The Pamphleteer in the Age of the Dark Enlightenment: Online Manifestos of the Alt-Right

By Pil and Galia Kollectiv

There is something explicit about the form of the pamphlet that seems at odds with the way

ideology is communicated within late capitalism. The current political system has been erected

through a persistent terraforming of common sense, an insidious voice that tells you there is no

alternative to the way things are and always have been, that it is the essence of humanity to

competitively pursue self-interest, and so on. None of this needs writing out in a pamphlet: it is

airborne, spores of ideas shaping the media, advertising and popular culture we consume. If

neoliberalism speaks to us, it is through the infographic, the pie-chart on your bill that tells you

how your taxes are spent, the comparative graph that measures you up against your neighbours in

an attempt to ‘nudge’ you towards certain behaviours. Corporate in-flight magazines offer a much

better picture of how this ideology is formulated than anything issued by the Adam Smith

Institute.

The pamphlet has two histories, one as an expressive format for articulating opinions

cheaply and quickly, and another as a conduit of information. The ideology that dominates our age

has seen the slippage of the former into the latter; if ever it is directly communicated to us, it is as

pure information devoid of subjective opinion. In this context, the recent rise of the Alt-Right

would appear to signal a drastic gear change. Suddenly, the ideology that dare not speak its name

is laid bare. Capitalism is no longer presented as the neutral ground that is never up for discussion.

Instead, a plethora of texts and images that have cropped up online define a new ideological

framework for the Right. With the demise of print media, it could be argued that proponents of the

‘dark enlightenment’, as this movement has been called, are the pamphleteers of our time.

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 In this essay we strive to understand how these contemporary forms of political writing

affiliated with the Alt-Right movement sit in relation to the history of the modernist pamphlet and

to understand what happens to the voice of the pamphleteer when it is reformulated for the digital

age. Following Walter Benjamin, we would like to argue that rather than a simple upgrade, the

new technological modalities of writing for the internet – new forms of digital and online

production, reception and reproduction – alter the meaning and ideological basis of the modernist

pamphlet. We are particularly interested in the disappearance of the strong futurity of the

modernist pamphlet that addressed a yet-to-become collective readership, and the twenty-first

century emergence of a new form of temporality in the writing of Alt-Right manifesto-like texts.

But despite these lines of departure from historical antecedents, we nonetheless see in this writing

certain continuities with the proclamations of the early twentieth century fascist voice described

by Benjamin.1

Much has been written about the rise of the Alt-Right, not least by the movement’s

proponents, who appear to be as keen to map out their burgeoning movement as subcultural

teens.2 If Alfred J. Barr’s chart of modernist movements could fit on a single poster, the hyper-

linked universe of neo-reactionaries, men’s rights groups, white supremacists and technotopian

anti-democrats has spawned a host of multi-dimensional Venn diagrams online.3 Variously

denouncing the ‘cultural Marxism’ of academia, challenging progressive positions on race, gender

and equality in general, this often uneasy alliance of conservative traditionalists and radical

libertarians has coagulated through a slow-cooked miasma of accumulated internet communiqués

on blogs, vlogs, discussion groups and social media posts. And although renowned for its reliance

on punchy memes, on quick juxtapositions of crude images and slogans, this prodigious sprawl of

verbiage better captures the essence of the aesthetic of the Alt-Right. This movement appears to

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have emerged fully formed as a cultural and political tendency that feeds into recent campaigns

and elections. But while it could be seen as an ad-hoc media concoction brewed from fragments of

disparate entities, it is precisely this methodology of gathering momentum over a sustained period

of collecting diverse articulations of interconnected ideas that has allowed it to gain currency.4

In what follows we conflate many of these diverse voices, using terms like neo-reaction,

‘dark enlightenment’ and the Alt-Right almost interchangeably. But while conflicting agendas

often underlie these groupings and individual voices, we would like to attempt to sketch out some

commonalities in the context of viewing the new right as a movement that simultaneously

continues the radical project of the avant-garde and undoes many of its principles. Ironically so

much of the technology that neo-reaction relies on emerged from the context of state funded

research and the welfare state. Just as early twentieth century fascism was at once unmistakably

modern and devoted to a reactionary dismantling of modernity, so neo-reaction embodies the

tension between the fetishization of technological progress and the complete rejection of the

socio-political order that allowed it to come into being. Yet because of the way this movement has

taken shape through the new media platforms of online publishing, it also demonstrates unique

characteristics that break with this radical tradition of fascist modernism.

