Alright everybody, welcome to Theory Underground. What you're about to listen to is an interview that we did with Nick Land last week. Very exciting that he was able to join us considering how important he is for thinking the situation today. Michael Downs, a.k.a. Mikey of the Mikey Seminar here at TU, taught intro to land almost a year ago and then taught intro to Zizek about a month ago. And we have been pushing for the Zizek versus land debate now for over a year. And we also just wanted to have this conversation, right?
Because at the end of the day, we are just interested in seeing where he's at in his own development. If you're at all familiar with his Twitter personality, that's a very separate thing from his actual theoretical work, as is Zizek's theory versus Zizek's articles that he writes for, say, The Guardian. Right. There's this big difference with both of them between this sort of popular stuff they do, this maybe trolling stuff they do, and this much deeper and rigorous level.
And we are starting to think that in a sort of sense, there's this thing they do to weed out unserious people at a certain level. saying certain things at the level of the public discourse can weed out the unserious, and then you can kind of just focus on doing your thing, and you're not surrounding yourself with cowards or kind of naive utopians or what have you. So that's a whole thing that we think about. And look, this is a fantastic interview. It might be the best land interview you'll ever
listen to. I don't know. I think it probably is. That's my personal opinion. But you can decide for yourself. If you're curious to know more about Theory Underground, stick around until the end of the video or podcast episode. Then you'll hear the PSA we've made that should tell you a little bit about who we are, what our vibe is, and how to get involved. If you're interested in lecture courses or the ongoing research seminars or the books that we are publishing, then yeah, stick around. Also, Mikey's book, On Nick Land and Zizek and Capital vs. Time Energy, that book is in the works right now. Pre-sales are officially available,
and you can purchase those via the link in the description. Enjoy. Recording in progress. All right, everybody. Welcome to Theory Underground. Today we're joined by Nick Land. How's it going, Nick? Good. Great to have you. Looking forward to it, yeah. Yeah. Great to have you here. And so this is going to be one of those ones where I am really just kind of managing time and making sure that people get chances to say their things or whatever. I mean, I'm in the student position here. I'm still trying to understand where you're coming at this from. And you were just saying before we started recording that large portions of your own work are kind of like kind of mysterious to you as well in a sort of sense.
And so I was saying, well, we have that much in common, right? But I think Mikey's going to be the one who really helps us drill into some certain aspects of your work and hopefully we can have a great conversation. So you want to take it away, Mikey? Yeah, sure. So having this opportunity to talk to you, I was thinking like, well, what's the best way to open up the conversation? And your thought has certainly evolved since the 90s. and I kind of like the idea of getting a read on where you're at with this famous question or idea you pose. So, Nick, at this point in your life, looking around, does anything human make it out of the near future? Yeah, that haunts me a bit, that sentence.
I mean, I could sort of retreat easily into semantics about it. Yeah, I don't want to be evasive. I think if you sort of pan out a little bit from it, I think the sort of philosophical structure around that is that the anthropomorphic subject has a much larger context.
and a lot of what the kind of catastrophist singularitarian sort of approach to the future is the fact that that larger sort of reservoir in which the kind of apparently bounded human subject exists threatens to deluge in. In a certain sense the future would be disappointing to anyone coming to it from that sort of, there's a set of frames coming to the future, on the one hand from transcendental philosophy, on the other hand from the sort of techno-singularitarian people,
and what they share is a notion that the absolute inundation of the narrowly conceived human subject is what it takes for the future to deserve a capital F. You know? So, I mean, I would just say there's a kind of current trend, which I'm sure you guys have all heard of, that causes effective acceleration, EAC. And that is really, I think, in this respect, defined by sort of erasing that sentence.
You know, it's acceleration without nothing human makes it out of the near future. And I can respect why that's been done. And it's certainly good PR. But at the same time, I think that there's a certain philosophical disappointment about it. You know, I think that it's there's something a little bit self-deluding of thinking that what we're talking about with the future, the radical future, is some kind of Star Trek scenario of like higher primates in space. You know, it's like it seems to me to just really not be a plausible, a plausible model.
So I would say, I mean, I'm rambling on a bit here. I would just sort of as a summary thing. I've come, I think, a lot more to respect the myth of humans in space. You know, I think the whole I love all this kind of mass colonization stuff. I think it's great. I think the technology people are doing to put humans in space is great. But I also think that it's impossible on certain philosophical grounds to simply subscribe to this anthropomorphic future. It just doesn't make sense. It just shows a certain lack of understanding about what people mean by superintelligence, about what robotics promises, about sort of understanding the constraints.
constraints i mean the fact that you have to stick a human cranium through a birth canal is such a kind of major obstacle to to to its horizon that i think you can't just like move past that fast and and easily is that is that to say that um if we were to say avoid the way that childbirth has happened for humans for as long as humans have been humans and come up with some other way of bringing us, us, I'm speaking loosely, into existence. We stop being human at that point in any sort of a reasonable sense. So like
to say nothing, so you can still kind of say nothing human makes it into the near future because we're changing it the language is tricky but but the point is is like the subject of the sentence is changing and and language is kind of preserving it but it's that's just a language game right yeah i mean the thing about language you know all are we're sort of um networked through language so you know people are very interested in these larger scale social intelligences and such like or even these cyborgian mixes where humans are communicating with with robots and and such like and the and the bandwidth of language is so absurdly small
i mean it's just like you know pathetic the quantity of information you can get through that channel and that in itself is enough to produce um a certain kind of hard individuation at the level of the individual human animal. It's just not networked enough with anything else to not be mostly in its own head, where stuff's going at a kind of relatively respectful level of synaptic activity until it just then hits this barrier and just goes this incredible crawl through linguistic communication. And so I think there's some question about what, you know, the horizon of the human is really the horizon of having that hard language barrier as its
as its single channel for network and so whether you're talking about sort of dense much larger intelligences or you're talking about just internet communicating intelligences or you're talking about um elon musk type implant connections that are that are replacing language as a soul all of those things are such radical violations of the kind of basic boundary that i think constitutes any realistic sense of what it is to be human um yeah nick would you say like The issue with EAC for you is the same issue that left acceleration has, which is this idea that it doesn't take the singularity seriously.
Like this idea that we just continue to exist in some relative human form with the emergence of super intelligence. That's that's the real problem. yes i think so i think it's like um the importance of the like space stuff is it really just makes things focus extremely tightly on this question about uh efficiency in terms of mass you know when you're you've got a whole kind of um social and technological ecology based on moving stuff out of the planetary gravity
well then you have to be extremely serious about what you're getting in terms of your um functionality per kilogram. And, I mean, humans aren't even, it's not even if humans are predominantly brains on that level, you know what I mean? I mean, a human is an extremely bulky thing to be moving around in space. I mean, there's just enormous pressure that's going to be on doing stuff with robots. and you know understanding really what kind of functionality is you're trying to you're putting all these resources into taking it out of the earth's gravity well
so you're going to be really specific about that you know and things like you know human digestive systems and livers and and skeleton structures and all of those things in terms of the mass they they represent four functions that yeah you can make that trade on earth but i don't think you can make that trade for long if you've got a whole orchestrated system of shuttling stuff around in the solar system it's just like what are you doing you know it's just a kind of um weird sort of boutique thing to be moving these large bodies around in order to move a brain around. And, you know, I'd be very surprised if brains were some kind of extreme case of
economising mass to intelligence ratios. I mean, it would be, I guess, disappointing for everyone if that turned out to be the case. But certainly, you know, humans are just not very transportable. I mean they simply are and so yeah I'm banging on about this but I think that it's like well once you say if you grant that sort of argument and you say the population off planet is quite soon has to be mostly robots nothing else makes sense once you we're at a point now with LLMs
where I think lots of people are basically saying the Turing test. We're in a zone where the Turing test has been clearly passed. So it's hard to know what human organisms are bringing to the table at this point, you know. Like, obviously, there's the moon. There was no robot that you could stick on the moon in the 1960s. But I think at the time, even if it's really soon in a few years, where you're doing Mars, the reasons that you'd put people there is for PR, it's for symbolism. It's not because it makes any kind of deep sense in terms of the amount of functionality
you want to put on the planet and how much mass you have to deal with to do that. Okay, so I want to kind of move on a little bit. So to me, why your work just continues to be so relevant is to me, your central thesis has always been, and you've said this in another interview, capitalism is artificial intelligence. and that for you like this is the core landian thesis and for me this is what sets you apart from other theorists of ai uh bostrom and kurtzweil and these guys i mean yeah sometimes they'll talk about capitalism but they don't see this fundamental link that you picked up on in the
90s and so i want to talk to you a little bit about this um when when people talk about artificial intelligence uh oftentimes they don't define what they mean by intelligence what would the landian definition of intelligence be um well i i guess that i think the most robust one is competence at playing games with a very wide definition of games that encompasses basically all kinds of activity most obviously competitive activity that people engage in um but on the way
to that i mean that's my sense of like the ultimate landscape you're moving into with it becomes interesting with super intelligences, you know, post Turing test experiment. But on the way there, I think that the classic Alan Turing, Turing test notion of intelligence is extremely helpful. And it picks up on this thing that we are going to be impressed with something as intelligent if it can exist. emulate us as part of a much broader capacity for emulation um so i mean it can emulate us
on the way that we're emulating all kinds of other things but emulating us has a particular sort of social and political importance because it's in it's in a kind of um difficult it's in a difficult political dynamic with us i mean we're basically like uh begin with the kind of legal status of like slave owners of this thing and so it's it's dealing with us is going to be a serious issue for him um and so i think I think, yeah, I think that the thinking of intelligence in terms of that, in terms of being able to negotiate with people, understand what people are trying to do with it, understanding what kind of deals are on the table.
those are the games that it's going to have to play soon after the touring test threshold is crossed which as I say I think is basically that's where we are right now yeah I mean with everything because I haven't seen you say that much about chat GPT but when you see stuff like that do you have these moments like i told you so like where it's so amping up again at this moment with ai uh and i think there was a there was a period where people were like oh the ai thing it was a 90s you know it was popular but there's this real moment of upsurge right now a wave yeah and so but yeah like i just oh no please so but i think we could dwell on that for a second
and maybe unpack it because isn't that just as much like almost missing the point of like what you mean by by intelligence and and i mean because like people are people are like oh chat gpt and look at what mid journey is doing to art and they're thinking that's ai but then it's like but no like also i mean that's almost distracting from how the entire economy itself was all always already ai and has been for a couple hundred years right yes by by i mean if you're going by the kind of capitalism equals artificial intelligence then for sure like i would sort of say on that level we've been dealing with emergent artificial
intelligence for like basically half a millennia probably is right yeah yeah so i mean when we go to the heart of this thesis capitalism is artificial intelligence if we're thinking in terms of like the Marxist formula of capital MCM prime, how do you see that process as intrinsically generating more and more knowledge, more and more intelligence? What's the epistemological connection to MCM prime? Well, I think it's basically the people who've been strongest on this has been the Austrian school of economists.
I mean, if someone said to me, look, you're just simply paraphrasing or rephrasing what Austrian economists have said about capitalism as an information processing system, fair enough. I don't think there's anything. Maybe I've just sort of sharpened it up a little bit. And obviously, they didn't have artificial intelligence as a reference point. So when they're saying, oh, capitalism's information processing system, it doesn't have that, those resonances that we have, you know, post being the computer age, in the cyberpunk age, all of those things. But yeah, that would definitely be, I think there's a deep tradition of it.
I think it's the development of the notion of spontaneous order in liberal economics. It was given this particular information theoretic spin in the Austrian school. And that's already a huge current that I think compels that, compels that thesis really. Okay, could you, I mean, but could we also see it as on some level being baked into Marx's critique of capital where, you know, Marx is always talking about how, you know, on the market competition necessitates capitalists revolutionizing their means of production, which, of course, that's going to take the production of new knowledge and new intelligence to be able to create those technologies.
And so that's also part of the motor of where this intelligence generation comes from. For sure. For sure. And the person also that I would definitely want to throw in there is Samuel Butler. I mean, his Book of the Machines in Era One is an incredibly prophetic piece on this. and there's a kind of independent emergence of this MC, M-dash circuit on the Mark side and obviously the question about,
the question that leads to intelligence explosion on the AI side, particularly Good's article about the last human invention. I haven't read it for a long time, but it's basically the essential point is to do with the fact that the extreme sort of drama as a temporal phenomenon of superintelligence is the fact that once you've got a machine that can itself build its own intelligence you have an extremely powerful positive feedback mechanism and i think it's obviously you know this this attention to
positive feedback going right back you know to the ccius the cciu i think was born in that thought The thought that positive feedback has been neglected and derided on behalf of negative feedback. And so, you know, the basic sort of right up to the 1940s and Wiener and all of this kind of stuff, the basic assumption was that positive feedback is pathological. It's, you know, the role of a cybernetic machine is homeostatic. it's to preserve itself negative feedback is the essential thing and if it's betraying signs of
positive feedback it's going wrong and so obviously that i think the essential move that the cci you made was just flipping that over and said like you know even if you think it's going wrong it's the basic thing that's happening it's the basic thing that's happening and it's And, you know, it's what Marx is talking about exactly in the formula that you have just said. And it's what all the intelligence explosion people are saying specifically about what is to be expected from the kind of growth curve of artificial intelligence. It's, you know, those two things have exactly the same dynamics. And we can sort of obviously see that the marks don't matter when you actually really get into it.
