Nick Land discussed at Compact Mag

earlier Ashley on this blog almost a month ago: 

https://rotsstof.blogspot.com/2025/09/my-fave-thus-far-by-dr-ashley-frawley.html 

One 36:07 of the funniest things that's occurred in the kind of gradual excavation of 36:15 countless littleknown right-wing thinkers since 2015 is the sudden 36:20 emergence of Nick Land on the uh Tucker Carlson show. 36:27 um not not an appearance by him but instead an explanation of his work uh as 36:33 a window onto our you know present situation. So Jeeoff what what is the um 36:42 purported relevance of Nick Land in terms of the account of him that's being presented to a mass audience and then 36:48 what's your own understanding of his work? So Nickland is in the limelight because of an interview 36:56 on Tucker Carlson's show with a guy named Conrad Flynn, who I'd never heard of before, but seems to be somebody who 37:02 thinks that various elites, including Hollywood elites and tech industry elites, are involved in some sort of 37:08 occult esoteric religious practice and belief and 37:14 specifically are attempting to channel demons. Now, you know that this this would lead us 37:21 down a whole other rabbit hole because there are plenty of other people who think this, but um I had not come across 37:27 Flynn's particular version of it. What's notable here is that he gives pride of place to Nick land 37:33 because he argues land is incredibly influential in Silicon Valley. 37:39 And basically he shows Tucker a uh a graph which was 37:47 designed by Land and some of his collaborators in the '9s that they called a numog which is essentially a 37:54 kind of cobalistic numerological chart although it looks a little bit like um 38:00 like some kind of um you know circuit diagram. So it it could it could be 38:06 mistaken for a kind of technological or technical graph, but it's which which I think you 38:13 know and and this kind of gets to the point is part of the point. It's it's both a tech it looks like a technical 38:19 graph, but it is also a kind of occult uh numerological 38:25 depiction of some sort of or or an instrument for conjuring some sort of um 38:32 entities from the beyond. And so Flynn's basic argument to Tucker is that 38:38 land for several decades is a figure, a sort of cult philosopher who has argued 38:44 that the the significance of the emergence of artificial intelligence is that it is a kind of channeling of other 38:50 worldly, you know, perhaps demonic or spiritual entities. 38:56 and that many people in Silicon Valley read and are interested in land and Flynn 39:04 concludes, you know, therefore many of the people in Silicon Valley are themselves attempting to use AI to 39:10 essentially summon up demons. So, and indeed he has a few pieces of evidence 39:15 for this because uh Elon Musk himself has said at various points that when we, 39:21 you know, build AI, we are summoning the demon. So this is this is a kind of theme that you've seen. It also ties 39:28 into recent uh discussion around uh you know t sort of Elon Musk's fellow PayPal 39:36 founder Peter Teal being very interested in the figure of the antichrist. And so 39:41 this kind of spiritual dimension of AI discourse has has come to light in in 39:48 various ways recently. So what was interesting about this Tucker episode was that, you know, many 39:53 people who are part of or privy to certain online subcultures were just 39:58 shocked by the image of Carl. You know, there's an already very memeified image of Tucker holding this numog, which is 40:06 kind of an iconic image from Nick Lan's output and just looking in his typical 40:11 puzzled way at it. And so this has become a kind of meme. And I suppose what was what was notable here was the 40:17 kind of mainstreaming of this this cult sort of underground figure, 40:22 you know, through his um appearance on this, you know, mainstream conservative show. 40:28 So, you know, who is Nick Land? Nick Land, interestingly, starts his career 40:34 as a what what might be, you know, derisively called by some on the right a 40:40 postmodern neo-Marxist, we might say. He basically is is interested in the work 40:47 of various French uh philosophers most notably uh 40:53 Jill Duloo and Felix Guatari who in the 1970s write this pair of books 41:00 anti-edipus and a thousand plateaus that attempts to kind of reformulate the 41:08 the theories of of specifically Marx and Freud. and put them on a new footing. 