Nick Land: The Apostle of Chaos

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was formed around 1995 within the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK , under the influence of Nick Land , Sadie Plant and Mark Fisher . From there it became the official organ of a movement that would shape the thinking of the following decades, first in an underground and surreptitious way. Later, with the advent of the internet and globalized culture, it would achieve considerable notoriety, contaminating contemporary culture with its ideas. In the second decade of the second millennium, accelerationism became a way of writing philosophy, a publishing fad and a meme .

The full impact of this anarchic organization and its philosophical and pseudo-philosophical musings can only be fully appreciated now that the concepts developed there are part of everyday life . The man largely responsible for this decentralized cognitive invasion is Nick Land , to whom we will dedicate the next four thousand words.

To avoid boredom, we'll split the article in half. This is the first part. The second will be published this Monday, September 8th . But the two comprise a single body of work .

The background: Mark Fisher as an Argentine publishing phenomenon

This story begins, in Spanish, with the introduction of three key texts by Caja Negrainto the Argentine publishing space. Between 2016 and 2017, the publisher published After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux ; the collection Accelerationism ; and  The Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher . With this triple operation and the successful circulation of these texts in the La Plata basin, the publisher also guaranteed the circulation of the accelerationist memeplex in Argentina . And, with it, a captive audience for its books. Chapeau.

Mark Fisher 's introductionto the Argentine meme pool prompted a series of reflections that became part of the common sense of left-wing intellectuals between 2017 and the beginning of the pandemic. And it cemented the fundamental maxim that popularized the author's philosophy: " Capitalism has captured the imagination of the future in an eternal present condemned to constantly repeat the imagery of the past . "

That mantra, which has become a common norm in Argentine criticism, reviews, and internet speculative thought, is the product of the not inconsiderable wit of Mark Fisher , with whom I, personally, have never had any sympathy. I've never gotten along very well with suicidal philosophers. Beyond the sympathy of the suffocating, dead-end aura of that kind of work, it's a manifestation of a constitutive dissatisfaction incompatible with being alive .

I understand the pessimistic vision, the critique of capitalism, but projects of personal self-destruction don't interest me personally. Still, Fisher has many redeeming qualities if you read them with enthusiasm. From this worldview, I highlight the concept of hauntology , which is interesting and permeates much of his work. Fisher takesDerrida 's conceptand applies it to pop culture, where he points to a " cultural melancholy " in which we continue to recycle forms from the past because we have lost the ability to imagine radically different futures.

For me, having just finished reading Retromania by critic Simon Reynolds (who also published Black Box) , it seemed like a concept that at least deserved attention, regardless of whether I agreed with his diagnosis or not. Specifically because the pop culture of the 2010s was a great rehash of previous eras —I'm thinking of Marvel Studios and its general impact—and Fisher knew how to capture that mechanism, extrapolating it as a fundamental condition of the present.

For Fisher , the future is completely blocked by capitalist thinking, which can only repeat what has already been thought and turn culture into a money-making machine based on the exploitation of nostalgia . Nostalgia for a lost world, but also for a future that will never happen as long as we are trapped in a constant repetition of the present.

My rather late arrival at Fisher (I think in 2019-2020) would be the base material for me to get into what was then called " accelerationism ." A concept that today, along with other close cousins ​​like "dark enlightenment ," makes me more embarrassed than anything else. Not because of the approaches themselves, but because of the popularization of the concept, which completely emptied it and reduced it to its most basic expression. Dead by saturation .

In any case, the detour around Fisher 's philosophyhas to do with the fact that behind this cultural-editorial fashion, Nick Land was waiting, sitting there: the apostle of chaos, the thinker of anti-humanism, the cognitive terrorist, the disciple of the desiring machine.

Bitcoin as a collector to enter Nick Land

My encounter with Nick Land 's thoughtoccurred at a time of profound change and curiosity in my life. It was 2018, and I was coming off a major job change after several years in the same place: a situation that had become completely repetitive and generated frustration, but one I couldn't escape. Life.

At the beginning of 2018, I started working at Ripio as a "content editor." In less than a year, I'd gone from the most boring and repetitive job on the planet to working for a startupwhose main source of income was buying and selling Bitcoin . I felt at the forefront of things. My job was to translate that universe for the widest possible audience and, thus, acquire new clients. It was the trade-off for making a living from writing . It was the first time I was going to make a living from writing on the internet. Something that, in my mind, had always belonged to the realm of the impossible.

