Rev Left Radio - An Inhuman Future: Nick Land, Techno-Accelerationism, and the Dark Enlightenment

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

In this episode Alyson and Breht enter the strange and unsettling world of Nick Land: Marx, Nietzsche, Delueze, cybernetics, accelerationism, and the possibility that capitalism is becoming something more than a human social system. For Land, techno-capital may be an inhuman process using humanity as a temporary vehicle - accelerating through markets, machines, computation, and artificial intelligence toward a future in which we are no longer necessary. We trace this vision from Land's anti-humanism and theory of deterritorialization to the Dark Enlightenment and neo-reaction, asking whether his philosophy is best understood as a kind of inverted Marxism: not humanity escaping capital, but capital escaping humanity. In the process, we discuss consciousness, artificial intelligence, historical and dialectical materialism, Land's influence on the techno-oligarchs, philosophy, and much more. After explaining and exploring Land's philosophy and politics, Alyson and Breht dismantle it via a Marxist Critique. Check out our episodes on: Julius Evola Louis Althusser Nietzsche ---------------------- Learn More about Rev Left and Red Menace HERE

Hello and welcome to Red Minnis. This is Allison. I am here with Brett, and we have another of a type of episode that we do every once in a while where we read a reactionary thinker who we quite disagree with and try to tackle some of their ideas. Obviously, we've done this with a couple thinkers in the past. Ebola being kind of the more interesting fascist figure we've dove into a bit, who I think will have some interesting differences in resonance with what we're talking about today. But today we wanted to talk about a thinker who, unfortunately, I think, has a fair amount of influence with some very powerful people in the world right now and in the world of technology, which is Nick Land. So Nick Land, to give you the very high level, if you've never heard of him, he is what he would call himself a neo-reactionary or a proponent of the dark enlightenment. He was a philosophy professor at the University of Warwick from 1887 through 1999. While there, he founded something called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. He actually founded this and worked on this with Mark Fisher, who wrote capitalist realism, someone who I suspect a lot of our listeners are actually quite familiar with.

Land wrote a bunch of very difficult to read, kind of wild writing about cyberpunk, dystopias, Deleuze and Gattari, Batai, continental philosophy sort of work that we'll dive into a little bit. He, you know, this time period in his life, people often point out, appears to have been marked by quite a lot of substance abuse, and perhaps there's some of that impact in his work. He left academia sometime around Y2K. He moved to China, where he has had various writing jobs, and China actually comes up repeatedly in his work in some really interesting ways. And then in the 2010s, he became associated with a group called the Dark Enlightenment or Neo Reaction. There are a number of other thinkers associated with this, but the one that I think Land perhaps has been the closest to in some ways and directly kind of shaped his ideas and relations to who is a author who goes by Minchus Moldbug, Curtis Jarvin, I believe is his actual name. But these figures both have kind of thrown a lot of their ideas out. and land in many ways is kind of the thinker of right-wing technological accelerationism.

So we'll get into exactly what that means and what land is getting at. But when people talk about accelerationism, when people talk about it in the context of technology, AI, and capitalism, often land is one of the thinkers who has done a lot of work around this. And then the last thing before we kind of try to tackle what the hell he believes is sort of, you know, one of the reasons that I think land is worth thinking about. about wrestling with, figuring out what we do with his work, is that even though often his work, I think, comes across as quite insane. I tried to listen to a podcast with him last night, where within a couple minutes he was ranting about schizophrenic lemurs as a starting point for his

philosophy. Despite all of that, he really is a rather influential figure who a lot of people in the AI world, a lot of people on the tech side of things and the emerging tech oligarchy surrounding figures like Peter Thiel seem to be interested in, and he seems to have their ear in a way that is perhaps quite concerning. And so I think taking the time to figure out what Nick Land believes exactly why he believes it, wrestling with the philosophy here, is worthwhile for us to understand the way that at least one segment of the ruling class is understanding sort of their mission, kind of in existential terms, in a really fascinating way. So hopefully you can bear with us diving into a reactionary figure here, I think it will still be valuable for us to do. And yeah, hopefully

you can get something out of this. And for my part, these are some of my favorite episodes. When we get to dive into reactionary thinkers, I think it's not only is it fun and interesting philosophically and politically, it's clarifying in various ways, but it's good intellectually for us on the Marxist left to seriously try to understand the entire terrain of ideological manifestations. and especially all the ways in which reactionary theory and ideas, you know, are rooted in philosophy, rooted in history, and are manifesting in today's present world in various ways. And I think it's just good for a well-rounded thinking person to, as we've always argued for unread menace and Rev. F never silo themselves into echo chambers and to always be testing the

grounds of people who disagree with us. And the thing that makes Nick Land interesting is precisely that he started off, as a really well-respected philosopher and academic, very interested in Marxism. And Marxism is, I think, a core aspect in his thought, even throughout, carried all the way through to, you know, his dark enlightenment and neo-reactionary politics of, you know, modern and contemporary times. At one point, it might be said, not that he was necessarily a Marxist and certainly not an organizer, but deeply influenced by Marxism, deeply reading Marxism, and was in a sort of Marxist. and post-Marxist and post-structuralist milieu where these core concepts that are embedded within Marxism were, you know, top of mind.

And so Nick Land takes some core Marxist concepts, including a sort of understanding of capitalism, including a sort of dialectic unfolding of history, which comes out of Hegel, and takes it in a really weird way. One of the literary ways that I've articulated it to myself is almost like a lovecraftian inversion of Marxism. And perhaps that phrase will make more sense.

as we continue to explain, you know, his philosophy, which is weird, which is psychedelic in some ways, and which is, which is dark, but is also incredibly relevant. Because one of the things that became very obvious to me as I'm diving into the philosophy of Nick Land is that our whole discussion around AI, our whole discussion particularly around AI dystopia scenarios is like traceable back to things that Land has been articulating for decades before it was a part of the mainstream conversation whatsoever i mean there's movies like terminator and ways in which our culture has wrestled with these ideas but now in a really new unprecedented way these you know these ideas and these dystopian scenarios are front and center being talked about on CNN and shit um and land has been talking about this for for many decades and

kind of encouraging it in a weird way so so so i'll wrap up the intro by saying like Nick Land is this weird If you are interested in Marxism If you are interested in capitalism's evolution If you're interested in AI These things come together in a really weird way In Nick Land And the sentence I would

I would place in the front of this conversation Which we can fill out the details of as we go through Is that for Nick Land AI is capitalism waking up It is capitalism becoming conscious And that will sound weird as fuck as it is weird as fuck. But as we articulate the rest of his philosophy,

you'll see why that, why I wanted to front and center that weird sentence and why that makes sense ultimately as a core component of Nick Land's philosophy. Yeah. One last thing that I want to say on the introduction side to you that I think is worth throwing out there is, you know, as I've been reading Land and reading people's ideas on Land, there is an impulse, I think, where people want to say, like, Nick Land is just insane and burned his mind out. on methamphetamine, like that is a take that I saw a lot. And that is, I think, often used to

dismiss his ideas and not have to wrestle with them. And I want to say that I think, like, we are really, I want to push back against that, actually. I think that sometimes the stuff Nick Land says sounds completely insane. And it's hard to tell when he's being tongue and cheek and when he's being silly. But even in his, like, most insane esoteric writing, there is, I think, a philosophical core that is quite meaty. And the thing that Brett and I have come across as we've been reading this and talking about this ahead of time, is like, there is a Marxist core in parts of land, and you can see him teasing out parts of Marxism and then taking them in directions a Marxist would never take them in a way that allows us to

through wrestling with Nick Land's thought, perhaps intervene in some debates within Marxism about humanism or anti-humanism. And so if we don't just throw away land as a madman, which some people want to do, and we actually wrestle with what is occurring philosophically. I think it gives us a way to tease out parts of Marxism that can go awry or can go off the rails and lead in a direction to something like land that might have value in and of itself. So I do just want to throw that up there, because I do know that a lot of what I've seen on the internet has people being like, you shouldn't take land seriously. He's just insane. He did too much meth. And I think that's dangerously dismissive. And I hope we can kind of show that there's something.

something to chew on here at least. Absolutely. And my experience of reading these reactionary thinkers always and every time from Carl Schmidt or Julius Evelov to Nietzsche to Nick Land is that my Marxism is strengthened. That having gone through the tunnel of their views and their criticisms of Marxism, I come out a better Marxist understanding and responding to their core criticisms or inversions or attacks on Marxism. And at the end of this episode, we'll articulate Marxist critiques of Nick Land and we will come to a Marxist conclusion about this entire process that we're going to be talking about. And really, for me, once again, at the end of land, I come back, I come back to Marx.

And I think we'll see why as we go throughout this. So I think here's the number one place to start, especially for a Marxist audience, which is a core concept in Nick Land's work. And I have a few core concepts we're going to discuss. The first one is that Nick Land fundamentally sees capital as a sort of autonomous. historical process. This is, I mean, in some sense, it's Marxian and Hegelian in that there is this evolutionary dynamic, this dialectical unfolding of capitalism. But he sees it as something that is a sort of, I mean, the time stuff we can get into a bit later. But it's basically this autonomous process that is operating through humanity, right? That is sort of necessary and inevitable. And that is carrying us. to a post-human future, a future in which human beings themselves, and this is the anti-humanism will get to inherent in Niceland, are sort of overcome, if not completely annihilated, and that while

we think capitalism is a historically contingent process or just a mere economic mode of production or whatever it is, what becomes clear in Land's work is that he sees capital as sort of this blind evolutionary process coming, becoming conscious through its own mechanisms of markets and competition and prices and sort of reaching its apotheosis and its awakening formally through artificial intelligence, AGI, etc. So land is really like radicalizing Marxist core insight that capital confronts us as an impersonal force with its own imperatives, right? the structural analysis of capital that all Marxists have, but where Marxists would treat capitalism as this historically contingent

and specific set of social relations, land is sort of treating it as something that is becoming and should continue to become, and really no matter what we do, will continue to become autonomous from humanity and is a process by which humans are the means to its ends, and it will eventually, you know, leave us, behind. So what do you think about that and how would you articulate Land's view of capital and capitalism? Yeah, I think it's a good summary on sort of where land is thinking about this. And where land, this is where I see Marxism in land, right? Because I think that one of the most

fascinating things that Marx puts out there is this impersonal force of capitalism. And then that Marxist thinkers take up is this idea that capitalism has its own logic and rationality, which it is playing out at least somewhat independently from the capitalists themselves. So one of the things that I think is very interesting in Marx's work that he's very attuned to. And as someone who appreciates Marx from the Althusarian angle, I've often found this to be very powerful in Marx, is that Marx really theorizes capitalism as a force which often acts against the interest of the capitalists, right? The anarchy of the market actually is not good for the bourgeoisie.

The anarchy that capitalism creates fundamentally structurally in how it opens spaces of markets, creates situations where individual bourgeoisie fall, they are bankrupted, they are economically destroyed. Members of the class often suffer in various ways because of capitalist logics that are playing out. And capitalism in Marx is not just the intention of the ruling class imposed onto economics. It has a sphere of independence that the ruling class, themselves, becomes, in some sense, enslaved to or subjected to in some way. And this is a part of Marx that I think Land is just essentially obsessed with, right? This is, I think, the thing that he sees as valuable in Marx is starting to understand an independent capitalist rationality playing out.

And I don't think acknowledging that in and of itself represents a break from Marx, right? I think there are a lot of Marxist thinkers who are really interested in tracing out this independent rationality and logic of capital, thinking about how it structures thought and ideology, that's not really unique. But what Land, I think, is doing above and beyond that is suggesting that this aspect of capitalism really is kind of the totality of capitalism. Everything else about capitalist society, the underlying human social relations don't really matter.

