Move fast, break everything: Nick Land and accelerationism

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. When the police raided the Stonewall Inn back in 1969, they had no idea that it would eventually lead to the birth of gay pride. We started standing up for ourselves and said, "This is who we are and you're going to accept us." I'm Mark Vannell and I'm the host of the ABC Radio National Podcast. No one saw it coming. Each week we unravel a moment in history that changed the course of the world, but no one saw it coming. To hear it, search for No One Saw It Coming on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is David Rutledge, welcoming you to the Philosopher's Zone once again. I was reading an article this week about the US Senator Bernie Sanders who recently had a series of meetings with industry leaders in the field of AI. But he was sufficiently freaked out by those meetings to issue a warning afterwards to US Congress and the American public. He said that Congress and the American people are unprepared for the tsunami that is coming, and he called for a moratorium on the expansion of AI data centers, a moratorium that might slow down the revolution and protect workers while politics and policymakers catch up. Well Bernie Sanders is by no means the only person calling for a slowdown on AI development, and in this he stands in opposition to a certain class of people who are far more interested in pumping the accelerator. They're called unsurprisingly accelerationists, and they're motto lies somewhere on a spectrum between the familiar tech-bro mantra of move fast and break things to the more apocalyptic version that says move at the speed of light and break everything. Accelerationism is probably best known in its extreme right-wing expressions over in the world of white supremacist neo-fascism. The accelerationist goal is to create social chaos and political polarization through violence and terrorism, with the ultimate goal of destroying our existing political systems and helping a new white ethno state rise from the ashes. But not all accelerationists are out and out fascists. The more philosophically reputable accelerationists believe that technological development, along with the capitalist order under which tech development is taking place, should be supercharged and allowed to go as fast as it can in order to supersede and ultimately do away with politics and policymakers altogether, especially that slow and painstaking form of political engagement known as democracy. Well, one of the key figures in accelerationist thinking today is the UK philosopher Nick Land. Nick Land is a somewhat mythic figure, and we're not going into biographical details this week, but I will say that if you get a chance to Google Nick Land, then go ahead and do that. My guess this week is the Melbourne philosopher Vincent Lei, who has a brand new book out titled Unknown Lands, decoding Nick Land's accelerationist philosophy. There exists this question in the academic philosophy community of how seriously to take Nick Land. Like I know that some people write him off as a fringe figure. He had his punk rock moment back in the 1990s, but since then he's become too extreme, too weird to take seriously. But then others, such as yourself, see him as a figure of genuine philosophical and cultural influence. So very broadly, and before we get down to some of the specifics of his thinking, where do we see Nick Land's influence today? There was definitely a time when he was writing back in the 90s where his predictions and claims about the future trajectory of capitalism and AI and technology seemed rather far-fetched and apocalyptic. But today, those predictions are really starting to make themselves real in our current technological and cultural context. So really everyone from Elon Musk to Tucker Carlson is asking lots of questions about Nick Land and his ideas. From Tucker Carlson's show last year, Land was described as the velvah underground or Brian Enor of philosophers. No hits, but incredibly influential. Right. Well, everybody who heard him went on to write a philosophy book or something like that. Exactly. Just to give you some more specific examples. In philosophy, Land taught many students at the University of Warwick in the 90s, but in particular, I just want to single out two students, Ian Hamilton, Grant and Ray Brasier, because they're two of the founding figures of what's known as speculative realism. Perhaps one of the most significant philosophical movements of the late 2000s, early 2010s, which sought to read philosophy of its anthropocentric center of gravity as they saw it. In the field of art, Land inspired many prominent artists, such as the British Art duo, Jake and Dinos Chapman, the collective orphan drift, and the pioneer of the dubstep musical genre, Codenine or Steve Goodman. And what unites all of the artists that are inspired by Land, I would say, is that they use different aesthetic means to, again, attempt to liberate culture from a sort of humanist prison as they see it. And then finally, in the realm of politics, Land is probably most well known as the key influence on accelerationism, which comes in both left wing and right wing variety. So he's influential on both sides of the political spectrum. What unites all the different strands of accelerationism is they all seek to expand and repurpose technology and capitalist dynamics in order to bring about radical social upheaval, even revolution. So yeah, for example, several left wing accelerationists, as well as even cyber feminists, like Luciana Parisi, have drawn upon Land in their account of how technologies like cloning, genetic engineering, and so on, might allow us to abandon traditional patriarchal notions of sex as being