Can someone give me a quick rundown of what this lad actually believes and wants?

Did it evolve out of our memes or our genes?

why is this guy popular on Veeky Forums now? (past year or so) or is it just Baader-Meinhof and he has always been popular?

i read meltdown which was cool. what next?

It is more of a Lovecraftian thing, above and beyond us. A "force of nature" if you will, and we are merely engaging in it. Therefore, just like a river, all we can do is go with the flow, or as he believes, angrily row towards the bottom even faster on our capitalist boat. It is hostile but only insofar as it doesn't really give a shit about our individual goals or desires.

idk i guess he didn't really like germans

he's had a following here for several years, but only recently has that snowball grown too sizeable to ignore. part of it has to do with his growing relevance to the world around us, but he's also someone with a sensibility that meshes well with Veeky Forums.

Why should we hasten it?

Because it's going to happen anyway and Land probably wants to see rumblings of it before he croaks

Thanks for the answers, m8.

Where should I start with his work?

kek

whats his best book?

Unwritten.

innovative readings of Kant, Nietzsche, Batallie, deleuze, etc. worth a read regardless of partisanship. He does rely heavily on the supposition that you already have a substantial knowledge of Continental philosophy; not having such will lead you to despise his work, regarding it as pretentious bullshit- this also happens to be the predicament of the introductory writer and former student (I believe) of land, ray brassier. Both have beautifully accurate accounts of philosophical history, and the ideas concatenated with it, and both require thorough readings.

So does he sincerely believe in capitalism or does he want to see it destroy itself? Dark enlightenment fags always dodge this question

both perhaps

From what I gather he "believes" in it in the sense of acknowledging its immense but hostile influence, while also not believing it can even be destroyed so we should not be talking about how to do it to begin with.

For some reason Brassier was much harder for me to grasp. Nihil Unbound for example, I struggled through the initial parts but did understand it. As soon as he started to "explain" Laruelle however, I confess to being utterly lost at first and it took months to decide on picking it up again. It is also somewhat humorous that Brassier hates people who try to convey philosophical ideas through the internet via blogs but Nick Land is all out on blogging/twitter.

Land's basic idea is that intelligence, evolution and capitalism are very similar processes (from a cybernetic perspective) 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. Capitalism, by way of economic growth is a self-improving process.

>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.

As soon as humans and human values cease to be aligned with 'maximize the dissipation of entropy' (in other words: when humans cease to be the smartest thing around), the world will cease to be a nice place for humans.

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. And the vector of maximum acceleration is: NRx.

A lot of ifs in that arguement to be basing your life on.

I think the only "if" is really if humanity fucks up and is capable of creating an AI capable of fulfilling this prophecy

Ignoring all the other bullshit, how exactly are edgy evolafags who want to literally turn back time "the vector of maximum acceleration"?

There's very little overlap between Evola and Land/Moldbug.

They do want to turn back time though.

Continental philosophy is not my cup of tea, but this:
>Land's basic idea is that intelligence, evolution and capitalism are very similar processes (from a cybernetic perspective) 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. Capitalism, by way of economic growth is a self-improving process.
I find an interesting idea that I would like serious discussion on.

Reminds me of complexity science that I am trying to figure out and my own interest in evolutionary biology.

How so?

Or "if" capital doesn't chnage with new technology like it has twice before. "If" the network society stays intact with the reconfiguring of politic thats going on rn. There are a lot of ifs desu.

Well, they call themselves traditionalists and reactionaries for starters.

I challenge you to find a single instance of Moldbug or Land calling themselves traditionalists. And reactionary doesn't mean "wants to turn back time" (especially with the neo- prefix). Even a cursory acquaintance with Moldbug is enough to understand that. What he proposes in practical terms involves radical change, in a direction that has never existed in the past.

I personally find it to only be a matter of time. It could in thousands of year, but I think given enough generations it will happen.

Well, you are the expert here, and I asked you to explain how their weird ass meme philosophy is supposed to accelerate capitalism. I'm just going from what I know about the "Dark Enlightenment" from all the /pol/ spillover.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Quotes/PeaceThroughSuperiorFirepower
"Welcome to NERV. God's in His heaven because He's scared of our superior firepower."

It's complicated. But basically it involves extending capitalism to sovereignty (and killing democracy in the process). Split america into thousands of city-states and let them compete.

>Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions like that [on the specifics of social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-nationalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the patchwork and find out.

so basically turning the world into a global complex of Singapores?

slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

I know this is a blog post, it's not from Land either, but it should get you started on the gist of applying competition/cooperation biological systems to society without stretching it beyond recognition.

