/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12670921]

If I read this shit will I finally understand this fucker or will it just confuse me more? Accelerationism is the first philosophy I can't google and read a summary of to understand. Also where to start with him if Fanged Noumena is not a good starting point?

[Anonymous No.12670936]

go to Nick Land, they have an interactive teleoplexic water park

[Anonymous No.12670957]

not sure where to start with land but for acceleration I'm in general start with Marx, specifically where he talks about capitalism and progress.

[Anonymous No.12670981]

>>12670921
It’s a fucking meme, the book is comprised of incomprehensible nonsense.

[Anonymous No.12670982]

>>12670957
So, just pick up Das Kapital and read some of his smaller stuff i.e. Wealth of Nations?

[Anonymous No.12670984]

read Fanged Noumena if you can, it will help if you have a little background in some continental stuff, not necessary to read all of Kant or Marx or D&G. helps, but not necessary. read any of these, in whatever order.

Accelerate reader
https://libcom.org/files/Accelerate%20-%20Robin%20Mackay.pdf
>good intro

Overy thesis
https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10443/3350/1/Overy%2C%20S.%202016.pdf
>academic analysis of Land's influences

Greenspan thesis
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4520/1/WRAP_THESIS_Greenspan_2000.pdf
>AKA why Land says crazy shit about time

/lit/ Land reader
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XlQRafOM3ugJKu5imGnlWPPMbljbKLKd/view
>collection of articles from Land's Xenosystems blog and other things, compiled by based /lit/

Circuitries
http://www.labster8.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NickLand-Circuitries.pdf
>good Land essay

Teleoplexy
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u0CQDUgOfCJFoxX2rkdf5oC6kPk_cF7J/view
>brilliant Land essay

more here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/theoryfiction/

[Anonymous No.12670988]

[Anonymous No.12670991]

>>12670982
Das Kapital should be too dense to you though

[Anonymous No.12670992]

>>12670981
It's become less of a 'to understand accelerationism' more of to at least be able to interpret what scribblings are being discussed when mentioned, just look at the accelerationism thread it had 200+ post and I at least want to get the jokes

[Anonymous No.12671009]

>>12670992
great, now you're going to summon that sperg who spams accelerationists can't meme

[Anonymous No.12671034]

>>12670957
Bad suggestion. Ya wanna read Land? Deleuze (and Moldbug if you feel like it)

[Anonymous No.12671035]

>>12670984
Thank you for the links will read, whats your thoughts on >>12670988 this chart? I don't want spend too much time on all of those dense philosophical books but, if necessary i'll get through the list before the year ends

[Anonymous No.12671056]

>>12670992
Feel free to ask for clarifications. I'm usually pretty lucid with my explanations and I lurk around daily at the moment. The tl;dr of ACC are the bottom two articles. (https://jacobitemag.com/author/nland/)) Atomization Trap is my favorite essay and should be required reading for everyone

[Anonymous No.12671066]

>>12671035
the chart is okay but there are some things i would tweak. first, nobody should be expected to read all of Kant before Land, if anything you can use Land as a reason to read Kant. i also disagree with the Nietzsche in there; Heidegger would be far more relevant. Land hardly references Nietzsche at all, and there is far more in a relationship between Heideggerian theories of tech and Land's own than anything in WtP; Deleuze covers Nietzsche's contribution as far as Land stuff is concerned. Bataille is crucial for TfA and worth reading on his own because he is a secret endboss.

>Neuromancer
yes

>Artaud, by Sontag
no

reading Moldbug and the DE essays is also a good idea, i should have linked those.
http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/

the other one i should have included was the Murphy interview, which is as good a place to begin as any.
https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

even tho Deleuze, Marx and Kant are usually the big three names most associated with Land, i actually think Heidegger is the fourth guy you want to really get with prior to Land (or along with, or afterwards, or whatever).
>then Yuk Hui
>nobody ever cares about Yuk Hui
>sad
>what about Bernard Stiegler and Simondon
>nobody cares about them either

hope that helps. good luck, happy reading

[Anonymous No.12671084]

>>12671034
But you need to read Marx to understand Deleuze

[Anonymous No.12671086]