In many ways, this Alt-Right writing continues a long line of artistico-political manifestos,

with its declared enemies and hermeneutic commitment to the uncovering of truths and desires

fettered by the bourgeois order of modernity. Whereas the original pamphleteer nails his theses on

the chapel door, the ‘shitposter’ sees the Alt-Right as a declaration of war against the so-called

political correctness of an establishment termed ‘The Cathedral’ by its proponents. This

amorphous body extends from academia to the mainstream media and obfuscates the supposed

reality of inequality that this diverse network is determined to expose. Using the metaphor of the

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Matrix films’ ‘red pill’ as a truth procedure, the self-perception of the neo-reactionaries is of brave

crusaders bringing to light an unpopular but necessary truth. At the same time, despite its fascistic

affiliations, there is an inclusivity in even the Futurist manifesto that is not expressed in these

newer writings. The Futurists’ manifesto expects opponents, but Marinetti’s ‘we’ is as much an

invocation of a new society, and an institution of an ‘us’ against a ‘them’:

You have objections?—Enough! Enough! We know them... We’ve understood!... Our fine
deceitful intelligence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our ancestors—
Perhaps!... If only it were so!—But who cares? We don’t want to understand!... Woe to
anyone who says those infamous words to us again! Lift up your heads!5

Similarly, Dada’s manifesto, although resolutely individualistic, nevertheless encourages all who

read it to join, merely assuaging fears of loss of liberty. Tristan Tzara explains that ‘Dada was

born of a need for independence, of a distrust toward unity’.6 He insists that ‘[t]hose who are with

us preserve their freedom’.7

By contrast to these historic universalist projects, the manifestos of the Alt-Right, being

explicitly anti-democratic and anti-universalist, are much more ambivalent in their calls to arms.

Ranging from the sprawling disquisitions of Nick Land, adopted philosopher of the movement,

through the op-eds of Breitbart and 4 chan-memes to the political screeds of Mencius Moldbug

[a.k.a. computer scientist and start-up entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin] and the racist theories of Vox

Day, these voices are united primarily in their determination to section off the world’s population

into worthy and unworthy inheritors of a future unknown, yet full of at least as much dread as

promise. Thus, in his introduction to his blog, Unqualified Reservations, Moldbug writes:

Alas, our genuine red pill is not ready for the mass market. It is the size of a golfball,
though nowhere near so smooth, and halfway down it splits in half and exposes a sodium-
metal core, which will sear your throat like a live coal.8

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This bragging about the difficulty in attaining the ‘dark enlightenment’ is pure vanguardist

rhetoric, and of course Marinetti was just as keen to build exclusions into his movement: women

specifically are rejected from his society of war-as-the-only-hygiene. But the reason it is not

impossible to imagine Futurist women, who indeed existed, is that there is a universalizing

capacity to his text. The inherent elitism of the project of neo-reaction, conversely, hopes to

instigate a new feudal order that would do away with the democratic element, or the vestigial

socialism of the nationalist right at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since according to

Moldbug, statecraft needs to be structured around a ‘Formalist’ or ‘Neocameralist’ monarchy [his

terms of this system or ideology], with a CEO such as Elon Musk at the top, there is no need to

the recruit the corporate serfs that we already are to his movement.9 Since late capitalism already

works this way, the only need to preach it stems from a commitment to the ‘dark’ truth. Of course

underlying the insistence that equality is neither possible nor desirable are the familiar capitalist

tropes of essentialism and naturalization: exponents of the Alt-Right observe inequality in existing

societies and instead of working to change this, we take it to be an expression of a human nature

that somehow transcends history. The aspiration to provide each according to their needs is

mistaken for a call for an unachievable sameness: ‘If I get an apple and you get an orange, are we

equal?’10 But where twentieth century capitalism largely limited itself to letting people come to

such conclusions based on an internalized understanding that such is the way of the world, at least

outside of the extreme realms of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) with its

candid call to monetize everything, the Alt-Right theorizes anti-democracy as an explicit system

of thought. To quote Moldbug’s manifesto: ‘The other day I was tinkering around in my garage

and I decided to build a new ideology’.11

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 Looking at the ideology of the right through its conventions and styles of writing in the

