The fascination of Nick Land: a Landian accelerationism primer

I think Fisher is a good counterpoint to Land, and thus a lens through which to understand the appeal to me of Land. Read Capitalist Realism? Very disappointed? Yeah, me too. It gets referenced so much, but it's just not it. Fisher's whole thing is hauntology, which is precisely what makes him the anti-Nick Land in the most uninspiring way possible — spending all his time complaining that we're stuck in place, that we can't imagine futures or achieve new culture, while ignoring where it was happening right under his nose, even under the auspices of capitalism itself. Fisher was a left-pessimist, the kind that turns "anti-capitalism" into just naysaying and ressentiment. This attitude and those adjacent to it like left nihilism, a petulant rejection of everything (all the nihilist, localist, humane economy, primitivist, degrowth, etc movements), and left melancholy, a continual holding on to outdated and defeated ideas and forms of praxis (Marxist Leninists, etc), really exemplify everything I hate about the left. Even left utopianism, which seems opposed to this, believing in the possibility of absurd and unachievable futures like Fully Automated Luxury Communism and converting entire societies to a gift economy or something, partake in this in some sense, as they stem from an attempt to create a mirror image capitalism that hides from the forces it introduces.

Land calls what Fisher and those like him do "transcendental miserablism." This is a later Land writing, prior to his full NRx turn, but I recommend reading "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" to understand this register:

This post at K-Punk epitomizes a gathering trend among neomarxists to finally bury all aspiration to positive economism (‘freeing the forces of production from capitalist relations of production’) and install a limitless cosmic despair in its place.

(It is such a good critique of Mark Fisher.)

The Frankfurtian spirit now rules: Admit that capitalism will outperform its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances, while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse (“we never wanted growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides, haven’t you heard that the polar bears are drowning …?”).

[…]

In fact, with economics and history comprehensively abandoned, all that survives of Marx is a psychological bundle of resentments and disgruntlements, reducible to the word ‘capitalism’ in its vague and negative employment: as the name for everything that hurts, taunts and disappoints.

Transcendental miserablism, this inverse mirror image of Landian accelerationism, is a sort of political aesthetics of masochism, and it is very accurate to the zeitgeist — especially obvious with the anti-AI crowd right now. I use "transcendental miserablism" to describe them a lot. Seriously, read that whole essay; I think you'll get a lot out of it and probably understand better where Land and I are coming from.

Fisher might have been turning away from that near the end of his life with the Postcapitalist Desire lectures and Acid Communism, but to me even those felt like grasping at straws — desperate, often hauntological themselves, and definitely devoid of the libidinal investment and excitement they needed to have. It was like he was looking for something but couldn't sell it to anybody, even himself. A telling example of why this was comes from one of his Post-capitalist Desire lectures is where he says, in the space of a few minutes,

1. "I can't imagine what you'd want phones in a post capitalist world"
2. Phones primarily exist to make us always on call, accessible to capital
3. Phones don't make it easier to communicate with others, because "I can just go talk to my friends in the pub, it's not that hard"
4. Phone mediated connection isn't real connection, because it's indirect

Revealing how, as much as he claims to understand Lyotard's points about… post-capitalist desire (more below), he doesn't, not really — he's just as much of a left pessimist as everyone else on his side. It's a political aesthetics of masochism, and you can get enough of that just by being online.

Read his blog essays if you're interested; a few of them are good, tellingly particularly the ones where he spends most of his time outlining what's interesting about Land while showing where he goes wrong:

Terminator vs Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism

Postcapitalist Desire

The sad part is, because he knew of Land, Fisher did see the problem: the left had lost its libidinal charge. He even grasped in the right directon for the solution — those two essays above show it! The problem is that, like Nick Sirnck and Alex Williams (the authors of "A Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics"), Fisher didn't quite feel comfortable being as libidinally invested in, immanent to, and darkly appreciative of the pleasure-pain of capitalism and what it does, makes possible, and makes us desire, as might have been necessary to actually create a genuinely new political program. He got trapped in trying to find a new libidinally charged leftism through hauntology (the mourning of lost futures), and you can't mourn your way out of resentment, dispair, and miserablism.