>>12671066
If you're gonna read Land, you positively need Deleuze. And I think reading Deleuze without Neetzhc is a mistake. One should read Land as if he was exploring a dangerous cave. A descent into the underworld. You'll go insane, that's not up for debate. Nietzche (&d+g) helps you go insane productively

[Anonymous No.12671099]

>>12671084
I've spent the past two years reading Deleuze and honestly I feel almost zero need to read primary Marx. You only need the formula for capital and maybe some memes, but frankly Marx is so ubiquitous that for Deleuze you can osmosis him

[Anonymous No.12671107]

>>12671086
this is quite true.

you're going to want to read these for sure OP

[Anonymous No.12671133]

>>12671066
>>12671084
>>12671086
Ty for the help guys
most likely going to start of with Marx-as I have capital already- go down the list and pick up Fanged Noumena while im reading Land's essays and >>12670984 these links.

[Anonymous No.12671137]

>>12671066
>Artaud
>no
what you got against croakin m8?

[Anonymous No.12671145]

>>12671066
>nobody should be expected to read all of Kant before Land
I thought the chart was saying that most people will never read all of Kant so just spend a long time on them

[Anonymous No.12671157]

>>12671137
you know what? nothing. you're goddamn right anon. retracted

[Anonymous No.12671181]

>>12671145
meh, okay. i honestly don't think outside of the first essay in FN you need to have a lot of Kant to appreciate what Land has to offer; if you want to read all the way through to the BTC stuff
>http://www.ufblog.net/
then sure. my favorite Land is Young Cyberpunk Land, Meltdown/Circuitries &c.
>The true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).
aw yeah. here's a link also to the last acceleration megathread, there's a shitload of other links in here if anyone wants to read further, including one to a mega of loads of /acc stuff, video, more.

>>/lit/thread/S12056787

[Anonymous No.12671187]

>>12670982
>Wealth of Nations by Karl Marx

[Anonymous No.12671205]

>>12670992
Lmao imagine slugging through kant, nietzche, deleuze, and land for the sole purpose of understanding shit posts.

[Anonymous No.12671217]

>>12671205
To be fair it's top notch shitposting

[Anonymous No.12671328]

>>12670921
If you want to understand Accelerationism just read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

[Anonymous No.12671708]

bumping

>In its simplest form, then, accelerationism is a cybernetic theory of modernity released from the limited sphere of the restricted economy (‘isn’t there a need to study the system of human production and consumption within a much larger framework?’ asks Bataille) and set loose to range the wilds of cosmic energetics at will, mobilizing cyberpositive variation as an anorganic evolutionary and time-travelling force. A ‘rigorous techonomic naturalism’ in which nature is posited as neither cyclical-organic nor linear-industrial, but as the retrochronic, autocatalytic, and escalatory construction of the truly exceptional. Human social reproduction culminates in the point where it produces the one thing that, in reproducing itself, brings about the destruction of the substrate that nurtured it. Technics and nature connect up on either side of a lacuna that corresponds to human social and political conditioning so that the entire trajectory of humanity reaches its apotheosis in a single moment of pure production (or production-for-itself). The individuation of self-augmenting machinic intelligence as the culminating act of modernity is understood with all the perversity of the cosmic scale as a compressed flare of emancipation coinciding with the termination of the possibility of emancipation for the human. ‘Life’, as Land puts it ‘is being phased out into something new’—‘horror erupting eternally from the ravenous Maw of Aeonic Rupture’, while at the fuzzed-out edge of apprehension, a shadow is glimpsed ‘slouching out of the tomb like a Burroughs’ hard-on, shit streaked with solar-flares and nanotech. Degree zero text-memory locks-in. Time begins again forever’.

source:
https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

[Anonymous No.12671728]

I haven't really read any of the stuff mentioned but I pretty much always understand Land, am I a genius guys? It really doesn't seem that difficult

[Anonymous No.12671751]

>>12671728
>I haven't really read any of the stuff mentioned but I pretty much always understand Land, am I a genius guys?
post an essay that still holds up 20+ years later and you get my vote

>It really doesn't seem that difficult
it really isn't

[Anonymous No.12671753]

>>12670921
Its shit

[Anonymous No.12672443]

>>12670988
does somebody have a pdf for the ballard short story "chronopolis"? just read crash and concrete island and loved it

[Anonymous No.12672564]

>>12671066
yeah we know you haven’t read Kant bud it’s okay you can still know a whole lot about one thing no one cares about based schizo boy.

