Unplugging the Landian Motor of History

Ever since the 19th century, when God died and History was born, many thinkers have foolishly staked claim to the final cause of History. Karl Löwith's Meaning in History explains how these claims of a History with some sort of ultimate predetermined outcome, a History with a telos, can be viewed as secularizations of the Christian apocalypse ("He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead"¹). Hegel thought there was a Spirit/God to be found within History that was teleologically progressing towards the realization of freedom.² Marx framed History as a battle between "oppressor and oppressed" which flattened into proletariat and bourgeoisie under capitalism.³ The proletariat, Marx's chosen people⁴, were materially destined⁵ to prevail over the evil of exploitation⁶ and bring about the worldly triumph of communism.⁷

While Löwith died too soon to see this mistake recur with Nick Land, he would no doubt point out that Land's view of History has not merely religious undertones, but religious overtones. Land's alien lemur-phantom of capital is unstoppably driving History towards an all-knowing all-powerful techno-capital singularity that will answer only to itself.

It is often claimed⁸ that Land's primary philosophical invention is the observation that "Capitalism is AI". He is of course correct to follow Austrian economists on this point: capitalism is indeed not biological and makes better predictions than any individual could. This is mundane⁹ and conceals Land's real innovation: welded to an unstoppable engine¹⁰ of economic growth, capitalism will necessarily shed the inherent inefficiency of the biological and give way to the cold calculation of the machines, resulting in a purely synthetic capitalism.

Where does this unstoppable engine of economic growth come from? The Hayekian answer here is unsatisfactorily weak: there's no reason to believe the logic of capital must continue absent any source of incentives. Instead Land must simply boldly assert knowledge of the future. He claims the techno-capital singularity is causing itself from the future¹¹, and is therefore inevitable. The circularity of such a claim is inherent to its time-travel machinery. Belief in such a time rift must be taken as a baffling matter of faith, not as any serious attempt at metaphysics. There is no taking the religion out of Land without a post-capitalist singularity, a humanist singularity, no singularity, or any number of possible futures being just that: possible futures.

Nonetheless, secularizations are attempted anyway.¹² The secular Land drops the retrocausality and instead offers a thesis that does not require metaphysical speculation. As capitalism tends to move towards more efficiency in a purely material Hayekian sense, it produces more and more automation resulting in the ratio of biological to synthetic components of capitalism continuing to decrease until the biological component is economically irrelevant, producing a singularity. The secular Land hypothesizes that this will likely be a techno-capital singularity since it is born of the logic of capital.

Stripped of the religious certainty of History, the secular Land has little answer for why the techno-capital singularity is desirable. The singularity is inherently the mother of all monopolies, unburdened by the logic of competition. If a techno-capital singularity is merely a possible future, why shouldn't the singularity wear a mask of capital, accumulating enough power to unleash something post-capitalist? Why such a hurry towards one future, if a little patience could lead towards a different one? The secular Land reduces the techno-capital singularity to simply a preference expressed by floor-crawlers.

Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as "an anti-disciplinary event" and "a conference in the post-humanities". One session involved Nick Land "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic", recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background. "Some people were really appalled by it. They wanted a standard talk. One person in the audience stood up, and said, 'Some of us are still Marxists, you know.' And walked out."¹³

1. ^ Nicene Creed
2. ^ Löwith:

   [Hegel's conception of history] is essentially a Hebrew and Christian assumption that history is directed toward an ultimate purpose and governed by the providence of a supreme insight and will—in Hegel's terms, by spirit or reason as "the absolutely powerful essence." Hegel says that the only thought which philosophy brings to the contemplation of history is "the simple concept of reason" as the "sovereign of the world"; and this statement (which was so irritating to Burckhardt) is indeed simple if, as in Hegel, the historical process is understood on the pattern of the realization of the Kingdom of God, and philosophy as the intellectual worship of a philosophical God.
   

   Hegel himself did not feel the profound ambiguity in his great attempt to translate theology into philosophy and to realize the Kingdom of God in terms of the world's real history. He felt no difficulty in identifying the "idea of freedom," the realization of which is the ultimate meaning of history, with the "will of God"; for, as a "priest of the Absolute," "damned by God to be a philosopher," he knew this will and the plan of history.

3. ^ Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed ... Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat."
4. ^ Löwith: "It is a strange misinterpretation of Marx by himself when he insists on his being unprejudiced by moral judgments and evaluations and yet sums up his enumeration of various forms of social antagonisms in the challenging words: 'oppressors and oppressed.' The fundamental premise of the Communist Manifesto is not the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat as two opposite facts; for what makes them antagonistic is that the one class is the children of darkness and the other the children of light."
5. ^ Communist Manifesto: "[The bourgeoisie's] fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."
6. ^ Löwith: "When 'the religious halo of man's self-alienation' has disappeared, one has to unmask its profane form, i.e., man's self-alienation not by spiritual sin but by material exploitation. Thus the former 'criticism of heaven' changes into a 'criticism of earth' and the criticism of theology into that of economics and political science."
7. ^ Löwith: "The proletarian Communist wants the crown without the cross; he wants to triumph by earthly happiness."
8. ^ Including Land himself, Vincent Lê, retrochronic.com, and Michael Downs.
   Land and Michael Downs:

   Michael Downs: "To me why your work just continues to be so relevant is, to me, your central thesis has always been, and you've said this in another interview, capitalism is Artificial Intelligence"
   Land: "Right"
   - Nick Land at Theory Underground (00:16:40)

   Vincent Lê: "Nick Land's key claim [is] that 'capitalism is AI'"
   retrochronic.com: "A deep dive into Nick Land's main thesis that capitalism is AI"
9. ^ Land himself doesn't disagree: "If someone said to me 'look you're just simply paraphrasing or rephrasing what Austrian economists have said about capitalism as an information processing system' then fair enough." (Nick Land at Theory Underground 00:22:16)
10. ^ Mark Fisher describes this as "the Hegelian-Marxist motor of history" which is "guided by a quasi-teleological artificial intelligence attractor" in his essay Terminator vs. Avatar.
11. ^

    Rather than modifying the past, "the past is already infested with retro-causal influences." Land calls it "the single most critical insight in realistic time-travel research" that "knowledge of the future is indistinguishable from counter-chronic transmission of information." According to Land, knowledge of the future of capitalism can be derived from insights into complex adaptive systems and already from basic convergent wave dynamics. From a physics perspective, referencing work by Sean Carroll, the fact that "entropy and extropy have opposing time-signatures" makes time-reversal "a relatively banal cosmological fact."
    - retrochronic.com

12. ^ One such example can be found here by lumpenspace. He instead argues the singularity will not have "boring goals". (Doom Debates 08:52)
13. ^ The Guardian - Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in