Regarding modern Nick Land, I also have to mention a hilarious interview with Land where he's asked why he switched from his early version — who was very much into deterritorialization, anti-fascist, and a strong feminist — to the modern NRx version. I think it illustrates well another perfect foil for early Nick Land, funnily enough:

"Nick Land’s enemy isn’t The Cathedral — his enemy is the emancipatory commitments of his youth. The bitterness of this break becomes incredibly apparent in an interview that he did with Marko Bauer and Andrej Tomažin titled “'The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation'”; after a few banal softball questions, he gets this blazing 90 MPH pitch of a question:

"Interviewer: …Via @Outsideness you wrote: 'Actually I like plenty of immigrants and black people, just not the grievance-mongers, rioters, street-criminals, and Jihadists…' Don’t you here sound a bit like Borges (of the Tlon Corporation) advocating ‘liberty and order’ while supporting Pinochet… Isn’t all of this a far cry from: 'Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker…'

Nick Land: [Long silence.] Let me see what is the best way to answer. [Long silence.] I don’t know, it’s difficult… One element of it is age. Youngsters are highly tolerant of massive incendiary social chaos… But I just don’t think you can make an ideology purely out of entropic social collapse… All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order… Nixon put down hippies, the Thermidor put down the craziness of the French revolution. It’s an absolutely relentless and inevitable historical story that the party of chaos is not going to be allowed to run the process… What I would say to these crazy youngsters now is, you don’t have a programme. What you’re advocating leads perversely to the exact opposite of what you say you want."

The Nick Land of the present day is a man who thinks of himself more aligned with Nixon than the crazy youths, who simply want to create a nice gated free-market utopia away from the rainbow coalition of cybernetic queer brown zombies that he used to get high with.

"How you have fallen, you Nixonian geriatric," to quote a friend.

The crime of this is not just that it's immoral — Land was always immoral to some degree — but that it's boring. There's nothing new that can be made of this; it's the exact same thing you can hear if you turn on Fox News. More than that, there's none of that libidinal charge, that energy, that was in his early works, because, faced with abyss of his own views, in his old age he blinked.

A big part of why early Land liked capitalism was because he thought it would obliterate gender and racial hierarchy, spread drugs, and transhumanism everywhere. Whether that's true or not, the reasoning informs what his work — and those who enjoy it — are aestheticizing. This version of Land does not have that. Some people try to draw a line from his early days to his modern neoreactionary ones, on the basis of his inhumanism, but that's the thing — now he wants stability, a political program, individual human beings running "sovcorps" based on cults of personality. In other words, he may long for a world of oppression and violence, but not an inhuman one at all.

If I ever turn out like that in my old age, I give anyone permission to shoot me!

The problem with those just coming to Land is that, to understand him, you need to be familiar with an insanely heady mix of difficult continental philosophy, heterodox schools of economics, and cybernetics. Additionally, sometimes it can be difficult to understand what he's getting at without going in with a general understanding of the framework he's operating within — including how he synthesizes his influences into a conceptual territory. So, for the rest of this essay, I'm going to try to give you the Cliff's Notes of his philosophical influences — their core ideas and how he uses them — so that if you decide to dive into his texts, you won't be completely lost.

Feel free to skip any of the following sections if you're already familiar with any of the given thinkers. In fact, to make that easier, I've actually turned each of these sections into their own page, so you can treat this section as its own little internally-linked rhizome (network with no beginning or end, nor any necessary nodes).

