{"id":24616,"date":"2025-06-10T17:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/silicon-tanks-nick-land-the-right-face-of-accelerationism\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T17:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T14:00:00","slug":"silicon-tanks-nick-land-the-right-face-of-accelerationism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/silicon-tanks-nick-land-the-right-face-of-accelerationism\/","title":{"rendered":"Silicon Tanks: Nick Land, the right face of accelerationism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The British philosopher Nick Land began his career as a careful reader and bold interpreter of 20th-century leftist thinkers, anarchically breaking the usual bounds of academic tradition. He is now a supporter of \u201cneoreaction,\u201d an apologist for technocracy and surveillance capitalism, who regards Peter Thiel as the greatest thinker of the present day.<\/p>\n<p>How that 180-degree turn happened, and why Land found in bitcoin a confirmation of his \u201coutrageous\u201d hypotheses, is the subject of the first piece in the new series \u201cSilicon Tanks,\u201d in which ForkLog profiles the most influential philosophers and visionaries of the digital age.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/share.transistor.fm\/e\/ad32bea8\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The CCRU era<\/h2>\n<p>\u201cTrump will be magnanimous. He feels the hand of the Lofty Powers on his shoulder. Elon Musk, just admit: \u2018My grasp of Solemn Providence was imperfect.\u2019 That\u2019s all that is required of you. The timeline will stay the same, and we could still make it to Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen Musk says: \u2018I understand democratic politics better than Trump,\u2019 it\u2019s as if Trump were to say: \u2018I understand building electric cars better than Musk.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2018Sorry, Donald, it\u2019s all the f\u2014ing ketamine, I won\u2019t do it again\u2019;<\/p>\n<p>\u2018You are forgiven, my son. Get back to work.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>Then I woke up and screamed.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Trump will be magnanimous. He feels the hand of The Lofty Powers upon his shoulder. Just admit &#8220;My grasp of Solemn Providence was imperfect&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/elonmusk?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">@elonmusk<\/a> , that&#8217;s all it takes. The timeline could be saved. Mars could still be within our reach.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Xenocosmography (@xenocosmography) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/xenocosmography\/status\/1930689085011906803?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 5, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Those lines are not the work of some random armchair pundit on X, nor a bored teenage 4channer, nor a survivalist religious fanatic building a private nuclear bunker in the Ozarks in anticipation of the Second Coming. That is how the 63-year-old Nick Land \u2014 among the leading contemporary philosophers studying the intricate relations between humans, technology, the state and capital, in the broadest senses of those words \u2014 comments on a recent public spat between Donald Trump and Elon Musk.<\/p>\n<p>In 1987 he defended a dissertation on Martin Heidegger and \u201cOn the Way to Language.\u201d That same year Land began teaching at Warwick \u2014 a \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/ru.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/%D0%A3%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%8B_%D0%B8%D0%B7_%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%BB%D0%B0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">plate-glass university<\/a>\u201d that would become one of Britain\u2019s most prestigious intellectual centres.<\/p>\n<p>From the outset Land showed a consistent refusal to obey the rules of the university and the scholarly world. For a long time he had only one major work in a relatively traditional register \u2014 Thirst for Annihilation (1992). In it Land turns to the work of Georges Bataille, the French philosopher and writer of transgressive fiction whose central themes were the limits of personal freedom, extreme bodily practices, the crisis of humanism and, as a consequence, mass dehumanisation, reducing people to two functions: \u201cexecutioner\u201d and \u201cvictim.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cBataille burns out your soul and it\u2019s not possible to take it. You can either die or go somewhere else. Or both,\u201d <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.urbanomic.com\/chapter\/fanged-noumena-no-future\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><em>Land admits<\/em><\/a><em> in his 1995 essay \u201cNo Future.