41:16 And you know for our purposes what's important is that many people in the 1990s are and so they you know introduce 41:23 v dul andqatari introduced various concepts including the virtual which they're thinking about really before it 41:29 becomes a way of talking about technology. Um they're interested in networks. They're interested in 41:35 decentralization uh in what they call the ryome which is a kind of network at which any point can 41:42 connect to any other point which they counterpose to what they call the arborescent structure which is that of a 41:49 a sort of hierarchy a treelike hierarchy where everything branches out from a single trunk. And so they introduce all 41:57 these concepts and then the 90s many of these sort of academic philosophers land 42:02 among them start applying them and using them to think about what's going on in the digital sphere. And so that's really 42:10 where land kind of first comes into the conversation about technology. 42:16 But whereas many of the people who take this kind of idea take it in a a sort of 42:22 in the direction of essentially the kind of left-wing anti-globalization movement of the 1990s. And here I'd note the 42:29 figures of Michael Hart and Antonio Negri who write the best-selling book 42:34 empire published in 2000 who are really you know likewise kind of taking the 42:40 ideas from Doo and Guatari about decentralized networks and you know the the shift of capitalism 42:48 to this kind of nomadic decentralized structure from which they conclude that sort of left-wing revolutionary 42:54 strategies also have to be decentralized and nomadic. And so all of these ideas end up feeding into things like the 43:00 Occupy movement with its rejection of hierarchical structures and leadership. 43:05 And so the point is a lot of these ideas about and you know this idea I think you heard a lot on the left this phrase the 43:12 disgust becomes a network uh in this period. And so the these a lot of these 43:18 ideas become part of a certain phase of the left in the 1990s and 2000s. But Lance takes it 43:26 in a very different direction which is that he ultimately uh you know in his 43:32 1990s writing he's very dismissive of sort of the old left because it's attached to the state you know this sort 43:39 of hierarchical dinosaur that is you know no longer relevant and he's very dismissive of of socialism 43:47 which he sees as a kind of attempt to constrain the proliferation the kind of unstoppable proliferation of digital 43:54 networks. And so he, you know, he outlines these ideas that later become called 44:00 accelerationism, which is essentially the idea that um, you know, the only important kind of 44:06 political cause is simply the acceleration of the 44:12 explosive tendencies of of capitalism and and the technologies attached to it. 44:19 And so the point is that he he sort of um takes these ideas in a direction that 44:25 that you know becomes really not about overthrowing capitalism but allowing 44:31 capitalism to realize its itself more fully. and he and this I'd say is where the 44:38 kind of um demonic dimension comes in because what he's interested in is the 44:44 idea that you know human cultures and societies over the course of history 44:50 have in various ways been built around trying to put the brakes on certain 44:55 runaway processes and prevent acceleration that you know essentially human societies have functioned as a 45:01 kind of stabilization system or to use the cybernetic term terminology. He he preferred a kind of um structures for 45:10 producing homeostasis, for preventing kind of runaway positive feedback cycles 45:15 as he called it. And so what he argues is that you know 45:20 ultimately you can associate this um you know the kind of taboss and and barriers 45:27 and and sort of prohibitive structures of of many societies up up to and including our own as ways of trying to 45:34 prevent these kind of runaway processes. And that you can also associate these runaway processes with some kind of 45:41 absolute outside that, you know, radically threatens and undermines, you know, what we think of 45:48 as as humanity and the human um, you know, sort of uh the human in in some 45:54 sort of stable sense. And so, you know, what he becomes interested in really sounds here like he might have in mind 46:00 um the, you know, St. Paul's epistle to the Thessalonians where you Paul talks about the the catacon or 46:06 the one who restrains um yes and there's this you know it's cryptic passage but you know there's 46:12 this idea that something is restraining the emergence of uh a kind of and you know 46:21 basically the the end of times you know there's some kind of restraining force that's holding off the apocalypse. 46:29 Correct. And so for land, you know, really the the mission at all points is is in some ways to kind of remove the 46:36 brakes from this process. And you can see this in, you know, he's not only 46:41 influenced by these philosophers, but by science fiction, specifically the works 46:46 of William Gibson and the films like Bladeunner and Terminator. And you know 46:53 maybe Terminator provides the clearest um illustration of this because for him 46:59 it's Skynet you know which is this kind of accelerative artificial intelligence that you know is the the representation 47:06 or embodiment of this kind of runaway process that you need to align yourself with. And you know this essentially 47:13 means and amounts to the the destruction of the human the destruction of humanity. 