Nick Land - Accelerationism, Retrocausality, Technocapital Singularity, and SV

Nick Land - Accelerationism, Retrocausality, the Technocapital Singularity, and Silicon Valley

Nick Land is a difficult philosopher to apprehend, and his primary works read like the writing of an undiagnosed schizophrenic. Despite this, he has struck a cultural nerve and many within the silicon valley space have adopted some of his nomenclature and have even built an entire subculture upon these ideas. Most notable is the “effective accelerationist” or “e/acc” movement, which builds upon Nick Land’s ideas and declares that capitalism itself “is a form of intelligence”, to quote Marc Andreessen, and that AI is the natural evolution of capitalism, or what Land would call “machinic intelligence.”

What is also clear is that on websites like LessWrong, which is extremely influential within these circles, Land’s idea of retrocausality is built upon in theories like “roko’s basilisk”, which posit that future AI is an evil machine which is going to retroactively punish any human who doesn’t help it come into being. This is an almost 1:1 interpretation of Nick Land’s concept of the numogram, which posits that capitalism itself is a kind of bootloader for machinic intelligence, something it retrocausally embedded in human civilization as a means of making itself come fully into existence. In fact, one might even see the story of roko’s basilisk as a form of Landian “hyperstition”, which is Nick Land’s term for a kind of superstitious falsehood which attains a kind of reality after achieving memetic spread.

The aim of this discussion is to cover the aspects of Nick Land’s philosophy which have had the most impact on silicon valley tech moguls like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Since the material is very dense and expansive, the discussion will begin with a 30 minute presentation covering all of the main parts of Nick Land’s philosophy pertinent to the discussion. The primary works covered will be Nick Land’s essays “Meltdown”, “Machinic Desire” and “Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration”. The secondary work we will consider is retrochronic.com, which is fairly comprehensive in describing how his work has influenced Silicon Valley.

I recommend reading the introduction essay on retrochronic.com for an overview of Nick Land's primary ideas and their impact on Silicon Valley. The presentation will draw from that and go deeper into the primary works themselves, as well as expounding on Land's history and influences.

Optional Listening: Nick Land explains the esoteric significance (in pretty blunt honesty) of the numogram (3 hour video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URWFdmLRt0U