1. Deleuze and Guattari What D&G gives Land: The concept of deterritorialization as capitalism's active, decoding force that breaks hierarchies and makes things reconfigurable. The idea that desire is productive, not a lack needing Oedipal control. The crucial insight that capitalism doesn't die from its contradictions — it feeds on them. Land takes this and asks: what if we stop trying to brake the machine and instead accelerate its self-revolutionizing motion?
2. Lyotard What Lyotard gives Land: Libidinal materialism — the insistence that we genuinely enjoy capitalism's shit, that false consciousness is condescending, and that the only way out is through. Land inherits the scandalous task of tracing how flows of libido construct us, but drops Lyotard's hesitation: for Land, there's no risk of "going too far"—the whole point is to push through to the other side of enjoyment.
3. Bataille What Bataille gives Land: The solar economy — the idea that Earth's problem isn't scarcity but excess energy that must be burned off, either through war/sacrifice or through capital and technology. The concept of low materialism (matter as entropic, messy, eruptive) becomes Land's obsession with industrial ruination, climate meltdown, and the wasteful core of technocapital. Bataille's "expenditure without return" becomes capital's self-amplifying drive.
4. Marx and the Austrian School What Marx gives Land: The "Fragment on Machines" — automation making workers obsolete, skill transferred to machinery, capital itself becoming the laborer. The general intellect (social knowledge) as the true productive force. Money as an alien god that enslaves through abstraction. Land strips out Marx's moralism and keeps the cold mechanics: this isn't a system to overthrow but a runaway AI we're trapped inside. What the Austrians give Land: The market as a distributed information-processing system that computes through price signals far beyond human cognition. Entrepreneurship as discovery — a Darwinian process exploring possibility space. Creative destruction as the engine of change. Land takes these pro-capitalist insights and makes them horrifying: the market isn't efficient — it's an acephalous AI that's already thinking for itself.
5. Norbert Wiener What Wiener gives Land: The distinction between negative feedback (homeostatic, reterritorializing) and positive feedback (runaway, deterritorializing). Capitalism isn't an equilibrium system — it's a positive feedback circuit that accelerates itself. The "governor" on a steam engine becomes the image of everything Land wants to disable: any human attempt to stabilize the system just produces wilder oscillations.

Land, then, is the heady mix of all of this: a fusion of the ideas of all these thinkers' ideas about capitalism, desire, and the fate of humanity while stripping them of any moralism, any hanging-back, any regret or miserablism, in a mad rush in and through the systems he is theorizing. To quote Fisher,

In a nutshell: Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire remorselessly stripped of all Bergsonian vitalism, and made backwards-compatible with Freud’s death drive and Schopenhauer’s Will. The Hegelian-Marxist motor of history is then transplanted into this pulsional nihilism: the idiotic autonomic Will no longer circulating idiotically on the spot, but upgraded into a drive, and guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor that draws terrestrial history over a series of intensive thresholds that have no eschatological point of consummation, and that reach empirical termination only contingently if and when its material substrate burns out. This is Hegelian-Marxist historical materialism inverted: Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off.

[…]

This is – quite deliberately - theory as cyberpunk fiction: Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of capitalism as the virtual unnameable Thing that haunts all previous formations pulp-welded to the time-bending of the Terminator films: “what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources,” as “Machinic Desire” has it(Fanged Noumena, 338). Capital as megadeath-drive as Terminator: that which “can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with, doesn’t show pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop, ever”. Land’s piratings of Terminator, Blade Runner and the Predator films made his texts part of a convergent tendency – an accelerationist cyber-culture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land’s machinic theory-poetry paralleled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, which sampled from exactly the same cinematic sources, and also anticipated “impending human extinction becom[ing] accessible as a dance-floor” (Fanged Noumena, 398).

In essence, out of this hallucinogenic, sped-up (literally) mix of thinkers, Land comes along and says — that D&G were right, capitalism is this deterritorializing, decoding, alienating force; that Marx-plus-Weiner are right that it's a runaway positive feedback loop of technocapital development and accumulation that is fast making the worker obsolete; that Lyotard was right that there's a very real allure to this, and we can't go back to precapitalist desires, if even such a thing makes sense; that Bataille was right that wastage, expenditure, destruction, is inherent to the biosphere as a thermodynamic system and technocapital, this monster born from humanity, is the best avatar of that meltdown yet; that the Austrians were right and, through the lens of modern terminology, capitalism is a massive planet-sized distributed artificial intelligence system that requires no computers whatsoever, but will use them as soon as they become available, and it is far beyond our control.

