A second name that crops up in connection to Trumpworld’s philosophy is that of
Nick Land, an Englishman and former academic. Together, the pair have come to
be recognised as the twin eminences of a predominantly online movement known
as neoreaction or the Dark Enlightenment.
Seeing references to Land transports me back to the early 1990s, when I spent a
year studying for a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Warwick. He
was then a charismatic young lecturer, not yet the dark magus of anti-democratic
neoreaction that he is today.
In those days, Land described himself as a “delirial engineer” — a follower of
marginal thinkers such as the French writer Georges Bataille, who sought to
liberate the forces of unconscious desire that the rationalism of the Enlightenment
was meant to hold in check.
His work was also a celebration of capitalism, or rather of the fearsome power of
the market to dissolve settled ways of life. Accelerating capitalism could usher in a
new set of social relations, he believed, or hasten the “singularity” in which the
biological and technological merge.
As the Nineties wore on his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He started
living in his office on campus. He eventually left his academic post in 1998 and
moved to China. I didn’t hear of him again until 2011, when a small independent
publisher put out a collection of his essays called Fanged Noumena.
The years spent overseas had left their mark. What once looked like a tactical
embrace of the market had turned into veneration of a “globally ascendant Sinocapitalism”. In a breathless paean to the “turbo-charged Shanghai economy” he
rhapsodised about a “perfect complicity between radical innovation and profound
conservatism”.
Over the next few years his theories gained traction among the US-based far-right.
During the first Trump administration, as journalists started to cite Land in their
attempts to understand the “alt-right”, I tracked him down. In an email exchange
he told me that China and east Asian statelets like Hong Kong or Singapore came
closest to what he regarded as a model of “competent government”. He has also
praised their lack of “social terror”, which he attributes to ethnically homogenous
populations.
Land, like Yarvin, believes the ideal state should function like a business.
According to this theory, which Yarvin calls “neocameralism”, a properly
constituted state is one that has been cured of democracy. Its guiding principle is
“no voice, free exit”: the residents or clients (not citizens) of such a state have no
rights, but do have the ability to take their custom elsewhere.
One of the touchstones for Land and others on what is sometimes called the
“techno-commercial” wing of neoreaction is an article written in 2009 by the
Silicon Valley billionaire and now prominent Donald Trump supporter Peter Thiel
(who also happens to have been an investor in Yarvin’s start-up, Urbit). “I no
longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote. The fate
of the world “may depend on the effort of a single person” able to make the world
“safe for capitalism”.
Land’s Thiel-inspired vision for a “hard reboot” of the western world, set out in a
long essay entitled “The Dark Enlightenment”, includes the dismantling of
democracy and a massive downsizing of government. Once an obscure idea, it
sounds a lot like what Trump confidant Steve Bannon used to call the
“deconstruction of the administrative state”. That, Land told me, “is definitely
[something] my type of neoreactionaries would endorse. To the point of euphoria.”
I contacted him again recently, and asked if he’d respond in the same way to what
Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are doing by
gutting federal agencies. “The answer,” Land said, “is definitely yes.”
jonathan.derbyshire@ft.com
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