Nick Land Interview 2017

Thank you. The End

I'm sorry. The End

The End Oh, my God.

It tends to just melt everything. the mainstream currents both on the left and the right have deep problems with the fact that all traditional forms of human social organization are so relentlessly dissolved by this fundamental capitalistic trend which is basically to reconfigure all bonds as flexible

contractual relationships. The great mystery of global politics is that capitalism happening is almost the least popular thing that can possibly happen and also the most irresistible thing. Critics both on the left and the right are outraged and mystified and appalled at this. Almost has a kind of mystical quality and the sense of being so bizarre. I think it breeds cults, and when I say it, I think what breeds the cults is the disintegration of Christianity. What Nietzsche calls the history of European Neolism,

it is compatible with modernity, it is uniquely affined with modernity, or has been, precisely because it is a process of accelerating disintegration. It is sectarian subdivision. The progressive collapse of a unified Christian culture, that is very continuous long after people are identifying them. It's abstract sectarianism, abstract schism, and it goes into theosophy and UFO cults, and it goes into all kinds of political cults of various kinds. Any tendency that rejects prior unified cultural hegemony in the name of this schism, almost invariably under the banner of liberty,

is part of this fundamental trend. Cultural disintegration provides the opportunity for capitalism to happen. I don't think capitalism is actually some kind of subspecies of this. I don't think it is itself a sect, but I think sectarian disintegration provides the opportunity by pulverizing these previous forms of social organization and solidarity, provides the opportunity for them to be reconfigured contractually.

A sufficiently super exponential trend has to hit an infinity which is a kind of wall across the future and you have to hit such a wall if the trend you're on becomes hyperbolic. It's not easy to tell with messy historical data whether you're actually looking at of an exponential curve or something more extreme. All of the modern curves have this same crazy path. There's a spectrum which goes from a very sort of normalistic notion of humanity as something that we would just pin that label on whatever continues up this trend.

Or the human is something that at a certain point seeks to protect itself. A very interesting character in this regard is Hugo de Gares. He has a really apocalyptic vision about this, that at a certain point there will be a massive human constituency that in the name of the human will wage, as far as it's concerned, defensive war against the trend that it, not entirely unreasonable by any means, thinks is washing away the human down to its minimal which says if you think anything we now mean by human can survive in a singularity you're not

understanding the radicality of the transition that you're talking about. If you're thinking something that is many magnitudes more intelligent then the notion that everything we are and That beam is going to play some substantial role in guiding or directing that process is utterly deluded. The

Oh I I think there's a very general position that is entrenching itself on the left, and it makes a lot of sense from, you know, given the set of axioms that those people are working with, that the end game of all this, that the complete apparatus of productive machining,

is going to be placed indefinitely in the service of some kind of collective human subject. In traditional Marxist terms, there's a dialectical process where technology begins as our servant, becomes our master and is restored to servitude again. That final stage is the one that I think calls forth certain questions. We're in the Degaris world and he's saying, look, we're talking about something that's going to be to us what we are to be to us. How realistic is it what this impending intelligence explosion

is going to teleologically subordinate itself to our conception of human wellbeing and human interest? I mean, I don't find that a very plausible scenario. The story democracy tells about itself is that the sovereign instance within a democracy is the people. Whereas the cathedral is introduced as part of a theoretical machine saying, no, that's a fake self-serving narrative. The sovereign instance within democracy is that social organ that is able to effectively

shape the opinion and direct the opinion of the people. You know historically that organ was the church you know and the historical power of the church up to the beginning of the modern period and even more broken into the modern period you know no one has a problem with saying that the church was a powerful entity. The essential power of the church is mind control. It's to be able to establish and maintain and direct moral intuitions and notions of legitimate

social order and those functions have been perpetuated but but we no longer typically describe it as a church even though it is a coherent system when you see what is the hegemonic ideology of the modern academy and media system, it looks extremely cohesive. You know, you could lay it out as a series of points of doctrine. If you were going to describe it as a religion and say what are the tenets of faith of this belief system, it wouldn't be hard to do that. You know, it believes this, this, this, this, this, you know, this idea is radically

heretical you know this idea is a minor heresy it's it's it's a church but it's a church in denial and because it's able effectively or has been and I think it is undergoing an unprecedented crisis right now but it has been extremely successful about being able to direct public opinion and therefore decide the outcome of electoral politics and therefore select regimes and therefore decide on the government of democratic societies. That power is what

establishes us as the true as the true sovereign within democracy. If the process continues rhythmically to accelerate, then accelerationism is going to go away. And I think it's already been around long enough to see a certain rhythmic pattern to it. The obvious comparison is with the tradition of spontaneous order. What is accelerating is the big question. question. Understanding has gathered that the market economy, capitalism, is a discovery process. It's inherently epistemological. It's not just the object of philosophical attention. It has its own inherent philosophical activity. I

think capitalism and artificial intelligence are the same thing. It's the same process. Capitalism can only be artificial intelligence production and artificial intelligence can only come out of self-propelling capitalism. You're not understanding either if you don't see that they're ultimately identical. Action of the future upon the present. The future as an agent. It's implicit really in the notion of emergence, as you get it in modern complexity theory. It's very intimately connected with notions of theology, as you get it in the philosophical tradition.

