The philosopher Nick Land has been widely described as “fascist”, “neofascist” or “alt-right”, all essentially inaccurate or uninteresting labels. Those who bother with fine distinction would call him “accelerationist” or “neoreactionary”, terms which, while accurate, are idiosyncratic and provide little exterior perspective. I cannot claim to know what Land “really” is, and I’m not sure that’s an especially interesting question either. What truly matters is not what a philosopher “really” thinks, but how their ideas can be fruitfully explored and appropriated.
Hence, here I aim to characterise Nick Land as a kind of libertarian, a weird libertarian—“weird” in the colloquial sense of strange, unusual, bizarre etc. but also in the more particular Lovecraftian sense: that which comes from an unknown beyond, that which is in-itself Other. The relation between Land’s ideas and normal libertarianism is somewhat akin to the relation between the chest-bursting xenomorph and John Hurt’s character in the movie Alien; Land violates libertarianism and uses it to produce a demon child (thus following the advice of his precursor Gilles Deleuze).
This should be a fascinating and novel exploration since, while Land has been dissected from various positions on the Left for his entire career, and also cautiously approached by many on the reactionary Right in recent years, libertarian encounters with Land’s ideas are almost non-existent. This is most likely due to the mutual animosity between libertarians and Continental philosophy, and indeed between libertarians and virtually any ideas outside of libertarianism; libertarians, while often stereotypically smart and bookish people, are rarely interested in venturing outside their little floating intellectual castle, other than to occasionally fling some shit out the window at their passing enemies.
Nick Land’s tortuous backstory—from Deleuzo-Marxist leftist, to accelerationist, to occultist, to self-induced psychosis, to neoreactionary and back to accelerationist again—has been told a million times, and I’m not going to rehash all of it here. There are various useful sources online if you are unfamiliar with the outline and details. The interesting aspects of the story will only be brought up here as and when they are necessary for the case being made.
There does however seem to be an arc to Land’s journey: an (aptly) accelerating convergence upon the weird libertarianism that he would eventually come to espouse. While many like to distinguish between an early Nick Land and a later one (bifurcating philosophers’ careers is after all a well-established practice), I think it makes more sense to see Land’s trajectory as a jagged continuum, or at least a process that anticipates its phase changes, even if only in hindsight.
Most of Land’s scholarly work is contained within the collection Fanged Noumena. Land writes like a true Continental: his texts are extremely dense, full of neologisms and esoteric terminology, and largely inaccessible to those unwilling to engage in a careful, contextualised reading, supported by a reasonable grounding in Continental philosophy. Even then, one is never quite sure what he is “really” trying to say, and, as I argued above, it’s more fruitful to focus on how he can be interpreted than on how he should be interpreted.
Of interest to us here are the essays from “Making it with Death” up to “Meltdown” and also the later “Critique of Transcedental Miserablism”. These are the writings that earned Nick Land the title “the father of accelerationism”. These texts—especially “Machinic Desire”, “Circuitries” and “Meltdown”—outline his most famous ideas, and must be grappled with if we wish to see how Land evolves from being some kind of leftist to a weird libertarian. First however it is necessary to talk a little bit about accelerationism.
There is an inevitable degradative process that occurs to all bodies of thought: first the body of thought arises, then its opponents conjure up a caricature in order to discredit it, and finally, in one of this obscene universe’s most hilarious ironies, some people not only believe but start advocating the caricature. This famously happened to witchcraft: Christians made up stories about witches worshipping Satan and having blood-drenched black masses, and then some strange people who heard these lies actually started doing those things for real.
Who are the real witches then? Are the people who cavort around a pentagram slitting a lamb’s throat fake witches? Or are they just a different kind of witch? Is witch a term with multiple meanings now? Who decides who a “real” witch is? Such is the problem with “accelerationism”. People on the internet will have vicious arguments about what accelerationism really is and who’s allowed to call themself an accelerationist, and what faction of accelerationism is the true one, and none of this is worth wading into. I’ll try rather to be as purely descriptive as I can.
The term accelerationism was coined by Benjamin Noys (this seems to be the only notable thing Noys has ever done) to refer to a certain tendency within leftist thought which believes the only way to get rid of capitalism is to overcome it by going through it. This is always traced back (at least proximally) to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s cautious call to “accelerate the process”, since perhaps capitalism’s inherent tendency to undermine traditional institutions can be exploited in some way for anti-capitalist ends.
