Punk and Gonzo Versions of Reality

Blogs, via their links and various link tracking software provide a quick, computer parsable impression of social networks. It doesn't take too long to figure out where the cliques are, what the centers of thinking are, where to get the best scoop on X, et cetera.

So, what are we to make of this War Nerd guy that's been getting a lot of link-love of recent, and even wrote his own book?

I've been reading him for a while, so I'll let you in on the joke, but only after you listen to his hilarious interview on NPR:

http://teageegeepea.tripod.com/warnerdinterview.mp3

(via tggp, copy the URL to your address bar or it won't work)

and since we're at it, why not read one or two columns while you're in the mood?

Alright, now I can let you in on the joke, such as I am able. That interview is a joke, and if you believed that it was what it sounded like, then the joke is on you.

Realize, for starters, that "Gary Brecher" isn't. He's almost certainly an alternate version of John Dolan dreamed up by John Dolan for the purpose of eradicating mendacity worldwide, and failing that, amusing himself. Even if Brecher isn't Dolan (and I would bet money that he is), the narrative almost works better if you do think of them as the same person. Brecher/Dolan is capable of much higher levels of communication than what he shows here, and since he doesn't sound drunk, assume it's part of the joke.

The joke is that this interview is all bullshit. The interviewer's pious aversion to violence and death? Bullshit, Brecher even goes so far as to explicitly point this out. Since this Brecher doesn't sound anything like Brecher usually does, and Brecher is probably a pseudonym for Dolan, we may even be dealing with nested levels of bullshit.

So exactly at who's expense is the joke? That's somewhat hard to tell. Sure, Brecher is making fun of the NPR interviewer; that much is obvious. That moralizing, condescending self-satisfied hypocrite is exactly the sort of phony person Dolan so detests, so naturally he's playing up the War Nerd at his most unsophisticated and revolting to squeeze as much out of his interviewer as possible, all while still staying more or less true to the character. This is performance art, after all.

(I wanna hear this naive mister rogers wannabe interview someone from 4chan. That's your goddamn nerd culture.)

But beyond that Dolan plays his cards close to the chest, or perhaps I'm just thick. For whom does he shill? Certainly, he hates the current American administration, but who doesn't? Indisputably he hates literary frauds, which he sees as indulgent masturbation of a most mendacious sort. Has a sore spot concerning the so-called war on drugs too. In his incessant, flamboyant hatred of these political institutions he reminds me quite a bit of Christopher Hitchens, another author whom we actually pay to tell us all how depressingly inferior we are.

Indeed the main differences, as I see them, are that Dolan is a better writer, doesn't explicitly spell out his political agenda, and prefers hard drugs to alcohol.

But in the folds hewn between his words Dolan betrays what Mencius Moldbug would call Universalist doctrines, that is, he isn't quite so different in what he believes than your average Yale or Harvard elite. The fact that he probably fucking hates their guts doesn't mean that he isn't in roughly the same ideological grouping.

John Dolan represents a sort of Punk Universalism. The chords, the words, the techniques all came from familiar ground, but they've been stripped of anything unnecessary and they started diverging after that. Whether this curious divergent path leads to anything truly derived depends on just how independent his thinking is. Does Dolan get his kicks picking off the errant and parasitic from his own herd, or does he head his own?

And holistically, why am I writing about all this sort of thing?

Simply, 2008 is an exciting time. The Internet isn't particularly censored, you see, so all sorts of divergent ideologies are constructing their own little niches, cliques and narratives. There are truly weird taxa, like Moldbugian Formalism, and sparkshow power struggles within existing confederations, like what Richard Dawkins does now that he finds biology boring. There are experiments with ultra-distributed, ultra-democratic communities like wikipedia. For whatever reason, perhaps it was their fantastic provincial arrogance, the powers that be saw fit not to make the internet conform to the same rigorous standard of conformity that other media do.