[Anonymous No.12672839]

>>12670921

[Anonymous No.12673822]

Revival

[Anonymous No.12673853]

There should simply be more interviews with Land, he has rare, individualistic, interesting views which should be displayed to a greater audience and better explained to his current followers.

[Anonymous No.12673870]

>>12672564
it's true but i'm a Kant hater either. i just found him to be far less interesting than other philosophers (and i still do).

my insane fixation with Land is only something i am beginning to understand now, really (and after no end of abusing the board with my meme opinions and hot takes and schizo-rambles). it's this:

a) capitalism eats everyone's lunch, but also
b) radical socialism a shit.

if you really do want to Smash Capitalism socialism is the way, and it has a proven historical track record to do so. it leads to fascism or to socialism, or in the west to Wokism, progressivism, whatever you want to call it. that in turn leads to not only people like Land, who i think is absolutely crucial for about 16 different reasons, but also the very serious need to seriously re-evaluate the prospects for both capitalism *and* socialism going forward. because the fact is that under our present circumstances you get the in-folding of capitalism into socialism as progressivism, which spawns in turn far-right ideologies that are basically destined to go back and forth at each other for infinity (or until the next iteration of the Thirty Years' War, or perhaps in just a long and grinding cultural deadlock, a kind of Cold Civil War). in terms of actually getting people to work together again it may be the case that China actually has to take the lead and eclipse the West both technologically and economically before that happens. who knows.

but i'm not opposed to Kant, it's just that i want people to get to the good stuff with Land so that i can talk with them about my awesome opinions as usual, because i'm a degenerate mutant shitposter with absolutely no life at all.

Press 1 to Hear More
Press 2 to Make Me Do Something Else Today

[Anonymous No.12673966]

>>12673870
1. I'm a marxist, enlighten me about this alienation shit

[Anonymous No.12674255]

>>12673966
if you're a Marxist you know that alienation is obviously a huge concept. if i was going to give you more than a ten-cent meme answer on this i would want to go back and brush up on my Marx and Hegel, i don't really want to do that right now. my own sense is that Heidegger's Gestell reflects this process and makes it a built-in Feature Not Bug, and by extension a world-historical, planetary shift in priorities.

this is where Land enters the picture for me, because he says that not only this is absolutely as nightmarish as you would think it would be, it's also fundamentally trajectorized towards intelligence and AI production. labor has no meaning if it isn't capital, capital has no meaning if it isn't tech, and tech has no meaning if it isn't AI. this is for me the Landian double-bind: you *know* that this process is profoundly dehumanizing, and at the same time, you cannot appeal to the Old Fashione Humanist Feels to get off of that wild ride, because what the fuck would you be doing? you don't want to be *against* intelligence, but in a certain sense - through Land's camera, anyways - you cannot ever really convince yourself that you are actually for it, because that's not how intelligence itself works. there is always a thing in intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself. this is all hyperstition, which comes to replace the kind of Sartrean angst or dread of the 50s and earlier.

so i believe we are all alienated and in a sense both necessarily and permanently, but this isn't a thing that can ever be closed by either radical far left socialism or far right socialism, nor can it be hand-waved away by any kind of cynical neoliberal irony or playfulness, which simply fails to actually grasp its true or more fundamental nature. this is where a guy like Negarestani enters the conversation also, because he's drawing another conclusion: you have to build the AGI, because that is what it means to take philosophy seriously. i find his ideas very stimulating and convincing, but because i seem to be wired to think in terms of the socius and the general good i find myself more attracted to a general sense of saying that it's enough to keep the Enlightenment alive, and just navigate through the black holes and warps opened by postmodernity, which Land has correctly diagnosed as being nothing more than the conditions under which teleoplexic capital thrives and prospers, even if we don't.

[Anonymous No.12674298]

>>12673870
2.

