Hi Arx, have you tried locating Nick Land in Shanghai? I live here and have yet to get any clues as to his whereabouts. Good to read about another like-minded individual such as yourself. I am familiar with incels so I got a kindle copy of your book, though that's not my main reason. I think you have empathy for people, so I look forward to your take on this phenomenon that has inflicted so many Western (and Westernised Asian) men, and increasingly women too, the latter manifesting in a different way from men. I will be following more of your writings on other platforms. I am curious about what you mean regarding low-agency PoC literary fiction. Do you mean pandering to the latest accepted liberal discourse, or familial kinships?
Thanks for your thoughts - I haven't ever thought of locating Nick since, as far as I know, he values his privacy and isn't known to meet up with others iRL.
Low-agency = complaining about their comparatively low status in the PMC striver cultural class, focusing on narratives of victimization (without any genuine geopolitical contextualization of Asian-Americans as imperial subjects / mentally colonized), approval-seeking of white cultural institutions, characters defined by disempowerment, evasion of any expressions of anger, disguised assimilationism, wholesale repudiation of their home cultures as morally inferior to liberal values, etc.
Enjoyed this conversation. At first I was worried the voice modulation would make it difficult to understand, but you get used to it pretty quickly.
I thought the discussion of evolutionary psychology and its relation to the “manosphere” in particular was interesting. Looking back at my own intellectual path I can see that I was interested in a lot of these topics that we might today call manosphere-adjacent but not actually part of the manosphere. This would have been around 2010, I was finishing high school and got really interested in the paleo diet, HIIT, barefoot running…all this stuff posited that the way humans lived before agriculture was healthier and ideal, and this could then be expanded to encompass other things like relationships. I remember the book “Sex at Dawn” was huge but was probably also used by many to justify extramarital relationships or assuage their own guilt. For myself I got into Darwin’s “The Descent of Man.” Oh, and we should also throw Stoicism into that mix as well.
Still waiting for someone to write a sort of definitive history that ties all this together, as unless I’m out on a limb here there were many, many people into this heady mix of stuff and a lot of blogs connected to it. Tim Ferris may have been a sort of figurehead at the time. Anyway, that’s the end of my ramble!
Thank you for having me on - it was a great conversation with a great interviewer. Your style really resonated with me and I think we covered the range of topics very well. Appreciate the opportunity.
Hi Arx, have you tried locating Nick Land in Shanghai? I live here and have yet to get any clues as to his whereabouts. Good to read about another like-minded individual such as yourself. I am familiar with incels so I got a kindle copy of your book, though that's not my main reason. I think you have empathy for people, so I look forward to your take on this phenomenon that has inflicted so many Western (and Westernised Asian) men, and increasingly women too, the latter manifesting in a different way from men. I will be following more of your writings on other platforms. I am curious about what you mean regarding low-agency PoC literary fiction. Do you mean pandering to the latest accepted liberal discourse, or familial kinships?
Thanks for your thoughts - I haven't ever thought of locating Nick since, as far as I know, he values his privacy and isn't known to meet up with others iRL.
Low-agency = complaining about their comparatively low status in the PMC striver cultural class, focusing on narratives of victimization (without any genuine geopolitical contextualization of Asian-Americans as imperial subjects / mentally colonized), approval-seeking of white cultural institutions, characters defined by disempowerment, evasion of any expressions of anger, disguised assimilationism, wholesale repudiation of their home cultures as morally inferior to liberal values, etc.
Enjoyed this conversation. At first I was worried the voice modulation would make it difficult to understand, but you get used to it pretty quickly.
I thought the discussion of evolutionary psychology and its relation to the “manosphere” in particular was interesting. Looking back at my own intellectual path I can see that I was interested in a lot of these topics that we might today call manosphere-adjacent but not actually part of the manosphere. This would have been around 2010, I was finishing high school and got really interested in the paleo diet, HIIT, barefoot running…all this stuff posited that the way humans lived before agriculture was healthier and ideal, and this could then be expanded to encompass other things like relationships. I remember the book “Sex at Dawn” was huge but was probably also used by many to justify extramarital relationships or assuage their own guilt. For myself I got into Darwin’s “The Descent of Man.” Oh, and we should also throw Stoicism into that mix as well.
Still waiting for someone to write a sort of definitive history that ties all this together, as unless I’m out on a limb here there were many, many people into this heady mix of stuff and a lot of blogs connected to it. Tim Ferris may have been a sort of figurehead at the time. Anyway, that’s the end of my ramble!
Great analysis of that era! I agree that people use science to justify their own behaviour which might otherwise be regarded as simple selfishness.
Gio Pennachietti has done some interesting breakdowns of what happened in the space:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4bFi7dDwAY
Thank you for having me on - it was a great conversation with a great interviewer. Your style really resonated with me and I think we covered the range of topics very well. Appreciate the opportunity.