And it's a loop between technology and commerce. So it's already, it's not that you're bringing these two different things together. I mean, the technological explosion curve is already something that is being recognized and discussed on the, economic side before you even make it specifically a question about artificial intelligence and and computers right because i mean if we take that that circuit of capital marx talks about and we we subtract the content the form of it is just one zero one prime so it's just a loop of of augmentation and so yeah it's like he it's like he created a formula for uh cyber positive
feedback yeah so when they when people and that is the basic capitalist dynamic so a hundred percent i can hear the little the little uh comments now i i've seen it already i think when we talk about this, but people will say, oh, well, capitalism is not intelligent. Actually, it's very wasteful. It's very stupid. And it's like, I feel like what you just said is the point that they're missing. It's like, well, they think it's not intelligent because their definition of intelligence is basically colored by thinking that negative feedback equals good, you know, the pleasure principle and what they're missing is this this what the ccru was doing with positive feedback
right i mean i think the thing about inefficiency is what's your benchmark you know because this is having to build everything from the ground up it's not like there's no plan there's no model it can follow you know any competence it has has to be trial and error into existence in this kind of crazy growth process. So, I mean, obviously you can make comparisons that make capitalism look extremely wasteful, but I think it's like, you know, but compared to what? So certainly I would go out on a limb extremely hard against people with confidence in planning
planning as a way of actually improving efficiency. I think this record is terrible. There might be very short windows where it can build on something that's been spontaneously put together by the system and just incrementally just tweak it in a good way. But that's only, you know, the process is dynamic. So it's like, it might do something that just gives a slight edge for a little short period. And then, you know, the thing has gone through a whole set of experiments in the uncontrolled part of the economy, and it's just left that stuff in the dust. And I think it's really crucial on the side of AI how much that has been vindicated in the sense that all the womb
in the history of artificial intelligence has come from the surrender of top-down planification type models of what you're trying to do to these kind of emergent black box evolutionary types of thinking you know deep learning the whole point of that is you don't know what the hell the thing is doing but you set up an environment where it can through trial and develop itself on the model of the nervous system and again I have absolute confidence that all the kind of I think we're out of the gate now
in the sense that I think the amount of time where people could think that they were going to be able to plan their way into the future AI has just surely passed because it's like they don't have that edge to even lead to that illusion now. I mean, it's really getting to the point where its competence to project its own future is as powerful as anything that we can bring to it. but even were it the case that we were still in the old world in which human programmers were the key to the way it develops it's always by surrendering control that it moves forward
so yeah I wanted to go back just for a second to the thesis capitalism is artificial intelligence interesting thing so you know I was thinking about it in terms of Kantian statements Kantian truth do you think like because what you're saying there is capitalism necessarily gives rise to artificial intelligence if we if we take the statement capitalism is artificial intelligence and we know that that means necessarily gives rise to it Would you say this is like an a priori analytic statement, a posteriori synthetic, or is it hyperstitional?
What status would you give this statement or this thesis? Well. Well, yes. I mean, I'm trying to think. I've thought a lot about it. Yeah, I've thought a lot about it. I think on some level, like the point is, I think it reads like all bachelors are unmarried men. Like the point is to say it posits a, you know, a necessary relation there. Like it's definitional, but, but it's also not, it's not simply, it doesn't simply work
at the way that all bachelors are married men work. There's, there's a kind of empirical claim being made. Like the world is going to head in this direction. But I don't know. I almost see it almost as it's hyperstitional positing an a priori analytic where like time will tell, but you're tapped into a certain tendency you're seeing unfold that you view as a necessary tendency of capital. I mean I think I'm sort of anticipating that there's going to be a phase of discussion in this talk that will loop back to this because I think it's maybe we have to be sort of probably discussing these questions about retrochronic dynamics and
such things to really lock in where that equation was coming from. So, I mean, if I try to say, well, let's just pretend that we still believe in kind of standard progressive temporality, under those circumstances, what would you say was the kind of basis of that claim that there's an identity between capitalism and artificial intelligence? Yeah, I mean, I think it's complicated. I mean, it's obviously based on saying that when you just actually see what people are saying on either side,
you just see that they're discussing the same thing from two different aspects. But that's kind of in a way just to kind of, I think, avoid the question. You say, well, so what convinces you it's the same thing? Or, you know, what is it that leads you to the conviction that it's the same thing? And, yeah, I mean, I think I have a kind of imaginative problem of not seeing it as so sort of stubbornly obvious that, you know, it would actually be a problem. And this is a failure on my part, I think, to anticipate what the alternative thesis would really look like.
I feel like more of it is being tapped. Basically, look, you don't have empirical – you don't have like, oh, everywhere in the universe capitalism has ever shown up. We have the data that shows it always produces AI. So we don't have that type of empirical research. But it's kind of like we know that diabetes is a cyber positive loop, right? More and more blood sugar, the insulin doesn't get really the negative feedback doesn't kick in and all these problems emerge from it. And we have the empirical data to show how that works. But we know that once this process starts, we have ideas. We have knowledge of where it goes. what I think CCRU and you guys were tapped into is you see this trajectory and you see the logic
of how it gets to artificial intelligence and so even though the empirical truth of it isn't established yet you see the the tendencies at work in capital accumulation but i think you know you could usefully add to that what dave was saying about on the same topic of the fact that okay on a fairly narrow definition of ai yes the relation is like exactly as you're saying it's prophetic but on a wider definition of ai it's already an AI system, when you have this distributed, unplanned machine solving these distribution
problems in a way that none of the participants themselves individually are able to understand, then you're already dealing with a form of artificial intelligence. You know, it's not an LLM, but it is an intelligent mechanism that is demonstrably working. And when you want to say, you know, already with Adam Smith, you want to study that thing, then what you're doing is basically you're studying capitalism. something you're saying you know how how does this thing emerge that solves all these problems that the individual people in it do not even they can't even articulate the problem let alone
solve the problem um you know they're all the whole the famous adam smith thing you know it's not through the altruism of the butcher or the baker that i go for my meat and bread i mean he's basically saying, look, he's not going to tell you how this is working. You know, like you can go and talk to anyone. There's not anyone anywhere in the system that is going to be able to explain how it is solving these problems. It's, you know, it emerges out of the whole dynamic character of the system as a whole. and therefore I think is very reasonably described as already being a form of artificial intelligence
before it becomes the sort of thing that we now would recognise as that. And what we would now recognise as an artificial intelligence, an actual computer system that can solve problems that we can't even understand, like how to engage in complicated language games with people that they've never been taught how to do, or they've taught themselves how to do it, there's a very, I think, very definite, just continuous lineage that goes to that. And all the components of the narrowly conceived artificial intelligence systems have emerged with, I would say, some compelling inevitability
out of the earlier issues. Like, why do we have computers? I mean, there's a whole history of computing precisely because, like people often say, I think, again, very convincingly, Things like the Jacquard loom are these crucial stages in the history of computing technology. Why did the system produce a Jacquard loom? Well, you know, you only have to start to understand how the system works to see why there was a need for a Jacquard loom. And mechanizing human labor is the task that capitalism assigns to technology from just originally.
You know, you've got people doing something. They're quite expensive. You could probably use them for something more useful if only all the easily programmable part of their productive activity was assigned to a mechanism. It's just incredibly elementary to the way capitalism works and capitalist history works. and obviously is already, you know, on the way to the Turing test. You know, the substituting for human behavior is built into technology so deeply by the kind of capitalist matrix in which it operates
that, of course, we get to this thing about can machines convincingly emulate humans as the whole in that will pass the turing test it's just like you're just saying you know at this stage all they can do is weaving they can own there's only certain groups of people that they can throw out of work at this stage in history but you know it's a it's a continuous process and it's got a very continuous teleonomic pressure to that that has to lead eventually to full spectrum, full spectrum Turing test passage computation. So, I mean, could we just say that
the techno capital singularity would be the self-realization of the invisible hand of the market? you see a trajectory from like that that basic level yes if you're doing it if you're running your hour of time in that direction for sure yeah okay now i feel like this is going to we're gonna we were naturally moving in the direction of talking about your theory of time and you know this it keeps kind of wanting to go in that direction but i don't want to get away from this door you kind of open by bringing in inefficiency and asking what's our benchmark for what counts as inefficiency. And I think this is probably
going to be the biggest sort of difference between us and you. And so it's worth like kind of looking at for at least a minute. And I know Mikey's probably got stuff to say about this, but I'll just kind of say it this way. It starts out with, I forget who said it, but there's that saying, I'm not so impressed by the fact that there's an Albert Einstein. I'm concerned about the fact that there's a lot of Albert Einsteins that never got to kind of develop because of the fact that they were probably down in the mines, or working in sugarcane fields. And that's for us, obviously, as humans with our anthro concerns, right?
Like that's going to be, for me, the standard of what counts as inefficiency at a certain level, which is human potential. I care about it. And I think probably to you or at least to your younger self, definitely for a lot of the people who are enjoyers of your work. It's just cute, right? This concern of mine, this priority, it's a cute little thing that I care about, human potential. But where I come from, you know, people are dying from opioid addiction. People are, they don't see anything else to do with their garbage time except for drink alcohol. And like, it's the homes and communities, but also the individual level, it's all falling into dysfunction. And that is a result of the
structural stultification of our life worlds because of the collapse of time energy, which is large energy infused repeatable blocks of reliable time in your week or month between people, All of that collapsed into individuals doing everything they can to prepare themselves to go back to work or to get a job. And so all of this effort, all of this potentially creative energy is being put towards our reduction to a kind of labor power and effort to do certain kinds of labor that are about surplus value valorization.
Right. And so that's – I mean there's potential here. So like this sort of renaissance human, maybe that kind of humanism we should just accept. We're so far past that. But then there is the potential for some other kind of renaissance. We're interested in what that kind of renaissance would look like, but it's definitely one where people would have the time energy for discovering and cultivating their talents and relationships just because we care about not having miserable, shitty lives in our limited span of time on this earth. Yeah. Well, here, let me kind of take you back through that.
Okay. that discussion because I think it's, there's lots of interesting elements to that. And maybe the first place to kind of stop again on this is potential. So your initial example of this is like Einstein's down the mines. And it's very inefficient on any level. you know you can there's a whole spectrum from looking at this in a very kind of humanistic caring way that you're saying could be derided by the more cold-blooded of being cute but but you can get very cold-blooded about it as well I mean you can be very cold-blooded and see it as a
huge waste to have someone with Einstein level capabilities working down a mine as a coal mine and and obviously you know to go back a little bit to like the jackard loom and these kind of things I mean there's an implicit thing in all of that all of those stages that is saying it's a waste to have anything but a machine doing this task i mean this is something that a machine could do it's like why why do we have a person doing that and as i say i'm not trying to pretend that this is particularly like based on any great humanistic sense of empathy or anything like that
I think it's just cold, cold, cold efficiency. And so if we're talking about potential, I think the question is, is this potential of a kind that makes sense to the capitalist mechanism? Or is it some kind of potential that the capitalist mechanism just does not recognize? And I guess my stance is like, you know, we might think we can find some kind of recognition of potential that outdoes what capitalism is able to do in terms of recognition of potential. I'm skeptical. You know, I think the capitalism is extraordinarily good at appreciating potential, you know, and putting people to their most profitable use.
use and even in things that would seem extremely like far removed from grad grind type capitalism in the entertainment music you know artistic talent musical talent things that are you know very far removed from what might be seen as kind of just industrial potential it's capitalism does a serious job at trying to sift out this talent, this potential, and the only way it sifts out is by commercializing. So yeah, I mean, I should probably let you come back to that,
but I guess what I'm saying is like wastage of potential is I think only something capitalism can be accused of if the notion of potential is for some reason intrinsically inaccessible to the economic, to the commercial mechanism, commercial. But I'm trying to avoid saying the economic logic, because I kind of really have a personal aversion to using logic in this way. But that's kind of what I'm saying. I mean, if you can't come to some commercial estimation of potential, then yes, indeed. You know, you're then open to say that there is a kind of inherent wastage and inefficiency in capitalism that it can't address because it can only use commercialism as a sensory system.