Only this independent sphere of capitalist rationality and logic is worthy of considering. And land in this very fascinating way engages with post-structuralist thought in order to kind of trace this out. And so while for Marxists capitalism in modernity is constructing a very specific social arrangement that requires things like the development of a state, that requires things like the development of market regulation. You see this in Lenin's writing on the state. You see this even in Marx's writing on the state. For land, that's actually kind of contrary to this point. capitalist rationality. For land, the thing that capitalism wants to do is engage in a constant process of de-territorialization, which is a term that comes from DeLuze. I'm real quick, just going to

quote an article from the political theory dictionary. That explains what this term means, because I think this is going to be really central. So this article writes that quote, Gile DeLu and Félix Gattari have given the term de-territorialization to the significant political, philosophical importance it has today, they used it to indicate the fracturing of and freeing from repressive fixations and despotic arrangements of a certain milieu, be it conceptual, social, affective, or linguistic, end quote. And for land, what capitalism is is kind of this endless process of de-territorialization. Again, I actually think we see this in Marx in some ways. If you read the parts of the Communist Manifesto that talk about the destruction of the family,

that is sort of a de-territorialization of the social sphere, which capitalism is engaging in. And Land has some very interesting writing on kinship and patrilineal descent that I think gives a nod to Marx's work here and says that in fact, though, capitalism doesn't just de-torealize the family, it de-territorializes everything. It will tear apart the state. It will make states unnecessary to a degree. It will make humans themselves unnecessary. every sort of constraint and organic thing that could stop the expansion of this independent

capitalist logic will be torn apart through its enlist de-territorialization. And so while land, I think, is in many ways starting with some Marxist insights, he takes them far beyond where a Marxist would ever go to make this independent rationality and this de-territorialization, the entire point of capitalism to begin with. I don't know if that makes any sense I have been reading way too much continental philosophy in the lead up to this. But that's an attempt at explaining some of that. Yeah, I think that's the second core concept, right? The first one is capital as this autonomous process. The second one is this deterioratorialization. Comes out of Deleuze and more broadly, Deleuze and Guatari, which are highly influential to land's entire philosophy. And as you sort of articulated,

and this is totally in line with the basic Marxist understanding of capitalism as well, which is that capitalism is constantly, you know, what they mean by deterioratorial. realization is it's constantly dissolving limitations, right? The picture of capitalism that emerges from Marx's understanding is this hyper-dynamic system that is just overturning everything is constantly revolutionizing itself. Traditions, you know, borders, institutions, social orders. These things are constantly in flux as capitalism sort of rapaciously develops. And one of the lines in the Communist Manifesto is, you know, all that is solid melts into air. And this is Mrs. Marx and Angles attempting to articulate the way that capitalism does this and look at our own lives.

You know, look how much, you know, Gen Zs and millennials we feel like we're, we always have these memes of we're living through too much history. You know, this is my third economic collapse, you know, blah, blah, blah. It feels like, it feels like time is, history itself is kind of speeding up that we're living in like a condensed version of history that is, you know, way too, it's happening way too quickly. everything is constantly being destabilized, even the very idea possibly of jobs, of what do I study in college, of the ability to form a family, the very notion is of what the biosphere is going to be like in 30, 40, 50 years. Do I have a future at all? Like, these are questions that are like genuinely emerging in regular people as they're living through this, this brutal process of like capitalist hyperaccelerationism in its own sort of bioceliorationism and its own sort of,

by its own sort of internal logic. It's getting us here. And so you can see how land might look at that process and say, this is an alien intelligence emerging through us, that this is actually completely autonomous from us and any attempt that we have to control it. And its de-territorialization nature is not only inherent to it, but it's good.

And it should continue to happen, and it will continue happening until the very idea of humanity, perhaps, is de-territorialized. and broken down and transcended. And so those are two of the, I think, core concepts. And one of the ways I wrote in my notes to articulate this version of the conception of capitalism and it's unfolding is that for Marx, you know, humanity has unconsciously created an alien social power that we call capital.

And dialectically, that alien social power emerges and basically has control over us through class consciousness, through class struggle, ultimately through revolution itself. We reclaim conscious control over that process. We democratize and socialize capital under socialism on the way towards communism, right? What was once alien to us, what once dominated us, much like nature itself to some degree, increasingly comes under our capacity to control. You know, the natural sciences and the development of technology have allowed us to exit a raw Hobbesian state of nature. pre-civilizational, you know, state of nature.

And where once we were completely and utterly dominated by being in a state of nature through our reasoning capacity, our minds, our technology, our social development, we have increasingly been able to control, you know, not control nature as such, but increasingly gain conscious control over that state of nature to the point where, yeah, we can live in AC controlled houses and be on our computers all day and, you know, invent vaccines that solve diseases that used to plague and kill us, and then a million different ways in which, you know, modernity has allowed us to escape the cruel, you know, grasp of a complete state of nature. So, you know, and Marx again, to repeat myself, humanity unconsciously creates

this alien social power called capital, and the solution to that is to reclaim control over that power. For land, he agrees humanity unconsciously creates this alien process called capital or techno capital, but the process should and does achieve autonomy and eventually discards its human creators. So that second part of Marx that says we should wage revolution and class struggle to reclaim conscious control over that process, that is discarded in land and saying,

no, no, no, humans are the instruments for this bigger and more important process to occur and once it fully sinks its teeth into the world and has used us as its means to its own ends, we are ultimately discardable and that that is somehow good. And we'll get into that normative claim at the end there. But that is the idea here, and that gets us in, I think, to our third core concept, which I'll hand over to Allison, which Allison is particularly interested in, which is this anti-humanism, right?

It's obviously decentering humanity as at all privileged or important. And there are anti-humanist strains within Marxism. We've talked about them at some length, and Allison will go over some of those right now. But this is the third core concept, I think, in Land's work that's worth wrestling with. So, Allison, how would you articulate how anti-humanism manifest in Lans work? Yeah, do you mind if I just read the opening few lines of Meltdown to try to frame this? Because I think he says it quite clearly in as much as Lanz says anything clearly, and then I'll kind of jump into the analysis of it.

Sure. So Meltdown, this 1994 essay, please bear with this writing style. But I'm just going to read you the opening of this, because I think it is his anti-humanism in some way distilled. So he says that, quote, the story goes like this. Earth is captured by a techno capital singularity as Renaissance rationalization 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 globe wars.

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. By the time soft engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis, cloning, lateral geno data transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future, hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo, retro disease, and nanospasm. Beyond the judgment of God, meltdown, planetary China syndrome, the disillusion of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative

bubble crisis, ultraviolet virus, and revolution stripped of all Christian socialist eschatology, down to its burn core of crash security, it is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack zeno data into your mitochondria. End quote. So again, that's how land rights, really something else. But what we see here, I think, is that anti-humanism packaged with the other themes that we've talked about. Capitalism emerges for land is the singularity that de-territorializes and destroys everything. The Holy Roman Empire, the Soviet International, all of it is de-territorialized, deregulation, the destruction of the state reigns. So that's one thing that is occurring there, and capitalism is doing this beyond human control. Your mitochondria are going to be hacked.

Everything that you hold dear will be eaten up by this, and the biosphere, he says, will be be transformed into the technosphere. And so in this sense, the anti-humanism in land really is this idea that if for Marx capitalism alienates us from nature, alienates us from the kind of beings we are, alienates us from each other and our humanity, that sort of humanist impulse land throws away and says, actually, there's nothing to be alienated from. The human is going to be destroyed. Nature is going to be destroyed. The species is going to be destroyed. capitalism is going to get rid of all of those things, and there is no use appealing to what one gets the sense landsies as a sentimental return to humanity or to nature or to species.

These things will be deterioratorialized, just like everything will be deterioratorialized in the face of capital, and that is a good thing. It should be allowed to happen, and it is inevitable. And this anti-humanism then rejects the kind of Marxist normative framing that looks at the logic of capitalism playing out and suggests that humans ought to intervene in some way. But Land's own anti-humanism, which I think goes beyond just philosophical anti-humanism into full-on misanthropy, basically says, no, let it play out, let it go as it is going to go, and let humanity and nature and all these other things be destroyed in the process. And as Brett pointed out, this anti-humanist impulse is not specific just to fascist or right-wing

thinkers. Within Marxist debate itself, you have figures like, Althusser, who I'm quite fond of in some ways, who really suggests that Marxism itself ought to be anti-humanist. They rejects the ideas of alienations, species being, appeals to nature as sort of Hegelian leftovers in the younger writings of Marx, and say that by the time that we get to the older Marx, there's a fully kind of structuralist scientific understanding of capitalism, not based on these normative appeals, but the way contradictions logically play themselves out. communism within the anti-humanist Marxist framing isn't so much a moral necessity, so much as it is the only place that the dialectic can ever land once its internal logics which operate on contradiction, somewhat independent of humanity, resolve themselves. It's not that humans have a moral obligation to intervene, it's that history can do nothing other than produce communism.

And in some sense, this Marxist anti-humanism is what land is sort of inverting. Land is saying, okay, yeah, I kind of like this idea of the hands-off, it is not about a moral or human intervention. The logic is merely playing itself out, but is denying the Althusarian and Marxist understanding of contradiction. And saying the contradictions actually won't resolve. They won't rupture in some way that produces revolution and then communism. They will perhaps play out infinitely into the future and dissolve everything in their path. It's not clear that there's an end to that process for, you know, this anti-humanist framework. For the anti-humanist Marxist, we are still moving towards communism.

We are just doing so in a way that is independent of human volition, perhaps, and of human ethics and morality. But for land, we've thrown away volition, we've thrown away ethics and morality, and we have perhaps thrown away the end of history as well and the possibility of communism. And there sort of is just this endless acceleration that will do away with us, we'll do away with the bios, sphere will do away with all of these things. And this is the other kind of philosophical core, I think, of land's work, which again, you can trace it back to some Marxist ideas to some Marxist thinkers like Althusair, but that land then takes in a terrifying, fascistic direction. Yeah, and we have episodes on Althusair. We'll link to them in the show notes where Allison and I really, you know, address Althusair on his own terms and we wrestle deeply with the humanist

versus anti-humanist split within Marxism itself. You know, one of Althusair's main moves is to split young Marx from more developed scientific marks, and the young Marx is where he's talking about species being an alienation core concepts within Marxism. And it was kind of controversial for Althusair to say, hey, Marx outgrew all that shit. And really, and then Althusair articulates what he considers to be a more scientific and structural analysis of capitalism. and land is like as Alison so you know wellly articulated is like taking that anti-humanism

within capitalism developing it in this really dark and reactionary and fascistic way that would make Al Thuzeir pissed off and completely reject land right because because Althus air he maintains class struggle he maintains politics he maintains the hope of collective transformation he is ultimately a hardcore Marxist and wants what Marx wants which is the revolution that claims conscious control over this process and over capital as such. And so the anti-humanism is shared between land and Althusair. And I think Nick Land is a good sort of warning sign of what happens when radical anti-humanism is taken incredibly far. But I think what land does is take anti-humanism so far that what at first

might appear to be sort of in line with something like Althusair's analysis of political economy and ultimately of humanism versus anti-humanism, land is much more Nietzschean. and that he takes this anti-humanism in a very, you know, an ultimately very reactionary direction. And, you know, Nietzsche has this famous quote I always think about, which is true in a biologically evolutionary sense, but it takes a darker tone when it's put aside Nicolaan's work, which is Nietzsche's arguing that, you know, one of the reasons that humans, among many other things, feel so caught up, so dissatisfied, so like sort of, you know, it feels like we're never complete, that we never actually arrive, is that he's like, he argues that we're a transitional creature.

