Neon Vagabond
⚠️ UNRELIABLE PROPHECIES WARNING ⚠️
THIS PROPHET'S FORETELLING MAY OR MAY NOT BE ACCURATE. NO REFUNDS WILL BE OFFERED FOR INACCURATE PROPHECIES.
WOULD YOU DESTROY A BETTER WORLD TO SAVE THIS ONE?
TO GO STILL FURTHER ... IN THE MOVEMENT OF THE MARKET ... FOR PERHAPS THE FLOWS ARE NOT YET DETERRITORIALIZED ENOUGH, NOT DECODED ENOUGH ... NOT TO WITHDRAW FROM THE PROCESS, BUT TO GO FURTHER, TO "ACCELERATE THE PROCESS" ... THE TRUTH IS THAT WE HAVEN'T SEEN ANYTHING YET.
I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.
EVERY MAN IS FREE TO DO THAT WHICH HE WILLS, PROVIDED HE INFRINGES NOT THE EQUAL LIBERTY OF ANY OTHER MAN.
IN ITS COLDER VARIANTS, WHICH ARE THOSE THAT WIN OUT, ACCELERATIONISM TENDS TO LAUGH.
WE WILL ENJOY OUR ALIENATION
DARKLY • AESTHETICIZE • WHAT'S • COMING
Index
To briefly explain the structure of this blog: this is a nearly direct export of my Zettelkasten knowledge system. I call the hypertext nodes here thoughts instead of "posts," because they can be changed, rewritten, and edited over time — to erase mistakes or represent my changing views — but can also remain stagnant and unedited as I move on to thinking more actively about other things — whether unrelated, or specific related subtopics — and my views change but I haven't had time to go back and edit them.
Thus, if you want to get a more complete and up to date understanding of my views on a topic, look at a whole thought page, not just an individual thought: like any brain, my public second brain is a constantly changing, evolving web of beliefs which is moved forward precisely by the tensions between various parts of it, forcing it to move in one direction or another.
Recent Updates
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The market is for Outsiders
I love the market. Yes, you heard me right. And more than that, I love it precisely because it is inhuman, alienated --- because it allows for functional anonymity, social and material decoupling, deterritorialization of relations of material interdependence, the destruction of all obligatory culture and values. The local supermarket doesn't care that I'm trans... All it cares about is whether I have money. It may be profitable for some surveillance capitalist corporations to know those things a... -
Futurism
Charts the course of the original, interesting, Nick Land's descent into schizophrenic, meth-addicted, paranoid breakdown --- producing interesting theory almost all the way --- and explains why he turned neoreactionary after. Probably the best way to go into accelerationism, with this in mind, so you always know to be careful. For accelerationism the crucial lesson was this: A negative feedback circuit – such as a steam-engine ‘governor’ or a thermostat – functions to keep some state of... -
The "dogshit economics" of AI according to Cory Doctorow
This is a response to this post. I'll respond to the post point by point, because I think that in his rush to discount something he finds personally distasteful, Doctorow gets his economics and arguments very wrong. First, Doctorow argues that the current excitement around AI is a massive economic bubble, larger than previous bubbles like the dot-com boom or the Worldcom fraud. A significant portion of the stock market is tied up in a few AI companies that are not profitable and have no clear pa... -
Lyotard
Then Lyotard comes along with Libidinal Economy and introduces libidinal materialism --- which early Land explicitly called himself, by the way. He's interested in completely erasing the top-down, condescending leftist idea that "no one can really want this shit capital is throwing at them; this has to all be false consciousness, and we've gotta fix everyone, returning them to a more natural precapitalist mode of desiring." He defends the idea that we really do enjoy the shit capital is giving u... -
Marx and the Austrian School
Land didn't just pull from continental philosophy, however. Part of what made his work so unique is the way he synthesized Marx's descriptions of capital's operating principles and internal logic --- freed from Marx's angry, outraged moralism --- with the Austrian School of Economics' economic insights --- symmetrically freed from their ideological commitment to pretending that the outcomes of capital must always be positive for the humans trapped within the system. The only other thinker that I...