1930s, Walter Benjamin sought to unlock the logic of German fascism through an analysis of a

collection of short essays by fascists edited by Ernst Jünger. For Benjamin, the principles of

fascism were best understood as a uniquely aesthetic reaction to social and political realities, a

poetized mysticism of war that had to be constantly defended against the actual experience of the

First World War. While the fascist sought adventure, nobility and camaraderie in war, the war was

fought as anonymously and bureaucratically as any capitalist project of mass production. And it

was through writing that this idealist war on the reality of war was declared. Compared by

Benjamin to German Expressionism and to the principle of ‘l’art pour l’art’, the fascist position is

an expression of a literary voice that emerges from the experience of war. Fascist writing for

Benjamin is journalistic in essence: ‘…the smooth style of these purportedly rough-hewn

thoughts… could grace any newspaper editorial’, he writes.12 But this is not merely a stylistic

observation. The editorial style of the fascist authors comes out of a particular philosophical

position that ‘despite all the talk about the eternal and the primeval…’ works through ‘journalistic

haste to capitalize from the actual present without grasping the past’.13 The fascists, in other

words, were not dialectical or analytical enough in their thinking. They did not understand the

development of war in relation to technological, economic or social forces. They did not

understand its evolution into modern warfare and thus reduced war to a banal abstraction, an

empty slogan.

Benjamin’s essay is full of astute observations that remain surprisingly relevant to the

fascistic right today and we shall return to some of them later in this essay. But for now what we

would like to take from him is his reading of fascism as a kind of aesthetic filter through which a

certain type of subjective experience is born. It is not through political organization (the party or

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even the paramilitary faction), but through writing that fascism constructs a fictional and

fantastical model (of the reality of war while ignoring its actuality). Fascistic writing reflects the

managerial logic of modern warfare without understanding the conditions and histories that led to

the experience of fighting – it is journalistic, jingoistic and expressive without being critical.

Therefore it is impossible to uncouple the ideological core of the right, old and new, from its

linguistic and aesthetic dimension: the logic of the world it creates is encapsulated in the words

that it spins and the literary means it employs.

Political writing at the beginning of the 21st century is clearly different from the essays that

Benjamin critiqued in 1930. The notion that an obscure preface to an artist’s collection of poems

could migrate within the length of one month to the front page of an important international

newspaper, as Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto did in 1909, seems almost unthinkable today. The

immediacy and spontaneity of its publication, its wide dissemination and the fact that it has been

translated into a host of languages from Russian to Romanian almost instantly, speak of a

different economy of writing that is in perpetual decline in our age of electronic media. To

paraphrase Benjamin again, newspapers do not tell their readers stories, they provide explanations

and information that are in essence the opposite of storytelling.14 The modernist manifesto, and the

Futurist Manifesto as its archetype, is an act of informing the public of a particular artistic

intention or tendency: it is a contextual framework for potential acts that might yet emerge in the

future. The modernist manifesto has an intimate relationship with the technology of the press and

with paper distribution – it emulates the logic of newspaper reporting and of the industry’s vast

circulation and instantaneous impact.

In considering political writing today, and in particular the cluster of writing associated

with the Alt-Right, one has to take into consideration a very different economy of information,

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opinion making and argumentation. In order to understand how views are created, transmitted,

mutated and eventually shape political discussions and convictions today, it is enough to look at

an obscure ‘thought experiment’ posted on a little known forum and community blog devoted to

the discussion of rationality (in science, philosophy, economics and so on) by the name of

LessWrong.15 The original post posited a slightly convoluted sci-fi setup in which a hypothetical

future AI being (referred to as the ‘Basilisk’) would punish (via a complicated simulated reality

scenario) people who were in a position to assist its coming into being (through say, financial

investment in relevant technology) but did not act on it. The very postulation that the Basilisk

might even exist puts the person possessing this knowledge at risk or, in other words, like the

video from Japanese horror film Ringu (1998) once you’ve been exposed to Roko’s Basilisk

(named after the user who came up with it) you are immediately implicated in this nightmarish

scenario.

