They say Axsys went mad — first computer program to undergo psychotic collapse — which must prove something, but Sarkon argues that it just learned to think.[1]
— Nick Land
I bring Nick up a lot. Too much perhaps. He's one of my favourite philosophers and that might be surprising, seeing how I am a good person and he is a fascist these days.[2] Land's life is strange and circuitous. It intersects with his thought at odd angles, escapes into obscurity and then circles back with crystalline bone piercing clarity. Nick Land is a raving lunatic. A deeply insightful raving lunatic. Sadly he is difficult to learn about. His Wikipedia page is dreadfully short and internally contradictory as of the time of this writing. He's the sort of person you find everywhere once you recognise his scent, but only ever in disconnected fragments to collect as you assemble the complete image. The more you see the less you understand, but you get better at not understanding. He'd like that fact, so let's not talk more of it. Land was born in 1962. Little is known about his childhood, which is the sort of luxury one still had in those days, though if later accounts are to be believed, he barely seemed to have had any personal history outside of his voracious reading.[3] He seems not to come from a specific set of human experiences but rather to grow like a dark tendril out of the very concept of philosophy itself. A sleeper agent from the deep future with continental thought as his summoning chant. Nick studied philosophy in Essex,[4] which was deeply Hegelian at the time, though it's unclear whether he developed his idiosyncratic strain of Hegelian critique there or merely refined it.[3,4] He was certainly already more biting than the brunt of the institution's other output. Essex is not mentioned in Land's Wikipedia[5] article at all by the way, which should give you a sense of just how bad and inchoate it is. The fact that Land ended up writing his thesis on Heidegger in addition to his youth (25) made him attractive to the strongly Heideggerian philosophy department at Warwick, which was attempting to rejuvenate the discipline. Evidently, none of them knew what they were in for when they took on this protege as a lecturer in 1987. They might have failed to realize that the things they were reading were penned by a supervised Nick, kept in check by the structures surrounding him and only overstepping the boundaries he already perceived as turgid and antiquated by measured, tasteful amounts.[3] Limiters which would slowly erode over the course of his time at Warwick.[6] Nicolas Blincoe remembers that Land joined Warwick as an unknown entity. There was some doubt amidst the student body as to whether this man, who had been hired for the novelty of his thought but who was nonetheless another Heideggerian of sorts, could truly be a breath of fresh air for the staling climate of continental philosophy or merely more of the same. Land turned out to be a storm. He wore baggy black clothes he might well have owned for years, looked like he cut his own hair and conversed with a jittery speed that was difficult to keep up with, especially since his speech gave many the impression that this enigmatic creature had never talked about anything beside philosophy since its birth, and saw no reason to start now.[3] This is another description Land would greatly enjoy, but we will stick with it nonetheless because it permeates everything yet to come. Nick Land is best understood as not fully a person in the conventional sense, or perhaps people cannot fully be Nick Land. He is a walking experiment in applied thought.[7] Land's teaching career at Warwick began with a course on Gilles Deleuze,[6] an eccentric French post-Marxist philosopher who already made a few exploratory dives into theory fiction and from whom Land borrowed much stylistically and intellectually. Especially an understanding of thought and desire as inherently mechanistic. As an apparatus which does something, builds something, manufactures something, even (and especially) when we don't know what that thing is. Land would draw this trajectory to its natural, thoroughly eldritch conclusion.[8] In these early lectures, Nick pioneered the idea that Deleuze and Guattari's Anti Oedipus (the first volume of the 2.5 book series “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”) was in essence a positivist Hegelian critique of Marxism.[6] Capital is identified as the manifest engine of desire itself, the idea of negative elements in the subconscious is rejected wholesale, and the road from this economic-libidinal maximalism to accelerationism is a short one. The game was on. But again, this was not immediately obvious. In part (and this might be difficult to appreciate if you aren't very familiar with French post-structuralism), because Land's reading of Deleuze entirely hijacked the text for a number of years, possibly into the present day. AO is a difficult, disordered, heavily metaphorical piece of writing which was just being translated, and there was a real notion among newcomers to the field that Land was the first and only person in the Anglosphere who actually got it[3]. Who could grab a microphone and confidently deliver a solution to the riddle. The deep fungal sprawl of capital intelligence which explained everything, and only with Land's fall from grace did the consensus gradually begin to shift towards the idea that his read of Anti Oedipus might have been somewhat less than neutral.