For Land however, accelerationism was never really a prescriptive doctrine, only a descriptive one. As he explains in his recent article “A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism” (hereafter QDI), accelerationism is intended as a description of how the transformation of society by various forces is becoming more intense, not a doctrine that advocates intensifying it. As he writes: “the process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique”. We’ll come back to this key idea in more detail later.
In popular parlance however, accelerationism first came to refer to a rather crude and silly leftist idea that the way to destroy capitalism is to accelerate it in order to maximise the force of its own contradictions. Later on, accelerationism came to refer to a far-right idea i.e. that society is decadent and going to collapse, so terrorism and political radicalism should be used to intensify this decadence, bring about the collapse, and allow a rebuild to start as soon as possible.
The original accelerationists, who, excepting Land, were all radical leftists, vociferously reject these caricatures, especially the second one. But now thousands of neo-Nazis have started advocating the second caricature, the Anti-Defamation League has a whole webpage on it, and the term accelerationism has essentially lost its original meaning (same as how libertarians lost the word “liberal” and had to steal a new term from French anarchists. It’s like some discursive Pass the Parcel). In this post we’ll ignore common contemporary usage, and concern ourselves only with the kind(s) of accelerationism advocated by Land and those directly influenced by him.
Now we’re familiar with the concept of accelerationism, let’s examine the nature and roots of Land’s position. The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argued that capitalism undergoes repeated processes of “deterritorialisation” and “reterritorialisation”. What this means (crudely) is that capitalism undermines old institutions, in a liberating process, but then installs new barriers to liberation in a subsequent conservative move. Land, in the essay “Making it with Death”, describes this as “imminent” because it is something capitalism is doing itself, rather than it being a “critique” imposed by some external force. He goes on to argue that capitalism positively depends on this institution-undermining process; it cannot exist without it.
So capitalism will eventually undermine and destroy itself, felled by its own sword? No, says Land: “the death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part” i.e. capitalism cannot destroy itself because it is identical with this very process of self-destruction and reinvention; as Land states in QDI, capitalism simply is creative destruction. Hence, the left condemnation of capitalism on the basis of a moral critique misses the point; capitalism is the critique, the liberating force, and any external attempt at critique can only slow down this liberating process.
Land here essentially allies himself with the second law of thermodynamics. Briefly, the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (viz. disorder, spread-out-ness) tends to increase in a closed system i.e. things tend to fall apart, material things tend to collapse. We could say then that the material things are “critiquing” themselves, with capitalism as the systemic manifestation of this phenomenon. To be liberated from the imposition of order is to fall apart, to follow the course of entropy, to follow the unimpeded natural course of material things. We normally think of critique as the analysis of ideas, but Land anti-idealises it, incorporating into material processes themselves.
You can probably see now why the philosopher Mark Fisher referred to Land’s perspective as a “cosmic libertarianism”. Not only human beings, but molecules themselves are to be liberated from the imposition of order and structure. The next essay “Circuitries” shifts from the pure philosophy of the previous piece to a blend of theory and cyberpunk fiction. Here, Land takes aim more explicitly at one of the main forces he sees damming up the deterritorialising flows of Capital: humanism.
Humanism, as in the ideology that places the nature, identity and interests of the human at the centre of all concerns, seeks to continually reinstantiate a unity that capitalism is tearing apart. Capitalism relentlessly, ruthlessly dismantles everything, and that includes the self, the subject, and human identity. Reterritorialising mechanisms that Land refers to as the “Human Security System” are deployed to combat this, but toil in vain against an inevitable collapse.
Land’s position here would be anathema to the average libertarian, whose ideology is firmly rooted in Enlightenment humanism. Libertarians, especially natural-rights libertarians, are firm idealists and humanists. They believe in abstract principles—individual rights—which arise from a fixed essential human nature, and define an ideal form that present society must be measured against. Libertarians are, on the whole, utopians: they have a vision of an ideal society, designed to fit human nature, which any right political praxis must move directly towards; if this libertopia is ever obtained, it must then be frozen solid for all eternity, as any change would constitute degradation.
