The Enemy We Need: Nick Land

I might be hyperbolic when I say this, but Nick Land is probably ground-zero for radical politics in the 21st century, to date. His work–alongside other neoreactionaries–have hyperstitioned recent conditions in the United States and elsewhere. His former student Mark Fisher was correct when he argued that Land is the enemy that the Left needs.

From the first line of “Meltdown,” we read:

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.¹

He continues:

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. [. . .] Neo-China arrives from the future.²

This is Terminator philosophy.

There’s one thing that we need to get out of the way before we go any further: Nick Land is best read not as a cybernetician nor a fascist theorist nor any of the other categories often placed upon him. He engages in two things: philosophy of history and alterity theory. We tend to see these categories as distinct spheres. For Nick Land, they are the same. This is equally true of both his early and late writings.

Most of his writings will be ignored in this review, as I either (1) didn’t find them compelling, or (2) did not feel the need to dignify them with a response. Even so, his main writings are–in my view–very important.

Philosophy of History

Land is, in some way, someone who believes in a sort of quantum progressivism.

By “progressivism,” I mean that history proceeds along rails to its endpoint. For Hegel, this was made up of a Weltgeist resolving contradictions and bringing about increasing levels of freedom. For Marx, engine of history was made up of class warfare, which resolved socioeconomic contradictions until they resulted in communism. For Land, the end is the technological singularity.

What makes Land’s philosophy of history “quantum” is that it is not made up of the regular stuff that we’re familiar with: race, class, gender, ideology, social status, or any other category of social research. Land instead advocates for retrocausality. This is a really strange perspective, and we have little evidence for it, other than it being a potential explanation for quantum entanglement.

When we examine the world, we tend to assume that cause and effect follow the arrow of time. For example, I did not eat earlier, so I am now hungry. I haven’t worked out in six months, so I feel winded when I climb up a staircase. Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, so European states engaged in a precarious balance of power politics that culminated in the First World War. Zionist settlers committed ethnic cleansing when they declared Israeli independence, so now there are millions of Palestinian refugees and millions of others living in occupied territories. Cause comes before effect.

According to retrocausality, on the other hand, events in what we understand—through our puny human minds—to be the future directly cause things in the past and present. Everything becomes teleology, and there’s no free will, not really. It connects to quantum entanglement because, the idea is, that two entangled particles might be lightyears away, but they immediately transmit information without need for material constraints like the speed of light.³ How does this happen? No clue. But, the information held on such particles in the future led to what was shown at the time of observation, or something to that effect.

In Nick Land’s view, superintelligent AI in the future is the driving force of human history, pulling all of us towards it like some enormous metaphysical magnet.

This AI relies on human technologies and economic structures. In fact, Capital is literally AI, and we’re all meatpuppets doing its bidding. This really isn’t far off from Marx’s line, “[m]en make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please […].”⁴ The logics of Capital demand that we fill specific roles, and it doesn’t matter how many CEOs are personally killed off, Capital will ensure that they get replaced. It doesn’t matter what workers do, the markets of the logic–and of underdevelopment, which is intentional–ensures that there is a global supply of labor paid at near slave-wages. It’s this that Land refers to in his famous and eminently memeable line:

[W]hat appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.⁵

Even though the quotes I’ve assembled so far come out of his early writings, he had not moved on from this view at the time he wrote Dark Enlightenment (2012).⁶ Unlike Curtis Yarvin, who explicitly advocates for company microstates structured as corporate entities, Land puts forth no positive political program.⁷ Instead, he sees the “exit” from liberal democracy through transhumanist (which does differ from his earlier posthumanist writings) speciation. I quote:

When seen from the bionic horizon, whatever emerges from the dialectics of racial terror remains trapped in trivialities. It’s time to move on.⁸

Alterity

The place where Land’s interest in alterity is most evident in his writing on horror. Even though this is from Land’s later period, it’s still quite good. “On the Exterminator” is a brief essay about the Fermi Paradox and the so-called “Great Filter,” which is increasingly theorized to be ahead rather than behind us. What, exactly, the Great Filter is, if it exists at all, is one of those “unknown unknowns” (in the words of Donald Rumsfeld), although speculative evidence seems to point to it being in the future–maybe it’s a “known unknown?” Land thinks otherwise.⁹

There’s also good writing in “Abstract Horror” about Capital as Other; it functions on logics alien to human understanding, and that in itself produces a sort of cosmic horror.

But, what’s important to Land’s thinking on alterity comes through in Robin Mackay’s biographical essay about Land as man (at least, up until ~2003). According to Mackay, Land believed that the major contribution by Heidegger and the poststructuralists was that they “[staged] a ‘break-out’ from the history of Western thought.”¹⁰ But, they were consumed by the institutionalization of academic philosophy. Land sought to reignite it.