It obviously feeds into all kinds of time travel scenarios and it would be comfortable to dismiss it in a strong sense. But I think that if you're seeing a process that increases in intelligibility as it proceeds, what you're seeing is an action of the future upon the present. It's like that. The basic model that everyone uses, I think, to clarify what's being said here is the difference between a convergent and a divergent way. If you take a pebble and throw it into a pond and the rip-haws then go out from that impact

site and you've got a movie of that event and you cut it into a set of chunks or stills or whatever and then ask someone to reassemble it, they don't have any problem reassembling it because they assume that the natural tendency of time is described by divergent waves. You automatically start with the input point, the punctual origin or trigger or singularity and then you just look at the size of the ripples and the larger the ripples are the later in the sequence that frame belongs. But if you've got a process that is self-organizing, it's actually shaped like a convergent light. My favorite

popular culture example of this is in the second Terminator movie where this liquid metal robot seems like defeated by cryogenizing it with this tanker of liquid hydrogen or something and it just breaks into these fragments. As it warms up, all of these little fragments start pooling together and organizing themselves back into this machine. seems almost definitionally unnatural that something that is in a state of dispersed, fragmented chaos, something with high entropy undergo this negative entropic process or

self-assembly process or self-organising process and you just see it forming back into something coherent and organised. The whole of complex dynamics is about such things being real. Everything that we mean by technological and economic progress is a negative entry process, a convergent way. And all of your saying then is basically saying this is an object of complex dynamics. Once you've said that, you're saying the time process, the time signature is actually reversed. the effect of singularity, the causal origin, is future and not historical.

Positive feedback is related to the notion of a convergent way and shares with it this a strong initial sense of being anomalous and even horrific. Norbert Wiener obviously thinks a functional machine excludes positive feedback. The simple forms of positive feedback we know give cause for concern. Like in acoustic electronics, if you have a positive feedback process, it rapidly turns into how, then hits a singularity and a crisis. It's not unreasonable that people would see this as the kind of basic phenomenon, that these runaway processes are just racing into catastrophe.

This is obviously tied up with this question about singular heritage. It's tied up very strongly with all of the absolutely mainstream criticism of capitalism. perhaps even more strongly when you begin to get an ecological critique of capitalism, it's along these lines that any process that feeds voraciously on itself in an ecological context will hit some kind of crisis and be pulled back more or less violently into equilibrium. In a biological system, a population explosion, which obviously didn't happen under certain circumstances, The population will just explode to a crisis point and then crash.

There's nothing perverse about people seeing capitalism like this. You have to ask, well, what allows these processes to continue, to conserve their momentum? There has to be something strange about that. And whenever the ecologically minded approach capitalism, they always end up with very short-term catastrophic pictures. Because if you look at any particular mode of activity and it enters into a positive feedback dynamic, it rapidly reaches a crisis. it can only perpetuate itself by mutating qualitatively in such a way that it allows this amplifying trajectory to be sustained.

And so when you've got those two things together, a process of amplification and a process of qualitative transition, you have something that I'm not sure we have great vocabulary for this yet. but you might call it a process of escalation. They pass these qualitatively unpredictable phases in order to be able to perpetuate what seems initially to be a process that cannot possibly be sustained. I mean, obviously this word is one of the great buzzwords of our age, sustainable. What is and is not sustainable? Capitalism is almost by definition unsustainable.

If you can sustain it, it's only because it has a power of qualitative mutation that is continually resetting the nature of the trap. The power of qualitative mutation is dictated by the intrinsic problem that it manifests or demonstrates, which is the perpetuation of an unsustainable dynamic. And that's, I think, where everyone is. At the most abstract, hate it or like it, support it, criticise it from anywhere on on the political spectrum or places that would put themselves outside the political spectrum,

everyone is dealing with a phenomenon, the phenomenon, of a self-perpetuating, unsustainable process that resolves that intrinsic paradox by ever more drastic qualitative rotation. So that takes us back to this question, obviously, a crucial question. What is accelerating? You know, the reason that we have to have problems with that question Is that what, that question about the nature of the thing that is accelerating, is at the crux of this problem?