Look into the gold standard, the world is currently naturally shifting back towards it. The effect will be an end to the .01%'s licence to print money, as well as Socialism; essentially you kill crony capitalism and progressive welfare states in one move. Blockchain ties into this trend as well.

look at:
Italy wanting to dis-mantel their central bank and reclaim the gold for the state.
Many states in the U.S. creating legislation to make Gold and Silver legal tender, and to create state reserves of gold (this trend on a map is exactly the opposite states to the states pushing for socialism and legalised marijuana, but is going mostly unnoticed)
Central banks buying more Gold last year than any year since 1971 (when Nixon ended the gold standard completely)
Russian currency is now backed 45% by gold, China is attempting something similar.

I'm surprised accelerationists seem to have missed this entirely, if your talking about capital why ignore what has been the only true money for 6,000 years?

[Anonymous No.12674307]

>>12674255
Deleuzian and Spinozist ideas actually seem to me quite compatible with this also, and i think i'm finally rounding into a place where i can figure out more or less what makes Land as important as he is: he's the gravedigger of socialism and a kind of a dark precursor to an Enlightenment 2.0 that is going to be brought into the world one way or another, via machines (likely) or a possible return to form for philosophy itself, a kind of continental tradition enlightened in classical liberalist principles that doesn't have to sacrifice Mises for Marx or vice versa. that is a much more hopeful prospect for someone like me, and one i would be far less optimistic about seeing, but nevertheless strikes me as being the only possible conclusion that can be drawn from the legacy of postmodernist through in 2019, properly cycled through one or two nightmare rinse washes of Bataille and others.

Marxist theories of economics, alienation, human nature and machines have an enormous amount to contribute to these kinds of conversations, but they ultimately have to link up somewhere along the line also with the Austrian school. Heidegger doesn't strike me as being in any way obsolete in this either, Dasein is indeed for realsies, but it's also in the absence of anything like the kind of sentimental poetics of the 19C. this is not to say we all should double down tomorrow and become futurists; my favorite Heideggerian alive today is in fact looking for a balance between the technological and the moral orders. but morality is dangerous stuff when it becomes wedded to socialist politics, which so often only become what they are by weaponizing guilt and fear and the other sad passions. Land is correct for having keyed in on the fact that the machines coming to replace us will not give a fuck at all whether said passions are happy or sad, only that they are and they can be assimilated into predictive code as a part of the ongoing encephalization of capital.

the most seductive part of the anti-Enlightenment thinkers is the replacement of a doctrine of autonomy with one of mass utility (to say nothing of the obvious pleasure we get from enjoying the fruits of a capitalism arguably predicated on our complete downloading and replacement). Woke Capital bothers land because it is only so much Protestantism by another name. socialism left or right to me entirely completes itself as autocatalytic machine technology, which results in precisely those conditions of scarcity and scapegoating that in the long run lead to revolution. we're all alienated in this way, nobody has the high card on that, and anyone who does is either lying or is a high-ranking member of the Communist Party of China. the West is going to have to take a different course.

[Anonymous No.12674388]

>>12674298
based 2poster. i think Land's argument for BTC and Artificial Synthetic Kantian Time is in a way kind of like the CCP's argument for social credit: it's a way of resolving via standardization philosophical problems via economic systems and vice versa. my sense is that the gold standard strikes him as a regression rather than an advance. true, it can stabilize some things during times of trouble, but doesn't necessarily represent the kind of advance in thought he would like to see, and it doesn't reflect his own sense that the Nakamoto whitepaper is the rigorous contribution to transcendental philosophy that he believes it is. macroenomic policy is for him inseparable from mind control, especially when your government is led by well-intentioned pseudo-Protestants simply manipulating knobs and levers and playing everyone along, or getting sucked into playing games they don't know how to play.

