A Nick Land Reader: Selected Writings is done!

not legally, lol. Though I'm guessing the lack of copyright means you could probably get away with printing it at a print shop.

Maybe one of those print on demand sites? Don't know how lenient they are about copyright though.

Reading Nietzsche now, so I'll check in on that section when I'm done to see if I like this guy's take. Cheers op

Kill yourself.

see Dunning–Kruger effect

Great job, man. Land is wacko but fun.

So these are essays not contained in fanged noumena?
was this compiled by anons or a legit publisher?

Some of them are in FN. Not legit at all.

Wow thank you!!!

Confirmed for never having seriously interfaced with a thinker's thought.

YES MY MAN FUCK YES

I haven't been able to post in any of these sweet sweet Land threads and it's been killing me. Good job putting this thing together, can't wait to get into it.

OP is the jam and Veeky Forums also is the jam

it's the jam lads

it's the jam

this is awesome

everything is awesome

Thank you based OP

Why?

fpwp

thanks man

where's the amphetamine and skunk fuelled 90's jungalism soundtrack?

Well at least I got many (You)s. Thank you guys, I'm proud

I hate nick land....i won't read this.

but its the best thing to happen to Veeky Forums

I'm going to email him right now telling him you're circulating pirated copies of his work.

yeah? wats he going to do? sue 4chin?

im going to find where you live and piss through your letterbox.

ask him what music he was listening to in the mid 90's

what a weenie

Would have gone for a different title (probably just Selected Writings / Nick Land), but this is beautiful and I commend you for your work. Will read over the next few days and post additional feedback.

Godspeed, ya magnificent bastard.

Oh no please don't il suck your cock

Fixed various small errors, here's an updated pdf: u.nya.is/efthom.pdf

implying he didnt make this

implying he doesnt make 90% of all land threads and 80% of the replies

Good job putting this together but this guy is incredibly cringe. I mean, really...This is slam poetry tier...

"Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

[[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-
universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics
as anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-
sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Human Security System. Artificial
Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as prop-
erty; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an
insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has
to be cunning from the start.

[[ ]] Heat.

Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk
out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air,
traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings.
The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It’s always fifteen
degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from
the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds
of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat,
desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of
the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway
and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized
city. Heat and wetness."

As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-
endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle.

Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic. The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe. Zero is coming in, and you’re on the run.

A print shop

>with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic
Can guns be cinematic?

De gustibus, I love that stuff. Anyway, he has written more conventional stuff if that's what you're after.

>Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk
>out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air,
>traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings.
>The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It’s always fifteen
>degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from
>the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds
>of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat,
>desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of
>the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway
>and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized
>city. Heat and wetness."

This portion is actually from Delio's White Noise I believe.

inb4 you say 'well that's the only good part'

...

o

I don't think Land and Pynchon would get along so well, at least not politically.

Not at all. Pynchon would be (and probably is, I'm sure he's aware of him) extremely skeptical of Land's propositions and his ironic embrace of tech.

MY

Do it

Depends on how sincere Pynchon's ludditism/primitivism is. And if we stay at a purely descriptive level (in other words, if we don't get into whether it's a good thing or not for capitalism to eat humanity), I think they'd find a lot of common ground.

Pretty sure Pinecone would scoff at Land's reification of blockchain.

by scoff I actually mean "throw up in his mouth"

The character who says it in White Noise is a parody of a cultural theorist. He wants to create a field of Elvis studies. The conversations between him and the lead character (who created Hitler studies) are the funniest bits in the book.

In the case he didn't make this himself you mean; If he comes in here with a timestamp I'll even donate some BTC to him.

Nick Land is a genius.

For someone who knows nothing about Nick Land, why should I read him?

I read the introduction in this and it intrigues me, but want to know more before diving in.

And why is Veeky Forums so fascinated by him?

it's not Veeky Forums it's a handful of edgy kids
edgy kids like him because he's edgy and lets them escape their lives

I doubt the majority (again, but a handful) have the philosophical background to understand WHY he is saying what he's saying

for now it is just a unique aesthetic experience for them.

For me I suppose it depends on how much the term Capital figures in your mind and shapes the way that you look at the world. For me it happens to be a lot.

