"Wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labour. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future."' —Thomas Piketty
Who will enlighten me about Nick Land's Capital as a Lovecraftian god devouring everything?
Saturn will surely smile upon you for spreading the bad word. Gospel? GNOSPEL?
Noah Murphy
Capital obviously doesn't require human agents; in fact, right now it operates with them as serfs, unable to refuse its bidding because of starvation or plain old reward mechanisms. Of course, nothing prevents it from operating totally severed from its progenitors, with humble beginnings like bots at stock trade and to greater heights like automated stockholders.
Capital is as close to predictable as possible without being predictable. This is its paradoxical structure. As the margin shrinks narrower, it will trash around like a wild beast, but the margin must shrink - again, humans are doing the bidding of their master because of the carrots and sticks.
Imagine an elder monk trying to come up with a problem his students can't answer. If they fail, he hits them with his staff, if they succeed, he allows them to read a passage from a holy book. Students come and go, and the questions get harder with every lesson, until we reach a crisis point and nobody can figure it out.
Adrian James
>Wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages
Couldn't you stop this by banning lending at interest?
Carson Thomas
No because there's other assets that gain money while not losing value, real estate that's rented, stocks,bonds, ext.
It's not a problem though because the kids of the new rich will not work and spend a fuckload of money. Most wealthy families lose it all within 3 generations
Isaiah Morales
Capital is just ownership isn't it? If I have enough ownership, am I a man of god?
Elijah Campbell
>tfw when you realize that when liberals (in the non-retarded American sense) talk about the long term it's actually the point in time in which capital has turned humans into commodities for itself
Austin James
Capital isn't just ownership of the means of production. His whole point is that at some point becoming a rentier becomes more advantageous than actually producing shit.
Sebastian Wright
That would be anti Semitic.
Daniel Hill
Godammit, what exactly is capital in the Landian sense? Every definition I look up is it being ownership of assets. How could we be commoditized by ownership that don't need humans anymore?
Robert Peterson
Ehh, not exactly. Sorry in advance, because explaining through metaphors is lazy, but hopefully the point will be clear.
You are a peasent in some horrible country. Half your crop is taken by regular army, there's a risk of pogrom because you worship Ilu for bountiful harvests and state church is not too happy with that, and the existance is generally miserable. Through impossibly luck you somehow take a position of a general in a small revolt, your friends get killed but revolution succeeds, and now you are the new king. Are you free? It seems like you control everything but now the lower layer exerts power over you, just like you were opressed by high layer in your farmer days.
Capital is much the same. The totality of it forms a system that is more powerful than each of its parts, unpredictable from below and allows no option to grasp it in whole, and controls you like some cursed artefact possessed with the will of its own. You are its serf and commodity, even if there are no human masters above you. Basically see the post: End point is: capital produces shit by itself, humans are just tangled in the web of its formal ownership, not unlike neurons in the brain that technically make you do stuff but pragmatically it's he other way around. Even a huge cluster of neurons is not independent, but at least they are blessed with inability to percieve themselves as such.
Sebastian Cruz
I'm still missing it, are you saying capital is ownership, or some new definition?
If you are saying capital is ownership, are you saying relationships between owners has created an oppressive conglomeration where even owners are owned?
Is he saying Capitalism is a Lovecraftian entity, not Capital itself?
Caleb Thompson
>>Couldn't you stop this by banning lending at interest?
>10194608 >No because there's other assets that gain money while not losing value, real estate that's rented, stocks,bonds, ext.
But those assets (unlike loans, etc) don't increase in value as a result of lending at interest or usury.
And to the extent that lending at interest and/or usury were banned or limited, the value of real property, etc, would grow more slowly.
Parker Ward
So the agricultural revolution? Or even earlier when we were adopted by fruits as seed delivery devices?
Leo Green
Ownership of capital doesn't liberate you from capital, just like political mastery doesn't liberate you from politics. You're trapped in the web of the same negotiations and relations that you were before.
Dominic Robinson
Shit is still being produced, and it's being produced because you want, but not exactly what you want - rather, what the collective wants, or even more precise what will yield the most profit. Profit and maximisation can exist only within scarcity, so scarcity is produced and enforced. Furthermore, it's not just the natural scarcity, but altered scarcity that is the result of totality of capital individually striving to produce conditions in which each cell (or the atom) gets the biggest yield. That's where the Lovecraft stuff comes from.
Creepy cyborgs once made by man's hand and given a utility function surround the playground of remaining humanity, trying their best so the humans fulfill their utility functions. They feed them, because dead people can't make them feel good, but not too much, or otherwise the humans will tell them to fuck off and stop giving them meaningless tokens of value. They can't ditch the hairy apes and play with themselves because their dim-witted creators were smart enough to let them define value, so they continue to toy with the miserable race.
Nicholas Torres
Could it be said that more ownership and power is the way to worship Capital? Saturn Pagan Satan worship kind of thing? Baphomet?
Is selling your soul to the devil, getting Capital's blessings?
Kayden Miller
So automation of production is the main point of Land? He's afraid of the singulatiry?
Angel Garcia
Automation in the general sense, I'd desribe it as integration. News come out that CEO of X-Corp raped a woman; stocks drop; an outside influence, seemingly. But somebody profits. Soon, media conglomerates publish such things because it's profitable and don't when it's not, and somebody pays them to, one who wants stocks to rise or drop. Later, CEO is a mole inserted in the corporate ladder by somebody who wants to reveal the story when he climbs to the top, or even more curiously CEO plays against the corp by himself, or is subtly programmed to rape somebody, and so on and so forth. That's also automation, in a way, and the process is the eldritch God in question, an eternal drive for everything to be schizophrenically connected and looped to drive profits for somebody inside the system, the pawns of this God.
Automation in a literal sense of course is part of the process.
I think your confusion stems from the fact that Land's capital is synechdochal, inherently connected to the whole. Calling it capitalism obscures the idea that it doesn't have alternatives, so he doesn't. Even Polanyan grass-roots reciprocal sudo-communism races toward integration, for example.
Nolan Edwards
You seem like a retard. Is this what Jung's Ni sounds like?
Hunter Sanchez
No, during the agricultural revolution there was still no concept of capital and private means of production. I mean, even in Roman and Feudal times there still wasn't a sense of industry and capitalistic risk taking as we have from the late XVIII century.
Luke Carter
That makes a terrifying amount of sense. Honestly I had always assumed Land was just a meme. So all memeing aside what would be a good introduction to his thought?
Kayden Ortiz
That would actually worsen the issue. To start a business you need money. The two options are having money already and borrowing it from a bank.
Nicholas Roberts
Humans are the meat puppet of Capital. Read Mark Fisher's essay on Land's accelerationism.
" Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatiblewith Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating idiotically on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off."