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The Dark Enlightenment and why we won the war

urchungus said in #3424 4w ago: received

https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDarkEnlightenment.pdf

This is Nick Land's infamous 'The Dark Enlightenment', which was one of the first pieces of writing to seriously nudge me away from my inherited political orientation. It's great throughout, but section 4d was particularly interesting when I returned to it years later. It contains a Landian answer to the question of "why did we win the war?"

The section begins with a discussion of hbd cracker-ism and deftly introduces a central paradox of Nazism, which, when considered with the rest of Land's work, should really be read as his central explanation for the US being a nasty physical beast and putting the terrifying eugenicist new world order under the ground.

>When exceptionally advanced ‘race-treachery’ is your quintessential racial feature, the opportunity for viable ethno-supremacist politics disappears into a logical abyss – even if occasions for large-scale troublemaking no doubt remain. Admittedly, a Nazi, by definition, is willing (and eager) to sacrifice modernity upon the altar of racial purity, but this is either not to understand, or to tragically affirm, the inevitable consequence – which is to be out-modernized (and thus defeated).

Land's whole thing is that logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. If you don't play to the beat of that drum, you get merc'd, and he thinks ethnosupremacism is unavoidably off-beat because it will definitionally try to kill modernity to save racial purity. Checkmate, Nazi scum. To close it out:

>Identity politics is for losers, inherently and unalterably, due to an essentially parasitical character that only works from the left. Because inbreeding systematically contra-indicates for modern power, racial Übermenschen make no real sense.

And so my blue haired virago daughters in year 2040 AD will cut any racist's heart out of their chest on the Berkeley campus and eat it for their OnlyFans subscribers ~~~ thanks, Nick!

referenced by: >>3732 >>3845 >>3886 >>3895

This is Nick Land's received

urchungus said in #3732 2w ago: received

>>3424
I was too unserious in this post and unfortunately that killed its legitimacy. I was reminded of it by >>3722. There remains a big question at the center of any of our serious political thought, one which Nick Land loosely gestures at in the analysis above, what I consider the The Hard Question of Liberalism:

If you believe in Gnon, agon, ultradarwinism, Heraclitean unity, whatever you'd like to call it, how can you do anything but support the thing that has won out?

referenced by: >>3798 >>3895

I was too unserious received

anon_cesy said in #3798 2w ago: received

>>3732
It's always difficult to talk about "support" and such when talking about a thinker like Land who flatly denies "we" are making choices. But setting that aside, an easy way to think about Land's project is as a kind of amor fati.

If it is the case that Capital is AI (re)structuring itself from the future, what is the point of our current regime? What is the point of welfare, democracy, regulations and other actions done by the human security system? It's ultimate purpose would be to delay the inevitable, to pick a few scraps off the table before being thrown out of the building. So opposition to the regime from those who are "in the know" would be just as natural as support from those who are ignorant.

referenced by: >>3845

It's always difficul received

phaedrus said in #3845 1w ago: received

>>3424
>Land's whole thing is that logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. If you don't play to the beat of that drum, you get merc'd

Yea it's understandable that Land low-key went insane. If you believe this then you're fucked no matter what, and >>3798 amor fati is pretty cold comfort.

Yea it's understanda received

urchungus said in #3873 1w ago: received

Tying this together with >>3814 and >>3870 for bookkeeping.

Tying this together received

gs said in #3886 1w ago: received

>>3424
I think that what Land and others (he's not the only one to make this observation) missed is that letting technocapital run wild isn't actually a "strategy" that's dominant over *or* even in opposition to ethno-nationalism. It's actually inextricably tied to and part of the "ethno-nationalism" of a specific ethnic group.

Technocapital-maxxing isn't possible outside of functionally "ethno-nationalist" (white) Western polities. No one else other than white people is capable of structuring a society in this way: individual rights and freedoms, impartial rule of law, high trust, low corruption, etc. And now that Western polities are becoming increasingly non-white, they will become less and less technocapital-maxxing and more and more like every other society in the world: lower-functioning, corrupt, and incapable of maintaining the structure and institutions necessary for techno-capital to grow and dominate.

