Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,30
post-Internet art,” was making some last-minute preparations for the show’s opening. He was a neat and droll man in his mid-thirties, a native of Auckland who had lived for many years in Berlin, where he was a significant figure in the international art scene. He talked me through the conceptual framework for the show. It was structured around games—in theory playable, but in practice encountered as sculptures—representing two different kinds of political vision for New Zealand’s future. The bright and airy ground floor space was filled with tactile, bodily game-sculptures, riffs on Jenga and Operation and Twister. These works, incorporating collaborative and spontaneous ideas of play, were informed by a recent book called The New Zealand Project by a young left-wing thinker named Max Harris, which explored a humane, collectivist politics influenced by Māori beliefs about society.
Down in the low-ceilinged, dungeon-like basement was a set of sculptures rooted in an entirely different understanding of play, more rule-bound and cerebral. These were based on the kind of role-playing strategy games particularly beloved of Silicon Valley tech types, and representing a Thielian vision of the country’s future. The psychological effect of this spatial dimension of the show was immediate: upstairs, you could breathe, you could see things clearly, whereas to walk downstairs was to feel oppressed by low ceilings, by an absence of natural light, by the apocalyptic darkness captured in Simon’s elaborate sculptures.
This was a world Simon himself knew intimately. What was strangest and most unnerving about his art was the sense that he was allowing us to see this world not from the outside in, but from the inside out, and this required a certain level of proximity—often to people whose politics he found repellent. (There was in this sense a journalistic quality in Simon’s approach to his work, if not to the work itself.) Over beers in Anthony’s kitchen the previous night, Simon had told me about a dinner party he had been to in San Francisco earlier that year, at the home of a techie acquaintance. There had been a lot of Silicon Valley new money types there, he said, a lot of “blockchain entrepreneurs.” There were MAGA hats, and there was palpable excitement about Trump and the great rupture he seemed to represent. These people were from hacker backgrounds, and their view of the world arose out of a deep ethos of lulz. It was as though the new president had pulled off the ultimate troll on the liberal establishment. Seated next to Simon at dinner was a man named Curtis Yarvin, who had founded a computing platform named Urbit, with the help of Thiel’s money. As anyone who took an unhealthy interest in the weirder recesses of the online far-right was aware, Yarvin was more widely known as the blogger Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug was the intellectual progenitor of neoreaction, an antidemocratic movement that advocated for a kind of white-nationalist oligarchic neofeudalism—rule by and for a self-proclaimed cognitive elite—and which had found a small but influential constituency in Silicon Valley.
Beneath all the intricacy and detail of its world-building, The Founder’s Paradox was clearly animated by an uneasy fascination with the utopian future imagined by the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley. The exhibition’s centerpiece was a tabletop strategy game called Founders, which drew heavily on the aesthetic—as well as the explicitly colonialist language and objectives—of The Settlers of Catan, a massively popular multiplayer strategy board game. The aim of Founders, as clarified by the accompanying text and by the piece’s lurid illustrations, was not simply to evade the apocalypse, but to prosper from it. First you acquired land in New Zealand, with its rich resources and clean air, away from the chaos and ecological devastation gripping the rest of the world. Next you moved on to seasteading, the libertarian ideal of constructing man-made islands in international waters. On these floating utopian micro-states, wealthy tech innovators would be free to go about their business without interference from democratic governments. (Thiel was an early investor in, and advocate of, the seasteading movement, though his interest has waned in recent years.) Then you mined the moon for its ore and other resources, before moving on to colonize Mars. This last level of the game reflected the current preferred futurist fantasy, most famously advanced by Thiel’s former PayPal colleague Elon Musk, with his dream of fleeing a dying planet Earth for privately owned colonies on Mars.
The influence of The Sovereign Individual was all over the show. It was a detailed