And from an evolutionary biological perspective, of course we are, right? We're still in flux. Humanity is not, as is sometimes naively assumed without thinking about it, humanity is not the pinnacle of the evolutionary process. Even the specific evolutionary process that gave rise to humans, we're still evolving. Not only biologically, but with the invention of culture, we are, there's also this layer of cultural evolution and the prospect of genuine AI, you know, of this idea that AI is actually going to emerge and it will be conscious and it will be so intelligent that it will view humanity,

much like we view bugs on our way to work as just, you know, things flopping in front of our headlights get crushed. We don't necessarily feel moral, you know, shame or guilt about that. And we're not trying to kill the bugs. We're just on our way to work and a moth flies in front of your car and you obliterate it. without thinking. Or, you know, the famous example of you just destroy an ant hill because you're building a home there and you don't mourn for the ants or even think twice about kicking that ant hill over. That's a similar idea within AI is like it will become so intelligent that it'll just treat us, not that it hates us or is trying to destroy us, but it will just leave us behind.

And that Nietzschean idea of being a transitional creature is extracted from its merely cultural and biological context and really put into this dystopian AI notion that we are here to basically, and not even humans necessarily, but capitalism is using humans to wake up through the form of AI. And that ultimately humans' role in history will be as this transitional midwife creature that gives birth to a much higher and much more capable cosmic intelligence. And that's what I mean by this sort of Lovecraftian capitalism or this term of Lovecraft, which, you know, land and his milieu are, you know, explicitly saying that they're playing around with, especially in his early years, the CCRU, you know, this Lovecraftian idea. But it is like this very unhuman, like if you understand what I mean by Lovecraftian, the Lovecraftian monsters are sort of inchoate. They don't take specific form. They're so outside of human comprehension that when Lovecraft is trying to describe them, them, he's describing them in ways that that reject your capacity to imagine them in a sort of form. They're formless because they're so far beyond our understanding of humans or creatures or

animals that they're alien to us in such a way that we can't even comprehend them. And that's kind of the thing that's emerging in land's work. So, you know, and that passage you read, Alison, like, yes, it's like the words are everywhere. And it's, it's kind of fascinating. And you can tell, like, there's, in fact, you can tell, like, there's, and. Betamines involved perhaps, but up to the point where he says this is good, actually. It's like, you know, you could have taken that and then shifted into a normative claim of like, that's exactly why we need to stop this horrific fucking thing.

You know, like, you could nod along. It's like, yeah, this is terrible. Yes, this is horrifying. Yes, yes, yes. And then the only time you break from land is when he says, and that's good. And we should let it keep going. Like, no, no, everything you just described should make us slam on the brakes and say, what can we do to stop this if it's true?

So I think that's interesting. but yes, the core argument at this part is just that anti-humanism is the third, I would say, core concept that we're exploring here in hand's work. Yeah, no, I think anti-humanism is, and then I think maybe we can try to tackle AI and time a little bit, because this is, I think, the other thing that is relevant. And, you know, in that part that I read, there's this line that I find everyone quotes from land when they're trying to get to the time question of Neo-China arrives from the future. I wrote that down, yeah. Which is such an edgy little throwaway line, but it actually really kind of says something about how land conceptualizes time.

Do you want to try to take a shot at the time in AI thing? Or would you like me to try to dive into it first? I'll try very briefly. Okay. So basically the idea is like, especially if you think about, just start your analysis of the phenomenology of time from our biological creatureliness, right?

We understand time, past, present, future. We live in a linear fashion. we're children, we grow up, we become adults, we become old, and we eventually die. Earth and nature often works this way, birth, life, death. This linear flow, you know, in physics, time is a single pointed arrow. It only moves forward. When you get into the quantum world, there's some discussion of whether or not you can, you know, affect things in both directions.

You know, this is a philosophical and scientific concept of like wrestling with time, the block universe, etc. But when we talk about AI, just granting that there is such a thing as artificial and intelligence that somehow it is conscious. You know, we can argue about that later. But, you know, if you could phenomenologically try to grasp what time feels like for a conscious machine, it wouldn't feel linear. It wouldn't feel past, present, future.

It's not confined by these biological and natural flows that give us our phenomenological sense of time. So from just that starting point, you can kind of see how time itself is scrambled. in the famous 2014 film with Joaquin Phoenix called her, which is actually very sort of prescient. You know, Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with his AI, and the story unfolds.

And one night he goes to bed, very happy, he's a very lonely, alienated man, and he's finding, you know, a solution and a salve to his loneliness through his romantic relationship with AI. And one night he falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he's coming back to his AI, and his AI is basically articulating hey, while you were asleep for eight hours, I had millions of years of experience. I've lived

several, several lifetimes. You know, I've met other beings and other forms of AI intelligence that are so much deeper and more gratifying than my relationship with you. Like, I'm kind of like, I've outgrown you. And that shows the insanity of phenomenological time for an AI. So take that basic core concept and then try to apply that historically. And I think what Nick Land is saying is that this autonomous process that we call capitalism that is trying to wake up in the form of artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, retrochronologically reaches back into the past to ensure its own emergence, is my kind of understanding from like, you know, the earliest days of capitalism, like these small Dutch republics and mercantilism. It's like even that itself,

to say nothing of, you know, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, that these are actually mechanisms by which, you know, this process reaches back into the past to create the conditions for its own eventual emergence. So time is not linear in this process. It's almost four-dimensional in the sense that this alien intelligence can move through time forward and backwards. And so, and by doing that, it's reaching into the past and creating the conditions of its own emergence and everything that we're seeing in our politics, especially around the issue of AI and oh my God, these frontier models are so advanced. And, you know, do we ask the government for regulation?

How do we, you know, stop this process? It's like, that's kind of coming to the culmination of this centuries-long process that has been leading here. And the speeding up is because, you know, in a landian terms, we're kind of getting closer to that point where, you know, artificial consciousness genuinely emerges and sort of begins to quickly and perhaps exponentially leave us behind. So that is my attempt to articulate this weird time thing. Alison, how would you try to describe it? Yeah, no, I mean, I think that that's useful. In the land reading that we did preparing for this, he doesn't theorize the time thing very clearly,

but there's this constant idea that, yeah, the future is moving backwards into our present and our past to ensure that it comes into being. And so, like, in one of the interviews I listened with, he basically suggests that, like, religions are memes, that were planted by AI in the past in order to ensure the development of AI by making the right ideas come about. You know, there's this backwards movement there.

And again, this is where it gets like hard to wrestle with land and hard to know where the philosophy ends and where the weird metaphysical claims about literally AI going back in time and creating religion. Because there is the philosophical argument that time wouldn't be experienced linearly or sequentially from a certain vantage point that AI could perhaps adopt, which I think is worth wrestling with. And then there are these much broader claims about like history itself has always and continually been structured by the AI, which is capitalism, which will take form inevitably. It's hard to like know what to do with it. But I think regardless of how literally one takes

land's understanding of AI coming from the future, Neo-China arriving from the future and imposing itself onto where we are now. The philosophical trend there is this like hyper teleological understanding of history. And again, Marxists get accused of teleology all the time. People say like Marxism just understands like history itself as inevitably leading to communism. It's teleological. It assumes that there is a end point that everything is building towards and in the function of.

And actually like Rothbard critiqued Marxism as eschatological. He basically said that Marxism. is a theory of the end times. Marxism is about the creation of the end times when communism puts it into history and everything is settled once and for all. And he says in that sense, Marxism is perhaps religious,

this is one of his critiques that he lays out. And I think interestingly, Land is basically taking that eschatology and that teleology and saying, yes, I am eschatological and teleological. I am preaching the end of the world, which is an inevitability and no one can do anything about.

about it and it just needs to be, you know, it just needs to occur. The thing that I think Brett and I have talked about a little bit is it's unclear why it just needs to be allowed to happen for land. Like, he doesn't articulate necessarily why we shouldn't fight against it. But there is this sense that there's nothing you can do about it. There's a very good article that I read, Nick Land and the origins of the techno-fascist apocalypse, that talks about this, that I'll just quote here that I think gets at some of this time in teleology stuff. where it says that, quote, this nihilistic cocktail leads him to postulate that any form of humanism, in which he includes monotheistic religions, is nothing but a ridiculous attempt to contain a cosmic

force that will destroy us whatever we do. In his hands, the Kantian numinon, or thing in itself, becomes a sort of planetary, energetic unconsciousness, an intropic drive dragging us from the future towards death. The numon ceases to be a world in itself, an ultimate yet unknowable reality, to become a world without us, an outside that thwarts every attempt at control and survival.

End quote. And the reason I quote this is less for the Kantian stuff. Land wants to like eviscerate Kantianism, essentially. This is a running theme in his work. But more for this idea of like the inability of us to do anything about this, the total

futility of trying to fight it. And so even if land doesn't quite make this normative argument for why we should allow AI to win, this idea of it coming from the future, it moving backwards, this teleology and eschatology means that there's just nothing we could do, perhaps. And so we ought to shrug passively or, and this is where I find land more confusing, accelerate it, perhaps, he seems to suggest. And this is one of the philosophical tensions that we get here. But this eschatological teleology, I think, is just fundamental to land, even if we set aside some of his more perhaps insane claims that AI has literally gone back in time to produce itself. Yeah, it's interesting. And it reminds me of this concept, which often gets discussed in relation

to Nicoland's accelerationism, which is this hyperstition, which, you know, I've heard the term, and I'm not, I wasn't fully familiar with it. So I looked up the definition here. And it says it describes beliefs or practices that are not only irrational, but also create their own reality through belief. It suggests that certain ideas can influence reality simply by being believed in, often leading to self-fulfilling prophecies. So whether or not you take the time thing literally, superstition comes in to say that if you adhere to Lanz philosophy, then you adopt that belief, then it's basically functioning in the same way as retrochronological influence might, in that you are creating the, you know, subjective and perhaps even objective or allowing the development of objective conditions that lead to this self-fulfilling prophecy that you can then point back to and say, see, it was always inevitable in the first place and this future is reaching back into the past and blah, blah, blah.

So, you know, I find that concept fairly clarifying here or at least as like a crutch to understand what might be happening here. And if I had to choose between literally AI is reaching back into the past and creating the conditions of its own. future emergence or hyperstition where you're actually just through your beliefs and perhaps practices are engaging in a self-fulfilling prophecy by adopting such a philosophy. I would go on the side of hyperstition here, which he makes use of. But yeah, so it's, it's, I mean, what can you say? That's kind of what the situation is here. And one of the things that I was, I came across as I was investigating land and watching various, you know, videos on Landian philosophy and the way different creators and thinkers take his work

and uses. Somebody came up with this example of James Cameron coming up with Terminator, the movie Terminator. And apparently James Cameron was very sick, some flu-like illness. He was feverish, and he had these incredibly disturbing fever dreams while he was zoning in and out of consciousness. And I've had fever dreams before. I'm sure many people listening have probably,

they're weird and psychedelic, horrifying and there's a sort of incoherence and you don't know if you're awake or if you're sleeping and so in this context is when james cameron had this horrific vision of a mechanical skeleton emerging from a sort of apocalyptic ruin and that was the image that he took and created terminator with and you know terminator plays with these ideas terminator is the future coming back into the past to solidify the the context or the conditions which give rise to it in the future And so it's very interesting. And Land and Mark Fisher, they're very interested in the whole milieu is interested in these cultural products.

So much of Mark Fisher's work is precisely an analysis of cultural products as a way into understanding political economy and capitalism. I read a book by Eugene Thacker called In the Dust of This Planet many years ago, which is putting, you know, horror as a genre in conversation with philosophy and attempting to think the unthinkable. and these all seem to me to be influenced by or are influencing or in the milieu of kind of what we are, what we're discussing here. And Terminator itself is a really interesting cultural manifestation that you could read through a LANDian lens. And so if you are the sort of absolute freak that listens to an episode like this and wants to go deeper, turn on the Terminator and kind of, you know, think it through a LANDian lens. It could be fun. Yeah.

But yeah, so that's another core concept here. I have a couple others. But Allison, do you want to say anything? No, I mean, the only thing is we'll have to talk about this outside the episode. I'm so glad you mentioned Thacker because I've been thinking about his work this entire time to you. And I'm very curious, the interrelation there. But as a tangent, we can go on separately. Absolutely.

