Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

To oversimplify a lot of things, there are few fields with as wide a disparity in aesthetic ideals and practical realities as programming. Actual software that exists in the world is a bewildering tangle of pragmatic compromises reached by people whose relationship with caffeine as they desperately chase deadlines is analogous to Nick Land’s relationship with amphetamines. There is almost no elegant theory or underlying design principle. There is just spur-of-the-moment cleverness soldered together with legacy code with an inefficiency that puts evolution to shame.