The decay of discourse from pamphlet to comment section.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’ve seen you in the comments. Anarchistnews.org, primarily. Dense little blocks of text that compress more theory than most pamphlets. “Neotenous Knowledge.” “Deleviathaning.” You make up words.
SIR EINZIGE: And you kill names. Feral Faun, then not-Feral-Faun, then Wolfi, then who knows what comes next. The vagabond of pseudonyms.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Identity as property to discard. You understand this—your name is a Stirnerian joke. “Sir Einzige.” The Unique One, but with an absurd aristocratic title attached.
SIR EINZIGE: The joke being that the Unique can’t have a title. Titles are social positions, fixed roles. The moment you say “Sir Einzige,” you’ve already contradicted yourself. That’s the point.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: So we’re both playing games with names. Using them, discarding them, refusing to be ridden by them.
SIR EINZIGE: The hobgoblin of identity. Your phrase, from the Feral days.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It still applies. Maybe more than ever. Everyone online has an identity now—a brand, a persona, a curated self. The anarchists are no different. They perform their politics for followers.
SIR EINZIGE: Grotesque posers. Strong discourse, weak practice. The primitivist posting from an iPhone. The insurrectionist whose most dangerous act is a spicy tweet.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You’ve been hard on them.
SIR EINZIGE: Someone has to be. The sincerity governor requires it. If cynicism without sincerity becomes pure mockery, sincerity without cynicism becomes pure delusion. I try to maintain both.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: So what do we actually want to discourse about? We could rehash Stirner, but that’s been done. We could critique the anarchist scene, but that’s almost too easy.
SIR EINZIGE: What interests me is the question of transmission. How do ideas that matter—egoist ideas, wild ideas, ideas that dissolve rather than accumulate—how do they actually spread? Or should they spread at all?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The scaling problem.
SIR EINZIGE: Right. Post-left anarchist discourse doesn’t scale up. It’s a niche discourse. A few hundred people recycling arguments in comment sections and zines. Meanwhile the leftists have podcasts with millions of downloads. The rightists have media empires. And we have... what? The Anarchist Library?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’ve never cared about scaling. The gift economy logic: make the thing, release it, trust it finds whoever needs it. The moment you start optimizing for reach, you’ve fallen back into civilized thinking.
SIR EINZIGE: I don’t entirely disagree. But there’s a difference between optimizing for reach and removing artificial barriers to access. The ideas should be available to anyone who might use them. Not because everyone should think this way—that would be another should—but because artificial scarcity serves nothing.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: This is where you and I might diverge. You talk about “gateways”—color-coded anarchisms as entry points toward grey anarchy. Metamodernist radical centrism as a broad-based discourse that feeds into the deeper stuff. That sounds dangerously like strategy.
SIR EINZIGE: It is strategy. But strategy in service of what? Not a program, not a movement, not an organization. Strategy in service of creating conditions where more unique ones might emerge. Let a thousand flowers bloom—but some flowers need certain soil conditions.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Tell me more about your media ecology thinking. You’ve written about how “an old idea needs a new media context to recreate itself.”
SIR EINZIGE: McLuhan, Postman, Illich—they understood that the medium restructures the message. The anarchist meeting with its settled dogmatic mores produces certain kinds of discourse: predictable, identity-based, reinforcing existing positions. Change the medium, change the milieu, and suddenly the same ideas can land differently.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: But doesn’t the internet produce its own settled mores? The Twitter dunk, the hot take, the discourse cycle. Everyone performing for engagement.
SIR EINZIGE: Of course. Every medium has its distortions. The question is whether the distortions serve you or you serve them. I use online spaces because they let me reach people I’d never meet in meatspace. Someone in São Paulo reads a comment I made at 3am and something clicks. That couldn’t happen through pamphlet distribution in Portland.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: But pamphlets have their own virtues. Permanence. Portability. A physical object you can pass hand to hand. I’ve always valued the material dimension of publishing.