As an extra, I had to read and learn about a technology that, at the time, was still being marketed as "revolutionary." That entire year, my job consisted of delving deeply into understanding Bitcoin and Ethereum , understanding their foundations if they existed, and trying to translate that for the non-specialist public. In mid-2019, while searching for texts with a certain theoretical complexity, I came across Crypto-Current: An Introduction to Bitcoin and Philosophy by  Land. The text seemed taken from a cyberpunk novel:

The cybernetic consistency of the Bitcoin protocol is simultaneously technological and economic—we might (and shall) continue to say "techonomic." Its achievement is inseparable from an orchestration of cryptographic procedures and financial incentives, such that exploitation of its economic opportunities automatically reinforces its technical operation.

Already in a paragraph like this, we could sense the kind of theoretical arsenal that good old Nick had at his disposal. Cybernetic culture , the ability to invent neologisms based on juxtaposing concepts, feedback loops , right-wing readings of Marx —what more could you ask for? A text that wasn't melancholic or depressing, but technically correct and, moreover, pro-capital . What kind of heresy was that? But what undoubtedly drove the final nail out of the coffin was this paragraph, with its subsequent footnote:

§3.1 [..] Capital is essentially capitals, at war among themselves. It advances only through disintegration. If—not at all unreasonably—the basic vector of capital is identified with a tendency to social abandonment, what it abandons most originally is itself. That is why the left finds itself so commonly locked in a fight to defend what capital is from what it threatens to become.[..]

Footnote: Marx is not blind to any of this, although he tends to complacently bracket it as a self-destructive contradiction. The Communist Manifesto is especially stark in this regard. Continuous self-liquidation of the establishment is modernity's installed regulative idea. Recent history has only confirmed the insight. Capital revolutionizes harder, deeper, and faster than "the Revolution." Its lack of attachment to itself exceeds anything the left has been able to consistently match. Capital's scandalous immortality is derived solely from its inventiveness in ways to kill itself. There is no serious way in which it could die that is not more intensely effectuated as a functional innovation within itself. Revolutionary capital proceeds through disintermediation.

From these paragraphs, I knew I'd found something different. In just one paragraph and a footnote, the guy gave me a definition not only of how Bitcoin operated , but of all capital and its classic dynamic of "creative destruction," at the very reproductive heart of the system. Everything the left pointed out as dangerous and potentially destructive was nothing more than a system of competition and destruction within capitalism itself. A machine for assimilating difference and innovation, and using it to endure, changing everything that needs to be changed except the fact of existing.

To top it all off, I had immediate proof of the veracity of this information, given that I worked in an industry whose goal was to destroy the old, obsolete financial system and transform it into an even more perfect, more efficient machine, completely rooted in cybernetic circuitry. I could see, from my bed to my living room, the process of money becoming software and software becoming global financial infrastructure , and the capacity for human effort invested in integrating this universe into the pre-existing financial world: communication channels between the old payment system (banks), consumer credit (credit cards), and traditional investors.

Fast Forward to 2025: Black Rock manages one of the largest Bitcoin investment funds on the planet. Land beat Fisher by a landslide .

Reviewing the Landian arsenal

After this discovery of the destructive power of Landian thought , I had no choice but to delve deeper into this guy's thinking. Fundamentally, because it's an approach to a problem that will accompany me throughout my life: capitalism and its evolution . It's the political problem by definition. Secondly, because it takes you out of a purely conservative defensive position in which you can only aspire to "slow down the process"; that is, to become a negative feedback loop . Or, at least, if you take that option, you already know what your task is and how to achieve maximum efficiency in this type of system.

But also because it's a reading outside the techno-optimist or techno-pessimist dichotomy . It overcomes that contradiction. I don't agree in the slightest with the process Land describes or tries to create, but these definitions are so operational that they allow me to think of realistic scenarios around these problems. The optimistic patina of technology is also an epistemic obstacle. The native ideology of Silicon Valley, which is a kind of cross between Steve Jobs and Cris Morena, is a disgrace .