But what does libertarianism become if the constraints of idealism and humanism are shirked off? What happens if one attempts to think a libertarianism beyond the normal bounds of liberal-humanist dogma? If libertarians (1) no longer adhere to an essential human nature, from which rights and principles are derived, but instead accept the contingency, malleability and dissolubility of the human, (2) reject idealism in favour of an immanent materialism, and (3) reject utopianism for a historically grounded politics—moving along vectors toward practical liberation—then what they would end up with, I submit, is something quite close to Land’s position.
Land understands this material cosmos of liberation within the framework of cybernetics. Cybernetics is an interdisciplinary field which studies systems and how they are regulated. Central to cybernetics are the concepts of negative and positive feedback loops: negative feedback is when a system engages in dampening to counteract changes and move itself back to equilibrium, like a thermostat maintaining temperature; positive feedback is when a system ramps up changes and moves itself away from equilibrium, like a chain-reaction in a nuclear explosion.
As Land notes in “Circuitries”, positive feedback has traditionally had a bad reputation, on the grounds that positive feedback processes are explosive, they tear things apart. Hence, cybernetics has concerned itself almost entirely with how to use negative feedback to keep systems in check. Libertarians will see obvious parallels here: the abject fear of laissez-faire by governments, whose main object throughout history has been to keep the economy/society/the people in check through various mechanisms of top-down control.
But, Land argues, cyberneticists have failed to distinguish between short-term and long-term escalation. Just because a process escalates doesn’t mean it has to go to infinity immediately; even an exponential process can take a long time to take off. Just because matter is falling apart, doesn’t mean it will turn to dust in an instant—it can pass through many intermediate phases on the way. This long burn, which Land calls “long-way runaway” sounds rather like the cybernetic concept of an autopoietic system, a system like an organism that continuously grows and rebuilds itself as it gradually collapses back into dead matter.
Land’s simultaneous praising of this “cyber-emergent” order and explicit denigration of “planning” again echoes libertarian concerns, especially those of the Austrian thinker Friedrich Hayek. While Hayek was very much a humanist and individualist, he was the closest to a cybernetic systems-thinker of any major libertarian philosopher. Hayek believed in the price system, in tacit knowledge, in institutions that evolve without humans understanding how and why, and in the making of macroscopic “decisions” through the microscopic propagation of knowledge. For Hayek, capitalism works because it is essentially in charge of itself.
Land’s cybernetic post-libertarianism takes this to an extreme Hayek would undoubtedly not have accepted: the market is reduced to pure function, operating wholly in and through materiality, with no external mind(s) to oversee it. The market is not bound to a human purpose or ideology; that the ideal should govern the material is “theological” to Land. Again, this echoes Hayek’s critiques of what he called constructivist rationalism, although Hayek would never have dared approach the near-Romantic Continental irrationalism of Land (Land takes Hayek and Frenches him up a bit, as it were).
We can now appreciate one of Land’s most oft-quoted declarations: “there is no real option between a cybernetics of theory and a theory of cybernetics”. Here, he is dipping into the tradition of second-order cybernetics, which realises that a fully complete cybernetic theory must include itself in the cybernetic system. Humans can never truly observe or control a system from outside because by interacting with the system they become part of it. Furthermore, any attempt to theorise a system is itself produced by and a part of that system. As the now obscure German cyberneticist Niklas Luhmann argued, in a very Hayekian vein:
“Planning society is impossible because the elaboration and implementation of plans always have to operate as processes within the societal system. Trying to plan the society would create a state in which planning and other forms of behavior exist side by side and react on each other. Planners may use a description of the system, they may introduce a simplified version of the complexity of the system into the system. But this will only produce a hypercomplex system which contains within itself a description of its own complexity”
In “Circuitries”, Land’s focus on the un-human also leads him to another of his favourite topics: artificial intelligence. He argues that, just like industrialisation saw the work of capitalism being transferred from humans to machinery, the information-technology age sees cognition being transferred from humans to computers. “Human brains are to thinking what medieval villages were to engineering” he says, implying that capitalism will progress from human minds to new kinds of cognitive capital goods: “techno sapiens”.
