The article at https://xenotransmissions.substack.com/p/evil-nerd-theory-part-iii-a-case mentions his neoreactionary history before Palladium:
In 2013 a group spins off from LessWrong and forms a more explicitly reactionary blog and discussion forum, called - you can’t make this up - More Right. The founders here are Samo Burja, now a political consultant and researcher interested in long term institutional persistence issues. In 2014 Burja was more interested in things like race and IQ, and the contemporary applications of monarchic authoritarianism and religious law. You can find his More Right archives here.
The article also links to his More Right piece The Cult of Neoreaction which Nick Land discussed on his own blog, and there’s another archive of his posts from a different date here and here is an announcement of a spin-off created by Samo and others called The Future Primaeval (that has various archives here but looking at an archived post list here from March 2015 to Jan 2017, looks like he didn’t write any under his own name but that substack at the top of my comment says that one of the other people on the Palladium editorial board, Wolf Tivy, posted there a lot under pseudonyms Nyan Sandwich and Warg Franklin).
I don’t necessarily think the idea of a past great filter means paranoia/despair/insanity, the Lovecraftian horror element mainly enters in when you try to reconcile ideas about transhuman expansion throughout the universe with space opera style visions of intelligent aliens being reasonably common. It might just be that the laws of nature make it very unlikely that star systems/planets suitable for the evolution of intelligent life will ever arise, and unlikely that evolution will hit upon various milestones even if the planet is suitable. People have made speculative arguments about such unlikeness for reasons that are not primarily about the Fermi paradox, like the “Rare Earth” book by a geologist/paleontologist and an astronomer. It’s also sort of a natural extension of certain kinds of anthropic reasoning that our own existence shouldn’t count as evidence against Rare Earth style ideas.
As an aside, I wish there was some sort of terminological distinction between “transhumanism” as a form of belief in/advocacy for the imminent possibility of “superintelligent AI” or “enhanced” humans (a la Kurzweil, or what the rationalists really want as soon as we ‘solve alignment’), vs. SETI style speculations about the typical fate of intelligent life in the universe and the idea that this might tend to involve a major role for AI and self-replicating machines in societies that don’t destroy themselves (for example the speculations by J.D. Bernal, Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke, none of which presupposed that it would happen anytime soon or that there would be any sudden ‘intelligence explosion’ leading to immediate doom/paradise). The latter I find interesting to think about (and I like some SF stories set in worlds where this is true like Banks’ Culture stories or Egan’s Diaspora) but these days it’s kind of tainted by association with the former.