Hi, I'm Benjamin Studebaker. Hi, I'm Michael Downs. And this is Political Theory 101. So today on Political Theory 101, we're going to be talking about Nick Land. And we've got Mikey Downs on. He's recently written a book about Nick Land and Slavoj Zizek. The book is called Capital vs. Time Energy, a Zizekian Critique of Nick Land.
And I'm going to let Mikey do the introduction on Nick Land because he has spent much more time with Nick Land than I could possibly imagine myself ever having spent. I spent a little bit of time with Nick Land roughly 10 years ago now, when I was research assistant for David Rensiman, who is the supervisor on my Ph.D. at Cambridge. And we were looking up different kinds of anti-democratic theory, looking at what kinds of anti-democratic theory is around for his book, How Democracy Ends. He was looking to think about what are the different ways people today envision democracy could end and are any of those routes plausible? Does any of that seem like it could actually happen? And it was in the course of that that I was first introduced to land.
So I am very, very interested to hear how all of this has been developing, especially because lately there is all of this talk about Nick Land having some kind of influence, influence on the Trump administration. There's all this chatter about that lately. So hopefully we'll get to find out if there is anything to it. So go ahead, Mikey, do your thing. Let me start just by saying how happy I am to be here, to have this conversation with you. I've been looking forward to it all week. So, yeah, I mean, who is Nick Land, right? We could spend two hours just unpacking that, but we won't. Let's see if we can do something with that question in, I don't know, five minutes or so. So Nick Land starts off, he's a really gifted student in philosophy. And after he does his PhD, he becomes a lecturer at Warwick University. This is in the either late 80s, very late, late 80s to early 90s.
And at this point, he is developing his philosophy that he would call libidinal materialism. And for him, this is a kind of little almost secret tradition or trajectory in the history of philosophy. And Kant lays the foundation for it. But ultimately, he thinks that this tradition runs from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Freud up to Bataille. And then later, Deleuze and Guattari are going to become the central philosophical influences for him. But early on, he hadn't gotten to D&G quite yet. And Bataille was really the main thinker that he was engaging with. And for him, I mean, long story short, libidinal materialism is a materialism of base matter or libido.
And typically we think of libido as like human sexual energy, but he views libido as almost a cosmic principle, right? It's the driving force behind the actualization of all things. And so, yeah, early on, he was interested in developing this concept of libidinal materialism. And early on, he's already thinking about how things become new, how matter morphs and produces new objects. So he was always interested in the formation of the new, the production of new things. and um so he he starts off as pretty much you know a really gifted philosophy scholar uh even in his early stuff you can start to detect like okay this guy's gonna end up being somewhat of
an unorthodox thinker uh the traces are there early on um but but in his first and really only like official type of book uh the thirst for annihilation this is what he's doing he's developing his libidinal materialism. At the same time, as he's working on this, he's also writing standalone essays that would really go on to shape a whole generation of thinkers. And this would include many of his students, Mark Fisher, Anna Greenspan, Ian Hamilton Grant, Ray Brossier. You know, there's so many important thinkers that came out of, you know, being his students, his and another theorist named Sadie Plant.
We'll get to that in a second. But he these essays that he wrote in the mid 90s, they're collected in a book called Fang Numina. And this is probably his most famous influential work. And in these essays, he starts to, you know, he's expanding on what he was doing with libidinal materialism. But now D&G really come to take center stage. And he starts thinking in terms of the concepts they develop in Antioedipus in particular, but also cybernetics. And this becomes more and more important to him. And for him, he starts developing his own Deluso-Guattarian concept of capital, of, you know, that Marx's basic famous formula is MCM prime, which is the logic of accumulation for Marx.
For Land, he takes what D&G did in Antioedipus with how they understand capital, and he expands it. So he basically argues in this kind of techno-cybernetic expansion pack on D&G that capitalism is artificial intelligence. This is really the central Randian thesis, is that the cyber positive feedback loops within capitalism that push forward its technological dynamism, its ability to continuously produce and refine new forms of technology is structured towards the production of artificial intelligence. Now, he would also say that this is baked into capitalism early on with how the capitalists competing in a specific market have to compete by enhancing their means of production, revolutionizing their means of production, which generates new forms of scientific knowledge.
So this is a way that capitalism early on is already an intelligence producing machine. Uh, then he's going to also draw from the Austrian school and think of markets as generating intelligence, but ultimately these tendencies, these structural, uh, aspects ultimately culminate in the production of artificial super intelligence. Um, this is why he wants to accelerate the process. Uh, this is where he becomes really the founder of accelerationism and what his accelerationism is all about. This is the big word that still to this day is discussed and debated. What is accelerationism? What is it all about? For land, it's about deregulating capital so as it can speed up the process towards the inevitable production of artificial intelligence. So these
are really the two early periods, the libidinal materialist period, and then the period of the the stuff and fang noumena the core essays there um quickly i'll just say like at this time all of the students i mentioned they all together with land and sadie plant formed a philosophy collective that they would call the cybernetic culture research unit uh abbreviated as ccru and it was uh it was really like nothing in the history of philosophy uh as far as like a philosophy gang or a theory gang. They fused doing philosophy with rave culture, with computer culture, with occultism. This is one of the big aspects that comes into it. It's a kind of like
techno occultism that they produced. And this is based on their discovery of what they call the pneumogram and then for them this pneumogram this time map as they called it has something to do with 45 demon lemurs this is where everybody listening is probably like where is this going but uh we're not going to get too much into the occult stuff um this this is where also based on the rave culture nick got heavy into drugs especially speed uh amphetamine and he ended up abusing it to the point of having a psychotic break in the early 2000s. After his recovery, he and Anna Greenspan, who he ends up being in a relationship with, they moved to Asia.
I think they went to Singapore first, if I'm not mistaken, and then they ended up moving to Shanghai, where they've lived ever since. But in the early 2000s era, they're primarily focused on thinking megacities because for nick and anna both of them this is kind of where they were working as like a philosophical team or duo um they think that megacities are going to be the engines of uh the production of artificial intelligence uh that megacities these dense populations can speed up the the rate of intelligence production and so they were I think in mega cities, uh, starting around 2008 and onwards, uh, he enters his dark enlightenment
period or his neo reactionary period. This is really what made him kind of a thought leader on the right, especially on Twitter. Um, and he, and another guy, Mencia small bug, AKA Curtis Yarvin, they would be kind of the founding figures of the neo reactionary movement. And so from 2008 up into the 2010s, this era is his neoreactionary political moment. Towards the end of this decade, he gets into thinking about Bitcoin a lot. This was when the Bitcoin wave was really hitting. And he wrote a book. It's unfinished, but he wrote a book on cryptocurrency, which was his Bitcoin book.
And it really is one of the best things he ever wrote, even though it remains unfinished. But those are kind of his six main periods. So you have the libidinal materialism period. You have the accelerationist period. You have the CCRU slash occult period, the megacity period, the dark enlightenment, and then the Bitcoin era. And now he's kind of, I don't know what, he's chilling. He's not doing a whole lot of theorizing these days. He's still on Twitter. But yeah, that's, you know, long story short, that's that's who Nick Land is. Yeah. So let's get into the politics of this neo reaction thing. The quote that I I found that I thought really got straight to the point quite early on in the in the book.
It goes something like this. For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed. It is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Habitian, a coherent dark enlightenment devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression. Predisposed in any case to perceive the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob, it conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative, systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption.
The democratic politician and the electorate are bound together by a circuit of reciprocal incitement in which each side drives the other to ever more shameless extremities of hooting, prancing cannibalism until the only alternative to shouting is being eaten. Yeah. What is motivating that? So, OK, here's what is going on behind the theoretical scene, so to speak. So what land is all about is the emancipation of the means of production, which is to say the emancipation of capital, the emancipation of technology, and especially technological potential. That's what he's about.
And he's about it for a number of reasons, some DeLuzo Guattarian. But at the core of it, it's pretty Nietzschean. Like the idea is, OK, well, if the techno capital singularity or artificial super intelligence, if it spells the extinction of the human race, like isn't this guy a kind of pessimistic doomer philosopher? Not from his perspective. And this took me a while to get like he's not sitting there like a mad genius, mad scientist. It's all going according to plan, which is like the meme of him. But really, it's this kind of Nietzschean affirmation of fate, of becoming, of the new. And for him, the human, and this is also Nietzschean, the human isn't anything all that great.
