Event Details

Professor Roger Burrows (School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University) will be presenting at this event hosted by the Centre for Alternative to Social and Economic Inequalities (CASEI)

On Neoreaction (NRx) and its Software

This public talk examines the impact of neoreactionary (NRx) thinking - that of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land, Peter Thiel and Patri Friedman in particular - on contemporary, political debates manifest in 'architectures of exit'. It specifically focuses on Urbit, as an NRx digital architecture that captures how post-neoliberal politics imagines notions of freedom and sovereignty through a micro-fracturing of nation-states into 'gov-corps'. It traces the development of NRx philosophy - and situates this within contemporary political and technological change to theorize the significance of exit manifest within the notion of 'dynamic geographies'. While technological programmes such a Urbit may never ultimately succeed, I argue that these, and other speculative investments such as 'seasteading', reflect broader post-neoliberal NRx imaginaries that were prefigured a quarter of a century ago in The Sovereign Individual (co-authored by Lord William Rees-Mogg).