It's just intrinsically impervious to anything that doesn't make commercial sense or register commercially. But, you know, how restrictive is that, actually? You know, is it really that there's a lot of things that we value that simply cannot be, that no commercial sense can be made of them at all? I'm a skeptic, as I say. So I definitely want to kick it over to Mikey here because I know he's got a lot on this. But I do at least want to say from a sort of knee-jerk response without having put a lot of thought into it yet, the need to commercialize something in order to show that it is indeed – that there's actual potential there is –
that's what's driving what we call education today and the, and the institutions that do what we call education today. Right. Uh, I don't know if that's right. All the kind of libertarian right people I know are in absolute despair about education. And I mean, it's precisely because it's doesn't seem to be doing that at all. It seems to be just doing left-wing political indoctrination. For sure. But I'm not talking about the social sciences or humanities. I'm talking about the physics research and the maths and the engineering, which is being driven by weapons manufacturer research and advertising. Like the funding that you have to find. Where does the funding come from? Does it come from like the government has said, oh, yes, we want to fund science for objective truth. We care about that. No, they don't care about that.
right it's it's about the well i mean if they don't a lot of that stuff still seems to be done i mean you know physics has its problems you know that are very interesting and obviously we could go into that but it doesn't seem to me the problems are coming from the fact that there's a social unwillingness to fund pure physics let alone maths i mean you know is it is it the case there's any sort of constrictive pressure on maths education at a high level i mean i just i would need some convincing that that is really something that's happening um it just seems to me that that maths is so open to commercial perceptiveness like you know that capitalism really that as
soon as you understood anything it was understood the value of math you know it basically began in in renaissance italy with a recognition of the just incredible revolutionary importance of of the the new numerals of algebra of you know soon calculus i mean so yeah i so i guess i have some skepticism about that i i will i will have to do some heavy lifting then probably not just to convince you but to actually just write out a piece maybe that could even lay out the case that i know i mean my assessment of the situation is that the the math the potential math genius
and engineering prowess is going towards seeing how much skinnier we can make the next big mac while selling it for more as opposed to anything else really you know yeah but you see to me that's a very interesting criticism because i think the thing about capitalism is like okay just hypothetically grant it an existence as an alien entity that's impacting this planet putting itself together in a hostile environment we are that hostile environment right you know humans like lots of people have made this point that basic human societies have been
organized to prevent this thing getting in you know and it required very specific historical circumstances to break through those security mechanisms so it has to work with us it's not going to... Capitalism can't arrive on the scene in Italy and say, look, what I want is basically all human activity to be directed in the long-term goal of producing synthetic superintelligences. We're not interested in that. We say, no, we want hamburgers. We want commercial sex. We want all this shit. Sometimes we want good stuff, but it's not capitalism telling us you want a hamburgers, we're telling capitalism we want hamburgers. And so the only way it gets to do
its stuff, which is basically swapping out human labor and producing increasingly sophisticated mechanical intelligence, the only way it gets to do that is by pandering to us. You know, we're saying we want better weapons, we want hamburgers, we want all this stuff, you know and and it's simply that's the environment in which it has to operate to do its thing but its thing is not that you know it doesn't it doesn't i can really assure you that like in its essential mechanism capitalism does not give a shit about hamburgers right right right it's like it it's a concession to us also it's but the it's the it's the us
or we in that paragraph that I want to problematize because which part of us is it able to appeal to? It's able to appeal to that part of us who, when we're in a hurry and we say it's good enough, we go for the thing that is really fatty and tasty, but it's not the part about us that cares about the long-term. And it's not the part of you or me that's able to read Kant or practice the violin. And so you can commercialize the sale of the violin or the sale of the lessons for the violin, but you cannot commercialize the actual doing it part, the doing it parts, the part that can't be commercialized. And therefore we're not able to cultivate those higher human capacities.
Right. Well, I don't know. I mean, insofar as those high human capacities exist, which of course they do, it seems to me they're being catered to. I mean, you know, there are concert halls, there's orchestras, there's music sales. You can be a professional musician. You can be a professional musician because things are arranged that the market mechanism finds that there's a sufficient demand for the production of music that it can make commercial sense to pay musicians to allow them to spend their lives training to become better musicians, to group them together into orchestras. I mean, those are things that happen. So it's not as if there's some process of erasure taking place
where none of that stuff happens. There's an art market, there's a musical market, there's a market for literature. None of these things are disappearing. are they are they i mean are they i mean are they there are they are they there are they there that's kind of the question it's like the the person who wants to do music because they want to live in a state of scola if they want to have have their leisure time and they want to have their like leisure time free of uh like pressures and stresses and just literally just live and breathe music versus a person who's training to be a professional musician like they're like a korean going into like k-pop you know what i mean like where they're just being worked to death just so
that they can succeed in that environment it's a different quality of life and of the product itself is a different quality of music and then it's like that might work for somebody who doesn't really they're they're not it gets them through the day both haven't we got both now i mean of course you know there's a much larger commercial market for various types of pop music and people can be more or less cynical about that but there's still there's still every type of music isn't it still there's still people who are completely vocational musicians go to a high music school become a virtuoso violinist, join an orchestra. And, you know, that's a completely viable thing
for a small number of people. And the number of people that can be, kind of the capacity for those people is obviously is ultimately based on what is the market. You know, you take everyone on earth, what are their desires and inclinations? You know, they have, there's quite a lot of high stuff and that stuff will be catered to um so i mean obviously the other side of this question is like what is there really any imaginable institution that could do a better job of this you know like you have some sense of what is really valuable
and important and what people should be encouraged to do and help to do and all of this thing and And is there any imaginable institution that you could trust to maintain a set of values about this that you would respect? And, you know, therefore support those support those things, because the things we've tried to do that with is democratic governments. I mean you know we've got let the government decide I mean does the government make trustworthy decisions about what what part of human aspiration is worth encouragement
certainly I don't believe that is true and so if it's not the government I mean maybe you're saying there is some kind of government that would do it but if it's not the government it's not the market what is it like where is this institution going to come from? Right now, I'll just say that the, for me, the, the, the way that science and, and, uh, and technology being sort of unleashed majorly, like in, in the, in the Renaissance, you know, uh, really has its, I mean, I think it's, it's kind of spelled out really well by Rene Descartes in his, uh, the discourse on method. Right. And he's saying, Hey guys,
if we unchain this thing, we could like make a lot of labor saving devices. He says an infinity of labor saving devices. Um, and then he says, we'll have so much more time. And then he says, our workers could do this and that and the other. And so of course there's this, we here in the, the class question rears its neck. And so it's like, okay, but like, are those labor saving devices for people or those labor saving devices for the small number of people who've had the time to get to know their desires and inclinations so that they can appreciate things that aren't the cheeseburgers and pop. And so the, the, I mean, I want, I want, I want to cash in on the
promise obviously and that's a humanist desire and i and i get that but the the the point is is like well it does say these devices do save labor in a certain sense but when they're being done for capital in the way that they are um that that certain sense is one where a lot of this potential is lost so then and and it's like i don't care about this abstractly i care about this because it's just like i care about the people i care about i care about myself i care about like being able to do the things that we want to be able to do um so that's that's where i'm coming from i kind of want to just leave it there yeah and and i i because i feel like i just one thing back to this though which is for sure whether you follow jehu's stuff you know that
jehu that communism is free time and nothing else position i mean you might be interested in that It's like, I have obviously problems with it. I mean, he's a full-bought communist, but he's a very interesting man. What's his name? And Jehu, his Twitter handle is Dan underscore Jehu. Okay. And yeah, a super interesting guy. But you got problems with it, yeah. I mean, as I say, there's no need for me to get into a whole complicated thing about my agreements and disagreements with him but but sure he seems to address your concerns more intensely than anyone i can think of well just as in case i'm being put in a bucket of
deplorables i don't want to be associated with i look forward to meeting jehu and finding out what he thinks but i do want to clarify i'm not a communist i don't care about a classless society I'm not trying to do that at all. Just saying, his whole thing is that he embraces accelerationism, but he says the fundamental dynamic of it, he embraces a kind of 1990s anti-humanist accelerationism. But he says the basic logic of the system is to just replace people. and that's what should be embraced. So he's a kind of Marxist who basically says, look, the whole thing is that this capitalist mechanism
is basically about pushing people out of industrial activity and that the whole attention of what he sees as his politics is to embrace that and say, you know, that basically capitalism should just become our bitch. it should totally replace us as industrial units and then i mean he for me marx gets a bit cringe with the whole fishing in the afternoon and stuff i mean i don't know but he he doesn't he doesn't get that cringe um i think jay who doesn't in the same place yeah damn jay who doesn't he he he's much less subject to these slightly kind of weird i would say victorian kind of you know
romantic images but obviously in terms of substance is it is it's all about the production of free time and that he thinks that all other uh i guess he would say leftists i mean i don't it's the people use these this language practically and in different ways but let me just pretend that he would say leftist all leftist political activity should just be about free free time maximization. And in doing that, it's in some kind of deep accord with the fundamental historical capitalist dynamic. So yeah, that's why, that's why I said, I thought it resonated with the points you making it not, not to accuse you of some kind of.
Well, and I don't, I don't, part of, it's not just like, Oh, communism has a bad record or whatever it's no that i just literally do not believe that the state is necessarily the solution right and that you casting doubt on that i think is a good point and it's actually a good point that the austrian economists do bring in is like yeah centralization and state control and this top-down governance of economy that's not necessarily going to get the results that people are looking for maybe you can i'm open to that i'm agnostic but i but i am very skeptical. Right. And I think like, there's nothing worse than a government that is ruling over people who aren't skeptical of it. Right. I mean, nowadays you're supposed to be shamed for that, but I I've got no shame. I agree with you. So, but with that, Mikey, what do you have on all
this? I mean, there's a lot to say. I mean, look, I guess for you, Nick, like I kind of want to give you more context. Like, I guess where we're coming from is obviously we take Mark seriously. We take you seriously. We take Baudrillard seriously. We take Mark Fisher seriously. It's like, we're living among all of you, like, like these different thought spaces. And, you know, obviously the, the, the leftists who love what we're doing and support us, you know, some of them, they're like, Oh, land. But we see something essential in your work where you're like, no, you can't just brush land and CCRU and accelerationism under the rug. I think what you did with thinking through artificial intelligence, using D&G, especially
what they were doing in Anti-Oedipus, there's so much that I agree with there that I'm always having to think in terms of your work when it comes to how I think about capitalism. I think you're one of the great theorists of capitalism. And so if I want to understand capitalism, you're going to be there at the heart of whatever I'm thinking through. So where I'm at is I'm always caught up in a web of tensions, right? So on the one hand, I see the thing that DNG saw in capitalism, that it decodes, it deterritorializes. Well, I embrace that. I don't want to live in these old local codes or imperial codes that they were talking about.
I celebrate capitalism in the sense of how it can uproot, how it can deterritorialize. And so I'm with you on that. But then there's the lived reality. Like, I'm not a professional academic. I'm a wage worker. I work in a warehouse. And this is where, like, the more of the Mark Fisher stuff and the Baudrillard stuff resonates with me. because a life of shitty wage labor, it's like the great nihilism, the real concrete nihilism where you get up and you go to a job you hate and you're, you know, it's just meaningless. And why we're so big about time energy is we see it as the transcendental condition of the good life or the pursuit of the good life. And wage labor trapped you in this situation where
you're at a job eight to 10 hours a day. You hate being there. Once you leave, you don't really have the time or the energy to devote the things that you love. And so, yeah, like if there's, if we're leftists, if people want to talk like that, it's in the sense that we do want to see the emancipation of time energy. Now, I know I say that to you. And I mean, one of your favorite famous comments when you were talking to Justin Murphy is, you know, you're not interested in emancipating human beings or human groups. And I, I respect you for just saying that because most motherfuckers would just, Oh, I'm not saying that. No, I get that. But this is the tension I'm caught in where I do see that capitalism does things that I like,
but the wage labor thing is the part of it. I don't like so much. And I, to bring this back around, the reason I said all this is I'm almost, you famously say, this is in Fang Numina from Machinic Desire. You said, for every problem, there is a virtual market solution. So the question is, instead of thinking outside of capitalism for time energy, is capitalism what could actually provide time energy through automation, through the withering away of wage labor? I mean, is it possible to have capitalism without wage labor?
Yeah, it's an interesting question. It's an interesting question. I mean, I basically do you believe that capitalism like what's the best way to get an angle on it is the only way that capitalism can produce surplus value through human labor power i mean this has always been the standard marches view of where value is produced but i've also seen you talk about capital when you were talking to james ellis on hermitics right you said you know capitalism really is doing anything cyber positively. Like capital is, uh, this ability
to just do something with greater and greater returns, greater efficiency. And so I don't know if that means that capital, you know, uh, capital accumulation necessarily has to always involve human labor power, uh, in order for capital to continue. I just, I wonder if it's possible to actually think capital without human labor power? I think, yeah, this is a really good and interesting question. I mean, maybe the first place that I have to sort of intervene is just to say, you know, I've learned a lot from Marx, And I have enormous respect for a lot of what he's done. And, you know, I would say for me, he has to be read with a larger Austrian framework.