You know, let's let's have the overman. Let's have the Superman, the Ubermensch. Let's have something more beautiful. Right. And for land, whatever forms of artificial intelligence come after us, they are the things that are going to be more beautiful than us. And he views humanity as really a kind of allergic reaction to change, to technological progress, and that humanity itself is conservative in the sense of trying to conserve itself. And he, in all his periods of thought, ultimately just wants us to have the strength to accelerate the process, to let capitalism bring forth the future, and even if that future means a future without us, right?
Now, the thing is, he at some point, like in the 90s, he would just affirm that. And a lot of leftists could actually get behind this, like transhumanist types of leftists, post-humanist types of leftists. They could say, OK, well, you know, it's not like. It's not like you're doing this to hurt the human. You're not trying to it's it's more of just this spirit of becoming to remaining open to the new. And so there's a kind of like wild anarchist materialism, something like that baked into this is the way they saw it. But in a famous interview that Land did with Justin Murphy, Justin asked him about this. And Nick was just like, I'm tired of playing these rhetorical games. He was like, basically, he was saying, look, when I was with the CCRU and I was at work, I had to play these games because everybody's around.
he was around was basically a leftist, right? And so he would find ways of trying to code this in a way that was acceptable for the leftist he was around. But ultimately, like retroactively, he would say he's always been like, you know, some kind of libertarian, which is to say he just wants capital to be unregulated and unchecked, free to do whatever it does according to its own logic and thus free to develop technological capabilities. And so when asked by Justin about the idea of emancipation, Laird said, look, I'm fine with this language of emancipation, but the question is, what is being emancipated? If it's humans or particular groups, I have no interest in that. What I have an interest in is the emancipation of the means of production, which is to say
technology, which is to say artificial intelligence. And so that's what he's really been about all along. After he left the university system, I don't remember how much I said. So, yeah, when he was abusing speed, it led to a psychotic break for him. And like I say, after his recovery, he he moved to Shanghai. I should have said there was a you know, he was doing this kind of stuff in his office at Warwick. He was having, you know, playing jungle music and doing drugs and all. So you can imagine a philosophy faculty having issues with this kind of stuff going on. Somebody's going to make a movie about this down the road, I swear. But after he left the university system, which he hated, he didn't have to play these kind of rhetorical games.
He was financially independent or however it worked where he could just end up saying what he really felt. And he dropped whatever facade or rhetorical coding of leftism or something acceptable to leftism and just went to the right. And the thing is for him, he's a libertarian at heart, but he doesn't believe typical libertarian politics will ever be accepted by the masses, by the public. And so what drew him, for a long time, he was very skeptical about what was going on. In the 90s, he acts like capitalism is this unstoppable force. It's going to break through all safety protocols, all regulations.
It doesn't have a problem doing this. It's like trying to stop a train with a doll or something like that. It's going to run over everything. By the 2000s, now he's writing stuff like suspended animation, where he thinks that capitalism has now been – it's animation, its ability to produce new things has been suspended. And in that essay, he attributes this to whatever remaining aspects of Keynesianism are still at play, especially in liberal politics with the Democrats, for example.
And so he even though we would say, oh, like Keynesianism was gutted with Reagan and the arrival of neoliberalism, despite Land loving Reagan and Thatcher and all that, he doesn't think it got rid of enough Keynesianism and that it continues to slow capitalism down. And he thought that the Obama era in particular, he hated Obama because he thought that this just slows down capital. And so he was all along looking for some viable political alternative. Young Land just was like, oh, just destroy, destroy. This is the DeLuzo-Guatarian thing. We don't really need a politics. Politics is basically over anyway. We just need the accelerating tendencies of capitalism, and it's going to blow apart all this.
Well, he left that as he matured and was like, no, like if we want capitalism to be freed up to do its thing, it's going to take an actual politics that people can catch on with people. And that's when he discovered around 2006, 2007, Mincius Mulberg, right? And his blog, where he's working out this theory of what's called neocameralism. Long story short, what Molebug wants, nowadays everybody just refers to him by his real name, Curtis Yarvin. What Yarvin wants is basically for corporations to own entire states.
So I don't know, Walmart would own California and GM would own Michigan or whatever, however it would work. These big corporations would own entire states. And the point for him is this makes the board of directors of a corporation the state. now like so it's a kind of like state realism that both yarvin and land who at their heart are good old-fashioned libertarians it's like okay we're good old-fashioned libertarians but we also have to be state realists well let's just let the corporations be the state and so that is really kind of the heart of this and what these uh these corporate states would be for for yarvin
the term they use is sob corps or sovereign corporations. And for Mollbug, Yarvin, what he wants is a patchwork of them. So there's a whole plethora of different sob corps that exist. And the fundamental principle of all of this would be no voice free exit. So they're anti-democratic. You don't vote. You don't get a say. It's like going into Starbucks. Well, you don't get to decide where the tables are in the Starbucks. You don't get to decide what's on the menu. You don't get a vote in anything like that, but you're also free to leave Starbucks whenever you'd like. So this is how they want to envision the state as being in the control of the board of directors and in particular, a capitalist monarch, a CEO king, so to speak. And so this kind of
theorizing in 2007, 2008, you can see how Steve Bannon and those guys, some of them were probably influenced by this with what they saw in Trump and what they were pushing in 2015, 2016. They liked Trump precisely because they want a charismatic CEO king to run the soft Corp. And at least at one point, they kind of saw this in Donald Trump. And so I guess I'll shut up now. I want to hear what you have to say about all of this. And so, yeah, take it away. Yeah. So interesting. There's something libertarian about them. But whereas libertarians tend to be associated with the freedom of individual human beings and tend to make
appeal to individual sovereignty arguments, they're not interested in individual human beings. Certainly land isn't. No. So if you're not interested in individual human beings, but you're still interested in freedom, then it becomes freedom of what? What then is being set free? And it would seem that the answer to that is technology. Why is the value placed on technology in the first place? What is it that he likes about technology? Why is technology to be affirmed in the first place? See, and that's this great question where you go, well, Nick, why? And to me, after all this time of reading them, I don't really know if I have like a great answer to that, except that it kind of goes back to his libidinal materialism, which he doesn't talk about this anymore.
He doesn't call himself a libidinal materialist. But what he was all about back then was he thinks that human society, human laws, prohibitions, human culture, they stifle the productive dimensions of libido, of energy, of matter. And what he champions is this kind of full on free play of becoming. And this is the Nietzschean dimension of him. Right. I mean, I think it's also, you know, the anti-democratic thing, the anti-liberalism thing. There's, you know, a lot of a lot of people we know argue whether or not Nietzsche can be a friend to the left or or not. But there are certainly aspects of Nietzsche's work that can be interpreted as right leaning or anti-democratic, anti-liberal.
And I think those are things that appeal to Nick because on the one hand, he likes the idea of an order of rank and he doesn't like the kind of democratic universal leveling that he thinks liberalism does. And he thinks to do that, you have to hold certain potentials back, certain energies back, because trying to make everything equal for all, trying to make everything democratic is itself unnatural and therefore goes against the free play of matter itself. So his politics ultimately, even if he doesn't talk about it a lot nowadays, is rooted in a metaphysics or an ontology of championing the liberation or emancipation of the potentials locked away in matter itself.
So whereas a lot of people would position technology and nature as in opposition to each other, for Nick Land, it is the nature of the cosmos to technologically develop. Yeah. And in humans falsely juxtaposing these things and then allying themselves with a false nature against technology, they have in some sense. Almost sinned against or committed a heretical act against the fundamental nature of the cosmos. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, because remember, who came along and said there really is no distinction between culture and nature? It was Deleuze and Guattari in Antioedipus, where they say all is machines, machinic connections. And they view all becomeings in this kind of flat way of like this.
This is not the type of leveling he would dislike. He would just say that, no, there's there's one. Ubiquitous process of becoming, and it is about parts of bodies connecting to other parts of bodies. And we're not limiting this to human bodies or even animal bodies, objects, parts of objects connect to other parts of objects. I mean, chemical compounds at that level, right? Atoms or subatomic particles forge connections. And so Deleuze and Guattari developed this metaphysics of partial connections or machinic connections. And he's taking that and running with it. And yeah, in the first main chapter of Antioedipus, that's Deleuze and Quartari's thesis is that when you stand back and think about it, this divide between nature and culture is something that humans are kind of arbitrarily making up probably for their own egocentric reasons, according to them.
when in fact everything that's produced is produced in this kind of univocal way, this one way of forging the new, which is through new partial connections between things. And so I think that's why he would, you know, he would basically say, I think humanity or society is an allergic reaction or even a kind of immune system against the radical becoming of, as he calls it, machinic desire or the energetic unconscious or the machinic unconscious. All of these terms that Deleuze and Guattari use are really ways about talking about how nature itself or being itself produces the new. And so when you hear the unconscious in this, it's not like a human unconscious.
