Entropic Modernity

Prologue: The Thrill of the End

The early 21st century has witnessed the collapse of progressive political projects, hastened by a paradoxical fusion of digital hyper connectivity and ideological fragmentation. In the age of what I call entropic modernity (a hypertrophied aftershock of postmodernity), meaning disintegrates into a myriad of digital fragments, and narratives are perpetually recombined into new, unstable constellations. The grand narratives that once anchored the Left (visions of inevitable progress, emancipation, and enlightenment) have splintered. We live amid the ruins of the modern “metanarrative” of progress, in a cultural milieu that no longer trusts overarching stories of human advancement. The result is a crisis of historicity, where “no longer does there seem to be any organic relationship” between present and past.^[1] History is flattened, so that the future appears less as the telos of a coherent political project than as the aimless extension of chaotic present microtrends. The Left, once the torch-bearer of utopian futures, now sees its narratives of progress and solidarity dissolve in a sea of information overload and irony. Digital capitalism’s networks produce a hyperreal social sphere in which images of politics often count for more than policy itself. Power operates through perception and media circulation, unmoored from material truth. The result is an implosion of meaning into what Baudrillard called the code:^[2] a situation where political discourse becomes a self-referential game of signals, memes, and viral spectacles. The public sphere, inundated by 24/7 news, social media feeds, and algorithmically curated content, behaves like a chaotic system trending toward maximum entropy. In this environment, the traditional coordinates of Enlightenment rationality and truth are destabilised. The collapse of grand narratives has left a vacuum of legitimacy, a metaphysical void in capitalism’s endgame where neither the Left’s vision of inevitable progress nor neoliberalism’s promise of endless growth commands belief.

As information proliferates, once stable symbolic systems fracture and recombine into unstable configurations. In Goodman’s terms,^[3] the loss of consensus reality amounts to worldmaking run wild: no single version entrenches itself enough to serve as a stable reference point. This produces what we can describe as narrative entropy, a condition in which not only grand narratives but even basic facts become contested.

It is in this turbulent, disorienting context that a new assemblage of reactionary ideas has emerged to fill the void. Rather than offering coherent doctrine, they assemble counter-hegemonic projects out of fragments: narratives of civilizational decline, technological determinism, and apocalyptic renewal. Their strength lies less in systematic philosophy than in the capacity to weaponize ambiguity, to turn memes into myths and despair into affective cohesion. In doing so, they provide not clarity but compensatory meaning, offering simplified cosmologies that speak directly to those who feel unmoored.

But we know that neoreactionaries did not invent chaos; they simply embraced it. While progressives remained engrossed in policy debates, the Right was experimenting with new ways of coding reality. Signals multiply faster than institutions can metabolise them, trust decays, and consensus time collapses. The Right’s apparent agility is not proof of historical destiny. Bound by its commitment to structural coherence, the Left struggled to adapt to a landscape where contradiction and fragmentation were no longer exceptions but the very conditions of political life.

The unruly convergence of actors, agendas, and historical contingencies cannot be neatly diagrammed. The genealogy of our moment is not the result of a single coherent vanguard pushing society toward reactionary ends, but rather the contingent sedimentation of diverse forces, from Silicon Valley accelerationists to traditionalist Catholic reactionaries, from opportunistic grifters to true-believing memetic warriors. Figures like Nick Land, Curtis Yarvin, or Peter Thiel are symptomatic rather than solely causative. They occupy nodal points in a vast, fragmented diagram of power where cultural, economic, and technological vectors intersect chaotically.

This is less a pipeline than a swarm. A genealogical approach, in the spirit of Foucault, reveals the radicalisation ecosystem not as a single directed flow but as a disordered assemblage of emergent tendencies. These tendencies do not converge because of shared intentionality but because of shared conditions of possibility. They are disparate actors, often at odds with one another, whose trajectories momentarily align under the gravitational pull of entropic modernity. This alignment produces effects far beyond the intentions of any individual agent.

Such complexity reminds us that reductionist theories of radicalisation, whether rooted in algorithmic design or socioeconomic grievance, risk missing the dense interplay of material, affective, and discursive forces at work. Certainly, economic precarity and social atomisation furnish fertile ground for extremist narratives. But so too does the collapse of epistemic authority, the erosion of civic institutions, and the acceleration of cultural production into realms of hyperreality where truth itself becomes a contested artefact.

We might better conceive of radicalisation today not as a deterministic funnel but as a volatile feedback loop that incorporates algorithmic nudges as well as offline precarity, existential despair, fragmented identities, and an insatiable hunger for belonging and meaning. This feedback loop is amplified by the collapse of mediating institutions such as trade unions, local civic groups, and traditional political parties, which once acted as buffers against ideological extremity. In their absence, the media ecosystems do not simply reflect radicalisation but increasingly produce it as a structural condition of entropic modernity.

To grasp this moment, then, is to resist the urge for neat schematics and embrace instead the messiness of historical contingency. There is no singular origin point, no definitive “why” to be uncovered. There is only the patient work of genealogy: mapping how disparate practices, discourses, and affects have been conjoined, layered, and sedimented over time to produce the appearance of inevitability. The radicalisation of political life is not a direct consequence of economic immiseration or algorithmic manipulation alone but a chaotic assemblage of crises each feeding into the next in unpredictable ways.

Dark Utopias: How Silicon Valley Lost Faith in Democracy

The cultural milieu of mid-2000s Silicon Valley provided fertile ground for neoreactionary ideas. The region’s “move fast and break things”^[4] libertarian mindset meant many tech entrepreneurs were already skeptical of government and democracy. Indeed, many early neoreactionaries were ex-libertarians who concluded that, in Peter Thiel’s words, they “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”.^[5] They saw democratic governance as an impediment to rapid technological and economic progress. The alliance of tech and neoreaction revealed a crucial dynamic of our time: segments of the elite, disillusioned with the “inefficiencies” of democracy, are drawn to anti-democratic ideas packaged in futurist, high-tech garb.