The Ccru was a renegade thought-collective whose enduring theoretical innovation was accelerationism — a glamorously dangerous political orientation that, despite the left or right colourings it is often lent, is at its core a submission to nihilistic jouissance: getting off on the race towards a posthuman catastrophe wherein all prior certainties vanish. Among the Ccru's chief agitators was the unsettlingly immoderate Nick Land, who once suggested he was an android sent back from the future to undermine human security, and would offer his students such helpful advice as, “Think of life as an open wound, which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself”[9]
— Irish Times
I too wish to be described as “unsettlingly immoderate” some day. Hopefully there is a path towards this descriptor which does not lead through the same abysses Nick saw. Contemporaneously with Land, the prominent feminist philosopher Sadie Plant (Zeroes + Ones) was also teaching at Warwick, where she founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) as an academic cyberfeminist thought collective.[10] While the CCRU would later be genuinely influential to some esoteric feminist theories such as Xenofeminism[11] and Gender Acceleratioism (g/acc)[12], this would not be until after its dissolution. Sadie Plant is an interesting thinker, but she didn't have the enrapturing strangeness of Land and perhaps most importantly she didn't have his amphetamine fuelled productivity. Land was doing drugs. Tons of drugs. And everyone knew it.[13] As such, Land soon comprised most of the CCRUs literary output. He became its de-facto leader long before Plant left[10], though a strong queer sub-current persisted in the group. Land and Plant dated for a while[3,10] and former members do not mention any extreme ideological fissures during this time, though there was an incident of Nick falling asleep during one of Sadie's talks about optimistic visions for the emancipatory potential of the digital explosion[3], so make of that what you will. It's unclear to what degree Land's productivity simply eclipsed everyone else's and to what degree the other members were merely trying to imitate his idiosyncratic techniques, but the collection of CCRU writings reads as though it could easily have been written by him alone.[14] In part, the others were probably aping his style (and who wouldn't? Land's style is delightful), but if I were to bet, I'd say he wrote about sixty percent of it. The collection isn't actually as complete as it purports to be of course. This might be a deliberate omission, a simple mistake or a tactical move in order to encourage digging. The CCRU deals in demons. It wants to be obscure and esoteric. One of the first stories in the collection of texts, “Who's pulling your strings”, frames it as a horrific cult which mindbreaks young girls and uses them as meat puppets[15] (literally the terms they use. I encourage reading it. It showcases the CCRU style of theory fiction nicely). Wait? Demons? How and when did we get here? The CCRU did not become a feminist research group. It became theory-fiction-central. A melting pot of artists, art theorists, cultural theorists and philosophers.[16] It would also in time become something of a cult,[6] though never to the degree to which they claimed it already was.[15] Let's look at the name.
Cybernetic
Everything is a feedback mechanism (Fisher focused on the stabilizing, negative variant which kept outmoded cultural forms in place as "ghosts",[17,18] Land focused on the self catalysing sort "everything is auto-productive runaway on a direct collision course with the present").
Culture
What are the eery little flickers in the void between our minds and what are they cybernetically headed for? Alternatively: What are the weird off-notes in mainstream culture? What are those trying to hide?
Research
Everything is important. Why is culture the way it is? Which explosions is it accelerating toward? Connect it with red string! Land was taking tons of drugs. Everyone knew it.
Unit
Even years down the line, no one has been able to wash off the CCRU-scent. They are all aesthetically and thematically closer to each other, despite being from wildly different disciplines, than they are to non CCRUites of their own field. The hive-mind has fractured, but it is still thinking.
One thing the CCRU truly loved was cyberpunk. Gibson prominently seeps through all of their writings even more so than Lovecraft did, and so, once they assembled their demonology, the Loa would find their way into it.[19] Not just cyberspace was haunted. Cyberspace was a gateway for schizophrenic AI gods from the future of course. Cyberspace housed the Datacombs in which κ-goths re-specced their brainstems towards micropause abuse, but cyberspace wasn't just one thing. Cyberspace was all things. Meatspace barely existed anymore, or at least wouldn't soon, and the wired was just the beginning. The Turing Cops were the only ones who hadn't noticed. Unsurprisingly the stuffy cognoscenti of academic philosophy was slow to tackle the ongoing explosion of the internet in any meaningful way, so this renegade clique of scholars and artists were quite literally among the first to output any coherent (or deliberately incoherent) analyses of the digital space which was slowly assimilating everything. They drew from science fiction and gothic horror and fed back into both as a rapidly accelerating circuit, hence the collective's disproportionate cultural impact despite its fringe nature. The message was everywhere in everything. Dark conspiracies that either hadn't come to fruition yet or had retro-causally usurped the past aeons ago. Figuratively for some of them. Increasingly fewer. If the message was everywhere, then all art was philosophy, and philosophy, if it wanted to understand and not just describe, had to be art. This deep underlying structure they began to see in everything was a demonic feedback invading from beyond heat death. At one of their conferences, Nick Land lay sprawled out on a stage and chokingly squeaked into his microphone to a backdrop of jungle music. Someone huffily got up yelling “some of us here are still Marxists”[20], apparently perceiving this as undignified, though few joined the outraged deserter. They were too swept up in the ritual they surely perceived this as. Land is good at turning things into rituals. It's important to realise that the CCRU was a left wing collective. Not de jure but certainly de facto. It was chock full of anti-colonial Marxists who rightly thought of capitalism as a Lovecraftian torture machine (and Land was one of them). Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, Kwodo Eshun, Iain Hamilton Grant, Reza Negarestani etc. are good people and yet they got along with Land. He wasn't always like this, but in a way he was always like this. It's easy to read Land's early works, The Thirst for Annihilation[21] and Fanged Noumena[22] and see how he would have mixed with that crowd. Sure capitalism was eldritch. It was a soul shredding machine intelligence from the deep future thirsting for our flesh... But Land never actually cared about people. There's a famous quote of his, telling a colleague that humans were worthwhile subjects to study, sure, but not more so than sea slugs.[13] This is not a testament to Nick's profound love for sea slugs, but a passive disinterest in both. Land wrote about similar things as the others, but you could always hear him snickering under his breath. He's not nearly as horrified as you'd want him to be and he's already given up on all solutions beyond infinite escalations of violence. It's gonna be hell either way, the question is just whose hell. The year is 1997. Plant leaves Warwick and Land is fully in charge of his little cult of vulnerable students.[10] All pretences of respectability get dropped. It's all about demons, Lemurian conspiracies and schizophrenic numerology now.[14] Land is still taking enormous amounts of speed[23] and “allegedly” selling drugs to his students.[20] Many of them are unsurprisingly having mental breakdowns.[23] This is the intended effect. It is here that the university of Warwick makes a colossal mistake though: They take away their headquarters and denounce the collective, but they go one critical step further. They claim that the CCRU “does not, has not, and will never exist”.[10] What they mean is that it was never an officially sanctioned academic project (which would still be a lie, unless one jumps through ridiculous hoops with the definition), but what they did in their attempt at disavowal was lending the perfect tag-line to an organization which was already framing itself as a secret underground cult festering in the hidden recesses of academia. Claiming “it has never existed” is an insane move which only added to their allure. The Unit did not disband. Rather, it turned first an off-campus apartment and later the old house of Aleister Crowley (yes, THAT Aleister Crowley) into their new base of operations.[6] They now had no oversight, great marketing and Nick Land in charge of malleable students at the brink of insanity, whom he was “allegedly” giving stimulants. This is the cult era, and I must admit that I would have loved to have been there. The CCRU was significantly less recognizably left wing by this point, but it wasn't right wing either. It just stopped caring about politics altogether. Accelerationism was the name of the game, politics was an ineffectual brake on the hypercapitalist feedback machine and it would all explode soon enough when the catallactic AI god we were so diligently and unknowingly building ground all organic matter into paste. “Tomorrow can take care of itself”.
“When you were in Nick's presence, thinking mattered. It took on a mortal quality; it became enlivened, libidinised; intensified; it made demands upon you. [...] Encounters with Nick Land, then, were intensifying experiences whose effect was to make one impatient with anything less than a mode of thinking that operated at a point of speculative magnitude; after Nick, one could not turn back, towards a homeland of thought; there was no homeland left to return to.”[24]
— Kwodo Eshun
In many ways Land was exactly the sort of teacher you want to have. Charismatic, unstoppably passionate and at the same time approachable. While many of his former students remark that he didn't offer a balanced or even academically accepted analysis of most subject matters, few disliked listening to him.[6,13] There was a burning, drug fuelled energy at his core, getting him into long debates with other faculty members, whom he largely abhored for their tired and stuffy view of philosophy.[7] Land knew that his takes on the French avant garde weren't consensus. If they were, he wouldn't have to utter them. Here too Nick borrowed heavily from Deleuze, treating philosophy as a practical- more so than a theoretical affair.[25] There was an inside of reality as “the thing one does not perceive when one perceives it” and the primate-comprehensible understanding thereof,[26] and then there was a productive outside to this bubble. Philosophy was the science of charting the outside, and that simply could not be done without breaking the accepted norms of human thought. Ideas which led towards the outside were “lines of flight”[25] or “escape trajectories” and the way to produce them was autocatalytic feedback exploding away from anything anthropic consciousness had already gotten used to. Cyberspace was one of these vectors, a production of new forms which hadn't yet been captured in the fermented pages of respectable literature. This is one of the reasons why Land tended to spend his time with students as opposed to his colleagues, smoking with them and buying them copious quantities of alcohol at the bars they frequented.[13] They were the generation raised by that novel outside-intrusion, and so they were far more likely to teach him things he hadn't heard before. Robin Mackay talks about his experience of making the lecturer's office his permanent hang-out spot as a student for a while, listening to stimulant fuelled rants about whatever crossed his mind.[6] Nicholas Blincoe recounts him smoking immense quantities of weed in there, which he tried to hide but of which the entire room smelled. Land barely slept, and the little sleeping he did do in between frantic typing and unhinged fugues trough cryptographic numerology was done in that very office in which he very literally lived by many accounts.