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>From the 20th-century continental tradition he borrowed a writing method critics dub theory fiction. Following experiments by Friedrich Nietzsche and S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, thinkers like Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski preferred to set out their ideas as literature rather than academic articles. Land\u2019s key writings are cast in the same mode, drawing on Lovecraftian and abstract horror, cyberpunk and slipstream, with a palpable dose of William S. Burroughs:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cThe metrophage tunes you to the end of the world. Let\u2019s call it Los Angeles. The state is rotten to the core with narco-capital and is now falling apart at random. Its collapse exposes an urban war landscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones, controlled by a combination of high-intensity airmobile LAPD units and quasi-Nazi private security outfits. Along lines of social fracture, media gigacash is sadomasochistically interlaced with zones of dynamic underdevelopment, where viral neo-leprosy spreads against a backdrop of tectonically tense static.\u201d (<span data-descr=\"translation by Diana Khamis\" class=\"old_tooltip\">\u201cMeltdown,\u201d 1997<\/span>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Following Bataille, Land demands that one \u201cextinguish one\u2019s personality\u201d \u2014 a similar aim to that declared by the members of the secret society \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/syg.ma\/@natella-speranskaja\/acephale-ot-dionisa-nitsshie-k-mistierii-kazni-bataia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Ac\u00e9phale<\/a>,\u201d who practised \u201cmagical\u201d rites and symbolic \u201csacrifices.\u201d For them the rejection of the self was an experience of individual death through which a new collective organism was born.<\/p>\n<p>Such ideas underpinned the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), founded by Land in 1995 with his Warwick colleague Sadie Plant. The CCRU jettisoned traditional philosophical strategies. Instead of lectures and seminars they staged performances with electronic music, during which Dr Land, to awkward laughter from the audience, demonstrated a transformation into an \u201cother\u201d: a snake, a werewolf, a lemur. As <a href=\"https:\/\/rima.media\/document\/2021-05-13-gorky-220260-zachem-demony-poslali-nam-nika-landa\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">explained<\/a> by Diana Khamis, a translator of Land\u2019s writings into Russian, CCRU members \u201cused self-humiliation and dehumanisation as a means to overcome the \u2018I\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>CCRU\u2019s strategies were shaped by the social, cultural and political backdrop of the time. In the autumn of 1994 British society was convulsed by the parliamentary passage of the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.legislation.gov.uk\/ukpga\/1994\/33\/contents\/enacted\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Criminal Justice and Public Order Act<\/a>.\u201d Ostensibly aimed at defending \u201cpublic morals\u201d and cracking down on illegal raves, the law in effect curtailed freedom of assembly and encouraged police violence and other abuses of power. Among other things it contained a clause that silence in response to \u201clawful questions\u201d by constables would be treated as an admission of guilt.<\/p>\n<p>The Act also offered an absurd definition of the genres it sought to ban. Techno and house were described as \u201cmusic\u201d (the quotation marks are in the text), \u201cwholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.\u201d Both civil society and musicians opposed the law, which remained in force for four years. <span data-descr=\"\u2018To hell with them and their law\u2019\" class=\"old_tooltip\">\u201cFuck \u2019em and their law\u201d<\/span>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zKNoU2P0dQc&#038;pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">declared<\/a> The Prodigy. <span data-descr=\"\u2018We have explosive\u2019\" class=\"old_tooltip\">\u201cWe have explosive\u201d<\/span>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Xc9l7pygQRo&#038;pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD\">threa<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Xc9l7pygQRo&#038;pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">ten<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Xc9l7pygQRo&#038;pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD\">ed<\/a> The Future Sound of London.<\/p>\n<p>There were subtler acts of cultural resistance. On the eve of the law\u2019s entry into force, Autechre issued the Anti EP, a three-track release constructed from as many non-repeating beats as its authors could muster.<\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"border: 0; width: 100%; height: 120px;\" src=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/EmbeddedPlayer\/album=2988674025\/size=large\/bgcol=ffffff\/linkcol=0687f5\/tracklist=false\/artwork=small\/transparent=true\/\" seamless><a href=\"https:\/\/autechre.bandcamp.com\/album\/anti\">Anti by Autechre<\/a><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The original pressing was sealed with a sardonic warning that it should be played in the presence of a lawyer and a qualified musicologist capable of explaining to the police the unrhythmic nature of the compositions. Through such practices mass art began to explore the peculiar beauty of error \u2014 the glitch in the algorithm \u2014 and the liberating potential of bugs and glitches.