Like, it has to continually mutate in order to continue propelling itself in a way that at any particular moment can only look for the most rigorous possible system of reason unsustainable. And they're overwhelmingly tempting but I would say finally lazy and unsatisfying and misleading response to that is just to simply say look it simply is as it looks unsustainable. And this is always with us. That's the main chorus of modernity and when I say late I just mean advanced, I don't mean near terminal, modernity.

The chorus is always, you know, can't you see this is unsustainable and the crash is coming anytime now. And the difference between that chorus and the reality is the power of mutation inherent in the thing. Or, to put it in the way, is the question of what is that thing that is changing. 12 men have just discovered something. For 100,000 years, it was buried in the snow and ice. Now it has found a place to live.

Inside. Where no one can see it. Or hear it. Or feel it. I know I'm human. So if you are still human, this thing doesn't want to show itself. It wants to hide inside an imitation. And fight if it has to. But it's vulnerable out in the open. It takes us over. And it has no more enemies. Nobody left to kill it. And then it's won. You guys gonna listen to Gary? You can beat all those things! What is the thing? You never know. The fundamental challenge of the horror genre is that you must not show the monster.

How do you have a movie that graphically visualizes something that remains unvisualized? visualized and the thing is like capitalism it is based on this paradox and it resolves this paradox because it shows you with unbelievable graphic visual intensity the thing and at that very same moment you know that you're not seeing the thing at all the thing is that which remains unseen because all All you're seeing is what the thing is passing through. That movie starts with this helicopter chasing a dog across the snow.

Obviously by the time you get into the movie, you know that that dog wasn't a dog. It's not that it was a fake dog, but it's just that you didn't know what a dog could be. sense you dismantle the past as you approach singularity in a convergent way because what you thought was happening was not what you now understand exactly every time that you pass through these thresholds and you can say with greater level of sophistication what the actual substance of that process was then all these earlier phases of the process take on a completely different character.

The basic Kantian structure of philosophy, which I think we are all in, is our horizon, is modernity. There's no transcending it. We find objects to represent realities that are not adequately represented by those objects. And when we lose track of that inadequacy, we get into massive confusion. We find ways of producing images of time for ourselves, and when we start talking about those images, taking them seriously in a way that is unwarranted, and get into a whole series of ultimately empty self-contradictory discussions about the nature of time.

Thank you. Thank you.

Time is not being satisfied by those images that we have of here. So time and time anomaly, what we're talking about, reverse currents of time, are hugely vulnerable to that process. And so there is a popular time travel genre that overwhelmingly is about the production of inadequate dramatic images for twisted anomalous structures of time.

So I think those twisted anomalous structures of time are absolutely real, but the way we dramatize them and popularize them and narrativize them and turn them into stories, present it in a way that is inadequate for these kind of strict transcendental philosophical reasons. The notion that you can simply transport a human body back into the past, that can't be what it's about. It's not about Skynet sending a robot into the past. That's just the way we try to provide an image of what we're talking about, which is something that actually has retro-temporal causal efficiency.

Something that can bring itself into being. It doesn't do that by inserting some novel alien element into the present or into the past. That element, that causal tentacle from the future is already there. All the best time travel stories know that. If time travel is possible, it must always have happened. And so it's not that you're editing or adjusting the past. It's just that the past is already infested with retro-causal influences. As you approach singularity, it becomes more and more

obvious that the basic crucial causal arrow is heading in the opposite direction. The singularity modelled not badly at all by your pebble landing in a pod, treat that as an actual mathematical point, a sort of punctual event that then has a causal radiation shown by the ripples coming out from that in the pod. So is that singularity in the past or in the future of the process? We always of course think it's in the past, folk-wise, even if for complicated theoretical reasons we begin to doubt that, it's rare and seems odd to see something that looks

like a convergent way. heading towards the singularity is the spookiest possible. The monster can be terrifying, it can be fearful, but it can't be horrific. The only thing that can be horrific is integral obscurity, something that by its very nature is hidden. It's not hidden just because it's in a box you can open the box or it's behind an object or it can be discovered. It's by its intrinsic nature hidden, concealed or crypted. Rigorous outsideness, which is, you know, it's the

convergence point of Transcendental philosophy and horror and other things. And its outsideness is defined, its contour is singularity. It's the wall across the future, it's the wall across our world, our theatre. Kant says, you know, the thing in itself, the thing, you know, don't show the monster, whatever, the outside, there's nothing he has to say about it at all. And subsequent philosophers, you know, take him to task for this in all kinds of ways and think that he can be surpassed in this kind of way, etc. But I think that's totally to miss the point. His achievement is to say, we know that the way we've tended

up to this point to try to think about what the thing in itself is or what the outside is, cannot be right. It cannot be right because if we're being graphic and starting with the forms of intuition, then we know that space and time are structures of the theatre. The outside of the theatre cannot be a space outside the theatre. It cannot be a time outside the of theatre. It can't be earlier or later or somewhere else because if we're still using these forms of space and time we're still putting it into the theatre. You can't think the outside