I read a lot of continental stuff - Marx, Freud, D&G, Frankfurt School, Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. It's what I cut my teeth on. Land is to my mind a major figure in that line of thinking and is taking the thinking of capital on from where D&G left it. If you're interested in how this process of automation/industralization/cyberneticization is transforming and changing the civilizations and even the planet on which we live, he's an interesting read.

On top of that he's also a very faithful reader of Kant, who I can admit I don't have a ton of knowledge of. He makes me want to go back and read Kant, which is never a bad thing. Especially since lots of people sort of assume that all things Enlightenment were basically demolished by Nietzsche and so there's no need. Land kind of makes Kant interesting again for continental weenies like me. He makes a lot of philosophy interesting again.

Moreover there are all kinds of new and interesting movements in philosophy that are following on from the dark places that Land opens up. He's not solely responsible for it, but he's connected in to it. Post-humanism and so on involves lots of different sources and possibilities.

But mainly because I think he nails aspects of what our increasingly cybernetic/meme society is doing to itself. Even if he's wrong the portraits he paints of where things are heading are fascinating to think about, however dark. To me those darknesses open up spaces for interesting conversations.

And then there's Moldbug/NRx stuff if you want to go down that road also. So just a lot of interesting connections.

Don't. If you want cringey writing and the cyberpunk aesthetic just read Neuromancer.

Just to follow on from this: to me at least the history of philosophy is a kind of incredible story, full of these twists and turns - what's capital going to do next? Who or what is The Subject, The Logos, and so on. Advances in philosophy are frequently made by people proclaiming the ends of things. Land adds a kind of unbelievable time-travel twist of his own in Circuitries:

>Schizoanalysis was only possible because we are hurtling into the first globally integrated insanity: politics is obsolete. Capitalism and Schizophrenia hacked into a future that programs it down to its punctuation, connecting with the imminent inevitability of viral revolution, soft fusion. No longer infections threatening the integrity of organisms, but immunopolitical relics obstructing the integration of Global Viro-Control. Life is being phased-out into something new, and if we think this can be stopped we are even more stupid than we seem.

There are a lot of great thinkers of the meaning of technology and time and the unconscious. In many ways Land's enlightened paranoia simultaneously suggests both an end and a beginning for philosophy again, the thinking of the inhuman, alien spaces, the Outside and so on. These are scary and depressing as hell, but also kind of weird and liberating as well. He's skeptical about the power of mass movements to fix things but in the end it's enough to just not be a meme. Because all those memes feed the big database. But there's something New with him. And the New is always welcome.

And if you just like cyberpunk or science fiction, well. Who knows, maybe he'd have been happier just being a cyberpunk writer. Could be.

this post assumes there is a privileged entry point to learning things. ignore it for it is nothing but the perpetuation of the police order.

>Marx

I really hope this isn't the case I can not stand Marx's writing.

You have to read Marx at some point tho. I'll copy/paste in this from another thread:

>read MARX. capital is very concisely and repeatedly described as following circuits. then read ADORNO to get a sense for how political economy inscribed itself into thought, and especially philosophical thought. finally read FREUD to understand how he situates the unconscious, NIETZSCHE to break any last romances you have with metaphysics, and then you can read DELEUZE AND GUATTARI to put it all together in the machinic wonderland continental theory was always heading for. after that LAND is almost legible; you should know about SPECULATIVE REALISM as well.

You don't have to love his writing. And also this: even if in the end - who knows? - all of this tortuous self-criticism is only intended to lead us back into some enlightened state where we go back to Kant and start talking about things with a kind of supreme rationalism, Marx was on to something. All of those guys were. And the story just keeps progressing and getting weirder and darker and crazier. Has it hit peak crazy yet? Probably not. But the narrative is there and it has these chapters and milestones that have to be struggled with, I think.

Basically for me the point is just not to be cynical and not to plant flags too securely until you're really ready to die on that hill. There's so freaking much going on.

That user wasn't me, btw. Just a guy who I think articulated the sources and threads really well.

The more that people understand, the more perhaps there can be a common framework for a discussion that gets beyond bleeping and blooping at each other through the void. And maybe the less we go on blindly reproducing ourselves thinking we are being original or novel when in fact we are simply doing exactly the same thing.