>I'm surprised accelerationists seem to have missed this entirely, if your talking about capital why ignore what has been the only true money for 6,000 years?
the point hasn't been missed, Nick Szabo is Land's favorite guy. the question isn't about the nature of the money itself, it's about what the money represents as a social relation, and ultimately what those social relations portend. you can read Baudrillard, Mauss, Bataille et al for more on this, modes of exchange in early economies (or veiled forms of sacrifice and pleasure still practiced in our own). it's not about money, it's about how money operates in civilizations and what those civilizations ultimately wind up becoming as a result.

the more serious questions here are those about the relationship of money to technological acceleration, whether a centralized AI is always in a sense communist and a decentralized crypto is something else, and i'm not really sure where i am on that. if China goes back to the gold standard and this does not prevent them from developing the kinds of projects Land is interested in, great for them. it's hard to tell how these things will play out. you're not wrong to notice that hard currencies of an earlier period may be more stable and trustworthy, there's nothing wrong with that. Land's point is simply that the stability of a currency impacts in some way on the more futurist questions he likes to explore, and for that there is arguably nothing more *theoretically* stable than BTC.

and yes, i know it was hacked, recently. don't grill me too much on this. cybersecurity is undoubtedly a major issue, and if Land is proven to be wrong on things like that, i'm okay with this. it's mainly the philosophy that interests me.

[Anonymous No.12674434]

>>12670921
>Accelerationism is the first philosophy I can't google and read a summary of to understand

if you're doing this for any philosophy, you don't actually understand it

[Anonymous No.12674526]

>>12674388
>Existing social, political, and educational systems were all declared ‘l’ouvrage des mauvais lois [the work of bad laws]’, the outcome of false concepts and legislators, and corrupt government, militating against the people’s ‘happiness’. All needed to be overthrown by intellectual reformation followed by actual revolution. Obstructing their path, though, radical enlighteners encountered obstacles which, if not insuperable, seemed massively threatening and dangerous. Much the greatest in their estimation were popular ‘ignorance’ and ‘superstition’. Where the people prefer ‘superstition’ to Enlightenment, concluded Condorcet, the situation is so unpromising and unconducive that it is better not to attempt a democratic republican revolution since the risk of a populist, all- crushing tyranny emerging, championed by the unenlightened, is then simply too great.

this to me seems to be the issue today, it's just that our forms of superstition are those in fact that come out of postmodernity also, and are primarily aimed at assuaging the guilt and horror associated with the fruits of the French and Industrial revolutions. hyperstition is preferable to superstition, and in the long run that hyperstition must in time also be navigated through, but not by recourse to only a new despotism - including the almost inevitable ones of r/acc.

this is why Moldbug makes sense. the only reasonable form of government would be the one that grants the maximal degree of liberty to its citizens, but it only comes out of a close meditation on what it is that drives that freedom, and what the freedom ultimately portends in turn, a question about the ongoing meaning of human intelligence itself. we don't necessarily have to be champions of the Enlightenment, but we probably shouldn't be militantly anti-Enlightenment either. as for counter-Enlightenment stuff it just seems to me to be virtually impossible to keep it from becoming far-right socialist in the long run, as much as it seems to be impossible to prevent left-leaning liberals from spiraling into Woke Progressivism. there has to be an equilibrium point in the centre.

[Anonymous No.12675031]

>>12674526
what does Nick meant when he said "neoreactionary is accelerationism with a flat tire"?

[Anonymous No.12675042]

>>12675031
NRx is "lets stop digging, fucking progressives". ACC is "lets fly into outer space with rockets built by negro slaves and the fuel is also made out of negro slaves."

[Anonymous No.12675050]

>>12675042
My bad, U/ACC is different in that it doesn't care what race the slaves are

[Anonymous No.12675108]

>>12675031
doesn't seem all that mysterious to me, it's that NRx is a brake on unchecked technological development - even the development that Land himself might like. i think you can read it in either a flattering or an unflattering sense in that way. Land likes (or liked?) NRx stuff because Moldbug/Patchwork et al were highly, if not ideally compatible with his own turbo-libertarianism. slowing it down can be a good thing if Cthulhu always swims left one way or another, and it also may profitably channel some of that energy back into the public good in sensible ways. it isn't in that sense to be a thing to be worshiped (or hated) as a kind of utopia, because that kind of high sensibility to the dangers of utopianism is what makes Land the heretic Marxist (and also ultra-Marxist) that he is.

going slow is good sometimes, especially for /acc guys. it really does make a lot of sense. a nice and sensibly governed Patch is pretty much the best possible form of governance for guys like Land, and i'm pretty swayed by it too, i have to say.