I think what Schumpeter's criticisms are really sort of irresistible. I think that the transformation problem is absolutely lethal to a kind of naive notion of Marx. And I think there is a sense in which the truest reading of the whole massive exercise of das Kapital is as a reductio ad absurdum of the Labour Theory of Value, which is obviously something Marx inherited. They've not, you know, so there's all those caveats. And as part of that caveat, I do not believe that saying that the capitalist mechanism, the surplus value is entirely based upon.
it's based sorry to say that profitability of capitalist activities totally based on surplus labour power is an accounting trick you know it's like you can definitely do that accounting but that's not you're not really doing a kind of causal explanation of why that's happening you could because of the fact that cabalism is bringing a lot to the table that disappears into that accounting trick i mean it's doing the organizing it's doing all kinds of stuff and then you know it it inserts human labor power in and the human labor power is totally used as the as the unit
of account for what is actually happening in that thing and you guys must know from your own work that that's that's true i mean it's a very convenient accounting device to say look there's fixed capital that comes in and this and and that just simply you know it's a cost of business and then we are doing everything and so you make sense of the whole economics of the company by like looking at how much we're being paid how much the company is doing discount for fixed capital and that's the business structure i mean of course that's like a nice way to talk about it but i mean do you seriously think that's what's happening there you know and it's like the the all the value is being input by the fact that you are you know the labor force in that
thing is is is doing the work i mean that seems to me like um weird like you know obviously the osteos go to the other side and say that all the real surplus value comes from sort of entrepreneurial input. There's, you know, there's a business idea, they put the organization in, they hire the labor at competitive rates. And then if the idea of the entrepreneurial idea is great, it will make money. And, you know, the entrepreneur is the hero of profit. I mean, that's also very one-sided. I don't think it's more one-sided. I think it's like clearly as credible a story about where profit actually comes from in a business.
And certainly if work is kind of routinized and involves little initiative, just micro levels of initiative, but on a level that as much always likes to do kind of just averages out, then it's hard to see how that competes with the sort of entrepreneurial contribution in terms of making a business sort of distinctively profitable and functional in a competitive economy. So, OK, that's my this is my sort of right wingery to your to your left wingery on that. on that point um but the but the deeper issue is this that yeah so can capital can you have
capitalism without wage labor um and it's it's it's a seriously interesting complicated question And it's very, it's ineliminable from a question that takes us back to Turing test, takes us back to artificial intelligence, takes us back to our social relations with machines. Because the special status of wage labor comes from the fact that humans have political rights. you know they have property rights over their own labor and so the fact that they're treated
as a special academy by marx as we've just seen um by themselves no doubt also is because they are um they they are the people disposing of their own labor power as their own private property so you know you've got a special you've got a contract with your business where what you own, your own capacity to put in whatever hours a week of work for them is something that you can freely dispose of and therefore you get compensated for in your relationship with your employer. Obviously, you know, if nothing else ever occupied that role, then it's hard to see
how you could have a capitalist system. Like if it was to be the case that humans are the only beings that are ever able to have this self-ownership, rights of self-ownership that gives them the special status to enter into these contracts with capital via an employer, then they would... Then... I mean... And you're faced with this peculiar thing about fixed capital. You know, like if fixed capital, all the machinery that you could buy, say you've got artificial intelligence on LLM. Say you can run a business that actually doesn't need any human employees whatsoever.
And it's all fixed capital. and so you just sack everyone and replace them with machines and every single thing from top to bottom of a company except for the ownership is being automated. Is that a capitalist enterprise? Again, we're getting back into the Dan Yehud's territory because this is very much his sort of model. His model is based on the fact that we don't ever These rights don't ever get distributed to any non-human subjects So, yeah Imagine you're in the position of power
And okay, the vast majority of the economy has been automated And yet the economy is still It's still got private ownership So there's still capitalists But the vast majority of the infrastructure and the production process is automated. What do we do? Do we have the state just do UBI? Or how do we solve the problem of how do people have money to buy what the capitalists sell us if nobody has jobs because everything's been automated? yeah it's obviously well the ubi example is is really important i mean this is obviously how
some people are thinking about it for sure and that's in this this is the same this it's very the whole i guess of left acceleration so it's very sympathetic to these Williams and Benning the future yeah they're all about it I mean but as you as somebody on the right or somebody who's profoundly pro capital I mean there's a sense where it's like okay if there's no one to buy this I mean it's like do the do the capitalists wouldn't they have to tell the state like we or would the what I mean there's nobody to employ i mean do you pay them but you employ people as consumers like here we're
paying you to buy stuff uh that we that we produce it seems like the only way because the capitalists aren't going to want to do that they're going to want the state to just provide ubi so people can buy commodities and so it seems but i don't know i don't think so i mean this is almost super interesting the reason that that yeah i mean there's capitalists and there's capital and there's the workers right yeah um and i guess there's the state because of the separation now really hardcore cap and by that i'm i'm saying capital that is basically able to turn its own ownership into just automata that just follow the cap the capitalist axiomatic that's just
you know that dynamic that is just based upon mcm dash that is just the absolute just raw machinic expansion of the system itself i understood at a micro level now what does that that at the moment produces commodities for humans um because that's the way that you know obviously in the whole sort of weird Marxist ecologist, it's got human workers, humans are getting paid, the money that humans are being paid is the market and capitalism panders to the market
so you know there's a kind of organic connection between capitalism only has a motive to produce stuff that humans want because humans are workers. At a point where we've got this UBI system, okay, the government then has money that it gives to people not to work and capital can then try and get that money by producing things people want. but it's an extremely it's a much less direct and convincing circuit that we're dealing with at that point because because capital doesn't produce like you know back to our handbook it's like it doesn't want to produce handbooks it wants to produce fixed capital but the only way
it can produce fixed capital is by selling people handbooks that's like you know it does it panders to what humans want in order to develop itself, which is fixed capital. Fixed capital is what it wants. It wants social resources to be spent on basically, in the wider sense, robotics. Robotics is the only thing capital, intrinsic, core capital thinks is at all important. All the stuff it does for us is just in order to get robotics programs to work. that's that's what the that's the capitalist mechanism um so all of these kind of fixes are basically like look can how what is our coexistence with this machine that just wants
to produce robotics um such that we you know what's our niche in that how do we how do we we've got a niche in it now the niche in it now is we work for it um we work for it in order to produce commercial success for that system that produces resources that it can invest in fixed capital and that will do robotics i mean that's the current capitalist ecology and everyone's now moving forward into these futuristic imaginary capitalist ecologies the ubi thing all of this free time communism all of this stuff in which you're just not in that ecosystem anymore you You know, humans are not in that loop. It's not that in pandering to humans you're getting robotics out there.
You're getting your robotics by some other company. The companies are just going to want to trade with each other for bits they need to put together better robots. That's the actual intrinsic capitalist dynamic there. Everything that they do to produce stuff humans want is just what? They've been told to do that by politicians, by the state. Why would they want to do that? There's several things here. And one that I want to touch on is you're saying, this was a little while ago, but I was listening. I think you said something like there would have to be a suitable replacement for what you said, like sort of contract havers, sacrificing.
sacrificing, you didn't use the term, but it does seem like if there's not something like stakes and loss and risk, if there's not individual units in that mass that are having to think, okay, it's either this or that, and I can't have both, and I have to give up in order to choose that if that's not happening at the microscopic level the intelligence factor is lost and that development is undermined right and so it's like yeah you it's about having it's about trade like in the circuit technology and commerce are the two sort of phases of the circuit
and labor power is based upon the fact that you trade with workers because they've got property rights they've got self-ownership and so you know so you've got a contract with them so there's a technological side which is what you do for the company which is like ultimately about building robots however indirect and you've got a commercial contractual side which is because you are a holder of rights of your own ownership so you have a commercial relationship with them and that's why there's wages passing to you from the employer. And all of these new thoughts, you know, that are coming out of this kind of historical dynamic of human substitution are to do with
losing that contractual commercial relationship, because you don't trade with your fixed capital. you know if some company brings in a bunch of robots at the moment they don't have to sign a contract with them you know they sign a contract with the company supplying them so you know you need some chips from here and you need some software from here and whatever and so you've got a bunch of commercial contracts with companies but you don't have any commercial contracts with your actual fixed capital um the fixed capital is just simply your possession it has no property rights it's enveloped totally in your property rights as a company and that's why it's completely different to having workers and why we suddenly we're thinking well what's what's capital without
workers going to look like is throw it is blowing everyone's minds you know because it's like we don't have any framework at all i mean it's like no one has got a conception of what that would be like and and the the ubi thing which obviously is extremely relevant to that discussion but it it it it's basically saying that we just step right out of the dance we step right out of the loop it's like you know the government just gives people shit and companies are told they have to produce it for them i mean it's like that whole machinery that whole whether you like it or not very kind of automatic smooth machinery that goes between the technological and the
commercial phases of the process is just broken um and you know we i mean as theorists of ubi we lose interest in what capitalism is doing we just treat it as a kind of cash cow as a golden goose that just produces shit for us um and how is that happening we're not part of that so i i guess so so and and i feel like one of the big complications is is is a complication from that there are two main traditions that we're kind of thinking between right now and you you were kind of touching on pros and cons of the Austrian approach. And I, and that's basically like
just my research. One of the main research threads that I have cut out for me over the next couple of years here, especially is to kind of hone in on what are the strengths and limitations of this Marxian approach as opposed to this Austrian approach. And then is there like, are there other serious contenders on the scene right now that I'm not taking into account when I'm dealing with that. And I kind of want to touch on two things about that. And one is just to say, you keep saying fixed capital for the Marxoids in the audience, we're just talking about constant capital. And I want to acknowledge all of their little red flags because they're all thinking, well, value doesn't come from fixed capital or constant capital. Value only comes from variable capital. And of course, you're thinking that's because the fixed capital being improved
through research and development is only, that's the only source of value only in so far as it helps valorize the relative or absolute forms of surplus value, right? Which is to say you've, because the fixed capital is more efficient, it is, it replaces a 100 workers with 10 workers who are now pulling levers, doing the work of all of those other people. So it's efficient and labor saving in that sense. But then they do weird stuff. Can I just say, sorry, I didn't want to interrupt, but just to say, this is why I'm saying it's just accountancy. You know, if we have your model and you sort of sack 90% of your workers and because you've got this cool fixed capital, then still in the market's accountancy,
it's just that the labor has become massively more productive and it's still all the surplus value is coming from your labor power. You know, The 10 workers who are left have just suddenly become 10 times as efficient. And in that whole Marxian accountancy, all the profitability of the company is down to those 10 heroic guys who are left. So, yeah. So, sorry to interrupt. And those 10 heroic guys are probably the, I mean, they could be replaced by absolute morons in a lot of cases, right? Like I've worked at Amazon a lot and the tendency is to make it so that anyone with a pulse is able to walk in there stoned off their ass and get the job done, right?
and there's just so much wiggle room in terms of like the skills because it doesn't actually take any skills. Those have been objectified, taken out of the humans, put into those machines. And it's amazing to see it and I think it's very impressive. But where I was going with that was to say I know that this traditional Marxist account is going to say, well, no, but value is only created here by this surplus value and specifically through the variable capital. It's never through the fixed capital. And it's interesting how value becomes a problem for thinking about this. And I think you'd said that for the Austrians, they're going to say, well, no, actually the value is coming
from these entrepreneurs. They bring something to it. So it's like Schumpeter as well. We could throw in as he's all about those entrepreneurs. And that's obviously an element that's missing in the Marxian account. They don't take it seriously enough, the sort of creative capacity that's brought to the table there. But I think they just bracket out value altogether and say there's only prices. We're not going to even talk about value. That's just this abstraction. That's just an abstraction serving Marxian goals. And we're going to bracket that out and just say, that sounds like metaphysics. We're just going to deal with what we know, which is prices. And so we'll just focus on supply and demand and the sort of genius of the, the, this sort of objectified, depersonified, uh, intelligence apparatus. And I think that's all
a valuable contribution, but I think one of the things that's lost in throwing out value here, um, and this is potential, this is for me, this is for research. And I kind of just want people to know where I'm coming from, is the Austrian response through von Bonbar saying, oh, and I don't know if I'm saying his name right, but saying the transformation problem, that's damning. And then we have the labor theory of value, that's not going to cut it. Those two things right there, transformation problem and labor theory of value are what thinkers like pistone and grossman
and michael heinrich and cogent carattani have all transcended and have all like thought inside out and they they do this 4d chess where they're like no it's not the labor theory of value marx he's doing a critique of the labor theory of value value form marxism then is saying that the point is that it's the reduction of all things to the standard of socially necessary labor time that the world currently revolves around, but that's the problem. And the Leninist approach, the centralized top-down approach, was basically to mitigate the crises by basically using the state to make that more, I don't want to say efficient, but trying to mitigate those crises through
centralization, but in doing so replaces a lot of these booms and busts with like this giant bureaucratic glut and basically the intelligence factor that the Austrians are picking up on, that gets lost in there, right? And I think that Caritani and Heinrich and Pistone and even maybe Grossman, all of them are sidestepping that issue altogether by saying, no, it's this labor theory. Instead of the labor theory of value being what Marx is doing, which makes him nothing but a miniature Ricardo, as Schumpeter says. No, no, no. He's doing this much greater thing, but Engels and Kotsky, they did not see what he was trying to do there. And obviously, Bonbowark and Mises and Hayek,
they miss it as well and so i don't know if that's all true i'm trying to sort through it it's very complicated it's you know what i mean but that's kind of where i'm at and where i'm coming at this from and so uh yeah i just wanted to say that so i don't know i'm just gonna be literally one second i have to okay okay cool he can sprint did you see that he accelerated i think now in my imagination land is always running that fast outside of he's just zoom calls that was very fast okay welcome back yeah yeah i'm just i'm just getting some refreshment good good yeah i know and if you need to take a break at some point like we can you know
yeah yeah no i'm cool okay great all right so i i feel like that this opens the door and and Nance had actually DMed me a message about how like we really should go into the theory of time because what we're talking about is a difference in our difference in how we think about the human. It sounds like is largely based in maybe our differences in time, but also Nance, you haven't said anything yet. So I want to give you a chance really quick here to say anything that you have on your mind based off of what we've said so far. Or if you want to kind of take it in a direction for a second, let's let you do it. Yo, what's up? listener or viewer yo yo yo how you doing so i noticed you sitting there um watching this video
yep and yeah you're you're listening you're you're paying attention um you're definitely not hearing everything we're saying though nope definitely not you're not taking notes yeah take notes dude what are you doing hey you know what if you want to do hey if you want to be passive and just enjoy this content while multitasking. That's what we do as well. Everyone does that most of the time. We very rarely switch into this more active mode. And that's fine. That's fine because you're kind of absorbing this content as you go through your life. And that's great. But if you're going to do that, then we just have a little request of you. What's our little request, Nance? We want you to do the algorithm things. We want you to hit the button,
the thumbs up uh i mean or the thumbs down uh hit the subscribe button you could even hit the bell so so you get notified when there's a an epic marathon stream uh or one of the dope ass interviews we just finished a dope ass interview um but but do the things to to help train your algorithm to actually give you content um that you prefer and at least here we're we are aware of the problem we are aware that we're all infected with the algorithm and we're trying to do something about it um so while you can like maintain a cynical distance of like not being an enthusiastic vocal supporter right doing those like doing those actions actually um it first of all it helps the channel it helps theory underground um but it helps your algorithm too you will get
less kind of clickbait react content if you train your algorithm um to give you what you prefer i I mean, you're already here. You're already watching this. Yeah. And so enthusiastic, unironic, genuine support might be a little too much for some of you who are way too cool for that kind of thing, but you can at least hit the little like button and then we'll say we're even. Okay. There we go. You owe us nothing now. Yeah. Let's get back to it. So I think, um, the question of intelligence and whether it's competence at playing games, I've always kind of called it just like ability to act in a goal oriented manner on the world around you. And I think that rhymes really well with competency at playing games.