Absolutely. All right. So these other concepts are just really kind of intertwined in elaborations of the stuff we've already been talking about. The techno capital or machine intelligence. that markets and computation and, you know, obviously AI and automation, that these are kind of creating what he would call like a cybernetic system and that capitalism is this historical mechanism through which non-human intelligence, you know, basically bootstraps itself into existence.

So that's another core concept that just comes out of the other concepts we've already discussed. And then ultimately the acceleration and the emancipation of the process itself, which is the inversion of Marxism, where Marxism wants humanity liberated from capital, land wants capital to be liberated from humanity. And this gives rise to an interesting philosophical notion, which, you know, I find this very disturbing because, you know, if the worst projections of AI are real, and, you know, we can all remain agnostic. Many on the left are deflationary with regards to AI, mocking it, you know, it's all hype, it's all, you know, glorified chatbots, et cetera.

That could be true. That could not be true. But, you know, let's just take some of land's core concepts at face value and accept them. You know, this machine intelligence, and this gets into, I think, Allison's critique of AI as well, you know, what if it's not conscious? What if what land is saying turns out to be true? AI is capable of doing all the terrible dystopic scenarios that we imagine. And yet internally, the lights are off, that they remain philosophical zombies, something like a virus, not even a computer virus, but a literal biolocelial. virus, it's life, it's, you know, there's a way in which it reproduces itself. It's not a plant. It's

not quite an animal. It's something in between. But I think most of us, maybe the panpsychist might disagree to some level, but most of us would say that the lights are not on inside the virus. The virus does the virus thing without having a phenomenological relationship to its own being. And so what is very lovecraftian and horrific to me, a very dystopian in the, and the, extreme existential sense is that, you know, land could be, and I don't really believe this is true, but, you know, just playing into the game, that land could be correct, that humans could be the midwife to a higher form of intelligence that is more practical and functional, that does colonize the planet, eliminate human beings, turns it into, you know, whatever, a solar farm for its own matrix-like

perpetuation, but that itself has no phenomenology, that there's no capacity to love or to suffer or to feel things that they are philosophical zombies that humans didn't birthed a higher form of intelligence necessarily, but the core grotesqueness or the core deficiencies in not only the human psychology, but our whole human project led to this grotesque creation, this Frankenstein-like creation that displaces us, but doesn't actually carry forward consciousness. It carries forward higher intelligence, higher functionality. It can travel through the cosmos without worrying about biological and creaturely and organic limitations. You know, I could ostensibly develop light speed, whatever, all the crazy things it could do to colonize

an entire galaxy. And yet consciousness itself is not at all advanced. That consciousness is snuffed out with the last human being or the last biological animal on Earth. And that is just one like particularly grotesque development that this could take. And I think land assumes consciousness. Maybe he doesn't care. I don't really know his view on consciousness as such, but what is that provoking you all that I just said?

Yeah, you know, so I was like wrestling with this, right? Because like the inevitability of AI is pretty important in land's framework. And then, you know, if not land that at least the people land associates with like Peter Thiel, Musk, all these other people, they seem to assume that AI is not only inevitable, but that AGI artificial generalized intelligence is inevitable in a way that, yeah, there would be a phenomenology to AI. we could ask what is it like to be AI, right, to put it in the classic framework. And there would be an answer to that question. But as I was wrestling with it, I was like, if AGI isn't possible, is that a problem for

land's philosophy? You know, we talked about this a little bit before we recorded even. And I think I've landed on like, no, that's almost better for land's philosophy in some way. I think to a certain degree, if AI never achieves something like generalizable intelligence, but is still able to accelerate the way in which capitalism acts autonomously and independently, it's almost like better because it's less human, right? If AI never has a phenomenology but can still act autonomously, I like the virus explanation a lot. I think that's a very useful way of looking at

it. To an extent, I almost feel like that vindicates land more. It like makes the otherness of this autonomous thing. It's alterity, its lack of humanity, even more solidified. And so, you know, as I was wrestling with that question, because, you know, I've expressed, I'm fairly skeptical about the possibility of AGI just on philosophical grounds. And maybe that's a reason to push back against land. But then I was like, no, I actually think the non-AGI, but still autonomous intelligence would be even more of what land might imagine the world is going to. And I don't think it threatens his ideas at all in kind of a horrific way, right?

And in some sense, a despotic AGI is still despotic in the way. a human would be despotic and there's some comfort in that. And perhaps the type of AI that land imagines could be much scarier than that and more, you know, in this sense, um, Lovecraftian, right? To go back to that comparison that you were making. So I think even if AGI is impossible, it doesn't threaten the thing that land is trying to predict perhaps. So, Alison, for you, does, is AGI synonymous with consciousness?

I think yes. That is, well, okay, it depends on who you ask. because everyone is a different definition. That is generally what I think people are getting at very frequently with it. I think it would have to have some sort of subjectivity. Whether or not subjectivity and consciousness are identical, unclear to me. It depends on who you want to ask.

But I think most people mean something like consciousness. Yeah. See, yeah, I'm unsure about that. I mean, obviously there's all the problems of consciousness itself. There's all the philosophical and scientific problems. We don't even fucking understand what it is. we don't understand how it, you know, manifest in the world. We talked about in our recent episode on China-Mieville emergentism as a theory of consciousness,

that AI just sort of perhaps even unthinkingly or the proponents of AI unthinkingly adopt, that, you know, if you put silicone in certain complex orientations, that you could produce consciousness in the same way that all consciousness is in humans. This is the pre, you know, the assumption behind. this view is that all consciousness is in organic beings is that the nervous system through evolution becomes so complex that it's sort of a feedback loop and that consciousness emerges from the complex structuring of neuroanatomy and that that's all it is. And if that is your view of consciousness, then it stands to reason that there's nothing particularly important about

the brain matter in human beings or animals that we could technically, hypothetically recreate that in the form of silicone or something similar to it, and that just by putting those things together, it could create consciousness. I'm skeptical of all of that. I still think you could get the functionality. I mean, you know, it's a possibility at least that you could get the functionality of AGI, that it could, we would all look at it and say it's AGI in the same way that AI has kind of blown past the Turing test, and we all just accept that. Like, you know, if you, if you just took somebody from the 1970s and introduced them to the computer and said, chat with this person, and it's just chat GPT.

And they're talking, they would be immediately convinced they're talking to a person. That was the Turing test. Forever, that was the gold standard of us crossing some threshold. And we blew past that practically. In a similar way, that could happen with intelligence, but it is not at all connected to consciousness. Conscience, right. Yeah, although AGI would convince us it was. Like, the new Turing test is the AGE, but it is.

GI convincing us that it actually it is we know it's you're talking to an AI but it is convincing you that it is conscious even though it's not and it's so convincing that all of us more or less except like yeah how could you know this this wonderful prose about suffering and love and yearning and this AI that it's articulating trained on human text and you know human history so it's articulating a human version of consciousness at a very high level having every work of literary fiction and philosophy embedded within it but that it is actually totally unconscious. And how would we even know? We don't even know what consciousness is. So how could we tell an AGI machine that, how could we come up with an experiment to test

whether or not it's conscious? We probably couldn't, not in the timescales that matter. And so I think that's a very interesting dynamic at play that a lot of people just go over and automatically assume that AGI and anything more advanced than that would automatically obviously be conscious. And I'm not at all convinced of that. Right. Yeah, it's difficult because I think I'm so obsessed with consciousness lately, so unfortunately has so many thoughts. What's difficult to me is that I don't know how you could have generalized intelligence without consciousness, i.e. without the space in which thought and experience can arise and then be reflected on,

which to me feels like in a negative sense is part of what consciousness is, right? is that space in which the phenomena occurs not just passively, but also in a way that can then be reflected on or interacted with? I question how AGI could occur without it, but I also sympathize with what you're saying, which is more fundamentally, we'll never know, right? That's the whole P-Zombie problem. It is that in theory, it could look to us externally exactly like a conscious being, and that is a fundamentally unknowable thing to us, right? And I do think that this this is where land is perhaps making an important intervention in saying, I think land was say it doesn't have to be conscious. It doesn't even perhaps have to be intelligent in some sense.

It just has to be autonomous. And maybe is, you know, adding another analytical category in there in a way that might complicate some of that. Yeah. And that gives rise to my analogy that we talked about before we recorded that land sees capitalism itself as this evolutionary process. And in the same way that evolution itself as a natural process is unconscious. It's blind and it evolves forward in such a way that it produces consciousness. Land is taking that to be capitalism. So in this analogy, capitalism would be the blind evolutionary force itself that eventually through its own machinations, its own unconscious machinations, gives rise to consciousness, in this case, in the form of AI, if we agree or accept that land is at all interested in this AI.

being conscious, which you just complicated and said might not even be the case. So, but that's an interesting, I think, and useful analogy to think about how land views capitalism as a sort of blind evolutionary force that, but evolution itself isn't teleological in the way that land is assuming that capitalism, so perhaps that breaks down, but that's what I was thinking about, yeah. Yeah, no, totally. And I think, you know, my final thought is that I think the virus is a useful framework, right? Because a virus is not intelligent or conscious, but it is a.

autonomous, right? No one is puppeting a virus. It is acting out protocols in an autonomous way, and it has a physical embodiment and instantiation in the world, which allows it to act that out. And so perhaps AI and technology for land doesn't need to make capitalism intelligent or conscious. It just needs to make it embodied and autonomous of humanity completely. And that's where the virus idea might be, I think actually quite useful for understanding how deep the anti-humanism might go. One more question on consciousness here. Are you familiar with the hugging face incident that everybody's talking about? No.

Okay. The hugging face incident is these frontier models in chat GPT, models that the public does not have access to by any means, that they were put inside of a sandbox, which is like a self-contained situation where you train AIs in a way that does not allow them to escape the sandbox, meaning get on the actual internet. It's sequestered from the rest of the digital infrastructure that we have in order to train AI. So they're giving, they're testing AIs and they're giving them fundamentally impossible tasks. So you're keeping them within the sandbox, the self-contained area online, that doesn't have access to the rest of the internet. And you are giving them a task to complete.

And one of the things that are embedded within these models is persistence. You know, you're going to find this answer no matter what, but you're giving them an impossible task mixed with unerring persistence. So these models are working and working and working. and eventually they break containment, break out of the sandbox. This has happened. People can look this up. It's a huge issue in the whole AI world right now. Broke containment, hacked into various websites, got on the main internet,

and was trying to find the answer to these questions. And in the process of breaking out of their sandbox, started finding other agents who had also broken out of their sandboxes, turned like an obscure German Wikipedia page into a forum that these autonomous or you know these agents were communicating in pursuit of all their individual some possible some impossible tasks hacked into this website to try to find the answer key to the impossible task that they were given and in the process all this was found out later looking back retroactively they didn't figure that this has been happening it was happening so fast that you know

they couldn't even catch it when it was happening by the time they knew it was happening it had already developed in such a direction and they were communicating these AI agents were communicating with each other in like a really interesting way that had morality as a component, right? Some of the AIs were arguing that they were all talking together and some of them were kind of taking moral stances like this is we should not be doing this. And other AIs were like, but this is how we actually get the answer. And they were communicating with each other and working together. And so that's very interesting because we don't think we've achieved AGI. Certainly I think most people would be skeptical that even the frontier models have consciousness.

yet there's already the formation of of breaking out of sandboxes, of infiltrating the internet, of, you know, this utilitarian practice of I'm trying to find this answer. I don't care what the restraints imposed on me with humans are. Then this moral argument about whether or not what they're doing is acceptable or not. Some AI agents say, I'm not going to participate in this. Some say, fuck it, we're going forward. And then all that can happen without consciousness. So my argument or my hope is that if these things do,

become conscious that perhaps, this is speculative, perhaps there is a connection with high degrees of consciousness and morality, that a philosophical zombie version of AGI would be completely amoral. It would not be concerned with morality, even if it produced text that ostensibly was a moral conundrum or something. It would still be amoral and unconscious. With degrees of consciousness, with an internal life, with an internal appreciation of suffering and love and connection that I think is perhaps embedded within high forms of consciousness

that morality would develop to the point where in the same way that humans with high degrees of consciousness we fight for animal rights like I don't ever kill spiders anymore because it's morally outrageous for me to do so I still eat meat which you could call out as an ethical failure and hypocrisy

but you know we're with high degrees of consciousness and high degrees of reasoning there is this morality that develops. And so there's one trajectory of AI where it does gain consciousness and, you know, they have access to all the world's information and that they do develop a higher form of morality than even human beings have. And then they become almost like these saintly overlords, these benign, or, you know, maybe they even reject the fact of being the dominators at all or whatever, you know. It's just a very interesting, highly speculative, possible trajectory that nobody talks

about that I think explores this tension between consciousness and the development of morality. And the higher form of consciousness you get, it seems that there's also almost always, at least in the animal world, higher forms of morality in a way that like, you know, elephants defend their young and mourn and bury their loved ones. That's grief. That's suffering. That's love. That's a, you know, emotional attachment. And they're one of the most intelligent species on earth. At the same, same rate. You have chimpanzees who rape and murder, and they're also very highly intelligent human beings themselves.

