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2.91 AVERAGE
2.91 AVERAGE
The most concise articulation of Nick Land's shift to the right. Here you will encounter little or no Deleuze and Guatarri but instead classical liberalism, Curtis Yarvin and Social Darwinism. There's an impression of a once formidable concept generating machine starting to crank out weird, vaguely interesting noises. This essay lays bare Land's flirtations with political realism in the tradition of Hobbes and Schmitt, race realism, eugenics and transhumanism.
Mencius Moldbug is the pen name of Curtis Yarvin, part time silicon valley computer scientist and founder of decentralized computing platform Urbit and full time neoreactionary who advocates for a restoration of medieval style city states. His self released book Patchwork became an urtext foe the neoreaction movement. As the title suggests, Moldbug imagines a world populated by a montage of community-states where sovereignty will be kept in check form devouring the people by means of its unequivocal transubstantiation into joint-stock corporation. His solution to the totalitalizing ambition of the classical Leviathan is to multiply the Leviathans and push to extreme the logic of lobbying and vote purchase of interest groups in a not-so-progressive democracy. This radical idea of patchwork is the object of Nick Land’s essay.
In the essay, Land praises Moldbug for recognizing the Hobbesian stakes at hand, and for raising the possibility of an exit. Like Moldbug, he believes that democracy is not simply doomed to collapse, but is “doom itself”. Therefore we must turn the clock back on Enlightenment. Democracy encourages private debauchery to the point of systematic plunder and auto-cannibalization. Dark Enlightenment “[...] conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption” says Land. In his view, the political agent(s) have the incentive to spoil what they cannot possibly steal, lest the resources be captured by the opponent and then utilized against them. But what is the alternative to progressive democracy?
Since the electorate is bought off anyway and the organs of communication and mass media, essential for the communicative rationality of democracy are paid for by special interest groups, Moldbug suggests we should bring these disavowed realist mechanisms out into the open by means of “formalizing” sovereignty. This entails the mapping of the whole terrain of shareholders, residents and businesses--“[...] the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares”. Politics, purportedly a rule of and by the people that only conceals beneath its veneer of respectable ideals a dark current of social exchanges (favoritism, bribery etc) has been neutralized now that residents can pay their sovereign tax and not bother with the governing process which will be carried out by actual rulers anyways. Voice or politics is sacrificed at the altar of exit. At least on a theoretical level, this rings the death knell of politics, or specifically, a kind of mass political mobilization from which fascism draws its energy.
Dark Enlightenment is also recognizably anti-egalitarian. “The Cathedral”, by which both Land and Moldbug interpret as a broad Left cultural-ideological consensus on a global scale lashes out at anyone who dares to deviate from the egalitarian ideological line. That all human beings are born equal and that the differences can be attributed solely to cultural upbringing is, in Land’s opinion, a statement of ideology and not strictly of fact. He writes, “The central dogma of the Cathedral has been formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or blank slate theory”. But against the false choice between biological determinism, so valorized by the right, and social constructivism championed by the left, or at least as Land sees it, he opts for the third option--techno-science. According to Nick Land, we are fast approaching a bionic horizon beyond which population converges with its technics. What our being is, simply becomes an expression of what we can make happen. There is no doubt a certain dystopian ring to this idea. It comes with a hefty price tag. The ultra-wealthy will enjoy privileged access to the ripe fruits of genetic engineering and cybernetic biohacking while the rest of the human spawn will be left to fight for low-tech scraps. However, Land is not horrified by this prospect. In a sense, he believes this is quasi teleology being traced by the existing process of techno-capitalism independent of human intentionality, collective or otherwise.
While Nick Land performs a very generous and sympathetic reading of Moldbug’s essay, his vision of the future is not exhausted by the image of hundreds and thousands of sovereign joint-stock corporations. Yet they do come terrifyingly close. Any would-be ethno-nationalist or alt-righter would not be averse to the idea of the patchwork as the future of geopolitics. After all, there is nothing theoretically contradictory about sovereign joint-stock corporations building their clientele along the racial or ethnic lines. However, Land’s commitment to the impersonal process of techno-capitalism, which he recognizes as the only harbinger of absolute horizontality, means he has to instrumentalize the patchwork of Moldbug as a means to something even more fluid, fragmentative, and experimental. For example, he dismisses the alt right as “predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase”. Accordingly, Land can only affirm the patchwork to the extent that it opens up opportunities for schizotrategic insurgencies and currents that are currently inhibited by the Cathedral to percolate up. Moldbug substitutes the Cathedral with the Hobbesian-Schmittian consensus that empty place of sovereign can only ever be displaced, not annihilated. For Land, it is apolitical indeed, but it does not go far enough from the point of view of absolute deterritorialization...