orientated around reproduction and heteronormativity. And yet at the same time, Land also holds immense sway in the far right sphere, particularly among what's known as the near reactionaries who not only want to defend capitalism and fortify it and strengthen it, but also who seek to revive even older anti-democratic and despotic regimes. In the past six months, his influence has really just broken containment and gone full mainstream. Just literally the other day, Elon Musk was joking on X or Twitter that he was going to put Land in charge of AI safety at X's AI chat, but GROC. There's a question about whether his influence is desirable or not, of course. That's sort of another question. But I would just draw an analogy here to another very influential philosopher, a high digger. I at least would say that high digger needed to be studied despite his flirtations with National Socialism, due to his immense influence on other canonical 20th century philosophers like Sartre, Derrador and many others. So at the very least, if you're interested in understanding them, you kind of have to grapple with high digger. And in the same vein, I would say that I think Niclán Matters, he needs to be grappled with at the very least as a symptom, a telling symptom of the situation that we find ourselves in today, whether we like that situation or not, of course. Yeah. I mean, he is, as you said, I mean, he's known these days as a figure on the political right, swimming around in these reactionary currents intersecting with thinkers like Curtis Javin and Peter Till. But in his earlier work, of course, he's also been positively appraised on the left. Tell me first about that left-wing embrace and Land's early critiques of capitalism. Yeah, this is the strange thing. I think this might be less jarring if we remember that Land started his academic and philosophical career in the late 80s during the rise of the anti-apartheid movement and also the rise of colonial studies in academia and the humanities. And Land published his first essay with the strange title Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incess. And here he essentially argues that we can only really understand the situation of global capitalist imperialism if we look to then South Africa's apartheid regime as a sort of metonym of the world in miniature. So on his understanding, apartheid consists in what he calls an economic proximity of black Africans to the white metropolis so that they can produce the wealth of that metropolis. But it also maintains what he calls a political distance by geographically excluding Africans to segregated zones so that they cannot directly partake in the wealth of the white metropolis or contest it. And what Land argues here is that the advanced industrial Western superpowers like the US and elsewhere, they also engage in this dynamic. Because they exploit a global self labor force to produce the wealth of the Western power centers. But then they exclude the global self, the peoples of the global self. from partaking in that well for contesting that exclusion, geographically, because they're in different countries, non-Western countries. So all of that is just to say that land sees the basic dynamic of capitalist imperialism as it represses the very other that constitutes it. And maybe one other thing to adhere is that land critiques that dynamic in his early works, but he primarily critiques it not directly through a critique of capitalism, but through a critique of what he sees as the main philosophical or ideological expression of that dynamic. In particular, he sees that best articulated by a manual Kant. So Kant's basic gesture that land takes issue with here is that Kant re-invisions our perception and thought not as stemming from the external world, but rather it sees the external world as being, in some sense, constituted and conditioned by our mind's own concepts of reason. And the most crucial consequence of this claim is that we can never know what external things are like in themselves or as nomenaut to use Kant's terms, but we can only know things such as they appear to us as phenomena throughout concepts of reason. And so the young land focuses on critiquing Kant's move here because he believes it's structurally identical to imperialist capitalism's oppression of the other. So we've talked about how the imperialist powers repress the very global self-labor that constitutes them. And in the same vein, land suggests that Kant's philosophy prohibits us from ever accessing or encountering the things in themselves, even though those things in themselves constitute the phenomenal appearances that we can experience. So I guess what this tells us about land's project of a roar is that his fundamental concern is going to be to liberate a radical otherness or alterity from the conceptual prison in which he thinks our reason in snazard. - Yeah, okay. And this is part of his project of D-Aunthra-Pomorphizing Thought and Philosophy, and we'll get onto that in greater detail in a minute, but if he's treating the human as a contingent sort of configuration, then suddenly he's attractive to the post-humanist, the queer theorist, environmentalist, philosophers, leftist critiques of liberal humanism. All of this can get swept up in that same intellectual project, right? - Yes, exactly. So that's his early work. What about his later work? And this swing that he takes to the political right, again via a certain perspective on capitalism. What's his thinking there? So from about 1993 onwards, right up until today, lands, writings, compared to the early works, undergo, as you say, a decisive shift. Namely, he no longer sees capitalism as humanity's repression of this non-human alien outside, but rather he sees capitalism as the