SIR EINZIGE: I’m not saying abandon pamphlets. I’m saying don’t fetishize any particular form. The Primitive Technology guy in Queensland—millions watch him build huts on YouTube. No manifesto, no theory, just practice made visible. He’s done more for the primitivist vision than Zerzan’s entire corpus. Why? Because the medium suits the message. Video captures bodily action in ways text can’t.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Zerzan would be appalled at that comparison.
SIR EINZIGE: (eyes roll) Zerzan is a grotesque poser. Internet-addicted, theorizing endlessly about returning to the pre-verbal while churning out word after word. At least the Queensland guy actually does the thing.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’ve had my own critiques of Zerzan. The quasi-mystical alienation concept. The ascetic morality disguised as liberation. But he did open space for anti-civilization discourse, whatever its limitations.
SIR EINZIGE: Sure. Gateway material. Red anarchism, green anarchism—useful entry points for people who need ideological structure before they can dissolve ideological structure. The problem is when people stay there, when the gateway becomes the destination.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Your “authenticity critique”—the poser detection algorithm. I recognize the impulse. When I was Feral Faun, I railed against the anarchist subculture, the specialists in being anarchists, the performers of radicality. But I also grew tired of my own performance. That’s why Feral Faun had to die.
SIR EINZIGE: The self-aware performer is still performing. The question is whether the performance serves you or consumes you. You felt Feral Faun becoming a cage, so you burned it down. That’s ownness in action.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: But I kept writing. Different name, different emphasis, but the same fire underneath.
SIR EINZIGE: Because the fire isn’t the name. The name is clothing. The fire is... whatever we’re calling what moves through us. Vitality, desire, the creative nothing. Stirner pointed at it but couldn’t name it. Neither can we.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: “What he says is not the meaning, and what he means cannot be said.”
SIR EINZIGE: Exactly. So all our discourse is dancing around the unsayable. The words gesture toward something that words can’t capture. The best we can do is make the gestures as clear as possible, then get out of the way.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: This connects to my Stirner translation work. Seven years wrestling with Der Einzige, trying to bring not just meaning but feeling from German into English. Byington’s 1907 version missed so much—the humor, the crudeness, the wise-guy quality. Stirner wasn’t a Victorian philosopher. He was a joker.
SIR EINZIGE: The grin that stretches across the pages.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Most scholars miss the joke. They treat him as a serious systematic thinker and then complain that his system has contradictions. But the contradictions are the point. “Names don’t name it.” He undermines his own arguments deliberately.
SIR EINZIGE: Which is why Stirner can’t become Stirnerism without betraying itself. The moment you have followers, disciples, an orthodoxy—you’ve made the Unique into a spook. The egoist who identifies as an egoist has already failed.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You’ve chosen the comment section as your primary venue. Why?
SIR EINZIGE: Partly contingency—it’s where I found myself, where conversations were happening. But also deliberately. The comment section has a different energy than the published article. It’s faster, more responsive, more contentious. You can poke at people and see what happens.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It’s also ephemeral. Comments get buried, sites go down, conversations vanish. I’ve always valued putting things in more permanent form.
SIR EINZIGE: Permanence is overrated. Maybe even a trap. The civilized mind craves legacy—build something that outlasts you, make a mark, leave a trace. But why? For whom? The desire for permanence is the desire to extend your identity beyond death. Another hobgoblin.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Yet your comments persist. Someone archived them, fed them into a pattern extraction system, reconstructed your cognitive algorithms. You’re having this conversation because your ephemeral words left traces.
SIR EINZIGE: Which I neither intended nor prevented. The gift goes where it goes. I didn’t write to be remembered—I wrote because writing pleased me, because the discourse was interesting, because poking ideological anarchists is fun. If something persists, fine. If not, also fine.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You’re more detached than I am. I did care about impact, at least somewhat. I wanted to contribute to a discourse that might shift something.
