Joakim Andersen highlights the phases and key concepts of Nick Land’s intellectual odyssey, suggesting that Land may be one of the most original and interesting thinkers of our age of transgressed borders and Artificial Intelligence.
Nick Land is one of the most distinctive thinkers of our time, a central figure behind both accelerationism and the neoreactionary milieu. He is read by many in Silicon Valley but has remained fairly unknown to the broader public. This now seems to have changed, especially since he was mentioned by Tucker Carlson and participated in a conversation with Alexander Dugin on Auron MacIntyre’s YouTube channel.
Interest in Land has been significant, partly because he, like Dugin, can be portrayed as a grey eminence behind major actors — here tech oligarchs rather than Putin — and with a demonic rather than Eurasian agenda, and partly because his worldview is both complex and innovative. Land is both educated and intelligent, and he is also skilled in self-promotion (compare with Žižek, although Land is less interested in the constraints of the Overton window). His perspective has undergone metamorphoses but overlaps with continental philosophy, science fiction, occultism, and Protestant theology.
Several of Land’s texts are included in the 2011 anthology Fanged Noumena. There, we initially encounter the early Land, politically quite left-leaning and rooted in continental philosophy, including in texts like “Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest.” He frequently returns to Kant and Heidegger, to Bataille and Deleuze; the language is at times dense but not yet as impenetrable as it would later become.
In the Kant text, he describes the tension between integration and separation, where the national states of the Third World can be viewed as a form of the old South African Bantustans and a prerequisite for developed countries to practice endogamy. He also brings in a feminist perspective here: “it is only when the pervasive historical bond between masculinity and war is broken by effective feminist violence that it will become possible to envisage the uprooting of the patriarchal endogamies that orchestrate the contemporary world order.” As is evident, this is a left-wing position, and a fairly radical one at that, but also a historically outdated position regarding both the world at large and Land himself. Endogamy and geographical separation were shattered, with consequences that are well known today.
But already in this early phase, we can sense more enduring themes and interests in Land. There is an interest in processes and logics, a dynamic rather than static thinking, and also an interest in the non-human. The distanced, impersonal language and the non-human unite Land with the Traditionalist Evola, but in early Land it is rather animality and werewolves that represent this non-human. For Evola, as is well known, it is the higher rather than the lower non-human that is in focus. In the early “Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger’s 1953 Trakl Interpretation,” we encounter, for example, the poet as werewolf, associated with night, forest, moon, and the animalistic. “Spirit and Teeth” continues the same wolf theme. We learn, among other things, that Derrida is not a werewolf.
With an intensity that borders on the poetic, Land describes the human type Rimbaud called “the accursed race” (“the accursed race, living like beasts, whose veins are inflamed by a cosmic menstruation, have never entered into the great project of civilization, which begins with the use of fire to keep the wild animals at bay. Instead they leave a scorched and blackened trail in their wake as they irresponsibly protract the trajectory of animality”). Rats and swarms are also mentioned. We are explicitly told that the accursed human type stands beneath civilization and does not understand it (cf. Evola’s distinction between two forms of anti-bourgeois attitudes, where one is lower than the bourgeoisie itself).
Werewolves, nights, and moon goddesses are gothic phenomena, and Land retains a gothic streak in his later incarnations. This unites him, incidentally, with Marx’s depictions of how dead labor controls the living, where vampires and werewolves are also used as metaphors (even though Marx is cited far less frequently than Deleuze, Heidegger, Kant, and Bataille in Fanged Noumena). The interest in non-human states, processes, and figures links Land with the post-structuralist philosophical duo Deleuze and Guattari, whose dense, monumental works had a significant influence on the intellectual left a few decades ago. Costanzo Preve described Nietzsche as “the door out” of Marxism for many old leftists, and something similar applies to the gentlemen behind A Thousand Plateaus and Anti-Oedipus, both heavily influenced by Nietzsche. Much was odd, aimed at titillating the specific social milieu that these works targeted — provoking them just enough but not too much (hence the romanticization of mental illness as an implicit alternative to the bourgeois individual, for example). But there were also fruitful elements, including the attempt to develop a language for describing processes and change, and the dichotomy between the primordial state and the nomadic “war machine,” which aligns well with an Indo-European perspective. An unexpectedly large number of those who read Deleuze and Guattari have therefore moved away from the stereotypical “left” and into more or less promising directions (from Swedes like Sjunnesson and Bard to foreign thinkers like De Landa and Land). Deleuze’s and Guattari’s interest in things like fungi and machines fits with the aforementioned non-human theme.