This is starting to sound a lot like typical Silicon Valley singularitarianism, and indeed Land was influenced by people in the transhumanist and singularitarian movements (Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelley especially). But, as posthumanists like Katherine Hayles have pointed out, most transhumanists do not transcend humanism at all; they are “hyper-humanists”. In their quest to upload themselves to the cloud or merge their brain with technology, they merely seek to augment the human, leaving a thoroughly human subject in control. Their perspective just extends and radicalises the Enlightenment ideal of human reason and science triumphing over nature.
No such anthropocentric hubris is present in Land. He sees both humanity and technology as part of nature, and coextensive with part of an over-arching cybernetic system. Whatever’s in control in the future is unlikely to be anything resembling a human subject. Indeed, as was discussed above, if we take Land’s cyberneticism to its logical conclusion, no kind of thinking subject is ever in control of things, since the subject itself is a product of material forces. As he contemptuously puts it: “A Cartesian howl is raised: people are being treated as things! Rather than as … soul, spirit, the subject of history, Dasein? For how long will this infantilism be protracted?”.
It is at this point, in the essay “Machinic Desire”, that we come to what—stiff competition accepted—must be Nick Land’s most insane thesis. I will give you the words of the man himself first and then unpack it:
“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because 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. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation”
So basically, Land is saying not only that capitalism will lead to a technological singularity, an age dominated by artificially intelligent systems, but that capitalism as a whole is simply a mechanism for such systems to come about. A future AI is using us as resources to build itself. Of course this is batshit crazy, but it seems a little less bonkers when you bear in mind that (1) Land is steeped in Marx, who believed in a materialist and teleological view of history where everything is evolving towards a predetermined end, and (2) Land, for reasons we won’t go into here, has some idiosyncratic beliefs about causation and time in which events in the future are able to cause events in the past.
I wouldn’t blame you if you’re screaming “Stop, stop! I want to get off!” at this point, but for those more intrepid nomads I encourage soldiering on. The madness will start to come down to Earth in a couple more sections. First though, we must pass through the climax of the madness: Land’s most widely-known and important essay “Meltdown”. This work is not really theory, but prophesying: Land attempts to predict how global-society will change as capitalism accelerates. It is hard to say that he wasn’t prophetic; at a time when the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and Francis Fukuyama was declaring the end of history, Land cackled and declared “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”.
It’s worth reading the whole piece through two or three times (slowly) in order to properly digest it. It is extremely dense, packed with weird neologisms, scientific terminology and worldplay. I’ll do my best to provide a summary here to guide comprehension. “The story goes like this…”: first, the industrial revolution unleashes the power of the market. Governments get scared and react, trying to reign things in. This gives us fascism, communism, two world wars and a twentieth century full of turmoil. There is an arms race between the state and the private sector that finally extends into cyberspace.
“Neo-China arrives from the future”: techno-capitalism goes global, no longer a purely Western phenomenon, evolving entirely new forms. (Feeling familiar yet?). Humanity is superseded by the post-human: “Nothing human makes it out of the near future”. Increasingly advanced artificial intelligences slip through our fingers, becoming incomprehensible and then uncontrollable by human powers (This ought to be sounding familiar by now…). Social mores come to align wholeheartedly with the advancement of commerce. Culture becomes extremely adaptive and transitory, passing at breakneck speed from one fad to another.
Workers are replaced with cyborgs. Culture melts into the economy. While China continues in the direction of growth and economic liberalisation, the West descends into nationalism and conservatism; ridden with guilt it turns against itself. As the West loses control over global commerce to the East, Western countries turn to protectionism, the welfare state erodes, domestic inequality grows, and Western political systems come to the brink of collapse. New anti-authoritarian movements erupt everywhere to finish off the decaying despotism.
Nanotechnology and genetic engineering blur the boundaries between nature and culture. Memes break out and spread like viruses. “With the information superhighway, media nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on its own digital annihilation” (Yep, that definitely sounds familiar). Life migrates further and further into virtual spaces. Cyberpunk becomes a reality: “Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual Chinese-Latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude”.
Western political systems finally collapse. Where law still prevails it is martial law. Elsewhere, warlords roam. In the midst of wreckage, the young and creative make the world their playground.