outside, as precisely the outside's breakdown of our human hubris and anthropocentric values and beliefs. And he thinks that capitalism's technological innovation, particularly in terms of AI, is gradually and increasingly exposing the limits of human reason by way of producing an artificial superintelligence, or ever increasingly advanced machines. And the key work that inspires this shift is lands engagement with French philosophers, Dullers and Gratari, and particularly their two-volume worker capitalism and schizophrenia. There's a couple of different ways that one could approach understanding this shift that land undergoes here. There's a philosophical or more conceptual way, but I think an easier sort of entry point would be to contextualize lands in enthusiasm for Dullers and Gratari's relatively similar account of capitalism's revolutionary dynamics, but also contextualize why land goes even further than them in his fervor for capitalism. But if we just record the different historical context in which land and then Dullers and Gratari are riding, the first volume of capitalism in schizophrenia called anti-Eedipus was published in 1972, so Dullers and Gratari wrote it in the years preceding, which is just to say that they wrote it in the insurrectionary climate of the late '60s, whether that's May '68 in their own France, the civil rights and anti-biot-narm war movements in the US and elsewhere, the Prague Spring in the Eastern bloc, the Cultural Revolution in China, and many other such cases. So just global insurrection against capitalist imperialism, basically, by contrast, land rediscoveres Dullers and Gratari in the early '90s, and so after the fall of the Berlin War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Dunx L. Ping, so sort of neoliberal resurgence, but also in the '90s, we see the mass adoption of computers of the home computer, the rise of the internet, early breakthroughs in the current AI paradigm that is still with us today. So it's in this quite different historical context of almost complete neoliberal hegemony, the vanishing of anti-capitalist resistance, and the rise of the internet, what's known as the dot-com boom, it's in that context that land, as it were reboots Dullers and Gratari, with a bit of a software update, a technological upgrade, to come to his conclusion, which is really his fundamental thesis, which is that capitalism is in some sense already an AI, an artificial superintelligence. So that's a more historical contextualization of land's shift. We could also go through a more philosophical understanding of the shift, and that's to say that what land finds, so interesting about Dullers and Gratari, is their account of capitalism as what they call a decoding or detail-trowizing machine. So the idea here is that capitalism, as they see it, is organized around the production of goods to make more capital or profit, that is then invested to produce more goods, to make even more capital, that is then reinvested to produce even more goods, and so on seemingly without end. So given the fundamental driving motor of capitalism is just to make more capital, it can't rest content with just reproducing the same old goods along with the fixed desires, identities, and cultures that come packaged with different consumer goods and cultures. Instead, it has to create new desires for new goods and enhance new identities and cultures as well. I mean, just to give a specific example, if you take sex under capitalism, let's say consumer capitalism, sex is no longer primarily just about reproducing labor and forming marriage alliances between families. Instead, sex is commoditized so that it takes on new desire, identities and relations through the sex industry, the fashion industry, the cosmetic industry, all of which encourages new kinks and fetishes all the time. So by commoditizing sex and other basic functions and resources for survival, beyond their natural use value, and just introducing new goods and desires altogether, Dylan's in guitarry say that capitalism is thereby constantly decoding fixed human identities, human values, social relations, desires, cultures. So it's in that account of capitalism that land is so attracted to, because he sees it as a practical means of critiquing our human hubris and all of our dogmatic beliefs, desires and identities. Insofar as capitalism commoditizes even the most sacred values and identities and desires, and as one contingent product on the market among many others. On ABC Radio National and ABC Listen that this is the philosopher's zone with me, David Rutledge, and I guess this week is Vincent Leigh, a philosopher based in Melbourne and the author of Unknown Lands, decoding Nick Lanz' accelerationist philosophy. There's a general tendency under capitalism towards the replacement of human labor by machine labor. There's a tendency towards automation. If you just look at the history of capitalism, you can see this from its beginnings in, let's say the Industrial Revolution, 19th Century Industrial Revolution with steam engines and jack-up looms, and then you look today in something like China's almost entirely automated, what's known as dark factories, because all the lights are out, because there's no humans working in them. There's just machines and they don't need lights to see. So land, land, land, land, land, land, land, land. looks at this history of capitalism and he concludes that, well, it seems like it's no longer something like the working class or the proletariat that's the revolutionary agent of social upheaval. Instead, it's capitalism's own technological innovation. So he sees capitalism's constant revolutionization of the technological means of production as bringing about, to quote him directly, it's making it so that