Mencius Moldbug is the pen name of Curtis Yarvin, part time silicon valley computer scientist and founder of decentralized computing platform Urbit and full time neoreactionary who advocates for a restoration of medieval style city states. His self released book Patchwork became an urtext foe the neoreaction movement. As the title suggests, Moldbug imagines a world populated by a montage of community-states where sovereignty will be kept in check form devouring the people by means of its unequivocal transubstantiation into joint-stock corporation. His solution to the totalitalizing ambition of the classical Leviathan is to multiply the Leviathans and push to extreme the logic of lobbying and vote purchase of interest groups in a not-so-progressive democracy. This radical idea of patchwork is the object of Nick Land’s essay.
In the essay, Land praises Moldbug for recognizing the Hobbesian stakes at hand, and for raising the possibility of an exit. Like Moldbug, he believes that democracy is not simply doomed to collapse, but is “doom itself”. Therefore we must turn the clock back on Enlightenment. Democracy encourages private debauchery to the point of systematic plunder and auto-cannibalization. Dark Enlightenment “[...] conceives the dynamics of democratization as fundamentally degenerative: systematically consolidating and exacerbating private vices, resentments, and deficiencies until they reach the level of collective criminality and comprehensive social corruption” says Land. In his view, the political agent(s) have the incentive to spoil what they cannot possibly steal, lest the resources be captured by the opponent and then utilized against them. But what is the alternative to progressive democracy?
Since the electorate is bought off anyway and the organs of communication and mass media, essential for the communicative rationality of democracy are paid for by special interest groups, Moldbug suggests we should bring these disavowed realist mechanisms out into the open by means of “formalizing” sovereignty. This entails the mapping of the whole terrain of shareholders, residents and businesses--“[...] the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares”. Politics, purportedly a rule of and by the people that only conceals beneath its veneer of respectable ideals a dark current of social exchanges (favoritism, bribery etc) has been neutralized now that residents can pay their sovereign tax and not bother with the governing process which will be carried out by actual rulers anyways. Voice or politics is sacrificed at the altar of exit. At least on a theoretical level, this rings the death knell of politics, or specifically, a kind of mass political mobilization from which fascism draws its energy.
Dark Enlightenment is also recognizably anti-egalitarian. “The Cathedral”, by which both Land and Moldbug interpret as a broad Left cultural-ideological consensus on a global scale lashes out at anyone who dares to deviate from the egalitarian ideological line. That all human beings are born equal and that the differences can be attributed solely to cultural upbringing is, in Land’s opinion, a statement of ideology and not strictly of fact. He writes, “The central dogma of the Cathedral has been formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or blank slate theory”. But against the false choice between biological determinism, so valorized by the right, and social constructivism championed by the left, or at least as Land sees it, he opts for the third option--techno-science. According to Nick Land, we are fast approaching a bionic horizon beyond which population converges with its technics. What our being is, simply becomes an expression of what we can make happen. There is no doubt a certain dystopian ring to this idea. It comes with a hefty price tag. The ultra-wealthy will enjoy privileged access to the ripe fruits of genetic engineering and cybernetic biohacking while the rest of the human spawn will be left to fight for low-tech scraps. However, Land is not horrified by this prospect. In a sense, he believes this is quasi teleology being traced by the existing process of techno-capitalism independent of human intentionality, collective or otherwise.