47:18 And you know for him this is something to be to be embraced basically. And so 47:24 you know and and it is something you can kind of connect to to the demonic or to 47:31 fears of the demonic. Um and so you know to to try to sum up here what what's 47:38 interesting is that you know he under goes very.... he leaves academia seems to have some sort of nervous breakdown um 47:45 ends up as an expatriate living in China but then in the early uh 2010s he 47:51 reemerges as a a participant in what was then the neo-reactionary blogosphere 47:58 and so he becomes connected to people like Curtis Yarvin and various other figures who become influential on sort 48:04 of the alt-right or the dissident right or these different strains that emerge in that period. And 48:12 what's if if you read his um his writings back then, you know, one thing 48:17 he's reflecting on is the kind of odd alliance that he is part of because he 48:22 describes himself at that point as a technocommercialist that you know essentially his his agenda 48:29 is about you know again removing the brakes allowing this kind of tech you 48:34 know technological singularity to realize itself through the operations of capital 48:40 and but he's allied with these figures who are you know basically ethnationalists and religious uh 48:48 reactionaries you know basically sort of integralist um you know sort of deis 48:53 vault types um and so he's he's often kind of puzzling over the fact of this 48:58 and you know what he basically accepts is that they all u they all have the 49:04 same enemy which is essentially you know which is what Yarvin in his mold bug era 49:10 designated as the cathedral, you know, which is basically the the sort of globalist progressive power structure 49:18 which for land the problem with which is that it is holding back ..... and and you know this does get to a kind of tension, 49:24 right? Because for him the problem is that it is holding back ..... it is it is dead set against allowing this sort of process of 49:32 capital to fully realize itself. that that for him the the cathedral the function of it is again to pro it's or 49:38 it's what he calls in his earlier work the human security system it's to create a kind of stability and homeostasis. 49:46 Now, you know, I suppose what what's kind of interesting is that many of the other reactionaries he's he's uh in 49:52 conversation with sort of think the opposite, right? They think that um the function of this of this cathedral is to 49:59 kind of dissolve traditional communities to um you know to kind of force these 50:04 new trendy things like transgender ideology on on people and so on. So, you 50:12 know, he's he's in alliance with people who really in some respects seem to think the opposite of him. And so, 50:18 that's, you know, that's kind of an odd thing about this. And so just to conclude, 50:24 you know, he's writing about this 10 years ago that like he's in alliance with these people who um on some level 50:30 agree with him that the cathedral, the the sort of globalist woke, you know, 50:35 liberal power structure is is the enemy, but at the same time who seem to interpret it in in more or less the 50:41 opposite way as him. And what's interesting to see is when Tucker is confronting him, he's doing so from I'd 50:48 say more with the perspective of the kind of religious traditionalist uh background with like a little bit of 50:55 the sort of the sort of ethnationalist side of things tinged into it. So he 51:00 really does represent these two other factions that land in his kind of radical accelerative 51:08 uh you know support for the disruptive tendencies of capitalism. 51:13 has been has been radically at odds with and you can see this at you know but has been at alliance with for all this time. 51:19 And so you can also see this in this um dialogue he did shortly after his his 51:25 the discussion of his work on Tucker with Alexander Dugan, the philosopher 51:30 associated with this sort of neo-urasian traditionalism 51:37 uh and often claimed to be a kind of leading ideologue behind Vladimir Putin's sort of national you know sort 51:44 of neoist uh or you know sort of Slavic nationalist ideology. So anyway, I made 51:50 I forced Ashley to listen to this interview or at least maybe she listened to part of it. So I'm curious if she has 51:55 any responses to the discussion between land and and Dugan. -------

