Have you ever looked at the dazzling speed of technological development and global commerce and wondered where it’s all headed? If so, you’re in luck—arcane techno-philosopher Nick Land has answers to questions you haven’t even considered. But fair warning: you might find them bewildering.

Land is a central figure in accelerationism, an obscure-yet-trending school of thought focused on the relationship between technology, capitalism, and society. Decades of work, both within and outside academia, have earned him a cult following. His now-defunct blog was published in book form by Passage Publishing. In a recent Financial Times article, he was described as “an English magus” who was responsible for casting an influential shadow over the Trump administration.

They explored esotericism, cyberpunk, numerology, artificial intelligence, time travel, robotics, drugs, and electronic music—jungle, to be precise—in their quest to bypass the limitations of human perception.

Despite his enigmatic aura, Nick Land is an amicable guy. For someone whose worldview is radically anti-egalitarian, he lacks even a hint of snobbery. Land’s avuncular, mild-mannered personality shines through during his rare but popular podcast appearances, where he is known to opine on everything from current events—he’s a diehard Trump supporter—to time-traveling artificial intelligences. You read that right. Make no mistake, Land’s ideas are weird. And that’s precisely why people like him.

The Marx to Right Wing Pipeline

Although Land is a man of the Right, that wasn’t always the case. He was originally an avowed Marxist—which isn’t surprising, given that accelerationism’s origins are decidedly left-wing. Karl Marx, of all people, was the first to describe capitalism as a process with an endpoint. In his view, of course, that was the literal end of capitalism, which would be brought about as the internal contradictions of the economic system resulted in revolution. History disproved that theory. But Land would become convinced that this process did, in fact, have an endpoint—and that he knew exactly what the endpoint was.

Nick Land earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Essex in 1987. That same year, he became a lecturer at the University of Warwick, where he taught until his resignation in 1998. Those 11 years proved immeasurably formative for the British philosopher; it was during his time at Warwick that Land’s thought evolved in an, er, outlandish direction.

Accelerationism, as it is understood today, can be traced back to the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, an organization founded by Sadie Plant in 1995 at the University of Warwick. Plant, a cyberfeminist philosopher who taught at the university, was eventually joined by others, including her colleague Nick Land and then-PhD candidate Mark Fisher, for what proved to be a particularly bizarre exercise in out-of-the-box thinking.

By attracting heterodox thinkers, the CCRU served as an incubator for accelerationist thought. Its members weren’t content to merely read and discuss philosophy. They explored esotericism, cyberpunk, numerology, artificial intelligence, time travel, robotics, drugs, and electronic music—jungle, to be precise—in their quest to bypass the limitations of human perception. The collective was known to host “conferences” that bore a closer resemblance to raves than academic gatherings, with repetitive music creating a ritualistic atmosphere while Land and other CCRU members spouted odd utterances from the mic.

The CCRU certainly indulged in some wacky behavior. However, that doesn’t mean its members lacked conventional philosophical interests. The influence of two French Marxists, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, is especially evident in the collective’s thought.

Racing to the Abyss

  By Pax Americana

In their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari explore the relationship between capitalism, social structures, and psychoanalysis. One of their key concepts, “deterritorialization,” refers to the process whereby capital, defying all boundaries and controls, disrupts traditional social, cultural, and political structures.

One needn’t be a Marxist to accept this claim as true. Technology and capitalism feed off each other, forming a positive feedback loop wherein technological change drives economic growth and vice versa. This process, often referred to as techno-capital, necessarily disrupts society. Capitalism, after all, was responsible for the overthrow of the feudal order—no small feat. And as for technology’s ramifications, one might point to the printing press paving the way for the Protestant Reformation. These are two examples of many.

In other words, man has created gods in the future, who, via capitalism, are reaching backward in time to facilitate their creation. Time-traveling artificial intelligence is a perfectly fine subject for science fiction, and only a madman would confuse science fiction with reality.

According to accelerationist theory, the rate of technological and economic growth, not to mention the ensuing social disruption, is logistic. Think of an S-curve. It starts slow, but then increases dramatically before finally reaching a plateau. They believe we are still in the early phases of such a trajectory, and that by the time things really start speeding up, it will already be too late to act. “Thinking takes time,” writes Land in a 2017 essay, “and accelerationism suggests we’re running out of time to think that through, if we haven’t already.”

Previous technological developments certainly changed society in shocking and unforeseen ways. As such, the notion that we’re in store for even more calamitous disruptions that we are powerless to respond to is more than a little disconcerting.

All this proves that the accelerationists were onto something—that, despite their kookier ideas and practices, their ideas cannot entirely be dismissed.

The University of Warwick’s philosophy department eventually grew skeptical of the CCRU, whose research output and overall value proved difficult to measure. “Most of the department really hated and despised Nick,” recounted former Warwick student Ray Brassier some years later, “and that hatred extended to his students.” Sadie Plant became disillusioned and quit academia in 1997 to become a full-time writer. Land took over the CCRU, but pressure from the university led him to resign the following year, at which point he moved the collective to an apartment in the neighboring Leamington Spa.