Thus, by the mid-2010s, an unlikely synthesis had occurred. What began as obscure blog commentary had evolved into a network of thinkers and political hobbyists with surprising influence in certain elite circles. Rather than drawing solely on recent fringe philosophy, neoreactionaries tapped into a long lineage of thought: ranging from anthropological theories of violence^[6] to classical elite theory and early technocratic visions. Neoreaction (NRx) first cohered on blogs like Unqualified Reservations,^[7] where in 2007–2008, software engineer Curtis Yarvin (writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug) began articulating a comprehensive anti-egalitarian ideology​. In 2010, libertarian blogger Arnold Kling labeled Yarvin’s ideology “neo-reactionary”,^[8] a term that swiftly took root as the banner for this new intellectual current. Yarvin’s early writings sketched the outlines of what he called “formalism”^[9]—a vision of governance that treats the state as a sovereign corporation and voters as mere shareholders.

In 2012, Thiel delivered a lecture at Stanford University titled “Founder as Victim, Founder as God”, where he articulated views resonant with the neoreactionary themes. He remarked: “A startup is basically structured as a monarchy. We don’t call it that, of course. That would seem weirdly outdated, and anything that’s not democracy makes people uncomfortable.”^[10] In fact, Thiel has been a significant supporter of Yarvin’s ventures. In 2013, Thiel’s Founders Fund, along with Andreessen Horowitz, invested $1.1 million in Tlon Corporation, a company founded by Yarvin to develop the decentralized computing platform Urbit.^[11]

It was Yarvin who popularized the now-infamous metaphor of “the Cathedral” to describe the nexus of universities, media, and the Washington bureaucratic establishment that, in his view, functions as a liberal-progressive brainwashing machine. The “Cathedral”, he argues, sustains a quasi-religion of egalitarianism and social progress and must therefore be dismantled or escaped. It is framed as a false reality maintained by hidden powers, much as Gnosticism posited an illusory world ruled by Archons. Neoreactionaries cast themselves as the initiated elect who have pierced this veil of illusion (their “red-pill” gnosis) and who await, or seek to hasten, a world-ending rupture of the current order.

If Yarvin laid the intellectual groundwork for neoreaction, the British philosopher Nick Land became its visionary fabulist, reshaping its principles into an otherworldly vision of techno-political acceleration and collapse. Land’s trajectory is striking: in the 1990s he was a notorious theorist at Warwick University and co-founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an academic collective pushing the boundaries of postmodern philosophy into hallucinatory cyberpunk terrain. Deeply entangled with the work of Deleuze and Guattari, Land’s early writings^[12] celebrated the deterritorializing force of techno-capitalism. The true relevance of the CCRU does not lie in their texts alone, nor in their myth-making, but in the exodus they performed as a collective body. They were among the first to inhabit, almost prematurely, the transitional threshold between the physicality of the late-twentieth-century world and the virtual futures that were then only half-promised. While still rooted in the material textures of the 1990s (streets, basement clubs, underground presses), they anticipated and accelerated toward the incoming, dematerialised, online existence. Their work performs this crossing: not just commentary on cyberspace, but a literal passage through it, dragging philosophy, art, and libidinal speculation into the abstract frontiers of the early internet imaginary. In this, they were not early adopters but early deserters of the old world, fugitives from history running into dataflow, encryption, and algorithmic hauntings.

Deleuze and Guattari discuss in Anti-Oedipus the idea that capitalism is a system of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, constantly breaking down limits and reconstituting them in new forms. One of the most cited passages in this context comes from their discussion of schizophrenia and capitalism, where they suggest that one possible strategy is to “accelerate the process”,[13] a suggestion frequently mistaken as advocacy. This line has often been misinterpreted as a call to intensify capitalism’s contradictions until it collapses or transforms. This idea has been taken up in later interpretations, such as Nick Land and the accelerationist movement, which pushes for an extreme embrace of capitalism’s deterritorializing tendencies. Land’s own vision of Accelerationism was grounded in a cyberpositive embrace of capitalism’s self-reinforcing feedback loops. Rather than hoping for systemic breakdown, Land saw capitalism as an autonomous force that should be intensified and accelerated into new, uncontrollable trajectories.^[14] But in recasting his earlier enthusiasm for technological intensification into a vision of fragmented techno-feudalism, where markets, intelligence, and computation dictate power rather than humanist ideals, he broke with any leftist pretenses and reframed accelerationism in brutally anti-egalitarian terms.

It was Land who penned The Dark Enlightenment essay in 2012,^[15] effectively a manifesto for the NRx movement that Yarvin sparked​. In this text and related blog posts, Land performed a kind of theoretical alchemy: he synthesized ideas from cybernetics, complexity theory, speculative philosophy, and systems collapse models, and reoriented them toward a reactionary vision of political transformation. Unlike Yarvin, whose blogging was deliberately provocative and tailored for online subcultures, Land framed neoreaction in a way that felt like an inevitability encoded within techno-capitalist development. For Land, liberal democracy was not merely flawed or corrupt: it was structurally unsustainable. The term “Dark Enlightenment” itself signals an inversion of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: it is an Enlightenment gone dark, shorn of optimism and universalism, a calculated apologia for what much of modernity would consider the “Dark Ages”. The question was not if the modern egalitarian order would unravel, but how soon, and whether its collapse should be resisted or accelerated. Land’s answer was the latter: civilization should not merely endure its disintegration but embrace it as a vehicle for something new, something beyond humanist constraints. For Land, neoreaction was not just a political program but a mythos: a story about the inevitable return of strong sovereignty (“the inescapable return of Leviathan”,^[16] as he phrased it​) amid the ruins of liberal chaos, understood as a stage in capital’s autonomisation. By blending dark futurism with arcane philosophy, Land gave NRx a kind of theory-fiction aesthetic. The movement’s ideas, initially exchanged on blogs and forums, took on the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a hyperstition, in CCRU terms,^[17] incubating in the feeds and message boards of the internet. If enough people (especially powerful people) believed in the coming demise of democracy and the rise of tech-augmented neofeudalism, perhaps they could will it into being. This feedback loop between ideas and reality is precisely what Land and his CCRU colleagues meant by hyperstition​, and NRx provides a case study in how internet subcultures can weaponize belief to shape political outcomes.