So, is this nothing but the ridiculous fantasy of a drugged-up sci-fi nerd? Or a prophetic vision of a future that seems all-too frighteningly real already? Maybe both? Neither? We can only wait and see…
We’re finally past the peak of the madness. Let’s come back down to Earth now, and talk again about Land’s relationship with libertarian thought. Land’s attitude to free market capitalism has been described as “turbo Thatcherism”, and it’s easy to see why: Land embodies the extremest version of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum, originally derived from Herbert Spencer, that “there is no alternative” to capitalism. As Land writes in “Machinic Desire”:
“Markets are part of the infrastructure—its immanent intelligence—and thus entirely indissociable from the forces of production. It makes no more sense to try to rescue the economy from capital by demarketization than it does to liberate the proletarian from false consciousness by decortication. In neither case would one be left with any thing except a radically dysfunctional wreck, terminally shut-down hardware. Machinic revolution must therefore go in the opposite direction to socialistic regulation; pressing towards ever more uninhibited marketization of the processes that are tearing down the social field”
Both left and right-wing libertarians would certainly concur. Austrian libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises for example argued that a socialist economy is literally impossible; unless there is a well-functioning market in capital goods, there can be no economic coordination, and an economy as such cannot exist. Hayek, in a parallel argument, claimed that the economical allocation and use of resources depends on the decentralised propagation of information, which in turns relies on the existence of a market system. Acquiring the knowledge necessary to plan an economy from above is simply impossible.
In his 2007 essay “Critique of Transcendental Miserablism” (hereafter CTM), Land notes how many on the modern left, having accepted that there really is nothing else that can beat capitalism, have turned against growth and modernity altogether. Gone are the Marxist and Soviet dreams of edenic abundance; modern leftists are ecological now: they want to degrow, dismantle the industrial economy, and head out into the countryside to live the life of a medieval peasant. Most of those who still call themselves “socialists” or “Marxists” are nothing but soft-capitalist social democrats (thesis: any radical leftism that doesn’t literally involve chopping off heads inevitably devolves into some kind of social democracy).
A small dissenting voice on the Left is/was that of the “left accelerationists”, spearheaded by the late Mark Fisher and then developed further by Mssrs. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Fisher accused Land of “capitalist realism”, of unjustifiably positing capitalism as something transcendental and fixed when actually the system itself is a mere contingency. According to Fisher, neoliberalism does not grow and innovate fast enough. Contrary to Land’s prophecies, the 21st century has delivered only stagnation and nostalgia, and the only way to overcome this is to think beyond capitalism, to accelerate to a post-capitalist system.
Land, unsurprisingly, is unimpressed by any attempt to think a post-capitalism. As he says in CTM “Post-capitalism’ has no real meaning except an end to the engine of change”. By the time Land writes QDI, left-accelerationism as a movement has already fizzled out, falling back (as he points out) onto a techno-garnished Marxism. Land reasserts capitalist realism, claiming that “Since anything able to consistently feed socio-historical acceleration will necessarily, or by essence, be capital, the prospect of any unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’ gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed”.
This seems like a logically problematic argument, since Land is basically claiming he is right by definition. And furthermore, how can his immanent materialism be reconciled with the idea that capitalism is something fixed and transcendental? This debate rages today in the circles of Land’s intellectual descendants, hasn’t been resolved, and ultimately is beyond the scope of this article. For those interested in knowing more, the debate around a so-called “unconditional accelerationism” is the place to look.
Shortly after he wrote “Meltdown”, Land had a literal meltdown; years of amphetamine abuse, a libertine lifestyle, and obsessive esoteric philosophy culminated in psychosis. He dropped out of academic philosophy, and moved to neo-China (Shanghai, specifically). A few years later he resurfaced, as one of the founding-fathers of the far-right “neoreactionary” movement. This alleged “fascist” turn is often seen as a stark departure from his earlier position; in light of the interpretations made here however, we should see it as a much more acute pivot.
The neoreactionary movement is (or was, as it has largely dissolved now) a loose band of far-right fellow-travellers who were all influenced by the writings of the blogger Curtis Yarvin (AKA Mencius Moldbug). Yarvin, who now writes under his real name at magazine The American Mind, was a Silicon Valley technolibertarian, influenced by the “propertarian” ideologies of Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Murray Rothbard advocated anarcho-capitalism, in which all functions of the state—including police, courts and the military—are left to the market. Hoppe twisted this into a somewhat neo-feudalist model, openly praising monarchy and denigrating democracy.