<\/p>\n<p>CCRU pulled in the same direction. It abandoned logical and lucid philosophical language in favour of verbal chaos that mimics the thinking of a schizophrenic, an occultist, someone intoxicated by drugs \u2014 or a broken machine. The mode lets Land conduct a furious audit of the intellectual values produced by bourgeois capitalist society:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cWhen one turns to the Western tradition \u2014 to the authoritative discourses of truth, to the councils at which theological dogma was elaborated and which today underwrite our \u2018common sense\u2019 \u2014 one should not be investigating \u2018errors,\u2019 \u2018weaknesses of argument\u2019 or \u2018mistaken judgments.\u2019 No, what is at issue can only be a deeply rooted and fanatical discipline of lying. And hence one aspect of the radicalism of atheistic thought, from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bataille, lies in overthrowing the high-bourgeois apologetic-epistemological problematic of modern philosophy with a question posed for the first time with full clarity: where does the lie stop?\u201d (<span data-descr=\"translation by Yana Kononova\" class=\"old_tooltip\">\u201cNietzsche the Shaman,\u201d 1995<\/span>).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>CCRU delighted in mystifications: it devised its own conspiracies and conducted <a href=\"https:\/\/gorky.media\/fragments\/barker-govorit\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">interviews<\/a> with fictitious scholars. Its key influences were Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix Guattari, authors of the monumental Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Following the classics of post-structuralism, the unit offered a psychoanalytic reading of capitalism as a system that produces not values but desires, reflecting Freudian complexes, a death drive and self-destruction. The alternative is the \u201cschizophrenic\u201d thinking of the rhizome, the mycelium, which lets one slip the grasp of the state with its repressions, neuroses, sadism and masochism.<\/p>\n<p>No less important was the Situationist International of Guy Debord, with its critique of consumer society and its anarchic insistence on revolution for revolution\u2019s sake. These ideas and practices would feed accelerationism \u2014 the ideology that calls for total speed-up of progress and a rethinking of technology in order to aggravate capitalism\u2019s internal contradictions and hasten its collapse. The unit also took serious cues from cryptographers and the early cypherpunks.<\/p>\n<p>In 1995 CCRU co-founder Sadie Plant wrote \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/uberty.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Plant_Sadie_Zeros_and_Ones_no_OCR.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture<\/a>,\u201d a foundational text of early cyberfeminism. It contains several tenets often cited as part of the theoretical base of the left wing of accelerationism. Plant argues for rethinking the gendered dimension of technology. In patriarchal capitalist society, machines are coded as masculine: they are expected to help subjugate the world and satisfy needs and desires.<\/p>\n<p>She points out that digital technologies are, by contrast, feminine by nature: algorithms trace back to practices traditionally coded as women\u2019s work \u2014 weaving, for instance. It is no accident that the first machine to use <a href=\"https:\/\/syg.ma\/@iozhi-stoliet\/sedi-plant-vstuplieniie-k-statie-binarnost-pola-binarnost-koda\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">binary zeros and ones<\/a> was the <a href=\"https:\/\/ru.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/%D0%96%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%82%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%86%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Jacquard loom<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In 1997 Plant left Warwick to focus on independent research. A year later the university dispensed with Dr Land as well \u2014 the administration\u2019s patience had run out; he was asked to vacate the lecture hall and \u201ccorrupt\u201d the young elsewhere.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/GMdPLxbuc8Q?si=v3NVzhwV-vb6r6zv\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Despite its brief existence, CCRU attracted the attention of many intellectuals who shaped the culture around the millennium. Among those involved were the incisive critical theorist Mark Fisher, Reza Negarestani, later author of the cult \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/syg.ma\/@sygma\/rieza-nieghariestani-tsiklonopiediia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Cyclonopedia<\/a>,\u201d Ray Brassier, a co-founder of <a href=\"https:\/\/magisteria.ru\/architects-of-meaning-philosophers-of-the-20th-century\/speculative-realism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">speculative realism<\/a>, the <a href=\"https:\/\/artguide.com\/posts\/1745\">Afrofuturist<\/a> Kodwo Eshun and others. Music at the seminars came from Hyperdub founder Steve Goodman, while reports were filed by Simon Reynolds, a critic held in high esteem in Britain and America.<\/p>\n<p>Most of them disavowed their teacher when, after years of seclusion, Land returned to public life with new ideas that had little in common with CCRU\u2019s left radicalism.