Land explicitly cast the near-future in eschatological terms: his infamous prediction that “nothing human makes it out of the near future”^[18] operates as a kind of technoscientific doomsday prophecy. The coming Singularity is portrayed not as utopia but as an inhuman revelation, an apokalypsis in the strict sense of an unveiling, exposing the “hidden systems of control” that trap humanity. For all its anti-spiritual posture, neoreaction often echoes religious narratives: there is an evil world to be escaped, a promised cataclysm to purge it, and even hints of a savior in the form of a “Great Man” or techno-king.

In this sense, neoreactionary thought reveals a hidden theological core: a secular apocalyptic faith with Gnostic overtones, dressing age-old millenarian longings in cyberpunk attire. Neoreactionary thinkers may frame their vision as future-oriented, but their core ideas resurrect archaic, pre-modern hierarchies and forms of governance; the supposed “Dark Enlightenment” is not innovative, it is a reactionary attempt to revive feudalism cloaked in technological jargon and Silicon Valley aesthetics. This paradox mirrors the broader postmodern condition of ideological contradiction: neoreaction is both hypermodern (embracing technology) and arch-conservative (reviving ancient hierarchies), it is itself part of a broader failure to reconcile technological advancement with social progress. Instead of emancipating humanity, neoreactionaries seek to reassert control by elites.

This sentiment resonated with Yarvin’s and Land’s calls for enlightened technocratic elites to exit the “failed”^[19] democratic experiment. Neoreaction envisions a society of walled-off sovereignties, insulated from the chaos of democracy, where governance is not a collective process but a privatized enterprise. The Silicon Valley enthusiasm for seasteading, “charter cities,”^[20] and other private governance experiments is straight out of NRx theory, which imagines breaking society into competitive mini-states, each ruled by a sovereign CEO or corporate board. In this sense, the Californian techno-libertarian dream, an alliance of hacker radicalism and free-market fundamentalism, provided both an audience and a springboard for neoreactionary philosophy. What appears on the surface as a futurist vision of optimized governance is, in reality, a return to neo-feudalism, where control is concentrated in the hands of a few technocratic overlords.

Hyperstitional Drift: The Neoreactionary Mythos

Neoreaction presents itself as bracing nihilism, a clear-eyed rejection of liberal pieties in favor of competence and order. The attraction lies here: nihilism lifts the weight of coherence while faith restores meaning. Together they form a psychic economy well suited to entropic media where uncertainty craves quick resolution. Its influence was not confined to the realm of theoretical discourse; it flourished through culture, media, and meme aesthetics in the hyperreal cyberspace of the 2010s. The movement’s proponents cleverly harnessed the postmodern blurring of irony and sincerity, reality and simulation.

Irony became the double-edged sword of this cultural war. The online alt-right deployed layers of irony and absurdist humor as a strategic cloak for extreme ideas. By contrast, much of the Left (especially the academic left) mistook irony as mere nihilistic play, failing to see how sincerity and extremism could hide behind a façade of memes and jokes. Yet the New Right had a keen grasp of post-irony: in these spaces, irony is not the opposite of belief; it is the medium through which belief is smuggled in and amplified. Online, one can don a neo-fascist persona half-seriously, until eventually the performance hardens into reality. By the time outsiders realize whether something was “serious or just a meme”, the new reactionaries have already shifted the Overton window. This ambiguous blend of play and conviction proved to be a potent weapon against a liberal establishment that still assumed public discourse was taking place in good faith.

By now the metamorphosis of Pepe the Frog ^[21] from an indie comic character into a political totem is well known, yet its very overexposure is part of what makes it significant. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the digital landscape witnessed an extraordinary convergence of irony, myth, and political insurgency, and Pepe stood at its center. His vacant eyes and endlessly mutable expressions condensed a diffuse force that operated across 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter, where political conflict unfolded less through policy debate than through esoteric symbolism and memetic warfare. What made this transformation powerful was not only the appropriation of the figure by far-right communities but the mythopoetic charge it accrued. In the rise of so-called “Meme Magic”, Pepe functioned as more than satire: he was a channel through which collective fictions achieved operational force, an emblem of how digital folklore no longer comments on reality but actively systematises it. This was most clearly expressed in the rise of “Meme Magic”^[22] and the so-called “Cult of Kek”^[23]. In an absurd, self-referential play of semiotics and synchronicity, internet users “discovered” that Kek, an ancient Egyptian deity associated with darkness and chaos, bore the same name as their favored internet slang for laughter (kek, a corruption of lol originating from online gaming). What began as a joke metastasized into a hyperstitional force: users convinced themselves that their meme-propagation was not just cultural expression but political magic, shaping reality itself. Every Pepe posted, every ironic prayer to Kek was an invocation meant to tilt the world’s probability field toward the absurdity of a Trump victory. And in a moment of history seemingly scripted by Baudrillard himself, it worked. An imagined prophecy or conspiracy theory is incubated through circulation until belief itself generates the very conditions that appear to confirm it. Goodman would describe this as a new world-version acquiring reality through symbolic projection. His claim that we project predicates onto the world and thereby modify our very perception of reality provides a philosophical foundation for understanding how a meme or myth can reshape what counts as real. The case of online subcultures transforming a cartoon figure such as Pepe the Frog into a “hyperstitional force” illustrates this process: collective projection turns an ironic joke into an operative element of political reality.

This ironic faith, sincere in its performative insincerity, encapsulated the weaponization of postmodern detachment that defined Trump’s first mandate. While the liberal establishment relied on old-world signifiers of credibility such as fact-checking, expertise, and institutional stability, the new digital Right waged war in an entirely different register. It understood that reality, in an age of algorithmic media, was porous, fluid, a game to be played rather than a truth to be upheld. This is almost a direct restatement of Goodman’s claim that facts are versions and that “worldmaking begins with one version and ends with another”.^[24] Reality is made by our descriptions; hence when multiple incompatible descriptions proliferate, reality itself splinters into competing fictions. In entropic modernity, we witness this pluralisation of world-versions at large scale. Goodman’s notion that “facts are theory-laden”^[25] reveals why opposing political camps cannot even agree on basic facts: they are effectively operating in different constructed worlds, with different theories loading their facts.

