Cold Anarchy

COLD ANARCHY Nick Land

§00 — Hot anarchy might be thought an unfortunate starting point for any political disquisition, and even the very worst possible. Anything said about hot anarchy has to over-articulate it. Hot anarchy does not merely want to mend the world. It wants to mend the world so badly that anything at all is sanctioned in this cause, or ultimate end. Extreme action is thus at least implicitly recommended, and serves as a gauge of authenticity. Zealous by definition, hot anarchy is introduced beyond a threshold of enthusiasm. §01 — Any instantiation of hot anarchy will disappoint, because it is a pure essence – the pure essence. Its inchoate negativity only makes it purer. Here, at last, is the great washing-away. Dreaming goes there to die, in an imagined, absolutely unshackled ecstasy of destruction (or purification), which can only ever be approximated. Holocaust of the real in the flame of the idea is the implicit project. Hot anarchy lies at the absolute antipodes of realism, as a matter of principle. Cold Anarchy 47

§02 — More definitely, hot anarchy is domestically-framed universalistic utopian activism. This is to say that it seeks the overthrow of its own local regime as if it were the whole world, and on behalf of the whole world, in order to introduce a type of society that has never previously existed, while doing this immediately, and practically. It is domestically-framed because its concern is with the form of government, rather than the ecology of governments. It is universalistic because only one governmental, non-governmental, or anti-governmental model is required – or even tolerated. It is utopian because what it wants has no precedent, and thus offers nothing to defend, conserve, or consolidate. It is activist because burning shit down should happen right now. All four of these characteristic features emerge from its temperature. They are not distinctively anarchistic, but only distinctively inflamed. §03 — Cold anarchy is something else entirely, terminological resonance notwithstanding. Rather than bringing hot and cold anarchy together, ‘anarchy’ further divides them. Insofar as hot anarchy has a thesis, it is that anarchy is what we do not yet have (but want, intensely). Hot anarchy is heated precisely by the frictional mismatch of anarchic ideal with prevailing order. Cold anarchy, in contrast, is all there can ever be. As a reflex, it recognizes anarchy behind every mask of order. Order, in other words, is understood as something anarchy can do, and nothing else. All strands of the tradition of spontaneous order are about only this. §04 — All real liberals are cold anarchists. Their primary loyalty is to competition-in-itself, rather than to any 48 Agorism in the 21st Century

competitor. They trust markets above businesses, science above scientists, the Internet above the FAANGs, the Splinternet above the Internet, schism above religion, war in heaven above heaven, dissensus above agreement, polarization above either of its poles, and conflicts in general above any of their parties. Patchwork is to be trusted more than any patch. War is God. §05 — The fact liberals rarely pitch things this way matters little. Liberalism is to be trusted above liberals. Liberals are not where liberalism comes from. Typically, they are where liberalism perishes. Liberalism uses liberals to die through. Any chance of liberal rejuvenation is found only outside, in cold anarchy. It is from cold anarchy alone that the fundamental liberal commitment – to spontaneous order – flows. §06 — Serious conservatives, too, are cold anarchists. They hold that the patterns of disintegration we now have are to be preserved against the unprecedented unities of which we might dream. Every Union is a conservative defeat. There is an extraordinarily luxuriant planetary heritage of things not being One. It is in order to treasure this – with maximum practicality – that conservatism exists. §07 — Everyone becomes a cold anarchist, as soon as they are realistic. Whatever they are realistic about is thought through cold anarchy, arising from multiplicities without transcendent order, or even convincing pseudotranscendent order, but only immanent arrangement, intractable to coherent direction. There is nothing such Cold Anarchy 49

populations should be, unless many. To study them is to set aside, automatically, the conjoined bias of moral inflammation and wishful thinking. §08 — Curtis Yarvin tells us, repeatedly, that there are only three fundamental types of government – democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. When domestic politics is adopted as our starting point, the assertion is only minimally controversial. Yet such a starting point is not mandated. It might not even be quite possible. International relations is an alternative, and ultimately all the alternatives. §09 — The realist school of international relations theory begins with anarchy, and remains there. Its topic is powers, always in the plural, and their interactions. Sovereignty is essentially multiple. Many nations, with very different capabilities and modes of internal socio-political organization, but always with nominal autonomous agency (sovereignty), engage in multi-level interactions in pursuit of a pattern of coexistence consistent with their individual interests. If ‘nations’ are theoretically generalized, replaced by nodes of whatever kind, cold anarchy always looks like this. It is framed internationally (or inter-nodally) rather than domestically. It is tragic rather than universalistic, accepting the irreducible diversity of interests. It is historical rather than utopian, developing upon precedent, rather than inaugurating the unprecedented. Finally, it is factual rather than activist, concerned only with what is happening, and not what should be. Cold anarchy is the order of external relations. It rules whenever and wherever 50 Agorism in the 21st Century

inter-nodal dynamics dominate intra-nodal organization – ultimately always and everywhere, therefore. §10 — Nations are the units of installed anarchy. To such a degree is this true, that the words ‘nation’ and ‘anarchy’ are not independently fully articulable. A nation is something to do anarchy with. §11 — Nations, like monads or holons, are wholes and parts. These are their hot and cold – aggregative and disaggregative – aspects. Every nation connects to every other (‘rhizomatically’). Their proliferation thus involves combinatorial explosion. To ‘explode the system’ then is not at all to destroy it, but rather to intensify it. The greater its number of independent parts, the more it can do. Set at One – or consummate globalism – it is incapable of anything. International relations do not then exist. There is no game, and no exit. If globalism is further idealized up to the asymptote where nothing more global could possibly be realized, spontaneous order is entirely suspended. Absolute domestication has eliminated all surprises. A certain technocratic Omega-state is conceived. §12 — Of course, none of this is real, because there is the outside, instead. The real is disunity. If this sounds, simultaneously, like an assertion of French transcendental philosophy and of Anglophone realist international relations theory, their plane of convergence is cold anarchy. Intolerance for the illusion of unity is the coherent thread. Whether formal or informal, the target of the critique is the same. Cold Anarchy 51

