From Wikipedia:
Reactionary modernism is a term first coined by Jeffrey Herf[1] in the 1980s to describe the mixture of “great enthusiasm for modern technology with a rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy” that was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism.[2] In turn, this ideology of reactionary modernism was closely linked to the original, positive view of the Sonderweg, which saw Germany as the great Central European power, neither of the West nor of the East.
From John Ganz on this Peter Thiel op-ed:
When Thiel writes about a “war on the internet” and “the internet” that had “begun our liberation,” the natural assumption is to assume that he’s speaking figuratively, that this is a metonym or synecdoche meaning “people on the internet.” But let’s say he’s being literal: for Thiel, the internet is a subject, it is doing something and the machines, The Big Machine has agency—it is “agentic,” as the tech people like to say. This is the viewpoint of the “Dark Enlightenment” and “neo-reaction,” which forms part of Thiel’s intellectual milieu. The belief is that a technological singularity is coming and the elect must work to accelerate it. The state must organize itself like an enterprise for this work to be completed. Progress, which is hampered by democracy, must have an authoritarian state to continue unabated. This is, of course, reactionary modernism: a belief in technological advances without the sentimental baggage of the Enlightenment.
https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/reading-thiels-op-ed
Mark Carrigan 