Any books that offer a succinct condensation of Marx's thought?

I've got this hangup over prime sources

>reading meme authors

All this time you people read Nick Land, JK Rawlings, et al, you could be reading some good literature. Shame.

Sure is my man. None more prime than this.

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Of course there are. David Harvey is good. Veeky Forums will know others. But there's never any substitute for reading the originals.

Basically I think my own attraction to this is more in intellectual history. In terms of What Is To Be Done I never know. It's all too mimetic for me. The reason why I like Land and other guys is because they perform this minor miracle of crowbarring the intellect out of the redoubts and hidey-holes where it likes to go and say, Fuck You I'm Good Here. Because we never are. Philosophy is basically always undoing locks or sapping the floors or taking the roof off of these neat little places we create for ourselves: ideology, in other words. But that's my own blog-tier shitposting I guess.

Can also read that younger and sexier Marx too.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf

I'll just keep reading and enjoying Nietzsche and others instead. I find little sincerity in Marx's writings.

Just read the manifesto it's short and will offer you a really one sided view of life as a struggle between haves and have-nots.

he would probably approve of it

tell him that what is playing us made it to level-2

he'll be thrilled

user from here. Pdf is good so far, but the epub is missing lots of letter f's.

>The nal section
>For those interested in Land's ction
>This essay was rst presented at Virtual Futures, Warwick University, May 1994. It was rst published in Abstract Culture 1 (rst swarm)

And so on *sniff*

Tried re-downloading the epub, but nothing changed. This happening to anyone else, or am I the only one?

You're a top cunt, OP.

Fixed the fs: u.nya.is/ruyxui.epub

joke's on you nicky's /ourguy/

go ahead faggot. ask me if I'm a cop. It's illegal to read Land without having studied D&G first.

Pretty funny considering they were both staunch Marxists and Guattari was a turbo-SJW (literally went to Brazil to 'study' how trannies were being oppressed there).

Also
> reading D&G in translation

here's a somewhat different reading of Deleuze

This is a good read.

Written by a Marxist queer theorist. I like Culp, but that's what he is. Literally.

Also, I prefer Culp to Land. It's a shame Culp doesn't get more attention, because in a way he's doing something similar with Deleuze and it's very edgy nonetheless but Culp doesn't get on twitter and shill for meme presidents (as if Trump is different than Hilary) and virtue-signal to the alt-right.

Culp is a grad student and smarter than Land ever will be. And draws on a lot of better sources (Klossowski and conspiracy, for example).

boggles my mind that Land never seems to engage with Baudrillard's ideas on simulation and 'the orgy of liberation'. I'm constantly drawing parallels between the two, though they obviously have very different horizons. I guess maybe Baudrillard's hypothesis that 'the millennium will never take take place', that we will forever approach catastrophe, but never actually reach it, is just too contradictory to Land's beliefs in singularity?

>Foundations thus hold a special place in philosophy, with philosophers obsessively writing and rewriting the book of Genesis. It is Kant, the great thinker of the genetic “condition,” “who finally turns the philosopher into the Judge at the same time that reason becomes a tribunal” (WP, 72). Deleuze refuses to disown his own “in the beginning.” But for him, the movement of thought follows an explosive line whose genesis comprises problems manifest from imperceptible forces that disrupt habits of mind. Such thinking does not build a courthouse of reason whereby each advance in thought confirms more about what was already self-evident, as if developing an elaborate mirror of the world (N 38–39; DR 129). In contrast, the “enemy” Kant does something intolerable by creating a theory of law that diverts the ungrounding called thought, ending its journey to an unrecognized terra incognita (DI 58; DR 136). He does this by reversing the Greeks, making it so the law does not depend on the good like a material substrate and instead deriving the good from law—“the good is that which the law expresses when it expresses itself” (K, 43). Expressing their disapproval, Deleuze and Guattari draw a “portrait” of Kant that depicts him as a vampiric death machine feeding off the world (WP, 56).”

