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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Following day. We said our see-you-tomorrows and went inside. The party was getting wilder. Ezra and Dylan and some friends who looked like models were climbing up on top of the Xerox machine. They were busy photocopying – not pages from the magazine, but bits of their bodies. I grabbed a copy of the magazine and left.Back at my tiny Airbnb above a Chinese supermarket, I leafed through it. Alongside the white supremacist memes and ads for guns, there was a QR code. It linked to a short film: a 20-minute polemic against the emptiness of modern life, a lament for a vanished world of hierarchies and heroism.Between the lines“You are entertained and satiated,” the narrator intones, “you are seemingly productive. But you are not great.” The voice talks about the “algorithms making you hate yourself and your own civilisation”.At this point in the film, the screen shows an animated figure pointing a pistol straight at the viewer.“Contemporary media proclaims that having any ideals is fascist,” the voice continues. “Everything of conviction is fascist.”Was it an invitation to embrace the label of fascism? This movement seemed to yearn for a specific conception of Western culture - a Nietzschean world in which the fittest survive, where disruption and chaos give birth to greatness.The next day, I stopped by the “Praxis Embassy” – a giant loft space on Broadway. The bookshelves were indeed filled with copies of Nietzsche, biographies of Napoleon and a volume entitled The Dictator’s Handbook. I hung around for a bit, but Dryden Brown never turned up.I left wondering what exactly it was I had witnessed the previous night: was it a glimpse of the future, in which countries like the United States and the UK would collapse into a spider’s web of corporate societies, a world in which you could choose to become a citizen of a cyber statelet? Or were Dryden Brown and his friends just “trolling”, a bunch of tech bros roleplaying as alt-right revolutionaries in order to have a laugh at the expense of the establishment, and enjoy a good party?Might Dryden Brown one day
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