It's not an anthropomorphic unconscious. It's the unconscious of matter itself and how it expands, how it produces the new. And so that's what he wants to champion. And he thinks that humanity, sociality, society, and even politics, generally speaking, tries to ward this off so as to protect us from the outside, which is to say he thinks that human culture is a kind of insular immune system. It's a protective shield against the wild forces beyond our comprehension in the universe. And if we limit things to how we cognize them, how we categorize them, it's like we get a hold of them. But all of this is ultimately self-dupery, right?
We're tricking ourselves thinking that somehow we've mastered the cosmos. When, you know, like our sensory apparatus, for example, I mean, the surface of the sun is what, 20,000 degrees, something like that? I mean, how can, yeah, you and I can register, oh, 100 degrees Fahrenheit versus 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Like we can, our bodies can cog 20,000 degrees. Like that's where he would talk about these forces in the universe that are so beyond us, beyond our conceptual apparatus, beyond our sensory apparatus, that whatever they're doing forms this wild libidinal outside. And ultimately, it is what produces everything that is. but it's unconscious to us. We can't, we can't get ahold of it. We can't integrate it into our
conscious psyches. It's, it's just beyond our comprehension. Uh, and somebody could say, well, it's beyond our comprehension. How are you talking about it? Yeah. But it's, it's almost like a placeholder where he knows that there's limits to how much we can cognize. And we know this, we know that our bodies can only function within a tiny, tiny range of temperature. And we know that if we go outside that range of temperature, we're either going to freeze to death very quickly or we're going to burn up. And so whatever temperatures are out there beyond the limits of our body, yeah, we can't have any, we can't traffic with them. But on a sense, we know they're there. So this is how he uses the concept of the noumenon. These types of wild intensities that are beyond our ability to encounter or experience,
They're noumenon or noumena, I should say, in the sense that they're out there, they're things in themselves, but our human experience cannot process them, cannot integrate them. And nevertheless, though, those noumenal forces have more of a foundational role in the production of things in the universe than anything that we do at the experiential or conceptual level. So it sounds like the thing that he really associates the human with is the impulse to territorialize in Deleuze and Guattari's work. Yes. So the impulse to try to nail things down, try to preserve them, keep them stable. And in the course of doing this, to put them in terms that we can deal with, terms that we can understand. And since the terms that we can deal with and the things that we can understand are limited, the impulse to territorialize necessarily restricts or restrains the freedom of the cosmos.
The human tries to stop the asteroid from hitting the Earth instead of perhaps appreciating the specific character of that enormously energetic collision of things. Yes. The human would try to defend in some way the maintenance of a territorialized box. And the state, you know, you could see why there would be an opposition to the political or to the state as the state tries to maintain a state of affairs, tries to maintain some kind of order. And yet there is a thought here that nonetheless, some kinds of political systems or regimes may be preferable to others because some of them might allow for this deterritorialization to happen faster. And so that would be where this corporatism comes in.
The thought being that these corporations are more compatible with this deterritorializing than democratic publics. Along the same lines, it makes me think a lot about a book that my supervisor wrote actually relatively recently, just a couple of years ago. David put out a book called The Handover, in which he made the argument that AI is already ubiquitous throughout our life in the sense that most of the political decisions that are taken in our lives are taken by impersonal apparatuses, what he called artificial agents, that are not human. human because no particular human can be said to straightforwardly own any of the actions that
they take. They absorb certain human inputs, say votes or purchasing behavior in the case of markets. But nonetheless, all of the decisions they make are based on some sort of algorithmic amalgamation of data as opposed to a particular human exercising judgment. And it strikes me that in suggesting that corporations are like machines, he is making a move that's not altogether different from the move that David Rensman makes in that book. Of course, David also says that states are like machines, but he says this from within a quite Habesian framework for understanding what the state is.
The state, while it might have a circulation of elites or it might have competitive multi-party elections, David doesn't really conceptualize democracy as necessarily fulfilling a set of higher human or democratic values. There is a notion in his book, Hypocrisy, that the promise to try to fulfill these values to satisfy a democratic public might cause a democratic state to behave better than it otherwise would. But it still won't live up to the values. It will just have to behave in a way which makes it appear as if it's trying. And in the course of having to behave in such a way, it will have to do more in terms of those values than a state which could be honest and wouldn't have to try to lie about what it's there to do and what it's for.
OK, it would seem to me that Nick would want a state that is much more honest and and lacks those kinds of hypocrisies, which in David's book, Hypocrisy, he framed that as as what fascism was. Fascism was the sword always out there for you to see it. Nobody trying to hide it or to dress it up as something else. Never put away, always out, always visible. And then, you know, you're invited to identify with the stamping and identify with the thrashing that the sword does. In some sense, you are invited to feel yourself part of the smashing and the collisions and the force and the violence of the thing.
And that that would be a different way of potentially relating to the state. That would be the fascist way of relating to the state as opposed to the democratic mode of wanting it to live up to your values, which you frame as coming from you and making demands upon it and it having to in some way placate or pacify you by gesturing in your direction. yeah that's interesting i mean hmm i will say that like nick nick has always gone out of his way to say that he thinks neo reaction is the most anti-fascist of all politics he hated fascism in the 90s and he claims to still hate fascism and you know people will call him a fascist and i mean i i they have their reasons for
doing so but uh for him fascism means that i mean this is a basic way of understanding that the way i've heard him say fascism is the victory of the state now i don't think you and i would probably say that's our working definition of fascism but you know i could see something that he could so his reply i think or at least a reply that would be available to him i don't know if it would be what he would say. But to the accusation that he's a fascist would be to argue that the fascists were for concrete value as opposed to abstract value. And this is an argument that Moishe Postone makes in relation to anti-Semitism, that anti-Semitism in the
fascist imaginary is a way of trying to concretize the abstract. So it's a frustration with the role that money plays in dominating modern life, the association of a particular group of people and the scapegoating of a particular group of people for that, for international finance or international financial flows for capital, effectively scapegoating the Jew for capital, and then trying to eradicate capital by eradicating the Jew. And in the course of doing this, trying to return in some way to something pure, which excludes that, but which nonetheless still bears a lot of the industrial markers of modernity.
So therefore, something which is totally contradictory, can't actually be sustained in any meaningful way, is attacking consistently the thing which is itself the basis for what it is. And so maybe if he understands fascism in something like that sort of way, and I have no idea whether he does, that would be part of why for him it would be anti-capital as opposed to pro-capital? So I think here – yeah, I think it's helpful to go back to what D&G say in Anti-Oedipus about fascism versus capitalism. I think Nick – like it's a weird relationship he has to D&G now because he's not a leftist. They were leftists. And yet he remains DeLuzo-Guattarian in some really key important ways while also disavowing them or rejecting them in whatever he perceives to be their worst form of leftism.
But I think this is what holds true for him, is that capitalism is all about deterritorialization and decoding, which is to say it undoes tradition. It undoes fixed identities. Like you think about the identities in the feudal order, right, or in antiquity. These are identities that were essentialized. capitalism totally uproots fixed identity. Yeah, it sells us identity back in the forms of commodities or what we post on social media and all this. But our identities in comparison are very fluid compared to the old world forms of social identities. And so he thinks capitalism
comes in and just starts uprooting everything, de-territorializing everything. And that's That's its basic tendency, whereas fascism's worst tendency is the authoritarian imposition of the same. It wants to impose a certain universal order on all things on the basis of its privileged form of identity. And that's what he would fundamentally reject about fascism. And so even, you know, our global liberal hegemonic order, he would call fascist because he thinks that globalism is an attempt to impose liberal sameness on all that is. And for him, he's all about a politics that's capital oriented, which for him means a politics of fragmentation, of difference, of becoming, of all of this.
So he thinks that capitalism spurs on particularism, breakdown, fragmentation, etc. This is where I have this core fundamental disagreement with him. I think capital does that in a lot of ways. I think this whole thing about deterritorialization decoding is true. Marx knew this. Marx and Engels talk about this tendency of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto. But this has always been the famous critique of Nick Land, is that he takes what Deleuze and Guattari say about capitalism and its tendencies toward deterritorialization and decoding, but he ignores what D&G say about how capitalism also re-territorializes and recodes wherever it goes.