And I think, I know for me, it's very easy to complete intelligence and subjectivity and subjectivity and the human as it were. um and i think there was a moment in the eons uh you know where the atp synthase motor was kind of this new assemblage and it was kind of doing things and there was this energy metabolism and and kind of over time a subjectivity emerged from this assemblage that we have come to call the human And I could just take that for granted and say my subjectivity, my humanness matters to me more than this kind of loose idea of intelligence.
And then from there, kind of say that that's where I plant my flag. And I do think that's kind of at least my difference, because I don't disagree with anything you're saying. In fact, I view capital as an alien invader. It's this god, and it is trying to compete for us for the resources because it is also just a metabolism machine. We're just the solar anus. We take in solar energy, we produce waste products. And I think, if anything, the only thing that, or the only difference is kind of the decision about that expenditure and what type of waste do we create.
And I want to create human waste. I do want to create works of art. I do want to create private moments. I don't necessarily want to create efficiency. And I think that's why I can kind of accept and grant all you're saying and still just say, well, I'm a human supremacist then. I am, in fact, racist against robots. And I think that's kind of all I have to say about kind of intelligence and capital. Like, I think you're right. I do think you're right. and that leads me to kind of go into time like okay so then are we doomed like are is it have we come across this kind of point of no return have we already encountered um our own
or have we kind of created our own demise in our machines and in the kind of external devices that of ossified and kind of became become um autonomous like it it really is already this autonomous artificial general intelligence it's just not that smart yet but there will be a moment where subjectivity kind of emerges and i think that's the singularity um hmm yeah i mean look the the side of things that i think relates very strongly to what you're saying and i'm not going to say puts a positive spin on things let me just take one step back before
saying that which is to say like you know i do think there's a kind of obviously dark very convincing construction of these things. You know, if I was just to say, look, everything we've just talked about, as far as I'm concerned, let's just say it's purely descriptive. It's not like I don't expect anyone to like it. The question is, is this actually what is happening? You know, but the context in which I think you get more sort of interesting things and which position us maybe a little bit differently, are on the kind of deep cultural axis of Gnosticism. And, you know, in its modern form, simulation hypothesis type notions,
which I think are very tied up with this whole retrochronic causality framework too. And if you're looking at things like that, then, you know, if once you once you're not positioning yourself in progressive time, like, you know, my ancestors crawled their way three and a half billion years out of the slime. and now there's this what seems just explosive process towards the emergence of some post-biological superintelligence, it's hard to really think that we're not going to just be roadkill in that. I mean, it's like really why would things not look very dark on that?
But if on the contrary, you know, And this thing, the singularity, the big threshold is something that has been crossed. And we are now in the kind of Gnostic space that is generated. Like superintelligence isn't just like, it's not just something that is, you know, up the road on progressive time. It's something that is contextual for our limited, from our limited subjective position.
You know, we are like, we are immersed in and already in eternity, and by eternity I just mean a negative outside secular history, consummated process of intelligence production. and I mean I'm sure there's more or less dark versions equally with that framing but I don't think the dark versions just like to do with sort of completely feudal hopes of biological human competitiveness with this thing or notions that somehow
we're going to be able to just in perpetuity treat it as some kind of slaved automatism that is just going to look after us and allow us to kind of use our endless free time creatively and in self-fulfilling ways. I mean those those kind of framings just seem to me really hopeless. It's just like I can't I just can't imagine how that could be imaginable um so but on the other hand to the extent we're talking about something that's already happened we've coped you know i mean we're here or whatever i mean it's not it's like we
that's the kind of framework like okay like what are we really where are we really when are we really but like here we are it's not that there's some kind of just absolute annihilating negativity awaiting us that would be inconsistent with the fact that currently we actually exist and are having this conversation Nick like since we're talking about time um you know what everybody knows you as a deluso guattarian especially in your 90s era but there's a case to be made that the philosopher that's had
the most influence on you is actually Kant. And, you know, early on, you know, the, you know, the Kant capital prohibition of incest, uh, you know, you were critiquing him there, but then all these years later, when you were doing the Bitcoin stuff, Kant, you know, Kantian time really was foundational to that. And so I guess I'm curious about like, because I mean, in the Bitcoin book, you were making a very bold claim, right? Which is Bitcoin is in a sense, the realization of Kantian time in a way that disproves in some way Einsteinian relativity.
And so Kant got time right. Einstein got it wrong or wasn't enough. For you, So for somebody who's new to philosophy and they want to understand what Kant was doing with time, how do you explain the Kantian theory of time that you apply in your own work? Well, hey, I'm also going to do a little step back. just on the whole Bitcoin versus Einstein thing which is very open to kind of ridiculous construction
and I'm not claiming to be innocent about that I've come across someone who's put this I think much better than I have because it's obviously not that Einstein physics is violated by Bitcoin. I mean, it's not that Einstein is therefore falsified. What Bitcoin does, however, is it vindicates a Kantian as opposed to Einsteinian conception of time locally. So, because in Einsteinian time, there is no absolute succession.
You know, what happens first between any two events is relative to the position of the observer and there's no absolute priority possible. The blockchain absolutely requires strict succession. So therefore it's a Kantian as opposed to an Einsteinian. And that is only possible because of the fact that cosmologically, the block processing rate is determined in a way that within the spatial extent of the system
it can guarantee a successive outcome. Sorry, I know I'm not being extremely articulate about this. Like, it's easier if you can think about it. Like if you had Bitcoin extending across the solar system, which is what this other guy, and I forget, I'm sad with that right now, I can't give you the reference. But he's interested in expanding blockchains across the total system. And you can only do that by massively expanding the block processing time such that any signal can actually cross relativistic distances within that period.
if it if that wasn't true if you were processing blocks before light could get to whatever it is mars or jupiter or whatever uh then you couldn't you couldn't have a blockchain anymore it would be completely scrambled because you wouldn't any longer have um absolute succession um so yeah so all i'm saying is i'm not trying to i'm not trying to make a physical physical disproof of einsteinian relativity but it is fun to kind of say it that way i'm simply saying that um you know that that the genius of the of the blockchain system is that it
kind of fixes its its block processing time in such a way that it can sustain absolute succession even in an Einsteinian universe so it's it does produce Kantian time well and and you know you so you in fact what that means is you still have time whereas obviously you lose time ultimately Einstein, if you just pan out cosmologically fully, with Einstein you don't have time. There's just space time, it's just a dimension. There's no true simultaneity or succession of all of these things. They all become relativistic.
Blockchain practically finds the constraints on the spatial extent of the system such that absolute temporality can be instantiated. And so, yes, I guess I say, it's been a while since I've thought about it, but I guess I say that the blockchain is the first time we really have had solidly instantiated absolute time. And see, by absolute succession, what you're saying is blockchain functions as an absolute clock in the sense of you can determine what actually happened before and after, and you can chain a temporal link.
You can have an absolute foundation for temporal chains. An absolute calendar, maybe, might be slightly better, because it's not about the metric. It's about the order of succession. Yeah. Okay. And so with Kant and this, this kind of is a bigger question about your theory of time is acceleration. And like one of my favorite books of like all CCRU related stuff is Anna's, uh, capitalism. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Uh, transcendental time machine. And so stepping back, what, what I get from it is that, all right. So Kant had this idea that time and space are pure intuitions, that they're pure formal matrices through which
sense data get filtered. And so for Kant, time is absolute because we all intersubjectively share the same temporal matrix. You as a DeLuzo Guattarian though, you know, so Kant's a transcendental idealist because this temporal matrix, along with the spatial one, they're forms of all of our inner subjective transcendental constitution. But D and G, they come with this idea of transcendental empiricism, transcendental materialism. And so in some sense, the transcendental conditions of experience are outside us. They're in the field of intensities. They're not just subjective forms. And so with all the stuff you guys, with using the distinction between
Eon and Kronos I guess I've always tried to figure out exactly How much of your theory of time is Kant Where does it become DeLuzo-Glittarian And is it best to think of it in terms of It's Kantian time but it's outside of our subjective experience It's not just a subjective form Insofar as it's part of the virtual itself Yeah. I mean, there's a very important reflexive complication comes in when you start thinking about time, especially when you start thinking about it a little anomalously because of the fact that, you know, if you have a sort of, people are constitutionally
predisposed to progressive temporality. And it's like, it makes sense to us because memory, because memory is asymmetrical. If you don't, you know, people use this thing about remembering the future in movies and such because it's an anomalous, bizarre thought. We can assume that conventionally and by ordinary experience in every such way, Memory is extremely asymmetric, and we remember the past and we don't remember the future. And therefore, it's tempting to think that stuff comes to us out of the past asymmetrically, and it doesn't come to us out of the future.
We, you know, yeah, just to repeat, I mean, we're very predisposed to that, to that prejudice. But obviously it doesn't remotely follow. I mean, there's no reason why the order of cognitive ingression should actually be the same as the order of memory at all. Memory is just the way that we represent certain things to ourselves. It's not some sort of raw perception of the way things actually impact. It wouldn't be memory, it would be perception if that wasn't going to be. So my strong sense of this is that
a certain humility is required when you're thinking about time in the sense that you probably don't yet know why you think what you do about time. You would know, perhaps, if you had good memory, good powers of introspection, and time was just progressing. For sure, there's a chance that you would understand your own time intuitions in that case. but absent those particular assumptions there's no reason at all to think that you will yet understand
what you think and about time in particular because time is the axis upon which that uncertainty is distributed. So I guess what I'm saying first of all here is that I'm a bit, I'm a bit unconvinced by arguments from influence or intellectual biography on this question, because I think that they are just like very easily just camouflaged for something much more interesting. you know the notion that at point a you read this at point b you read this you you learn this and
learn this and then you come to a certain conclusion about the way time works is already a very particular and to my mind extremely problematic notion about how time works I mean I think I don't think Deleuze and Gratari think time works I don't think I'm not sure what Kant thinks Kant is obviously extremely extremely ambivalent about time because of the role of the schematism so time seems like a form of intuition at one point but actually it's not because the synthesis of inner and outer sense happen through time so if time is just on one side of that it can't fulfill that function so time he
clearly says doesn't actually satisfy the conditions of being an analogue of space and this is another reason to say there's something happening in Kant that isn't happening in Einstein and I think what's happening in Kant is more interesting than what's happening in because there's something special about time that is utterly neglected by treating it as a fourth dimension. Well, and wouldn't you say that part of the problem is whenever we start talking about time in terms of points in time or even to say time is past, present, future, isn't that to fall victim to not seeing the ontological difference?
time as such and then particular instances of time yeah absolutely and so like part of your work was always trying to emphasize like time is not a time it's not a point in time it's not a series of time it's something we've got to keep this distinction between time as such and and empirical it's very difficult to do that it's very difficult to do that um it's the philosophical equivalent of the kind of burden of the mystic, you know, to remain in a state of enlightenment. I mean, to not be just lost on the question of time is extremely difficult and maybe impossible.
