Nick Land

What did Nick Land actually believe in?

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.fo/zkKOc
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

He belieeved that if we made the capitalist system accelerate and thus deteriorate faster then we could reach the singularity and enter a new stage of human society even faster

I believe he use to be a leftist at some point, but Land is now associated with far-right futurists and the Neo-Reaction Movement (NRX)/ Dark Enlightenment. According to Vote 1 (a great app btw):

I don't understand why anyone would want this, but there you have it.
Also post more Land memes

They see themselves as royalty in such a system, or at the very least in a muh privileged position. It's basically a more honest ancap with less pedophilia.

ok

Jungle, garage and early dubstep.

Jungle is fucking awesome tbh

so his ideology is just a weird mix between Trans-humanism and cyberpunk larping with Neo-reactionism and delusions of grandeur sprinkled on?

So do people just meme about this guy because of his bizarre ramblings? Is there any value behind what he says? Does he even make any sense?

archive.fo/zkKOc

You cannot fucking make this shit up.

I don't get it

...

lost

Top kek. Never occurred to me.

...

Capital is itself a powerful super-AI according to Land, it has absolved humans and now we are cogs in a machine; Land embraces this - we exist to serve capital

So according to Land, Camatte was right in proclaiming that "Capitalist society is death organized with all the appearances of life. Here it is not a question of death as the extinction of life, but death-in-life, death with all the substance and power of life. The human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital."

...

I haven't read Camatte so I wouldn't know but I think that's a pretty accurate description, user

It's all 5d chess, his ultimate goal is to break up the Human Security System (the social and political taboos preventing humanity from becoming post-human) he will swear allegiance to whatever group let's him push his real agenda forward.

this and it's a challenge to neo-Leftism which itself has become fully absorbed into this process (or "bourgeois", in the legacy nomenclature), now rolled into one of its appendages or modes of appearance (co-opted), or at most some kind of ornate Sisyphian theatre designed to distract from it (the Spectacle), while """critically""" accepting the ultimate triumph of Capital and its post-human trajectory if you read half way between the lines, self-relegated to little more than a profoundly amoral power play of representation and recognition of "marginal" consciousnesses for the vampire to feed on, all the while cloaked in morally loaded terms such as "justice" and a dense cloud of pretension. Land shows you can start from similar premises, Marxism and post-modern ontological word soup, and come to starkly opposite exoteric conclusions, which are more honest as stripped naked of their humane rationalizations which serve only to blind and bewitch ones servitude to the real process.

We does he embrace it though? In order to be able to appear like a "deep" philosopher because he is a cynical shithead?

...

point is, doesn't matter what you happen to feel about the yuckiness of reality, your delusions about having any agency at all, or your impotent crocodile tears about him and his ideas. there's no going back.

There is a saying in storytelling: "Don't tell the audience, show them" You could write long, scholarly tracts explaining why progressives and leftists and humanists are huge hypocrites, or you can adopt the persona of an evil villain and show it to the audience


Ted Kaczynski says more or less the same thing, in his latest book he even comes to similar Landian accelerationist conclusions, the technoindustrial system will continue expanding and eventually discard humans as dead weight.

it was pretty much what Heidegger was actually on about too.

All he's showing me is that he doesn't comprehend the difference between is and ought.

in depth critique here

Didn't say it is "wrong".
He makes a certain prediction about the future. So far so good.
But then instead of simply letting it there, he also says that this future that he predicts to be the case is also what ought to be the case. That's what doesn't make sense.

Well even though you're very stupid I'll explain. He says it's inevitable, so we ought to accelerate the process rather than letting it carry on for longer than necessary, hell there's even a concrete moralistic case here, over and above anti-hypocrisy.

Even if he didn't suggest there is one variable we can and ought change: velocity, the nature of inevitability is that ought doesn't really come into it. If we detected a Pluto sized asteroid on a definite collision course with Earth, a full extinction level event, NASA qualifying every statement tracking it with "this sucks, this shouldn't be happening" adds nothing: it's just a pathetic ritual.

Death is inevitable, there we ought to kill ourselves now.
Same logic.

The moralistic case would be about not prolonging agony, and especially not for the sake of self-regarding illusions, euthanasia in terminal illness would be a more comparable case (muh sanctity of life here playing the role of neo-leftism).

That's quite a rationalization.I think he just wants to appear edgy.

Your desperate armchair psychoanalysis can't wriggle you out of the future that awaits us all. I've refuted your argument that it's illogical or even necessarily immoral, and you've given no indication of how you propose you cross the is-ought chasm yourself, a perennial issue in human affairs with no clear resolution. If there is no logical way to bridge them, how are any "ought" statements therefore even logically connected to the world of "is" in any way?

Ironically you can't seem to summon enough specifically human intellect to surpass the Turing threshold of today, so I'm not holding my breath on an answer.

I didn't make any ought statements myself. So i don't need to bridge the is/ought gap.

Far future predictions are very clumsy and false with high probability. There are many alternative future scenarios and no reason to accept one over the other. Thus the hypothesis that Land just wants to be appear edgy is the best one.

Someone post the 'layers of irony' meme edit where he explains why he doesn't have a girlfriend.

You suggested there is such a gap, I'm asking you to explain your use of it. If there is no actual logical interconnection, which would necessitate that all ought statements are arbitrary strings of words expelled as a bodily function with no baring on the real world except superficially, then you can't accuse others of fallacious thought when they "confuse" the two, any more than you can accuse them of faulty argumentation for burping.

This is itself a "far future" prediction, and this is like the next 100 years, possibly within our lifetimes. The common belief that this is now an unthinkably great gulf of time such that nothing can be said about it with any confidence as though it were an aeon, is itself evidence we live under the singularity.
Except Land obviously argues the case that his captures the inexorable, and you haven't refuted it. You're just asserting that because multiple such scenarios are available, that renders it impossible to select between them. I imagine you believe in climate change, and not in a future where, e.g., anime suddenly becomes real?
Further to actually making an argument, you could clarify the time scale that's realistic for predictions, and why X class of projections are inherently superior to Y, explaining your reasoning. All science is predictive by nature.

Land writes fiction, or speculative realism at best.
He wants to be edgy. Why is that so difficult to accept for you?

Nick is married

...

I'd be glad if you could refute it, but you're clearly not thinking rationally. Imputing motive is not an argument, likewise I could simply say cowardly complacency is yours.

Yeah we should just die instead.

The reality is humans will never become post-human, because post-humanism just grosses people out to much.

We are already partially post-human in a variety of ways, and some far more than others. You'll see an evolutionary arms race between those who do modify and those who don't will get left behind. If it's in Capital's interest and it will be, the State will follow.

Not that long ago Facebook's level of voluntary intrusion would have seemed unthinkable. What is the userbase now, 2 billion?

Nick's previous leftism is greatly exaggerated, usually by other lefties who want to use him as a 'cautionary tale' etc.