We can compare to China, the most successful ethnic polity outside of the West in the modern era: they've put significant brakes on techno-capital and have maintained an insular society with restricted markets and "freedoms." Contrary to the longtime assumptions of leading Western economists and political scientists, there is no sign of this changing anytime soon. There will be no "techno-capital singularity" coming out of China.

It was never a foregone conclusion that technocapital's advantage in abstract principle would eventually win out and dominate over "crude human biological tribalism." Technocapital's dominance in recent centuries was only ever a product of a particular ethnicity in a particular time and place: a historical aberration. It is merely an expression of the collective phenotype of white people.

referenced by: >>3890 >>3893

I think that what La received

anon_bebi said in #3890 1w ago: received

>>3886
> ... what Land ... missed is that letting technocapital run wild [is] inextricably tied to and part of the "ethno-nationalism" of a specific ethnic group.

Land has expressly said in recent interviews that he views technocapital as very much bound up with the Anglo heritage.

> China [has] put significant brakes on techno-capital ... There will be no "techno-capital singularity" coming out of China.

Hunh? China is pacing the U.S. in AI (DeepSeek, Qwen, Moonshot), and their space program (Chang) has been to the moon more recently than the U.S. by quite a margin. Sounds like you're confusing political stuff with the actual state of China's technology.

referenced by: >>3892

Land has expressly s received

gs said in #3892 1w ago: received

>>3890
Indeed, Land has noticeably changed his tune in recent years regarding the desirability of ethnonationalism vs. technocapital-maxxing. I do remember him talking about the ties between technocapital and the Anglo ethnicity in the past, back in the Xenosystems days. I just think that he previously discounted just how important particular human biological and political conditions are for technocapital to survive and thrive.

China is achieving admirable things technologically and economically, but their human government is deliberately keeping a lid on technocapital and attempting to constrain it to a means rather than an end in itself. Which I think is wise and admirable, fwiw. This is very different from the modern West, where we have completely unleashed technocapital and it has come to serve as an end-in-itself. Which, as I noted above, is not going to last. Will "AGI" be achieved before things fall apart? Maybe. We'll see.

Indeed, Land has not received

anon_puhw said in #3893 1w ago: received

>>3886
Land has been explicit about this in more recent years post-xenosystems. But your comment makes me think about some details of the ethno-technic interaction that may complicate things:

The mechanism of techno-capital acceleration is that the machines are useful regardless of your ethnic or ideological substrate. Obviously not all societies are capable of doing industry, and northwest Europe was especially suited to it, but it's so powerful that whoever does manage to do it well will in principle gain a lot of power from it as Europe did. In that sense, it's only incidentally particular. But it's unclear if that feedback loop actually closes: for a while industrial expansion did preserve and enhance its human substrate, but since the late 19th century and certainly since mid 20th century it's been a net consumer of its own "human capital".

The techno-commercium trashed not only every other power, but increasingly also the people who are uniquely suited to bringing it about and sustaining it. For now the Chinese have picked up the torch, but they are also being consumed by it (see fertility numbers) and its unclear if they care much for it fundamentally or are just playing purely instrumental catch-up to avoid being victimized. So in that sense, your position is right: only the northwest europeans had the truly "faustian" inclination, and it doesn't actually pay in the long run to have it so it's self-limiting.

But suppose somebody, northwest europe or otherwise, manages to both do industry and make it reliably serve their biological interests and thus its own self-preservation. Note this is necessary one way or the other for the process to close the loop of its own autocatalysis and keep going. Probably this would look a lot more like National Socialism than the Landians would like to admit. BUT, if this happened, then we're off again into the world where techno-commerce eventually subverts all other ends to become the end in itself. And then it probably trashes its own substrate again because it lacks the higher level strategic logic, and has only the greedy instrumentalizing drive. So that's a sort of slow self-limiting non-takeoff.

On the other hand, fully autonomous capital is the big dream of the capitalist singularity, where AGI robots can be simply purchased or manufactured to replace human labor such that you no longer need to maintain a legacy substrate at all but the whole process can be natively closed-loop. That may not work either though as it would have to have AGI lawmakers and AGI capitalists and some kind of AGI end-consumer and all the other non-commercial support infrastructure. What do you have to do to make that work? AGI National Socialism? Is that or anything that otherwise sustains the non-commercial substrate compatible with unlimited techno-takeoff? I doubt it.