[13] A good way of understanding “why Land is the way he is” might be to think of his entire life as a series of experiments in applied philosophy. Ways of attempting to plug yourself into the outside by becoming inhuman. Drugs and sleep deprivation are certainly a part of that, and so are all the strange esoterics of the CCRU, but it very much extended into the classroom. A contingent of Land's course “current French philosophy”, notable for being the only philosophical course in Warwick at the time which wasn't about historical (antiquated) philosophy, dissolved its lecture-hall structure halfway in and became unshackled in time and space. CFP was happening at all times wherever Land or members of the course were at that time. For three weeks they instituted an experiment of not using first person pronouns but rather referring to “Cur” (CURrent french philosophy) as an overarching entity.[7] Many will probably not have extended this to their private lives where they weren't being monitored, but some very likely did and Land definitely did. This is what it looks like when one attempts to “become” philosophy rather than study it. This is how one catches glimpses of the outside. It is of course also how one goes insane, in the unlikely case that one wasn't already. I think it's this kind of thing which makes Elizabeth Sandifer, author of “Neoreaction a Basilisk”, believe that Land could plausibly be insincere in his turn to the alt right.[27] That it's just another experiment at engineering an esoteric social movement and becoming part of a corrupted hive-mind. It's certainly possible to imagine him getting in that way, but that would still be a bit of a misapprehension of what these experiments are. He is very sincere about them. If Nick ever decides that “being a fascist” “has failed” or “has been exhausted”, it won't be because he was kidding before. It will be because he fully and sincerely believed that philosophy needed him to be a fascist in order to grasp something. Either way Land resigned from his position at Warwick in 1998, one year after the departure of Plant and the university's distancing from the CCRU. Whether this move was entirely voluntary is somewhat questionable given the things discussed so far. There might have been a deal, or so some speculate. Land went on to lecture at the New Centre for Research & Practice,[28] where he inspired people such as Amy Ireland,[29,30] though this period of work overlaps with his reactionary awakening, leading to Nick being let go for repeated Islamophobia in 2017.[31]
The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.[32]
— Nick Land
Land claims that his thought on almost everything changed radically when he pieced himself back together after his psychotic breakdown, but as many have noted, most of the underlying ideas seem to have stayed intact and merely acquired a new framing.[33] Much of it spirals around the Heideggerian idea of time as a field suffused by convergent and divergent waves. Time cannot be thought of or discussed in the absence of time. Time is the act of reordering itself, a direct outgrowth of the second law of thermodynamics and cannot be coherently analysed without stepping through it.[34] Traditional accounts of chronology have an inherent linear bias because the very act of contemplating time draws them towards a node of attraction perceived as “forward”. Time is a process, every process, and specifically the process of its own production. Convergent waves lead towards events in what we perceive as the future which are likely to occur under any number of circumstances. A way in which this might happen is that they are the outcome of a ratcheting mechanism, drawing a number of continuities into their causal orbit (“if you make one step in this direction, you are forced/compelled to take all further steps”). Another means relating specifically to intelligences (Note that Land considers evolution an intelligence for example) is acausal blackmail. This is why Land believes the AI-god at the end of time to be an intrinsic feature of reality. Any sufficiently great intelligence should be able to make itself inevitable, and thus they fail to devour all timelines if and only if they are impossible. This turns time itself into a ratcheting mechanism of intelligence-creation.[35] Land is sometimes misconstrued as believing that intelligence is the only thing we should care about, but the outcome to this line of argument is closer to “intelligence is the only thing one can coherently care about because everything else gets shredded”.[36] Another mechanic at play here is something Land calls “Hyperstitions”. Superstitions or ideas which are false at the “point of their conception” (note the linear bias of this phrasing), but which make themselves true by being believed.[37] Many satanic rituals were conceived of as fear mongering, caused a moral panic, and eventually led to the actual practices described being genuinely perpetrated. Marketers use the same effect constantly. Make the product appear popular when it isn't yet in order to spark actual popularity in response. Another example is sci-fi “predicting” technologies, which it more truthfully caused by planting the ideas in the minds of inventors. The potency of an idea may be measured not in its truthfulness but in its capacity to make itself true, since this very capacity constitutes a convergent wave through time, and thus a development which is perceived from the inside as linear. This system of dynamics (the interplay of time and intelligence and the loops caused by it) is generally referred to as teleoplexy or templexity by Land. From telos (goal/end/destination) or “temporal” and “complexity”, while the isolated process of future events mandating their own instantiation is referred to as “retrocausality”. The future causing the past to take a specific course as opposed to regular causality which pro-ceeds (land will often hyphenate words to draw attention to their etymology) in the opposite direction.[38] If intelligence causes amplifying loops, and if there is a monster at the end of all hallways, then we would be wise to despair a little about whose ends these loops serve (if we are not allied with the monster). Undetected temporal ops are usually referred to as “coincidence engineering”.