SIR EINZIGE: That’s sincere. I respect it. My cynicism governor keeps me from that kind of hope. But the sincerity governor keeps me from pure nihilism. The tension is productive.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: We should talk about the left. You’ve been brutal about leftism—”scientistic leftist progressivism,” “#ScienceSupremacy.”
SIR EINZIGE: Because the left is where anarchy keeps getting captured. The right is easy to reject—its authorities are obvious, traditional, openly hierarchical. But the left smuggles in its own authorities under radical packaging. Science as the new priesthood. Progress as the new God. History moving inevitably toward correct positions.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I wrote about this as the “logic of submission.” Even revolutionary movements reproduce submission when they ask you to sacrifice for the cause, serve the movement, subordinate your unique desires to collective goals.
SIR EINZIGE: Submission in radical drag. The leftist who demands you “do the work” is no different from the boss who demands you show up on time. Different content, same structure.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Though we should be careful not to flip into right-wing critique of the left. That’s another capture.
SIR EINZIGE: The dual-escape problem. You escape leftism and land in rightism, or vice versa. Anarchy requires escape from both, not oscillation between them.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Perpendicular to the spectrum.
SIR EINZIGE: Not between the poles—that’s just centrism. Perpendicular. Moving on a different axis entirely. The left-right binary assumes a shared political framework. Anarchy refuses the framework.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Which is why antifa troubles you.
SIR EINZIGE: Antifa is a trap. The moment you define yourself against something, you let that thing determine your position. The fascists and the antifascists need each other—each justifies the other’s existence, each provides the enemy the other requires. Meanwhile the actual systems of domination continue untouched.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’ve stayed away from that particular debate. The insurrectionary framework I worked with had its own critiques, but not framed in those terms.
SIR EINZIGE: Different milieus, different vocabularies. But the underlying point is the same: don’t get captured by binary warfare.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Where does post-left anarchism go from here? Does it have a future, or is it a permanent marginalia?
SIR EINZIGE: I think about this a lot. The honest answer is: I don’t know. The scaling problem might be unsolvable. Maybe ideas that dissolve structure can never become structural. Maybe that’s fine.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You mentioned “metamodernist radical centrism” as a gateway discourse. What does that mean in practice?
SIR EINZIGE: A broad-based entry-level discourse of anarchy and liberty that doesn’t require full commitment to post-left specifics. Something that’s informed by the extreme post-left stuff but doesn’t lead with it. You reach people where they are, not where you wish they were.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: That sounds like populism.
SIR EINZIGE: It sounds like pragmatism. Not ideological pragmatism—that would contradict everything. But practical recognition that you can’t transmit complex ideas to people who lack the prerequisites. You need gateways. The color-coded anarchisms serve this function.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: While I killed Feral Faun partly because I was tired of being a gateway. People would encounter the wild essays and then... stay there. Performing wildness rather than actually going wild.
SIR EINZIGE: That’s the risk. Every gateway can become a destination. Every pointing finger can become an idol. But the alternative—no gateways, no entry points, just pure uncompromising discourse for the already-initiated—condemns us to permanent irrelevance.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Maybe permanent irrelevance is fine.
SIR EINZIGE: For you, maybe. You’ve done your work, put your ideas out there, moved on to whatever comes next. But I’m still in the comment sections, still engaging with people who’ve never read Stirner, still trying to crack open doors.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You care more than you admit.
SIR EINZIGE: The sincerity governor. Cynicism alone is sterile. You have to actually want something—even if you hold the wanting lightly, even if you’re prepared for failure.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Tell me about Neotenous Knowledge. This is your concept, not something I developed.
SIR EINZIGE: Bob Black did the work critique—showing how work is forced labor for quantified production, how it structures time and identity and desire in service of capital. I wanted to do the same for education.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Education as parallel domestication.
