Silicon Valley’s anti-human guru
“I've not met Nick Land, but I would definitely give a shout out and say for anybody who hasn't encountered his work they should definitely read up on it. He is, I think, pretty clearly, the philosopher of our time.” – Marc Andreessen, 2023
Nick Land is a former Marxist academic that developed the ideology of “accelerationism”, turned to the extreme right, and left the West to live in China. In the late 2010s the manifestos of white supremacist terrorists started to quote him. Then in the last 2 years something even stranger happened. A movement inspired by Land emerged in Silicon Valley: effective accelerationism or short “e/acc”. Now, Nick Land is suddenly listed as a “patron saint” in the manifesto of Marc Andreessen, the founder of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firm. What is going on here?
1. e/acc has been significantly inspired by Nick Land and its leaders have publicly promoted Nick Land
Marxist accelerationism wants to accelerate capitalism to accelerate its own destruction. However, upon reflecting on this in the 1990s Land concluded that it is not humanity that will abolish capitalism, it is capitalism in combination with technology that will abolish humanity.
e/acc is an ideology that has emerged on Twitter in 2022, mainly promoted by a handful of pseudonymous Twitter accounts. The declared goal of “e/acc” is to accelerate the “technocapital singularity”, which is when capitalism as a form of intelligence grows in a fast, recursive fashion without human control. Core tenets of e/acc, namely, the idea of a “technocapital singularity” that is feeding on itself and the goal to accelerate it, correspond closely to ideas put forward by Nick Land:
“Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity (…) accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway (…) nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” – Nick Land, 19941
“e/acc is about having faith in the dynamical adaptation process and aiming to accelerate the advent of its asymptotic limit; often reffered [sic] to as the technocapital singularity. Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’ (…) e/acc has no particular allegiance to the biological substrate for intelligence and life, in contrast to transhumanism. Parts of e/acc (e.g. Beff) consider ourselves post-humanists; in order to spread to the stars, the light of consciousness/intelligence will have to be transduced to non-biological substrates.” – Beff Jezos and bayeslord, 2022
Some powerful Silicon Valley decision-makers have openly adopted “e/acc” as their ideology. Specifically, both Marc Andreessen (co-founder of a16z, Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital firm) and Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most famous startup incubator) have publicly declared their support for “e/acc”.
The founder of e/acc who prefers to go under the pseudonym “Beff Jezos” (Guillaume Verdon) is familiar with Nick Land. He shares the core anti-human tenet of Land of “accelerating” towards loss of control and, possibly, human extinction. In contrast to Land he is self-declared “apolitical” and in favor of the enlightenment.2
The founding charter of e/acc by Beff Jezos directly mentions Nick Land and links to “his original founding text for accelerationism”. In turn, Nick Land has explicitly endorsed the “e/acc” tenets, and Beff has saluted Land’s endorsement.
Beff Jezos follows Nick Land on Twitter, and he has uploaded and shared a video in which “the one and only” Nick Land discusses “e/acc” as an autonomous offshoot of his ideas of accelerationism.
Beff Jezos uses the term “cathedral”, which is a code-word used by Nick Land and other rightwing bloggers to describe an alleged complex of academic institutions, mainstream media, and bureaucratic apparatuses that work in unison to enforce a set of woke orthodoxies.
Beff Jezos shares Nick Land’s desire to accelerate technocapital even at the cost of human extinction
Marc Andreessen is the most high-level openly declared supporter of “e/acc”. He is familiar with Land’s works, recommends others to read his works and has called him the “philosopher of our time”. In contrast to Land, he has argued that the technocapital machine is pro-human.
Andreessen has written a manifesto that names Nick Land a “patron saint” of techno-optimism and recommends that his readers read his works.
Andreessen holds Land in high esteem:
He has shared an inspirational quote from Nick Land on Twitter.
To the question which three humans he would like the most to have in a room and listen to, he answered with Plato or Socrates, Nietzsche, and Nick Land.
He thinks that Land is extremely smart, saying “Nick Land has like 200 IQ points on me”
I have followed Andreessen’s advice and have read Nick Land’s two most popular books “Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007” and “The Dark Enlightenment”.
I cannot recommend them.
2. Nick Land is all vibes, no facts
Nick Land’s books are difficult to read, but that doesn’t mean that its contents are smart. Most central claims of Nick Land’s books are empirically highly questionable. Land almost exclusively cites a small handful of books and extreme rightwing bloggers. Other than that, he often seems unaware of the basic scientific literature on topics that he writes about (e.g. technological determinism, varieties of capitalism, economic growth), and he provides no data to back up his claims.3
As an example, let’s briefly look at one specific core idea – namely, that democracy is a is especially prone to corruption and rent-seeking and that it grew as a “parasite” on top of runaway techno-capitalism.