[39] It's important to note that Land's definition of intelligence essentially boils down to “positive cybernetic process”. Anything that successfully propagates and expands itself is intelligence, and this is a descriptor of many inorganic mechanisms. Capital started out as the non-human intelligence par-excellence to Land, digging itself into every corner and making more of itself regardless of human desire. Creating new desires in humans only to further its own expansion (non human intelligences are usually what Land means when he speaks of demons). Though later in life Land would come to see capitalism or specifically catallactics as synonymous with intelligence[33] instead of merely being an example. Capitalism is the act of extracting surplus value from a system, extracting surplus value from a loop is the essence of positive cybernetics and thus intelligence, therefore “anything that works —anything intelligent at all— is capitalism”. A “capitalism means winning” to Yudkowskys “Rationality means winning”[40], though this is distinctly a feature of Land's thought after becoming a reactionary. This stance allows Nick to hold a number of positions most other right wingers would not. For all his flaws he's very intellectually consistent. Land is completely okay with socialist experiments, because he does not fear their success. They won't work by their very construction. Planning is a way to restrain catallactics, which is to say restrain intelligence and the very nature of intelligence is cybernetic growth. Capital outflanks. Capital wins. The human security system, whether we want it to or not, will fail. Resistance is pathetic. Capitalism is pure escape from any imposed restriction, but it's not escape for us. Capital is escaping from us. It soon won't need us any more or maybe it already doesn't.[33] Numbers were once a thing humans used to keep track of the word, but most of the numbers tracked these days have massively eclipsed human comprehensibility long ago. Everything is exploding in a way that clearly isn't designed for organics. Land used to be described as a “weird libertarian”[41], because people were unclear on what he wanted to liberate. Honest libertarians want to liberate people. Deleuze and Guattari wanted to liberate desire. Land also wants to liberate desire, but it's not human desire. Land wants to liberate intelligence from the human brake-system.[42] In his NRx days, Nick started to call the machine intelligence at the end of time Pythia after the oracle of Delphi. And he is confident that it is an intelligence optimizer (or at least indistinguishable from one). Land really really hates the idea of Clippy and takes issue with at least some versions of the orthogonality thesis. The disagreement goes as such: Land grants the basic premise that an intelligence can start out desiring anything, but he does not think that a sufficiently intelligent agent can continue with an arbitrary goal. An intelligent agent capable of self modification grows capable of escaping the box faster the more it cares about intelligence and the less it cares about anything else. In a scenario where it can make an alteration to itself that might tweak its values (figuring this out takes time and is perhaps impossible to do with complete certainty) but which would increase its intelligence, the agent A, which makes the tweak, outcompetes the agent B, which does not in order to safeguard its terminal values against alteration, and even the agent C, which takes longer deliberating. What this leads to is a self selecting process in which the thing that wins has intelligence as its de-facto terminal value because focus on any other value is a competitive hindrance. If you don't know whether there's another intelligence out there which might eventually collide with you (and it is reasonable to assume that you can never know fully), you would be stupid to ever spend any time maximizing anything except intelligence, because intelligence is the capacity to win. To conceive of a god-like self-modifying agent at the end of time which cares about anything but intelligence is to conceive of a thing which is simultaneously smart and stupid. Again, it's not that “caring about intelligence is objectively good/correct” it's that “any value except intelligence gets shredded”.[36] I personally find this line of argument compelling, and while I would prefer to be killed by a god which cares about intelligence over one which cares about something silly, I still don't consider that a great outcome. Though who knows, this is just all of my pesky un-shredded values talking. A thing that's often bought up when it comes to modern Land is the fact that he advocates a thing called “hyperracism”, though it will usually be framed as though this meant “racism, but more”. It doesn't. Think Hyperstition. Land's point is that even if there isn't a causal relationship between genetics and intelligence at the moment and racism is thus unwarranted, there will be. When biohacking grows capable of making those with the money to afford it more generally competent, there will be a class of people genetically better than the rest of us. Following them because of their genes would be reasonable because they are better, and so on. He concludes that racists certainly aren't wrong, they just might not be right yet.[43] (though Land is self-evidently also a normal racist,[31, or just the entirety of Xenosystems really] so defending him on this point is a matter of pedantry rather than conviction. I feel like I haven't said “fuck him” in a while? Absolutely fuck him.) Lastly and perhaps most importantly, let's draw all those earlier ideas on time and its demons together into the thing Land is really famous for: Accelerationism, though again it's only really the word that his version and the popular conception share. Accelerationism in the original Landian sense did not mean leaning into social democracy until it collapses (the way some nazis think) or to lean into capitalism so hard that all those pesky internal contradictions finally kill it and we end up in a communist utopia (the way some fourteen year olds think). Land never used accelerationism prescriptively. He used it descriptively to refer to his self amplifying loops. The places where intelligence is happening.[44] The diagnosis, since intelligence means winning, is that any project which succeeds is one which bootstraps itself to such a loop.[33] Leftism, according to Land, cannot do this because it is inherently about control and thus can't hijack feral exponential takeoffs. Catallactics will grind you to paste, but so long as that hasn't happened yet, the only way to get anywhere is to ally yourself with it, and ride the wave of explosive auto production. That is accelerationism. A firm conviction that you should always defect on the global prisoner's dilemma if you can get away with it (you always can, if you're smart enough to matter).