Memes, rather than mere satire, became the primary mode of ideological transmission, compressed, cryptic, and viral. Pepe was not merely a joke; he was an avatar of political entropy, a harbinger of the collapse of liberal seriousness, and a manifestation of the anarchic currents that had found new agency in digital networks. What had begun as a troll campaign on fringe message boards bled into mainstream consciousness, forcing legacy media to acknowledge the existence of a cartoon frog as an election-year talking point: an absurdity that only reinforced the meme’s power. As journalist Dale Beran^[26] has observed, the “weaponized irony” of these spaces did not reject politics but transmuted it into a post-ironic spectacle, where insincerity itself became an engine for radicalisation.

This was the moment where the neoreactionary current ceased to be an obscure intellectual discourse and became something else: something aesthetic, memetic, and deeply woven into the very fabric of digital life. The hyperreal mechanics of the 2016 election did not merely provide a political shock; they revealed a “new” way in which power could be seized not through argument but through spectacle, acceleration, and absurdity, leaving traditional forms of political communication hopelessly lagging behind.^[27] The destabilisation of truth as a stable referent undergoes here a decisive mutation. What postmodernism once registered as relativism or skeptical play becomes the calculated mobilisation of falsehood as an instrument of rule. The implosion of meaning gives way to something harsher: the deliberate evacuation of truth so that its absence itself becomes a technology of power.

The rise of figures like Elon Musk in the political-cultural arena exemplifies this new paradigm of memetic power. Musk has, especially after his takeover of Twitter (rebranded “X”), behaved more like a chaotic information warlord than a traditional corporate leader. His erratic tweets, flirtations with far-right tropes, and impulsive policy changes to the platform are often read as blunders by conventional analysts. Yet from another angle, Musk’s seemingly erratic stewardship of a social media empire is often read as failure, yet it also passes as a kind of memetic warfare. The role he plays as tech magnate turned meme warlord borders on self-parody, but in an algorithmic environment where virality confers authority, even blunders can masquerade as strategy. His interventions exploit informational asymmetry, converting noise itself into a medium of control.

Every scandalous or confusing gesture generates disproportionate engagement, sustaining the platform’s visibility while gradually shifting the Overton window of what can be said. Trolling becomes governance by other means. In this respect, Musk reproduces the tactics of neoreactionary and accelerationist politics: move with speed, cultivate confusion, dominate the conversation, and force adversaries into perpetual reaction. It is a strategy of velocity over stability. Traditional institutions, whether governmental, journalistic, or partisan, are encumbered by procedural norms of consistency and deliberation that such tactics sidestep altogether. The architecture of digital capitalism intensifies this asymmetry: algorithmic systems privilege engagement, and thus reward conflict, novelty, and extremity, eroding the space for nuance or consensus and fostering an epistemology attuned to fragmentation.

Until his resignation on 28 May 2025, Musk served only as a Special Government Employee in the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency,^[28] a 130-day liaison that dramatised the interchangeability of corporate and state sovereignties. His trajectory illustrates a wider shift in political communication, one in which outrage, humor, and schadenfreude have become the primary currencies of attention. Neoreactionaries, and the broader New Right, understand that outrage is not a liability; it is fuel in the attention economy. As Guy Debord^[29] observed, in the age of spectacle the distinction between publicity and propaganda vanishes: all attention reinforces the message. Thus, a controversial meme or incendiary post, even if widely condemned, still centers the reactionary narrative in discourse. Content designed for conflict and emotional intensity travels further in this environment, while modes of communication oriented toward consensus or factual persuasion rarely generate the same viral momentum.

The creeping embrace of overt political transgression, whether through Nazi salutes from figures like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon or the increasingly brazen rhetoric of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, is not reducible to shock value or ideological signaling. It is a deliberate tactic, probing the frontiers of acceptable discourse and testing how far the erosion of democratic norms can be pushed. Nor is this confined to the United States. Leaders such as Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Narendra Modi in India, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have all weaponized irreverence, bluster, or theatrical impunity, reframing authoritarian gestures as expressions of popular authenticity. The aim is not simply to normalise authoritarianism but to render democracy irrelevant as a category of political evaluation altogether.

Trump offers a particularly stark case. He does not merely present himself as a truth-teller; his more insidious move is to render truth itself meaningless. The message is not “I can lie and people will believe me” but rather “truth does not matter at all”. What this strategy achieves is a perverse integrity, an inversion of sincerity. In an era where the ornate discourse of liberal moralism has lost credibility, extreme vulgarity becomes an unassailable proof of authenticity. Trump’s lies are not failures of rhetoric; they are expressions of dominance, demonstrations that he does not need to conform to a shared reality. His supporters do not believe what he says; they believe in him. This is why calling him out on falsehoods and pointing to his endless contradictions is politically useless: it only reinforces the emotional commitment of his base. The more absurd the lie, the more it affirms his position as a man unconstrained by the hypocrisy of conventional politics.

This is why reactionary politics today is not simply authoritarian but sadistic. Its adherents do not just accept the erosion of democracy; they revel in the suffering it causes their perceived enemies. Overt racism, defamation, fascist iconography: these are not ideological commitments so much as weapons of enjoyment, instruments of jouissance drawn from the despair of the opposition. The so-called “culture wars” were never about ideological struggle; they were about establishing a regime of humiliation, in which each scandal, each grotesque spectacle only deepens the sense of political inevitability.

As Walter Benjamin stated, fascism is the aestheticization of politics,^[30] a process by which mass participation is permitted only as spectacle, ensuring that the structures of power and ownership remain untouched. What we are witnessing today in the neoreactionary and digital reactionary movements is a hypermodern realization of this principle. The illusion of participation, expressed through online engagement, memetic campaigns, and performative outrage, functions as a pressure valve that absorbs political energy while leaving real decision-making in the hands of corporate and technocratic elites.