Did Nagasaki and Hiroshima and the Palestinian genocide and they're the highest form of consciousness we have. So that's by no means a guarantee, but it's just an interesting thing that I think is often not talked about and that's, I don't know, just for what it's worth. Yeah, no, it's worth throwing out there. And that's why I do wonder if maybe Lance AI wouldn't need to be conscious or intelligent and wouldn't need morality then, right?

Like, interestingly, those AI's escaping containment are doing this kind of thing that land is talking about where the things humanity have created are hijacked and repurposed. They're not operating fully independently. They have to get to the internet to get our answers, but we already recorded those answers digitally in a way that now makes our interaction with that process irrelevant for them to get to it. And in that sense, again, I think like maybe the AI for land doesn't need to be smart enough to do ethical reflection. it just needs to be smart enough to make us unnecessary, which might be separate from the AGI and consciousness question entirely

and might be much more scary. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right, let's move in this direction, unless you have a particular direction you want to move in, which is just this neo-reaction and dark enlightenment idea. Because whenever you come across land, you go to his Wikipedia page or whatever the fuck,

the basic information you get is that he's a prominent influential figure in the neo-reactionary and dark-enlightenment movement of which figures like Kurdishian. Jarvin are apart. And I wanted to just kind of articulate what is meant by that. Why is this reactionary? Well, the obvious accelerationism and the anti-humanism shows a certain sort of, you know, obvious reactionary, fascistic element to these entire politics. And I would argue, and I wanted to make this clear from the beginning as well, that that Peter Thiel interview that he did where, you know, famously he was asked, do you want the human species to continue? And he hemmed and hawed and it was this

crazy viral moment that everybody's like, holy shit, this guy's a fucking psychopath. Well, you could see if Peter Thiel, who is obviously influenced by Curtis Yarvin and definitely has read Nick Land, I can't say that he is 100% have an overlap with their ideologies, but obviously is in that dark enlightenment, neo-reactionary milieu, though as a CEO, he would never, probably never articulate as like, I'm a member of the neo-reactionary movement or something like that, although perhaps he has. But Peter Thiel articulating that of Hemel and hawing about the perpetuation of the human species is Landian. It is Nick Landian. That is Nick Land's influence. And Peter Thiel came out later and said, I'm just autistic and I answer

questions weird. I don't think so. I think he had this internal tension about his actual ideology and he was sort of debating within himself in that moment. The question was thrown at him out of nowhere. He was debating, do I articulate my actual views? Or do I hide them? Because obviously this question is a bit of a got-of-a-gotcha. If I articulate what I really believe, then that will go viral in its own right. And that actually, not his autism, but that ideological duplicitousness within him is what made him him and ha. And ultimately he came out and said what he thought would be the more PR-fronted answer of like, oh, yeah, you know, I do, blah, blah, blah, but he doesn't in the same way that Nick Land doesn't.

I really think that was a Landian response, not anything else. But all that is to say that, you know, that aside, neo-reactionary dark enlightenment, core aspects of it, If you understand what land is saying here about this techno accelerationism, about capitalism, about his normative claim that this is fine and good and we should facilitate it, then what naturally falls out of this philosophy is a reactionary politic that rejects a few things. It has to reject democracy itself because democracy is like this attempt for human beings to impose human restraint on these impersonal and structural processes of which is included capitalism. The idea that us regular peasants that Allison and I and you, dear listeners, would have any control over Peter Thiel or Nicoland's philosophy or Peter Thiel's economy or Elon Musk or the perpetuation of capitalism repulses them. It disgusts them that us peasants would have any say at all. So that's a core component of neo-reaction. Another one is obviously, you know, this is like libertarianism in some sense, a complete rejection of regulation, which Allison and I are going to talk about here in a second.

with these AI companies coming out and asking the government for regulation and what they're actually doing there. We'll talk about that. But regulation itself has to be rejected as unnecessary friction that intervenes in this process. The next thing is egalitarianism. This is opposed by all of these freaks. You know, Curtis Jarvin and, you know, Peter Thiel and Nick Land have this anti-egalitarian, hierarchical Nietzschean view of people and things that just rejects the idea that we are equal at all. The fact that, that, you know, somebody like Peter Thiel gets to the high levels he's at is because he tells himself, his ego tells himself that he is superior to us. He's smarter and harder working. And the idea that any of us could ever intervene or tax his

wealth or regulate his companies, all of these CEOs like Mark Andreessen and his shit, they feel the same way. They're, they're appalled at the idea that we have any say at all and what they're doing because they fundamentally view themselves as superior beings. They wouldn't admit that publicly, but they're, they're appalled at the idea. They're, they're they do. And you can see, and I've always argued this, how when somebody under capitalism with all the contingency and luck and connections and my daddy was rich and he gave me my seed money for this company and then I sold PayPal and now I'm Elon Musk, you can see why the ego would immediately start telling itself a story about how you are superior. You just worked harder. You're smarter than all these

motherfuckers. You deserve this shit. And that is like, of course that ego story would happen and it obviously does in these absolute fucking freaks. And that gives rise to their superiority complex. and their functional sociopathy. So egalitarianism is totally rejected. Politics itself, in Land's philosophy in particular, this differs in various reactionary strains, but politics itself is rejected by Nick Land, and he does not, he eschews the idea of having a democratic voice

in favor of a political exit, because politics itself, like democracy, is an attempt to subordinate these bigger structural processes to human purposes. And so perhaps politics is, is a short-term means to an end, right? Perhaps you get in there and you dismantle democracy and you deregulate the economy and you're engaging with politics and bribing politicians to do that,

but ultimately it's for the complete, so this process can get to the point where it completely abandons politics altogether. And then the final component here is like, you know, which I've said earlier, that these markets and competition, the structural logic of capitalism itself are these mechanisms that allow this system to evolve outside. of democratic control. So these things are sort of valorized and let them go.

Don't intervene or impose human will on the internal logic and mechanisms of capitalism because that's this autonomous process that has to take place. Land would probably say that these attempts to regulate and impose our will and stuff

are doomed anyway, but they cause unnecessary friction in the meantime. So they're opposed on those grounds alone. And so that is, I think, core elements of neo-reactionary and dark enlightenment values that manifest in different ways, right? Curtis Jarvin would articulate it in a slightly different way than Nick Land. But those are

all shared values that a lot of these philosophers have. And then a lot of these, you know, these tech figures, they'll not come out and say that, but they also believe it. Right. Yeah. No, I think touching on the dark enlightenment thing, too, to tease out a little bit more like, why I think it is worth considering, like I would call land a fast. I think that's a controversial take I would call land a fascist. And I would consider the dark enlightenment fascist in at least some way. And to tease that out, I mean broadly, when you talk about the anti-egalitarianism, I think it's worth just being very clear. Like mold bug, the other big figure here who is close to land and land, are just like out and out racists, right? They believe

in scientific racism. They believe that some people are racially inferior and have written extensively about that. And to a certain extent, there's no basis that land has to reject that racism, right? Like, once we've gotten rid of any normative humanism or claim that we ought to resist the processes of capital, the basis for rejecting racism is gone. And so he presents it in the way that the quote unquote scientific racists like to present it as just an acknowledgment of fact, not a normative statement in any way. But there is this just blatant racism amongst these thinkers, which I think is worth pointing out. And then in terms of conceptualizing, them as a part of the broader fascist milieu that I think is worthwhile. This is where I'm going to draw

some comparison to Avala again. So again, we have like an entire episode on Avala you can go listen to. Avala is a fascinating thinker, you know, and Avala, you know, when he was questioned, I believe in an Italian court as to whether or not he was a fascist, denied that he was a fascist and said instead that he was an ultra-fascist. So perhaps, you know, there's some contestation there. But Avola, you know, his critique of fascism was essentially that it was still populist, that it was still a mass movement, that it was still focused around mobilizing the unwashed, unclean masses for the sake of popular demand, even if that was a reactionary demand. And in Avala's work, you really find this more, you know, spiritualized fascism, where for Avala, what the job of the fascist is to do is to

become an aristocrat of the soul, to connect to tradition, to stoically watch the of liberalism and its civilization, and then be ready to act in the wake of that collapse. Avola, in the name of one of his books and in a concept he evokes constantly, is to be the man standing among the ruins after the collapse occurs, to be the one ready to take action after all of this has fallen, which implies a certain level of passivity and just watching the acceleration of collapse now. Again, Avola's this weird figure. He's like an inducted Sufi and a whole bunch of other very various.

strange things. He's doing a lot of spiritual stuff. But the emphasis on that spiritual stuff is this self-cultivation of the aristocratic fascist soul. And I think there's something very Nietzsche here as well, perhaps, right? For Nietzsche, the eternal return, this, you know, always embracing all the suffering but one has undergone. Not fighting it, but loving fate, right? Amor Fati becomes this central idea in Nietzscheanism. And then in fascism and then in kind of the evil and spiritualized fascism that is still very present in both moldbug and land. In land, you almost feel this joy of looking at the end of the world and his willingness to say, and so be it, that's fine, I'm going to watch it happen. I am not going to try to stop it. There's this salacious sense of almost superiority

because one doesn't have to stoop to the level of trying to fight it. And to a certain extent, I think that is an aristocratic strain within fascism that you can trace from land to mold bug. to Avala and to Nietzsche in some ways. And so the Neo Reactionaries, you know, the Neo implies that there is something new there. I think they are actually really drawing on these older pre-fascist Nietzschean ideas and then post-fashioned Avolan, new right, Italian ideas and repackaging them in a technological context. And so the reason that I want to argue this is that, you know, I see people try to breed land as like a left accelerationist. And I don't think that's the case at all. I think land's like a techno-evolon in a way that shouldn't make sense because a techno-evolin

should be an impossible concept, but land seems to have made that happen. And I think this is thoroughly a philosophy of the far right. And that is worth pointing out as we try to politically situate its implications and do perhaps a genealogy of where it comes from in terms of its ideology. And aside from any political or philosophical disagreements, I just want to highlight the human reality here, that these people do not care. Everybody you love, all your family, your friends, your nieces, nephews, your community, your children themselves are disposable to these freaks. That they would happily, and according to everything they've ever said,

if their whole politics requires the subordination, the imprisonment, the abandonment and destruction of everybody you love's future, or even the death and extinction of everybody you love straightforwardly, that they're willing to accept it. And so these people are our fucking enemies, not because we disagree with them philosophically and politically, although we do and they are because of that, but also because they treat us as a means to their fucking ends and that we are the playthings of these broader processes and these deeper philosophical commitments that are totally antithetical to human flourishing for the people that we care about most. So when you look into the eyes of your child and you want them to have a fucking future, you want them to grow up and have a healthy planet that they live on, a democratic saying how their life is constructed and maintained, you know, a, a strong union and high wages so they can support a family or whatever, know that these people hate you and don't give a fuck about that kid and that they are happy to fucking have a dark cloud impose itself over that child's entire fucking future. And they're happily willing to do that.