Land says that all our subjectivity and desires at this point in history are irretrievably shaped by capital. More importantly, he argues that we don't get to pick and choose, because we're not the ones in control anymore: capital is the main agent of history now, a cthonic egregore we've summoned and cannot now banish: capitalism is an extremely complex system — a polymorphic, acephalous information-processing AI and positive runaway feedback loop that we just don't get to control. In fact, since all of our desires and thoughts are always-already mediated by it, it just recuperates or adapts to any attempts at resistance, or dictates them from the start.

In fact, he argues, looking back, history is perhaps best explained as shards of what needed to be assembled to create capitalism — the concept of zero, double entry bookkeeping, ships, money, debt, the limited liability corporation, the steam engine, etc — being innocently invented for their own reasons, and then inevitably assembled due to the inherent incentives implicit in them which always would have, and must have, led us towards forming capitalism, as the natural end point of the forces working from within these shards of what would become capitalism. This is his idea of capitalism as retrochronic: working backwards through time, assembling itself out of the past.

The second part of Land's argument is that capitalist markets are perhaps the best desire-generating and desire-satisfying machines the world has ever seen. Yes, they don't actually feed and clothe everyone well; there are persistent misallocations of resources, but to point that out is almost to miss the point. Another system might provide steadier and more equitable living conditions, but capitalism is like a drug that you're addicted to, not a healthy meal: it starves you, but at the same time it woos you and gives you highs. You can't get enough of it, even if you're a leftist; even the desires you think go against it are produced by it and then sold back to you. An example of how even seemingly anti-capitalist desires are already captured by capital is in Fisher's "they killed their mother" essay about Avatar: "They Killed Their Mother": Avatar as ideological symptom. Consider advertisements, recommendation algorithms, and the constant microbial bloom of new products tested and discarded just as fast.

Crucially, Land doesn't rely on what he's talking about being "classic" capitalism as we are familiar with it; for him, he's talking more about the existence of accumulating capital and networks of information controlling the movement of goods and services, whether those networks of information are state-run public "markets" in the traditiona liberal sense, or cloud capital markets like Amazon, or networks of computers automatically trading and communicating faster than humans can process or even concieve; what he's interested in is the system where capital accumulation is the driver, embedded within systems of networked information processing: what we could call capital-ism (with a dash). Whether we still have "capitalism" is debatable; but I think even if we want to call what we have now /Technofeudalism/, he'd be perfectly happy with that — that's all that's needed for a technocapital runaway planetary singularity, a market-mind.

In the 1990s, he talked about capitalism "achieving escape velocity from humans," where capital, concieved as a sort of artificially intelligent superorganism that only uses humans, human communications, and human institutions as a substrate, keeping us operating within it through negative feedback loops and incentives and desiring-production, directing our flows into reproducing it, no longer operate as if they have to care about the humans either making up corporations and capital management systems, or the humans in the markets it operates within, or the humans producing material goods (who will become more and more obsolete anyway, as Marx argues in "Fragment"); he was arguing for a less science fictional — although it'd be difficult to tell by his wording — version of Accelerando's Vicious Offspring (in the novel, corporations turned AIs eventually ground the solar system to dust for raw materials to build Matryoshka brains and leaving humanity behind except to experiment on us). A big part of it for him is the idea that labor is the only thing creating value is just wrong in the era of technocapital, cloud feudalism, and automation. That's another reason he gives for why we don't have a foothold anymore. As of 2025, 50% of consumer spending is driven by the top 10% of earners, and companies are abandoning consumers in favor of other businesses (such as Micron, Nvidia, and the entire RAM market), and technofeudalism is taking hold through cloud capital. Was he wrong?