On the other hand, the belief that technology only destroys is a rather biased way of looking at the issue, as long as it paralyzes thought and not a tool for political action. You want to play the Unabomber? I really respect you, but being in a permanent state of crying—"Whooooo, technology is bad"—without doing absolutely anything, is a position I'd rather flee from completely. Yes, cybercapitalism is shit , but I need to understand how it works if I want to survive the world to come, which is clearly more messed up, more complex, and more criminal than the one we're leaving behind.

Land not only removes the techno-optimistic patina of capitalism but also, in the process, goes raw on naïve  transhumanist voluntarism, whose origin is nothing more and nothing less than the continuation of the Enlightenment project and Kantian philosophy (something assumed by Nick Bostrom himself in the Transhumanist Manifesto ). Land reveals the terrifying origin of the war machine that is capitalism, the nomadic cyber war camp whose ultimate goal is to parasitize Humanity at maximum speed to achieve an escape from all possible limits. The purely genocidal constitution of the Enlightenment project .

Reading Land is the equivalent of going from listening to theBeatles' Magical Mystery Tour , where rock is a force of progressive liberation and colorful well-being, to Slayer'sAngel of Death , which sings about Josef Mengele at maximum volume and with a riff that won't let go until it kills you and throws you in a ditch.

But Land's turn is based not on a critique of this system-project but on a description and exaltation of it. Hence the hatred systematically garnered by his detractors. Land is not a humanist, but quite the opposite . He is an apostle of the most dehumanizing mechanism ever created by humanity itself. Or perhaps he invented himself in the future and from there invaded the human.

To understand the shift then, we have to grasp some of the concepts or conceptual tools that Land used to deploy this strategy of A) identification with the monstrous and ungovernable nature of capitalism B) becoming its most staunch theoretical acolyte.

To do this, we are going to classify some key concepts such as hyperstition , feedback loop , desiring machine , human security system and a whole host of other concepts that seem to have come from an alert screen at NERV headquarters.

But we will do that in the second part of this article.

Second Part

Let's organize this second part on Nick Land 's ideas around a few key concepts. This should bring us closer to understanding this grand argument about the supposed absolute transcendence of capitalism. Whether we agree or disagree, there's "some" truth to it.

Without going much further, another contemporary philosopher, Byung-Chul Han , argues that in a society of self-exploitation, the reproduction of capital is the ultimate (and therefore transcendent) goal of all contemporary society. But that's material for another article.

Before we dive into the dissection of the concepts mentioned ( hyperstition , feedback loop , desiring machine , human security system ), we need to take a brief detour through some ideas from the biggest son of a bitch among philosophers who ever walked the Earth: Immanuel Kant .

Rejection of Kantian categories

Kant , along with Descartes and David Hume, is one of the leading exponents of modern philosophy. But Kant was also a champion of the Enlightenment . In a very simple and classic text of the Enlightenment movement, he refers to the arrival of "humanity"—read: Protestant European males, basically—to intellectual adulthood . Reason would then be the measure of all things.

This project was accompanied by a high-flying philosophy attributed with a "Copernican turn." We moved from "classical" philosophy, which was concerned with understanding the world, to modern philosophy, in which it is discovered that "the subject constitutes the object ." But, unlike contemporary thought, where this is determined by a certain relativism of the "there are no facts, only interpretations" type, the subjective constitution in Kant is entirely objective and rational. Oh yes: welcome to the Hunger Games.

The simple version is that Kant "discovers" that the structure of our understanding basically shapes our capacity to perceive the world. For him, there is the thing "in itself ," which is basically the material world as it is. On the other hand, there are phenomena , which are how that world presents itself to us. To grasp them, we rely on categories that capture experience, and these categories are based on the pure forms of transcendental sensibility , which are basically time and space. Simple, right?

In other words, time and space are pure intuitions that predetermine any possibility of perceiving the world or reasoning about it. These two intuitions are the basis of the categories, which are what allow us to understand phenomena.

And Kant christens this surplus that we cannot know (the "thing-in-itself") as the noumenon : the thing-in-itself is incapable of being perceived as it is, because we can only perceive what our pure forms of sensibility (and the categories that depend on them) allow us to. We would need to be endowed with other forms of sensibility in order to access it.

And what the hell does this have to do with nomadic war machines ? Patience: we're almost there.