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A rightward turn and the \u201cphilosophy of bitcoin\u201d<\/h2>\n<p>After leaving the university Land went through a severe personal and intellectual crisis, worsened by abuse of psychoactive substances \u2014 chiefly amphetamine and its derivatives.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cThe cybertheoretical hurricane named Nick Land died at the very end of the 1990s, eaten alive by lemurian demons, leaving behind a smirking, middle-aged man of extreme right-wing convictions, still dabbling in the Kabbalah and still capable of writing damn good texts. When I asked this man what I should do with his early works, how I should deal with his untimely death, and how to understand what had died and what remained, his answer was unequivocal: do whatever you want with them and take my death however you want, I really am dead, and in any case we all die regularly, chopped up by time like birds hitting a jet engine,\u201d writes Diana Khamis.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Land\u2019s 21st-century programme is negative: less a set of prescriptions than a barrage against his ideological opponents. His main adversary is Nick Srnicek, the Canadian philosopher behind the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/liva.com.ua\/manifesto-accelerate.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Accelerationist Manifesto<\/a>,\u201d which, <a href=\"https:\/\/syg.ma\/@igor-stavrovsky\/nik-lend-bystroie-i-niepristoinoie-vviedieniie-v-aksielieratsionizm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">in Land\u2019s view<\/a>, fundamentally misunderstands and appropriates accelerationism, recasting it as \u201can implicit call for a new Leninism without the NEP (but with utopian techno-managerial experiments from Chilean communism).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In Land\u2019s account, left and right have swapped roles in history. Democratic socialists, he argues, have become conservatives defending the global status quo, grounded in \u201coutdated\u201d ideas of humanism, justice, equality and the maximisation of welfare for the greatest number. The far right, by contrast, has assumed the revolutionary task of wrecking the existing world order and its institutions.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lh7-qw.googleusercontent.com\/docsz\/AD_4nXfhWuxtk0SL-8ffEDwEdeTZwLtWQyyf3P1x08103AcP0fAZQCBpzGIX9fiCh4GlHX-JM3crSNOnjZh7oyq0yWB8kBZKPJNu5fuI5ghgSbv8ZdSjlqrA_l2sXrUDjp3Yt_NjJk4oyw?key=5m3nTUeyEF6v9c_UNPFAig\" alt=\"Silicon Tanks: Nick Land, the right face of accelerationism\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A pr\u00e9cis of Nick Land\u2019s later writings. Data: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.anarsisthaberler.net\/dayatacagim-tek-sey-parcalanma-nick-land-ile-roportaj\/\">Anarsist Haberler<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Land\u2019s thinking in its new guise blends social Darwinism, \u201cscientific racism,\u201d and intolerance toward feminist and broadly libertarian political projects. The leading philosopher of our time, Land proclaims, is <a href=\"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/news\/peter-thiel-reaffirms-commitment-to-bitcoin\">Peter Thiel<\/a>; venture capitalism is a new form of natural selection in which the right to survive is earned by successful investment. He lays out his platform in the essay \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/syg.ma\/@msie-anys\/nik-lend-tiomnoie-prosvieshchieniie-chast-1-nieorieaktsioniery-napravliaiutsia-k-vykhodu\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">The Dark Enlightenment<\/a>,\u201d enthusing over <span data-descr=\"real name \u2014 Yarvin Curtis\" class=\"old_tooltip\">Mencius Moldbug<\/span>, a living icon of the \u201calternative right.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Land prefers to style himself and his allies as the \u201cnew reaction\u201d (NRx), distancing themselves from the most fanatical (and often armed) alt-right groupings \u2014 though even here he expresses a degree of sympathy, if evasively and in his own way.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cIf identity politics in the blood-and-soil vein can, in various ways, cling to power, worse times will be upon them, because they will be forced to produce or create something, and they cannot do that. They will lose any potential for mass globalisation, and their name will be associated with defeat. I would like to see such experiments on a small scale so that they end in instructive failure rather than a global catastrophe [\u2026] Local failures are wonderful. Global ones, of course, are not nearly so fine,\u201d <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/logosjournal.ru\/articles\/2034\/\"><em>Land said<\/em><\/a><em> in an interview with Logos.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The mind-set of NRx is neatly captured in an apocryphal tale about a supposed forebear \u2014 the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola, author of the ultra-right treatise Revolt Against the Modern World (1934). In 1941 Benito Mussolini offered him the editorship of a regime journal. \u201cDuce, but I am not a fascist,\u201d baron Evola replied.