So then, to sum all of this up with a quote from his Machinic Desire,

what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources. Digitocommodification is the index of a cyberpositively escalating technovirus, of the planetary technocapital singularity: a self-organizing insidious traumatism, virtually guiding the entire biological desiring-complex towards post-carbon replicator usurpation

Or this quote, from A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:

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 a system in the same place. Its product, in the language formulated by French philosophical cyberneticists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, is territorialization. Negative feedback stabilizes a process, by correcting drift, and thus inhibiting departure beyond a limited range. Dynamics are placed in the service of fixity – a higher-level stasis, or state. All equilibrium models of complex systems and processes are like this. To capture the contrary trend, characterized by self-reinforcing errancy, flight, or escape, D&G coin the inelegant but influential term deterritorialization. Deterritorialization is the only thing accelerationism has ever really talked about.

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.

[…]

In this germinal accelerationist matrix, there is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Creative destruction” is the whole of it, beside only its retardations, partial compensations, or inhibitions. Capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could. If subsequent history has not vindicated this point beyond all question, it has at least simulated such a vindication, to a maddening degree.

To this point even Greek socialist Yanis Varoufakis says, in his recent 2023 book Technofeudalism,

"This is the supreme irony: the system that was supposed to be overthrown by the proletariat has been killed by capital itself. Capitalism’s demise was not brought about by the masses who suffered under it, but by the very logic of its own development. The drive to accumulate capital led to the creation of a new, mutated species of capital—cloud capital—which, in the process of its own growth, ended up devouring the markets and profits upon which capitalism depended. Socialism did not kill capitalism. Capital did. And in its place, it has produced something far more efficient at extracting value: technofeudalism." (Technofeudalism)

Although I think I (and early Nick Land) would disagree with Varoufakis that this a) isn't capitalism and b) that the overall motion isn't more deterritorializing than territorializing, as, while we all become "cloud serfs," this is a form of serfdom infinitely geospacially and temporally deterritorialized, infinitely switchable, and everything else becomes more commodified, more replaceable and disassemblable, and precarious — nothing like classic feudalism at all. Think about the gig economy here.

Land's thinking is that as this deterritorialization goes on, society will get more infinitely reconfigurable and decoded, more "schizophrenic," and far more inhuman, and it's long since out of our control — so far so "good". His response to all this is where he becomes the "mad black Deleuzean" I find so fascinating: he takes Lyotard further and asks — what can we do to become immanent to that process? To identify with it, into it, enjoy it, and build a new aesthetic and theory around what is being done to us without our permission? Recognizing it's "evil" but leaning into it anyway, finding art in it, instead of trying to fruitlessly claw back to the "before times." So:

Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.

This is why I think a more accelerationist take on leftist pessimism is interesting. It's not really pessimism as in "look how sad I am, I'm going to be perpetually frustrated, angry, and resentful, denying the possibility of anything new while bemoaning that nothing new comes around — or kill myself." It's more a sort of positive nihilism, a "yes-saying" with full awareness of how fucked up everything is, but being willing to throw yourself at it and create something new out of it. It opens you up to seeing new possibilities.

It also comes from a sort of "sympathy for the "devil: a willingness to recognize the awe-someness of technocapital outside the totalizing moralizing of the modern Left, and the strange jouissance of capitalism. Perhaps it's best to sum it up as this: *I'd rather live under technocapital than under most of the worlds imagined by other leftists.* Yes, that's informed somewhat, perhaps, by the privilege of having a rich father for a few years of my young adult life to help me get set up, and getting to live in the United States instead of the third world, but I think it's deeper than that, because at the same time I am a very disabled neurodivergent socially isolated, very poor trans woman with no healthcare, living paycheck to paycheck doing menial jobs to try to get by, with basically no family or social safety net due to my transness, and my father isn't able to support me anymore — degrowth just kinda sucks, especially for disabled people and people with diseases.

Now that you have the background, here are a few pieces of his you can start with:

1. Meltdown
2. Cyberpositive (Nick Land + Sadie Plant collab)
3. Circuitries
4. Machinic Desire
5. Teleoplexy
6. A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism
7. Critique of Transcendental Miserablism

Program:

Read "Meltdown" like you're mainlining cyberpunk: don't stop to understand every reference, just feel it.