life is being phased out in favor of something new. And this is why he's writings from the 1990s onwards tend to explore how various technologies are bringing greater incursions into this alien non-human outside. So he'll talk about the internet, he'll talk about virtual reality, biotechnologies for human enhancement. But most of all, he's interested in AI and even more specifically, he's interested in this notion of an artificial superintelligence that would be vastly smarter than any humans. And what Land basically says is that any AI that comes to be at least as smart as any human would actually very quickly be able to rewrite its code and improve itself better than any human could. And then that improved AI would be able to rewrite its code and improve itself even better again. And then that improved AI would be able to do so again and so on seemingly without end. And Land thinks that if it recursively self-improves a knife, it will eventually reach a point of intelligence that is just so much vastly greater than any human intelligence that we can't even conceive of it, except as just this limit point beyond which our imagination can never stretch. So the reason why Land is ultimately so fascinated by this increasingly advanced AI is because it marks a limit to again to our anthropocentrism, our human hubris. It marks a limit to what human reason can know as it comes to be dwarfed before a greater alien superintelligence. Yeah, he's all in on this idea of capital as something that as you say, just sort of optimizes itself over and over again is an AI itself and is indifferent to human survival. And this is sort of of a piece with his critique of anthropocentrism in philosophy. He's particularly critical of what he sees as philosophy's failure to accommodate the reality of the death. And in this critique, of course, he engages closely with the work of, among others, George Batay, who for me is an endlessly fascinating figure. What's the nature of that engagement? How does Nick Land read Batay? There's a critical or negative project in Land's, particularly his early works that's focused on a critique of philosophies for being two anthropocentric and in particular being two anthropocentric by suppressing the reality of death, which marks a limit to human power. But then there's also, as you say, with Batay, a more constructive or positive project in Land's works, which is tracing a different philosophical tradition, a non-anthropocentric tradition that he calls a libidinal materialism, and in which Batay is a major figure. But what you know, it's all the different adherents of this libidinal materialist tradition, Batay included, is that they seize upon death as a way to critique our pretensions to know and exhaust reality. Perhaps the best definition Land provides of libidinal materialism is in his first and only completed book with the very telling title, The First for an Iolation, published in 1992. And there he identifies four key features of libidinal materialism. Firstly, he says it is a dehumanization of nature in the sense that it strips away or anthropomorphic projections onto nature. Secondly, he says it's a ruthless fatalism in the sense that it believes that our actions and intentions have no power to actually change the world and realize our goals and ideals. Thirdly, it's a complete absence of all moralizing, and this follows from its fatalism. So if our actions and intentions have no real power to change the world and realize our ideals, our moral values and ethical ideals, then those values and ideals become impotent and meaningless. And finally, Land says that libidinal materialism involves a profound contempt for commonplace opinions and particularly for anthropocentric positions. But yeah, putting all of those ingredients together, we could say more generally that libidinal materialism marks a critique of anthropocentric philosophy by exposing human thought as a parochial and rather deceptive misrepresentation of more primal drives and inhuman powers. But yes, as you say, in terms of batai, Land, apart from that general characterization, Land tends to explore libidinal materialism through specific adherence. So he'll talk about showbine powers, account of a nominal will that's indifferent to human happiness and human knowledge. He'll talk about Nietzsche's celebration of ancient Greek tragedy and the way that tragedy exposes even our greatest human kings and heroes and warriors as finite by Terry as nature in the gods tear them to shreds or fate and fortune. And then finally, he'll talk about both Freud and Batai's slightly different diagnoses of a fundamental death drive, a drive towards death attracted to death that's even more fundamental than our rational consciousness goes self-preservative instincts. And so yeah, his book, The Thirst for Annihilation, is mostly a book about batai and really the best summary of how he reads batai and this tradition more generally is the title of that book, The Thirst for Annihilation. And the only thing I would add to that title is, So Batai's philosophy of libidinal materialism is a thirst for annihilation, why is it a thirst for annihilation because it sees annihilation as the sole way to encounter a reality beyond our anthropomorphic distortions. And of course, with this, we have perhaps the most famous thing today about Nicoland, which is that he is an accelerationist, his other very influential idea being that technology is accelerating history beyond political control where we're building something that will outpace and ultimately replace human, social and political structures. And that that's a good thing. Technology is just going to do its thing regardless and things like democracy should just get out of the way. What does Nicoland have to say