The neoreactionary dream of “exit” over voice, CEO governance, and privatized sovereignty is not an alternative to democracy but a new stage of aestheticized politics, a system that Benjamin warned would lead not to emancipation but to the preservation of elite control under the guise of mass expression. DOGE’s mass-lay-off fiasco shows how quickly “exit” curdles into administrative necrosis.

The Vibe Industrial Complex: From Postmodern Irony to Reactionary Sincerity

One hallmark of the neoreactionary “vibe shift” is the reframing of politics as an aesthetic choice rather than a formal ideological commitment. Reactionary ideas manifest less as logical arguments than as provocative cultural identities that one can superficially adopt. Within the Dimes Square scene,^[31] for instance, reactionary ideology has been explicitly transformed into fashion statements such as trucker hats displaying provocative slogans, Instagram feeds curated with Orthodox Christian icons, macho bodybuilding imagery, and Mean Girls-style quips. By converting ideological stances into fashionable aesthetics, the movement significantly lowers the barriers to reactionary politics, enabling participants to perform a reactionary sensibility without explicitly endorsing a manifesto or formal doctrines.^[32]

What is at stake here is not even the capitalisation of risk, the wager of cancellation, or the placing of skin in the game, but its pantomime. It is cosplay. The staging of forbidden utterance takes place within the securitised circuits of platform capitalism, where the very possibility of transgression is already hedged, monetised, and insured through mechanisms of patronage and subscription. What appears as danger functions only as commodified frisson, a prefabricated affect calibrated for circulation and consumption. The potency of this aestheticization is amplified by visually oriented platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where motifs such as Roman imperial statues, Gothic ecclesiastical imagery, and nostalgic 1950s domestic aesthetics are fetishized by young trendsetters. Online communities circulate “fashwave” imagery, a fusion of fascist motifs with vaporwave aesthetics and glamorize “TradCath” (traditional Catholic) lifestyles as though they were merely another fashion subgenre. Perhaps the most notorious example is Bronze Age Pervert (BAP), whose cult following has grown around the pairing of classical statuary and bodybuilding imagery with stark reactionary aphorisms. His homoerotic macho aesthetic, steeped in Nietzschean vitality, functions as a seductive packaging for authoritarian ideas. As Wark^[33] observes, BAP’s deployment of muscular heroic figures conveys “values of strength and dominance”, thereby reinforcing the link between beauty and fascism. The neofascist glorification of hierarchy and violence is thus communicated through visual allure, merging aesthetic exaltation with destructive impulses.^[34] In such instances, political ideology is transfigured into art, rebranding reactionary politics as an edgy lifestyle upgrade rather than a moral rupture. The sensibility at play here borders on camp: reaction is worn as one more ironic accessory in a fashion arsenal. This has precedents; Susan Sontag notably argued in the 1970s that certain cultural venerations of fascist aesthetics, eroticized uniforms, neo-classical pomp, could “neutralize” fascism by treating it merely as “an aesthetic view of life”.^[35] Neoreactionaries similarly exploit style to sanitize substance, packaging elitist, anti-democratic ideas within appealing visuals and trendy affectations to render them aspirational rather than alarming. The aestheticization also serves to blur intent: it becomes unclear whether a podcaster’s embrace of monarchist aesthetics is earnest or merely ironic performance art. In a cultural milieu privileging vibes over principles, reactionary politics slip in quietly as another subcultural aesthetic: one more flavor of cool rather than a coherent ideology subject to critical scrutiny.

A telling example of this aestheticized reactionary posture is the case of Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson. Peterson rose to fame denouncing postmodernism as an assault on truth and morality. Yet Peterson’s own persona has increasingly been stylized into a kind of self-conscious mythos. He has taken to wearing flamboyant custom suits emblazoned with religious iconography. The man who rails against the relativism of postmodern culture now inhabits an image steeped in patchwork symbolism: an almost postmodern collage of sacred art and celebrity flair. Peterson’s public exhortation to “put your life in order” came with “ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should have gone to rehab”.^[36] In other words, the Peterson phenomenon itself morphed into a hyperreal spectacle—the guru of order whose personal story erupted into disorder, played out on a global stage. It was as if the archetypal struggle between chaos and order from Peterson’s lectures leapt into reality, turning the intellectual into both a meme and a mythic character for his audience. The aura around Peterson—part sincere self-help sage, part embattled culture-warrior—exemplifies how a reactionary figure’s life and image can bleed into an affective narrative that followers consume as fervently as doctrine.

In the end, figures like Peterson illustrate what is at stake in the vibe-driven rebranding of politics. Political ideology becomes personal fiction: a story one can live through or consume vicariously, as entertainment and identity all at once. Reactionary aesthetics exploit this break by offering ready-made myths for those disenchanted with factual politics. The aesthetic becomes the ideology, the vibe becomes reality. In a culture where “reality is fiction”, the vibe industrial complex of today’s reactionaries is a powerful force: converting fears and desires into shareable images and stories, and in doing so, quietly fomenting a new breed of politics that feels like a lifestyle upgrade. Irony operates here as the hinge between fiction and practice, initially enabling flirtation with taboo ideas under the guise of humor or “just joking”. The alt-right, for example, famously occupied “the ambiguous space between irony and sincerity”, masking extremist messaging as harmless internet trolling.^[37] Dimes Square participants adopt a similar protective irony, creating ambiguity around whether provocative statements reflect genuine beliefs or elaborate satire. However, irony as a political stance is inherently unstable and often curdles into sincerity over time. Observers have noted this trajectory in cultural phenomena such as the Red Scare podcast, where hosts Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova transitioned from ironic mockery of liberal sensitivities to earnest alignment with reactionary figures and positions.^[38] This evolution exemplifies the broader youth-cultural slide rightward, facilitated by post-ironic ambiguity, an uncertain state where humor conceals sincerity. Online communities instrumentalise this ambiguity as a cognitive Trojan horse, where iterative circulation and social reinforcement translate ironic play into habituated belief. Through repetition, memes embedding misogynistic or racist tropes undergo a process of discursive normalisation, sedimenting into subcultural codes. What begins as humor crystalize into affective attachment, cultivating prejudice under the protective alibi of irony.