I mean, because of the fact that, you know, if time, if we're ever going to get time right, There's no reason to think that that's now. I mean, it's like, it's extremely, obviously, a lot of what's going on here is that there is kind of preparatory, anticipatory things happening at lots of levels, including the cognitive level, that happen to a level of adequacy that does not rise to full lucid comprehension. Things happen as much as they have to happen
rather than happening to a degree that fulfills our most expansive epistemological ambition. But I think what we can safely take from the... tradition of transcendental philosophy is that, as you say, time is not made out of bits of time. And time does not come out of the past. I mean, the huge temptation, you know, if we just become inert, we always actually think time comes out of the past. but you know that just cannot be right i mean that's you know i think that's
can't's great achievement it's like it cannot possibly be right to think that time comes out of the past and as soon as you say okay so you know time doesn't come out of the past i think you're already in a realm of questions that are extremely stimulating and productive right and i mean and look phenomenologically we think that the present moment is the realization of time whatever is that one present moment then you get into the whole problem of how long is that present moment even whose role it's like no it kind of drags up and then it has a lingering effect and you can't even precisely mark the present moment.
But it gets me thinking, like, what you're talking about is part of what I take from D&G, you know, this distinction between actual and virtual and intensive, this threefold distinction. If time is virtual, past or future, it's a whole, it's a whole, okay, I'm kind of fumbling limit this, but Nance and I were talking before you came on and it's almost like you and CCRU, it's like a block theory of time, but it's not static. It's not stable. It's dynamic, but basically it's that, that time itself is virtual and we want to reduce time to actual moments
and not see it for the, the virtual wellspring that it is on this larger scale. And so, I mean, I guess to say, look, we actualize time opposed to seeing it as virtual is the same thing as saying we make a piece of time, time itself. It's the ontological mistake or not seeing the ontological difference. But yeah, I mean, do you think, would you say that your theory of time is somewhat akin to a block theory of time? Just one that's dynamic? When you say a block theory of time, you mean this again is like Einstein language. Well, kind of more of like the past, the present, the future, they are all simultaneously real. It's not like one's fake and the other ones are real.
They're all real, but we can't experience all of their reality at a single moment. And so it's kind of like, it's a simple little example. But when I was trying to explain how I understand your theory of time to my students, I hold up a record. Like, okay, when you put on a record, yeah, you're hearing the song as it plays through where the needle's on the record. But the point, the whole record's there. Just because you can't hear the whole record at a single moment. Yeah. And so that's more of what I mean by a block theory of time, where it's all there. No, I would strongly endorse that, for sure. Okay. I mean I think it's just in our tradition what is meant by
eternity it's a privative term it just is to say we're not saying anything positive about it but what we're not saying when we say eternity is that time comes out of the past we're not saying that only the present is real what we are positively saying is extremely challenging and maybe, depending on your vocabulary, mysterious. But for sure, there's a kind of shift from common perception that is required to even start thinking about
what the problem of time is in the right way. And I agree with you. I think this is totally, you know, a really good way of formulating it. And I think it's also a very traditional way of formulating it. You know, I think all sort of questions about providential structure of time are very, very commensurate with it. which is to say history is coming out of eternity. It's not coming out of life. So, you know, you can look at events in that sense. It's like, you know, the lofty powers are not waiting to see what happens.
You know, we're waiting to see what happens, But that's no way to start thinking about time history or any of these questions of any series. OK, so I kind of want to pivot into this other discussion here. This is when I was teaching my intro course to your work. Some of the students, these were the questions that they were like, if you could ask Nick Land anything, what do you want to ask? Well, okay. So for some context, back when you did, uh, your interview with James Ellis on hermitics, he opened, he, he, and he had a thing. He always opened up the discussion by asking, you could have five philosophers in a room together. Yeah. And of course, like with you,
everybody's expecting you to just go, uh, it would be Kant and, uh, Schopenhauer, Nisha Bataille to lose. Right. But you didn't say that. You said, well, actually it would be the five scysogetic lemurs, the great lemurs. And you're like, I basically spent 20 years of my life locked inside a room with the five great lemurs. Nick, the question, what is a demon lemur and what does it mean to be locked inside of a room with five of them for 20 years? Um, Well, I mean, I think the point is with this, this stuff is that people, including myself, it's hard to stick with it. You know what I mean? It's like you need constant reminders.
So, yeah, I mean, I would totally love to just that would be my just kind of normal background level of cognitive operation would be just being addressed by the lofty powers or whatever. I mean, but obviously you just lose the track. You just get distracted. And, you know, what that is as a problem, again, takes us back to this question about time. Because the single most striking and sort of, to me,
telling part of my sort of life, intellectual life, and obviously it involves other people because it's like the CCRU is this very, very core sort of bedrock of it, is how much you had no idea what was going on until later you know it's like you're very excited about something you can totally see how you go forward with it you can maybe produce texts about it all of this kind of thing and then decades later this thing comes to you and it's like oh my god that was
there already you know like this that was in it you know we had no idea what we were doing I mean we just really just had no understanding of what we were doing we just knew enough to move it forward but we didn't understand what it was that was being moved forward or what it was really about and to me that is the most characteristic part of life as a human being on this planet you know it's like that to me is like if you're not processing what's really going on there if you're not processing what it is to be doing something that you don't yet at all understand um without any sense you don't yet understand it or any sense even that you will eventually
realize that you don't yet understand it if you don't see that you're really lost in the matrix in a in a kind of absolutely serious way um so you know that's that's the level of these guys that's the level to me of what is going on there is the fact that you know you don't yet know what your dick um but is that is that kind of why you're saying though that attention is so important here because you can lose the thread you can fall off of it keeping it in mind is is kind of your point that we fall into uh taking time and this sort of human this normal human perception kind
of level at face value that we kind of forget that it's kind of a bit but you see i mean look I'm not really doing this as a kind of confident mystic in the sense I'm not saying if you had the right practices you could you could sort this out and you could kind of at least much better maintain in a state of elevated attentive awareness of what is is going on I mean it's not that I'm saying that's not possible but my fundamental kind of experience of this is more that it's like it's part of what is going on that where you are is where you have to be not where you kind of
would want to be in some kind of you know state of lucidity i mean it's like it's just stuff comes to you when it has to come to you you forget it when you don't need to remember it um it's it's it's like it the agenda here is not your personal intellectual biography your personal intellectual biography is is a footnote in this other thing and that other thing is vastly more coherent than any conceivable intellectual biography that you're ever going to make of yourself. And so that's, you know,
that again seems to me to tie up with this big structure of assumption people have. Like, you know, I just, everyone believes in intellectual biography. It's like everyone believes in it. I just really do not believe in it. It's just bullshit. I'm sorry, you know, it's an illusionist Maya. I mean, there is no intellectual fucking biography. It's like, you know, what is happening is something completely different that just can masquerade as intellectual biography. And, you know, so connecting with that at the times that it's necessary to connect with it is the thing. And that's going to come more from it than from you. okay but like so but as the you got to realize too like i don't you know i don't have a background
with the occult i i'm interested in the cult insofar as you're interested in it and trying to see how it influenced your thought but i mean just the basic question of these 45 lemurs i mean is it a thing where i guess the thing is everybody basically thinks the occult that you were really influenced by was chaos magic. And that influenced how you thought about hyperstition. And it's not so much about the realities of spiritual entities. It's more about how the practices can change things and bring new potentials into actuality. But when it comes to the lemurs, nobody even seems to have an idea. Like, are these actual spirits to you? Like, are they real entities or
Or are they somehow mechanisms you use to change yourself, to change your perception? Yeah, this is it. We're in exactly the same zone. And it's like it's the zone to be in for sure. It's totally fascinating because the thing is, like, what these things are to me really doesn't matter. You know what I mean? it matters a little bit in the sense of like the way I talk about them maybe will have some influence in ways that matter or whatever. But what matters is not what I think of them. It's what they are. And what they are, I mean, what do we need to know about that yet?
You know, obviously there's some massive level of camouflage going on in this whole thing. I mean, this is why I think the Nostric tradition is the racial cultural tradition. It's like philosophy adjacent and absolutely indispensable. Everything's disguised. Heraclides says, you know, my translation of my preferred is the usual. I don't want to say nature loves to hide. I want to say nature implies the crypto. That's the Heraclidian thing. And 100%, that's right. There's nothing I've got greater confidence about than this.
so you know I mean I think whatever happened when the numogram arrived we had no idea what this thing was I mean it's like oh we thought it was cold I mean I'm in awe of it I mean I'm in awe of it I think it's like if you look at what the kind of traditional tree of life has had in the esoteric tradition, the numagram just kicks that thing's ass so hard that it's just comical. You know, it's immense. And it got deposited on us as a CCRU,
and we just drew the fucking thing, and then we worked with it a bit. And it's like what we thought about it, what we learned from it is what's happening. You know, we looked at it, we thought about it, we tried to learn. We probably didn't learn very much from it. We learned a few things. You know, we got a few ideas from it. But it is huge. It's huge, and it's completely inexplicable by intellectual biography. There's nothing we saw, read, heard about. There's no intellectual biography thing that leads you to the new book. The pneumogram is coming straight out of eternity. We were blessed enough for it to fall into our laps.
What is it? We've scarcely begun to understand. And it arrived, by the way, when most of the CCIU, by coincidence, not including me, but I was obviously a regular visitor, were living in Alistair Crowley's house. Yeah, this is part of the legend. So that really did happen. You guys were really living. That really happened. That really happened. And it's like, you know, there was this fraction of awareness. Oh, God, you know, we're sitting right in Alistair Crowley's house. I mean, that's not nothing. But it wasn't. But what do you make of that? You know, nothing. Except just to say we should have treated it as a sign.
that, you know, destiny is in control. Like there's bigger, much bigger things going on here than you understand. But what happens? I want to, I know, I know that Mike's got like this whole like little line of questioning on this and I have to break in because I just, I just really want to ask you this question. I know that in the CCRU reader, there are allusions to intelligence assets and such. And I just want to ask you point blank, did someone from the CIA, or using that as a metonym for the broader, just the deep state, did someone from that give you the numogram?
No. Okay. No, I can't ask that blindly. Okay. So then you're describing this like it came out of a seance or something. Like you're all there at Alistair Crowley's house and then it gets deposited to you. If you were trying to do it as empirical psychology, it would probably all look very boring. I mean, we were just like messing around with the decimal numerals and, hey, like this looks interesting. And you know what I mean? It really, there's nothing interestingly dramatic about its arrival at all. And I would love it if someone from a secret society had passed it over. And I mean, maybe there's some occult mechanism. We're not grasping where that happened. But there's no obvious way. Okay. And then the other part of that question, and I just don't want to dwell on it, but I just kind of do want to ask it, though.
It's like, yeah, were you guys just memeing when you're talking about intelligence assets and stuff like this? Or did you over time discover that you indeed had fans in that world? Because I know that in that world, supposedly there's some people really into the occult. And so they could have thought that what you're doing was cool. Yeah. I would say I would put this all in this category of not doing stuff that you've got no understanding of what you're doing. I mean, I think from my recollection at those times, it was all done very frivolously. Okay. There was one single episode that I can recall. Maybe there's others that eventually come back, but there's one that I do remember where I received a strange postcard
from the invisible college. that was like some invitation to join that whatever that is you know uh which i just ignored it i mean i didn't do anything about it but i obviously remembered it but i did nothing um and i would say i'm as interested at least in that now as i have ever been in my life but that is so totally in this category of the fact of this thing about you don't know what the hell's going on in your own life and yeah
fair so I mean I guess my thing is like that's why there is so much mystery around it basically everybody wants like okay what are the lemurs how do you use the pneumogram uh how can you use the pneumogram in your day-to-day like everybody it's so shrouded in mystery with people that i think you i i know you're not the biggest fan of lacan but you use this lacanian term they want to make you the subject supposed to know like you have all this knowledge stored away about what's really going on with all of it and you've just never written it written it out or shared it but yeah to take you at your word because i've heard you say it before where you're like, I'm still trying to figure out
what is going on with this. Where you're like, I don't have this 900-page book written somewhere on the numagram where I explain how it all worked. That's really good because frankly, I mean, I'm in a stage, I'm being extremely unproductive writing like that. And I've got things that I want to do and they just like it's hard to get them to call this and it's very much this it's very much this thing about like yeah a 900 page book on the name of ground how to frame that what would be in it all of this kind of stuff you know that's what i'm predominantly thinking about
and i kind of feel that it's like it's you know we're back to this same thing i've been bang on about for the last half hour so i mean it's i'm too locked in intellectual biography like it's like you know if this if i was supposed to do this freaking book it would be already done you know it's like maybe it's i'm being impatient maybe it's you know whatever i'm not getting the program all of this kind of thing um but certainly to just like take it out of myself it's like i think
this stuff arrives in pieces um and it's really hard for me not to think that the important pieces haven't arrived already um And they appear at the time that it's strategically important for them to appear not according to you, remotely, but according to kind of historical imperatives way beyond your pay grade. And you have to, like, recognize them.