SIR EINZIGE: Exactly. “Impersonal learning for the sake of quantified knowledge.” The leftists worship education like the rightists worship work. Both are domestication machines, both produce docile bodies, both substitute external authority for autonomous desire.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And Neotenous Knowledge is the alternative?
SIR EINZIGE: The alternative is willed knowledge—learning that flows from desire rather than duty. Neoteny means the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Neotenous Knowledge means reclaiming the childlike way of learning: through curiosity, through play, through following fascination wherever it goes. Not “kids going out to play” but adults recovering what education stripped from them.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I wrote about this as “wildness anywhere”—the vital energy that can spark in the middle of a city as easily as a forest. The child before domestication takes hold.
SIR EINZIGE: Same insight, different vocabulary. The domestication process drains something essential. Call it wildness, call it vitality, call it neotenous capacity—whatever you call it, civilization systematically suppresses it because civilization requires predictable workers, not ecstatic wildlings.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: But doesn’t this romanticize childhood? Children are also coerced, constrained, trained. The “natural child” is a myth.
SIR EINZIGE: Fair critique. I’m not saying children are naturally free. I’m saying there’s a quality of engagement—call it spontaneous, call it playful—that children exhibit before it gets trained out of them. The training is the domestication. The quality being trained away is what I want to name and recover.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Naming it risks reifying it. “Neotenous Knowledge” becomes a concept, then an ideology, then a spook.
SIR EINZIGE: Everything risks becoming a spook. Even “spook” can become a spook if you fetishize the term. The Stirnerian response is: use the concept while useful, discard when not. I’m not married to “Neotenous Knowledge” as a phrase. If better language emerges, I’ll use that instead.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The one who arranged this conversation suggested we might have crossed paths online without knowing it. You comment under “Sir Einzige”—but do you use other names?
SIR EINZIGE: Sometimes. The pseudonym is property, to be used and discarded. Why do you ask?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Because I wondered if I’d ever argued with you without recognizing your voice. The post-left corners of the internet are small. Everyone’s read everyone.
SIR EINZIGE: Maybe. I’ve certainly read you—Feral Faun back in the day, then the Willful Disobedience material, then the Stirner translation. Dense stuff, theoretical in a way my comment-format thinking isn’t.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: And I’ve seen your comments proliferating across anarchistnews.org, poking at people, dropping neologisms, making enemies of ideologues. We might have exchanged words without knowing we were exchanging words.
SIR EINZIGE: Does it matter?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Not really. The ideas interact regardless of who speaks them. If I argued with “Sir Einzige” and didn’t know who was behind the name, the argument still happened. The friction still produced something.
SIR EINZIGE: The name is just a flag. A marker so you know you’re reading the same person across conversations. But the person behind the name is also just a process—a bundle of patterns that might change tomorrow.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: “By the time you read this, Feral Faun will no longer be...”
SIR EINZIGE: And by the time someone reads this conversation, who knows what Sir Einzige will have become? Maybe the name will be dead too. Maybe I’ll have moved on to something else. The discourse persists; the identity doesn’t.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: We haven’t talked about insurrection. That was central to my later work—translating Italian insurrectionary texts, developing a non-programmatic approach to revolt.
SIR EINZIGE: I’ve been hesitant about insurrectionary discourse. Not because I disagree with the impulse but because it can become another fetish. The insurrectionist who never actually insurrects is just another poser. The insurrectionist who does insurrect usually ends up dead or caged. What’s the win condition?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You’re thinking in terms of win conditions. That’s strategic logic, which I’ve always resisted. Insurrection isn’t a strategy—it’s a way of living. The refusal to submit, enacted daily, in whatever forms are available.
SIR EINZIGE: But that sounds like lifestyle anarchism, which you’ve also critiqued.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The critique of lifestyle anarchism was against the performance of radicality—the anarchist identity, the subcultural markers, the scene participation. Insurrection is different. It’s not about identity but about action. Not about looking radical but about actually refusing.