Irony also functions as a social filtering mechanism. Initially, only insiders “in the know” decode the joke; newcomers who interpret irony literally push reactionary sentiments toward sincerity. “Tradition” as espoused by many online neoreactionaries isn’t a sincere return to the past at all: it’s an aesthetic game, a LARP-ing of archetypes in the arena of hyperreality. The “Catholic chic” trend in Dimes Square illustrates this process: what began as highly self-aware performances of religious posturing often evolved into genuine religious commitment. Even Julia Yost, a conservative commentator who popularized the concept of Dimes Square Catholicism, admits that while this “trendy Catholicism may be partly a pose”, some adherents clearly adopt the practice earnestly.^[39] The layers of irony gradually peel away, leaving earnest advocacy for reactionary values. In other words, irony mutates from posture to politics, a trajectory inherited from hipsterism.^[40] Early hipsterism was apolitical or vaguely liberal, using irony primarily for cultural commentary. Contemporary scenes explicitly weaponize irony for political ends, transforming aesthetic practices into vehicles for affirmatively reactionary politics. Unlike earlier youth subcultures, today’s reactionary vibe shift enjoys explicit intellectual scaffolding, drawing from actual reactionary thought. Thus, the cultural shift is reinforced by a feedback loop between lowbrow meme culture and sophisticated anti-liberal theory.

Moreover, this aesthetic and intellectual synergy is underpinned by financial and social infrastructures connecting think tanks, Silicon Valley financiers like Peter Thiel, and cultural hubs such as the aforementioned Dimes Square.^[41] The result is a distinctive ecosystem where reactionary thought, cultural provocations, and financial backing merge, interweaving intellectual and cultural reactionary streams.

Communities from Telegram channels in Eastern Europe to Instagram feeds in Madrid or Paris rehearse the same gestures: “Trad” iconography, fashwave collages, ironic misogyny, post-ironic nationalism. The youth cultures that once toyed with irony as cultural commentary now mobilise it as political weaponry, and the infrastructures of platform capitalism guarantee that these experiments are never isolated. They scale. They repeat. They sediment into habits of thought.

Ossification of the Left and the Lure of the Reactionary Future

Ossification has become the dominant condition of the contemporary Left: what was once a living revolutionary vision has, over recent decades, hardened into rigid dogma. After the collapse of the Soviet experiment and the neoliberal hijacking of social democracy in the 1990s, left-wing politics largely retreated into a defensive crouch, managing the damage of capitalism rather than imagining bold alternatives. Mark Fisher diagnosed this paralysis as capitalist realism, a pervasive sense that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, a fatalistic inability to envision any system beyond the status quo.^[42] This paralysis is not only doctrinal but temporal: a collapse of futurity, an incapacity to narrate horizons beyond perpetual crisis management. As Fisher put it, “the future has been cancelled”, leaving politics suspended in a loop of reactive firefighting.^[43] Into this vacuum, the Right advances not just policy answers but mythic futures, visions of restoration, collapse, acceleration, or exit. Time itself becomes the battleground: where the Left frames it as catastrophe to be averted, the Right proclaims it as destiny to be seized.

This asymmetry of temporal imagination ensured that the vacuum left by resignation would be quickly filled. Neoreactionaries moved swiftly to occupy the future tense that the Left had abandoned, offering their own dark answers to Fisher’s unasked question of what comes after neoliberalism. This ossification is evident in the Left’s continued reliance on twentieth-century paradigms even as capitalism mutates into new forms. Many progressives still cling to familiar coordinates: traditional class struggle, the old welfare-state model, and rights-based liberalism, even in an era when digital, deterritorialized finance capitalism obeys none of those coordinates. Nowhere is this more visible than in the media and rhetorical sphere: progressive movements focus on policy details and fact-based argumentation to win public support on issues like inequality or climate change, assuming that rational debate in the public sphere still holds sway. But in the emerging hyperreal landscape of digital politics, a landscape defined by influencer theatrics, algorithm-driven outrage cycles, and rolling news feeds, such earnest approaches struggle to gain traction.

Fisher powerfully shows how neoliberalism feels, yet the analysis sometimes lets mood outrun mechanism. The signature categories he foregrounds, depressive hedonia, hauntology, and the business ontology of audit culture, privilege a melancholic structure of feeling over a thick account of the institutional levers that manufacture it. The deeper irony is that capitalist realism has been metabolised by platform culture into a content mood. Fisher’s lines and tropes circulate as doomer vernacular across theorygram and BreadTube, from AOC Met Gala meta-memes to “We fuckin on the Capitalist Realism bed”, converting melancholia into engagement and critique into aesthetic commodity. Facebook groups like “Mark Fisher Memes for Hauntological Teens” and “Mark Fisher Depressive Ghostposting” illustrate the loop: the meme becomes a placeholder for the text, a gateway for some readers yet a memetic reduction for many, and the cycle is resold as data. In this feedback, a diagnosis of paralysis turns into consolation content, the vibe becomes the product, and the product sustains the very feeds that monetise fatigue.

Compounding this stagnation is an inward-looking purity culture that saps the Left’s broad appeal. In the absence of forward-looking vision, leftist spaces turned policing and critique upon themselves. Fisher famously lambasted this tendency as the “vampire castle” of moralism: a climate in which leftists swiftly ostracize allies for minor ideological deviations and enforce a rigid linguistic orthodoxy.^[44] The effect has been stifling. By prioritizing internecine purity over expansive solidarity, such spaces became unwelcoming and claustrophobic at the very moment when flexibility and growth were needed most​. The resulting malaise is palpable: activists and intellectuals who once positioned themselves at the vanguard of liberation now often seem demoralized, merely reacting to crises rather than setting the agenda. In the flattened political horizon of capitalist realism, alternatives appear anaemic.