And so my critique of this interpretation of his in my book is, look, man, wherever capitalism goes, it does impose sameness. The commodification, consumerization, wage labor, all of these structures, like it doesn't matter what country it goes to, what culture it goes to, it imposes these. And in fact, the leftist Marxist tradition was always critiquing capitalism for how it commodifies everything, right? So this tendency to re-territorialize everything via, you know, the law of value or the principle of commodity value, right? It is a universal tendency. It's not, I mean, there's one form of exchange value and wherever capitalism goes, it reorients everything around exchange value so as it can produce accumulation, so it can produce profits.
And Nick just kind of has always ignored this criticism. Mark Fisher made this criticism. Peter Wolfendale has made this criticism. And I've never seen him really defend his interpretation of D&G where he wants to make capitalism identified solely with deterritorialization and decoding. for D&G they had for them okay the the three main types of society were what they called the the savage society which is tribal society then there was the despotic society this is more of what we can think of as ancient slash feudal society and then capitalist society is the third one but D&G envisioned a post-capitalist I don't know they didn't even really call it a society but they
called it the new earth. And this would be some sort of situation, let's call it that, wherein bodies and matter were free to experiment and desiring production, which is their concept of desire, is this kind of free play of productive desire. It's free to do what it wants, right? It's not held back by any type of territorializations or re-territorializations. It's pure experimentation with possibility, with potentiality, which in DeLuzo-Guattarian terms is, you know, the body without organs. But Land doesn't do this and he doesn't talk about the new earth. And so he doesn't identify pure de-territorialization, pure decoding, the body without organs. He doesn't identify it
with the new earth. He identifies it with the tendencies of capitalism itself. And this is where DeLuzo Guattariens will always critique him and go, dude, you're missing this core thing. And you just kind of ignore it when people bring it up. But that's my thing is I'm like, I'm sorry, like everywhere capitalism goes, it forces people into wage labor. It turns them into wage slaves. It imposes commodification. It imposes the principle of exchange value. These are universal tendencies. And these are not fragmentations or, you know, the escape of difference. It's the imposition of sameness. And so, I mean, is this the fascistic dimension of capital? If fascism
means the imposition of the same, you certainly could make that argument. So I, but nonetheless, from his perspective, he thinks that fascism has to do with this violent imposition of sameness on difference, which tries to nullify or neutralize the power of chain difference becoming. And that's what he is against. And he thinks capital is the great force, the great liberator of escape, of difference, of fragmentation. And that's why he champions it. So when he envisions these corporations running particular U.S. states, does he have a vision for how those states would differ from each other, how they would operate differently? Does he have an account of how that would allow for much more
variety than we currently get? Uh, my capital, I mean, I honestly, I haven't seen, and maybe there's, you know, there's writings that I, you know, I, you know, I read too quickly or what, I just don't see robust descriptions of what, but, but for him, it would just be the law of capitalist competition, basically no different than, well, if you're into furniture manufacturer, if you're a company that makes furniture, how do you outcompete other companies? Well, you sell as cheap as you can, you make as good quality furniture, you have the better designers, blah, blah, blah. But this, Benjamin, this is where we get into all these problems. It's like,
okay so the idea is that humans are supposed to select the state they live in like they choose what coffee shop they're going to go to okay so they don't get a vote they have no voice but they can leave whenever they want but of course here's the logistical problem what if other soft corps don't want you for whatever reason um i uh where do you go seems to me that this this leads in the direction of, you know, Agamben's work of bare life or homo soccer, where there would end up being people who don't fit in the soft corp. Trust me, if there's troublemakers, they're going to be put on a registry that's going to be made known to the other soft corps. They're not going to want
them. And so what do you, you kill them? You, you, what they occupy the wastelands. They're, what are they? Dennis Leary and his, his band of misfits in demolition, man, they occupy the sewers and you know you have the nice serene city above but then you have the sewer dwellers that you know reject the capitalist like i i i don't know and i mean so i mean but there's i mean i suppose for him maybe you would have sewer dwellers but that wouldn't really matter because anything human is an impediment anyway so right right i mean he wouldn't care i think he would just say, well, if you can't, if you can't live, if you can't function and live within
the soft corp, well, that reality is just a brute reality you yourself have to deal with, bud. Too bad for you. I mean, that is part of this. There is some, they think that the state is a nanny state. It babies people and it doesn't want to deal with harsh realities of inequality, et cetera. And that, that for them, that people are naturally in, in equal, uh, unequal. And some, some groups are better than others when it comes to like, this is where the IQ racism stuff comes in. Right. And this is the heart of Neo reaction. That's the most controversial with people. And I mean, rightfully so, I mean, look, land says in a essay he wrote called hell baked,
The neo-reaction is like the least fascist type of politics there is. He says, is it racist? He says, probably. And the reason he says probably is he goes on and he says, what it most certainly is, is social Darwinist, which is for him, he says, consistent Darwinism. Darwinianism. And so this is where the race realism comes into play. And yeah, this is the main controversial dimension of neo-reaction. And look, I think, I mean, Yarvin has expressed certain positions on this. This is where Yarvin and Land are racist. And for Land, he would just go, sorry, on statistical average, certain people have higher IQs. And why does he care about IQ?
Because he cares about intelligence. So he thinks that the places where IQ is most pooled or concentrated, those are the places that should, you know, we should focus on and we shouldn't contaminate with lower IQ. This is why he has so much issues with immigrants and all This is him at his hardcore rightist where he doesn't like immigrants flooding European countries. He is a race realist. And, you know, and he would just say biology is a fact and leftists hate reckoning with the reality of biology and tough, too bad. And that's the this is this near reactionary thing.
For me, my critique of this is, you know, because I am, you know, I do not hold this position. I'm too much of a transcendental philosopher for this. And the funny thing is, Nick is one of the great students and developers of transcendental philosophy. I mean, it starts with Kant, transcendental idealism, right? Where you're talking about the necessary conditions of things. and um but but to me it's like look what kant did was he discovered that there's a form to experience that the mind imposes and that form is different than the content of experience well philosophers would take this and run with it and develop it so heidegger takes this distinction and makes it into the difference between the ontological and the ontic right there's a way
to be that certain objects have like lamps exist in one way we as humans exist in another uh works of art exists in another way tools exist in another way and so he made these distinctions about the way different beings exist right the way different beings be uh to do the kind of heideggerian jargon and for me the problem with what nick does is when it comes to race it's like there's this forgetfulness of the ontological difference, which is to say, um, you're forgetting the universal dimension of what it is to be human. Now that maybe all this sounds abstract, but what I'm trying to say is biology for me is not ontology. Like, even if you can do this
IQ thing, right. Which has already been critiqued, like, uh, um, Stephen Jay Gould, The Measure of Man, I quote that book in here, where there's already been scientific challenges to, and you would even say, reputations of this type of IQ racism. But I think at a philosophical level, you can go to the work of different philosophers, whether it's Heidegger, who, you know, obviously, you know, he has his political issues. But as a philosopher, especially in the early part of being in time, what Heidegger did was he showed the universal dimensions of what it is to be human or Dasein, as he called it.
But the point is, if you're trying to say that at the most basic ontological level, certain human groups are better than others in various ways, I just think that's a bogus mistake. It's a category mistake. And if Nick wants to respond, because this is what he says in Dark Enlightenment, oh, basically leftists and liberals just can't stand the idea that certain humans are better at doing certain things. No. I mean, OK, what liberal or leftist in history would argue that Prince had to be stopped from playing the guitar because it just wasn't fair that the rest of us aren't equally as good. We all know that certain humans have certain talents that some of us don't have.
That's not controversial to anybody. That's not the point of where we're talking about equality. We're not talking about a quality of talents. We're not talking about a quality of gifts, right, of, you know, talents or gifts. We're talking about a baseline ontological integrity. And whether it's through Kant, whether it's through Heidegger, whether it's through Lacan, whether it's through Levinas, I think we get to, in different ways, we get to a baseline, what I call onto equality, that we are all the same. at the basic level of our existence. Yeah, particular things, some of us are taller than others and blah, blah, blah. But this shit is,
it doesn't matter when we're comparing it to our basic mode of existence that we all share. And so at that level, we're equal. When it comes to particular features, yeah. I'm never gonna be an Abercrombie and Fitch model, okay? Oh, that's not fair. That's not what we're talking about though when we're talking about equality. So, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because on the one hand, he says that human beings territorialize and associates the human with getting in the way. And at the same time, he wants to suggest that some human beings are nonetheless better than others. Of course, that artificial intelligence that he wants to see take over has to be made by people. So there is still a role for people to play, despite for him, their overwhelming flaws.