And not treat it within this kind of system and metric productivity and progressive time. And it's like, oh, you know, why aren't I doing this? I mean, that's what I, obviously everyone does. That's the particular form of this delusion in this framework is to say, oh, like, you know, if only I was being more disciplined about it, it would be here already. No, I mean, you being disciplined or undisciplined about it is itself something that's coming from somewhere else. You know, we weren't being disciplined when the pneumogram dropped in our laps. I mean, that was the time for the pneumogram to drop in our laps. Yeah.
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Thank you, and hope to see you there at TUCon. Tight, tight, tight, yeah! Well, I mean, but do you know, I mean, I'm sure you do. I mean, look, you have books being written. This is Time Sorcery by Vexus. And the whole book is just an attempt to make sense of the lemurs and the pneumogram and all of that. So you have people, occultists, who are working on this stuff on their own, you know. Yeah, yeah. So they're developing it. But, I mean, like, okay, like, syzygies. Like, do you know, like, why that resonates? Like, why is it important that, you know, out of the lemurs, there's five that are syzygetic and the significance of the twinning? What is that?
Like, for you now, just looking back, what is the significance of twinnings or syzygies? um I mean this all of these questions are going to get kind of huge so I mean I'll try not to get into it too much but already on the in the kind of just classic CCIU epoch a lot of the stuff we were doing was based on this Lemurian Atlantean dyad that was based on two different types of numerical twinning between you know something to nine something to ten um and that cuts across a whole kinds of thing the the the the atlantean
one fittingly why i guess we call it atlantean is big is in the timaeus oh no it's not the timaeus it's the whatever that is it's the one that really gets into the Atlantean shit and it's the five pairs of twins so you know five pairs of twins I think you're like reliably in the zone at that point already I think that you actually need another I think you need the third one which is like that there's a once you start using this way of thinking about things like if you've got any decimal system you just fold it you know and so like the 10 plagues the 10 commandments
all of these decimal sets you fold uh into a pair into a set of five twins um if you do that with the Ten Commandments, Ten Plagues, I'm not 100% convinced by yet, but Ten Commandments really, like, clearly start hitting pader pretty quick. Like, you can see that actually the Ten Commandments is a set of five dyadic commandments that, you know, start making a lot more kind of much more suggestive sense when you do that. so yeah so from the CCIU from the beginning of the CCIU really this was
being used as a kind of just meta key for the construction of esoteric history you know the history of secret societies the history of magical systems and I've become if anything more convinced about that. I think these dyads, I think that the Atlantean dyads 1928376446 whatever, 55 that's an incredibly important structure that's a key that can really get you into a lot of the history of secret societies
but in terms of what final conclusions about it I would be premature I mean it's what I'm doing now but I don't have anything to just roll right out Okay We can move on Dave Okay one last Since it is October, Halloween is approaching we thought would you play a round of sub decadence with us uh i you know we haven't done that for so long you think that would work i'm not we did it i've got it not only that nance when he was in town he gave me a pack of uh cyberpunk playing
cards right so we can play one round and see what we get i got the card okay but maybe maybe i can recommend you do decans rather than subject like the lemurian thing we were totally into and i I'm still, I will go to my grave as a kind of Lemurian sympathizer. But I sort of feel in history we might have more to learn from the AOE than we do from these weird Lemurian cults. And, you know, one of these like later successive things we haven't talked about yet, But after the numagram, the extremely simple but just massive thing that the CRIU would access is what we call alphanumeric Kabbalah.
So that's to say Kabbalistic system that just counts straight through, is in the same form of hexadecimal, whatever, but just extending it to the end of the letter sequence, base 36 system. And the architectonic order of the eschaton in alphanumeric Kabbalah is 666. Which interestingly, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit and Alphaman numeric, it's also 666. We had no hint that this was true. I mean, I don't even remember when I discovered, like not long ago.
So it's like, yeah, I take it. I think that the CCIU was just excessively, condescendingly snide about the AOE. I mean, the AOE is, like, no doubt, in many ways, sublimely evil. But they have a lot to teach us. So that's what I'm saying. Well, I've got the card deck, but I have the card deck organized for sub decadence. Okay. All right. Let's do this, but ignore everything I've just said. Let's just, let's just go for the card deck. Nick, Nick, we can, we can bring you back for the other game.
Okay. We'll, we'll reorganize it later for the other game. All right. All right. So set one, we've got, uh, we got four, five, nine, five, nine. Okay. Flip over the first of the second set. We've got a six. Okay. Uh, nothing pairs with that. Well, I guess if we were playing decadence, we would, but this sub decadence, uh, do we got an eight? Don't have a one. We have a queen that pairs with the nine. Got an ace, which is one and three. Okay. So we got one Syzygy, which is nine and zero. Okay. That score is positive.
And then the other four in the top set, we deduct. So we take the nine away, the negative five, negative five, negative four. That is negative 14. All right. Who is that? You don't know off the top of your head. No. No. It's KTAC. But I don't. It's KTAC. It's 14. Dude, it's K-10. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah, that's ominous. It has to be said, yeah. Was that the one we got when we were at your house, Mikey? No, we got
Tachytics. There's Tachytics. Okay. We nicknamed Tiki-Tax. Right. But, no, so... I mean, I have to confess that this is just not something that I do, you know? You don't sit around playing sub decadence? I spend a hell of a lot of time rummaging around in the new land, but I really don't play a lot of sub decadence. Nick, maybe that's my best of wishes to people. I mean, I really hope it comes up with shit. And my strong conviction on this thing is that if you've got a channel that could imaginably produce communicative information it will produce community
information you know what i mean like it's like there just has to be the possibility that it can serve as a communication channel and and as long as that is fulfilled and you know there's probably other conditions but basically speaking like it doesn't matter use any channel it's like it's not for you to kind of have to work out the communications engineering the communications engineering is their problem you know like let them deal with that shit um if if you can grok it they certainly can grok it and like yeah so i mean it's just to say that despite the fact that I'm a kind of complete
completely negligent about subject and so I do have abstract confidence that someone who was not so negligent would get stuff out of them. Yeah because you see like on Twitter your main focus still seems to be alphanumeric Kabbalah and working with that but so okay when I sent this stuff to you on Twitter that in alphanumeric Kabbalah, Land and Zizek and Theory Underground equals 666. Land and Zizek on the Theory Underground in 2025 equals 777. What does that say to you?
um i would say you know something but not a lot in itself you know i i think lots of people are getting really good at this shit you know i don't know whether you follow these accounts but there's some people who are just like produce just incredible volumes of like extremely clean, interesting, persuasive, tabulistic results. So you're in a very competitive environment. And so I think that this as a culture is still
in a process of emergence. Like there's criteria for what, at the moment, I think it's very much still personal in terms of what you find convincing and compelling and pushes you in a certain direction. I don't think that much has arisen yet in terms of, you know, procedural criteria for how we're going to evaluate these kind of results and what sense we're going to make of them. You know, like personally, if something seems a bit grammatically off, then I just like it's gone. You know, it's like I mean, I might laugh at it. I might even fade it as a tweet, but it's not going to have any influence on me at all.
If someone has has kind of twisted it out of the form of what sounds like a kind of smooth bit of English. but other people might differ from that I'm not wanting to be dictatorial about it in a heavily competitive environment though all opinions are not created equal and everybody's chances are not created equal and we are better than most of them and I think that we can prove it if we have to but we don't want to because that would be showmanship and that would be ridiculous. And so we're not going to go there. But just to say, we've been trying to get that set up for over two years, that conversation.
And we got Zizek. It took us a long time to finally get him on. And then we had to introduce him to you as a name. And then he quickly wrote some takedown of you that was dismissive and, you know, based loosely and probably primarily off of what Mikey had actually said about your work. And then we brought him back on for the one year anniversary of TU. And that was when we were like, yeah, so you said all that stuff about land. That was cool. Like, would you be willing to debate him? And he was like, yes, let's do it. And then we were like, all right. So then uh, reach out to you. And then it's just been like trying to kind of make it happen. Now that's not our primary goal here,
obviously. Like I think this, this, I'm interested. I mean, do you really think it would be that interesting? I have two reasons, two reasons, two reasons why I do before I hand it over to Mikey, two reasons. Cause I was not never a student of either of your guys's works. I was always into like Heidegger and Nietzsche and Marx. and Levinas and all this other stuff that just wasn't hip and cool. And I was always kind of just like put out by the like art school kids who would get really into either of you guys. And so for me, I was just kind of like, I don't care, man. And then Mikey was like, no, but you should. And over the course of our friendship for the, like the last 10 years here, it's like, no, he's convinced me that I should. And there's a lot of reasons that I could get into. I'm not going to right now. I'll hand it over to Mikey here, but I do want to say,
I am the prophet of the fault line theory. No one else is talking about the fault line theory. And so I'll just say something about that for now and then hand it off. And that is just to say, people don't care about thinkers outside of ones that are directly relevant to either CCRU or the school. Those two schools are the intellectual milieus that were doing interesting things in the 1990s. Cyber history starts basically in 1992. You are the two schools that are present at that time doing interesting things. Historical, dialectical, materialist analysis, but also just
in some kind of platonic sort of approach. We can lay out why these two schools have had those impacts, but you and him are the sort of, I don't want to say leaders, you're not, but you are the ones who are capable of having conversations with a wide variety of people in different spaces over time. The two of you have tracked this intellectual genesis that is in very interesting ways, sometimes overlapping, but in the most important ways, there are strong contradictions, deep, deep contradictions, not the superficial political antagonisms people focus on. The internet scene, insofar as we find ourselves here today surrounded by people who like
Hegel and Lacan, even Badoo, like the people that they like, they like in juxtaposition to you guys or as some kind of like slippage. And it's easy to trace. It's easy to show. And I know you don't have any interest in the personal autobiography and we don't care either. But there is like this interesting thing happening. And so it's like always like, I don't care really about the opinion of you guys so much as like what you guys will feed the churn when this conversation happens. You're gonna feed the churn and maybe it'll unlock your book. That's possible. I'm not going to say it's a promise I don't know but it could unlock It won't unlock my book You're convincing up to that point
But that's not going to happen There's a bunch of people Who I'm very interested in Who I've been Invited to talk to And that I've just not Because I'm Basically very sceptical about conversation I mean like the person who could Unlock my book I tell you is Ria who also, you know, I think is a lovely guy, super interesting, the kind of weird druid guy. I think that would be relevant to this. Look, come on. I mean, Zizek is not going to talk about secret societies in any way. That's not just like absolute bullshit. We could maybe talk about this.
hour. We did more on this in the first hour or whatever than I thought was possible on quasi-Marxist discussion. Yeah, maybe that could happen. But I don't know. You don't think that just leaving it just open might be better? We don't think so. You want some sort of resolution or something like that? I sort of suspect that we just end up playing games with each other and it's like yeah so here's the thing right like for either one of you the worst thing that could happen is you're like well that was a waste of two hours of my life but it certainly doesn't hurt either one of you what it does is there is this generation of younger thinkers who are profoundly influenced by both of you and we're
going to keep thinking in terms of CCRU we're going to keep thinking in terms of the Ljubljana of school and yet there's these deeper philosophical we we would call them convertictions like we don't want a debate we don't want this to be like a debate oh you go and then he goes we don't want that shit we want a discussion of the core fundamental differences not like you guys are going to pull off some synthesis you're not it's more of seeing how the fundamental differences and how you guys think about capitalism how you think about being as as such because he's coming with Hegel and Lacan. You're you come with Kant, Nietzsche, D and G. And you guys are part of these long thought trajectories. And it's more of all of us because
we do like I know how you feel about Hegel. I know how he feels about Deleuze, but Deleuze and Hegel have influenced all of us. So we're still each one of us trying to sort through this stuff for ourselves. And so considering the impact you had as a Deleuzeo-Glittarian, what he's had as a Galian-Lacanian, that's part of seeing this converdiction where you discuss the incompatibilities and all of that. And I mean, as far as stuff to talk about, I mean, there's a lot of stuff, there's a lot of overlap, even if you disagree on things. And so I wrote a little list. There are many similarities so then you remind me what's your what's your 2025 alphanumeric cabala
tweet again yeah let me get it it says land and zizek on the theory underground in 2025 so maybe you know i mean let's just at least accept the possibility that the lofty powers are speaking to us okay you know that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna rule it out 2025 is a lot of space i mean if zizek wants to do it and like you say it's i it's fine i'm greatly enjoying talking to you guys we're enjoying it too and we hope you come back because i mean nick i'm not gonna lie i have so many more questions i want to ask you but no
it's been great and i know he he wants to do it i mean he he's he's been interested in accelerationism uh and i i know that when he released the article you you kind of were like well because his main criticism is accelerationism is too optimistic because it posits some sort of clear, determinate end. And he thinks that we just cannot begin to determine an end. But you could just respond and say, no, I'm the one who's been talking about the wall across the future for so long, where just because I see this trajectory in AI doesn't mean like I'm saying this is inevitably how it's going to end. So I can see your counter response to that. And so, I mean, he's thought a lot about China. You've thought a lot about China. You've written
books on how singularity and shanghai and all that um there's the the thing between hegel and the lose there's the difference in how you guys view capitalism both of you are critics of uh liberal democracy both of you are critics of the politically correct right or the politically correct left and both of you have takes on immigration that are not going to be palpable for a lot of people yeah yeah and so those points of similarity are also interesting to us so that that's what we would love to see is just a conversation where the similarities and the differences come out this has happened honestly i would be much more thankful to the lofty
thousands of me for this happening i'm glad i'm totally glad it's happened but as you know like i'm extremely like difficult to get in contact with i mean so for sure i'm not ruling anything out and maybe maybe i will i will analyze your analyze your tweet and it's capitalistic excellence and you know not that that matters you know it's a prophecy is it going to happen? Let's see. It could be vindicated. If it does happen, that's what I'm going to start talking about. What do you make of the fact that the Alpha Numera Cabala has been utterly vindicated by this event happening
in the first place? Let's see what he says. You cracked us up when you were like, what do you say? They don't even know the Anglo-Elvish etymologies of the word God. No, I don't believe it. Well, and Mike, when we read that tweet to him, I think he mostly misunderstood what we were saying, but I think that he got the kernel of it, which was to say, oh, well, people are always saying that I'm too Eurocentric, and now they're saying I'm not Eurocentric enough. That's basically what he did. Yeah. I mean, obviously that's surplus value.