Thousands of collegiate ‘thought experiments’ are launched online everyday and most

disappear to the bottom of the ‘vote down’ pile without leaving a trace within hours. But Roko’s

Basilisk somehow stuck and became part of the vocabulary of the new right. Although the founder

of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has banned all discussion of the Basilisk for five years,

threads, memes and cryptic references started appearing on various other discussion boards – the

idea caught the imagination of many who identify with the neo-reactionary movement. It spawned

lengthy online essays and even books critically evaluating the imagination of the Alt-Right. We

do not want to provide a detailed reading of Roko’s Basilisk here, but the way this concept has

been formulated seems to echo Benjamin’s understanding of fascism as a form of a mystical

abstraction. Instead of an abstraction of war, we find here an abstraction of social reality. The neo-

reactionary imagination reduces the social sphere, with all its intricacies, to a flat decisionist space

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in which ethics is simply a set of logical calculations aimed at maximizing one’s advantage at the

expense of other ‘players’ – essentially every other member of society. At the pinnacle of this

system stands the god-like figure of technological determinism that no one in particular thinks is

good or even believes in (but they just don’t want to take any chances). This is Veblen’s capitalist

paranoid conspicuousness par excellence – a cynical structure of mistrust and social alienation in

which every ‘agent’ is out to beat the competition in the name of an abstract goal that no one

actually cares for but that the penalty for being disinvested in it is great.16

But we are more interested here in how the political imagination of this current movement

is forged in viral outbreaks that sometimes solidify into a new vocabulary. In ‘The Work of Art in

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) and ‘The Author as Producer’ (1934) Benjamin

argues that the manifesto of modernity reflected in its very tenets the technical and formal

capacities of print media. Likewise, the structures of social engagement on the internet underpin

the thinking and writing of the new right just as much as this writing gives a name and a place to

the viral mob behaviour that emerges from online platforms. So, in what ways does this new form

of writing online differ from previous models and how can reading its formal or aesthetic qualities

help us understand the subjective experience that it conjures? What is the specific temporality

produced by its ‘voice’ and by the economy of its writing?

Writing about Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Martin Punchner argues that the

text, and in fact any manifesto at all, is theatrical in the sense that it creates a ‘scene’ or a ‘world’

in which only certain acts or forms of agency are possible.17 Since the Manifesto is a reasoned

explanation of how history is controlled by material conditions (organized via socio-economic

structures) and at the same time a call for a revolt against existing regimes, the text itself

prefigures an inevitable change and at the same time provides a detailed blueprint for such a

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change. The ‘scene’ in Marx and Engels’ book is dialectical materialism and the revolution is its

actor. Punchner is also right that this scheme is a better fit for the writing of manifestos than

Austin’s well known concept of the performative speech act where something uttered instantly

transforms the reality around it: ‘[o]therwise, a simple command would be enough: “Revolution

now!” – and it never is’.18 However, this theatricality has one distinct feature: it is future-oriented.

He writes: ‘The space of [the] transition from a class in itself to a class for itself is precisely the

space in which the Manifesto projects itself forward, anticipating what will have happened….The

performativity of the Manifesto is therefore at once political and futurist.’19 The Communist

Manifesto also does more than that. The ‘we’ that it speaks through – the voice of the proletariat –

is also a future possibly that is dragged into the present by the very act of writing. In other words,

the manifesto addresses a group of people who do not possess knowledge of themselves as a

distinct class and coalesces them into this new identity. Speaking as one is the first step towards a

newly found class consciousness.

It is this futurity of the (modernist) manifesto (which is not unique to that of communism)

that makes it a unique literary form. It is not a work of fiction like the novel, it does not draw from

the source of storytelling, defined by Benjamin as ‘experience which is passed on from mouth to

mouth’, because the experience that the manifesto wishes to communicate has not happened yet.20

Nor can it be seen as a work of non-fiction based in research because its object of study is not the

world surrounding but a world that is yet to come. The genre it shares the most with is perhaps

science fiction but the manifesto is written without the comfort and safety of the imagination as it

is in itself the key that opens the door to that other world, which is as real and tangible as any

system of thought.

