"Anissimov's Jolt to the Far Right"

Upgraded and adapted from an exchange in the Moot:

First, a generally useful point for context: I have always argued that futurisms conduce to reactionary corporate-military politics [1] in their acquiescent gizmo-fetishizing consumer fandoms and [2] in their daydreams of elite technocratic circumventions of democracy via design and [3] in their reduction to technical amplification of a progress for which political struggles among stakeholders in history in the direction of equity-in-diversity are always required in fact and [4] in their naturalization of the status quo through fantasies of status quo amplification peddled as "disruption" and "accelerating change" and so on.

Now, for years and years before what you call Anissimov's "jolt to the right" I have accused him of advocating a reactionary politics of plutocratic corporatism, fetishistic militarism, and anti-democratic eugenic and technocratic elitism. Check out the Superlative Summary and scroll to the pieces responding to him in particular -- under the handy heading "Michael Annisimov" -- over many years for a sense of what I am talking about. Of course, he whined and denied this as name calling but never responded to the substance of what I was saying. Now he lets his fascist freak flag fly, I can't say that I am at all surprised.

Second, a more gossipy and hypothetical point: Anissimov seems to me to have been somewhat left behind when the music stopped and many of the cultists he has hobnobbed with since he was a dumb conventionally-bright pampered white cluck of a kid ready to swallow a bunch of simplistic consoling self-congratulatory libertopian techbrotarian just-so stories online guru-wannabes told him to explain the complexities of the world for him and then they all grabbed chairs in better-funded more mainstream-sounding institutional perches with corporate (Google) and university affiliations (Stanford, Oxford). Rather than examining his enabling scientistic/ eugenic/ libertopian/ futurological assumptions he has doubled down on them. He's now opting for being a bigger freaky fish in an even smaller freaky pond in the Robot Cult archipelago because it suits his vanity and because he may be angling for one more round of the guru-wannabe grift so many he supported since he got brainwashed in high school have managed for themselves while he carefully and timidly stood by and watched. I don't think he's got the juice, poor thing, but we shall see how deep he goes down his hellish rabbit hole.