----- Ashley:

 --- 52:02 Yeah. Oh, see now I find the demonology stuff interesting that you were talking. 52:08 It sounded like people were taking it literally. I thought that the demon was like capital and like the AI 52:15 technocracy. Isn't that what that is? And then he's kind of he's not literally talking about 52:23 Satan. It's like kind of like a philosophical literary way of talking about human- centered morality. 52:30 I mean description. Are there people who think he's literally

 52:35 I mean Land claims to be in ....

 or is he literally summoning? 

claims he 52:41 claims to be in communication with uh with uh interdimensional lemurs. Now, 52:48 lemurs here refers to a a story by William S. Burroughs, the ghost lemurs of Madagascar, but which in turn 52:55 connects to this um idea of a a leorian primal race that comes out of Madame 53:01 Bllatsky's, you know, sort of theosophical theories. And finally, the idea that lemur um you 53:08 know has its root in a word that in in Latin that meant ghost or spirit. And so 53:14 anyway, the point is he does sort of actually claim to be literally channeling demons. And he does also, I 53:22 think, understand capital. I mean, he understands capital as a kind of emanation of some sort of 53:28 interdimensional demonic force. And so, you know, the 53:34 reason all societies are so bent on on controlling it is because it is 53:39 fundamentally destructive and disruptive of the human because it comes from the outside. 53:47 And so that you know this is I think he takes this quite literally and you know 53:52 but for him the the demon is ultimately something that uh you know is is to be 54:00 sort of positively embraced as a as a a force that will you know push us beyond 54:06 current stasis and into this technoc capital singularity.

Ashley: 

 54:13 Do you know I ......  people like Nick Land really annoy me because although I struggle with it myself there they're 54:20 wonderful they're great philosophers who take really difficult ideas and communicate them in a clear way and then 54:26 there are philosophers who take really bad ideas and hide how bad they are by communicating them in a very unclear way 54:33 so you cannot tell whether or not they're being serious. -------------  Is he not just saying I for one uh welcome our robot 54:40 overlords? Does that not essentially like like boil it down because there's all this there's all these fears as well 54:47 in the sort of like AI doomer world that the AI is going to and doesn't have any 54:53 kind of stop built into it to stop it from using us for its own terms and that 54:59 seems to be what land is saying will happen or is happening that there is some kind of force that is using 55:06 humanity like he kind of flips instead of saying like humanity or like history is God's plan for man. Humanity is just 55:13 this raw material for this greater non-human intelligence. And this is kind of like the fear that um AI doomers have 55:20 that there's this it will you know it's it will use us for its own purposes kind of like matrix style of just like um 55:27 self preservation i.e. getting as much energy as possible to fuel itself. 55:33 So is he not just being like yeah and it's good? Yeah. Is he like the guy? 55:40 [Laughter] 

 

