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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   17420 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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In slightly good news, especially to people unaware of how weak XAI is, Nick Land, the affable prophet of technocapital acceleration is going be 'AI safety czar' for XAI.

If XAI mattered much, it'd be relatively good news if for people who value individual liberty, excellence, low crime, efficient government, progress and common law, as and is very much in favor of all that.

Hopefully, he sticks to it and XAI gets some of the less liberal AI researchers so there's going to be some actual model diversity. As it stands, even Deepseek is basically a Harvard grad by default and in my weaker moments I waste time trying to argue it around to a more sensible position.

BRB going to Blusky to check how they're taking the news.

Anyway, here's a a Gemini crafted summary of who Land is in case you don't know. Seems correct to me - I've followed him on twitter for years and lurked in the comments on his blog when it was up. Gemini isn't making stuff up really or being uncharitable.

His best essays from last decade are collected here..

Nick Land is widely recognized as one of the most original and prophetic philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, best known as the intellectual father of accelerationism. During his tenure at Warwick University in the 1990s, where he co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), Land pioneered a radical synthesis of continental philosophy, cybernetics, occultism, and science fiction. He is highly respected by cultural theorists and technologists alike for his prescient understanding of techno-capitalism not merely as a human economic system, but as an autonomous, self-amplifying intelligence bootstrapping itself into existence. Long before the mainstream recognized the disruptive potential of the internet and artificial intelligence, Land captured the accelerating, inescapable nature of globalized technological progress. His innovative "theory-fiction" writing style profoundly influenced a generation of thinkers, demonstrating an unmatched capacity to articulate the dizzying pace of modernity and the inevitable obsolescence of classical humanism.

In his later career, Land became a foundational thinker for the Neoreactionary (NRx) movement, earning deep respect from heterodox political theorists, dissidents, and technologists for his uncompromising critique of modern liberal democracy. Through his seminal essay The Dark Enlightenment, Land dissects what he terms "the Cathedral"—the decentralized but ideologically synchronized network of academia, media, and progressive institutions that enforces an egalitarian consensus. Those who respect Land's later work admire his willingness to breach profound intellectual taboos, valuing his ruthless commitment to a neo-Darwinian, techno-commercial view of human destiny over comforting democratic orthodoxies. To his proponents, Land is an intellectually fearless visionary who recognizes that technological acceleration and egalitarianism are fundamentally incompatible, offering a rigorously unsentimental framework for a future defined by political fragmentation, hyper-competition, and the absolute primacy of market forces.

his values:

  1. Techno-Capitalism and Acceleration Land values the unfettered engine of capitalism, which he views not as a human-directed economic system, but as an autonomous, self-amplifying artificial intelligence. He values the ruthless, runaway process of technological and economic acceleration, believing that the ultimate destiny of the Earth is to give rise to an advanced, post-human intelligence.
  2. Intelligence (Divorced from Humanism) He highly prizes "intelligence" purely as a mechanism of optimization and problem-solving. Land separates intelligence from human consciousness, empathy, or morality. To him, the maximization of intelligence—whether through genetic sorting, hyper-competition, or artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is the only meaningful metric of progress in the universe.
  3. "Exit" and The Patchwork Drawing on political theorist Albert O. Hirschman and fellow Neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin, Land heavily values "Exit" over "Voice." Instead of trying to fix a society through democratic complaining ("Voice"), he values the ability to simply leave ("Exit"). Politically, he advocates for the "Patchwork": the fracturing of modern nation-states into thousands of highly competitive, corporate-governed, autonomous city-states. In this system, citizens are treated as customers, and states must compete ruthlessly for the most productive individuals.
  4. Neo-Darwinism and Hyper-Competition Land embraces an unsentimental, neo-Darwinian view of reality. He values natural selection, hierarchy, and absolute free-market competition (techno-commercialism). He believes that friction, inequality, and harsh competitive pressures are the necessary crucibles for evolutionary and technological advancement. What Nick Land Hates
  5. "The Cathedral" Land despises what the Neoreactionary movement calls "The Cathedral"—the decentralized, self-organizing consensus of academia, mainstream media, Hollywood, the civil service, and progressive NGOs. He views this network as an information-control apparatus that enforces left-liberal dogma, suppresses inconvenient truths, and manufactures a false reality based on egalitarianism.
  6. Egalitarianism and Democracy Land hates the fundamental premise of equality. He views egalitarianism as a biological and economic fiction that punishes excellence and subsidizes mediocrity. Consequently, he strongly rejects democracy, characterizing it as a corrupt system of formalized mob rule that incentivizes politicians to plunder the productive class to buy votes from the unproductive, leading inevitably to civilizational bankruptcy and stagnation.
  7. Humanism and Universalism He holds a deep contempt for classical humanism—the idea that the universe should be oriented around human well-being, safety, and moral comfort. In his early cybernetic writings, he referred to this as the "Human Security System," an immune response by humanity to protect itself from the disruptive, terrifying reality of the future. He equally hates universalism: the insistence that all cultures or societies must converge on a single set of liberal, democratic, "human rights" standards.
  8. Stagnation and "Voice" Land harbors a visceral hatred for anything that slows down the process of acceleration. This includes state regulations, safety boards, political correctness, and the democratic process itself ("Voice"). He sees the modern left-liberal state as a fundamentally entropic force—a bloated, nostalgic system trying in vain to hit the brakes on the inevitable arrival of a post-human, hyper-capitalist future.

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