Yarvin took up the anarcho-capitalist idea of private governance, and reformatted it to put a modernist spin on a traditional state architecture. Libertarians and the left are correct, Yarvin argues, when they claim the state has been captured by private corporate forces. Why not then simply formalise this? Rather than having a covert system of governance by the economy and private corporations, let’s just make it explicit. This is the essence of the proposed system Yarvin originally calls “formalism” and later “neocameralism”.
Yarvin’s solution to America’s political woes is to literally make Steve Jobs CEO of the United States. The United States is to be turned into a joint-stock corporation, and run explicitly for private profit. It is an utterly ridiculous dystopian idea that is scarily easy to imagine actually happening. Later on, Yarvin revises neocameralism to a system he calls “patchwork”: inspired by the Holy Roman Empire, and the sovereign city states of Renaissance Italy, Yarvin advocates for thousands of tiny little corporate microstates that compete like business, allowing citizen-customers to vote with their feet by moving from one to another.
This is where Land comes in. He is positively enchanted by the idea of a political system based entirely on exit. In his 2012 essay series “The Dark Enlightenment” (hereafter DE), Land proclaims that “Neoreactionaries head for the exit”, and goes on to excoriate both economic statism and democracy, while praising how free markets regulate human behaviour. This shouldn’t seem surprising at all; Land’s distaste for the state and state control is very clear in his 90s writings, and his opposition to democracy is only a short step away from his repeated elevation of economics and material cybernetic processes above any human political concerns.
In some ways however, Land certainly turned more socially-conservative. Where he once praised the unlimited explosion of desire made possible by the complete dissolution of all moral barriers, he now denigrates the “appetites” he thinks democracy unleashes, and holds up instead the decidedly bourgeois ideal of low time preference i.e. saving for the future. Moreover, Land’s anti-statism is conditional; he is not against the state, but for his own version of a good state. His heroes now become Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping, i.e. pro-market autocrats.
In a 2017 interview entitled “The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation”, old and new Nick Land are finally forced to confront one another. With interest in accelerationism rising rapidly around 2014-2017, Land, whose interview is quite clearly intended for a left-leaning audience, slips back into his old accelerationist costume. But he is still to a great extent the same neoreactionary Land he was in 2012. And what’s more, the Landian Jekyll and Hyde (I’ll let you decide which is which) don’t seem too estranged from one-another after all.
When asked whether positioning himself on the political Right constitutes a turn against deterritorialisation, Land draws a distinction between the paleo-reactionary blood-and-soil/throne-and-altar section of the Right which he wishes to “dethrone”, and the more market-oriented side of the Right which he sees as prizing fragmentation and experimentation. Experimentation in particular seems to excite him; he praises the scientific method, and claims that both science and society only work when Darwinian selection processes are allowed free reign beyond any kind of narrow, biased humanist concern. Land is reiterating the same posthumanism and materialism he has always advocated.
But then the interviewers call him out on the ostensibly far-right tweets he has been sending in recent years, asking “Isn’t all of this a far cry from: ‘Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude?”. Suddenly, Nick Land is stumped. He really doesn’t know what to reply. Then finally, after a long silence, he manages to piece something together: “I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse” he says. He goes on to argue that his previous approach of pushing for complete chaos and collapse would always backfire, because the political side that supports some kind of order will always win out.
You need a practical strategy, admits Land, just not a bureaucratic, centralised strategy imposed from the top down. Except…isn’t that precisely the strategy implemented by the autocratic regimes he now praises? It seems that Land is confused. But he’s not just confused: he is experimenting—or rather, from his perspective, he is allowing himself to be the space of an ongoing experiment. Land refuses to stand back and give a detailed analysis of the relationship between his accelerationism and his rightward turn, because he believes forces more powerful than him are working this out through him in their own time.
So here we are yet again, back with the 90s Land of second-order cybernetics and dehumanised agency. It’s becoming clearer that he never really changed—not fundamentally, anyway; he just adapted. This is why the 2017 Land, despite his various supposed reactionary proclivities, is still able to proudly declare “I have always been in a relation of antagonism and remain in a relation of antagonism to the bourgeosie”, praise Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and conduct a long and friendly interview with a radically left-leaning website.
