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Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital with Nick Land (audio)

8/20/2018

Nick Land is a British philosopher living in Shanghai. Nick is one of the main figures in the school of thought known as accelerationism. He is currently writing a book about the philosophical implications of Bitcoin. We talked about accelerationism, cybernetics, ideology, the evolution of Nick’s perspective, Deleuze and Guattari, emancipation and dehumanization, artificial intelligence, capitalism, Moldbug, mathematics and the significance of zero, religion, blockchain/Bitcoin, Kantianism, synthetic time, and more.

We recorded this online, over two sessions. We did have some unavoidable connection problems, so you'll notice some imperfections such as clicking sounds throughout. We did the best we could; big thanks to those who helped with the editing.

Listen the audio below:

Part 1: Acceleration, Ideology, Intelligence, Religion

Justin Murphy: You’re basically one of the leading thinkers, I would say arguably the leading thinker, of what we might call the school of thought that’s known as accelerationism. Accelerationism is something like the view that contemporary history is changing at an exponential rate, technologically and economically, and that this rate of change confounds nearly all of our traditional concepts for thinking about society and economics and politics. That’s just for people who have no idea what we’re going to be talking about, that’s broadly the school of thought you are known for and associated with, so maybe just before we even move forward (that’s my short, “elevator pitch” as it were), would you add anything to that? If someone on the street walked up to you and asked you “What is this whole accelerationism thing?” Is there a kind of essence or key upshot that you would add to what I just said?

Nick Land: We’re going to have this conversation so, you know, it’s probably … to try and anticipate might be a mistake, and I think as we start talking about it, we will find ourselves in various dimensions of accelerationism. In terms of my own involvement in it, I would say the guiding term, for certainly a long time, was cybernetics. The basic accelerationist thesis is that modernity is dominated by positive feedback processes rather than negative feedback processes, and the first wave of cybernetic theory — which consistently normalized negative homeostatic feedback and pathologized positive feedback — was therefore self-obsolescent. It was something that was not going to be a sustainable stance, given the — as you say — basic accelerating trend of the modern process, most extremely in its technological and economic dimensions. So that’s the “off the shelf” conceptual vocabulary that I think, at least initially, it comes in with, but it is itself extremely dynamic. And we’ve seen, an astounding range of different systems and terms of reference get sucked into this accelerationism conversation.

Justin Murphy: I’ve always been extremely curious about the relationship between your earlier work and your current thinking on these matters. A lot of your early work from the 1990s, it tends to embrace a fairly radical and even emancipatory political tone, I think it’s fair to say … it’s very kind of insurrectionary anarchist. There are a lot of feminist connotations. It’s very cyberpunk, obviously. It’s all about theorizing rebellion in the new digital context. Things like “hacking the macropod” and exploiting glitches in what you call the “human security system”, these sorts of notions … You talk about “k-war,” which I interpret as like revolutionary guerrilla warfare but on the level of the social codes. You’re even interested in more fantastic ideas such as stuff like “neolemurian time-war” in which one gets the sense that your position then seems to have been that these sorts of accelerationist insights might allow rebellious individuals and groups to fundamentally alter or hack the nature of social reality in ways that the status quo institutions are not able to defend against … There’s this very heady, emancipatory kind of tone to all of it, and so a lot of people who are interested in your work and your ideas, got into it through these early texts, and I think we know it’s very clear that since then, your thinking has evolved drastically, but what’s unclear I think is how and why exactly your thinking has changed or just how to understand the trajectory between those early heady, emancipatory connotations and your current viewpoints. So before even going into your current views and picking your brain about how you see these things today, I’m just curious if you could kind of mentally go back to the 1990s, when you’re theorizing all these kinds of radical ideas at the beginning. What was the first crack in that tendency for you? Like what gave, exactly? Was there a particular realization or insight or problem or anomaly in your viewpoint in the 90s that kind of cracked and made you see that all of these radical emancipatory ideas are not going to work, or how would you explain that?

Nick Land: These things come in waves. Wave motion is crucial to this. There was an extremely exciting wave that was ridden by the Ccru in the early to mid-1990s. You know, the internet basically arrived in those years, there were all kinds of things going on culturally and technologically and economically that were extremely exciting and that just carried this accelerationist current and made it extremely, immediately plausible and convincing to people. Outrageous perhaps, but definitely convincing. It was followed — and I wouldn’t want to put specific dates on this, really — but I think there was an epoch of deep disillusionment. I’d call it the Facebook era, and obviously, for anyone who’s coming in any way out of Deleuze and Guattari, for something called “Facebook” to be the dominant representative of cyberspace is just almost, you know, a comically horrible thing to happen! [Laughs.]

I just really responded to this with such utter, prolonged disgust that a certain deep, sedimentary layer of profound grumpiness — from a personal point of view — was added to this. But I don’t think it’s just a personal thing. I think that accelerationism just went into massive eclipse …

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