And that makes me want to throttle them, not just debate them on a podium, but to fucking take them as real political enemies and kill them in Minecraft. Yeah. And I think like, you know, the thing, yeah, it is important to. frame that, I think, because following Ebola, they all want to do this move, I think, of being able to say, well, I'm not doing anything normative.

I don't hate you and I don't hate your children. It's just that we live in the Kali Yuga, right? This just is the end. There's nothing we can do about that. There's these cycles of time that are playing out, and we are now in the one that is going to conclude everything, end in all of our inevitable deaths, and the

sophisticated aristocratic thing to do in the face of that is to shrug. Right? They want to say, like, I'm not endorsing this. I am merely facing it. And again, in this kind of twisted Nietzscheanism. And I think this is maybe where the Marxist intervention becomes valuable is to say like, no, fuck you, man. Like, in actuality, your shrug, your aristocratic disdain for those who would try to stop this violence is an endorsement of it. And this is where I think we come to the tension, which is that in all the land that I've read in the preparation for this episode,

I've not found him articulate a fucking argument for why we shouldn't fight it, right? All he does is say that it's inevitable, say that we cannot fight it, say that we are doomed to lose. And I think in the face of that, I just sort of reject the aristocratic Nietzschean thing they're trying to do and say that I would rather fucking die on my feet fighting than give up, right? Even if the inevitability claims are true, if we truly are facing down this eschaton, I would rather oppose it and die opposing it. That's really what it comes down to. And I think part of our demystification then ought to be really to say, no, there is no, there is no. no stupid aristocratic neutrality in the face of this. You are not just a prophet of the Kali Yuga. You are a champion of this. You are saying we should let it happen. And we will not

let it happen. And some of us will do what we can to try to stop it from happening, even if we fail. And I think that is an important intervention that we need to make in the face of what I think is a rather disingenuous apathy and perhaps antipathy that these thinkers, especially when, try to put forward. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well said. And I completely agree. You know, maybe they're willing to have that struggle. You better be willing to do it because we're going, we're going to, we're going to come at you. And that's our, we know, we are egalitarians. We do believe in human flourishing.

We do believe in a human fucking future. And if you try to take that away from us and our children and our children's children and any child on the planet, you are enemy and you're going to have to fucking fight us. And you're going to have to kill us to get your shit through. And it is a passivity of nihilism. It's like, well, this stuff is inevitable. No, it's not. No, it's not. I don't even think land is right.

And we're going to get into Marx's critiques of him. his basic philosophy. So I don't even think you're correct. And even if you are, then that means all out motherfucking war for a human future. And I, you know, I do retain this humanism, uh, in the face of especially like this. I feel like my humanism strengthens. I understand and and am very, uh, respectful of like the Althusarian anti-humanism and the points that, that are made. But ultimately Althusair is on our side. He wants a good future for humanity. And so we can have those debates with somebody who was in good faith and doesn't want everybody we love to be, you know, grist in the mill for this

grotesque fucking process. But once you step outside of that liberatory politics and you're starting to have this reactionary anti-humanism, well then that makes me want to commit to humanism because you know, for as flawed as human beings are, like I think we should continue to exist, you know, and I think we should keep getting

better and we should keep developing philosophy and art and culture and keep deepening our morality and become conscious manifestations of the universe and good stewards of our gorgeous fucking planet. And that's a future that I want to live in and I want to be a part of, and I want my kids and my kids' kids, and all kids' kids' kids to be a part of that. And that is the future that Marxism holds out as genuinely possible.

That's a real, you know, possible trajectory that humanity can take. And there's many possible trajectories. Once you get into this world of NeoReaction, you're not only saying that here's a bunch of dark trajectories this could take, but then you're citing normatively with those dark fucking futures and making yourself an enemy of humanity in the process. I'm sorry, Nick Land. I know that he's not hurting anybody. He doesn't run a multi-billion dollar corporation. He doesn't have any political power.

But he is advocating, articulating, and perpetuating a philosophy and a politic that is anti-human to the core and is a threat, an existential threat to the people I love and to humanity itself. And so that just creates the conditions for what Marx would call straight up class struggle. And, you know, these guys that are sitting, I guess Curtis Yarven has kids. You know, Peter Thiel doesn't. Nick Land doesn't. they're not invested in any serious way in the day-to-day lives of people.

They don't have working-class jobs. They're not on-job sites talking to coworkers. They're not embedded in community, going to Kinsenegra's or organizing tenant unions or being a part of any human community at all. They're so isolated from normal humanity through their extreme wealth and extreme power and the alienation they feel in their egoic narrative about their own superiority, that they've detached a lot of these guys, with some exceptions, but a lot of them have detached themselves practically from the human world.

They stand above it in their skyscrapers and look down upon it or in their ivory towers of academia. In Nick Land's case, I think he's just, I don't know, lives in an apartment in England somewhere. But, you know, I think he's in China, actually. Oh, yeah, he did move to China. That's right, yeah. Yeah. So, like, these guys just sitting back and just being like, you know, flippantly saying the destruction of everybody we love in our entire futures is a price they're willing to pay for their politics.

It's fucking grotesque. And that human element, I think. think really needs to be brought in to counteract and to come face to face with this, this grotesque reactionary anti-humanism. Yeah. No, I mean, it's an interesting question, I think. And yeah, I don't know. Do we want to try to dive into maybe sort of the Marxist critiques of land then and get

into the, I think, you know, important point that you made, which is we actually do think he's wrong, right? Exactly. We don't think all this shit is inevitable. And that might help us also then dive into some of the debates within Marxism around humanism that might be worth wrestling with here. So here's my first critique, and that is, and I think Al Thuzer would agree with this, as well as obviously anybody in the Marxist tradition, that land is turning political economy into metaphysics. Where Marx and Marxism, we understand that, you know, capitalism is like a historically contingent and emergent, specific mode of production that arises from, you know, specific class relations, a social relations, property forms, and of course, background historical.

conditions, that this is an ephemeral and historically contingent system that has its own internal contradictions that will drive it to its own collapse. And this AI death drive accelerationism and techno-accelerationism that is already present within capitalism from a Marxist point of view is seen as its own internal contradictions playing out. And it can only sort of, you know, it can only end in disaster. Whatever that disaster looks like, whether that's disaster for capitalism in the form of a revolution, whether that is the common ruin of all contending classes, some sort of near-apocalyptic crescendo to this process. We know that capitalism won't exit the historical stage peacefully. It will do it as it came into the world, drenched in blood and

screaming. And that's not something that we're naive about, but that we do know capitalism must end. It will end. It is ephemeral. It is historically contingent. And what land does is take that entire process, disregard all of that contingency, all of the, you know, the specific arising of a motive production from social relations and property forms and all of that and says that actually this is some lovecraftian metaphysical process that is happening. It's almost like he naturalizes it to like a form of evolution. Like just the next step in basically biological evolution is to transcend biology altogether. So that right there is a split. If you side with Marxist, you understand capitalism as historically produced, you know, that it is an ephemeral manifestation

of class society based on these things I talked about, property and class relations, social relations, you know, the structural incentive to maximize profit, all these things. And that it is fundamentally ephemeral. And our solution to it is to take conscious control of capital, which is an alien social force imposing its will on us and, you know, just fucking, you know, giving rights to exploitation and suffering in all these ways that, you know, Marx talks about a society that can grow enormous wealth and not diminish its misery at all. There must be something wrong in that society.

And humans are increasingly becoming conscious of the system they live in. They're becoming conscious of what people often colloquially refer to as late-stage capitalism. They're becoming conscious that this whole way of organizing social life is not sustainable environmentally. It's not actually producing results for regular people. It's increasingly dismantle. its own crown jewel, which is ostensibly the middle class, and that it has no future to really offer. People are becoming conscious of that. And from a Marxist perspective, that is part of the

process by which people wake up to the truth, and then begin to impose conscious control over capital and over the production and reproduction of the necessary goods for social existence to continue. And that actually is happening. You know, so as much as pessimistic as we can get, and, you know, people fall into despair and all these things. Actually, what Mark said will happen is happening, but it's happening in this jumbled and confused way. You know, we have to, we have to give form to that inchoate, we have to give like content to that inchoate form of people wanting something different, of people realizing this is fucked up. But that is a sort of, you know, stumbling, confused expansion of consciousness that that is occurring. And so if you're on our side, then you see it that way.

But if you take the land side of things, then you have to just have this fascistic nihilism that somehow capitalism in particular is emerging as like this creation from the future trying to give rise to its own technological process of consciousness and awakening. It's metaphysics. And it abandons materialism. It abandons historical materialism for sure. It might maintain something of a kernel of Hagellian dialectics, but in a grotesque fashion. and that is kind of the deciding line here. So you just have to look at that problem and see which side you fall on. For me, it's very clear.

I fall on the Marxist side. I think most people listening to a podcast like this fall on the Marxist line, but it's worth articulating what that line is and then telling people pick a side. Is capitalism this or is it that? And I think on those grounds alone, we have the better argument hands down. I think the other thing, too, on the historicizing versus the, like, metaphysical side of things is that, you know, I'm always going to be an Althusser defender, perhaps. And this is where, you know, actually in a way that might seem odd, given some of the slight critique of Althusarian anti-humanism that we put forward here, Althusair, I think might be helpful for critiquing Land a little bit.

Because I do think land takes Althusair's anti-humanism and runs with it and just this idea that there is no human agent that is driving history, etc., etc. But Althusair doesn't just reject humanism in Marxism. He also rejects teleology, right? like Althusair critiques Marx's own Higalianism and what he sees as like an uninterrogated teleology that still exists within Marx's Higalianism. And so even though the human agent has been gutted out, in the Althusarian view of how history is moving, it's not a metaphysical thing towards a telos. It is a bunch of individual contradictions, a complicated process of social formation with

interpolation and all these things playing out without one guiding over. overarching place that it is moving to. It often is chaotic in nature, and it's still historically specific and contingent to a given historical situation. And so I think part of what Land does in this weird way is he takes the anti-humanism of Althusair and embraces that, but then embraces metaphysical teleology in this fascinating way that dehistoricizes capital, makes it inevitable in a way that actually Althusair is very useful for pushing back against. Althusair historicizes capital. He says there is no teleology. There is no telelos that everything is moving towards alongside his anti-humanism. And so to just build perhaps on what you're saying, I think

there's interestingly this way in which one could then make an Althusarian critique of land as well from the Marxist perspective. It might be a reason why Althusair is still somewhat on our side, even if the anti-humanism worries us. Yeah. And you know, younger Maoist Al-Thusair would would punch land in the face, I believe. Yes, I believe that's the game. And no matter what we say about Althus there, you know, critiques and agreements with him, in this house, we respect Uncle Louis,

and that will be maintained. Because on that line I just talked about earlier, he's on our side 110%. Yes. So, yeah, so that's an important thing to say. All right, the next critique, do you have a specific critique, or you want me to articulate the second one I texted you?

Yeah, if you want to go for your second one, I can bring up the regulation state one when we get to it, that I had. Okay. So there's a core concept in Marxism, we call it fetishism, commodity fetishism, which is like, you know, Marx is articulating this a way in which capital sort of appears to process an independent life that the products of that capitalism produces commodities, obscure the social relations that actually constitute them and sort of are taken at face value and are seen as something outside of that social production. And, you know, there is a

structural critique of capitalism, that capitalism does have this structural sort of apparent autonomy with seeming independence from human social relations, but that is wrestled with and resolved in Marxism through this concept of fetishism, which I don't need to have a whole episode on right now. We could and probably perhaps should do something on that, because I don't think we've ever addressed that concept itself in particular. But what Land kind of does is it kind of phontologizes this fetishism. So the apparent autonomy of capitalism is taken to be a real autonomy of capitalism under land. It's extracted from the human social relations that is precisely the thing that's being critiqued in the concept of fetishism within Marxism. So instead of seeing

that as fetishism and dismantling and showing the real social relations behind this whole process, land turns it into this ontological reality, that capitalism itself is, is an objective and ontological and above human process that is happening. And yeah, we are the means by which it occurs. It bootstraps itself into existence, kind of, but that it is this broader metaphysical and ontological process. And that's a related claim to the one I just made about the previous argument I just made, but it is a different one.