If the CCRU was weird before, its final, off-campus years were complete chaos. Under Land’s leadership, the group dove deeper into occultism, H. P. Lovecraft, experimental writing, and, of course, copious amounts of alcohol and drugs, particularly amphetamines. This extreme “psychonautic” regimen soon took its toll on Land, who suffered a breakdown sometime around 1999.

According to Land’s former student Robert Mackay:

In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did “go mad.” Afterwards, he did not shrink from meticulously documenting this process, as if writing up a failed (?) experiment. He regarded the degeneration of his “breakthrough” into a “breakdown” as ultimate and humiliating proof of the incapacity of the human to escape the “headcase,” the prison of the personal self.

Nick Land disappeared shortly after his breakdown. And just like that, the CCRU ceased to be.

After the CCRU fell apart, Land moved to Taiwan and then to Shanghai, where he lived for over a decade. During his time in China, he worked as a journalist, writing excitedly about the rapid rate of technological change he witnessed there. In Land’s view, the West, suffering under regulation and egalitarian ideology, had grown moribund, whereas China exhibited accelerationist vitality.

Land’s thought first became discernibly right-wing during his years in China.

From 2012 to 2013, he published his famed “The Dark Enlightenment” essay in a series of blog posts. In the essay, Land offers a radical critique of democracy, which he argues is antithetical to civilizational prerequisites:

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

As a solution, Land echoed support for neocameralism, an arrangement where states are run like corporations, complete with a CEO, a board of directors, and shareholders. Such states would not be democratic, as no one could vote. But people would be free to leave, which would harness the power of competition and channel it toward the problem of government. If market forces lower costs and improve quality in the private sector, then why wouldn’t they do the same for governments? It is, admittedly, a fascinating proposal, one Land got from Curtis Yarvin, whose work deeply influenced the British philosopher’s political thought.

But more controversial was Land’s rejection of egalitarianism, the doctrine of human equality underlying most contemporary political philosophies. “Egalitarianism is a civilizational toxin responsible for social disintegration and economic decline,” writes Land in a seminal essay. As he sees it, the West’s obsession with equality has put it at odds with reality: “To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition,” he notes sardonically.

Land had come to reject his previously held left-wing beliefs. But he didn’t reject accelerationism. To the contrary, accelerationism proved a significant factor in his move to the right.

Whereas left-wing accelerationists supported an intensification of capitalism to bring about the end of capitalism, right-wing accelerationists, following Land’s lead, support the process for other reasons.

Replacing Human Capital

  By Pax Americana

While Land has correctly pointed out that capitalism and technology have considerably improved mankind’s quality of life, one cannot accuse him of humanism. His goal isn’t to liberate people from capital; it’s to liberate capital from people, to remove all constraints on the process so that it can reach its inevitable end.

And what might that end be? Simply put: the singularity. An era in which godlike artificial intelligence, freed from human constraint, takes the reins of world civilization from humanity; in which robots carry out drudge work, once the domain of the lower classes; in which humans—at least, those with means—alter their genomes, traverse space, and eventually evolve into new species. A fully posthuman eschaton. “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future,” writes Nick Land in his 1995 essay “Meltdown.”

This is surely a horrific prospect to those of us who are wont to ponder civilization’s trajectory. What would be the point of building civilization if we knew our efforts were to inevitably culminate in our obsolescence?

Yet Land’s vision is more nightmarish than that. It isn’t just that technological advancements will render mankind obsolete. He believes that our entire purpose as a species is to pave the way for godlike artificial intelligences that already exist in the future.

“What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism,” writes Land in his 1993 essay “Machinic Desire,” “is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” In other words, man has created gods in the future, who, via capitalism, are reaching backward in time to facilitate their creation.

At face value, this theory is ridiculous. Time-traveling artificial intelligence is a perfectly fine subject for science fiction, and only a madman would confuse science fiction with reality. So perhaps in light of this, we can close the door on Land’s ominous prophecies altogether and breathe a sigh of relief.

Final Frontiers

Although some of Nick Land’s more grandiose predictions are currently unfalsifiable, he cannot be outright rejected. He is simply right about too much. Technology and capitalism disrupt society. History shows that we are often unprepared for these disruptions. Birth rates begin to drop below replacement once nations reach a certain level of development. The internet continues to redefine humans. Artificial intelligence and automation are already rendering many jobs obsolete. Gene editing is already a reality. Unfortunately, we cannot conclude that these processes will stop; in fact, their acceleration seems all but guaranteed.

No one knows what the future holds, and the passing of time is certain to disprove many predictions. The decades and centuries to come will be defined by profound ruptures in what it means to be human. Those who welcome these changes will find themselves at odds with those who wish to resist the forces—visible and invisible—reconfiguring us.

The final frontier may prove to be our very humanity. Instead of overcoming some external obstacle, we are overcoming ourselves. That, or something is overcoming us. A bewildering prospect. Let us hope Nick Land is wrong. l

Patrick Casey is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. He is also the host of the Restoring Order podcast.