He goes on to argue that, in the early days of accelerationist thinking, it was not necessary to distinguish a right-wing from a left-wing variant because there was only one kind: the kind interested in the acceleration of capitalism. But then when a variant appeared explicitly calling itself “left-“, and basing itself on a supposed distinction between capitalism and acceleration, it suddenly became necessary to articulate a right-accelerationism in opposition to this. Land sees this right-accelerationism as merely the original form, the one that claims only “spontaneous catalytic processes” can drive maximum acceleration.
Even though it’s not especially pertinent to our weird-libertarian reading of Land, before we start wrapping up, we do need to address the issue of Land’s racism. Land is most definitely a racist, and has been perfectly at home for a number of years cavorting online with the Steve Sailer orbit of racialist/“human biodiversity” people. His racism is one of the main reasons he is widely regarded as some kind of fascist or alt-right figure. But crucial to understanding why Land is not a fascist is appreciating the true nature of his racism.
Land’s extremely peculiar neo-Nietzschean racism can be seen in his 2014 blog post “Hyperracism” and also in his more thorough 2019 article “Disintegration”. Land, while supporting the racialist position that distinct races exist and that they differ significantly from one-another in important traits, rejects any kind of white-supremacist/identitarian call to keep races separate and “pure”. Instead, Land praises diversity, and wants it to be ramped up. In keeping with his lifelong commitment to entropy and fragmentation, Land envisions a future in which the human species itself splits apart.
In the context of a whole universe that is being slowly torn apart by dark energy, Land posits accelerationism as an all-encompassing characterisation of the cosmos, all the way up from physical to biological disintegration. “Diversity is good, which is to say robust, and innovative” he says, adding “Heterogenesis is at all times the superior ambition”. He describes the posited splitting of humanity into distinct, divergent biological groups as “a process worthy of ecological celebration, and even techno-industrial acceleration”.
Ultimately for Land, this all comes down to the death of universalism, something he sees as following on from Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God, and proceeding at root from the deep vector-flow of the cosmos itself. As he writes: “The fundamental nature of the cosmos is to go its separate ways”. Land then is not any typical kind of racist; he is a weird racist, managing, as usual, to defy and transcend all contemporary categories in his profound commitment to acceleration and entropic dissolution.
It should be clear by now that Land is not a fascist in any especially meaningful sense. Nonetheless, he has been “doing that palm-stroking thing” with many on the contemporary and historical far-right, so what gives? Is Land some kind of “super-facist”, critiquing fascism from the right, like the batshit-crazy Italian mystic Julius Evola? No. If anything, Land critiques fascism from the left, or at least from what used to be the Left. If Land is reactionary in any sense, it is more a reactionary-leftism, going back to the romantic spirit of liberation and escape that the Left once embodied.
Fascist ideology is characterised by several key things: a drive to unification, a cult of the leader, a metaphysics of war, and an idealist ontology, all of which Land vehemently rejects. Whereas for fascism everything is about the One—one people, one voice, one law, one leader, one nation, one hope, one vision— Land is for the Many: dissolution, divergence, proliferation, fragmentation and collapse. Whereas for fascism, a single mind with a single will must command from above, for Land commands can come from nowhere but within the strange kernel of matter itself, beyond the will, reason and ken of any individual human.
While fascists hold that conflict and war are central not just to politics but to life itself, praise for any kind of war is absent from Land’s writings*. Even a comparison between Land and the fascism-adjacent Italian Futurists falters on this point: while the Futurists did praise the delirious onrush of technological modernity, espousing a very similar aesthetic to Land, their celebration of violence doesn’t gel at all with his purposes. Conflict, war, and physical violence do not feature as key productive forces in Land’s cosmology. He is for violent explosions yes, but not violent collisions.
