Warning: CCRU data hoard contained within. ⚠️ mega.nz/folder/vpFwWTZB#kLKq…

Reza Negarestani with a protocological interpretation of the cave allegory and divided line analogy as "political technologies of cognition"

I have a new piece out in Aeon Magazine (@aeonmag). It focuses on distinguishing Nick Land’s original version of accelerationism from the different contemporary movements going under that same name: both militant white supremacist accelerationism and effective accelerationism.

Am I the only one who missed this 2.5 hour long Land interview uploaded a month ago by a Chinese channel with 12 subscribers? youtu.be/08rEWqsUNrw?is=r7HG…

Nick Land in SF: The Dark Tech crew frame his position as p(doom)=100% and p(sim)=100%. He frames it as Gnostic Calvinism. These are different ways of saying the same thing. Trad Calvinism’s belief in Total Depravity means humanity’s doom is ensured. It’s already done. So Calvinism = p(doom). Gnosticism believes this world is illusion and we don’t access true reality because of demiurge cosmology. So Gosticism = p(sim). But neither of these positions is new. They are in fact many centuries old. Each has been criticized in many different ways over the centuries and neither position is “inevitable”. Land brings a stylistic novelty with his “cybernetic” framing and he recruits elements of Kant to deflect traditional critiques of Calvin and the Gnostics: namely that the unknowability of the thing-in-itself means we can’t make any positive statements about p(doom) or p(sim). Land calls attempts to make such statements “idolatry”. But even this is not new! It’s a redo of Heidegger’s interpretation of the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus. (Remember Land’s PhD was on Heidegger and his advisor was David Farrell Krell, the editor of H’s “Early Greek Thinking”. My own study of the pre-socratics was with a Krell fellow traveler so I went down this road) The trad view is that Parmenides and Heraclitus are opposites: P says the world is One, eternal and unchanging. H says the world is strife and flux. Heidegger rejects this and says they say “the Same” (not the same thing, but the Same…) He gets there with a radical take on the word “physis” (aletheia as unconcealment) and what he calls “the sway of presence” This Heideggerian version of the pre-Socratics maps straight to gnostic Calvinism: Parmenides=p(sim)=gnosticism. Being’s underlying structure is eternal and already fixed but inaccessible because we are stuck in doxa. Heraclitus=p(doom)=Calvinism. Being as flux aligns with the predestined catastrophe, intensifying change is the motor of revelation. Land echos Heidegger: P(doom) and P(sim) aren't contradictory, they are “the Same” terminal structure — the eternal One (simulation as Parmenidean veil) manifesting through relentless, strife-driven unveiling (doom as Heraclitean fire). The Kantian apophatic thing-in-itself (no positive grasp or else idolatry) preserves the pre-metaphysical "obscurity" Heidegger praises in the early Greeks which he felt showed the ungraspable depth of the Same. So Land in SF is a restatement of 100 year old Heidegger but flavored with cybernetics and capital. Up next could be how Land inherits Heiddegger’s weakness vis a vis Kant (how Kant outflanks them) and how a radicalized take on Kant’s “inescapable subjectivity” in Michel Henry’s late work (“I Am The Truth” and “Incarnation”) shows a way out of Land’s cold submission to the Outside……

Here’s my summary of Nick Land’s core thesis: capitalism is artificial intelligence.

AXXI-3: Network States. The frontier of agorist speculation. Now available in print.

[posthumanism ] can only imply its xenophilic, alienating commitment to our deracination – it cannot affirm or state it as such. ...this non-affirmative desire traverses a ghostly, biomorphic body, a doll-body complicit ... in its own dismemberment. open.substack.com/pub/davidr…

Let a million AI religions bloom.

"A diagonal is the leanest diagram of transcendental philosophy. A spiral is a diagonal expressed in time." —Amy Ireland

OCD is when you pay $4 for a checkmark so you can edit a minor punctuation error.

Trafficking with demons to see the future, aka freeing time from geometry to understand capital teleology.

Hell is a runaway feedback loop.

“The filter, if there is one, may be not death but sterile power: civilizations that reached outward perfectly and could no longer stay strange enough to go further. The silence, if it is silence, might be the sound of competence that finished itself.”

“It is therefore quite wrong — and also quite unMarxian — to say, as so many economists do, that capitalist enterprise was one, and technological progress a second, distinct factor… They were essentially one and the same thing…” — Schumpeter

From Zourabichvili’s Deleuze: a Philosophy of the Event