Sean Gabb did something similar to Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s high-school poet and (God help us) our Poet Laureate.
http://www.seangabb.co.uk/?q=node/302

I recommend ‘Hubristic User Interfaces’ and ‘Almost Pure Empty Poetry’ to start.

If you look at Yarvin’s technology:

http://www.urbit.org/2013/11/18/urbit-is-easy-ch1.html

It starts off citing Yorhe Looees Borjes:

“Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.”

If you are used to existing software code in the most C-ish style, Yarvin’s first example is jarring perhaps:

~waclux-tomwyc/try=> “hello, world”
“hello, world”

~waclux-tomwyc/try=> (add 2 2)
4

~waclux-tomwyc/try=> :hello %world
“hello, world.”

~waclux-tomwyc/try=> :cat /=main=/bin/hello/hoon
::
:: /=main=/bin/hello/hoon
::
|= *
|= [planet=@ta ~]
^- bowl
:_ ~ :_ ~
:- %%
!>(“hello, {(trip planet)}.”)

The jarring, if you are the sort to be so jarred, is intentional. The non-seeker of Yarvinesque-flavored technology will look at that, perhaps see flashes of Perl before their eyes, say “EWWW!”, and flee for pastures rendered more green by their contrasting normality. The seeker of the Yarvin Enlightenment will be intrigued and put in the effort to understand Post 1. Once he completes his struggle session with Post 1, he will say to himself, even if sotto voce, “Now I understand: I have power because I am among the Few who understand. We Few are better than those Many. They don’t understand. We are 1337 haX0rz! They are n00bz! Under the sign of @1-!hoon? (liturgically lowercased), we will conquer. We will trod upon the necks of the Many n00bs, feast on their blood, and take their girlz to ourselves. ”

Once Yarvin’s pound of flesh is extracted by Post 1, some will fall away into broad paths but, for Yarvin’s desired demographic, loss aversion will kick in and they will persevere, the most 1337 to the bitter end as their costs are much more sunk than those that turn back. Those few will then urbit around Yarvin as satellites, reflectors of the glory that is Yarvin.

Some may even discover, as Dzugashvili did when he found Ulaynov was not Ulaynovist enough for Ulaynovism, that Yarvin is not Yarvinist enough for Yarvinism. Like Dzugashvili, who had to destroy Ulaynov for the sake of Ulaynov, they may seek to escape Yarvin for Yarvin’s sake. Since, unlike Dzugashvili, they aren’t veteran terrorists, they will take the row of the Few and fork into their own groups of more Yarvin than Thou (Yarvin). Then they will say to themselves, even if sotto voce, “Now we understand: we have power because we am among the Few who understand. We are the Fewest of the Few. The other Few are not only beneath us, they are more fallen than even the Many. They understand but they have rejected Understanding. We are the truest of 1337 haX0rz! The Few are fallen and have become n00bz! Under the sign of @1-!HOON++ (liturgically uppercased), we will conquer the Many and destroy the non-Few Few. We will trod upon the pencil necks of the Fallen Few, feast on their Code Red Mountain Dew saturated blood, and …wait, they don’t have any girlz.”

You can tell schismatic blood flows through your caffeine laced veins if most of your conversations can be reduced to lexing and parsing. If you re-read Yarvinist moldbuggery for its fine shades and find yourself searching for Yarvin’s original intent, you may be a schismatic. If you find yourself building a new terminological wall to separate yourself from those whose neologisms don’t possess the proper ritual punctuation and significant white space, you might already be a schismatic. If Yarvin and his autodidactic squiggles are not Yarvin enough for you, you are not only a schismatic, you are a fire-breathing evangelizing Yarvinist fundamentalist schismatic. The only thing you lack is being born again with your own personal Yarvin.

Yarvinist moldbuggery will never be accessible to the masses. Attempts to make it accessible defeat the purpose of Yarvinist moldbuggery. The labyrinth winds its way to a place in a new ruling class intended to be the vanguard of the not proletariat. It’s hard to be a new ruling class when everyone else is trying to freeload off your special ruling class Mountain Dew. The more impenetrable the moldbuggery, the more exalted the Yarvinism (and, by extension, the Yarvinist).

All of which amuses me. As I’ve said before, Yarvin should come with this helpful disclaimer branded into his forehead: FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES only.

Take for instance the “State of Nature.” An idea of what man is like in the state of nature lies at the heart of all three of the Enlightenment-spawned political/sociological perspectives, namely those of Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke. Hobbes view was the war of all against all which must be suppressed at all costs by the ultimately powerful sovereign (a quite innovative idea at the time, I might add, and very distant from traditional conceptions of monarchical order). Rousseau saw man’s basic nature as nurturing, cooperative, and peaceful, with civilization an imposed corruption that kept us from that blissful state. Locke’s perspective was a sort of middle-ground, accepting that people have negative/irrational individual traits but arguing that they will naturally form a government to rationally see to their safety and posterity.

All three of these perspectives are correct to a degree, and all of them are wrong in some very important fundamentals. At the time their originators were writing our understanding of anthropology, psychology (both mass and individual), and the origins of civilization were practically nil, so the error is not necessarily something to blame them for. The problem is that these perspectives, which we now know to be at best only partial understandings of human behavior patterns, still form the priors for almost all modern political discourse. There have been no “updates” to them despite enormous strides in our understanding of human nature from anthropological, historical, neurobiological, and sociobiological perspectives.

Rousseauians (progressives) still assume the noble savage and his corruption by civilization. Lockeans (classical liberals, libertarians, American conservatives) still assume that humans can subdue any innate a/irrationalities to political ratiocination. I can’t think of any remaining Hobbesians, but I perceive a danger of neoreaction falling into that slot as, well, a reaction to the triumph of the other two schools despite it being no less mistaken than they are, and no less a product of the Enlightenment period’s limited understanding of human biological and civilizational development.

This is what the DE attempts to do and, at heart, the attempts to resist it are what I feel neoreaction is reacting against.

I would say that it is clear that Moldbug was loquacious for a reason. He has managed to inspire a whole internet community from his oeuvre, so he must have been doing something right.

Picking on spelling errors is a very low form of internet debate, but if someone reads sufficient volume that they can easily spell “hideous” and “prolix” then they are more likely to appreciate Moldbug’s breezy and discursive mode.

Still, de gustibus. I wouldn’t deny for a moment that brevity would improve accessibility. I just don’t want “Moldbug is a terrible writer” to appear unanimous.

However, I don’t understand the Dark Enlightenment as an anti-Enlightenment movement, but as a second Enlightenment. The Dark Enlightenment is merely a strand of neoreaction: it is the realisation that humans are not created equal.

As you say, Enlightenment bashing is a bit silly. It was the age of Hume as well as Rousseau.