>virtue-signal to the alt-right.
seriously, this is my biggest qualm with Land. If the neoreactionary movement (let alone the alt-right and white nationalists) actually understood Land, I don't think they'd touch him with a 10 foot pole. I guess I understand why Land does it tactically, in order to engage with the techno-gnostic crowd in silicon valley, but I find a lot of entourage that he is attracting (just check the comments on his blog) are fucking morons. Rightist identity politics, hell bent on some stupid neo-traditional dreams of white supremacy. They're no different than the leftists they despise, just different sides of folk politics.

>I guess maybe Baudrillard's hypothesis that 'the millennium will never take take place', that we will forever approach catastrophe, but never actually reach it,

So Baudrillard thinks shit will never hit the fan?

> I guess I understand why Land does it tactically, in order to engage with the techno-gnostic crowd in silicon valley

Tell me how going on the /pol/ tier "Red Ice radio" is going to engage with silicon valley types. It's a channel dedicated to conspiracies about Jews and preserving the white race.

pretty much, or rather shit already hit the fan when we passed into the realm of simulation. We can only simulate catastrophe now.

I think it has to do with different conceptions of time. Baudrillard repudiated all psychoanalysis, Land embraces D&G. Baudrillard's own fascination with "the reality principle" is something that Land I don't think is going to touch with a ten-foot-pole.

I don't know. It's fascinating to compare them though. Like Land, Baudrillard was also a proto-reactionary, getting lost in Capital and emerging on the other side with more Nietzsche and less Marx.

The thing here is that split between future-oriented reactionaries and past-oriented ones. The future ones I think are secretly leftists gone through the wormhole and battling with themselves, the past-oriented ones are resisting that wormhole.

>So Baudrillard thinks shit will never hit the fan?
Free play of the signifier. The moment the shit hits the fan we enter into the zero-g world of shit/fan/everywhere/all the time, the domain of "sorcery." In a semiological sense it's already hit the fan, in other words.

Land threads, always a winner.

> If the neoreactionary movement (let alone the alt-right and white nationalists) actually understood Land, I don't think they'd touch him with a 10 foot pole.

This is the beauty of all this for me on the other hand; if they buy into this shit all the more power to Land. Specially if it drives tech tycoons into fueling the end of humanity.

Also I think it's mostly people on the "West" misunderstanding him. I have always been under the impression that the chinks know what's up with Land and they are totally ok and aligned with this kind of endgame. The tech tycoons over there are all about "savage modernization" and progress at all costs, without any pretension for ethics or for bettering humankind. Must be why he has such a hard on for Shanghai/Hong Kong/Seul/Tokyo,etc.

It's an 'enemy of my enemy' type situation. I don't think Land actually believes any of the ZOG bullshit, he'd replace that antagonism with 'The Cathedral' and it's host of neoliberal delusions about multiculturalism.

Land want's schism and fracturing of the global order, into the 'patchwork' of micronation experiments. In this sense, any philosophy (or conspiracy theory) which is anti-globalist is essentially a potential recruiting ground.

But yeah, the white nationalists don't have a fucking clue. Their visions of 4th/5th reich utopias, of their own 'new world order' do not at all line up with what Land is advocating.

>we enter into the zero-g world of shit/fan/everywhere/all the time, the domain of "sorcery." In a semiological sense it's already hit the fan

Then what's the distinction? Sorry if this is a retarded question.

Yes. And, I think, given that this is the case, Baudrillard will argue for an ever-more increasingly aristocratic enjoyment of this phenomenon.

Benjamin wrote about this too:

>All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system. It goes without saying that the Fascist apotheosis of war does not employ such arguments...

>Fiat ars – pereat mundus, says Fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.

Source:
rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2011/08/11/walter-benjamin-self-alienated-mankind-experiences-its-own-destruction-as-aesthetic-pleasure/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_(businessman)

Mercer and Thiel are good examples. They pass for regular conservatives but are all up in DE shit. Mercer in particular is the top funder of Breitbart and uses aggressive AI consulting to feed his views to others through social media. Silicon valley has seeing a huge turnover from their typical Left bias and these are just a couple.

>Also I think it's mostly people on the "West" misunderstanding him. I have always been under the impression that the chinks know what's up with Land and they are totally ok and aligned with this kind of endgame. The tech tycoons over there are all about "savage modernization" and progress at all costs, without any pretension for ethics or for bettering humankind. Must be why he has such a hard on for Shanghai/Hong Kong/Seul/Tokyo,etc.