Nick Land’s claim: “Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably irresistible) incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and comprehensiveness. Anything they neglect to steal – or ‘leave on the table’ – is likely to be inherited by political successors who are not only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can therefore be expected to utilize all available resources to the detriment of their foes. Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon in your enemy’s hand.”4
Facts:
a) Democracies have lower corruption than autocracies
Unsurprisingly, stable democracies with an independent judiciary, constitutional limits on executive power, free press, and free and fair elections are the least corrupt countries.
Living in Switzerland, the most direct democratic country on Earth, you never have to pay a bribe to an official, public services are of high quality, and you get to vote directly on most major projects on a national, cantonal, and municipal level. Quelle horreur!
b) Autocracies are structurally more vulnerable to corruption and rent seeking than democracies
The Selectorate Theory of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses game theory to predict that democracies will be less corrupt and rent-seeking than autocracies. In short, autocracies have smaller winning coalitions. If someone wants to bribe an autocratic state, say for paying a low price to extract oil, such side payments are much easier when you have to bribe fewer people.
Who do you think got the better deal, the people living under Leopold II in a democracy or the people living under Leopold II as a corporate autocrat?
c) Politically inclusive institutions have historically led to economically inclusive institutions
Most scholars think the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and institutional reforms towards the rule of law have played a key role in causing the Industrial Revolution. The step-by-step movement towards institutions that put limits on rent seeking by rulers has been one of the enablers of the Industrial Revolution in a positive feedback loop.
In Why Nations Fail Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that politically inclusive institutions usually precede economically inclusive institutions. They also argue that economically inclusive institutions without politically inclusive institutions are sooner or later captured by rent-seeking elites.
3. Nick Land’s vibes are anti-human, anti-democratic, anti-protestant, antisemitic, neofascist, and racist
Nick Land is an unstructured and at times deliberatively cryptic and ambiguous writer. He also seems to have made a personal journey from far-left Marxist to far-right neo-reactionary. However, there are things that cannot be denied with any amount of “this was just a provocative metaphor” hand-wringing. At a minimum, there can be no doubt that his writings contain a wealth of statements that are morally repugnant. Furthermore, his views on techno-capitalism cannot be understood separately from his political views, the two are deeply interwoven.
Content warning: The following includes multiple quotes of Land that readers may find disturbing.
Anti-human:
Land believes that the interplay of capitalism and technology has created a recursive feedback loop that will end humanity:
“Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment; reformatting primate behavior as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, a drag.”5
Land is nihilistically in favor of accelerating the AI takeover and thereby human extinction:
“We are a specific biological species with a set of interests that are determined in terms of species preservation, not in terms of intelligence optimization. Maybe intelligence optimization collides in an extremely vicious way with our biological species interest in terms of human self-preservation (…) it's going to move the whole reproduction of complex chemistry on this planet on to a new reproductive substrate, that's extinction, that's a disaster, but it's a disaster that could still be in cold neutral terms the most glorious thing there's yet happened in planetary history and it's entirely compatible with the worst nightmare in our biological history as a species.” – Nick Land, 2018
Land calls the point at which AI takes over meltdown, and he presumes that the dominant human institutions will try to prioritize human survival and try to control AI. In response, a decentralized movement for “meltdown acceleration” will emerge to attack and undermine the pro-human institutional complex.6
Land is opposed to human rights and solidarity with humans that experience economic hardship or health hazards: “(…) our contemporary predicament, characterized by (…) spurious positive ‘human rights’ (claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies).”7
Anti-democracy:
Opposition to democratic institutions is at the core of Land’s dark enlightenment:
“For the hardcore neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself. Fleeing it approaches an ultimate imperative. The subterranean current that propels such anti-politics is recognizably Hobbesian, a coherent dark enlightenment, devoid from its beginning of any Rousseauistic enthusiasm for popular expression.”8
He repeatedly frames democracy as a disease, virus, or parasite:
“Anarcho-capitalist utopias can never condense out of science fiction, divided powers flow back together like a shattered Terminator (…) If the state cannot be eliminated (…) at least it can be cured of democracy (or systematic and degenerative bad government).”9
“When perceived from the perspective of the dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the democratic phenomenon is general parasitology.”10
He hopes that accelerating technology will replace democratic institutions beholden to humans, with corporate authoritarianism beholden to capital only.11 According to Land, corporate authoritarianism has never been tried yet (which ignores the “actually existing” corporate authoritarianism of the British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, and the Abir Congo Company).
Anti-humanism and anti-democracy are Land’s two core theses with regards to technological acceleration. Beyond that he has also described various groups, in terms that qualify as hate speech.
Anti-protestantism:
Nick Land repeatedly uses pejorative terms for protestants. He argues that their specific tradition is anti-traditionalism and that they are therefore particularly vulnerable to wokeism, where political correctness has replaced heresy, and the “cathedral” has replaced the church:
“(…) you can’t keep a good parasite down. A community of Puritans fled to America and founded the theocratic colonies of New England. After its military victories in the American Rebellion and War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on its way to world domination.”12
Antisemitism:
Land’s quotes another extreme right blogger explaining that wokeness or political correctness are a Jewish conspiracy against white people.