While Nick Land performs a very generous and sympathetic reading of Moldbug’s essay, his vision of the future is not exhausted by the image of hundreds and thousands of sovereign joint-stock corporations. Yet they do come terrifyingly close. Any would-be ethno-nationalist or alt-righter would not be averse to the idea of the patchwork as the future of geopolitics. After all, there is nothing theoretically contradictory about sovereign joint-stock corporations building their clientele along the racial or ethnic lines. However, Land’s commitment to the impersonal process of techno-capitalism, which he recognizes as the only harbinger of absolute horizontality, means he has to instrumentalize the patchwork of Moldbug as a means to something even more fluid, fragmentative, and experimental. For example, he dismisses the alt right as “predictable (and predicted) development of mass democracy, as it enters its collapse-phase”. Accordingly, Land can only affirm the patchwork to the extent that it opens up opportunities for schizotrategic insurgencies and currents that are currently inhibited by the Cathedral to percolate up. Moldbug substitutes the Cathedral with the Hobbesian-Schmittian consensus that empty place of sovereign can only ever be displaced, not annihilated. For Land, it is apolitical indeed, but it does not go far enough from the point of view of absolute deterritorialization...
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Very derivative of Moldbug, felt more like an analysis then a coherent book. Much more approachable and less pretentious than Moldbug, good general overview of reactionary ideas and navigating the “race question”
medium-paced
It's not that Land is racist here, but that he's a particularly unsophisticated racist here.
The beginning chapters are a good window view into anti-progressivism. The breathless ingenuity of Fanged Noumena is, however, long gone. This is zombie Land.
The beginning chapters are a good window view into anti-progressivism. The breathless ingenuity of Fanged Noumena is, however, long gone. This is zombie Land.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
This is sort of a summary of DE written by a trained and eloquent philosopher, with his own spin obviously. Although, ultimately, I think that you should read Moldbug directly to understand the background where we are coming from.
Highlighted quotes:
"In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has been normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad areas’ that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do their best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing onto the streets after dark..."
"the principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for. "
"Does anyone “really believe that people are born equal,” in the way it is understood here? Believe, that is, not only that a formal expectation of equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized interaction, but that any revealed deviation from substantial equality of outcome is an obvious, unambiguous indication of oppression? [part 4b]"
"To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, phys..."
"Perhaps the most striking feature, however, was a marked cultural tendency to settle disagreements in space, rather than time, opting for territorial schism, separatism, independence, and flight, in place of revolutionary transformation within an integrated territory. When Anglophones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space."
"Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly realized."
As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft."
"Union victory determined that the emancipatory sense of liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout the world, and the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured. Nevertheless, the crushing of American’s second war of secession made a mockery of the first. If the institution of slavery de-legitimated a war of independence, what survived of 1776? ..."
Highlighted quotes:
"In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has been normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad areas’ that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do their best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing onto the streets after dark..."
"the principal role of conservatism in modern politics is to be humiliated. That is what a perpetual loyal opposition, or court jester, is for. "
"Does anyone “really believe that people are born equal,” in the way it is understood here? Believe, that is, not only that a formal expectation of equal treatment is a prerequisite for civilized interaction, but that any revealed deviation from substantial equality of outcome is an obvious, unambiguous indication of oppression? [part 4b]"
"To call the belief in substantial human equality a superstition is to insult superstition. It might be unwarranted to believe in leprechauns, but at least the person who holds to such a belief isn’t watching them not exist, for every waking hour of the day. Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their variations in gender, ethnicity, phys..."
"Perhaps the most striking feature, however, was a marked cultural tendency to settle disagreements in space, rather than time, opting for territorial schism, separatism, independence, and flight, in place of revolutionary transformation within an integrated territory. When Anglophones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space."
"Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly realized."
As soon as politicians have learnt to buy political support from the ‘public purse’, and conditioned electorates to embrace looting and bribery, the democratic process reduces itself to the formation of (Mancur Olson’s) ‘distributional coalitions’ – electoral majorities mortared together by common interest in a collectively advantageous pattern of theft."
"Union victory determined that the emancipatory sense of liberty would prevail, not only in America, but throughout the world, and the eventual reign of the Cathedral was assured. Nevertheless, the crushing of American’s second war of secession made a mockery of the first. If the institution of slavery de-legitimated a war of independence, what survived of 1776? ..."
dogshit, land has lost even his style so emblematic of so much of his early work, the brilliant theorist who could combine ideas from bataille, deleuze, and nietzsche, and theorized u/acc, the middle of this text just reads like a /pol/ post “uh uh what if humans are actually genetically different, and these differences make some people useless” it’s a boring read that has none of lands originality or style, it’s just disappointing in every way