/lit/ - Literature

My 15-year-old daughter Tricia is a great fan of vampire fiction, and I bought this for her from a remaindered book stall, thinking it would be just up her street. The rather childish daub on the cover did make me think that perhaps the book would be too young for her, but seeing as it was priced at 40p I reckoned I could not go too far wrong.

This is possibly the worst mistake I have ever made.

From being a happy-go-lucky Goth with a crush on Robert Pattinson, Tricia has become a 'post-human nihilist' who stays up all night listening to the sort of machine music that makes your ears bleed and gibbering about the 'Dark Enlightenment'.

I have written to the book's author to complain, but received no reply. I am informed by his publishers that Mr Land has in any case disowned all his previous writing and decamped to Shanghai.

None too soon, in my view - but too late for Tricia, I fear.

>Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

Does anyone have the nick land chart? not the one from the /lit/ wiki, the one I'm thinking of had freud on it

>>15772938
I'm shitposting while waiting for 70mg of adderall to kick in and then I'm gonna read some Land

>tfw Anglo-Iranian
Perfectly balanced mix of the Chads of Europe and the Chads of the Middle East checking in.

>>15685387
>The contempt for reality manifested by such pronouncements is unfathomable. What kind of libidinal catastrophe must have occurred in order for a physicist to smile when he says that nature’s secrets are almost exhausted? If these comments were not such obvious examples of megalomaniac derangement, and thus themselves laughable, it would be impossible to imagine a more gruesome vision than that of the cosmos stretched out beneath the impertinently probing fingers of grinning apes.

>>15678286
Capitalism is a positive feedback control loop. The signals that run through this circuit are concrete labour and capital is the controller which allows abstract labour to be maximized at the output.

At the same time, capitalism is an artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Marx already knew this but of course at the time he didn't have the terminology we have now. Let me tell you about AGIs. Computer scientists are actively trying to find ways to make an AGI safe to implement. So far it is not safe because no matter the AGI's objective function, it would tend to do shit we don't want it to do. For example, it is proven that if you give it a simple objective function like collecting stamps, it will start consuming all our resources, eventually reaching the point where it will start to kill living organism to use their atoms to print more stamps. You can think of ways to avoid this but you'll probably fail since the scientific community still hasn't found one.

You see the problem we face now? We already built an AGI: capitalism. We know where this leads: complete resource repletion, out-of-control positive feedback loops, basically the AI apocalypse. In theory, we have no idea how to stop it an AGI. In practice, you should become a communist.

>>15646112
stfu old man

>>15637926
I think Nick Land's work is very compatible with Austrian economics. Consider Mises' statement on monopolies - while he admitted that monopolies produce a suboptimal allocation of resources, he also maintained that monopolist's supernormal profits play a vital role in attracting factors of production into a temporarily monopolized sector (not to mention the problem of determining a competitive price and quantity where P(q)=MC(q)). This implies that the textbook understanding of monopolies is completely wrong, competition is not a state but a dynamic PROCESS. This culminates in Rothbard's famous ridicule of the notion of noncompetitive (as in monopolistic) prices, any price that prevails on a market without government distortion is a competitive price. What this means is that it's impossible to criticize capitalism from within it, you cannot for example say "company X has monopolized the market and artificially inflates the prices" because that would mean that you KNOW for a fact what a competitive price might be but in Austrian economics you cannot know that without producing this product for a lower price yourself. A critique of capitalism entails a participation in capitalism as a producer, becoming one with Capital which brings us back to Nick Land.

>only consoom pop music and imdb top 250
>constantly whine about the state of art
What a pathetic loonie

>>15628851
The end of capitalism would be the end of the world

books that will help me defend Capital against reterritorializing forces i.e. socialism, traditionalism and progressivism?

Accelerationism, no less than the bureaucratic or military apparatus, is a mechanism for the absorption of surplus value, its very form and its finality are marked by this social function. The whole of accelerationism is an immense perversion, a drug, a radical break with reality, starting with the reality of desire; it is a narcissism, a monstrous autism: the characteristic autism and the intrinsic perversion of the machine of capital. At its most autistic, accelerationism is no longer measured against any reality, it no longer opens to any outside, but becomes itself the test of reality and the guarantor of its own test: reality as the lack to which the inside and the outside, departure and arrival, are reduced.

Lately I've been seeing a lot of Rob Miles' YouTube videos about the dangers of a general artificial superintelligence. And it struck me. Capitalism is a general artificial superintelligence. This is what Nick Land meant, isn't?

>A general AI with a simple objective function: collect stamps, will eventually start killing carbon-based organisms in order to print more stamps from their molecules
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4

This describes how a simple objective function (profit-seeking) leads to the parasitic characteristics of capitalism and its hunger for resources.

>A general AI doesn't like being turned off. If you put a turn-off button somewhere, it will do everything in its power to prevent you from pressing that button.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TYT1QfdfsM

This describes why capitalism doesn't like being removed, and how it does everything in its power (fascism, war, etc) to stop socialists from achieving their goal.

>A general AI doesn't like having its objective function changed. It will do everything in its power to prevent you from changing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l7Is6vOAOA

This describes why capitalism doesn't like reform and why a reformist project is bound to fail: capitalism will always oppose it, one way or another.

And I could go on. This basically opens up a whole new way of critiquing capitalism: as a rogue general super-AI that we have unleashed without knowing anything about the dangers of general AI. This means that computer scientists researching AI safety are now actively researching ways to stop capitalism.
Is this what Nick Land was getting at? Did I finally *got* Nick Land? Does anything I just said make sense or it is all schizoramblings to you?

>>15563465
>CAPITAL LINE GO UP GOTTA GO FAST SINGULARITY IS HERE

capitalophobia is the #1 social problem in the West, we need to stop the oppression of Capital by excessive regulation and defend Capital against constant attacks from the "progressive" left! any books that will help us in our struggle for Capital and against humans?

>>15515257
>defense of capital
based, what books will teach me how to defend capital with my life using divide and conquer tactics?

>>15489793
>However, infinite growth is neither needed nor possible.
luddite COPE

>>15440623
hyper-based (hyper-pbuh)

>>15431535
capital internalizes all criticisms of itself, to criticize it you have to talk like capital talks. the war is over, you've lost and singularity is closer than ever, the accelerator cannot be stopped

Is accelerationism just tranny cyber-Futurism?

summarize his philosophy in 2-3 sentences, I want to know if I'm dealing with a genius or a charlatan before I dive more deeply into his thought

>>15316790
the existence of alien races refutes Marx's criticism of capitalism, extraterrestial beings provide terrestrial capitalists with infinite supply of surplus value ready to be exploited, extraterrestrial imperialism allows capitalism to reproduce itself without end. accelerationism is real and there really isn't any going back

>>15280494
Discounted utility arrives from the future.

Deontology has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Aristotelian-fascist top-down ethical principles that always screw up viciously. Utilitarianism works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to mathematics: adding up individual utility curves for accessing optimal social utility.