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 What then is the temporal position in the online writing of the Alt-Right and does it

envision a future subject in the same manner as the modernist manifesto? A good example is a

blog entry entitled ‘What the Alt Right is’ written by Alt-Right activist Vox Day (Theodore

Robert Beale), which is considered by some to be one of the clearest declaration of principles for

the nebulous movement.21 The sixteen points listed by Vox Day are mostly a reiteration of well-

known beliefs of the right shared by many within the Trump administration: it calls for the

protection of the rights of ‘native’ whites against globalism and the threat of immigration, blames

current wars on a failed liberal attempt to promote diversity, calls for a rejection of ‘intrinsically

unscientific’ democracy and declares Western civilization to be ‘the pinnacle of human

achievement’. Some of the points are interesting because of their blatant use of terms and ideas

born of the discourse of the left such as talk about ‘the rights of ethnic groups’ (by which they

mean Caucasian), the right to self-determination (as long as communities are ‘homogeneous and

unadulterated by foreign invasion and immigration’). As with much of this writing, concepts such

as diversity are repurposed in the service of a cosmogony where human biodiversity equates to a

supposedly ‘scientific’ racism. It explicitly opposes war against other nations but includes

immigration in the category of acts of war. Most interesting in this context is point number nine:

‘The Alt Right believes identity > culture > politics.’ Other than the use of the ASCII ‘greater

than’ sign and the understanding of politics as a mathematical equation, the centrality of identity

as a site of politics is certainly shared by many on the left and this is perhaps where the libertarian

discourse of the Alt-Right is most faithful to its radical roots. The text ends with this short

paragraph:

The great line of demarcation in modern politics is now a division between men and
women who believe that they are ultimately defined by their momentary opinions and
those who believe they are ultimately defined by their genetic heritage. The Alt Right

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 understands that the former will always lose to the latter in the end, because the former is
subject to change.22

This sums up the reactionary position of the right against any notion of change and for the

supposedly stable and eternal ‘truth’ of essentialist racial classification. It is a rejection of the

reality of social relations as it exists today in favour of an abstracted ‘real’ that is supposedly

deeper than the ‘momentary options’ that define us now. This is why the Alt-Right does not speak

through the future-facing ‘we’ of the modernist manifesto: it is hermeneutic rather than

ontological, it does not seek to speculate a new world into existence and populate it with a new

subject. Instead, the Alt-Right seeks to ‘red-pill’, to uncover already existing, ‘deeper’, truths that

lie dormant under the totality of the liberal-democratic order. To use the performative analogy of

Punchner, Alt-Right writing throws its agents into an already given scene which they need to

interpret in order to reveal its hidden truths. Seen this way, it becomes easier to see why words

clearly taken from the democratic context, such as ‘native rights’ and ‘anti-globalism’ are

reinterpreted and retooled.

If there is another world that the manifestos of the Alt-Right open up to, it is not the

transformation of the society we all live in, which is understood to be governed by some

immutable laws of a naturalized human essence, both violent and competitive. Instead, it is the

narrative of an escape from this context that drives any utopian thinking permitted by this

movement. Thus PayPal founder Peter Thiel, an outspoken supporter of the Trump campaign,

outlines three possible solutions to the contradiction he identifies between freedom and

democracy, which he no longer deems compatible with one another.23 In light of ‘the vast increase

in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are

notoriously tough for libertarians’, Thiel suggests that the critical question is ‘how to escape not

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via politics but beyond it’. Two of his options for doing this – outer space and seasteading –

present the question topographically as a quest for an elsewhere unhindered by the existing laws

that render our ‘capitalist democracy’ an oxymoron, as he has it. We can already see this

aspiration manifesting in the large investment projects by people like Elon Musk that hope to

make space a viable alternative habitat. But Thiel’s third option, an exodus into cyberspace, is

perhaps the most interesting. Thiel correctly asserts:

By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of

the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social

and political order.24

Thiel’s qualification, that ‘these new worlds are virtual and that any escape may be more

imaginary than real’, is precisely what the obsession with notions such as the singularity or the

Basilisk hopes to overcome. In this sense, where the modernist text aims to set the stage for a

coming community outside the text, amongst the tech savvy thinkers of the Alt-Right we find a

desire to relocate into the text, disposing of cumbersome bodies and hoping our new machine

overlords will govern better than ‘the unthinking demos’.25

Furthermore, since the writing of the new right happens in dispersed form across many

platforms (comments, tweets, message board threads etc.), the literary voice, the potentially new

plural subject to which the manifesto is addressed, is also scattered. This is not only due to the

technological attributes of connectivity but rather reflects the beliefs expressed in this writing. The

ultimate ground of its philosophy is, as Vox Day claims, ‘identity’ – this violent, competitive