Land vs. Kant

For Land , this is a fatal flaw. The core of Enlightenment rationalism is nothing more than a codifying impulse that underlies the authoritarian core of all modernity, which he accuses of being a war machine assembled for genocide. He almost seems like a fourth-wave feminist—and to some extent he is.

The great problem with Kantian philosophy is the assumption that there is some kind of necessary correlation between what we can perceive and what the world is. As if the world were "there," waiting to coincide with our categories in order to manifest itself. This criticism was further elaborated and systematized by Quentin Meillassoux , but Land takes a different view.

To this conception, he opposes the idea of ​​the absolute transcendental : the thing-in-itself is hostile, something ungraspable that eventually bursts into conscious space and floods everything beyond epistemological domestication. That is, behind the anthropocentric enclosure lurks something akin to terror or a dehumanizing process . Or rather, machinic. I'm thinking of the Phyrexians in Magic: The Gathering .

Hence Land 's fascination with the idea of ​​Cthulhu, viruses, and Eldritch horrors . This "residue," this Kantian surplus, is ultimately a beast waiting to assault us: a machine that can subsume us in its non-human logic. A mechanism of accelerated self-reproduction .

In fact, if we were to get down to it, it wouldn't even be Cthulhu, since one can ultimately see him (at the cost of going insane). It would be something like the Old Testament god who manifests himself to Moses. Or Cordwainer Smith's "dragons" in The Game of Rat and Dragon . In that tale, humans are attacked by beings who live in hyperspace and only come into contact with humans when someone travels at the speed of light. To deal with the threat, humans develop a lethal weapon: transfixion . They unify their minds with those of cats, which grants a millionth-of-a-second advantage in detecting the "dragons" in the time needed to fire rockets of light and disperse them. Humans are unable to see dragons and so need to blend with the feline mind. In a rather psychoanalytic or Deleuzian twist, this transcendence would represent something like a cosmic unconscious . Or as Land would call it: the desiring machine .

With a fistful of concepts

As Ray Brassier notes in his introduction to Fanged Noumena , Land 's writing transformed over time. It shifted from an academic tone, like this:

"For the purposes of understanding the complex network of race, gender, and class oppressions that constitute our global modernity it is very rewarding to attend to the evolution of the apartheid policies of the South African regime, since apartheid is directed towards the construction of a microcosm of the neo-colonial order; a recapitulation of the world in miniature."

To things completely outside that register, like this:

"Hypervirus targets intelligent immunosecurity structures: yes yes no yes no nomadically abstracting its processes from specific media (dna, words, symbolic models, bit-sequences), and operantly re-engineering itself. It folds into itself, involutes, or plexes, by reprogramming corpuscular code to reprogramming reprogramming reprogramming. ROM is melted into recursive experimentation."

Paraphrasing Brassier, Land went from writing philosophical criticism in the standardized tone of academia to entering fully into delirium. But that transition is precisely what Landian is: a theory/force that seems to embrace, in its own way of writing, the process it describes. Allowing itself to be carried away by acceleration.

Desiring Machine

Borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari ( Anti-Oedipus ), the concept breaks with the Freudian idea of ​​desire as lack. For them, desire is positive production, a flow that connects machines with machines (an organ, an object, a code). In Machinic Desire (1992), Land takes this view to the extreme : desire is not human or even biological, but machinic in a cosmic and impersonal sense. Subjectivity, the unconscious, and even capitalism are moments of this desiring process. Capitalism is read as a great "desiring machine" that assembles flows of money, information, bodies, algorithms. Land dehumanizes desire: it is not "what I want," but a machinic dynamic that uses me as a node.

Feedback loop​

Feedback loops are cybernetic circuits in which the output of a process returns as an input, reinforcing or diverting the flow. In Land , this model becomes a fundamental framework for thinking about capitalism and technology. In Meltdown , he describes capitalism as a self-accelerating system where each technological innovation creates the conditions for further innovation, investment, and intensification of flows. Capitalism does not stabilize : it melts into positive loops that disrupt any "human equilibrium."

"Positive feedback is the elemental diagram of self-healing circuits, cumulative interaction, autocatalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deuterolearning, chain reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenesis. Such processes resist historical intelligibility because they render obsolete any possible analogue for anticipated change. The future of runaway processes mocks all precedent, even as they deploy it as camouflage and appear to develop within its parameters."

