Nick Land: Shaman of the Radical Technocrats

When you hear people like Elon Musk saying things like “you could sort of think of humanity as a biological bootloader for digital super intelligence” it gets the old noggin joggin’

There seems to be a common thread when the elite of Silicon Valley talk about AI. They certainly don’t think about things the same way as you and I. There’s a mindset, an attitude, and a shared language between them - a subtle nudge and a wink that’s easy to miss if you aren’t in the know.

That common thread is the work of a 63 year old English philosopher, Nick Land, which stitches together the imagination of the PayPal mafia and the Silicon Valley CEOs who are working hard to bring about Artificial General Intelligence, destroy white collar work forever and bring about the Technological Singularity before dinnertime.

This unassuming, softly spoken Baby Boomer is (along with Curtis Yarvin, also known as “Mencius Moldbug”), a darling of the Dark Enlightenment. He is a former lecturer at Warwick University and taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice (whatever that is) until he got fired for naughty tweets in 2017 ¹.

Land’s primary work seems to be in the space of the philosophy of technology, and had a blog or site called ‘retrochronic’ which has many articles stretching back to the 1990s. His thesis is consistent throughout his writings, and here is an example:

“In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic — and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed — schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.”²

The work that aligns him with Thiel, Musk, Altman and the rest of the Silicon Valley set is his theory of accelerationism³. If you want to know more about that, head over to the Grauniad which has quite a good long article about it, but as a TL;DR - Everything is heading in one direction (that of a dystopian, cyberpunk future) so we may as jolly well hurry it all along. It all smacks of the feverish silicon dreams of the ’90s, of mirrorshades, datajacks and credsticks, of computers that were just powerful enough to let us dream of what they could be one day, of wearing big leather jackets and having bad hair and thinking we were cool when we weren’t.

Unfortunately, the fantasies of teenage nerds playing Shadowrun and Cyberpunk RPGs and reading William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are now the business plans of multi-billion dollar corporations. Land and the gang believe that the destiny of capitalism and artificial intelligence are enmeshed and intertwined. The purpose of biological life was to give rise to thinking beings, which in turn gives rise to capitalism, which in turn gives rise to Artificial Intelligence… resulting in a great Human Centipede with a robotic head and with us at the other.

AI Declaration

• AI was used to generate the image. The text is written entirely by me.