‘self-at-birth’. And every user’s, commentator’s, message board participant’s identity is unique:

irreducible, unnegotiable and solipsistic. For the Right today, identity is a metaphysical concept

that precedes the social, cultural or political (‘identity > culture > politics.’), not unlike the

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abstracted idea of war that defined fascism in the thirties. Both stubbornly resist actual, lived,

social reality: that of bureaucratic mass warfare in the case of the former and the reality of

imperialism and global capitalism for the latter. Benjamin called this fascist tendency Nachkrieg,

the ‘after-war’ that brings war into civilian life and for which the actuality of war as experienced

by soldiers in the trenches is an enemy that needs to be overcome.26 For the Alt-Right, it is identity

after identity: a concept of a static identity that is an open revolt against the lived reality of social

life, in which cultural and political conceptions are always in flux and are always shaped through

encounters with others.

But the ‘we’ of the modernist manifesto is only one stylistic feature signifying futurity,

collectively and the ontological concept of writing as action in the world. Since the manifesto

aims to close the gap between writing and action, or between speaking about and creating a world,

the text is often delivered in concentrated bursts of energy. Quick short sentences with a big bold

façade in the shape of typographical interventions onto which abrupt line breaks are fired like

cannon balls. Take for example this line from Mina Loy’s Aphorisms on Futurism:

BUT the Future is only dark from outside.

This style reveals a particular regime of creative labour embedded in the modernist manifesto. The

manifesto is often un-authored or signed by a large group. The manifesto of the modern

movements saw itself as a form of poetic protest and its writing was often presented as a form of

spontaneous action: As Tristan Tzara puts it in his 1918 Dada Manifesto, Dada is the ‘absolute

and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity’.28

Consequently the tone of the manifesto is often brought into proximity with everyday cacophony.

Futurist noises, dada nonsense, newspaper headline sloganeering and the silly jokes of Surrealism

are introduced into the text in order to minimise the gap between the artist and the world or

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between poetry and the street. In this cacophony of writing, the author recedes to the background

in order to participate in, rather than just report on, the action. In a way that is closer to popular

cultural artefacts than to fine art, the value of the manifesto is not derived from a singular

authenticated authorial voice but emerges instead at the point of its circulation – rapid and wide

readership that, if all goes well, spawns imitators and rivals, parodies and counter-manifestos.

Even The Communist Manifesto was written, collaboratively, in only ten days of Parisian heavy

drinking.29 Compared with the two decades of painstakingly slow work undertaken at the British

Library in writing Capital, it is clear illustration of the fact that manifestos require a different

economy of means to other types of writing.

However, when we look at the writing of the Alt-Right online, the labour invested in

writing, its authorship and its dissemination seem diametrically opposed to those of the modernist

manifesto. The style of many important and much quoted contributions by authors such as

Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land and Vox Day assumes a gothic-like structure of minute articulation.

Blog entries have multiple parts, anticipating every counterargument and allowing for long

digressions to fill in historical details or prove intimate knowledge of a particular branch of

philosophy. It is somewhat ironic that the Alt-Right’s image of liberal democratic hegemony is

that of a cathedral, when these writers favour the writing of treatises with cathedral-like structures,

full of labyrinthine chambers and ornate passageways. If the manifesto’s energy is that of the

multitude rushing to the barricades, the dynamic of Alt-Right writing is that of a slow

accumulation, a pressure cooker simmering over a gentle heat. The authorial voice here is closer

in spirit to the conspiracy theorist than to the political activist, assuming a vast hermeneutic map

where every event in world history is related to everything else. In Moldbug’s own words:

The reality and the reality show are made out of (almost) exactly the same materials. In
terms of all major factual events, the history of the 20th century that you learned in school

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 is, so far as I can determine, correct – with one small exception… The difference is our
interpretation of events. We know what happened. Why did it happen? Let me explain this
question with an anecdote.30

Used to justify his hermeneutic paranoia, the anecdote that follows is a rambling and racist story

about the decline of cities and the rise of suburbia in Ohio, followed by several other equally

convoluted stories about the second world war, the crimes of democracy, trees, tyranny in Africa

and a house in Cleveland. There are so many edifices – anecdotes, analyses of historical events,

trivia, Wikipedia definitions and sarcastic commentary – that the main argument of the text (that

the civil rights movement and democracy in general are responsible for the exodus of white folks

from the American city) is almost forgotten. If the modernist manifesto explodes in one’s face

with all its ontological might, this writing is akin to the Chinese ‘death by a thousand cuts’, slow

and tediously torturous.