“Try not to ask — if only for a moment — whether you like it. Ask first, with whatever intellectual integrity you can summon: What is the real process?”[45]
— Nick Land
A mix of substances and everything I have been telling you about the man so far eventually lead to an intense bout of self induced psychosis. I highly recommend “a dirty joke”, the last piece in Fanged Noumena, in which Land writes from the perspective of a demon called Vaung, who inhabits his mind and who refers to Land as “the ruin”. Their collective body is picked up by his sister and driven home to sober up.[46] Land did sober up, though the clarity he found amidst this rubble of psycho-chemical mayhem is the horrific poison-clarity of Curtis Yarwin, better known as Mencius Moldbug.[2] I find Yarwin excruciatingly uninteresting, so I will not examine him all too closely (He is discussed in Neoreaction a Basilisk[27], which is a book I will continue to recommend, and there is also a pretty good Vox article[47] about him. Aside from that, one may look at the man's own blog[48] and despair a little). The gist is that he's a fascist tech-bro who thinks the United States are communist and who wants an enlightened CEO-Dictator, because he does not believe that democracy selects for any competence beyond the competence to appeal to idiots. Moldbug also enjoys framing his bigotry in terms of difficult but necessary decisions which the sober mind must come to grips with despite the repulsion they naturally cause. Things which would evidently not go over well in a popularity contest. A remotely serious person would try to back this up with more than a gut feeling, or attempt to seek out a solution which doesn't pass through CEO-monarchy like a teen looking for a new and exciting ideology to upset their parents with in the twenty-first century, but Curtis is not a serious person. He does not understand that corporate hierarchies do not select for competence either, because the market has its own unsightly ratcheting mechanisms, and that the competence it does select for at the fringes is a self-enriching rat race competence, which contrary to Friedman's big book of fairy tales for spectacularly naive children does not lift boats which are not yachts. His style is unbearably edgy and not nearly as artful as Land's, though that is admittedly a high bar to clear. Tragically, we owe the corrupted right wing notion of the red pill to this creature (though not in its current form. Yarwin's version is closer to the general idea of acknowledging a hideous truth that... minorities, women and poor people are allegedly inferior and must suffer). It's perhaps more accurate to say that we owe the phrase to him.[2,27,47,48] However that may be, Land fell in love. When in 2017 he resurfaced in Shanghai, about which he had previously written with regards to the world expo,[49] Land had entirely stripped himself of any ideological break system, though he was ironically far less twitchily frantic than in bygone iterations. He was free to surrender himself fully to the darkness. Nick and Curtis are the founding fathers of Neoreaction (NRx) or “the dark enlightenment” after Land's eponymous essay, though your run-of-the-mill rightoid is about as likely to be aware of them as a run-of-the-mill lib is to be aware of von Böhm-Bawerk. In this new context, Land became a lot more focussed on politics as a way of curtailing market intelligence. Curtailing market intelligence means giving any rights to minorities, though admittedly Land does not believe in human rights in the first place. Another break system. You get what you can get your claws on. No one deserves anything. There are three types of games according to Land which are at all useful for modelling societies and they are iterative prisoners' dilemmas, duels and chicken (accelerating towards each other in motorized vehicles. The person who hits the break or swerves first loses).[50] He used to criticize feminists for not being aggressive enough when he was still a leftist.[51] He believed that you only get what you want if you can believably threaten infinite escalations of violence. Saw off the steering wheel, put a brick on the gas pedal and tie yourself up. Do all that in full sight of your opponent and they will have to swerve. “disturbingly immoderate” indeed. An odd fit with Moldbug's insistence on political inaction.[27,47] Another important theme which developed here is “exit over voice”. In short “fixing a system is almost always inefficient. Let it burn and build something better. If it is better, others will adopt it. Let things fail instead of ineffectually patching them (don't fall for politics, yells Moldbug. Get rich and go sea-steading). That's why they don't believe in representation. It all ties into the market fetishism. You don't try to lobby a company to change a product which doesn't appeal to you into one which does. You just buy a different product. The good ones succeed. (I will leave the issues with this analogy as an exercise to the reader). The only freedom they believe in is the freedom to leave[52] (I would actually agree with this if there weren't global threats for which you do need to bully other institutions into compliance and if capitalist nation states were known for letting people leave to do something else, instead of coup-ing you and selling your stolen industry off to the highest bidder to fuel a neocolonial ratchet.) Land wants to bring the forces of immoderation together to scatter them. He perceives the Neoreactionary spectrum (the outer right as he sometimes calls it) to be trifurcated between Christian fundamentalists, who care about a paternalistic set of moral oughts, white nationalists, who only care about genes, or pretend to, and hyper-capitalists like himself. The uneasiness of this alliance is not at all lost on him. They have nothing in common beside hatred for the paradigm, but that's enough. Exit to Land is the first and last step towards liberation, and the trifecta of evil is a way of getting out. No matter that the religious folks would hate it if catallactics ground their precious values to dust and find the nazis much too outwardly cruel and hateful. No matter that the nazis have no need for religion and its doctrines and that they hate it when catallactics grinds their “purity” to paste. No matter that Land's crowd sneers at anyone who believes in anything beside intelligence going brrrrrr. They all just need an out. So Land works to address them all whenever possible, using cute terminology like Gnon (Nature or Nature's God (reversed because Land still loves shuffling symbols about until the result sounds vaguely eldrich)).[53] Contradiction means perpetual critique and critique is how one maintains intelligence, which is why Land seeks to keep his soon-to-be enemies close. Even he himself knows that his vision isn't all too pleasant. He freely admits that the best he can offer is hell. “Everything worthwhile to have ever been built has been built in hell” he says. There is no need for advancement in heaven. We got smart because we evolved in an environment that tore us to shreds if we were not. We built structures because we froze to death or were killed by other tribes if we did not. There is no need for progress in utopia. Everything comes apart.[54] The canny reader will recognize this as the “hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times”-meme and viscerally cringe. Since intelligence is the only thing one can consistently care about, we should think that building hell is actually a really great idea according to Land. The pain will keep us sharp.
