>>8358091

Jeffrey Herf wrote about "NRx/Dark Enlightenment" before Nick Land came along, labelled shit he didn't understand for dat dank wiki stamp and then got told to fuck off.

Really? I thought it was much later than that... I'll re-calibrate.

I've tried to figure out for years what Land's deal is, and I honestly don't know. (I've read nearly everything he's written, minus the Bataille work and some CCRU posts that aren't available.)

Why do you figure?

Land firmly believes in progressive socialism, but doesn't believe our current system allows for the process of gradual transformation like Marx described, so he wants to artificially accelerate to the "bad end" through "dark enlightenment".

But I thought he abandoned that conception of accelerationism and now wants to speed up capitalism so that a singularity can develop and overtake humanity?

I've heard this argued before, but I'm not sure it holds up.

>Nick Land
The guys a tweaker who desperately tries to fit as many narratives into his writing in an attempt to revive his failed academic career, he now teaches Highschoolers in China.

>he now teaches Highschoolers in China.
lmao, didn't know he was this pathetic

Source

absolutely delusional post

I'm surprised all those thirsty "fascism" scholars out there havn't jumped on this movement like they have on de Benoist, Dugin and Bataille.

So what's up with that shibboleth language? Whats up with it?
Does it serve purpose? Is it there to make him sound more intelligent?
I don't get it. But pomo had a following too, so I guess I'm not foolish enough.

is he the Tao Lin of /pol/?

Why do you keep giving this mediocre mind attention?

/pol/ doesn't know him
he's right about everything

Just because he uses/is inspired by some leftist ideas doesn't mean he's a leftist. He's anti-egalitarian, anti-humanist, anti-everything the left has ever been associated with.

If you don't know you're not supposed to know

He was constantly on all sorts of drugs at the time.

how could u even begin to come to this conclusion

NRx is extremely pro-capitalism.

Y-Yeah, I'm sure /pol/ would love the author who disparages nationalism on a regular basis.

So you can re-imagine old concepts in new ways and therefore apply them to analogues which might not otherwise be apparent. Once the new analogy "clicks," you can successfully extend the analogy and derive all sorts of conclusions. Nick Land is a master at working such analogies.

One of his more useful analogies is that technocapital operates like a virus.

Viruses are inanimate, but through interaction with a living body "hacks" the operation of that body's cells so that it functions more and more to reproduce viruses.

Technocapital is inanimate, but through interacting with a living society "hacks" the operation of that society's members so that it functions more and more to reproduce technocapital.

tl;dr capitalism is HIV, and we're all buggers.

Honestly, I see Nick Land threads and I just assume that's what he's about and ignore it.

Maybe I should check him out then.

I don't understand this guy.

How did you all even find him or come to know of him? There is shockingly little secondary writing on him or his work online.

This. He seems like a blogger who shilled himself continually on Veeky Forums and just regurgitates reactionary arguments made by brighter minds with a lil' steampunk aesthetic for the impressionable e-youth.

I found him through the Moldbug route. I ended up reading all of his work I could find in the course of a few years. His arguments are for the most part derived more from Marx with a strong Deleuze&Guattari bent; the reactionary stuff he got to later once he found synchronicity with Moldbug, in particular Moldbug's Dire Problem.

At some point I'd like to write my own summary of Nick Land, but first I want to read through his bibliography (which will take me a while).

Sounds like he's read his Burroughs

I think most people find him either through Scott Alexander (who is highly influenced by Land...Meditations on Moloch, Ascended Economy, How the West Was Won are all basically copy-pasted LAnd) or Moldbug.

Now that you mention it, I think he does mention Burroughs at some point in Fanged Noumena, but I'm not familiar with Burroughs. Mind elaborating?

Scott Alexander is an NRx sleeper agent. But you didn't hear that from me.

Burroughs conceives of language, drug addiction, really anything he deemed a 'system of control,' as a virus.

He still sounds like a hack.

anyone who does contemporary philosophy will know him and he's somewhat popular in the art world

>dark enlightenment
Do they expect people to take the movement seriously with a name like that?

it's not a movement, they don't care about appealing to the general populace and no one calls it that

So how do they expect to have their ideas put in place?

>continental
>sounds like a hack
No surprises here.

you are so far away man
just go read him and Moldbug

It also has roots in fascism

The latter is a form of accelerationism.

It also has roots in monarchy and imperialism.