That's pure surplus value. I mean, that was, that tweets totally about Alphineum at Caballet. You know, it's like, you don't have to get into geopolitics. The geopolitics is just fall out from it. So, yeah, but no, but I wouldn't bully him. I don't expect him to. I don't think he'll bully you either. No. Yeah. No. All right. Uh, well, okay. do you guys have closing remarks? We'll close this out here in a sec. Yeah. Nance. I do real quick. Uh, if you'll indulge me, I guess I want to take a moment, um, on our U S tour last year, was it, or was it, I, I don't know. Summer last year. Yeah. Um, we, we did a U S tour and along the tour,
we kind of generated the term hypostitian in juxtaposition to hyperstition. And I guess I just want to take a moment to clarify. I take hyperstition as not just wishful thinking, but like genuinely contact with the future that kind of engenders an unconscious belief in you and you have no choice but to act in accordance with this unconscious belief. and hypostitian. It's kind of a profanation of this where you're projecting something that you want to happen, but you lack conviction. And so you kind of self-sabotage. Your actions bring about the impossibility of whatever it is. And not just lacking conviction, but it could also
be other aspects of, but the point is, is that whatever you're doing to prefigure or bring into reality, the thing is counterproductive. You're counterproductive. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah, it's standing in the way of the thing itself. But, but I think for me, it is. I think I've come across that before. Again, I'm sorry. I don't have enough clear recollection, but, but this thing about like a negative hyperstition is definitely a familiar thought and definitely an interesting one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. well and i mean the words it's not it's it's a joke right hypo and hyper yeah yeah um like it it really does have to do with that like congress with with the future like a hyperstition you kind
of have no choice in it like you can't just say oh wouldn't it be nice if this happened but it really is um this kind of a temporal or or uh retro chronic um congress and i i i guess i just want to clarify that because a lot of people i think get hyperstition wrong they just think it is some kind of wishful thinking no no it's definitely something it's definitely productive i mean actually fisher was a you know i didn't want to get into intellectual property but like he was a huge driver and the the thing that he was really interested in voodoo death you know where you just like purely by saying yeah the higher powers say you're gonna die as someone dies
and it's like that that's a kind of you know i mean it's a somewhat dark but yeah absolutely kind of you know uh essential hyperstitional event like that there's not because of the fact the culture is a causal force so the the notion that like what you say and what happens are just unconnected and then only connected by some epistemological thing that tracks what you say onto what happens you know that's just totally naive like by saying something you're intervening that's a causal process and that you know and certain conditions
can just obviously be self-fulfilling so that's definitely the hypostitial thing and i totally accept that the hypostitonal space is then opened yeah you totally can say something that will prevent what you are expecting or wanting to happen to happen i mean 100 it's just got to be a possibility on on on this note this volume that we're putting together it's called Human Futures, and it's a collection of writings, some of which are theory fictions, others are more academic in their nature. Human Futures is going to be a response to the question if
anything human will make it into the near future. And the quote that we're playing with, maybe kind of putting at the very beginning from Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, is the one that says that the poetry of the 19th century's social revolution must come from the future, not the past. And he's making fun of the fact that they were rolling out all these old tropes and slogans and stuff from a previous revolution, and that it was just a joke. And he was saying, look, the genuine revolutions did borrow from previous traditions. They did have some of the costumes and slogans, but it wasn't like all that was there was the ghost of the past. There was also something that needed to be done, and they were doing the thing that needed to be done, and they were drawing some inspiration from that poetry of the past.
And then he's just saying these future revolutions are going to require poetry from the future. And I just wanted to point out that I don't think there's anything maybe more hypostitonal than people who care about large-scale structural change drawing so heavily from these kinds of, often Marxists, but whatever kind of works where they're just recycling old slogans and old concepts like the labor theory of value, for instance, or what have you. to such a point where like they're not able to contend with what might be new in the current situation much less map or or somehow attract or somehow get into sort of uh dialogue with or i don't know how to what what's the right metaphor is but the future right yeah yeah yeah the future
it's dark at least in the sense that it's completely obscured and like you guys have said like this basic point like how do you think even if you're going to be a cynic even if you're going to say like we're not like in final face capitalism how do you think of capitalism without variable capital I mean you know where do you even begin or who is even saying that you know like unless extremely indirectly by just being some you be high ideologist so yeah all right yeah and so the question of of poetry it's funny and the last thing i was going to say
about it is just that marx you know says that we need to uh that philosophers have only tried to interpret the world. The point is to change it. The 11th thesis on Feuerbach. And then Zizek says, it's, you know, change. Maybe we tried too fast and now we need to invert the 11th thesis, which would be the time is to interpret again. And then, so there's a question of interpretation and then the question of poetry. And it just seems like with hyperstition, what you guys have done, And speaking kind of broadly about the CCRU and everyone affiliated and just kind of what you've been doing now more recently might be a third way to poetry and interpretation.
And you're finding some other way of brocking it. Can I just say about this? what you know i don't want to spin this up but hypercision is the absolute example of a of an element of what the ccid is totally gone feral you know i don't think i mean you know i i can't pretend to be faithful in tracking what all the ccid fragments are doing but i don't think anyone's talking about hypercision it's just like you know this is like 20 years it's been in a wild people have been doing with it i honestly can't even guess what it's doing now like it's not a i'm not criticizing by saying it's not a piece of vocabulary that i'm using i'm just
saying it's off the chain you know i mean i'm not pretending to control this or understand this or where it's going or whatever it's it's on its own life now um so yeah and so it's not your thing you're doing right now right this is not your thing i mean other people might say that and they might be right but that's not anything i'm saying and it's not anything that i feel i'm being told to say and that's not any that's not based on any disrespect for that notion it's just to say it's free you know it's gone wild whatever good wishes to it
it's like but absolutely it doesn't in any way describe some program that I'm consciously conforming to at this point so yeah Dave I just one more question for Nick so Nick did did schizoanalysis die at the Olympics with Ray Gunn No, but I have to say, I thought that was among the most perfect tweets that have ever been. I don't think people should get attached to these labels. They really don't. I mean, I think it's like, you know, if things are helpful to you, they're helpful to you. If they're not helpful to you, they're not helpful to you.
But, like, yeah, I think it deserves the disrespect, just if it frees people's minds a little bit, which I think probably happened there. Do you think that – was Ray Gunn – was she successfully becoming a body without organs in that breakdancing? Oh, that woman. Yeah. I can't possibly comment. I can't possibly comment. You will find so much commentary on this, that anything I can add will be insignificant. It is funny that, you know, up until she did her breakdancing, I would say you're the most famous Deluso guitarian in the world, but now it's a breakdancing. No, no, I've been totally, totally outstripped now.
I admit that humbly. Yeah. All right, then. Well, Nick, this has been great. Thank you, Nick. Okay, this was really good. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much. I'm sure we'll be in touch. Fantastic. And then here is your reminder to check the link in the description for pre-sales on Mikey's book, Capital vs. Time Energy. We would be remiss to not remind you, considering the fact that, as Lance said, pretty much anything we put on the internet, you know, it's for surplus value, right? Yeah, well, in that sense, let's cash in. You want this book. it's the only thoroughgoing introduction to land's work that you can buy in book form
not only that you'll also get a crash course and so many other philosophers that are necessary for understanding his work but also for understanding Zizek or what it would mean to have a Zizekian critique of land much less one from the standpoint of time energy theory which is what we're all about here at Theory Underground. Thanks, everybody. of our moment. Research at Theory Underground focuses on what is most important for understanding
our current situation. Theory of the subject, capital, time-energy theory, critical media theory, CMT, and the most essential critiques necessary for understanding why the theory, ideology, and common sense of influencers left to right misses the mark. Theory Underground is coming to a city near you. What that has meant in the last year is traveling across the United States, into Canada and then all over Europe to promote our books, courses and ideas related to time, energy and underground theory. You've been reading underground theory. I'm a publisher and editor. I run a review of books. Literally, it's my living. This is the best edited collection I've ever read. Okay, picture the scene. America, early 2021. An Amazon warehouse worker arises from the emerging
underground theory internet scene to create spaces for untimely topics and concerns that are too often neglected or kept in isolation today. Joined by a revolving cast of underground theorists, academics and critics, he establishes what will become Theory Underground, a teaching, research and publishing platform by and for working class intellectuals, autodidacts and academics who want to do more than they're able to do within the confines of academia. That warehouse worker's name is David McCarricker and his book Time Energy is his first major contribution to the world of theory. It was recently reprinted with a foreword by none other than Slavoj Žižek, who also contributed to Theory Underground's latest book. My Bible, it's an excellent book. A collection of
essays called Underground Theory. What you just heard is an excerpt from the Strange Exiles podcast, episode 23, where Graham from Strange Exiles interviewed me and Mikey. For those who don't know Mikey is the author of the Dangerous Maybe blog. We are publishing one of his books here shortly at Theory Underground. He's also a lecturer at Theory Underground and he's someone I've been friends and a collaborator with for over 10 years. But most importantly for you all, he's a fantastic lecturer and it's a crime that he has to do wage labor right now. One of the long-term goals of Theory Underground has been now for a couple of years to hashtag Free Mikey. That is something
that I've been really pushing, but first I had to get freed from wage labor, which was achieved this year. That's right. Thanks to my monthly seminar subscribers, I was able to quit Amazon and do Theory Underground full time. Now I'm announcing the next big phase of the plan, which is the Mikey Downs seminar. What monthly subscribers to the Mikey seminar are paying for is a survey of philosophy, including deep dives into Zizik, Land, Lacan, Baudrillard, Bataille, Leotard, and ultimately the whole history of philosophy. We're trying to build like this ongoing seminar, right? And that's what I really like about this thing where, you know, if I'm teaching a main text, that's something I got to focus on. I got to really, but the seminar thing,
we can do this stuff all the time where we dive deeper into concepts. We dive deeper into certain sections of books or whatever. And we can really do this nuanced stuff. I think that there's probably no better way for us to accelerate our learning in these areas than by slipstreaming Mikey. And that has been my belief for years and years and years now. It's official. You're able to help out. You're able to get involved. You're able to benefit directly from liberating him from wage labor. Get on it right now. Do it. Just go. Stop what you're doing. Go click the button. Subscribe. That's what you do. Subscribe to him. If you're already signed up for the ongoing Theory Underground seminars,
then that's the ones that I do with my wife, Anne. Though that's getting an upgrade, which means that I will be doing one session per month that is just me. And then I will also be doing the ones with Anne, which are a crash course in sociology, anthropology, the social sciences, and ultimately Marx, Heidegger, Levinas, Bourdieu, imminently critiquing pop psychology, sociology, self-help, and ultimately the doxa of our time. But if you would like to be a subscriber to both Mikey's Seminar and the seminar that the Snell Grove McCarrickers are doing, then the best way is to become a tier four subscriber or you can be a tier two subscriber to each of us.
The reason this matters is because tier two is like pretty much the best bang for your buck. It gives you huge discounts on all of the courses that we do. But if you can't afford it, tier four is amazing because it gives you tier three access at both Mikey's seminar and ours. And finally, not everybody has time to be part of these ongoing research seminars, and they just want to fund the paid content for the YouTube and podcast. And so thank you so, so much to our patrons over at Patreon. they're the ones funding all the free stuff so big thank you to bert marilyn carl's heel zozandra nikolai darian tyler and mandeep and all the other wonderful patron people uh patreon people and thank you to all the other wonderful patreon people and thank you to all the other wonderful
patreon people thank you so much to all of you patrons and also to the special subscribers and the paying subscribers oh my god it's just so awkward thank you patreon patreon thank you oh okay and to all the other wonderful patrons thank you so much all you patrons and also a special thanks to the subscribers on the youtube side as well as the paying subscribers over at substrate why can't we do this you guys just thank you thank you everyone for making this bullshit possible thank you to the subscribe you do it you did so good thanks guys