Whilst the Futurist manifesto is still considered seminal, much of the art that tried to live

up to its fervour never achieved the same canonical status. As a cultural movement, the Alt-Right

similarly seems to be searching for a visual counterpart to its ideas. A plethora of visual output

has emerged from the preoccupation with memes, in particular the notorious appropriation of the

figure of Pepe the frog. However, the almost inherent democratic bias of contemporary art as an

institutional philosophy, if not as a practice, has precluded much overlap between these worlds. It

was precisely because of this that the few exhibitions that have attempted to bridge this gap were

encountered with disbelief followed by controversy. In London, for example, a small gallery

called LD50, hosted both an exhibition on the themes of the Alt-Right (71822666 (Amerika),

2017) and a conference featuring some of the prominent speakers of this movement. The inclusion

of Nick Land in this lineup, a writer long recognized in the artworld for his critical theory,

distracted many from the more contentious white supremacists and men’s rights activists on the

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list. It was only when the gallerist was exposed as a supporter of Trump’s Muslim ban in a private

conversation that a successful campaign to shut down the gallery was mounted by anti-fascists.

Anyone attentive to Land’s theoretical stance, and especially more recent blog posts that have

taken an explicitly racist turn and coined the term ‘dark enlightenment’, would have already

suspected that the gallery had been presenting this work uncritically. However, what is interesting

to note for our purposes is the ease with which these activities were dismissed as an ironic or

disinterested exposition of existing materials rather than active support for the agenda of the Alt-

Right.31 A similar scenario unfolded in Williamsburg in 2016, when Pierogi Gallery’s

Boiler space was driven to cancel a pro-Trump show which had been mistakenly approved as an

ironic gesture.32

This is no coincidence. Indeed, while there is a painful earnestness to the writing we have

touched on so far, much of the material that makes up the corpus of online Alt-Right text is

drenched in irony deliberately to ensure maximum deniability and to fly under the radar of those

who are not on board with its aims. The notion of ‘shitposting’ has been integral to the

construction of the iconography of the Alt-Right, and from the meme magic ascribed to Pepe the

frog and his attendant cult of ‘kek’ to the transgressive shock tactics of comedy sketch show

Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace we find a tendency to present for example racist

tropes in such a way as to allow any complaint to be dismissed as inability to take a joke.33

Perhaps recent incursions of the Alt-Right to the territory of contemporary art are not

coincidental or ironic jokes. Each phase of modern art generated its own ethico-cultural logic. In

the modern period that followed the French revolution, the re-organisation of art around new

institutions such as museums was deemed good for its democratic potential and the patriotic

spread of enlightened European values globally. Art was treated as a weaponized cultural

17
instrument to promote French Republican values. In the post war period, dominated by private

American wealth, art collectors who also philanthropically subsidized museum exhibition saw

themselves as the good guardians of culture, protecting it against the twin evils of the mass market

of popular culture and Stalinist social realism. In our own time, with its transition to immaterial

labour, informational and semiotic capital and financialization, art is clearly in search of a new

ethical horizon. While both Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug) and Theodore Robert Beale (Vox Day),

work in hi-tech, Peter Thiel has even started to invest in new online art platforms (the websites,

Artsy and Artify.it). There has been much discussion in the artworld of late about ways of exiting

the contemporary: will this exodus parallel the withdrawal from the social prophesied by the

tycoons of the new right? Unless a coherent opposition can be mounted, it is quite possible that

the new ethos of art will not be rooted in the democratic museum or the liberal art patron. The

new art may not be made by the sentient machines prophesied by the posthuman fantasies of these

sci-fi fanboys, but it may well end up co-opted by the anti-democratic spirit of a new elitist

techno-fascism. It is for this reason that it is imperative we read these texts closely. It is all too

easy to dismiss the new pamphleteers as isolated, marginal theoreticians riding on the coat tails of

global events beyond their control. However, it is by providing a discourse, an aesthetic language

and a moral justification for present day politicians that their trickle down effect becomes

dangerous. Earlier this year, it emerged that an obscure science fiction novel from the 1970s, The

Camp of the Saints, has inspired Steve Bannon’s anti-immigrant views.34 It is only by engaging

with such texts seriously, in political, literary and philosophical terms, that we can learn to

dismantle the arguments of the Alt-Right and propose better ones of our own.

