⚠️ 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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Lyotard
Then Lyotard comes along with Libidinal Economy and introduces libidinal materialism --- which early Land explicitly called himself, by the way. Hes 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 weve 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 us;... -
Marx and the Austrian School
Land didnt just pull from continental philosophy, however. Part of what made his work so unique is the way he synthesized Marxs descriptions of capitals operating principles and internal logic --- freed from Marxs 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 know... -
Deleuze and Guattari
Basically, one of the key points of D&Gs Anti-Oedipus is that capitalism --- through markets, commodification, alienation, abstraction, globalization, telecommunications, technology, capital, financial markets, money, etc. --- has this extremely strong decoding force (the process of breaking down established meanings, interpretations, and hierarchies), deterritorializing force (the process of detaching things from necessary concrete associations, making them infinitely reconfigurable, reassembla... -
Norbert Weiner
Finally, before we get to Lands ideas themselves, we have to discuss cybernetics, the science that complexity theory, control theory, and systems engineering spilled out of in the subsequent decades. Fundamentally, its the science of feedback loops: how do systems whose outputs feed back into its inputs, modified by extra information processing and interaction with external factors, behave over time? Once you have Marx and the Austrians views of capitalism not as a continual motion toward some k... -
Bataille
Then theres Bataille. Interestingly, Lands first and only published book when he was still associated with academic philosophy was The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, which was the first English book to engage with Batailles writings. Land draws a lot from Bataille; it could almost be said that Bataille provides the underlying motive power of Lands thought. One of the core ideas that Land draws from Bataille and uses to motivate his theories is the idea of the so...