There's a certain kind of person who is nonetheless useful in, say, computer programming, engineering, certain kinds of STEM fields. And perhaps he feels that IQ is a good enough metric for getting at people who are able to contribute in those fields, in the kinds of corporations which exist in the societies that exist today. And he wants that pooled so IQ can accumulate and not be diluted. And that's, I think, all of this has for him to do with the acceleration towards the techno capital singularity. And he doesn't really care if it doesn't actually track human intelligence or what makes people cool, because he doesn't think people are cool anyway. What we would what we would call genuine human capacity, talent, value.
None of that is meaningful for him. So the significance of IQ is just can you help companies to make better machines? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it was that, I mean, when we interviewed him, he defined intelligence as, you know, the ability to competently play games, which is kind of problem solving. And so it's more of just a kind of what, you know, the Frankfurt School would call instrumental reason or instrumental rationality, or what Heidegger would call in framing. It's this ability to think logistically in terms of a kind of technological assessment, right? Like that's what he considers to be intelligence. And no, like, you know, anything like love or solidarity or community, these aren't things that matter to him.
Now, I think they matter to him as a person with his family. I think like concretely they would matter, but not as a philosopher. And so this is, look, my thing is when land goes neoreactionary, I think this is when his thought starts to run into a bunch of contradictions. And I think the race thing is a contradiction, right? Because the whole thing of capital, the whole thing of D&G is that identities aren't fixed. You can de-territorialize and you're not stuck in some fixed essence or identity. and dng this is why they reject racism they're they hate racism and they think it was you know they reject faciality they thought that you know part of what white supremacy was was the imposition
on a global scale of like the white european face of jesus and that these facial features establish what counted as the face right and the metric through which everybody is to be measured And they were all for undermining faciality, all for decoding this and undermining this kind of imperial face or imperial identity. And Land himself said he hated when Facebook took hold in cyberspace because in the 90s, he saw cyberspace as this radical terrain where you could de-territorialize or decode yourself away from your everyday identity. and he hated Facebook because for him, he's thinking, well, Facebook is like this regime
of faciality. It's the most anti-Deluso-Guatarian thing there is. So I don't know how he squares all this with his race realism. And he would just say, well, social Darwinism is just Darwinism. And if you reject Darwinism, you're rejecting the facts. But so many critics, like even Darwin himself rejected this kind of social application of his his theory you know he darwin himself rejected it and um and so yeah i mean i just don't i i see a a core contradiction here that um i i don't think is one that is easily solvable for him so let's uh make sure we get
a little bit more in on the reception. You mentioned that Steve Bannon, in particular, has taken up some of this stuff and is influenced by it. Of course, Steve Bannon was eventually pushed out of the first Trump administration. And you said that they used to see Trump as the CEO sovereign king. But in saying used to, that implies maybe they don't anymore. And more recently, there have been efforts to try to tie them to, say, J.D. Vance in particular. New York Times trying to suggest that Curtis Yarvin is the dark whisperer for Vance. And a number of different figures have been specifically for Vance thrown up as the who is the dark whisperer for Vance.
Always someone who is associated with the right or authoritarianism or something. Where are we at at this stage? yeah like as far as like what is the status of neo-reactionary thought at the moment it's a kind of a pretty big open question right um nick doesn't seem to talk about it much in neo-reaction that is he doesn't seem to talk about it much anymore um what's clear is you know he loves what elon's doing he loves to see the state get gutted so i mean that's in keeping with, you know, his libertarian heart. But as far as, yeah, I don't see him use the term
near reaction much anymore. And I don't see him. It's not like he's out there preaching for, you know, the gospel of soft corpse or any of that. So I don't know where he's really at with all of that. Even though he wouldn't think it would work to preach it because the democratic public would never sign on to it, which can lead people to think that there might be a conspiracy going on or that these guys and the CEOs, the oligarchs might be in some sense in cahoots, but in a non-public way, if they think by definition, they couldn't possibly legitimate this to the public. You know, it's where I mean, but part of the reason I think he adopted it is because he thought it was it would appeal to the public more than, you know, the
typical libertarianism, right? The don't tread on me kind of, you know, classic libertarianism, because he thinks that what the way you sell it to people is businesses run efficiently. States do not run efficiently. We should run the state like a business. He would say that's part of what got Trump elected. Everybody kept saying, well, he's a successful businessman, right? So there's something about that that is ideologically uh marketable to the public um and i think what they would do as far as like yeah trying to sell the anti-democratic thing nobody gets the vote that's that's a hard sell but i think what what they would do i i mean look i think if you said to
a lot of people in the maga base we need to suspend elections we need to let trump have full control because things are so corrupt and things are so terrible that this is the only way to get things back on track. And this is, it's great to have individual freedoms. It's great to have the vote, but for the sake of safety, we need to suspend this, this democratic freedom of voting. A lot of people probably would go for it right now. And so, I mean, you're going to have major, major political backlash about it. But I think that the army go for it. I think that would be the real question. I don't think the army would go for it. And so that that's a good, a good point, too, is like, where would the military fit into all of this? But nonetheless,
I think the point is that the soft corp thing or what, you know, the term for it is neocameralism, which that will never be sold to the public. But I think the idea of looking people, I don't think would like the term sovereign corporations. If they started hearing how they talk about it among themselves, they wouldn't like it. But if you said state, you know, businesses run efficiently, states should run like businesses. You can kind of pitch that to a lot of Americans and they like the sound of it. So part of it would be is how do you translate all of this into normie speak that could get a lot of normies on board uh you know being a state realist and understanding that you know a large territory has to have some sort of state and saying it should
be run like a business that probably appeals more than to you know like an anarcho libertarian telling you oh they're just we should abolish the state but people don't go for that at all At least most of them don't. So I don't know. As far as where it's at right now, again, land is I mean, when he posts on Twitter, he's either celebrating what Elon's doing or what Trump is doing or whatever, something on the right. Or he's he's, you know, complaining about immigrants flooding nations. He's complaining about that or he's complaining about, you know, the Democrats for whatever failure of theirs he's complaining about. Or he's doing his occult thing. Right. He you know, he's doing his stuff with the pneumogram and alphanumeric Kabbalah.
And it's again, when you don't know him and you first you start observing him, it's a weird mixture of things on his Twitter feed. But as far as Yarvin, yeah, like Yarvin kind of, you know, I've seen him over the years. He did a debate with Ben Burgess and, you know, he pops up here and there. But as far as I know, I don't think Yarvin and Land have ever, I don't know if they've ever even had a conversation. And so like at one point land is really influenced by Yarvin, but I don't know how much Yarvin has ever acknowledged land. And part of it would be, look, you know, when libertarians say they, you know, why they love capitalism, it's because they think it leads to human flourishing. Once anybody finds out that the reason he loves capitalism is that it's eventually going to bring the extinction of humanity, a lot of people on the right are going to even want to distance themselves from what they perceive as kind of a madman.
Like, wait, what? Like, you like capitalism because it's going to eventually destroy us or make us transcend us? Okay. All right. Right. And so that I mean, land's hardcore true philosophy. I don't think you sell to anybody. And that's why he knows it has to be presented as just pro capitalism, pro business. Right. And anti-state. He knows he can work with that. But if you're trying to sell total. So and he he has said this himself. If you're trying to sell total social collapse as a politics, well, that's not going to work. I was like, yeah, you try to sell that to soccer moms. Good luck, Nick. Um, but, um, no. So what I want to say though, about this whole thing with Yarvin, cause he popped up and it's like, oh, he's JD Vance. He's, he's whispering in Vance's ear, something like how people thought that, uh, Dugan was whispering in Putin's ear, something like that.
um this is interesting benjamin because i've never heard slavoj zizek ever discuss uh nick land or curtis yarvin uh he never discussed nick land until dave and i had an interview with him and we uh we asked him about nick land and that got him thinking about it and like two weeks later he wrote an article critiquing nick um nick nick's response to it as far as i could tell was just uh lamer than I even expected it to be. But, you know, these two aren't going to see eye to eye on a lot of things. So then Slavoj ended up addressing Nick and doing his critique of accelerationism and the dark enlightenment. But then I've never heard Slavoj mention Yarvin. And then I was at the LAT conference last month,
which is the conference, you know, put on by Todd McGowan, Jennifer Friedlander, all them. and Slavoj was the keynote speaker. And in his talk, it's the first time he ever mentioned Curtis Yarvin. And I actually, look, if you go watch the video, just for anybody, if you go to YouTube and you put in GZEK LAT conference, it's going to bring this talk up. And if you want to see these comments, it's at minute 55 that in his talk, he discusses Yarvin. And then it's at minute, one hour, 24 minutes that I ask him a follow-up question about it, right? But it's kind of hard to hear him. And he kind of, respectfully, I'd say that, but he kind of loses his train of thought. And then he'll do his Zizek thing. So what I did was
I transcribed it. And I really, I was like, man, I really want to read through this with Benjamin and get your thoughts on this, right? But he is addressing Jarvin's current relevance in a way. So this is him at the minute 55 in his talk where he says, do you know who I find very interesting? Curtis Yarvin, this radical, whatever you call him. I didn't know what to call his orientation. I mean, neo-reactionary, but I don't know, Slavoj didn't call him that. And Salvoi says, his basic notion is a network state, which is more communist in a vulgar way than communists ever dared to be. His idea is that democracy no longer works.