Figures who once positioned themselves as critics of power, including intellectuals, artists, and media personalities, have increasingly found themselves aligned with reactionary currents, not necessarily through a conscious ideological commitment but as a strategic adaptation to the demands of cultural production in the digital age. Their trajectory is not simply a matter of changing beliefs but an indication of how reaction has been rebranded as the last vestige of transgression in a media landscape of endless exposure. In effect, media decide what is real (what can be remembered or transmitted) and also shape how we think: our very consciousness and categories. Friedrich Kittler even speaks of modern media as an “anthropological a priori”,^[45] meaning they come before and form the basis of human subjectivity rather than being mere tools we deliberately use.

What these trajectories reveal is not a coherent ideological drift but an adaptive strategy to remain legible in a digital marketplace that punishes predictability. The left, especially in its academic and media expressions, has tended to retreat into a defensive posture: vigilant against errors yet increasingly drawn into recursive disputes over its own standards. Meanwhile, the reactionary sphere, unburdened by the need for systematic reasoning, operates with a fluidity that makes it more adaptable to the conditions of entropic modernity.

If the past decade has seen a wave of prominent defections from left to right, it is because reactionary thought has become the ultimate contrarian stance in an intellectual landscape where progressive hegemony has been eroded not by superior arguments but by structural entropy. The figures who have embraced this shift are not visionaries but opportunists of chaos, figures who have learned that in an era of ideological freefall, the most lucrative position is always at the edge of collapse.

The Left’s ossification can be read not just as an ideological lapse but as an isomorphic fit to a reconfigured field. Organisations that once accumulated power through membership and antagonism were recoded by audit grammars into projects, outputs, and deliverables; the grant calendar displaced strategic time, so initiative is discounted relative to compliance. Platform publicity imposes a visibility calculus in which agenda setting carries asymmetric downside risk, and reputational externalities make caution rational. Class recomposition disperses workers across logistics, services, and platforms, thinning associational density, while the Left failed to invent binding forms capable of translating swarms, fandoms, and mutual-aid bursts into durable leverage. NGO-isation here is a supply-side adaptation to fund legibility rather than a demand from youth, whose political time is absorbed by precarious work, creator economies, and platform-native publics that seldom crystalize into institutions. Legal and administrative architectures, from anti-protest statutes (as evidenced by the flagrant criminalisation of protests against the genocide of the Palestinian people by the government of Israel) to procurement regimes, convert confrontation into liability, so proceduralism becomes self-defence. Cultural infrastructures are folded into content markets, outsourcing world-making to brands and eroding the symbolic craft that organises belonging. The result is a rational conservatism of means that presents as doctrinal rigidity but is better understood as an infrastructural equilibrium produced by funding cycles, platform publicity, and managerial metrics, within which imagination and experimentation are priced as risk.

Ossification denotes a pathological accommodation. It translates Lyotard’s incredulity toward metanarratives into programmable diversity, in which difference is rendered as segment, target, and optimization variable rather than as a universal claim on justice.^[46] The performative criterion elevates calculability as legitimacy, so that justification travels as evidence and benchmarking rather than as shared horizons.^[47] Adtech infrastructures operationalise identity as predictive categorisation, while multi-sided platforms extract rent from the heterogeneity they curate and enclose circulation within engagement metrics.^[48] In the cultural field, small narratives are commodified as lifestyle assets, authenticity is capitalised as brand value, and institutions capable of binding commitment are displaced by repertoires of affective distinction.^[49] The cumulative effect is not merely rhetorical. Recognition is routed through segmentation and metrics, redistribution is deferred, and the symbolic craft of belonging is outsourced to advertisers and influencers. Ossification names this capitulation: a regressive equilibrium in which the very conditions of collective world-making are surrendered to managerial and platform logics.

But if the Left is trapped today in recursive feedback failures, caught in cybernetic paralysis, it is not just because its infrastructures are outpaced or its tactics outmanoeuvred. Beneath these technical and organisational symptoms lies a deeper, more fundamental loss: the collapse of its capacity for narrative cognition. The Left’s systems of organisation have stalled not merely because they fail to process information efficiently but because they no longer believe in their own future. In this sense, narrative is not ornamental to system design: it is the operating system itself. No political system, however sophisticated its internal loops, can survive without a story to sustain its sense of purpose and trajectory. Narrative functions as the software that binds distributed actors into collective intelligence; it enables social systems to metabolise complexity into orientation, to translate raw information into direction. Without this narrative architecture, feedback becomes noise, and systems lose the capacity for self-steering. The Left today exemplifies this breakdown. Having relinquished the production of shared horizons (out of fear of totalising myths or historic betrayals) it has become informationally rich but directionally blind.

Against the Gospel of Collapse: Futures without Teleonomy

Van de Mieroop claims that the fight over reality has always been, at root, a fight over story.^[50] What we see collapsing is specifically the modern way of managing truth: anti-narrative in form but mythic in function, bypassing linear logic to create the impression of an incontrovertible truth recorded in the archive. Across time, then, we see that when people lose faith in abstract structures (be it imperial bureaucracy or liberal academic consensus), they resort to story and collage, assembling bits of reality into a persuasive tapestry of meaning.

The turn from system to story signals not simply a change of form but a transformation in the very metabolism of truth. Hovering over all these developments (the left’s ossification, the Right’s reactionary turn, the chaotic info-sphere in which they clash) is the larger condition that this text calls entropic modernity. This concept denotes the peculiar state of contemporary society in which traditional structures of meaning and order have broken down, leaving a landscape of fragmentation, uncertainty, and incessant flux. In physics, entropy signifies a measure of disorder or the dissipation of energy; by analogy, entropic modernity describes a cultural-political order that trends toward disintegration of shared narratives and the dispersal of authority into unstable networks.