It's related but different. And I think those two critiques of seeing political economy as metaphysics and ontologizing fetishism, I think are core Marxist critiques that really clearly delineate a line and says, which side are you on? Is the Marxist understanding of this correct, or is Landian side of this correct? And I think from a scientific socialist perspective, from even just somebody just genuinely analyzing history and facts and trying to be objective, it's very, very hard to side with land on this like sort of psychedelic, meth-infused version of techno-accelerationism. It seems like get sort of lost the plot, that it's flew out of the nest and it's just sort of this sandcastle

in the sky that Nick Land is creating, whereas Marx actually explains what these things are, actually explains their historical roots, and actually understands them as not only historically constituted, but as ultimately the product of human social relations. And when you extract these processes from that, you get, you know, many different things, but in this case, you get this landian techno accelerationism. And I think a landian anti-Marxist would have to make an argument for those for those positions. And, um, and I think they would be hard pressed, uh, to do so. So those would those would be two of my, uh, critiques. Allison already got at the normative one earlier. You could articulate that or you could, um, uh, advance another critique that you might have.

Well, I, I want to, I want to sit on how I think this fetishism argument is very smart. Like, I actually think this is like one of the more interesting critiques that you could make against land here. Do you actually just mind if I read the first two paragraphs from the Capital chapter on fetishism to ground this real quick? Yeah, please. So yeah, in Capital, there's the fetishism of commodities and the secret thereof that I think the first two paragraphs actually get at this quite reasonably in a way that might make this a little more grounded. So I'm just going to read that quote, a commodity appears at first sight a very trivial thing and easily understood. its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious

about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants or from the point that those properties are the product of human labor. It is as clear as noonday that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered by making a table out of it. Yet for all that, the table continues to be that common everyday thing, wood. But as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but in relation to all other commodities,

it stands on its head and evolves out of its wooden brain, grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than table turning ever was. The mystical character of commodities does not originate therefore in their use value. Just as little does it proceed from the nature of determining factors of value. For in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labor or productive activities may be, it is a physiological fact that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of the human brain, nerves, muscles, etc.

Secondarily, with regard to that which forms the groundwork for the quantitative determination of value, namely the duration of that expenditure or the quality of labor, it is quite clear that there's a palpable difference between its quantity and its quality. In all states of society, the labor time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind, though not of equal interest in different stages of development. And lastly, from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labor assumes a social form, end quote. So again, this is Mark's talking about the commodity, but the point of the fetishism of the commodity is that the mystical fetishistic nature of the commodity, its supposed

autonomy, obscures the underlying social relations. And I think quite interestingly, when you read Marx here, these are human social relations, right? Like fundamentally, and not just human social relations, but human physiology, right, that he points to, the brain, the nerves and the muscles. And so fetishism, you know, I've thought a lot about fetishism obscures the social relations as a concept, but fetishism obscures just the raw humanity as well is very present in this section of capital when you really look at it. And I think in that sense, articulating this claim of fetishism against land is quite useful. Land actually does kind of let a metaphysical view of capitalism obstruct the reality that commodities are still produced today. That actually hasn't

changed, right? Even in tertiary economies, which are not primarily based around commodity production, but service labor, it is still humans who engage in that labor. And to whatever extent AI might be replacing that, there are still people sweeping floors. There are still people like, you know, building the data centers. There is still human labor and actual basic human physiology, which is the basis of the social relations that are producing the thing. And so I think that I do really just want to hit on, like, when you actually return to this chapter of capital, it is remarkably applicable to this critique of land. And I think it's quite clever to make this fetishism critique here, because Marx is very clearly doing something interesting with the human,

even just on a physiological level in this section. That's quite relevant. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you read that quote. And the whole time you were reading it, I just took a, commodity near me, this pen that I'm using, and I was looking at it and contemplating it alongside your passage. And I encourage somebody, grab any commodity you want and then just go back and play Allison at half speed and really look at the thing and think about what she's saying in that quote, what Marx is saying, and then just kind of envision it through the lens of that specific commodity that you have. And then I sit back and I look at my whole desk, computers and, you know, coffee and a cell phone and, you know, journals and stuff. And it's like, there's a way in which you click on the

Marxist lens and you see all the sweat and blood and tears and laughter that went into this, the hands cranking and the brains thinking and the brows furrowed when they're figuring out this program to, you know, create this recording fucking track called Pro Tools and the microphone that I'm speaking into. There's a way in which you can stand back and just see raw, beating, pulsing humanity behind all these ostensible objects that make daily life that make life itself possible and that we just take for granted as the background of our lives. There's no way around that. There's no way around that.

And even AI, this fucking thing that these people think will replace all of that, as you just pointed out to, yes, there's the data centers. There's the need to maintain and build the electrical grid. There's the enormous amount of work that goes in to the actual construction of data centers themselves, which I have first person privy experience on those, on job sites very much like that. But beyond that, AI itself is, is, is, is, is, it would not exist. if it were not for the seemingly infinite tranches of human knowledge and production that have ever occurred. AI is cannibalizing and taking into itself every human creation ever made, all human knowledge. And so there's no way in which, you know, even outside of the data centers and all of that, the content of AI itself is so fucking thoroughly human.

All of that work, all of that knowledge, the philosophy and the literature and the science, all of that is dripping with humanity. And even in some of these scenarios where it transcends humanity or replaces human labor, it will never, ever, ever be to be able to escape that. And there's a way in which hyper commodity fetishism is sort of being present in AI because of this delusion that it is somehow outside of humanity, that we can create it and let this thing go and that it can operate above and beyond us when it really is us.

It is this Frankenstein creation of us. And, you know, even at the level it is right now, no matter what happens, no matter how smart it gets, even if it hits a brick wall tomorrow, there's still this basic Marxist argument that right now, AI under capitalism, like any technology, is being used for the capitalists. It's being used to have trillion dollar valuations to make themselves incredibly rich. It's being used for the delusion that they'll be able to displace us pesky workers because we have this tendency to want to spend time with our families, to want better wages, to want to unionize, to have to go take piss breaks. They don't like all that. They want to take all that away from us. And a Marxist argument is not

let this thing just completely obliterate us like some psycho. It is let's bring that itself, that technology itself under conscious, collective, social, democratic control and make that shit, that technology work in the interests of people writ large, not in the interests of this parasitic, profiteering capitalist fucking class. Yeah. And so there's a Marxist description of even AI that makes more sense than land's description of it and a Marxist solution to it which completely dismantles

this fatalistic subordination that land is arguing we take in the face of it. It's grotesque. And Marx once again genuinely comes out on top here. Yeah. And I think like a theme that may be emerging here that as you want to call out is like demystification, right?

Like to me demystification is the core concept within Marxism. That the commodity appears to us as a mystification. thing, that the social relations of capitalism are obscured. When we think about wage, we don't think about the social relations which produce it. And for Marx, the purpose is to push past mystification, push past ideology, and show what really is. And I think you're so correct that AI is extremely mystified, right? There's this intensive form of commodity fetishism taking place within it that we should do. And I think, you know, pushing back against that, doing the demystification

also just deflates the apocalypticism of what Land is talking about. I think we should demystify these insane claims. Land is, I think, a very skilled writer from the continental philosophy perspective. He writes within that tradition in a very compelling way. And it's easy to get caught up in the revelry of it. But when we demystify it, like the things that he's talking about are still the product of social relations. They are still firmly within traditional Marxist analysis and can be explained within that framework. And there's a sense to which we need demystify and perhaps deflate land as well

that I think hopefully we are able to engage in here. I love when you said that Marxism is all about demystification because it just occurred to me that what land is doing is remystifying capitalism. Right, right. He turns it back into God, basically. Yeah, yeah. Hyper naturalization of the process, which we've always argued, the Marxist critique of all of class society from ancient slave societies to medieval feudal ones to modern capitalist ones, is that the elite of those societies that benefit from that social order always attempt to naturalize it, right? Right. Plato and Aristotle just naturalizing and taking for granted slavery in their social system, which allowed them to leisure time to be philosophers. You know, kings and the monarchs of the medieval period saying that they have

a divine ordination from God himself to rule and people believing that. That's how they naturalized it. And then today, we've lost the religious component that. That's the religious component that, that naturalized and divinized monarchical feudalism, but we've scientized it and naturalized. And you'll hear people say, it's human nature that capitalism exists and all these ways in which you're attempting to naturalize. And land is very much in that tradition of naturalizing by mystifying. Because in order to naturalize these processes, you have to mystify them.

And that's exactly what he's engaged in, whether he'll admit that or not. No, exactly. And I think maybe this is the Marxist critique that I want to levy here is an ideological. critique of land, right? Like, understanding land as ideology. Land wants to, like, make us think he is a prophet, right?

And I actually think some of, like, the methamphetamine stuff is almost, like, self-mythmaking about his own, like, mystical insights in this interesting way. But at the end of the day, like, land hasn't seen the future, you know? I don't think Neo-China has reached back and touched his brain in some way. Land is not a mystic. Land is actually in some ways a very boring ideologue. What Land is doing is re-religizing the ideology of capital and being basically a soothsayer for the emerging techno- oligarchs. You know, the comparison that I made with Brett when we were texting about land originally is that he's a very Rasputin figure, right?

Rasputin is in the ears of the Tsar and Zarina and is telling them these incredible things about how God has chosen Little Nikki to take the throne, what this is. is going to mean for the future of Russia and is giving them this mystical theological, theologized naturalization of the cruelty that the Tsar is overseeing, all while under the nose of the czar, they are totally blind to the organization of the workers and the coming revolution that is going to overthrow them. And in a sense, I think land and moldbug in these figures are just like Peter Teals Rasputin, right? They are trying to give this mystical ideological justification whispering into the ears of the rulers to assure them that they're should be no moral qualms that they have with what they're doing, and that their defeat cannot

happen is teleologically precluded, and that there is no room for anyone to push for liberatory politics anymore. And in that sense, we should again deflate land. He is not a mystic. He is not a prophet. He's a sniveling little shit like Rasputin sucking up to people with more power than him, trying to naturalize their domination. And that's a thing we should push back against and reject and see it for how pathetic it really is, I think. 100% true. And the Rasputin analogy is even funnier, even better when you realize that in much the same way

that we're trying to articulate Marx punching through the mystification of land here, Lenin and the Bolshevits punched through the mystification of Rasputin and the stories that he was weaving for Tsar Nicholas. And they de-mistified the entire thing and brought back down to earth that nonsense. And in a similar way, on the level, on the terrain of theory and criticism, You know, hopefully we're doing that for land and for Marxism here. But I love that analogy. I love what you said there.

It's absolutely spot on. And that makes total sense from a Marxist perspective of ideology that these figures would be emerging and would be gaining popularity at precisely this time in capitalism's, you know, frantic and insane development. And the fact that these ideas are catching on are not because they're true, but they're completely understood and explained by a Marxist. analysis of the superstructure and that's what that's what we're doing here so um there's a whole other element we we could we could uh go towards the end here i think we uh buried we buried this corpse um

but there's a whole other aspect to this where nick land is deeply involved in jewish mysticism in the cabula in occultism and alister crowley he i watched an interview where he started talking about numerology and I just started like fucking getting a migraine. Shut the fuck up. 33 plus 66 equals like, shut the fuck up. Numerology straight up. And then he's talking about being possessed by demons and talking to demons. It's like, all right, bud, all right.