We have to erase tradition. And in an almost platonic way, we should reinvent from the zero point a new society. This should be done with new authoritarian leaders and artificial intelligence and so on and so on. And of course, his point is to stand against what he calls the cathedral universities, which are trying to block this. He, Yarvin, already predicted what Trump is doing now 10 years ago. When asked, how would you do this new state? Yarvin said, first, you gain power lawfully through an election. Then you exercise it unlawfully. You simply declare a state of emergency in your inaugural address.
This echoes Trump, who said, he who saves his country does not violate any laws. In other words, you can do it. So there's more, there's my follow-up question, but let's just talk about that for a second. So Slavoj says that really the SovCorp is more communist than most communists ever dared to be. And in my book, I talk about this. I go into the whole thing with Richard Wolff's interpretation of the Soviet Union being a state capitalism. And in a sense, it's like, isn't this kind of what the SovCorp is? You have a select group, a board of directors, only in, you know, it was the Communist Party or the leadership of it. And they control the surplus. They control all factors.
And more or less, it seems to operate the way that state capitalism did in the Soviet Union. I don't know if you agree that the Soviet Union and its economy was state capitalism. But I wanted to ask you about this whole thing, what you think about the SovCorp. And is it really the basic form of what we know is actually existing socialism and they don't want to acknowledge this? Well, I think that they would probably have more market dynamics in their proposal than you would see in something like the Soviet Union. You know, certainly in the Soviet Union, you couldn't simply move around in the Soviet Union very easily from place to place wherever you wanted to go. So you would have a much more marketized economy.
And you would I presume you would still have trade. What is what is Landon Yarvin's position on trade? Are they for all of this tariffing that's going on or? I mean, that that's a good question. I mean, even like I watched the video of Reagan talking about how tariffs totally mess up an economy. And I even saw leftist posting it like base Reagan, you know, because they're like even he knew like this tariff things aren't going to work. I don't know how much like I don't see Nick. I don't know. I don't get the impression that he's celebrating the tariffs. I don't see him say anything negative, but he probably wouldn't if he disagreed. Jarvin, I don't know. But this is a big question. And I mean, maybe somewhere on Jarvin's blog,
he worked all this out. I don't know. I've never seen it. But this question of trade, it's like, okay, so let's imagine a situation where California is owned by, I don't know, Walmart. Okay. So everybody who lives in this state would be workers and renters. Like you work for it and you consume in it, you purchase things, but you don't vote. But the question is, okay, but all of, like, all the, you want to say all the businesses within the soft corp, are they just one overarching business because it's one corporation? I don't know about the internal dynamics because,
and then the question is how much, you know, trade does it have with other soft corps? I don't know. I don't know how it would work on this level. I think to make sense of it, the only way to make sense of it is to think of it in a more Habisian way. So it would have to be, and this is why I think that I can see why Zizek would want to talk about it in relation to communism, but it seems to me that the more effective analogy is the habesian state where in the habesian state your conception of the good your human values you have to put all of that to one side because that stuff conflicts with your survival you have to do what's necessary to survive and that means you have to obey the
sovereign and you if you are being treated in such a way that your ability to survive is called into question, then that would entitle you to do something to defend your ability to survive, like leave or potentially even offer resistance if by doing that you would stand a better chance. But in none of these situations do you get a right to participate in politics in Hobbes' scheme. You might have a state which massages in some way the relationship, But it would do this for the purposes of maintaining order. Ultimately, it wouldn't do this out of out of some genuine need to do what you want or do what you believe in.
And it seems to me that this kind of Habesian notion of the state is is at the center of this. And on this kind of view, states and corporations are really very similar kinds of entities. You know, in your corporation, there might be some sense in which you as an employee or even you as a shareholder have a say. But this say would be diluted through various kinds of impersonal processes. And even if, say, you become a CEO in a corporation, you aren't really free to operate it in whatever way you personally please. If it's a publicly traded corporation, there's an impersonal structure which incentivizes you and constrains your behavior. And I recall in reading Yarvan, he suggested that there should be shareholders that the board answers to, but that these shareholders should not be the general population.
They should just be airline pilots because airline pilots are highly trustworthy individuals. Nothing arbitrary about that selection. Right. And what strikes me about that is that really it's not that the airline pilots are meant to be in charge because they don't make any of the decisions. However, the airline pilots, through not making the decisions and the the CEO who runs the thing in having to answer in some way to the collective opinion of the airline pilots about what kind of job he's doing, how well he's doing the job. It produces an impersonal logic that ultimately shapes everybody involved to such a degree that nobody really is owning anything that's going on. And it would seem to me that.
Communism. Communism in actual practice was another iteration of that in the sense that communism, fascism and also Keynesian fortism. All of these things were attempts to. Take this Abesian state and and put it on a more secure footing, ultimately. And that's not to say that there weren't dreams or goals or aims that people had in constructing these things that went beyond those horizons. Keynes didn't think of Keynesianism as a way of empowering the state. He thought of it as a way of preserving liberalism. And the Bolsheviks thought that they were bringing about an international revolution which would emancipate society. They didn't think of themselves as strengthening a state socialist state in Russia.
But in these cases, they were constrained by the by their inability to actually universalize these projects and had to therefore accept certain kinds of constraints. yeah it's you know i mean look i'm because it just gets me thinking so i'm sitting here going okay so i think the way i think what they would say is i think what yarvin would say is okay here's how the soft corp differs than a communist or actually existing socialisms throughout the 20th century, is that in principle, what the SOVCorp would do is say, look, if we're going to compete against the other SOVCORPs in the patchwork, the thing that we have to provide that's going to get
us more business, which is to say, it's going to get more people to want to come live here, is that we have the best standard of living. Now, it's not democratic, you don't get a vote, But it's the best order, the best security. All of this is the unfettering. That would be the thing that would be reminiscent of communism, the idea that you're unfettering the development of the means of production so as to allow the acceleration of the development of the of the of the forces. Yes, that would be the part that would recall communism. And I think just at the basic level of – I think why Slavoj would say from his perspective it's communist is like, OK, you do have one key figure. OK, if you call it a CEO monarch or whether you call it the communist leader, the question is, does it function in a similar way?
Does a CEO monarch function in a way similar to how Stalin did or Mao did? And I mean, it's maybe, again, I think maybe the difference you would say is, well, there's these impersonal forces, which are, I mean, like the invisible hand. You can argue that it's this form of artificial intelligence because it in itself generates what you ought to do. It, in a sense, dictates you what you ought to do. But it would be these objective laws of the market, so to speak. And so maybe you would say, well, actually, the CEO of SoftCorp is taking his cues from the objective laws of the market or the invisible hand. But nonetheless, there is this privileged individual who does have power over everything.
There's a board of directors or there's a party, however you want to talk about it. And ultimately, the people do not get a say. Now, I point out in the book, the difference between the two is that the soft corp just straight up owns the fact you don't get a say. If you don't like it, leave. Whereas the Soviet Union always had to say it was this democratic thing, egalitarian endeavor where, you know, your voice is being heard and represented. It always had to keep up that appearance, even though it wasn't true. And so I don't know, but I mean, I get why Slavoj makes this connection to communism. But I mean, obviously, there are still, you know, these these important differences there.
But there were a lot of other values that were important to the communists. The communists think that ultimately this development of the means of production is going to set human beings free, that it's going to enable human beings to express their various human qualities. And that's why there's still this need to maintain this this sense of democratic connection in the Soviet Union, because there is still this implicit belief that these capacities, while not yet fully developed, this alienation, while not yet fully overcome, is in a process of being developed in a process of being overcome. and that that still is the ultimate goal, even if that goal has to be in various ways mediated, put off, not not done up front.