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cBy which he meant that fascism was, to him, too much a movement of workers and peasants,\u201d <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/BafYod2c7NM?feature=shared\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><em>explained<\/em><\/a><em> the philosopher and Islamic political thinker Heydar Jemal.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Neoreactionaries hold as fundamentally false the <a href=\"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/news\/three-leaps-across-a-chasm-ai-and-web3-as-seen-by-the-2024-nobel-laureates\">assumptions<\/a> of liberal and neoliberal economics that people\u2019s well-being depends directly on the democratic nature of society and the openness of state institutions. They point to Chinese megacities and the monarchies of the Persian Gulf \u2014 places with very low civil liberties but very high living standards.<\/p>\n<p>Their ideal ruler of the future is Lee Kuan Yew, the dictator who turned the city-state of Singapore into a high-tech \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/librarianedge.pbworks.com\/f\/William+Gibson+article+on+Singapore+1993+--+Disneyland+with+the+Death+Penalty.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Disneyland with the Death Penalty<\/a>,\u201d as William Gibson \u2014 a formative writer for the young Land \u2014 described it with disgust. In the \u201cnew feudalism\u201d of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Surveillance_capitalism\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">surveillance capitalism,<\/a> where the technocrat-lord bestows prosperity on the loyal and punishes \u201cbackward\u201d dissidents, NRx adherents see neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but the inevitable end of civilisation\u2019s trajectory.<\/p>\n<p>There is no place in this global project for the \u201cobsolete\u201d morality of social justice. Only accelerationists \u2014 who do not think but act, conscious of the approaching \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/syg.ma\/@igor-stavrovsky\/nik-lend-bystroie-i-niepristoinoie-vviedieniie-v-aksielieratsionizm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">absolute horizon<\/a>\u201d of singularity \u2014 will fully function within it. In characteristically provocative fashion Land even names Karl Marx as the first accelerationist thinker, citing the conclusion of his \u201cSpeech on the Question of Free Trade\u201d (1848):<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cIn general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the system of free trade is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I vote in favor of free trade.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Anything that can catalyse capitalism\u2019s self-destruction in order to build a new techno-aristocracy on its ruins merits the support of right accelerationists. One variation \u2014 e\/acc \u2014 has won especially broad backing in Silicon Valley. The \u201ceffective accelerationism\u201d banner has been waved by the aforementioned Thiel, a16z co-founder <a href=\"https:\/\/habr.com\/ru\/articles\/771996\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Marc Andreessen<\/a>, former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.<\/p>\n<p>But right accelerationism also has a less respectable face, despite public NRx attempts to distance themselves. Its cultural-ideological base has been successfully integrated into various neo-Nazi movements. The small, marginal yet media-magnetic Atomwaffen Division has been most active here. Its members have been charged by US authorities with a series of hate-motivated murders. In its agitprop it embraces a distinctly Landian synthesis of occultism, counterculture, racism and xenophobia, hostility to left-liberal ideologies, the aggressive use of internet memes and the promotion of psychoactive drug use. Despite anti-Islamic rhetoric, Atomwaffen leaders praised acts of religiously motivated terror and urged followers to launch armed attacks on US nuclear facilities. In the destruction of the American state they see, in true accelerationist fashion, a chance to rebuild the world order around white nationalism.<\/p>\n<p>Strikingly, Land\u2019s creative strategies echo the philosophical evolution of Alexander Dugin, leader of the \u201cEurasian Youth Union.\u201d Earlier, like Land, he <a href=\"https:\/\/zavtra.ru\/blogs\/1999-05-0483\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">turned<\/a> to musical-visual performance, Crowleyan occultism and postmodernist <a href=\"https:\/\/paideuma.tv\/video\/marmeladnyy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">deconstruction of pop culture<\/a>. In the new millennium he, like the British neoreactionary whom he often cites, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.platonizm.ru\/content\/dugin-postfilosofiya-5-mutacii-vremeni-i-prostranstva-postvremya\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">subjected<\/a> the Deleuze\/Guattari legacy to a \u201cright\u201d revision and (coincidentally?) <a href=\"https:\/\/t.me\/thrashbooks\/3479?single\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">declared<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cChaos is neither dark nor light. It is dark-light.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Unlike most of his peers in the philosophy of technology, Land eagerly turns to blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Between 2018 and 2019 his accelerationist blog <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20200810120043\/https:\/\/www.uf-blog.