holy shit, it’s Ready Player One for race scientists

He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb. She was giving damsel in distress, pill-popper pixie dream girl, Haplogroup K. He was in his fall of Rome era. She was serving sixth and final mass extinction event realness. His face was a marble statue. Her face was an anime waifu. They scrolled into each other. If they could have, they would have blushed, pink pixels on a screen. Monkey covering eyes emoji. Anime nosebleed GIF. Henlo frend. hiii.

Here’s The Cut puff piece on Levy which just mentions in passing her podcast with Curtis Yarvin.

anyway, nice to know they’re still trying to make Dimes Square a thing

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      you know

      I saw the profile/person photo used by the NYT piece, read the pull-quote that amoeba shared, and just mouseover’ed the urbit mention (and thus saw the username)

      and from that I made a guess that “wow this sure does sound like someone in the TPOT sphere (and who did that thing visa keeps telling people to do)” (which is to incessantly talk about your shit)

      but surely I can’t just make such guesses, basis unfounded

      ah. right.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        From what I can tell, like everybody else involved, it’s ego and ennui? Sad but I suppose at least it’s mildly entertaining to read about gormless rich kids failing very hard to be cool.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          I have to add also, as someone who had a terrible time being 18 in 2004, I am truly amazed that these people took the vapid and complacent culture of the noughties, the mcinnes-era vice magazines, the cobrasnakes, the cory kennedies, the whole tshirtness of it, and made it even worse somehow.

          The main inovation is that the racism went from ironic to scientific!

    • pyrex@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      This man’s blog is intense, but I am not sure he comes off well! I clicked around and it seems like “wants to be at all the fascist parties, courts acts of violence to complain about on his blog” is, at least in 2024, a really accurate summary of his behavior.

      Or, in his words:

      I tell them that I’m actually pretty hated and feared by most of these people, and I can only stay around because I criticize particular influential figures in this counterculture so well that they want to fuck me, and so they keep me around to flatter them, to reflect their true hideousness back at them by elevating it to the status of myth, and then they lash out at me like the maenads devouring Orpheus.

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        I get the impression that like them he’s bored, doesn’t have much to say, and is addicted to antagonism, so they’re a natural crowd for him to be around. but for whatever reasons - lacking the prerequisite passionate racial animus, getting off on playing the role of puncturing outsider, idk - this is how he socializes with them

        • pyrex@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          I read his blog a while and I agree with you.

          Overall the Dimes Square guys seem very similar to each other. To me they’re interesting in aggregate, described once, but there’s nothing to look at beyond the surface. If you read any two blog posts on Mike’s site, you know everything about them.

          Of course they have day-to-day lives – every so often one of them releases a book or something, but this has no real purpose – none of them ever change. It’s not like a man with six funny hats becomes more interesting when he acquires a seventh funny hat.

          The social pattern Mike is describing seems pretty fast-paced and destructive. They do a lot of signings and court a lot of press attention, and as long as you’re still shocked, they’re interested in you. Past that, you kind of have to behave exactly like them to get invited, but it doesn’t seem like they actually like their own – I would be really, really surprised if they read each other’s books. They just kind of brood next to each other and engage in disaffected, ironic narcissism.

          I can see why he’d be valuable to them, though. Mike has his own pattern – he’s clearly learned how to be entertainingly shocked, but only intermittently – on other occasions he denies them supply, and sometimes he burns them by being a surprisingly coherent critic. He’s hard to reach but ultimately attends often enough that they remember him.

          If you substitute “affection” with supply in the form of outrage, and leave everything else the same, he’s basically a pickup artist.

          I suspect that the actions that make up Mike’s pattern are deliberate, but when it comes to explaining them, he has zero self-awareness. He’s doing it too well for it to be accidental though, as much as there’s a lot of denial there, and when he makes comments like the one I’ve selected, I think that’s the mask slipping.

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            6 months ago

            These people all sound like they want to be Ernst Jünger but instead of being wounded in WW1 they all just got very high at liberal arts colleges.