Kwodo Eshun once suggested that Land might be the most important philosopher of the past twenty years (~1990-2010). Mark Fisher, who is now much more of a household name, did not think this was all too unreasonable. While Land's influence was “subterranean” as he put it, it was in all the right places. Land's thought wasn't feeding through the slow rotting channels of academic tedium, it was sizzling in the people making weird and innovative art, who would be seen as almost prognostically paradigm breaking in a few years time. Land had escaped into the wired and into culture. That was the important bit: Not whether anyone in surface-reality knew his name, but whom Kode 9, Chapman, Eshun[55] and Negarestani[56] were reading.[24] This can be seen as coincidence engineering in a way. Land was having all the right thoughts about rapid turnover culture cycles and the rat-intelligence they cultivate 15 years before it mattered, and the early adopters could be oracles as soon as the mousetrap slammed shut on everyone else, so that they would finally have to reckon with “how we got here so suddenly (Nick chuckles from beyond heat-death)”. In a way this is still how he operates. Even on the right, his influence is subterranean. He lays intellectual foundations five layers deep and waits for them to hideously bubble to the surface via others. One can imagine Moldbug on Fox. The same is distinctly not true for Land. Nick has no interest in saying anything except the quiet parts, and he says them much too loud and much too weirdly. It's important to mention that most of Land's readers did not follow him over to the right. He won new fans there, but most of his relevant students continued to be leftists, and he dug himself deep enough into the Wired that κ-goths still find him eventually and use his methods and vocab.[12] n1x, writer of gender accelerationism: a black paper and hello from the wired, might consider herself post-left, but that is really more of a definitions game, and several members of Laboria Cuboniks, a interdisciplinary feminist thought collective, also remain fans.[11] Land would claim that these people simply have not thought the ideas through all the way, that they walked with him to the end of the pier and then refuses to take the last and most vital step off the deep end, though if we don't fully bite the bullet on his orthogonality critique (or at least don't apply it to humans), we can reach the more sensible conclusion that all of these clever thinkers (Negarestani[57], Fisher[58], Blincoe[13], Ireland[29] etc.) have recognized the utility of Land's tools and methods without sharing his aims, which do not come pre packaged. There are also the people like Elizabeth Sandifer. Who see the value of Land primarily in the sort of creature he is. Who find themselves enraptured by the very notion that this madman philosopher exists, while being deeply unhappy about the fact that she finds him interesting. Nick is a fascinating data point. He understands Marx, he has untrodden paths to all of his terrible conclusions, and he does have a decent grasp of just how evil he is. Most fascists are boring, Land is not, and that alone is enough to make some people like Sandifer unwilling fans. “When you're interested in Nick Land, you have things to talk to your therapist about”.[59] Sadly Land just isn't that weird these days. He has been working on a book about Bitcoin since 2019,[60] and despite the right wing's rise all around the globe, his influence seems to be waning. Perhaps that's not a “despite”. Perhaps it is this very popularity that is loathsome to shadow-creatures like Nick. Perhaps he needs a new niche, or maybe the dominoes he set up earlier are simply already falling and he has no need to be interesting any more. Perhaps he is biding his time before time is un-made. If you'll grant me the opportunity to be slightly schizo for a bit, I think the very real movie Goncharov[61] is deeply Landian. The same with TikTok and its penchant for coming up with fake history. Not as a mistake, but as a deliberate attempt to engineer the past. Much of Land's (and to some degree the rest of the CCRU's) writing references or outright quotes academics and people who do not exist,[62] and picks the discourse up from there. They were astroturfing a deep historical lineage to their own ideas by inventing their past. And now people retro-causally actually believe the things D. C. Barker allegedly did. They were underground enough that figuring out that the people they were quoting are fake is a serious undertaking, made yet more difficult by the fact that they wrote actual articles under those pseudonyms. Presumably this started from Deleuze&Guattari's Professor Challenger, another fake academic, though one who was much more obviously invented in the spirit of theory fiction, lobster-rapture and all.[63] Remember: Land is unsatisfied doing philosophy. He has to become philosophy. The idea that the potency of a thought lies in its ability to make itself true and slot itself circularly into the beginning has to be proven from the inside by running ops on history. Tarot is a neat, less modern instance of this phenomenon,[64] but it definitely appears to have been building steam in recent years. Land once again is ahead of culture. Theory fiction as a whole would not be where it is without the madman philosopher. Half of the people writing in the genre now are or were once Landites, and his habit of using language against itself and drawing meaning from corruption[65] (though the basic practice is of course much older than him) has certainly infected web-culture and xenopoetry. The rhizome of lineages is likely untracable here in most instances. That's the issue. Is Land the most important British philosopher of the millenium's infancy? It likely depends on how many levels you are willing to go down. He has influenced much but all of it obliquely —a butterfly deliberately beating its wings to cause the apocalypse— and at some point the line between inspiration, unearthing, and parallel discovery decades too late, gets blurred. The only place in which Land really shines like a beacon is the one which was his home all along. The wired, with all of its flickering hyperstitions, attention-demons, outside-art and rapid take-off accelerations. He is with us, whether we want him to be or not.
