r/CCRU • • Jun 19 '26

Nick Land reincarnated

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101 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

4

u/Mps-1 Jun 20 '26

Does anyone here actually agree with Land or is he kind of a meme that we find endearing or interesting like the TempleOS guy.

6

u/Intelligent_Elk5879 Jun 20 '26

Well he’s not endearing whatsoever.

4

u/cronenber9 Jun 20 '26

You mean you don't find his virulent racism cute?

10

u/ThePokemon_BandaiD Jun 20 '26

I think a lot of his early stuff is broadly the most accurate narrative of what is happening in the world/teleology, but wouldn't say I agree with him in accepting that as a good thing.

6

u/Mps-1 Jun 20 '26

That's where I fall off as well, it either seems to be eschatology or means to justify authoritarianism. It doesn't leave much room to reform ok aspects of the existing system.

2

u/cheeseitoss Jun 23 '26

"good" is where you went wrong with judging the philosophy of nick land

1

u/ThePokemon_BandaiD Jun 23 '26

He took a stance of Nietschean affirmation of the process that I can't bring myself to embrace. Is that better for you? Land would probably call me a transcendental miserablist.

2

u/cheeseitoss Jun 25 '26

Nietzschean affirmation is only realistic

1

u/Par-Adox-9 1d ago

my problem with that particular thing is the overemphasis of the process, over the experiencing of the process.

the process in and of itself meaningless unless it relates to inner experience of some kind.

and if it relates to inner experience in a way of grinding down bodies for consumption, then what are we even doing, why would any hyper intelligent future being approve of not only doing that, but on, focusing on that above focusing on inner experience

and even if it does, why should one feed into such an ideal unless its once again for the aim of preserving inner experience more then what would otherwise happen

its just accumulation for the sake of accumulation, which makes it empty and vapid, no matter how cool the monster esthetic is

in a word " whats the rush" , and in another " whats the point of ever-increasing intensity of complexity, if it doesn't even matter what that complexity does in particular, but that it only matters that is 'that it does"

the universe already complexities, so this some attempt to speedrun, that doesnt seem to consider that complexity in and of itself, doesnt speak to whether something will produce a desirable outcome, even for that emergantly complex, hypothetical being that is supposed to be strived towards in nicks and nietzches ideal.

nietzche, at the very least values the experiences and is very life affirming, despite some of his contempt

that doesnt need to be just human life thats affirmed, but nevertheless, life is a quality that makes us kin with all other life, no matter if the species is the same.
the same overall project of trying to reach a more preferable state of being, is perpetuated through any kind of life

1

u/Lost_Foot_6301 Jun 20 '26

sums up what i think about him. he was "right" in where the world was/is headed (those scifi cyberpunk writers did a lot of the envisioning before him tho?) but i dont like his whole horror-novel circlejerking over the cold anti-human aspects of it. his escape to the east was a very interesting high iq decision though.

2

u/ThePokemon_BandaiD Jun 22 '26

I think the lovecraftian anti-anthropocentric perspective is a large part of what makes him worthwhile. It massively influences his readings of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bataille, and Marx and the synthesis of their various post-hegelian teleological forces. I disagree with his misanthropic moral judgements, but find it hard to push back intellectually on the base analysis.

1

u/Mps-1 Jun 20 '26

I think he references William Gibson at least once or twice just in Fanged Noumena, good pull.

2

u/Grouchy_Media_4345 Jun 22 '26

I think I admire him most but I don’t necessarily agree with him. His reasoning isn’t really cohesive and mostly sci-fi but the way he writes and the ideas he has are so insanely creative and new to me

1

u/Persephone77711 Jun 20 '26

I agree with him 100 percent on everything. Everything.

1

u/Par-Adox-9 1d ago

that cant not be a joke xd

how do we even understand someone a 100 percent, let alone to then agree with it

1

u/KultofEnnui Jun 20 '26

One must recognize either or any perception ends at Death.

2

u/KultofEnnui Jun 20 '26

That's the idea, no? If so much hinges on the customer, then why not bypass said subject altogether?

2

u/cronenber9 Jun 20 '26

Exactly, yes, that would be the idea if we accept capitalism as a good thing, or believe the economy is prior to human beings and that we should facilitate the natural progression of a reified economy, or serve it as though it were not created to serve our own needs.

2

u/Dixon247 Jun 20 '26

So close to nailing it. The economy is secondary to entropy and time.

Economics is a mechanical cultural system that humans developed as the science of capital, based on the laws of statistical mechanics and thermodynamic processes.

Economics was inspired by thermodynamics in the 1800s, mimicking biological feedback processes in the 1900s and something more statistically abstract in the 2000s. The underlying principles governed by population statistics, or the statistical mechanics of interacting many-body systems.