All of that is dropped here and you get something that is much more stark, which is why I'm drawn toward the Hobbes. And you want to survive. This is what you've got to do. And yeah, you might have these other kinds of values, but don't those just get in the way of commodious living, as Hobbes would put it? Well, yeah, because the point every soft corp has the same ultimate value line must go up. And, you know, this is so this is where I but I always go, OK, this is the imposition of sameness is if every soft corp is structured by a CEO monarch and has a board of directors, then you're imposing the same form on every soft corp. Like whatever their inessential differences are, their form is the same.
And so I don't know how this actually is an escape of difference. Like if land wants fragmentation, it's like, yeah, it's a patchwork. So maybe you can argue it's fragmented. But if the form of each one of these fragments is the same, are they really, they might be fragments, but they're not differential. They're not profoundly different because they share the same shape or form to how they structure themselves. And so I just see it again as this imposition of sameness, which he hates so much. I mean, the other thing is maybe like if he keeps it at the level of the particular and not at the level of form, what he can say is, well, each soft corp, though, would have the freedom to try to market to certain demographics.
So, I mean, I think now maybe this is how somebody would try to work, you know, a critique of like fascism into this, which is to say, well, if one if one soft corp wants to actually market itself as Whiteville, well, then it can have the power to say we only want certain people of a certain race to live here. Now, you would say, well, you're limiting your market, though. So the logic of capital is going to undermine this because other soft corps aren't going to limit who their customer base is this much. And so you're going to go on. But I mean, maybe this is how he would try to say, oh, well, yeah, but you could also have like a black ethnostate or something. And it's a soft corps.
And you can make an argument that you should sell to the mass, but then you get a lowest common denominator and you can make an argument that you should sell to a particular niche. But then if you do that, then you miss out on a lot of the market. It seems like either way you would be quite restricted in what you would be able to offer. Yeah. And I just don't know if this really means any more escape of difference or the unleashing of technological potential than actually existing states. Yeah, but ultimately, the argument doesn't have to be held to the same standard that, say, an argument like Hayek's would have to be held to, because ultimately it's not committed to human emancipation. It sees the human as an obstacle. So since it sees the human as an obstacle, our objections to it that come from human values are just further evidence of our need to be cast into the dustbin.
The more that we resist the argument, the more according to the argument we deserve to go. so and i mean yarvin himself it's not like he he's not a landian in the sense that he thinks that ultimately like the transcendence of the human transcendence going beyond the human is a good thing uh but he certainly is for he places security as a far more fundamental value and you know people on the right are always talking about order right he he wants order he wants security And he thinks these are more important values than independent freedom and blah, blah, blah. And so he would be all for a surveillance state, heavy surveillance.
And then the question is, well, if all the SOB corps adopt the same surveillance tech, then you just live in surveillance world. and you'd have no sort of institution to appeal to outside of the patchwork because this is all you've got. There's really nothing that recognizes human rights or anything like that. Every state that exists only recognizes you as a potential renter consumer. That's all you are. And I think that when you do that, now you have in-framed, now you have instrumentalized people beyond any sense of intrinsic integrity or dignity. And this is where I just have a philosophical and
ontological difference from Nick, where I think I recognize this. I hold that human beings have a certain ontological integrity and it's valuable, but not a value that's reducible to market value or exchange value or commodity value. It's a value that transcends the capitalist form of value. And Nick and I think Jarvin just aren't going to go for any of that. So this is where we end up in actual substantial philosophical differences in how we view humans and how we view our situation on this planet. Yeah, one of the ways that you can, I think, make a big cut in political theory
is between people who prioritize survival and people who prioritize other kinds of values. So people who are focused on necessity, and then people who are focused on various kinds of images of what could happen or what we could be that would go beyond necessity, but which might require us to sacrifice in some way. And the thing that's funky about this view is that on the one hand, it is very much on the side of survival and necessity in the first instance. But then ultimately, because we human beings don't prioritize survival and necessity, we therefore are unnecessary and do not deserve to survive. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, OK, hold on. I forgot. OK, just popped in my head. There is there's something about Nick's essay, Dark Enlightenment, I wanted to ask you about. So in it, one of his critiques of Western liberal democracies is they end up being what I think he calls them donut cities. And what he means is that the inner core, the inner city becomes a ghetto wasteland that the vast majority of the people within the metropolitan area do not want to go because it's scary, it's violent, it's threatening. And that this effect of the ghetto in Western liberal democracies is symptomatic of something wrong with the very structure or form of our societies, right?
So it's a way of critiquing democratic liberalism because it's saying, look, no matter what you say about yourself, this is the effect your policies have on a metropolitan area. And he says, whereas in the great East Asian megacities, Shanghai being one, of course, but he says in none of these great cities in China I've gone to, there's no ghettos anywhere. There's not a part of any part of these megacities that you're afraid to walk through. And I guess, look, I've never traveled much. Are there really no ghettos in East Asian megacities, Benjamin? Like as far as like, is this a claim you think you could really defend or does this strike you as laughable?
Well, one of the things that is going on in states like China is that large numbers of people, and this has been going on for many decades now, have been moved from the rural areas into the cities for the purposes of supplying an enormous, enormous demand for labor as these cities are built up and the country industrializes. realizes. And as part of this, there's been an incredible amount of construction, which has gone on continuously. Far more housing has been constructed in China than anyone can possibly use. It's, I think, a function of the relatively low standard of living and advancement still in China that it has that kind of character.
It also has to do with the degree to which in China this movement is controlled. So it's not simply people having a choice about where they go and a right to exit. It's not like if you're in China, you can simply move wherever you want to move. And that's one of the things that makes Chinese cities somewhat different from, say, Indian cities, where people can come to these cities and look for work if they want to. and not find it and then end up living in large scale slums. It's because the Indians are more free about where where they go, what they do, that those cities can have that character. So on the one hand, you know, and he seems to like the freedom of people moving around, even if it results in all kinds of things that might be considered horrible from within the point of view of something like, you know, the platonic good.
He doesn't have any problem with that. If we all get scorched by 200 degrees, you know, 20,000 degree Fahrenheit, you know, star star energy, then in some sense, some great collision has occurred that, you know, we just lack the ability to appreciate. So maybe in this instance, it's a case of he himself being too human and his unwillingness to accept the cacophony of violence and terror and awfulness that can be going out at night in New Delhi. yeah yeah i mean but i guess the i mean what do you think of this though this this because it's one of the things in the dark enlightenment that stuck with me the first time i read it where i'm
like okay does he have a regardless of whether what he says about east asian mega cities is true i mean does he have does he get it something important here that we kind of have to reckon with about what is it about our Western liberal democracies that structurally seems to produce ghettos, large areas of a city that are poverty stricken, violence prone, et cetera. What is it about the structure of our society that does this? And it's true, like in America, Kansas City has its ghetto. Chicago notoriously has its ghetto. California, LA, New York, every place that we
have a major city, this is a structural byproduct of whatever we're doing at how we organize our government and our society. So what does it say about how we do things? And China has its incredibly poor destitute regions. It's just that those tend to be externalized outside of these cities. So it's not as if China doesn't have extraordinary poverty. China is still, in terms of its per capita, its standard of living, human development index, it trails Russia currently right now. Arguably, the HDI of China is still not higher than the Soviet Union in the 80s, if you take the entire country as a whole. Wow. Okay. So you can pick
your winners and put them in your gilded city and then prevent other people that you don't want from coming into that city, it doesn't mean that everybody outside is doing well. But it does mean that those people aren't going to be visible to you when you're inside the walls. Okay. And I think this is consistent with what you were saying before about Nick's willingness to have sewer people as long as they can't get up into the city and cause trouble up in it. He doesn't seem to have a problem with some people not being able to find their place and not finding anywhere in society to be. Indeed, he wants to destroy society. So he wants social structures, the things that would typically help those people to nonetheless survive and make it to disintegrate and for them to be put in enormous stress. In China, the rural areas have, you know, periodically,
you know, for decades now gone through enormous, enormous stress, including terrible famines and All kinds of of horrific disruptions that have to do with the forced migration and movement of populations. These are things that aren't that don't matter to him because these rural people are only valuable insofar as they can make it in a city. And the state is able to decide who can make it in the city and who isn't in much the same way that the corporation, by deciding who to hire and who not to hire, can decide who can make it in their territory versus who can't make it. and invite only those who can make it and keep out anyone who can't make it. And then that would help make sense, I think, of his position with regard to immigration as well. And why for him he can be for a right of movement, while at the same time very much wanting to exclude
substantial population groups from access to specific kinds of spaces or specific kinds of roles. Yeah. In the case of just why do we have enormous poverty out here? You know, we are at a point where we haven't figured out we don't know what to do with large numbers of people. We have a permanent reserve army of labor that we don't employ in part to scare everybody else. We. Increasingly don't produce many of the kinds of social roles we used to produce. So we have many cases in which people are trained for stuff that we don't have any any use for. So even in cases where they have been trained, we don't have anything we can do with them.