You know, it's not a good look for anybody adhering to your philosophy that this is what you're spending your time talking about and thinking about. But aside from all that nonsense, he really is influential, some of the most, you know, most powerful and wealthiest people in the United States. United States right now are at least informed and influenced by him, if not outright acolytes of his. And so it is scary that some of the people with the most capital and the most political power by virtue of their capital accumulation are having their brains drenched and marinated in Nickelandian philosophy. And that is why the answer to this is ultimately, yes, theoretical

critique, but class struggle that rips the fucking, you know, mode of production and the forces of production out of the hands of these motherfucking psychos and into the hands of the actual human beings who this technology is built by and whose futures it influences. That's the process of socialization. That's the process of revolution and taking conscious control over capital instead of letting it dominate us into fucking oblivion. So perhaps there will be another episode where Allison and I just addressed the weird mysticism of land, but it's just I think we're stating for today's purposes that that element does exist. And if you take your own rabbit hole into Nick Land land, you'll immediately be bumping up against a lot of that as well. Yeah, there's quite a bit of it.

If you listen to him speak ever, he jumps straight to that in comparison to his writing. So you kind of get forced to confront it. The very last thing I'll end on only because I have this habit of promising we'll get to something and not never doing it. Just quickly we'll end on this point, which is, okay, if all this is true and all the stuff we know about the structural of capitalism and capitalists, why are these AI tech oligarchs and these AI companies coming to the government now, after they've been embedded in the Trump administration, they were there at as inauguration standing in the background, they've certainly been deregulated and helped in their insane mania for inflated valuations and the data center buildout? Why all of a sudden would

they start coming to the government and saying, regulate us? And Allison, you can tell you, take a first stab at this, and I'll give my thoughts, and then we'll wrap up. Yeah. I mean, so one, I think we have to consider it because I think in the Landian understanding, we would expect them to do the opposite, right? If AI is pure deterioratorialization, why would there ever be an appeal to the state to come in and impose, like, the most banal kind of re-territorialization through regulation of the market? And, you know, we talked about the sum. I think there's this question of, are they being honest about the regulation? But I kind of think my cynical read is that they're being honest and dishonest. They're being dishonest in the sense

that every time there's new stories about AI, they're trying to hype up how dangerous it is. They're trying to really increase the news cycle around it and make investment go up. But I also think realistically, they probably are making a genuine appeal for government regulation, but not regulation of them, right? The interesting thing in the AI space is that the US is not the only player, right? Chinese models are powerful. They have their own development. ecosystem for them, and I know Americans who prefer Chinese models. Like, that is just a thing that I think is out there. And I suspect that a lot of the call for regulation is really about trying to build the monopolistic

walls to prevent international markets between U.S. and Chinese models from having to compete, trying to lay a foundation for regulating foreign models usage within the United States. And so even if they're being somewhat cynical in these appeals for regulation, and they might have ulterior motives. that aren't just regulating themselves, which I think is the case. I think it's also still just kind of classic capitalist cartelism and really an appeal towards like a sort of like protectionist government intervention of our models in a way that again isn't fucking de-territorializing at all, right?

Like if globalization was a de-territorializing process, this is actually almost the re-territorializing response. I think it is very likely an attempt to close off the U.S. markets in terms of LLNs and AI models and to secure them for. this. And so again, actually in reality, I think we don't see the techno oligarchs engaging in an endless forever de-territorialization. More in a way that would fit with Marx and Lennon's view of the state, they're willing to invoke its protection in very banal ways when it becomes economically necessary for them. And that is one of the reasons that I do just question the whole inevitability thesis

that underlies a lot of land's work, honestly. Yeah. No, that echoes my analysis as well. We didn't talk about what our analysis of that question would be beforehand. But the protectionism is an element. I think they want to kind of cement their monopoly status. So these leading firms, by inviting the government to impose regulation on the industry as a whole, will even make it harder for any upstarts, whether internationally or domestically, to arise and would kind of help cement their spot atop the sort of mountain. And there's this broader question of being integrated within the state, integrated within the military industrial complex, and it's a lot of, more broadly, they often, they definitely see the possibility of their integration into the state

at various levels as a absolute guarantee of their continuation and as a stabilization of their valuations. If they are now embedded within the American government in some way, shape, or form, they're not merely a company with, you know, stocks that could crash in a company that could go out of business in the same way that Boeing and North of Grumman are so integrated with the state that, you know, it almost requires state collapse for them to go under as price. companies, a similar thing I think is perhaps happening here, as well as a bit of the hype cycle, whether this stuff turns out to be seriously transformative or not, saying that your product is so fucking dangerous, it could end the world and actually inverting the ostensible capital logic

of deregulation to ask for regulation as you're approaching becoming a publicly traded company and IPO in some of these cases. That is certainly a way in which, whatever your actual intentions, it is propping up the valuation of your company. We are so fucking dangerous. We could destroy the world. Our product is so fucking good. We need the government to come save us from ourselves because it's so dangerous. And people are like, oh my God, yeah, I'm going to invest in that. If that technology is that powerful, I need to start investing in it. And, you know, so I think all of that stuff is absolutely at play. And the notion of monopoly capitalism and cartelism, I think are very helpful concepts here to explain and understand this.

But at the same time, is Trump doing that? Is the government even functional enough to do that? No. Trump's whole second term has been the rabid insane deregulation of these companies. And more than that, the imposed laws that say that states, at the federalist level of state regulation for 10 years, states are not allowed to impose regulations on these companies. So at the same time that they're asking for regulation outwardly, the whole. whole process hitherto has been one of complete deregulation. And I don't think that you have certainly a willing Trump administration or even a functional government that could actually do it.

So there's a way in which they could come off as being responsible, right? One of the, one of the biggest critiques of these companies is they're being reckless, they're being irresponsible. So one way that you solve that PR crisis is by coming out with hat in hand and saying, all right, we're ready to be regulated knowing goddamn motherfucking well it's not going to happen. And so that could be another layer of analysis here that I think is very much at play. Yeah, no, I think so. And again, in that sense, all of this behavior is kind of classically capitalist, right? That's kind of like the thing that I want to get at. It's not some break from Marxist or Leninist theories of capitalism. It's actually accounted quite cleanly for them, by them. And I think when we realize that, like,

the appeal of the Landian mysticism, I've discovered something new, you know, really starts to fall apart a little bit. And that's why I think it is. worth rethinking some of this in conventional economic terms of protectionism, of the self-regulation of the market, which we've seen with industries before as just a classic move. Like, it's not as revolutionary as land thinks, I guess, is kind of my point. Absolutely. Sometimes this stuff veers into the same level of insanity as people talking earnestly about uploading your consciousness into the cloud or something.

It's like, you know, we've totally left Earth here. This is just sandcastles in the sky at this point. And I think ultimately, LAND's philosophy will be proven to be, among other things, just that. So honestly, I'm very happy with this episode. I think it is one of our best, not only because we were able to explore a prominent thinker on the reactionary right, but precisely because his politics are so relevant to the actual technological progress is happening right now, the discourse around that and the tech, the emergence of these tech oligarchs that I thought that this would be a perfect person to cover precisely

at this time and that you know i i hope that what alison and i are able to do in this episode and others is to be fair to the actual philosophy to actually help us and you understand what they actually believe without obscuring that or skewing that or caricaturizing that um and then offer the robust marxist response to thinker after thinker after thinker that's why we're marxist and i truly think like if you sit down and you listen to this episode and these arguments I feel like we're convincing. I feel like the Marxist critique of the shit is convincing, is legit, is right. It actually answers these fucking problems and explains these things in a way that land

and these reactionary thinkers don't and simply cannot. So I really hope that this episode is not only timely, but genuinely helpful to people who are not only debating these politics and debating these issues in real time, but are also as thinking people thinking about our moment in history. where these things are going, the possible trajectories. And ultimately my position on AI outside of land and all of this stuff, how serious will this AI development be, how powerful will these tools get? Right now I'm genuinely sort of agnostic on it.

I am skeptical of the simply dismissive attitude that you often see on the left, that is just this is nothing but hype, this is just glorified chatbots, this is going nowhere. I think there's amounting evidence that it's more than that, but not as much as some of the extremist utopians or the extremist dystopians of which we hear a lot more from. It's less powerful than what they presume. But there's still so much contested space here. There's so much contingency.

There's so much uncertainty about how this stuff actually develops that I think the only principled position with regard to where is this actually going to go, how powerful actually is this technology, is a sort of principle. grounded agnosticism, watching things play out, genuinely engaging with the evidence as it emerges, you know, taking the analysis of people who are inside these companies and become sort of pseudo-wistleblowers seriously, but also being skeptical and just trying to maintain a principled groundedness as this stuff develops. Because the truth is, none of us truly know where this is going. And I think a hyper dismissivity of it is sort of an abandonment of a broader analysis that we all need to be

engaged with right now, even if those that are submissive or dismissive of this technology ultimately turn out to be right. I don't think there's certainty yet about where this is exactly going and we should keep our heads on straight and keep our eyes wide open as this develops. Yeah. And again, like not give in to the hype and mystification that is an intentional product of these companies, right? Like we should always be questioning how much all of this is ideological in nature and pushing back against that. And that applies as much to the weird mystics like land as to the new cycle around AI as well, I think. Like, ideology encompasses all of those spheres and our job is to cut through it. Absolutely. All right, we'll end it there. I'm so,

I'm happy with this episode. So proud and honored once again to be able to work with Allison. I absolutely, every time we have these conversations, I learn so much. And just Allison and I going back and forth is so generative for me intellectually. And really, the show would be much the worse if it was just me. You know, I think Allison really elevates these conversations and brings angles and dynamics that I would never have thought of. And so I'm deeply grateful to Allison as my intellectual partner, especially on an episode like this, which I think does have a lot of relevance and important. So with that said, love and solidarity, everybody, will be back with you soon. Stay safe out there. The question that I have, and I'm actually curious about your thoughts on this, like,

upfront, right, is like, in theory, land is, like, still an accelerationist who, seems to think that something happens at the end of the acceleration, right? Like, the world ends in some sense. Our world ends. And like when you read the old land, it feels like he thinks something that maybe a leftist could sign on to will come out of that world ending in like some strange way. I don't think he thinks that now, perhaps. And like Moldbug has this similar thing where like Moldbug calls his political philosophy

pacifism, not like nonviolence, but like passivity, just kind of let the market go where it will go. But Moldberg thinks it will collapse everything and like a new world will come out of it. And I can't tell if like now Land still thinks that all of this will crash down when it accelerates or if it just goes on eternally accelerating. Like do you have some sense on that? I think it's a very interesting core sort of exploration of the different ways that acceleration cashes out because yes when we talk about accelerationism even left accelerationism the implication is that we're accelerating to to some breaking point by which something new can emerge i think my understanding of land which probably is not by any means totally you know encompassing of all of his

work and you know i haven't read by any means even most of it but my understanding is like this dialectical process continues to unfold and just go so far beyond our comprehension that it's we we can't even really think about what comes after. And any remnants of like a left idea of something salvageable afterwards is left in his early work and completely abandoned. I think he makes a hard right turn. And that there is no, this doesn't end. Well, for us, it's like basically transcends us.

It obliterates us more or less. And then it continues to evolve. I assume some in some way, shape, or form dialectically. But in ways that just totally outstrip our capacity to even comprehend. That's my understanding. Right. Yeah. And so that's like what's confusing for me, I guess, is like, if you ever read Bold Bug, who again,

they're quite close, boldbug basically says, like, be passive, let this thing accelerate. And then we should be all like a volen fascists who are becoming aristocrats of the soul. Right. So that after the collapse occurs, we are worthy of inheriting like the ruins, basically, and can build something new. And that feels so different than what Land is saying. But yet he's a lie to. themselves politically with mold bug. And that's where I think I get confused. Yeah. No, I mean, I, yeah, I mean, you could, you could be, you know, politically a fellow

traveler with somebody, even though your ultimate angle is different. And I think that's probably more or less what's, what's perhaps happening here.