Entropic modernity, as the hypertrophied aftershock of postmodernity, is not a stable condition but a cascading wavefront. We are not post-entropic, nor have we arrived at any plateau of synthesis or settlement. Instead, we find ourselves surfing the cusp of this accelerating wave: momentum without destination. There is no promised landing ground, no stable terrain to claim as the “next stage”. What unfolds is a perpetual deferral of the future: a condition of suspended propulsion, where entropy and intensification coincide. The logics of acceleration (speed, data proliferation, informational noise) do not resolve into order but multiply disintegration. We inhabit a topology of ongoing transition, where even attempts at recuperation or restoration feed the very entropy they seek to resist. If modernity once offered narratives of progress, and postmodernity dismantled them, entropic modernity thrives in the turbulence of their debris, a feverish looping of exhaustion and escalation. The wave does not break; it endlessly crests.

Key to entropic modernity is the concept of information entropy: the idea that beyond a certain threshold, an overabundance of information leads not to enlightenment but to disorientation and the breakdown of consensus reality. Claude Shannon’s information theory^[51] defined entropy as the unpredictability or randomness in a set of messages; apply this socially, and our public sphere now approaches maximum entropy as signal and noise become indistinguishable. The fragmentation of narrative is both a cause and effect of this condition. Without shared narratives, society splinters into echo chambers; as it splinters, generating coherent shared narratives becomes ever more difficult. This self-reinforcing cycle is evident all around us.

Entropic modernity is our predicament: a condition of dissolution that has empowered neoreactionary and nihilistic forces. But within entropy lies the potential for a new order.

Yet, the future is not foreordained.

Entropic modernity challenges us to imagine progress without the crutch of inevitability. The Enlightenment (and Marxism after it) was fueled by a teleonomical^[52] belief: that history has a direction, that reason or class struggle propels us toward a definite better end. This belief has collapsed for many, and perhaps that’s a good thing: it forces humanity to confront the fact that a better future must be consciously constructed, not simply awaited. In a non-teleonomical worldview, progress becomes a choice and a struggle, not a fate. We can no longer assume the arc of history bends toward justice on its own: we have to bend it. This sobering realization can be empowering in a way: it dispels complacency and magical thinking. If things are to improve, human agency in all its messy unpredictability has to do it.

This text sets out not to lament the Left’s failures but to confront the metaphysical vacuum at capitalism’s endgame. We refuse to simply mourn the death of truth, coherence, or order in the face of entropic modernity. Instead, we need to explore how to resurrect the potential of chaos as a site of emergence, complexity, and collective power.

The ossification of the Left can be reversed by infusing it with the very dynamism it once had: an openness to the new, a willingness to mutate and experiment, a talent for hacking culture. Resisting the neoreactionary turn entails abandoning twentieth-century templates in favor of a synthesis adequate to contemporary conditions. That means moving beyond base-superstructure reductionism, since under informational capitalism, semiotic and material circuits couple and co-amplify. Cryptocurrencies illustrate the point: a speculative narrative crystalize into large-scale capital formation.

Marxist theory, at its strongest, recognised this entanglement of material determination and narrative form. Material conditions do not mechanically produce consciousness; they require mediation, interpretation, and framing. History, as Marx understood it, is made not in the abstract but through the “class struggle”: that is, through collective narration of shared antagonism and possibility. When the working class no longer sees itself as a class, the conditions of exploitation persist, but the motor of history seizes.

In this light, what has paralysed the Left is not merely cybernetic noise but the collapse of its narrative metabolism. The stories that once animated collective purpose, progress, solidarity, internationalism, the dignity of labor, and historical mission have fragmented under the centrifugal forces of entropic modernity. In their place, procedural moralism and defensive rhetoric circulate in closed loops, addressing the converted while failing to project futures compelling enough to recruit new allies.

Meanwhile, reactionary forces thrive precisely because they understand, viscerally if not theoretically, that narrative is power. They flood the public sphere with apocalyptic and restorative myths, deliberately blurring fact and fiction to create emotional resonance. Their narrative architectures, while chaotic and often incoherent, are nonetheless effective cybernetic engines: they convert fear into mobilisation, resentment into solidarity, fantasy into orientation. They synchronise distributed attention into coordinated action. The Left, by contrast, has treated narrative as a risk to be managed rather than as a system to be engineered.

Yet there is no neutral ground here. In an age of communicative capitalism and hyper-mediated reality, the absence of narrative is narrative: it reads as drift, defeat, exhaustion. The technocratic language of facts and policies, no matter how precise, cannot substitute for stories that make sense of the world and invite participation in its remaking.

This is where speculative futures must be rehabilitated: not as utopian indulgence but as a disciplined practice of collective rationality under uncertainty. Speculation is not the opposite of materialism; it is its necessary extension in conditions of systemic complexity. Capitalism speculates constantly: markets are anticipatory machines that price the future into the present. Reactionary politics speculates freely: it offers cathartic fictions of collapse and rebirth. The Left, uniquely, has constrained its own speculative imagination out of fear of repeating past errors.

But in doing so, it has abandoned the very mechanism by which collective rationality is composed. Speculative narratives, properly anchored in material analysis, function as cognitive infrastructures. They do not promise false certainty but furnish provisional maps for action. They allow distributed actors to synchronise intentions, to orient amidst flux, to recognise shared stakes. Without them, systems remain inert, feedback loops degenerate into noise, and agency collapses into reactive crisis management.

The task, then, is to reforge narrative as a vector of collective rationality, not as aesthetic garnish or strategic branding. This means refusing both technocratic fatalism and reactionary mythos. It means building narrative architectures that acknowledge determination without succumbing to mechanical determinism; that embrace contingency without lapsing into nihilism.

To rebuild the Left’s cybernetic capacity is thus inseparable from rebuilding its narrative metabolism. The Left must become not only an architect of infrastructures but a composer of futures. This is not a call for comforting fictions. It is a call for narratives that function as systems of orientation in an entropic world. Narratives that map the real while stretching it toward the possible. Narratives that restore feedback, not just within the Left but between the Left and the societies it seeks to transform. Only then can it recover its function as a system capable not merely of critique but of coordinated transformation.