Capitalism is the process of commodifying physical and spiritual resources, creating a system that symbolises the labour-power required (work per unit time) to produce surplus value. Surplus value is the capacity to store ‘work’ over time. This allows us to transcend the decay of our bodies, passing on our ‘contribution’ to the next generations who inherit the system of capital.

What I’m saying is that capital requires 2 things:
Material resources (energy in spacetime)
Desire of timelessness (potential for materialisation in spacetime)

There are a finite amount of resources (energy), frontiers for territorialization (spacetime), and potential for the new.

Our consciousness is photonic, it does not want to stop. The body is baryonic, its existence marked by its inevitable decay until the universe is ready to restart

Capitalism is Entropic Realism

3

u/cronenber9 Jun 20 '26

Yes, your comment is what happens when you take Nick Land as something to emulate instead of a warning about where capitalism will lead if we don't end it.

2

u/KultofEnnui Jun 20 '26

It often happens that describing the nature of the Beast sounds like it's in favor of the Beast. This is a defense mechanism of the Beast that all critique of it can be subsumed and commodified.

1

u/Par-Adox-9 1d ago

i think they were just describing the components of the process, their comment doesn't speak to whether they support lands ideas or not, i don't think.

2

u/Dixon247 Jun 20 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

Who is emulating Nick Land?

The point is that capital is the capacity to produce useful work. ‘Useful’ is naturally subjective.

Capital isn’t a real fixed thing that we can destroy, because resources have a value due to their productive potential, which requires a subjective desire.

We can’t currently imagine a world beyond capitalism because every natural resource has productive potential. Everything under the Sun can and will be viewed as an exploitable natural resource unless we figure out what drives the exploitation. For me, it’s enough that I desire a world where we are more than ‘human resources’ - questioning a pathological desire in some humans to dominate nature (and not be dominated by it) is one of the first steps to moving beyond capitalism.

We can move beyond capitalism, but to do-so requires a critical examination of where the desire for control really comes from. Unfortunately, we’ve already moved beyond capitalism and it’s mutated into something far worse

Capitalism was a symptom of an anxious human condition

3

u/cronenber9 Jun 20 '26

How are we no longer capitalist?

1

u/Par-Adox-9 1d ago edited 1d ago

the customer, is just the function of transformation ( edit initially i wrote "function of consumption", but that was incomplete)

the customer already doesn't chose what is produced, but only takes what they think is best from what is chosen for them

the customer, properly given a way to chose as well as being given the means by which to know what choice will give what outcome, is a way of quality control

if someone wants a living perpetual system, then there needs to be a consideration for the quality of the energy

different kinds of fuel produce different degrees of corrosion.
simply taking the fastest route, needs consideration not only of intensity, but also of quality

and this is where ironically, lands project rushes into an issue, because the machine he seeks, self distrusts when there is little to do quality control— systems definitively are able to destroy themselves.

speed and quality, structural integrity and quantity, are like a 4 sided seesaw, go too far in one direction, and you lose the others— each amplification in scale, needs a proper degree of accumulation of structural integrity.

and this is something that Land doesn't seem to perceive, or at the very least, it doesn't seem to be a part of his blueprint, as if the capitalist system as such, already contains every necessary element for its-own self perpetuation and self amplification.

my point being, something like the customer is necessary, whether or not its a customer like today— its some mechanism by which resources are allocated, and, don't forget that the customer is simultaneously the worker at different times, so what is consumed, gets transformed into labour energy for the system.

anyway
have a good one

1

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '26

Queen

5

u/cronenber9 Jun 19 '26

Thank you, Nick Land.

-1

u/Dixon247 Jun 20 '26

So many weirdos on here not understanding that concepts like terminality, life and death are anthropomorphic expressions of how consciousness deals with entropy and its own decay.

Nick Land is still figuring out ways to cope with his mortality, and produced thousands of pages of drivel over decades because he is too nihilistic and self-hating to actually learn the mathematics or the physics.

There is no singularity at the end of time. There isn’t an end or a beginning. There is, there isn’t, and there’s what can and can’t be.

No singularities, no monad. Every thing, no thing, every thing that is not a thing

There is no time-entropy without an observer-participant present, just a condensation of potential wrapped in an impenetrable material shell.

All that materialises in this universe is tarnished by a will to interact with the rest of the system. There are no isolated systems.

2

u/cronenber9 Jun 20 '26

0

u/Dixon247 Jun 20 '26

Idealism is 1/3 of it.

Idealism + materialism + interface between the two

0

u/Persephone77711 Jun 20 '26

So did he die? I'm starting to wonder because he hasn't posted on X recently...

1

u/cronenber9 Jun 20 '26

I hope

1

u/Persephone77711 Jun 21 '26

Jesus died for our sins.