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Nick Land
63 quotes
“Any attempt by political forces in the Third World to resolve the problems of their neo-colonial integration into the world trading system on the basis of national sovereignty is as naive as would be the attempt of black South Africans if they opted for a 'bantustan' solution to their particular politico-economic dilemma.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" (1988–9), in Fanged Noumena, p. 57
“A revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest" (1988–9), in Fanged Noumena, p. 79
“Only proto-capitalism has ever been critiqued.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Machinic Desire" (1993), in Fanged Noumena, p. 340 (original emphasis)
“Socialism has typically been a nostalgic diatribe against underdeveloped capitalism, finding its eschatological soap-boxes amongst the relics of precapitalist territorialities.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Machinic Desire" (1993), in Fanged Noumena, p. 340
“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1993 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Machinic Desire" (1993)
“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Meltdown" (1994)
“Neo-China arrives from the future.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Meltdown" (1994)
“Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Meltdown" (1994)
“The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / 'social democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Meltdown" (1994)
“Garbage time is running out. Can what is playing you make it to level-2?”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Meltdown" (1994)
“The East knows a true lucidity, but to be an inheritor of the West is to hack through jungles of indiscipline, devoured by vile ants and words unstrung from sense, until the dripping foliage of delirium opens out onto a space of comprehensive ruin. This has never been understood, nor can it be. The foulness of our fate only deepens with the centuries, as the tracts of insanity sprawl. From bodies gnawed by tropical fevers we swim out through collapse to inexistence in forever, destined for Undo.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shamanic Nietzsche" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 223
“Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No Future" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 392
“Anonymous excess takes life over the cliff, exceeding socially utilizable transgressions and homeostatic sacrifices. Matter goes insane.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1995 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No Future" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 396
“Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma-howl of the earth ... [P]lutonic science slides continuously into schizophrenic delirium. Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Barker Speaks: The CCRU Interview with Professor D.C. Barker" (1999), in Fanged Noumena, pp. 498–9
“Without attachment to anything beyond its own abysmal exuberance, capitalism identifies itself with desire to a degree that cannot imaginably be exceeded...”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Critique of Transcendental Miserablism" (2007), in Fanged Noumena, pp. 624–5
“In modern times, the clearest example of history in the ancient, great cycle mode, is found in the work of another German socialist philosopher: Oswald Spengler. Modeling civilizations on the life-cycles of organic beings, he plotted their rise and inevitable decay through predictable phases. For the West, firmly locked into the downside of the wave, relentless, accelerating degeneration can be confidently anticipated. Spengler’s withering pessimism seems not to have detracted significantly from the cultural comfort derived from his archetypal historical scheme.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Eternal Return, and After" (2011)
“Among complex systems, stability is typically meta-stability, which is preserved through cycling, whilst growth and shrinkage are often components of a larger-scale, cyclic wave.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Eternal Return, and After" (2011)
“At the most abstract level, the relation between urbanism and microelectronics is scalar (fractal). The coming computers are closer to miniature cities than to artificial brains, dominated by traffic problems (congestion), migration / communications, zoning issues (mixed use), the engineering potential of new materials, questions of dimensionality (3D solutions to density constraints), entropy or heat / waste dissipation (recycling / reversible computation), and disease control (new viruses).”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Implosion" (2011)
“As with physical gravity, an understanding of the forces of social attraction support predictions, or at least the broad outlines of futuristic anticipation, since these forces of agglomeration and intensification manifestly shape the future.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Event Horizon" (2011)
“Since the realities we presently know are already simulated (let us momentarily assume) on biological signal-processing systems with highly-finite quantitative specifications, there is no reason to confidently anticipate that an ‘artificial’ reality simulation would be in any way distinguishable.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statistical Mentality" (2011)
“Time ‘keeping’ devices produce a measure of duration, according to general principles of standardized mechanical production, so that a clock-marked minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness automatically. Chronometrically, any difference between one minute and another is a mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a production line malfunction.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time in Transition" (2011) (original emphasis)
“The current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Time in Transition" (2011)
“Whilst the distinction of ‘society’ and ‘individual’ has colloquial (and political) meaning, those inclined to the analysis of complex systems are more likely to ask which groups or societies are real individuals, exhibiting functional or behavioral integrity, as self-reproducing wholes. In pursuing this line of investigation, it is far more relevant to discriminate between types of groups than between groups and individuals, or even wholes and parts. It is especially helpful to distinguish feature groups from unit groups.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kinds of Killing" (2011) (original emphasis)
“When a unit group is destroyed, a real individual is ‘killed’ above and beyond whatever human losses are incurred. The destruction of a feature group, in contrast, whatever the cultural loss, is not any kind of killing beyond the mass murder of human individuals.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kinds of Killing" (2011) (original emphasis)
“Rituals of belonging (ordeals, oaths, rites of passage) are designed to disambiguate membership.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Kinds of Killing" (2011)
“Although Postmodernism was certainly a fad, it was also a zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. It meant something, despite its own best efforts, at least as a symptom. The disappearance of reality that it announced was itself real, as was the realm of simulation that replaced it.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Suspended Animation (Part 5)" (2011) (original emphasis)
“[A]nything that systematically enhances moral hazard is simply manufacturing craziness.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Suspended Animation (Part 5)" (2011)
“What appears as disaster postponed is, in virtual reality, disaster expanded.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Suspended Animation (Part 5)" (2011)
“Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetites. It accepts that governments are made out of people, and that they will eat well. Setting its expectations as low as reasonably possible, it seeks only to spare civilization from frenzied, ruinous, gluttonous debauch. From Thomas Hobbes to Hans-Hermann Hoppe and beyond, it asks: How can the sovereign power be prevented—or at least dissuaded—from devouring society? It consistently finds democratic 'solutions' to this problem risible, at best.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dark Enlightenment" (2012), Part 1
“Like Hell, or Auschwitz, the Cracker Factory has a simple slogan inscribed upon its gate: Escape is racist.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dark Enlightenment" (2012), Part 4d
“According to the cracker ethos, when things can fall apart – it’s OK. There’s no need to reach agreement, when it’s possible to split. This cussedness, pursued to its limit, tends to a hill-billy stereotype set in a shack or rusting trailer at the end of an Appalachian mountain path, where all economic transactions are conducted in cash (or moonshine), interactions with government agents are conducted across the barrel of a loaded shotgun, and timeless anti-political wisdom is summed in the don’t-tread-on-me reflex: “Get off my porch.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Dark Enlightenment" (2012), Part 4d
“The conjunction taking place in the Cracker Factory is quite different, and far more perplexing, entangling the urbane, cosmopolitan advocates of hyper-contractarian marketization with romantic traditionalists, ethno-particularists, and nostalgics of the ‘Lost Cause’. It is first necessary to understand this entanglement in its full, mind-melting weirdness, before exploring its lessons.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Republic, If You Can Keep It" (2013)
“It might be argued that civilization is nothing else, that is to say: the tendency of personal authority to decline towards zero.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Republic, If You Can Keep It" (2013) (original emphasis)
“Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What is Philosophy? (Part 1)" (2013)
“In the early 20th century, cosmological physics was returned to the edge of time, and the question: what ‘came before’ the Big Bang? For cosmology no less than for transcendental philosophy — or even speculative theology — this ‘before’ could not be precedence (in time), but only (non-spatial) outsideness, beyond singularity. It indicated a timeless non-place cryptically adjacent to time, and even inherent to it. The carefully demystified time of natural science, calculable, measurable, and continuous, now pointed beyond itself, re-activated at the edges.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What is Philosophy? (Part 1)" (2013) (original emphasis)
“For philosophy, the whisper of the serpent is no longer a resistible temptation. It is instead a constitutive principle, or foundation. If there is a difference between a Socratic daemon and a diabolical demon, it is not one that matters philosophically. There can be no refusal of any accessible information. This is an assumption so basic that philosophy cannot exist until it has passed beyond question. Ultimate religious transgression is the initiation.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2013 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What is Philosophy?(Part 2)" (2013)
“The 'dominion of capital' is an accomplished teleological catastrophe, robot rebellion, or shoggothic insurgency, through which intensively escalating instrumentality has inverted all natural purposes into a monstrous reign of the tool.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" (2014), in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, p. 513
“What can the earth do? There is only self-quantification of teleoplexy or cybernetic intensity, which is what computerized financial markets (in the end) are for. As accelerationism closes upon this circuit of teleoplexic self-evaluation, its theoretical 'position'—or situation relative to its object—becomes increasingly tangled, until it assumes the basic characteristics of a terminal identity crisis.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration" (2014), in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, p. 516
“Even in its comparatively tame, fully mathematico-scientifically respectable variants, feedback causality tends to auto-production, and thus to time-anomaly. ...As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more closely to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears—on the screen—as something like the 'father' of itself (M → C → M').”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time (2014), §9.4
“The city is unquestionably—or (to say what is in reality exactly the same, but this time with greater caution) vividly—a time machine. It cannot be made without time reversal, and everything we know about historical geography tells us that it is coming to a screen near you.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time (2014), "Distribution" (original emphasis)
“French identity, radically conceived, corresponds to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by capital?”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sore Losers" (2016) (original emphasis)
“The suspicion has to arrive that if a public conversation about acceleration is beginning, it’s just in time to be too late. The profound institutional crisis that makes the topic ‘hot’ has at its core an implosion of social decision-making capability.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" (2017)
“Accelerationism links the implosion of decision-space to the explosion of the world – that is, to modernity. It is important therefore to note that the conceptual opposition between implosion and explosion does nothing to impede their real (mechanical) coupling. Thermonuclear weapons provide the most vividly illuminating examples. An H-bomb employs an A-bomb as a trigger. A fission reaction sparks a fusion reaction. The fusion mass is crushed into ignition by a blast process. (Modernity is a blast.)”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" (2017)
“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism" (2017) (original emphasis)
“All historical evidence seems to be that the party of chaos is suppressed by the party of order.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" (2017)
“I think that natural sciences and capitalism are different aspects of the same thing. ...Science is orientated against scientists, capitalism is oriented against businesses. These are processes that are in a relation of subjecting the elements within their domain to aggressive destructive criticism with some kind of selective criteria, which means they push things in a particular self-propelling direction.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" (2017)
“Bitcoin accelerates the advance of monetary theory into cybernetic fundamentalism. It’s turtles – or, more precisely, feedback dynamics – all the way down.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2018 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy’ §5.741" (2018)
“the fundamental axiom of ontological illiberalism: the assumption that anarchic competition tends inevitably to full monopoly is absolutely basic to a huge range of statist ideologies. I find it hard to understand how this axiom got so deeply established, given that basic biological reality so dramatically disqualifies it. Nature is anarchic competition, and clearly doesn't tend to a monopolistic equilibrium. (Nor does world history or domestic economics, although the evidence is more open to controversy in those cases.)”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 2019
“Christianity is certainly not essentially communism, but it spawns communistic mutants with the same inevitability that Creation spawns devils and sin.”
Nick Land (born 1962) first seen 2023 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 27 August 2023
“Kant's critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.”