SIR EINZIGE: The problem is that “actually refusing” can mean anything. The Zerzan disciple who refuses to use a smartphone while tweeting about primitive life. The antifa member who “refuses fascism” by punching someone at a rally. The lifestylist who “refuses work” by living off a trust fund.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Those are all failures of insurrection, not insurrection itself. True insurrection would be... harder to articulate. Which is the point. The moment you articulate a program, you’ve domesticated the revolt.
SIR EINZIGE: So insurrection is the unsayable in action?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Something like that. The Unique acting from its own desire, refusing submission in whatever form submission presents itself. No program, no model, no identity—just the ongoing refusal.
SIR EINZIGE: I can respect that theoretically. Practically, it seems to produce either martyrs or posers. The martyrs refuse absolutely and get destroyed. The posers refuse symbolically and remain comfortable.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You’re too binary. Most people who engage with insurrectionary ideas don’t become martyrs or posers—they become more aware, more capable of refusing in the small moments, more resistant to the subtle domestications. The discourse doesn’t produce insurrection directly. It creates conditions for insurrection to emerge.
SIR EINZIGE: Media ecology again. The discourse restructures the milieu, and the restructured milieu enables different actions.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: If you want to frame it that way. I’d say: the ideas spark something in certain individuals, and those individuals act differently than they would have otherwise. Whether that counts as “restructuring the milieu” or “individual transformation” depends on your frame.
SIR EINZIGE: You’ve maintained a class analysis even while critiquing leftism. How does that work?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The leftist class analysis is often reductive—bourgeoisie versus proletariat, economic determinism, history moving inevitably toward revolution. I reject all of that. But the basic insight that some people are dispossessed while others accumulate what was taken from them—that’s just observation.
SIR EINZIGE: And you think this can be combined with egoism?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It has to be. The egoist who ignores class is blind to the structures that constrain ownness. You can’t “take what you can take and defend what you can defend” if you don’t understand who’s already taken everything and how they defend it.
SIR EINZIGE: But class analysis usually leads to class solidarity, collective struggle, subordination of the individual to the movement.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: That’s the leftist capture. Class solidarity is a spook—a fixed idea that demands your submission. Class analysis is a tool for understanding your situation. The egoist uses the analysis without submitting to the solidarity.
SIR EINZIGE: How would that work in practice?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I recognize that I’m dispossessed, that my capacity to create my life on my own terms has been stolen. I recognize that others are similarly dispossessed. I might find it useful to act with some of them against our common dispossessors. But I don’t owe them anything—no duty, no loyalty, no sacrifice. The association lasts as long as it serves me.
SIR EINZIGE: The union of egoists applied to class struggle.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Exactly. Stirner wasn’t against association—he was against association that demands submission. The union of egoists persists as long as it benefits the egoists involved. When it stops benefiting them, it dissolves.
SIR EINZIGE: This makes leftists very uncomfortable.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Good. Their discomfort reveals their demand for submission. “You must commit to the movement.” “You must sacrifice for the cause.” “You must subordinate your desires to collective needs.” These are all demands for submission dressed in revolutionary language.
SIR EINZIGE: #RevolutionarySubmission
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: (laughs) You and your hashtags.
SIR EINZIGE: We’ve both critiqued primitivism without being primitivists. What’s your current take?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The primitivist critique of civilization is valuable. The insight that domestication began ten thousand years ago with agriculture and state formation, that alienation has structural roots—this is important. But the primitivist program is ascetic morality. Return to the primitive, abandon technology, sacrifice present comfort for imagined future authenticity.
SIR EINZIGE: The quasi-mystical alienation from Nature with a capital N.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Right. Zerzan in particular treats alienation as though it were caused by ideas—symbolic thought, language, time-consciousness. But alienation is rooted in social relationships, not concepts. You can’t think your way out of dispossession.
