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Notes -
Our rationalist-adjacent 'friend' and (perhaps?) sometimes lurker mister Curtis Yarvin has another new substack article out, titled The Situation and the Solution..
It's a long article, and follows his typical style of being quite doomer about the political situation, lamenting how weak modern men are, and generally telling us that for REAL regime change we need HARDCORE monarchy, with no letting up.
However, he does make an interesting point, which dovetails nicely with something @coffee_enjoyer said downthread, as I'll quote here:
Moldbug agrees that fun is one of the missing elements in modern white culture and politics. He recommends replacing a modern 'soft party' with what he calls a 'hard party,' partially by making things fun:
What I find most interesting is Yarvin's vision of a 'hard party app', where people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.
Yarvin sees this gamification as a way to essentially recreate the old, militaristic political parties of the past, for modern men's sensibilities. He understands that modern men are much softer and weaker, so instead of continuing to try and make people angry and pissed off, which hasn't worked, he wants the right to play towards the fun that it can be to band together to fight your enemies.
While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?
I'm sure there are some reasons, but especially now that Yarvin has posted about it, I wonder how long it will take for political parties to adopt this app-style, gamified setup. And, I wonder how that will change the political game as we know it?
I see Yarvin is once again back to LARPing as a psycho.
Political campaigning, much like military campaigning, is 99% tedious and unglamorous shit, and even the exciting bits are quite often exciting in the wrong way. Militaries resolve this by not allowing soldiers to quit (and, often, by not allowing them to refuse to participate). Political parties don't have such tool kits available, so they have to resort to cheap carrots. Which is to say, we already do what Yarvin proposes, just not through an app. Politics, especially local politics, operates heavily on a prestige economy, where you can climb the ladder just by being willing to show up and do boring organizational work.
The problem is that Yarvin is wrong. Most people don't crave this level of political engagement. Trump's big success is with low-propensity voters who are like 50/50 on whether they can be fucked to fill out their entire ballot in presidential election years. Votr^tm badges are not going to persuade them to commit massive amounts of time and effort in political ground game. They want to watch the game, they don't want to be out on the field getting demolished.
An app as an organizing tool would have limited utility, anyway. You could rally the grunts, perhaps, but an open registration tool would be hilariously vulnerable to sabotage and subversion.
It has worked. The problem confronting Trumpism isn't that its supporters aren't motivated. It's
a) they have a ceiling of 51% of the vote, meanwhile about 40% of the country wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire and the marginal Trump voter will desert or stay home once it becomes clear he won't/can't deliver on his fanciful promises.
b) the gaps between their promises, their ideas, and their competence are insurmountable (but that's populism for you).
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