Composition and publication are two different processes, but the distance between them is collapsing. Of the many ways new media trends might be defined, doing so in terms of such time compression, and process amalgamation, is far from the least accurate and predictive. The Internet accelerates writing in this specific way (perhaps among many others) — so that it approaches a near-instantaneous communicative realization, comparable to that of speech.

This can be elaborated variously. For instance, it might be re-articulated as an incremental suppression of privacy. The author of a book lives with his words in solitude, perhaps for years. An essayist, awaiting publication in a periodical, might wait for weeks, or even months. A blogger is consumed by self-hatred if his words remain private by the time he retires for the night, or early morning. A twitter-addict sustains a particle of semiotic privacy for mere seconds. (Speckle comes next.)

Is this a bad thing? No doubt at least as much as it is a good one. It is no surprise to see an increasing number of micro-political statements among writers, amounting to an attempt to backtrack to slow writing, semiotic privacy, or patient non-communication. The book becomes an icon of refusal, set against the gradient of time. Outside new media, there has to be still more of this stuff … (but who notices that anymore?)

Neoreaction in a nutshells says — simultaneously — that progress is a horror story, and there is no going back. (This is a demanding tension, so there are even fewer neoreactionaries than one might think.) Upon accepting this formula, the response to instant publishing is pre-programmed. It is a nightmare become destiny, far more ruinous than has yet been envisaged, while unstoppable to a degree that no thought-processes are still slow enough to entertain. New media is a mind-shredder, into which we shall all certainly pass.

No reactionary denunciation of this trend can be too extreme, but the only format in which it makes practical sense is that of dynamic survivalism. What do we have to become to pass through the cyclone? That, my horrible splintered comrades, is the question.