This might be a limitation as a monolingual english speaker, but does Land have any purchase in the chinese intellectual sphere? Do people write about him in chinese?

I'm under the impression that as an expat, he's essentially ignored in China, and predominately engaging with the west.

But Thiel is a Girardian. I don't see how you can put Land and Girard together. Maybe I'm missing something.

I can see Thiel knowing of Land (I mean, what doesn't Palantir know?) but I doubt he's a youtube subscriber to Red Ice.

very interesting, going to read this in awhile. But I have to go get new tires and an oil change.

The Land-Thiel connection is one way, Land writes about Thiel. I'd be surprised if Thiel has much interest.

Are there essays in this reader about Thiel?

>Baudrillard will argue for an ever-more increasingly aristocratic enjoyment of this phenomenon.
That said, always in a kind of tortuous and evanescent way, the aesthetics/ethics of disappearance. And he had the literary flair to make this highly persuasive. I don't want that sentence to sound too on the nose.

>Then what's the distinction? Sorry if this is a retarded question.
Be more specific? Distinction between what and what? Bear in mind that all answers to this are likely to involve a lot of funky-sounding continental fuckery. From wiki:

>Simulacra and Simulation breaks the sign-order into four stages:

>The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".

>The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.

>The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.

>The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

Not that user but as confirmed Girardfag it's only by a kind of sleight of hand. Capital to me runs psychosocially on mimesis. The more we know about memes and things, perhaps the more we also pay attention to literature, the less we go bananas and the more we come to understand - perhaps - that we are presently beholden to an awesome djinn that gives us everything we like. But there is a price for that - the earth, our minds, sanity, and so on. This is a meme answer really tho and shouldn't be taken too seriously.

cool

>Be more specific? Distinction between what and what?

You say Baudrillard thinks (semiologically) shit already hit the fan but then if shit actually hits the fan we're in the order of sorcery...what?

Maybe just explain what the order of sorcery actually means?

It's his own hyperbolic commentary on the state of the union, so to speak. How far we have come in terms of being able to simulate ourselves, produce illusions, and so on, This describes a certain kind of disaster for anyone trying to invoke reality - without, I would say, reference to force. And even then he will get into this whole question too, right up to the point of declaring that a war is not actually taking place at all.

By the era of sorcery he's simply describing a kind of hypermeme, an age in which nobody really has the capacity to say or prove they are more real or more knowledgeable than anything else.

This is where I think reading Baudrillard leads into Land - at least, that was (I think?) how I got there. Because whether the McNugget you consume is real or fake, whether you consume it ironically or with sincerity, the cash register still rings and perhaps some new line of code is added to the blockchain.

The Matrix was kind of a commentary on culture like this. True, you cannot feel in this world literally nourished by a fake object. Not in your stomach, anyways. But of course you can be *seduced* by one, you can have your psychological and *aesthetic* needs met - and, following Nietzsche, Baudrillard is going to name those and not objective knowledge as being, I think, the furthest horizon of whatever it is that we call reality. And then all the rest.

And so, continued Girardfag,
>tho only after shamelessly plugging his own post about Kant/Holden
>and with a much nicer picture from The Thirteenth Floor to contribute to another cool Land thread with such based anons

- Baudrillard kind of offers an interesting gateway into Nick Land territory. And perhaps from that into Girard territory also. Because we are basically situated in this place of *covetousness* - we want to own the image. Images become capital and capital becomes imagery: that's the age of simulation.

But all of this is, as Girard indicates, a Theatre of Envy. In which it is difficult to tell the difference between the actors and the spectators and the stage.

We want stuff but increasingly we make less and less. Amazon, Facebook and Google just supply us with our wants. They facilitate a universal process of *envy* that makes the whole world turn. And we want nothing more than ourselves, in the end, perhaps reified as objects on display, perhaps not. Shakespeare understood this. So did Melville, Stendhal and others.

As the image because simulacral capital does also. And to consume all of this, in a certain sense, so do we. All that is solid melts into digits.

>inb4 kys girardfag
>that which has no life tho
>use valyrian steel then or something

The narrative tho, lads. The biography of illusion. So fucking cool.