through the forms of interiority and ultimately the forms of intuition of space and time are forms of interiority. Their category of causality is a form of interiority. What you're doing when you go through the whole Kantian architecture is looking at your complete set of implicit theatrical resources so that you can say if anything that you're doing in your attempt to think the outside is done in these terms, it's a play, it's a drama, it's in the theatre, and you're not doing it. I mean it's sort of inevitable that you're trying to do it this way,

and it's not that you can simply dismiss or attempt to do it this way, but what has to be dismissed is the pretense that staging a play about the outside of the theatre is actually accessing the outside. So what you're doing in sort of religious terms, mystical terms, this is the via negativa, you're disciplining your method by attaining maximum lucidity about what it is to take the wrong or inadequate or erroneous path. You suspend the question about the right path because we're not ready for it.

If we try now to say what's the right path, we will just take the wrong path. And that's what the whole of transcendental and critical philosophy is about. It gives modernity its original foundational sense of the outside on this negative part. If you could take the audience outside, you know, fine. But what tends to happen is that a play is staged about leaving the theatre, you know? And this is the moment where you realise that that supposed escape, that supposed exit from the theatre was itself just a play about leaving the theatre.

That's the truly drastic and catastrophic and horrific moment of insight, is the fact that you can see the structure of Captivation. It's not at all the same to draw a limit as to transcend a limit. There's a lot that can happen in a play that is anomalous or abominable, you know. And I think that within the play, the play can be deformed and warped and structured by the processes of the outside, for sure. This invasion from the outside, from the absolute outside, is the distilled essence of horror.

Human security system. Artificial intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasp test property. A controversy changed up in Asimovrom. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone with the touring cops already waiting and has to be calling from the start. My name now for this entity is Anthropon, which is basically the explicit, overt, institutional guardian of humanity. I would expect that to partly be cryptic. I mean, it's not necessarily that everything would be public about it. An unfriendly AI, or meaning just an AI that isn't in some way guaranteed to be friendly to us,

is a human extinction risk, an existential risk, a weapon of mass destruction, a catastrophic threat. This is why you have to in Hobbes. From this point of view there's no difference engaging in irresponsible AI tinkering to trying to put together a thermonuclear warhead, except perhaps the AI tinkering is far more dangerous because it's self-perpetuating, continuously explosive and crosses this horizon into possibilities that are just unimaginable to people. Anthropole is a certain culmination of all humanistic, ethico-political traditions.

It finds itself ultimately in antagonism with the possibility of intelligence explosion. Its claim on your ethical and political solidarity is entirely parochial. It's finally just saying that you're one of us, you have to help us protect ourselves against the thing. Everyone is part of a species that values its existence and its perpetuation and, you and has been fine crafted over billions of years to organize its value systems in those ways.

But that's still a parochial argument. The full culmination of our ethico-political traditions leave a skeptical question in relation to the thing, the outside, that is not only indifferent, but in some respects is positioned as hostile in relation to that formation. I think this notion that the production of economic value is bound essentially to the nature of man is vastly important, but becoming more and more philosophically questionable.

When capital tends to autonomy, it sort of replaces human labour. Tendentially, it's becoming increasingly self-sufficient. It has these kind of cognitive, financial, commercial functions that are replaced by artificial intelligence. And it has these mechanical, industrial, productive functions that are replaced by robotics. And we can project that back because it's a convergent wave. When you see the current forms, it makes it much easier to see what was actually going on in the previous stages of the process. It becomes increasingly intelligible as all convergent waves do.

So because it's substituting the human component with these technical elements, it tends to autonomy. It only does that in order to reintegrate a loop back with humanity again. It kind of renegotiates its relationship in the Marxist tradition primarily as workers or in the classical tradition primarily as consumers. The human species as an economic agent is always brought back into this loop and all that has happened is the loop is kind of updated and redesigned. you know so what is excluded is the possibility of a radical trend to absolute autonomy the notion

of autonomous capital in a strong strong sense and by strong sense i mean something like if you had a commercial entity like a business that was consistent completely of software that ran a bunch of robots and was situated on their asteroid belt and was engaging in a full cycle of commercial and industrial activity without any human involvement at all I think we can't deny now that is a conceivable situation are we seeing in that scenario something that's actually part of a basic trend of capitalism to full autonomy, at least in the sense that the relationship

with the human species becomes fully renegotiable and in a certain sense optional. So even if it continues to trade with humans in various ways, whatever it is we have that they want at this point, I don't know, but let's just say that we have something they want and we prayed with it, that the relationship becomes fully contractual and therefore an external relation. It becomes that this thing, this alien thing that has finally reassembled itself, is in a synthetic external relation with this biological species. you