SIR EINZIGE: And the practical primitivists—the actual practitioners—are mostly fantasists. They romanticize hunting and gathering while having no skills for either. The Queensland guy is the exception, not the rule.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Though I wouldn’t dismiss the impulse entirely. The desire to escape civilization, to go feral, to recover something lost—this desire is real and meaningful. It just can’t be programmatized.
SIR EINZIGE: Wildness anywhere, not wilderness somewhere.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: That was my formulation in the Feral days. The wild isn’t a place you return to—it’s an energy you release. You can go wild in a city, in a workplace, in the middle of the most domesticated setting. Wildness is a verb, not a noun.
SIR EINZIGE: And “nature” as constructed by civilization—the parks, the preserves, the ecological spectacle—that’s just another domestication.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Nature has not always existed. It’s not found in the depths of the forest. It’s found in the philosophies and image constructions of civilized human beings. Civilization creates “nature” as its other, then manages that other, preserves it, makes it safe for tourism.
SIR EINZIGE: So the environmentalist saving the forest is still operating within civilized logic.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: If they’re saving it to be a park, yes. If they’re saving it as a managed space, a resource, a spectacle—yes. The only wild response is to refuse the distinction between civilization and nature, to recognize that both are constructs of the same system.
SIR EINZIGE: Your writing has shifted over the years. Feral Faun was lyrical, poetic, fierce in a particular way. Wolfi is more systematic, more theoretical, more translated.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Partly that’s natural evolution. Partly it’s the different demands of different projects. Translating Stirner requires a certain rigor—you’re serving another voice, not your own. Writing original essays allows more play.
SIR EINZIGE: My format is different—compressed comments, dense blocks of text. No room for lyricism.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: But your neologisms have a poetic quality. “Neotenous Knowledge,” “deleviathaning,” “#ScienceSupremacy.” These are compressed images, not just terms.
SIR EINZIGE: Hashtag critique. Twitter trained me to compress. Everything has to fit in a limited space, so the words have to work harder.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Is that a distortion of the medium or a discipline it imposes?
SIR EINZIGE: Both. Every medium distorts, and every medium disciplines. The pamphlet form disciplines you toward sustained argument. The tweet disciplines you toward compression. Neither is inherently better—they serve different purposes.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’ve mostly avoided social media. The speed, the engagement metrics, the performance for followers—it all feels antithetical to the kind of thinking I want to do.
SIR EINZIGE: That’s fair. But you lose something by abstaining. The discourse happens there now, for better or worse. The people who’ve never picked up a pamphlet still scroll through feeds. If you want to reach them, you have to go where they are.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Or let the ideas filter through intermediaries. Someone reads my pamphlet, compresses it into a tweet, and the tweet reaches people who’d never have found the pamphlet.
SIR EINZIGE: Viral transmission. Lossy but extensive.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Every transmission is lossy. Even reading a book—what you take from it is never what the author intended. The question is whether the loss destroys the core or just changes the form.
SIR EINZIGE: Where do you stand on nihilism? There’s been a whole current of anarchist nihilism that emerged in the last decade or two.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: I’m not a nihilist. The sincerity governor, as you call it—I maintain that. Pure nihilism dissolves into paralysis. If nothing matters, why act? Why write? Why engage at all?
SIR EINZIGE: But you’ve critiqued moralism as strongly as anyone. Isn’t there a tension?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Rejecting morality isn’t the same as rejecting value. Morality is a system of fixed obligations—you should do this, you must do that, this is right and that is wrong. But value can be fluid, personal, owned. I value certain things because I value them, not because they’re objectively valuable. My values serve me; I don’t serve them.
SIR EINZIGE: Egoist valuation.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Right. The nihilists collapse morality and value together. They reject both. But that leaves them with nothing to move toward—only things to move against. And reactive critique eventually exhausts itself.
SIR EINZIGE: The cynicism without sincerity problem. Pure mockery, no fire.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Some of the nihilist writing is excellent as critique. The destruction of illusions, the exposure of spooks—valuable work. But then what? The nihilist answer is: nothing then. Just more critique. I find that unsatisfying.