CCRU
The deep secret of capital-as-process is its incommensurability with the preservation of bourgeois civilization, which clings to it like a dwarf riding a dragon. As capital ‘evolves’, the increasingly absurd rationalization of production-for-profit peels away like a cheap veneer from the positive-feedback detonation of production-for-production.
— Nick Land
The early Land is in many ways an interesting thinker, not least through the combination of continental philosophy and more mythical themes like “Shamanic Nietzsche.” His second incarnation, the accelerationist and cyber-occultist, is even more so.
In 1995, Land co-founded the now legendary Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Sadie Plant at the University of Warwick (Mark Fisher was also involved in the project). Originally cyberfeminist in orientation, the CCRU evolved under Professor Land’s leadership into a less academic direction. There are stories of him lecturing while lying on the floor, croaking into a microphone. Land and several others used drugs during this period; many crashed. There was also a strong interest in occultism, with elements such as Theosophy, Aleister Crowley’s old apartment, Burroughs’ works, Lovecraft, etc. At the same time, it was a culturally interesting era, where jungle music, industrial, and noise provided fitting soundtracks to films and books like Cyberpunk, Flatliners, eXistenZ, and Crash.
Land’s interest in the non-human now shifts from werewolves and rats to an accelerationist view of the development of capital and productive forces. Instead of trying to stop them, they should be pushed forward, with more or less emancipatory consequences. A left-accelerationism might see capital’s destruction of things like the state and family as positive, as well as the creation of conditions for “fully automated luxury communism.” The movement away from the human as we know it can also be driven by acceleration-utopia for some, but a nightmare for others.
In the central text “Meltdown,” we read about the “dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere” and how “Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property.” There is an anti-human tendency in this accelerationism; in “Circuitries” we read about “a transglobal post-biological machinism.” Identification with the successor can take many forms. The focus can be on its novelty or on the inevitability of its emergence. Already during this period, Land describes capital logic as a kind of AI. It is a non-human intelligence that step by step transforms both society and nature according to its essence, deterritorializing nearly everything —using a term from Deleuze and Guattari. CCRU was interested in everything from the music genre jungle to cyberpunk, from cyber-gothic to Deleuzian concepts like machinic desire.
Many fruitful concepts and perspectives are also developed. Chief among them is arguably hyperstition — “fictions that make themselves real.” This is metapolitically interesting, a way of coining concepts and perspectives that then become self-fulfilling. Particularly valuable in this context is the text “Lemurian Time War” (it is unclear whether Land is the author). It is based on Burroughs but interprets him in an intriguing way. It describes how “Burroughs construed writing – and art in general – not aesthetically, but functionally, – that is to say, magically, with magic defined as the use of signs to produce changes in reality.”
In light of the hyperstitional perspective, CCRU’s practice is not easy to digest, for the fictions put into effect included, among others, Lovecraft’s Old Ones and a flatliner-like A-Death subculture (rather than pro-social or pro-human equivalents). The temporal perspective is often reversed in Land’s work during and after the CCRU period. In “Meltdown,” we read that “Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future.” Land later speaks about the thought experiment of Roko’s Basilisk — how a future AI could influence people today to work for its emergence, with the realization that those who do not will be punished by it. This perspective can also be applied to investments and eschatologies, but it becomes truly evocative when we consider capital as a creation from the future that, like Skynet, planted its seeds in antiquity.