Luckily history humbles the certain

Everyone find their interests in continental philosophy when they meet their own interests.

Lucky enough you will end up understanding that what you were interested in first place was also because your own interests but ideology didn't let you know it.

>Scott Alexander
>slatestarcodex
Fucking
Stop.

Seems like there's some people who know their stuff here, so would anyone mind explaining Land's connection to Lovecraft and this weird development in philosophical interest in the works of people like Lovecraft and M.R. James? I know above someone mentioned Cthulhu being a symbol for unrestrained capitalism / AI, but I'm guessing it goes further than just that reference point.

Neither is that my cup of tea, I skimmed through it and find it a load of shit. It lacks citations and a lot of it is basic stuff. A lot of empty words.
I want something clear and descriptive. I am fine with some speculation.
There's also little connection of the dots. And so on and so on.

As I said, neither do I like Nick Land, but some of his idea(s) I find interesting. Most likely way too simple but I still find it interesting.

I don't know, I've always thought it was supposed to be more similar to pre-unified Germany.

nah Scott Alexander rules, you stupid communist

For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed, in any case, to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption
thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

>communist
Ironic considering Scott Alexander tries so fucking hard to pander to leftists.

He wants nothing.
He believes only in our collective death.

Go read Schumpeter.
Go learn what a Kondratieff Wave is.
Go read Capital. All of it. Especially Volume 3.

Then come back.

>Reminds me of complexity science that I am trying to figure out and my own interest in evolutionary biology.
You'll definitely like Land then.
Just start reading XS, especially anything related to Gnon, and you'll certainly get the taste for it.

yeah but he's still not as retarded as 95-IQ hegel worshipping brainlets such as yourself

It's pretty much impossible to get into Land in 2017, the copyright to half his earlier stuff is held by people who would call Marx a neoliberal, the other half was lost in the great blog purge of 2007.

ccru.net/index.htm

>It's pretty much impossible to get into Land in 2017
Hmm, highly disagree
All of his blog writing, all the way back to 2004 is still accessible. You just have to know where to look.

And to get into Land, you just have to start here:
youtube.com/watch?v=fiaWsgtJrNI

Earlier stuff being his sleep deprivation stuff.

I still have ebook copies of his three publications, does that count?

Honestly, if you're into the mathematical biology aspect of it, you should not be looking for philosophers/writers at all. I suppose Taleb and his Antifragility stuff is the closest to trying to do something rigorous with complex system and people. Otherwise you just look it up on research gate instead of asking on Veeky Forums.

But I must also ask, in what way precisely do you find all of this to be too simple? What kind of description of complex systems are you looking to find that is so intricate? I work in automation software design and come from a physics undergrad background, and all this statistical physics? It's not nearly as complex as you're making it out be, if that's what you're talking about. Neither is it descriptive, it gives no prescription whatsoever to how emergent phenomena actually happen, and I consider it all to be a merely entertaining blackbox with a lot of usefulness.

There is much value in analyzing history, it is a mistake of modern empiricists in my opinion to disregard anything that does not have the supposed rigorous lens of mathematics cast upon it. Physics and its related sciences have never departed to find "why" anything happens (thought scientists certainly think they do) or "what" things are, all we can use it for, is to describe relations among things. But that is a whole other topic that does not really concern this one.

Might as well disregard Nick himself then since conties derive so much from the same source Scott does, and not even come into this thread at all.

>Might as well disregard Nick himself then since conties derive so much from the same source Scott does, and not even come into this thread at all.
Why are you acting like Scott has anything more than a bachelor's degree in philosophy? Or are you that guy who thinks Spinoza is like totally niche in continental philosophy duuuude.

Is he celibate.

I've read capital and ive also noticed that value theory transfered from labour to machinery to communication technology to know that capital shifts and in unpredictable ways when technology is in the mix.

Pretty sure he has a kid and a Jewish wife.

people kept shitposting a tweet he made where he talked about accidentally burning popcorn he was making for his kid(s?). imagine Nick Land being your father.

Is it considered accelerationist to have kids?

what is it with anti-semites and Jewish wives? some kind of cuckoldry drive?

capital's got to perpetuate itself somehow. Anyhow the very act of considering reproduction as an economic or rational act is anti evolutionary fitness.

meant to post image

Maybe? Assuming he is serious about the things he writes on the internet, it would be hilarious if his child ended up on the losing end of the social Darwinism he supports.

He's not a Nazi, pretty sure he views Nazis as ethno-Bolsheviks.