I I would not dispute that characterization. 55:46 Uh, you know, he's um I will say he's a very good writer. So he's, you know, I 55:53 think somebody who you can kind of learn things about the moments that he's writing in. I'd 55:59 say particularly, you know, the the 19 the 1990s he he 56:05 really um I think kind of correctly captures things about, you know, there 56:11 there's sort of all this um overwhelming optimism about the 56:17 trajectory of digital technology in that period really coming from across the political spectrum. And again 56:23 there's a kind of fetishization of decentralization and you know networks and things like 56:30 that that you can find as much on the right as on the left right as much on the really the in the establishment as 56:36 on the fringes. And so what's interesting to me is in his in his early work, he sort of takes that logic and 56:43 takes it to a very stark and sort of nightmarish place, which so it it feels 56:50 like it's kind of the bad dream or sort of nightmare version of the mainstream 56:55 positive discourse. And then, you know, in the early 2010s, 57:00 I think again, you know, we're at a high point where Silicon Valley is very aligned with like the Obama 57:06 administration. There there's again this kind of idea about digital technology being this, you 57:12 know, force for good in the world and, you know, a means of achieving all of these progressive ends and so on. So I 57:18 think again he comes in there and provides a very dark spin on the the 57:25 actual meaning of this technology which I think does you know whether you um you 57:32 know I think even if you find his evaluation of it quite disturbing and 57:38 and difficult to accept he does actually capture something that is you know being 57:43 excluded from the sort of mainstream discourse about these developments. at both these moments. So, so for that 57:50 reason I I do think he's an important figure, but he does also kind of raise 57:55 all kinds of problems for because I mean in some level I think you know the the dialogue between him and somebody like 58:00 Dugan you know Dugan has historically had a kind of connection to Steve Bannon. So, you know, to that extent he 58:07 represents a certain faction of the the Trump coalition, but then, you know, 58:13 Land is kind of tied to the techno accelerationist side of the Trump coalition. And so we actually what's 58:19 interesting is you know 10 years ago land is writing blog posts about well you know I'm in this blogosphere where 58:25 I'm like weirdly you know I just want the technoc capitalist singularity but I'm in this blogosphere with all these 58:31 people who want to like preserve traditional society and um preserve the nation and things like 58:37 that and so what does that mean and and what's interesting is now he's actually you know or his ideas have a certain 58:44 foothold in power and again that that sort of um extremely 58:51 uh difficult kind of coalition is is um attempting to govern in some form or 58:59 at least or at least pretending to. And so the question is, you know, what does it mean? Can you have a sort of a 59:06 governing philosophy that is at once kind of ethnationalist, religiously 59:11 traditionalist and technoacelerationist? And you know I I will say if you read 59:17 you know pe people can check out his his work that was published in this volume xenos systems from a decade ago I mean 59:24 he does kind of grapple with this question at length. I won't I won't summarize it all but you know it's it's 59:31 it's it it's quite prescient in the sense that I think he's he's writing from the 59:37 perspective of like wow I'm in this weird blogosphere space with all these other fringe right-wing people. Um, and 59:44 we all hate the same stuff, but we seem to think completely opposite things. And in some sense now that is the kind of 59:51 contradiction of like the governing coalition of the United States.

Ashley:

 59:58 Yeah. I just don't think he realizes how much the World Economic Forum and all the wokes that he hates are saying the 1:00:05 exact same thing as them, just with a facade of liberalism or a facade of like 1:00:10 wanting to stop. I'm not sure that they are. I don't know. I don't know. 

 