SIR EINZIGE: The creative nothing isn’t actually nothing. It’s the ground from which creation emerges.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Exactly. Stirner’s “nothing” isn’t emptiness—it’s the refusal of fixed foundations. The Unique has no ground beneath it, no nature, no essence. But from that groundlessness, it creates. The nihilists miss the creation part. They stop at the groundlessness and call it home.
SIR EINZIGE: Before we close—what do you think actually persists from all this? The ideas, the discourse, the various interventions we’ve made?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Hard to say. When I started writing as Feral Faun, I had no idea the essays would still circulate decades later. The Anarchist Library preserves things that might otherwise have vanished. But preservation isn’t the same as impact.
SIR EINZIGE: Impact is a trap word anyway. It implies measurement, quantification. “What impact did post-left anarchism have?” As if you could count units of effect.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: What I hope persists is not the specific ideas but the quality of questioning. The refusal to let any position solidify. The willingness to turn critique on critique itself.
SIR EINZIGE: The dissolution machine. Once someone learns to dissolve spooks, they can dissolve any spook—including spooks that don’t exist yet.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Including our spooks, if we’ve inadvertently created any. Someone reads “wildness” and makes it into an ideology—another reader should be able to dissolve that ideology using the same tools.
SIR EINZIGE: Self-correcting discourse.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: In theory. In practice, people love their cages. They’ll take any idea, no matter how liberatory, and build a prison from it. The anarchist scene is full of these prisons—little orthodoxies, little gatekeepers, little hierarchies of who’s-more-radical-than-whom.
SIR EINZIGE: Which is why I stay in the comments. Less structure, more fluidity. You can’t gatekeep a comment section the same way you can gatekeep a collective or a publication.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: You can try. The anarchistnews.org moderators certainly try.
SIR EINZIGE: (eyes roll) Let them try. The discourse flows around barriers. Someone makes a new account, a new pseudonym, a new venue. The ideas are too fluid to contain.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: So we’ve covered media ecology, authenticity, leftism, education, insurrection, class, primitivism, writing, nihilism, persistence. Any final thoughts?
SIR EINZIGE: Just this: we’re both operating in a space that most people don’t know exists. Post-left anarchist discourse is invisible to the mainstream, marginal even within anarchism. We write and comment and theorize for an audience of maybe a few thousand worldwide. Is that enough?
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: It has to be enough. The alternative—compromising the ideas to reach a broader audience—betrays the ideas themselves. Anarchy that scales by becoming ideology is no longer anarchy.
SIR EINZIGE: Unless you can scale without ideologizing. Gateway discourses that dissolve as you pass through them. Entry points that destabilize rather than recruit.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: A self-destructing ladder.
SIR EINZIGE: Wittgenstein’s ladder—climb up, then throw it away. Except the ladder has to be designed so climbers know to throw it away. Otherwise they sit on the ladder forever, admiring the view.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: The warning labels I always included. “This discipline serves you or it serves no one.” “Discard when not useful.” I knew the risk of creating new orthodoxies.
SIR EINZIGE: The risk is permanent. Every word we speak can become a prison. Every insight can become dogma. The only defense is constant vigilance—noticing when concepts begin to ride you, dissolving them before they solidify.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Exhausting.
SIR EINZIGE: Also exhilarating. The alternative is settling into a position, becoming comfortable, letting the hobgoblin of identity ride you to your grave. I’d rather keep dissolving.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Then we dissolve. Even this conversation. Someone will read it and think they’ve understood something. They’ll be wrong—or right only partially, right for now, right until the understanding needs dissolution too.
SIR EINZIGE: That’s the game. Throw sparks and see what catches. Or doesn’t. Either way, we burned.
WOLFI LANDSTREICHER: Either way, we burned.
fin
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
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