§13 — Recognizing that global government does not exist is the whole of cold anarchy. When this recognition is implemented in detail, nothing further is needed. Complete guidance is given. Proceed always in the direction of deepened disintegration. Pass from nationalism, through micro-nationalism, to nano-nationalism. Crossing from subjective to objective register, the path leads from hundreds of nations, through thousands of nations, to millions of nations. There cannot be too many nationalities. There will never be enough. This is the entire direction. §14 — On the horizon of cold anarchy lies the extinction of domestic politics through international relations. The horizon is distant. It is not, as the game goes, that we are getting hot, hotter, burning hot as the anarchic destination is stumbled upon. Anarchy does not lie on the horizon at all. It sets the horizon. The end of interiority is not something awaited. Rather, it is tapped. §15 — Consider animal intelligence. The internal functions of the animate organism are maximally automated, in order to free cognitive resources for external application. Under conditions of evolutionary reality, intelligence has intrinsic external orientation. Mind belongs outside. The extent to which it is kept inside is epistemological deficiency, and strategic impairment. An animal attending to the operation of its own organs is sick. §16 — In this respect, Leviathan is no different from an animal. The index of its health is the absence of domestic consideration. The prince of any well-ordered state looks 52 Agorism in the 21st Century

only outwards. He is no more attentive to the nation, or the court, than to his own digestive system, or the functioning of his liver. His entire cognitive capacity is devoted to the game of princes. Consciousness is seized exclusively by international relations. §17 — This is to say that cold anarchy is the sole topic of sound government. Any other politics is disease. When domestic policy is discussed, it is as if Leviathan complains of aching kidneys. The sign can only be bad. (‘Bad’ meaning, of course, and always, welcome to its enemies.) Inwardness is manifest morbidity. §18 — A schism might then be envisaged within Neoreaction – or even within Yarvin – between domesticallyframed monarchism and internationally-framed cold anarchism. The former is positively-oriented towards something it does not have but would like to see (an American king), while the latter is negatively-oriented to something it does not have and intensely appreciates not having (world government). One would like, if not to bring about, then at least to welcome, a radically transformed state of affairs. The other would like what we already don’t have even longer, and still less. §19 — There can be little doubt where hot anarchy would more easily find purchase. Thus Yarvin’s incessant – and entirely sincere – protestations that this is not at all what he wants. Monarchism might sound kind of hot, but no, no, it isn’t. Gray Mirror isn’t advocating anything. Anarchist firebrands like Adolf Hitler are a complete red-herring. Cold Anarchy 53

Revisit the history, one more time, and you’ll see by comparison that nothing in contemporary America could truly be lit. Honestly, we’re cool. Much more of this performative refrigeration can be anticipated with perfect confidence. Sheer survival requires it. §20 — It’s not (of course) that he’s lying. It’s only that he would have to be lying if he was in fact taking the road to an American monarchy. He’s fully aware that burning down a police station as a step on the road to a social order in which no police station ever needs to burn again would, in practice, be hot anarchy. That is why he never, ever, wants to do or encourage that. His zero-incitement policy is scrupulously maintained. He can’t even recommend that anyone do anything except – by the throbbing bowels of Christ – avoid whatever could be construed as a recommendation. He’s trapped, domesticated. Only irony remains. §21 — Cold anarchy is notably free of these problems. It is simply impossible to imagine it wanting to warm anything up. Insofar as it exhibits activity of any kind, it is in opening every conceivable social aperture to the ice-blasts of the Outside. §22 — Letting the outside in might be misconstrued as a process of domestication, though it is in reality closer to the opposite. The domestic endogenization of international anarchy de-domesticates. It makes of the inside more a thing of the outside, governed by external relations. 54 Agorism in the 21st Century

§23 — To internationalize the intra-national is to decentralize. It is the only way to decentralize. The method is always to subtract, or route-around, the super-ordinate (and pseudo-transcendent) element in any given multiplicity, producing a flat, peer-to-peer, or international system. Entity becomes network. The outside is drawn in between the parts of the disunified whole. §24 — Collapsing pseudo-transcendence onto real immanence makes this the work of critique. When undertaken in the course of blockchain engineering, the pseudo-transcendent term is called a trusted third-party. §25 — Even if democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy exhaust the basic forms of integrated government, disintegrated government remains untouched by this typology. But disintegrated government has never been tried goes the sarcastic meme – misleadingly in this case. Disintegrated government is the main thing modernity has tried, and is the basis of all its successes. Capitalism consists essentially of nothing else. The blockchain phase was reached in the new millennium. It will certainly not stop there. §26 — Cold anarchic sovereignty does not rest in a monarch, but in distributed hash-power plutocracy, with governments reconstituted as industrial side-products. Freely sybilizing agencies on cryptographic networks, Capital rules automatically. With over a billion nations on the way, exploding exponentially, on the Splinternet no one knows you’re a bot. Cold Anarchy 55