“Hasn’t the rise and spread of PC eroded the power of Christianity, WASPs and whites in general? Blaming them is in fact blaming the victim. Yes, there are Christians, WASPs and whites who have fallen for the PC brainwashing. (…) That’s its purpose. To control the minds of the people it seeks to destroy. (…) You don’t have to be an anti-Semite to notice where these ideas originate from and who benefits. But you do have to violate PC to say: Jews.”13
Nick Land has suggested a “solution” to the “Jewish problem” in cryptic form in a text published in Fanged Noumena.14 This passage is shocking even by Land’s standards, so I will abstain from quoting it.
Neofascism:
Land’s books contain pro-Nazi statements:
“Nazism is morality itself, heir to Europe’s respectable history: that of witch burnings, inquisitions, and pogroms.”15
Land invokes the idea of a mythic Nazi sacrifice for the glory of having contributed to the rise of Gods:
“Death is too simple, too fluid, too disdainful of races and fatherland to have anything much to do with the Nazis. Resentiment was something they knew about, as was the aspiration to a mythic sacrifice, a Götterdämmerung that would inscribe them in the history books (…).”16
Racism:
Land’s books contain racist statements:
“Rather than accumulating genetic variation, a white race is contaminated or polluted by admixtures that compromise its defining negativity – to darken it is to destroy it.”17
In summary, my reading of Nick Land is that he hates multiple groups. He views macrohistory as a positive feedback loop of technocapital, which will soon not need humans anymore. He anticipates that the human institutional complex (governments, academia, media etc.) will try to protect humanity, but he wishes to accelerate the AI takeover by replacing democratic institutions with corporate authoritarianism that only serves capital. Partially as a revenge fantasy against hated groups and partially for the mythic glory of having contributed to post-humanity.
4. Is Silicon Valley cool with this?
Many “e/acc” followers may be genuinely unaware of the dark origins of the movement. However, key “e/acc” leaders, such as Beff Jezos and Marc Andreessen, are provably aware of and inspired by Nick Land’s writings. They may not fully agree with Nick Land. However, at a minimum, they have amplified his writings and done very little to contextualize or publicly distance themselves from them.
As a result, at a minimum, the “e/acc” movement does attract some individuals with toxic views. For example, the moderator of the public “e/acc” discord wants to talk about technology, but then seems surprised and somewhat exasperated when some “e/acc” members are repeatedly more interested in talking about Jews.
Second, tech billionaires love to pretend to be underdogs, but they are significant centers of power. It is in the public interest to apply a minimum level of scrutiny to their ideologies and actions. For example, Andreessen’s firm is also aggressively investing into everything AI (I mean everything) and into lobbying against AI regulation. The assets under his management may be about to grow significantly thanks to a collaboration with Saudi Arabia. Andreessen has also argued that there is little difference between democratic and autocratic systems, and he has openly ideated about ways to replace the liberal international elite:
“(…) in every human system always there’s always a minority of people ruling the majority of people (…) there’s never actually democracy (…) just imagine the horror show that would result if citizens got to vote on every individual issue as it came up, which by the way what happens in California (…) this is what’s called the iron law of oligarchy there will always be a small number of people in charge of the large number of people (…) they rule by telling a story that legitimizes their rule that story is the story that story in our era is the story of egalitarianism (…)
suppose that people woke up one day and literally took pitchforks and torches and went and stormed Davos and Aspen and killed the oligarchy elite the result would be anarchy, the result would be hell (…) if you want to replace the elite that you have today what you need to do is you need to have a better elite (…) the good news is like there’s a road map like there’s an answer to the question there’s a way to do this, it’s been done before, and it could be done again. Having said that, it's like the world's biggest challenge.”
So, I must ask: How many with “e/acc” in their Twitter bio’s have actually read Nick Land? Is Silicon Valley cool with this?
Nick Land. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Sequence Press. pp. 441-443
Bezos has explained how he views the differences in a separate tweet. However, this tweet is neither coherent with the official “e/acc” tenets nor does it seem to be an accurate representation of Land.
At one point he literally makes up “typical growth rates” of polities without even pretending to have a source.
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. pp. 6&7
Nick Land. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Sequence Press. p. 446
Nick Land. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Sequence Press. pp. 449 & 450
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. p. 12
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. p. 5
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. pp. 8 &9
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. p. 17
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. p. 10
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. p. 20
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. pp. 38&39
Nick Land. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Sequence Press. p. 465
Nick Land. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Sequence Press. p. 285
Nick Land. (2011). Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007. Sequence Press. p. 286
Nick Land. (2022). The Dark Enlightenment. Imperium Press. p. 38