Nick Land
Discussion
Joshua Citarella:
"I didn’t know much about philosopher Nick Land before I went down this multi-year rabbit hole. I knew he was associated with Accelerationism and that he had a pretty pessimistic outlook on technology. He was one of those cyber-punk guys. It wasn’t really my thing.
Land was a professor at Warwick University in London and co-founder of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Sadie Plant in the mid 90’s. Various art world and art adjacent figures passed through the group, including Mark Fisher (my personal favorite), Ray Brassier and Jake and Dinos Chapman, among others.
Burnt out from a drug induced mental collapse, which involved taking speed and long binge-writing sessions in the middle of underground Jungle raves, Land disappeared from public life. He resurfaced a few years later in Shanghai as a prominent Fascist thinker. Land’s new theory is the Dark Enlightenment. DE is the guiding philosophy for the Neo-Reactionary movement (NRx), the high-brow and even more radical contingency of the Alt-right. His new work is largely based on the writings of pseudonymous silicon valley blogger Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin first gains mainstream media attention when he is protested for speaking at a tech conference in Missouri in 2015. Steve Bannon places the story on Breitbart, covering it as an issue of free speech. Yarvin is a friend and political advisor to Peter Thiel, who is also the primary investor in his company. The web extends ever outward.
While he was in London, one might have characterized Land’s work as anarchist, insurrectionary or possibly nihilistic, but certainly anticapitalist. Today, he furiously tweets and blogs, openly advocating for eugenics and the abolition of democracy.
Knowing of him mostly through the far-right, I am surprised to encounter Land’s earlier work within the Post-left community. The type of racism and fascism he now represents is the complete and polar opposite of their beliefs. I guess enough time spent marinating in techno-nihilism will do strange things to the way you think. The Post-left enjoys his mania and appreciates the analogy of capitalism and the death drive. Land’s theory of “hyperstition” is easily retrofitted onto Stirner’s conception of property as a phantasm in the mind of the beholder. Both thinkers have a interest in occultism which occasionally makes an appearance in their work.
I can’t pretend to understand or summarize Land’s position. The levels of contrarianism run deep beyond trolling. He speaks in 20-minute monologues. His work is dismissed by most mainstream institutions but thrives online. In the case of Politigram, Landian thought is perfect fuel for anti-establishment teens.
In these online communities, the philosophy of accelerationism is split into largely two camps; Left and Right. R/Acc is associated mostly with Land and Yarvin. L/Acc describes thinkers like Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams and Paul Mason. Various niche groups have collected around the term U/Acc (Unconditional Accelerationism) in an attempt to revive popular interest for Land’s earlier work. All manner of Accelerationists agree with Marx’s fundamental idea that technology, at the hand’s of capital, capital, is the force which shapes human society and moves history forward. This preoccupation with technology often metastasizes into a dark and nihilistic worldview." (http://joshuacitarella.com/_pdf/Politigram_Post-left_2018_short.pdf)