>sleeper agent

Nah, that guy is straight up. He and others just think he's able to deceive people because of the narcissism that's typical of them. And the thing is about liberals in general is that they're not that different. It's kind of the main failure of NRx in my view, is that while they're good at pointing out the pathologies of fake leftists that are very much like them, they are totally unable to deal with the orthodox Marxism-Leninism that has currency in much of the world. Part of it is because it just does better in many respects (Land and maybe spandrell are the only ones that actually reach its level) and part of it is that many of these guys are actually ex-Marxists. Nick Land's accelerationism is basically just right wing Marxism, the argument being that the political subject has become impossible. Which might be the case, but all the places Land likes, Shanghai, Singapore, Vietnam and the kind of ideological realism he's attracted to are rooted in Leninist politics. Even if it's misused. Land would be nothing without Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

That quote can be taken either way. The CCRU is so caught up in SF and nihilist provocation that there was no realizable politics that could come out of it. Though that's why it was interesting, this idea that subject has become impossible. But of course Land is a narcissist who goes around looking for acolytes, so he had to docilize it just like the university. He claims to reject politics but then whines when people are mean to Trump. While living in China and having nothing useful to say about that. And of course he has a wifey who dabbles in Confucianism. It's all really pathetic, and it looks pathetic to anyone not deep into this shit.

Land doesn't support Trump and he has written on China multiple times

Yeah, we get it, Land pretends that there is a distance between him and his buddies. The thing is though, nobody is buying it anymore.

And like I said, nothing useful. It's basically aestheticized crap. I mean, his whole NRx phase basically started with his writing for a tourism magazine. It's kitsch, just like the rest of the current crop of right wing intellectuals.

Actually, something that has become really funny is the way Land complains about people misapprehending his intentions. He literally built his brand on trying to be the most radical anti-humanist and now he's the eternally misunderstood Beautiful Soul.

you're just being silly now

john-steppling.com/

Read some posts from this guy and you'll see the difference between the real avante-garde and Land's kitsch.

so Marxism made palateable for the steampunk kids?

but really he's just some anglo ESL high school teacher in China

really makes you think...

>but I'm not familiar with Burroughs. Mind elaborating?

He's literally ripping off Burroughs, word for word.

>Scott Alexander is an NRx sleeper agent. But you didn't hear that from me.

I think he's so deep undercover even he himself doesn't know it.

>anyone who does contemporary philosophy
I don't think I've ever heard an analytical mention or cite him and no one cares about continental hand waving.

amazon.com/Time-Ditch-American-Philosophy-McCarthy/dp/0810118092

You're basically a useful idiot for American Cold War politics. How does autism feel?

How does it feel to be a paranoid retard?

"No one" is most of the world to you because everyday you have to tell yourself that grad school was worth it or you will suffer narcissistic injury. What's more retarded than going to grad school to learn pretty much nothing?

>analytical
who cares lol

Marxism minus egalitarianism plus dude edgy mlao

>Dugin
"No"

You'll hear name drops because he is "le fashy" but there is no way these people have actually read him.

NRx is more like a right wing Foucault in that it is completely based around analysing power

Land has posted about him quite a few times. They're perfect foils to each other if you think about it. Dugin is the land empire and Land is the sea empire.

I was referring to the "alt right"

Can you explain this? Don't really see how Bataille or Benoist are fascist.

Dugin is a traditionalist who embraced the state socialism of the Soviet Union and Land is a traditionalist who embraced extreme capitalism. Its interesting.

>Land is a traditionalist

>Land is a traditionalist

so i just read this article
divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-land-ein-experiment-im-inhumanismus

and it makes him sound more like Andy Kaufman with a philosophy job than any kind of actual philosopher
is there a better outline of Nick Land somewhere?
also did he just recently become popular on Veeky Forums or am I just being fooled by ol' Baader-Meinhof

He's literally a leftist accelerationist shill.

I don't get why anyone takes that shit seriously.

Land's basic idea is that intelligence and capitalism are very similar processes w.r.t. maximizing ability to control entropy/do work. This is combined with a sort of universal Darwinism ("replicator selection") - processes which are better at doing work will propagate. Self-improving processes (strong AI) will dominate.

>Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment.

He likes to personify reality + replicator selection as Gnon: 'God of Nature or (perhaps simply) Nature'.

>xenosystems.net/war-in-heaven-ii/

Take this to its extreme, and some sort of market-AI amalgam is eventually going to dominate this planet. He portrays this in occult/horror/Lovecraftian terms. Cthulhu summoning itself into existence from the future.

>what 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.

So basically the only question that remains is whether to try to delay this or ACCELERATE right into it. Land falls in the latter camp.

OK that's pretty fucking cool. I'd have to be on the DELAY side though, maybe even ABORT or UNDO

You thought you'd conquered space

>autistic nerd acting out his Gibson-Lovecraft fanfiction as cutting edge philosophy

Pretty cool honestly