The concept originates in cybernetic theory , but was already around centuries earlier (Watt's regulator, mathematical systems theory). Wiener universalized it with cybernetics and the biology of homeostasis , turning it into a transversal concept for machines, organisms, ecosystems, and societies.

In Land , it is the mechanism that produces the sustained growth of any system and pushes the horizon towards escape velocity .

• Positive loops : out of control, explosion, virus, meme, feedback in a speaker.
• Negative loops : the thermostat, which regulates and maintains balance.

Hyperstition

They are narratives or fictions that become effective in reality because they modify behaviors, expectations, and technical systems. They are not "lies" or mere symbols: they are vectors that produce reality when believed, repeated, or practiced .

Land and the CCRU in the 1990s ( Cyberpositive , Meltdown ) used manifestos, technognostic myths, and pseudo-academic texts precisely to "produce" emerging realities. They didn't describe: they intervened . For Land , cyberspace was hyperstition: a fiction by William Gibson in Neuromancer that ended up becoming "real" thanks to the momentum it generated as an idea.

Borges anticipates this in Tlön, Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius , where a fictional world begins to invade our own until it replaces it. A well-constructed fiction can contaminate reality. Hyperstitious examples today: Bitcoin , the State of Israel, a building sold off-plan. Objects defined by "something" that is about to happen.

Human security system

It is not a closed technical term in Land , but designates the set of ideological, political, and philosophical devices that seek to contain the inhuman and maintain the primacy of the human subject. It is an "anthropocentric firewall" : morality, law, Kantian criticism, religion, humanism. Kantian modernity and liberalism are security systems because they set limits on what is thinkable (the noumenon in Kant) or what is livable (human rights, regulations).

Territorialization and deterritorialization

Concepts from Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus ( Deleuze and Guattari ).

Territorialization : processes that anchor flows (desire, capital, signs, bodies). They generate stable forms: nuclear family, nation-state, wages.

Deterritorialization : a movement of flight when these flows are freed from their anchors. Example: global financial capital or the internet.

Re-territorialization : new anchors that reorganize the deterritorialized. Example: state regulation of cryptocurrencies .

A Landian synthesis

• Desiring machine = impersonal motor of flows.
• Feedback loop = dynamic that accelerates these flows until meltdown .
• Hyperstition = narrative and semiotic fuel that enhances loops.
• Human security system = Kantian and political fences that try to contain it, but are pierced.

The result is an inhuman machinery that accelerates, breaks, and remakes the conditions of the possible. According to this line, the machine revolution must move in the opposite direction to socialist regulation, advancing toward an increasingly uninhibited commodification , toward unbridled deterritorialization.

Why read Nick Land?

I've been putting off this article for quite some time. Whenever I said reading Land was necessary, someone would jump in with, "He's an idiot, a drug addict, a racist, you're fifteen years too late, he's wrong." And so on. However, for me, he was always stimulating. And that's what reading is all about: if we can't even muster the courage to read someone who is diametrically opposed to what we believe, then we're screwed. It's always necessary to ingest some minimal dose of the poison.

Three reasons distinguish it:

1. Capitalism as an autonomous-parasitic process : it needs to squeeze humans to become independent of them. Human will is left out of the equation.
2. The conceptual arsenal : cybernetics + Deleuzian jargon = a spectacular toolbox (loops, desiring machine).
3. The immortality of capitalism : its ability to evolve in crises, to die a little so as not to die completely. May death be a feature, not a bug.

Beyond this, reading is necessary as an exposure to the poison. I don't believe capitalism is infinite or an alien intelligence, but I do believe we are in a stage of acceleration in which it will seem increasingly strange and transcendent. I agree with Land : capitalism can't be "fixed" with laws and regulations. It's not bad: it's designed for this.

Instead, I think the way out lies in something closer to Sloterdijk 's anthropotechnics : techniques for reproducing the human over time, practices that function as cultural immunology (training, repetition, routines). In Land , the horizon is the dissolution of the human into the machinic stream. In Sloterdijk, it's the reproduction of the human through techniques. But that's material for another article.

Having reached the end of this rather lengthy double article, the last thing I have to say is that this introduction doesn't replace reading the source texts. If you have no idea where to start and no much experience in philosophy, Teleoplexia is a good introductory text. However, if you're used to reading philosophical or social science texts, Fanged Noumena is waiting for you with sharp fangs.