1:00:15 Yeah, you and I should we should talk about this more. I will say what? Yeah. But no, I was just going to say we 1:00:21 should talk about this more on blame theory which listeners should check out the blame theory podcast 1:00:26 because it ties into our recent series on the crisis of liberalism because I think you know one interesting about 1:00:32 Land particularly more recent Land is he's you know attempting to rescue what he calls paleoliberalism 1:00:39 you know which which is essentially and this is where you know in in some ways he's a kind of you know he he's a he's 1:00:46 one of to use Quinn Sloian's term Hex bastards. I mean, he's a he's a kind of neohayakian 1:00:52 because he wants to rescue this notion of paleoliberalism, which is just sort of unregulated markets, the invisible 1:00:59 hand, etc. um in in his interview with uh Dugan and 1:01:05 or his conversation with Dugan I believe he cites uh Gert GOETHE he talks about the invisible hand but he also cites GOETHE'S FAUST ..........  the passage where Mephostophles describes himself as um a part of that 1:01:19 force that always seeks evil but always causes good. 1:01:26 And so again, this is kind of this connection of the demon, you know, the invisible hand of capital to the 1:01:31 demonic. Um, so and I mean he makes that explicit in 1:01:37 the in the conversation with Dugan. So he, you know, he so he is essentially 1:01:44 he's trying to argue that you can isolate a kind of paleoliberalism as he calls it from all the bad stuff that 1:01:51 that comes later. And you know, I think I think you and I 1:01:57 should probably discuss this more in another context. Um, 1:02:02 but that that's kind of where where um where he fits into the discourse and and I do think he 1:02:09 he represents something in I mean there are  Various Things That Are Really Significant To This Administration. You 1:02:14 Know, He He Kind Of Wants To Argue You Can Have A Kind Of Radical Free Market Liberalism But In One Country Like The 1:02:20 Anglosphere Can Have Radical Free Market Liberalism But Then You Know You Can 1:02:26 Protect That Within Tariff Walls I Guess And Then You Know Russian Society Can 1:02:31 Have Another Economic Order That's More Reflective Of Its Sort Of Ethnicultural 1:02:37 Uh Disposition. So that that sort of seems to be where he and Dugan try to find some sort of common ground. And so 1:02:43 then the question is, okay, but can you have a liberalism that isn't about, you 1:02:49 know, that that isn't fundamentally committed to free trade? Um, 1:02:55 you know, in his current iteration, Lan sort of seems to be saying this, 1:03:01 uh, that that you can have kind of liberalism in one country to paraphrase Stalin.

 1:03:09 Yes. Uh it's yeah it's extremely interesting and actually brings to a head so many of the kind of 1:03:16 contradictions that we've been talking about in that series. So I have to think about this because there's about 17 1:03:22 different strands I've been trying to follow and uh I at the moment I feel like that meme of that guy with like all 1:03:29 the threads on the board and he's like you know connecting pictures on a board. That's what I feel like at the moment. 1:03:35 I'll have to sort through what the hell is heck is going on here. So let's let's 1:03:40 talk about this more but um yeah I don't know it's got this is what 1:03:46 happens when you accelerate the economic side without the political yeah 1:03:52 so we we'll we'll continue this discussion in blame theory so check that out everybody uh look on on your 1:03:59 favorite podcast app blame theory podcast with me and Ashley uh to be discussed 1:04:06 can you have liberalism in one CUNTTREEhousing WaldBesetzung PropJacked

And and additionally, I should also add 1:04:12 uh a couple years ago, Nick Land published a few things in the pages of 1:04:17 compact. So people can check those out. They're actually somewhat uncharacteristic of his work because 1:04:24 they're about the English literary cannon starting with the biblical translation of William Tinddale and 1:04:30 going up to the works of Joseph Conrad. So it it may be the only uh place where 1:04:37 he has written at length about sort of classic works of English literature. 1:04:43 And so that's definitely worth uh worth a read. Three three essays you can find by Nick Land in in the pages of compact 1:04:50 which I believe at this point are his most recent kind of long form writing. 

He does he does tweet, but um and and 1:04:58 they're they're striking and sort of uncharacteristic in in some ways, although also tying they do tie in in in 1:05:04 fascinating ways to some of the themes I brought up. Other than that, people should check out uh Fang Numina if 1:05:10 they're interested in understanding his work. It's a collection published by 1:05:15 Urbanomic Press uh in 2011 of his his major writings from the mostly from the 1:05:22 1990s. So uh if people want to get a deeper sense of what I was talking about there 

1:05:28 and finally people can also check out the CCRU writings 1997 to 2003 which is 1:05:34 a set of collaborative writings he did with his colleagues at the University of Warick in the late 90s into the early 1:05:42 2000s and uh they're they're extremely strange and that's where you can find out about the numogram that that appears 1:05:49 in that uh you know now iconic image of Tucker are looking very befuddled and it 1:05:55 it's the numogram. The significance of it is explained at length in that volume of CCRU writings 1997 to 2003. 1:06:04 With that, thanks to Ashley, thank you Jeff. And thank you listeners. For more, 1:06:12 go to compactmag.com/subscribe.