Then read "Cyberpositive" — this is where Land/Cybernetic Culture Research Unit name the runaway positive-feedback loop. It's the purest crystallization of cybernetics + libidinal materialism.

After that, read "Circuitries" to see how it's all happening (to you).

Then "Machinic Desire" to understand why the theory is built this way.

Finally, read "Teleoplexy," which some (see the Dangerous Maybe podcast) consider his most important essay — the capstone on an explicitly accelerationist Landian theory, his return to it to cap it off after others had developed and responded to it, putting together his theory of techonomic time and teleology.

Finally, read the "Quick and Dirty Introduction" and "Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" for relatively accessible Landian theory, somewhat retrospective, extending in other directions. If you're not hooked after Meltdown, Land's not for you, and you should stop.

If you want more, then proceed to:

1. Fanged Noumena (a collection of the best of his pre-neoreactionary turn writings)
2. CCRU Writings (for his collaborations with others who were working in the same and an even more occult vein, building a full pulp fiction mythos that wove in Lovecraft and the occult)
3. Thirst for Annihilation (if you're really interested in Bataille and want to see what he does with him)

I don't think Land is perfectly right in his understanding of capitalism though: as you saw above, he identifies capitalism completely with deterritorialization, but I don't; I see it as having those two motions, one of deterritorialization and one of reterritorialization again, that Deleuze and Guattari talk about. I like Land because of the celebration of the former force, but I don't think that must become identical to a celebration, even in a sort of darkly nihlistic aesthetic way, of all the forces of capitalism — for instance, if we were to return to a neofeudal order out of capitalist forces, that would not be a deterritorialization worth the name, or the celebration.

This is why I like pairing Land with thinkers like Kevin Carson, who talk at length and in depth about the deterritorializing forces within technology and markets — for instance, see Homebrew Industrial Revolution — but also about how capital suppresses those forces. I understand I think in a way Land was never able to, or refused to, the true horror of capitalism — that, as Fisher says, it will never actually rip off its flesh-mask and usher in the technocapital singularity — but at the same time I am able to throw myself into its flows, understand the appeal of it, allow myself to survive it by this libidinal investment and recognition, and perhaps engage in wu wei, working through the system in a way that perhaps might change an eddy within it.

Thus, the question for me as an unconditional accelerationist — a form of post-Landian accelerationist that both understands the dual nature of capitalism and also that there is little we can do before it but prepare our subjectivities and perhaps work with the flows we think are important, even if they are eventually recuperated — becomes what can I do to accentuate the former force but not the latter, working within the streams.

I think work on peer to peer networks, undermining intellectual property and software lockdowns, working on individual and peer production, extending security and anonymity on the web, making body modification (for trans people and others) more accessible, leaning into xenogenders, are all possible examples of this. One great place to look after Land is at what the xenofeminists are doing; as usual, tech-savvy feminists rule! But I think there's something to be gained, as I hope you now see, from engaging with both, instead of just jumping to the Xenofeminist Manifesto.

Will it work? Probably not; this is more a question of what you do to pass the time as capitalism pushes us toward planetary meltdown, and what precisely you valorize about it. I think an important part of the way Land informs my views is not just this sort of dark aesthetic appreciation for and ability to move within capitalism's flows without giving into miserablism, and which brings about opportunities to grasp new deterritorializations as they come for — perhaps temporary, but in the long run we're all dead — new projects; but also a shift in what makes me enthusiastic about anticapitalist projects.

But, in the end, I think Land's sort of dark appreciation of what technocapital can create is a good antidote to transcendental miserablism. A way to throw yourself into the processes of technocapital and find joissance in them, to build an aesthetics and theory about them that isn't constantly lost in the mode of hopeful utopianism or miserable moralism. I have some mantras I came up with regarding this. My favorite is my Discord status: WE WILL ENJOY OUR ALIENATION. Capitalism will make us, and is making us, enjoy in some sense its shit, including the alienation cyberspace brings.