-evident premise “individual people act.” And people who believe this have the gall to sneer at Marxism.
$9000: "The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate" on the Blog
At this level I'll post "The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate" to my blog so that I can get a bunch of death threats on Twitter from people with anime avatars.
$10,000: Lizard People, Dear Readers
A delve into the paranoid murk of classic conspiracy theories, starting with David Icke's contention that the world is secretly run by lizards, and probably getting a bit weird from there.
$11,000: All Backers Get Bonus Essays as an Ebook
At this threshold, all backers of the Kickstarter, at any threshold, will get an ebook of all the bonus essays that go into the finished version, including a short piece that will be exclusive to this collection and never distributed anywhere else.
$12,000: TERFs
A look at Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, the adamant leftists who are strangely indistinguishable from Gamergate. Probably starting from the gloriously bonkers title metaphor of Janice Raymond's 1979 screed The Transsexual Empire.
$13,000: A Brief Magical Ritual To Neuter The Alt-Right
At $13,000 I will conduct a brief magical ritual on the Eruditorum Press site in order to forever blunt the power of the alt-right as embodied by neoreaction. Backers are advised to consult my past work in order to assess how much this goal is complete and utter trolling.
$14,000: A Short Story
At $14,000 I will round out the final edition of Neoreaction a Basilisk with a short horror story riffing on some of the themes in the book and gesturing at a few more.
For now, Neoreaction a Basilisk, my strange journey into right-wing philosophical horror, is available for your purchase. Thanks for the support.
Risks and challenges
At this point the risks are pretty low. The book is written. I still need to lay out the print edition fully, but this is about as straightforward a Kickstarter as they come.
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Funding period
- (30 days)