18
1
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays “War and Warrior” edited by Ernst Jünger’
[Jerolf Wikoff – tr.], New German Critique, No. 17, Spring (1979).
2
See for example, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, ‘An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right’,
Breitbart, 29 Mar 2016, available at: http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-
the-alt-right/ [Accessed 17.12.17]
3
See for example these images: http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/192/975/a35.jpg; ‘Developments in late
capitalism in 2014’ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CR6vtE7UEAABEIB.png
[Accessed 17.12.17] http://archive.is/i0.kym-cdn.com
4
Matthew N. Lyons, ‘Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Origins And Ideology Of The Alternative Right’ Political Research Associates,
January 20, 2017, available at:
https://www.politicalresearch.org/2017/01/20/ctrl-alt-delete-report-on-the-alternative-right/ [Accessed 17.12.17]
5
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’(1909), available at:
http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html [Accessed 18.7.17].
6
Tristan Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1918), available at: http://391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara.html
- .WW3X45MrLeQ [Accessed 18.7.17].
7
Tzara, ‘Dada Manifesto’
8
Mencius Moldbug [a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin], ‘A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations’, Unqualified Reservations
(2009), available at: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html
[Accessed 18.7.17].
9
Dylan Matthews, “The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.” (2016),
available at: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/18/11434098/alt-right-explained [accessed 18.7.17].
10
Mencius Moldbug, [a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin], ‘A Formalist Manifesto’, Unqualified Reservations (2007), available at
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html
11
Moldbug “A Formalist Manifesto”
12
Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, 125
13
Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, 122.
14
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” in Hale, Dorothy J, [ed.], The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-
2000 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 365.
15
https://www.lesswrong.com
16
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
17
Martin Punchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-gardes (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006).
18
Punchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 32.
19
Punchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 32.
20
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 362.
21
Vox Day [a.k.a. Theodore Robert Beale], ‘What the Alt Right is’, available at:
http://voxday.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/what-alt-right-is.html [Accessed 18.7.17].
22
Vox Day, ‘What the Alt Right is’
23
Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian’ (2009), available at: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-
thiel/education-libertarian [Accessed 20.7.17].
24
Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian’
25
Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian’
26
Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, 124.
27
Mina Loy, ‘Aphorisms on Futurism’ in Caws, Mary Ann, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, Nebraska: Nebraska
University Press, 2000), 327.
28
Loy,‘Aphorisms on Futurism’, 298.
29
Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009),115.
30
Mencius Moldbug, [a.k.a. Curtis Yarvin], ‘A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 8)’, Unqualified
Reservations (2009), available at http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/gentle-introduction-to-
unqualified_15.html [Accessed 18.7.17]
31
‘Mr. Osborne said that at first the gallery’s provocations were read as irony, but that anger at the gallery and at Ms. Diego
mounted after Ms. Jung shared the Facebook message.’ Quoted in: D. Shea, Christopher, ‘London Gallery LD50’s Alt-
Right Show Should Be Its Last, Critics Say’, New York Times, 25.2.17, available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/arts/design/london-gallery-ld50-alt-right-show-protest.html [Accessed 15.3.18]
32
Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Artwashingnrx And The Alt-Right”, available at: https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/artwashing-
web-de/ [Accessed 20.7.17]
33
EG Daymare, , ‘No Joke: Untangling The Dna Code Of Alt-Right Comedy’ (2017), available at:
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-joke-untangling-dna-code-alt-right-comedy [accessed 27.7.17]
34
Paul Blumenthal and J.M. Rieger, ‘This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World’
(2017), available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-bannon-camp-of-the-saints-
immigration_us_58b75206e4b0284854b3dc03 [Accessed 28.7.17]