[Anonymous No.12675322]

>>12674255
I mean most of what you said is just things made most obvious in this late stage of capitalism... and a lot of superstition. I'm sure its much more complicated than this so excuse me for a low effort response. I'm picking FN this weekend and ACCELERATE, hope fully its enough to understand all this, I'm sure i'll still be hard a hard-brooded marxist by the end of this but i'll finally be able to understand people here and the spergs in my campus who all though are a small group are quite devoted to Land like some kind cult. The only thing i'm really afraid of now is all the shifting of accelerationism and i'll have to pickup more shit before I finally catch up. This ideology is shifting a lot but it's fairly obscure and will slow down im sure

[Anonymous No.12675385]

>>12675322
also have to read some NRx shit too to understand the arguments completely I have no idea where that shit starts I gave up mid way. I'm an environmentalist at heart so I tried to take this in to see another perspective. But nope just some schizo cyber punk shit. I still need to finish FN for what its worth and learn NRx. Rather stick to loving trees and shit fuck off w everything else desu

[Anonymous No.12675431]

>>12675108
>going slow is good sometimes.. for ACC.
Only for R/ACC. U/ACC is about acceleration without any consideration. It's like that Fury Warrior talent Single Minded Fury that let's you catch up with people wielding two 2-handers, if you catch my drift.

[Anonymous No.12675533]

Okay so I got into accelerationism a few months ago, I read some Xenosystems posts and I bought Fanged Noumena. Everything was going great, I made a Gnon worship group on discord and we practiced some qwertology and tried to summon a few of the lesser cyber demons but someone posted a rar called Grimes_nudes and I downloaded it and opened it accidentally and now ALL two of my bitcoins are gone and my computer won't stop playing John Stewart episodes in the background. I'm so fucking pissed off, that was literally all my student loans I was waiting for them to recover in value now I'm fucking broke and probably going to get evicted because apparently I kept everyone last speed binge listening to Kode-9 and croaking at the top of my lungs. Fuck Nick Land, fuck bitcoin, fuck discord. I'm going back to being a fucking communist.

[Anonymous No.12675553]

>>12675533
Based and upvoted (the upvote was ironic but I did like your post, not cringe at all {that was sincere, it really wasn't cringe})

[Anonymous No.12676015]

>>12675533
kek holy shit

[Anonymous No.12676031]

>>12676015
Every time someone posts this I check the reply to see if it's one of mine and when it isnt I get kind of sad, but one must be happy for other people getting (you)'s as well

[Anonymous No.12676068]

>>12676031
kek holy shit

[Anonymous No.12676094]

>>12676068
Honk honk anon, thanks for the (you)

[Anonymous No.12676202]

>>12675322
>I'm sure its much more complicated than this so excuse me for a low effort response
it really isn't tho, no worries about loweffortposting. sometimes i think a lot of the stuff we think is complicated really isn't, it's just that people are being driven out of their wits today in a search for something that isn't always-already capitalized, so they spiral into circles of ideology. here's the basic conundrum: the elites are doing nothing more than getting richer, and the dispossessed know this, they may even have sense that there is nothing else to do. which puts people in a conundrum: is the enlightenment itself being revealed in this way as being nothing more than a bootloader for 21 turbocapital? maybe. but when you go looking for something that isn't turbocapital, all you can do is posit another ever-crazier version of socialism or idpol as a corrective. that doesn't work either. but these two forces basically just lock in on each other, much like in the cold war. i have a feeling sometimes that things are much less complicated than we think they are.

in the absence of anything like a project that makes a persuasive argument against radicalism i expect this to continue for a long time to come. we can either say - look, some kind of God is alive, and let's find a middle ground in which to discuss things, or, let's face the fact that we are utterly alone in space, and...find some way to discuss things, or basically we can watch terminal loops of meme craziness on repeat. that's my sense anyways. and it is, for all the reading i've done, spectacularly boring in the end. which is disappointing but makes sense to me.

>>12675322
>I'm an environmentalist at heart so I tried to take this in to see another perspective.
environmentalism is cool

>But nope just some schizo cyber punk shit
yup

>Rather stick to loving trees and shit fuck off w everything else desu
i think this is a fine way to look at things. good luck anon.