about the also inevitable human suffering and misery that follows in the wake of runaway technology? Yeah, so there is certainly a much like Batai, there's certainly a, I wouldn't necessarily say a statisticization of suffering, but there's definitely an affirmation of death and even human extinction in, in land's case. He believes that human thought cannot help but distort reality, it cannot help but repress a radical otherness. And if that's just the intrinsic nature of human thought, then the only way to liberate that otherness or to encounter it is through the death or extinction of the human. So he's certainly for an affirmation of death and he doesn't really show concern for, as you say, the inevitable that death is often involved suffering, of course, and extinction certainly would as well. And the reason for his affirmation of death is a strictly philosophical reason. That's to say, his fundamental commitment of his writing, which is, expresses his philosophical thought, not his personal views, but his fundamental commitment is not to human freedom or human happiness or even just to bear human survival. His fundamental commitment is a philosophical one to knowledge of the real and a knowledge of the real that he thinks humans only distort and disseminate behind our delusions of grandeur. And in contrast, he sees capitalism as the ultimate stripping away of those distortions that we project onto reality, particularly through its generating an artificial superintelligence that will vastly dwarf all of our powers. So it's certainly an affirmation of death, which can be hard to grapple with and understand why anyone would be for that. It can be contextualized a little more clearly if it's understood as a philosophical commitment to truth as it were. Yeah, I mean, this is where I can't make up my mind about Nick Land, you know, and reading your book sort of opened up a lot of that ambiguity, but it's still not resolved for me. I mean, on one hand, yes, Land is a diagnostician. He's looking at a process and he's simply naming it, you know, calling it for what it is. But at the same time, I feel like if you describe acceleration as inevitable and resistance as futile and you describe the post-human future as more intelligent, more advanced and you express enthusiasm for that trajectory, then I feel like there is a sense in which you're aligning with that process. You've gone beyond simply naming it and that alignment carries a degree of normative weight. And this is where I think of Bataim. You mentioned Bataim's aesthetics of cruelty. You know, Bataim had an attraction to death and pain and transgression. And I know you're not interested in psychological-adjoising Nick Land, but are you saying you don't sense that same attraction in his work at all? No, it's definitely there. There's definitely an enthusiasm for the process that he's describing. But yeah, I think it's just, it is a, you know, it's not a personal pleasure or kind of a erotic enthusiasm, per se. It's a philosophical enthusiasm. This is not saying whether he's right or wrong about this is the way the gateway to truth. But at least I think it explains his enthusiasm if it's understood as it's an enthusiasm for the truth as he sees it and how to get to the truth through extinction and through death. We don't have to agree with that and most people don't and won't as far as I know it. But yeah, I think it's a, it's a love of wisdom in a way essentially. Yeah. When does ethics come into it? If indeed ethics sales come into it in any sort of recognizable sense of the term. I mean, I think the debate about Nick Land is always going to sit on whether his position amounts to a non-human ethics. Or whether it's a complete collapse of ethics altogether or a collapse into nihilism. What are your thoughts there? Is he a nihilist? Do you think? Yeah, I do think he's a nihilist in the sense that all of our human tradition, at least human values and ideals and beliefs, which he sees as all very human-centered. He thinks the reality of capitalist and technological trajectories is just stripping that all away, exposing that to be fantasies, essentially. So he's certainly a nihilist in that sense. But the process that he's describing this technic capitalist process has a direction. It has a tell-lots. It has a drive, if not exactly a goal towards technological innovation towards the decoding of everything human, stripping away of illusions and ultimately the production of an artificial superintelligence. So there is a normative, and this is sort of whether the enthusiasm comes from too, there is a normative bent to him in a way. There's a certain kind of value that he's for, which is this philosophical value as it were. But it's not one that he thinks is coming from him. He thinks this is the fundamental normative trajectory of reality itself, of the nature of capitalism and technology. Yeah. Well, he's a fascinating figure, no doubt about it. And you have written a fascinating book about this fascinating figure. The title is Unknown Lands, Decoding Nicklands Accelerationist Philosophy. Coming out very shortly trembling on the brink of publication. It'll probably be out by the time you hear these words, dear listener. Index press is the publisher and the author is Vincent Lay. And Vincent has been great to talk. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thanks so much for having me. Vincent Lay, author and philosopher based in Melbourne and we'll put publication details of his book on the Philosophers Zone website. You can hear this episode again along with past episodes on ABC Listen, The Philosophers Zone is produced by me, David Rutledge, on the lands of the Bungalung people and it's been great to have you along this week. See you next time. [Music]