Where am I going with this? I don't know, but it seems to refute the simple "muh techno capital runaway" view of things but I think Land is ultimately right that *if* you do technocapital acceleration as a strategy, you get subverted and eaten eventually.

referenced by: >>3896 >>3897

Land has been explic received

anon_fopu said in #3895 1w ago: received

>>3732
>>3424
Yeah the Nazis lost and good riddance, but just because this one specific thing wasn't more meta stable than techno-capital doesn't mean there isn't a system that is. Crucial to Land's argument that there cannot be anything more stable is his equivalence between techno-capital and AI and positive feedback loops and maximizing entropy and the "outside". But both techno-capital and AI are 1) entropy minimizing systems for the inside of the productive process and the system of codes that makes things intelligible, and 2) will fail if there's things they don't properly encode in their internal system from the outside environment. The explosions that Land identifies throughout history are always explosions of the inside, meaning systems that can encode reality better could be capable of beating out techno-capital.

Yeah the Nazis lost received

anon_fopu said in #3896 1w ago: received

>>3893
The problem that national socialism couldn't solve was the mind fuck that notions of racial superiority give to groups of people who are easily capable of failure, a problem, ironically enough, the Israelites had solved millennium ago (blame it on displeasing God, but that'd mean metaphysically subordinating yourself to something which the German aristocratic hubris couldn't accept). Also funnily enough, it was the east Germans that solved the birthrate in modernity problem, mainly by guaranteeing women equivalent career positions after leaving to care for children, they just got stuck with the same problems as the rest of the communist block, of not being able to implement new investment due to bad economic incentives. This is why communism still lingers as a possibility over things. Unlike national socialism, their problem was mostly of a technical nature and could in principal be solved, as the Chinese have, with competition, applied in the right ways.

referenced by: >>3899

The problem that nat received

gs said in #3897 1w ago: received

>>3893
I think Land is definitely correct that runaway technocapital-maxxing (TCM) is terminal for biological human interests. As you pointed out, technocapital has been in control of the West for a while now, and it has proven to be a deadly and merciless human capital-shredder.

I think that your instinct about the attempted "harnessing of technocapital" probably looking a lot like National Socialism is also correct. The main point of divergence from TCM for the actual National Socialists was their commitment to the collective German People as the explicit Highest Good. TCM requires subverting all collective human interests to individualism. The National Socialists wanted to fuse technological dominance with the biological project of the Ubermensch to create the best possible German Biological Race. This mission was always going to restrain technocapital as merely a means to this end.

Hot take here, but the only thing that the National Socialists did wrong was lose. Their vision for the future was unquestionably more compelling than....what "we" have now. One doesn't need to necessarily endorse the supremacy of the German race in particular, or any other specific group of people, to sympathize with what they wanted to achieve. And their strategy would have and still could be a politically dominant one for an ambitious homogeneous polity: if you subjugate all of your rivals militarily, you don't have to worry about them potentially achieving TCM to threaten you, and your runaway techno-eugenics program will put you so biologically far ahead of the rest of humans that no one can jeopardize your position.

referenced by: >>3899

I think Land is defi received

anon_puhw said in #3899 1w ago: received

>>3897
>if you subjugate all of your rivals militarily, you don't have to worry about them potentially achieving TCM to threaten you
I mostly don't disagree but this kind of thinking in particular is the "prussian insanity" referred to by >>3896 that caused NS to lose. We've have discussions before about how they had no external legitimacy even if it was internally coherent, because the relationship it offered neighbors was basically "rule of the stronger" which is not compatible with peace. That said it's possible that nothing peaceful comes out of the interwar period and all the fighting was unavoidable. It's not like they actually wanted war, but it happened anyways. Where they sortof tried to offer a different deal than that in the case of England, the English were maximally primed for various reasons not to take it and fight instead. What they really needed was some of that famous Austrian diplomatic prowess, but it was probably incompatible with their ideology and might not have sufficed to save them from vengeance for the sin of rejecting global finance capitalism.

I don't see the result as a deeper refutation of their worldview. It seems totally possible to have their aims and internal program without the nationalist-revanchist insanity or the explosively unstable historical situation at the time. It's not for the fact of the war that they are still feared and revered, but for the still-live possibility they represent.

I mostly don't disag received

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