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\">Urban Future<\/a> serialised a long essay with the hard-to-translate title Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>The work is strikingly structured, recalling Wittgenstein\u2019s Tractatus. Land sets out the technical and ideological bases of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and altcoins, including Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/2PMGuNZreWA?si=glA4ESbExSQ3ciu2\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Flatly rejecting the moderate libertarian insistence on bitcoin\u2019s political neutrality, Land sees in the first cryptocurrency not a critique but a crushing blow to the \u201cleftist\u201d worldview. Cryptocurrencies, he argues, abolish classic conceptions of value and production shared by both Marxist and capitalist theory and practice.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cWhat is the value of a stock of 21,000,000 bitcoins? Why, 21,000,000 BTC, of course. Naturally, such a crude tautology might at first seem nonsensical \u2014 or at best a <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.quora.com\/What-does-I-have-got-semantic-evasion-mean-I-have-seen-this-sentence-in-an-interview\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" title=\"\"><em>semantic evasion<\/em><\/a><em>. But there is nothing trivial about the disturbance it provokes,\u201d he writes, thinking like a seasoned <\/em><em>bitcoin maximalist<\/em><em>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>For him, digital gold is a vivid demonstration of the power of \u201chyperstition\u201d \u2014 a key Landian term describing the ability of immaterial and \u201cfantastic\u201d technological phenomena to incarnate themselves and influence objective reality, steering the evolution of society, culture and scientific progress.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cHype actually makes things real, and utilises belief as a positive force. The fact that they aren\u2019t \u2018real\u2019 now doesn\u2019t mean they can\u2019t become real at some point in the future. And once they\u2019ve become real, they were in a certain sense always real. Hyperstitions, in their very existence as ideas, function causally to secure their own reality. [\u2026] A hyperstitional object is not merely imaginary or a \u2018social construct,\u2019 but is quite literally \u2018called\u2019 into existence by the actions undertaken with respect to it,\u201d the philosopher contends.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>In Land\u2019s present view, \u201chyperstition\u201d in Pepe or in Kek is a tool for splitting the \u201cAnglosphere\u201d above all. It is also a shield against Lovecraftian horror \u2014 an accelerationist redirection of it into a truly religious revolt against the modern world.<\/p>\n<p>Small wonder that, in the Musk\u2013Trump set-to, the philosopher took the side not of the \u201ctechie\u201d and visionary but of a pointedly anti-intellectual priest of what is, in essence, the hyperstitional MAGA cult. More than any other powerful politician, Trump has shown that deeds are secondary: on the road to singularity, the key is to produce and disseminate subversive information.<\/p>\n<p>However one feels about Land\u2019s evolution from an original intellectual into a \u201csmirking, middle-aged man of extreme right-wing convictions,\u201d there is no denying that the boldness of his ideas and syntheses, however anti-humanist, has earned them a place in the global reckoning with today\u2019s technologies and humanity\u2019s place within them. Perhaps the attraction of Land\u2019s method is best summed up by Diana Khamis:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><em>\u201cLand\u2019s texts possess a nervous and slightly dangerous allure, almost like outer space, a dark forest, the deep sea, corpses, gigantic Australian spiders, and other things that are strange, indeterminate, or many-legged.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Text: Comrade 93<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The British philosopher Nick Land began his career as a careful reader and bold interpreter of 20th-century leftist thinkers, anarchically breaking the usual bounds of academic tradition. He is now a supporter of \u201cneoreaction,\u201d an apologist for technocracy and surveillance capitalism, who regards Peter Thiel as the greatest thinker of the present day. How that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"select":"","news_style_id":"","cryptorium_level":"","_short_excerpt_text":"","creation_source":"","_metatest_mainpost_news_update":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1144],"tags":[18,286,1361],"class_list":["post-24616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-longreads","tag-bitcoin","tag-society","tag-virtual-world-innovations"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"views":"937","promo_type":"","layout_type":"","short_excerpt":"","is_update":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24616"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24616\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forklog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}