This “break-out,” was, in essence, a break-out from the human mind writ large. Mackay catalogs a laundry list of ways that he tried to do this, both in his research and life. For one, Land’s Ccru writings were “text at sample velocity,” in the words of his student, Kodwo Eshun.¹¹ Land claimed that he had come back from the dead. He claimed that he was an android sent from the future to terminate human security. He went weeks without using first-person pronouns. He required students to take the chapter titles of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, turn them into acronyms, and do something with them? He laid on a stage “(a ‘snake-becoming’)” and croaked invocations alongside the poetry of French poet Antonin Artaud.¹² He simply sought to overcome what others thought, and he wanted a total break-out. As Mackay says:

Embarrassment was regarded by Land as just one of the rudimentary inhibitions that had to be broken down in order to explore the unknown–in contrast to the forces of academic domestication, which normalised by fostering a sense of inadequacy and shame before the Masters, before the edifice of what is yet to be learnt.¹³

He took his quest for the Other—by which I mean the total Other from humanity—so seriously that he forced schizophrenia upon himself. Mackay’s text here is:

Let’s get this out of the way. In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad.’ Afterwards, he did not shrink from meticulously documenting this process, as if writing up a failed experiment. He regarded the degeneration of his ‘breakthough’ into a ‘breakdown’ as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the human to escape the ‘headcase,’ the prison of the personal self.¹⁴

I cannot overstate this enough, Land’s project, from the moment he was appointed in the faculty as the University of Warwick, is exactly the same as it is today. His Xitter handle is, after all, @Otherness.

Final Conclusions, from the Left

But, this does not mean we ought to dismiss Land out of hand. As time passes, and as political events continue apace, I find it increasingly hard to disagree with Land’s vision of history. I’m trained as a historian–we generally reject teleology and argue for some degree of human agency and the importance of contingency. It might be the Zeitgeist, or it might be delusions, but Land might be right about this, and that’s concerning.

But, I do not accept his rejection of agency wholesale. It seems much more to me that future events occur when a constellation of the right factors fall into place. There are set paths, but there is not only one set path.

Mark Fisher covers this in the last few paragraphs of his essay, “Terminator vs. Avatar,” which argues that the desire to go back to some untained, pre-industrial, pre-civilizational ecological utopia is itself a function of Capital.¹⁵ The other dominating side of Capital, the Terminator, is Nick Land philosophy. But, rather than ripping off Capital’s mask, leaving only wires–as Land anticipated–it has morphed to make itself seen as all the more soft and comfy: see, for instance, Apple in the 00s (which is his example).¹⁶

The finale of Land’s history does not have be the end, but there is no going back. The only way out is through, and postcapitalism has to be assembled from the debris of today. It is not some romantic, utopian possibility.

On these grounds, we have to see Land as a foil for our own project. We are not fighting against 19th century railroad industrialists or feudal lords in Versailles; we are also not fighting against Nazi Germany.¹⁷

Continuing to fight the same tired battles of the 19th and 20th centuries is a losing strategy. We need to be proactive, not reactive. As Land himself says:

The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability. Doing anything, at this point, would take too long. So instead, events increasingly just happen. They seem ever more out of control, even to a traumatic extent.¹⁸

There’s no guarantee that it’s even possible to be ahead of the curve, but we need new techniques and an arsenal of ideas to get by.

Endnotes

1
Nick Land, “Meltdown,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 7.
2
Nick Land, “Meltdown,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 7.
3
Some of this ground is covered in Klee Irwin, “Spiritualism–the Technological Endgame,” in After Shock: The World’s Foremost Futurists Reflect on 50 Years of Future Shock–and Look Forward to the Next 50, ed. John Schroeter (Bainbridge Island, WA: John August Media, 2020).
4
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, trans. Saul K. Padover (Marx/Engels Internet Archive).
5
Nick Land, “Machinic Desire,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 27.
6
A treatise filled with tedious digressions about race in American society, providential views of history, crime rates, the Hajnal Line, and various other pet subjects of the extreme-right.
7
On Curtis Yarvin’s views, see Mencius Moldbug, Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century (2017). My version was an epub. More recently, he had interviews in New York Times Magazine and Politico.
8
Nick Land, “Dark Enlightenment,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 236.
9
Nick Land, “On the Exterminator,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 253.
10
Robin Mackay, “Nick Land–An Experiment in Inhumanism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 267.
11
Mark Fisher, “Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism,” in A Nick Land Reader (2017), 259.
12
Robin Mackay, “Nick Land–An Experiment in Inhumanism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 268.
13
Robin Mackay, “Nick Land–An Experiment in Inhumanism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 268.
14
Robin Mackay, “Nick Land–An Experiment in Inhumanism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 271.
15
Mark Fisher, “Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 258
16
Mark Fisher, “Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 261-62.
17
I’m so tired of the comparisons of the modern US to Nazi Germany–the US is drifting to the extreme-right, but this is something new, albeit with origins in the past. It’s not classical fascism.
18
Nick Land, “A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism,” in A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings (2017), 33-34.