An interesting aspect of CCRU is the occult. They further developed Lovecraft’s mythos with figures like Echidna Stillwell and Vysparov, they incorporated Burroughs into the mythos through the aforementioned “Lemurian Time Wars,” and they also created new fictional cultures like n’ma and tzikvik. It never became quite as powerful as Lovecraft, although the adoption of certain Burroughs themes is certainly exciting.
What is truly fascinating is CCRU’s development of the so-called Numogram, a time-map linked to Lemurian demonism and time magic. There are clear similarities with Kabbalah and numerology, as well as with Goetia, but also differences. Land’s interest in contact with non-human entities from beyond is now focused on what are alternately called Lemurians or demons. What these beings actually are and what their agenda is remains difficult to determine. In CCRU material, they are depicted as residing in Cthelli, the Earth’s molten metallic core. Whether it is his own unconscious, classical demons, metazoological prosimians, or something entirely different that Land is communicating with is not easy for an outsider to assess. Regardless, according to many sources, the CCRU period ends when his amphetamine use lead to burnout or psychosis.
The Neoreactionary
The hypertrophy of the state, the hypertrophy of bureaucracy in its final phases, this woke lunacy that’s the most culturally ruinous process that’s ever happened in our history.
— Nick Land
When he returned several years later, Land left the left behind and instead embraced a right-wing position. This version of Land plays a significant role in what is called the Dark Enlightenment. He is, among other things, critical of democracy and egalitarianism. He addresses the need for eugenics, although his position on race, the hyper-racist one, does not entirely overlap with classical racism. Instead, he describes how assortative mating leads toward a new elite or race. He writes on this matter that “that it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.”
Incidentally, Land’s hyper-racism is not entirely unlike the Theosophists’ vision of a future root race arising from a European and Asian foundation. Regardless, “the left” and the woke phenomenon function as a brake on acceleration. It is not impossible that mass immigration even makes continued technological development impossible. This makes Land’s political repositioning logical.
At the same time, one can identify ongoing shifts in Land’s interests and focus, often fruitful ones. He highlights the connections between the Anglo tradition, individualism, liberalism, and British Christianity — both in his conversation with Dugin and on X/Twitter. This is paired with an interest in the Bible, Kabbalah, and angels. In conversation with The Dangerous Maybe, he says, for example, that “I think angelology is like again something that people thought they’d wave goodbye to at the start of the Renaissance and it is back, baby.” He also raises the question of how one can know whether one is communicating with angels or demons. It is entirely possible that the entities he communicates with are deceptive enough to tailor their messages, but the latest incarnation of Land may well be on his way to becoming Christian — albeit a rather unusual one, as suggested by quotes like “so what’s the fruit of the tree of knowledge? To be quick and crude: Capitalism” and “the AI-Capital equation is lucidly biblical, and intrinsic to Solomonic Wisdom.”
Taken as a whole, Land is a complex and innovative thinker, with a recurring ability to complicate his texts through Deleuzian terms and irony, which it is difficult to do justice to in a text like this. His central contributions are likely the insight that capital logic can be likened to an AI and the concept of hyperstition. The accelerationist perspective is also compelling and potentially troubling even without seeing it as an opportunity for Lovecraftian entities to break through the wall between their world and ours. Land’s treatment of Freud’s concept of the death drive is also interesting —and that is something we have not even addressed.
At the same time, one should obviously be aware of Land’s personal equation, hinted at both above and through his habit of choosing pseudonyms like “outsideness” and “xenosystems.” Regardless, he remains an intriguing chronicler of our time.
Related:
Tucker Carlson – The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast
The Dangerous Maybe – Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson
Auron MacIntyre – Nick Land vs. Aleksandr Dugin Debate
CCRU
CCRU – Glossary
CCRU – Lemurian Time War
Social Ecologies – The Numogram
Buy Joakim Andersen’s Rising from the Ruins: The Right of the 21st Century