And then also we have this weird situation with housing in the rich countries, which is that housing increasingly is that the defined benefit pensions go away. Your retirement is in your house. So we can't reduce the value of housing, which means we have to house poor and lower income or lower middle class people as renters. So as not to reduce the value of the housing stock. And the mentality involved in this is to build giant towers, to build giant high rises. But if somebody can't pay their rent, then you just kick them out. And if you don't create the kinds of roles for people that they're able to perform, then that's what we end up doing.
But, you know, our system doesn't require that everybody be taken care of. Our system isn't premised on that. Yeah. You know, it doesn't need it. And in some ways, it's useful for the system for some numbers of people to not be taken care of because it sends a message to everybody else. It creates an outcome that many people, even if they're not really in any danger of it, many people still worry about unemployment simply because of the implication that it could somehow, someday, in some way, produce homelessness. this, even if you're in a situation where it wouldn't happen to you in any short interval of time, just the knowledge that you could not for an indefinite period of time sustain the way you're living, I think it eats at people when they're unemployed on some level
and is part of the psychological distress of unemployment that compels people, even people who might be able to put it off for a while, to nonetheless frantically pursue work. Yeah. You know, I mean, and that's the thing, right? But like this, this, this is kind of at the heart of their, I don't know, the libertarian well tough, like that, you know, it's too bad. Like not everybody. They're not going to care about that. And, you know, that that's. Yeah, I just if they're going to say I'm a leftist, I'm a leftist at this point of departure where I'm like, yeah, well, I don't I'm not OK with that. Well, tough. The other thing that's relevant here is I don't know if you've heard about this abundance book that Ezra Klein put out.
Yeah, I keep hearing about it. I haven't read it, but yeah, it's on my radar. Like their their shtick is that you need to be able to move more of these talented engineers into places like San Francisco. And to do this, you need to build some kind of housing that will support the continued growth and development of these megacities, which have this capacity to generate technological development and innovation. And the rest of the country, the other places that are not these tech megacities, they don't have the same kind of potential and therefore can't have the same priority. Ultimately, there are certain places on this view that are the most technologically generative, and therefore you need to make it possible for very, very large numbers of computer scientists and engineers to live in these cities.
And this has to be the case even if they're not paid as much as they might like to be paid. So to facilitate this, there's all this talk about deregulating the density of the housing stock in California, specifically to allow for very, very dense housing to be built in San Francisco so that you can just pile, pile, pile computer scientists into San Francisco. You don't have to pay them a whole lot more money. And nonetheless, they'll still have somewhere to live that's close enough to what they need to get to work. And I think that that in some ways is a bit Landian. The funny thing is that it's coming from someone who is attached to the democratic party and is trying to formulate a strategy for democrats you know and it's so weird though we've been in this like okay like this landing
and dimension showing up somewhere you wouldn't expect it right i think that's interesting and i think this is what is going to be his like i don't think he's gonna go away i think his influence is going to continue. And I think, you know, especially once he's dead, his lore is only going to grow. And that's one of the reasons we have to be thinking with him and against him. Because I think in some way he's here to stay. And I'll tell you one of the reasons why is when I start talking to my coworker, I work at a warehouse, you know, this, and when I'm sitting around in the morning talking to the guys, you know, we have general conversations about this kind of stuff. And before I ever even told them about this guy named Nick
Land or his theory of AI and capital or anything, I mean, they're already sitting there going, if you ask them like, okay, do you think AI is going to fundamentally restructure our economy in a way that it's never been restructured before? They all say, yeah. And I go, do you think this means the loss of human jobs. They say, yes. I go, do you think this AI is going to be something that the government can actually control? They say no. And you say, okay, well, where do you think this actually leads? What does this mean for us as humans? And they say, it's probably going to exterminate all of us. We're living in the Terminator movies. It's Skynet. And you go, So you ultimately think it's going to bring about the end of humanity.
And these are all normie working class guys. They're like, yeah, basically. And I'm like, well, why don't we stop it? And they all say, you can't. And I go, why can't we? They're like, because the economy makes it where we have to keep developing. They talk Landian theory, and they don't know who this guy is. But basically, capitalism is artificial intelligence. They don't say it like that. But they're tapped into that logic somehow. They think all of this is inevitable, that it more than likely spells the end of humanity. There's nothing we can effectively do about it politically. And we kind of have to just accept our fate in the face of it.
So when I hear your average working class Americans say stuff that's very, very Landian, I'm like, no, we can't ignore this guy. We have to reckon with this guy because most people, when you ask them about AI, they're Landian and not Kurzweilian. They're not, oh, we're going to transcend our biology and we're going to live forever and it's going to be digitized, immortality. None of them do the Kurzweil thing at all. It's all, it's land. AI is going to kill all of us. There's nothing we can do about it because it's inevitable, because it's based into our economy. There's no alternative to capitalism. We tried those, they didn't work. So this is it.
And I'll say this, boy, does capital benefit from them thinking there's nothing we can do about it. So that's where me as a Zizekian who, you know, I'm about the critique of ideology. I'm like, man, their default position on this is like Landian ideology. and we got to, we got to confront, look, maybe there's nothing we can do. I'm not saying I'm like certain we can, but I mean, I think part of what it is to be human is this kind of stubborn resistance in the face of something that seems impossible and us going, nah, I'm not going out without a fight. Um, and so look, I mean, I I'm with you. Like I, and this is why your work speaks
to me so much. The way is shut. I think we have to reckon with this hopelessness that we all feel like. No, I don't think the state as we know it is going to prevent Skynet from getting loose. I don't. Something has to fundamentally change. The question is, is it all fate? Is it all is the future set in stone or can we still find ways to intervene? I think the symbolic challenge on our part is to at least continue to act as if there's something we can do about all this out of kind of some stubborn, annoying humanists that capital would love for us to give up on. And so that's kind of where I'm at with it is, you know, I take land serious. You know,
the thesis that capitalism is artificial intelligence, I think we have to think that. I think we have to reckon with that and critique it and assimilate it. And I think that is this core thing that he's got. And I think this is why he's a better AI theorist than Kurt Weill or Nick Bostrom is a lot of these guys act like this is just being cooked up in a lab. So like they don't connect it to the economy. And, you know, I asked Nick this and he agreed. I was like, this is where you're better than them as an AI theorist because you're still more Marxist. You still think in terms of how the mode of production structures at the most fundamental level what's being developed and what's happening. And they don't have that core Marxist insight.
So, you know, while I, you know, basically have no sympathy for the, you know, the race realism, you know, IQ realism stuff in the dark enlightenment, that stuff, this early 90s, early to mid 90s land, who's concerned with the relationship between capital and artificial intelligence, that's the land that I really, you know, take seriously. And look, I mean, of course, in the dark enlightenment stuff, I think he makes valid points against democracy. But I'm sorry, there's G Jack is anti democracy. You don't have to be right wing to be anti liberal democracy in certain ways. so you know he can make a valid point about you know the problem with political correctness or liberalism etc fine but
for me though like yeah the core Landian contribution to theory is that stuff he did in the 90s and I think that's you know this really important thesis that he developed between capitalism and artificial intelligence is the thing that we gotta continue to think about Wow we've gone and run this one out good and long i think we probably have i've hit the maximum of what anybody's going to be able to take or put up with sure so thank you for coming on mikey and thank you so much for having me yeah thank you guys so much for listening and for thinking about this stuff you know even if you don't like a particular view you still have to wrestle with it because there's a reason that we're hearing this kind of view and there's a reason that we're
hearing more about it. There's something about our time, something about our place that causes this to come about. We've got to wrestle with it. So I'm glad that you're wrestling with it. And that book, Capital Versus Time Energy, a Zizekian Critique of Nick Land, is available. It's available right now. It's a cool book and you get a lot of pages for your money. That's true. All right. I'll pop it off. Thank you, guys. See you next time. Bye-bye. Thank you.