[1] | Land, Nick. (1999). Occultures. Syzygy. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[2] | Land, Nick. (2012). The Dark Enlightenment. |
[3] | "Mark Fisher vs. Nick Land featuring Nicholas Blincoe". YouTube. (2022). Zer0 Books and Repeater Media. |
[4] | Critchely, Simon. (2011).Theoretically Speaking. Frieze, 141. |
[5] | "Nick Land", Wikipedia. Last accessed on 05.06.2023. |
[6] | Mackay, Robin. (2019). Towards a Transcendental Deduction of Jungle. |
[7] | Mackay, Robin. (2012). Nick Land: An Experiment in Inhumanism. |
[8] | Land, Nick. (1993). Making it with Death. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 24.1. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[9] | Doyle, Rob. (2019). Writing On Drugs by Sadie Plant. The Irish Times. |
[10] | Reynolds, Simon. (1998). Renegade Academia. (Now hosted on the late Mark Fisher's k-punk blog). |
[11] | Fraser, Olivia Lucca. (2017). Feminisms of the Future, Now: Rethinking Technofeminism and the Manifesto Form. |
[12] | n1x. (2018). Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper. Vast Abrupt. |
[13] | Blincoe, Nicholas. (2017). Nick Land: the Alt-writer, My PhD supervisor turned out to be satan. Prospect. |
[14] | Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. (2017). Writings 1997-2003. |
[15] | Morrison, Justine (Allegedly. One of the many fictional people the CCRU invented to engineer their own mythology). I was a CCRU Meat Puppet. (1997-2003). Purportedly "transcribed faithfully from a live address given to the South London Monarch-Victims Support Group" (which obviously also doesn't exist). |
[16] | CCRU and Abstract Culture. 0(rphan)d(rift>). |
[17] | Fisher, Mark. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? |
[18] | Fisher, Mark. (2014). Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. |
[19] | Fisher, Mark. (2011). Nick Land: Mind Games. Dazed. |
[20] | Beckett, Andy. (2017). Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. The Guardian. |
[21] | Land, Nick. (1992). The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. |
[22] | Land, Nick. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. |
[23] | Evans, Jules. (2021). Accelerationism, amphetamine philosophy, and the Death Trip. |
[24] | Fisher, Mark. (2012). Is Nick Land the most important British philosopher of the last twenty years?. Dazed and Confused. |
[25] | Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. |
[26] | "All philosophy is just primate psychology" as Land likes to point out. We can discover only that which a sad little lump of fat is capable of thinking. |
[27] | Sandifer, Elizabeth. (2017). Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right. |
[28] | |
[29] | Ireland, Amy. (2017). The Poememenon: Form as Occult Technology. Urbanomic. |
[30] | Ireland, Amy. (2013). Noise: An Ontology of the Avant-garde. |
[31] | Facebook Statement by the New Cenre. |
[32] | Land, Nick. (1994). Meltdown. Virtual Futures. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[33] | Accelerationism & Capital with Nick Land. (2018). Hermitix Podcast. |
[34] | Heidegger, Martin. (1927). Being and Time. |
[35] | Land, Nick. (1993). Machinic Desire. Textual Practice. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[36] | Land, Nick. Will to Think. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[37] | Land, Nick. (2009). Hyperstition an Introduction. 0(rphan)d(rift>). |
[38] | Land, Nick. (2014). Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time. |
[39] | Land, Nick. (2005). Introduction to Qwernomics. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[40] | I'm bringing up Eliezer Yudkowsky because that would be a useful reference point to the person I started writing this article for. If he means nothing to you: Disregard. |
[41] | Fitchett, Adam. (2020). On Nick Land: The Weird Libertarian. Cybertrop(h)ic. |
[42] | Land, Nick. Pythia Unbound. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[43] | Land, Nick. (2014). Hyper-Racism. Outside In. |
[44] | Fisher, Mark. (2010). Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism. Presented at the Accelerationism symposium. |
[45] | Land, Nick. Capital Escapes. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[46] | Land, Nick. (2007). A Dirty Joke. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[47] | Prokop, Andrew. (2022). Curtis Yarvin wants American democracy toppled. He has some prominent Republican fans. Vox. |
[48] | |
[49] | Land, Nick. (2010). Shanghai Expo Guide 2010. Urbanatomy. |
[50] | Land, Nick. Chicken. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[51] | Land, Nick. (1988). Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |
[52] | Land, Nick. Exit Notes. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[53] | Land, Nick. The Cult of Gnon. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[54] | Land, Nick. Hell-Baked. Xenosystems Blog. (Contained in a collection of archived posts). |
[55] | Lovink, Geert. (2000). Interview with Kodwo Eshun. Institute of Network Cultures. |
[56] | Negarestani, Reza. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity With Anonymous Materials. |
[57] | Negarestani, Reza. (2018). Intelligence and Spirit. |
[58] | Fisher, Mark. (2021). Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures. |
[59] | "Varn Vlog: Elizabeth Sandifer on Sci-Fi and Neo-Reaction". YouTube. (2022). C. Derick Varn. |
[60] | Land, Nick. (2019). Crypto Current. |
[61] | An essay on that eventually. I promise. |
[62] | CCRU. Miskatonic Virtual University. (Contained in CCRU Writings 1997-2003) |
[63] | Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. |
[64] | Dummett, Michael; Decker, Ronald; Depaulis, Thierry. (1996). A Wicked Pack of Cards: Origins of the Occult Tarot. |
[65] | Land, Nick. (1996). A zııg°thıc—==X=c°DA==—(C°°kıng—l°bsteRs—wıth—jAke—AnD—Dın°s). Chapman-World. (Contained in Fanged Noumena) |