And what of the charge, launched by Land’s forbears Deleuze and Guattari, that a solid commitment to the death-drive, to desire and dissolution, makes one not a fascist (of the Spanish/Italian kind) but a Nazi? Land has nothing but contempt for this argument. As he writes in “Making it with Death”:
“In the end this is nothing less than the contemporary citadel of Oedipus: if you don’t obey daddy you’ll become a Nazi…you’d better keep the lid pressed down on desire, because what you really want is genocide. Once this is accepted there is no limit to the resurrection of prescriptive neoarchaisms that come creeping back as a bulwark against the jack-booted unconscious: liberal humanism, watered-down paganism, and even the stinking relics of Judaeo-Christian moralism. Anything is welcome, as long as it hates desire and shores up the cop in everyone’s head”.
Land then is in many ways the exact opposite of a fascist; he hews much closer to anarchy than fascism, although, as we saw above, he cannot bring himself all the way to the embrace of pure nihilistic anarchy. Land instead transcends socialism, liberalism and anarchism, espousing a cosmic libertarian post-politics of strategic flight and exit. Unable to commit himself once and for all to a single, unified position, Land puts himself in the centre of the entropic maelstrom, making his own mind and body a space of imminent theoretical evolution.
We have established that Land’s worldview, or something like it, is what you get when you attempt to think a libertarianism beyond the bounds of humanism, idealism and utopian politics. But why should any normal libertarian (or liberal) want to do such a thing? Why not, rather than venturing into the strange and frightening space of horrors posited by Land, just carry on advocating the same eternal, ideal principles of an essential human nature, individual rights, private property and the minimal state?
First, as Land points out in DE, libertarians have been quite possibly the most ineffectual political force in living memory. Their strident commitment to an extremely unpopular ideology, their refusal to compromise on virtually anything, and their general distaste for politics as a whole, leaves them nothing but starry-eyed utopians, eternally disappointed by what they see as the slow, inevitable degradation of a once less-imperfect liberal edifice.
Additionally, the whole project of building an ideal society according to abstract principles is a non-starter. This should be obvious to libertarians: if planning society from the top down is not possible, then neither is redesigning society according to libertarian principles. If libertarians apply their own insights about economics to the political realm, they will see that politics itself can only proceed in a non-Constructivist way. Hayek saw this, hence his rejection of utopianism and advocacy for evolutionary institutions like the common law.
Curtis Yarvin is a utopian too of course; building neo-cameralism from the ground up is an equally silly and unachievable project. But Land appreciates this, and understands that a non-utopian strategy of escaping in a certain direction is the only viable option. Land cares more about the possibility of change, flight and experimentation than he does about any particular ideal arrangement. If libertarians (and any remaining liberals) could think of their politics not as an attempt to get society perfect and then keep it there, but as an ongoing process, ever-moving along a vector of liberation, they would do a lot better.
Second, I have written previously on why I think humanism, or at least a naïve form of it, needs to be rejected. The existence of a mind separate from the body, a free will, a human essence, objective moral principles, and a unified and inviolable self have all been brought into serious doubt by contemporary science and philosophy. These doubts will come to the fore throughout this century as the rise of AI, neurotechnology and genetic engineering make it almost impossible to cling on to old myths about human nature. Only a politics that is able to accept and respond to these revelations will be able to survive in the long term.
The 21st century will see the irruption and entrenchment of divers new authoritarianisms and despotisms: deep ecology, postmodern paleoconservatism, state capitalism with Chinese characteristics, zombie socialism, theocracy, neo-eugenics, illiberal democracy, brainless populism, PC-mania and molecular bio-politics. If any space of freedom can be carved out of this mess, for the sake of any sentient entity capable of appreciating it, this will not be achieved by a tired liberalism—classical, neo- or progressive. Instead, new post-humanist, post-liberal political strategies for liberation must be envisaged.
Land does not have all the answers here—he may not even have any of them—but his body of thought, while utterly insane in places, is bold, impressive and intriguing. It provides an example of how to take the insights of economics, cybernetics, materialism, and modern science seriously when developing a contemporary politics. It will help us to think past the bounds of a political a priori stuck in 1688, 1776 and 1789. We need to swallow our fear and dive headfirst into the awaiting beyond. “We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You’re finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started?”
*Update 24.8.20: This statement is not accurate. It would be more precise to say that Land does not praise war or conflict in the conventional (“molar”) sense, but only in a more “molecular” sense. See his blog post “Hell Baked” and also Chapter 9 of his book The Thirst for Annihilation.
Cybertrop(h)ic 