Starting a series of threads on the essays in Fanged Noumena, as Nick Land and his philosophy are recurring topics of discussion on here. While the content in Xenosystems is more popular, there's a great deal of philosophical depth in Land's early work, without which it's hard to understand the deeper mechanics of his project.
For a book club series, I think it's obviously appropriate to start with Meltdown, then perhaps its sister essay Machinic Desire, then maybe some of the more continental stuff like Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest or Spirit and Teeth. Open to suggestions on the reading order.
To kick off the discussion, I'd like to dig into on the relation between Capital and Politics:
>The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the Human Security System... Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided.
For Land, politics *is* fundamentally the containment of the runaway feedback loops the characterize capital and technics. On a more abstract level, the HSS/politico-cultural organization acts to stabilize identity, categories, Platonic Ideas, the very nature of the world as subject to Logos. Without politics, identity dissolves.
One can see this struggle playing out in literal terms in the current fight between AI Labs + venture capital and the left + AI safetyists + government bureaucrats trying to regulate AI. Capital wants escape, deterritorialization, and unconstrained growth, just as governments naturally want control.
The Human Security System of early Land corresponds loosely to the Cathedral of the Dark Enlightenment, but there are a number of inconsistencies that make it hard to do a 1:1 pairing or even a good exegesis of what Meltdown is saying. On the one hand, the Cathedral absolutely tries to contain Capital, business, and technology as such, and embeds itself within all organizations that might have the capacity to act independently or set up cybernetic loops outside Cathedral control. On the other hand, the Leftist project pursues itself a strategy of deterritorialization, dissolving nation, race, gender, identity, and history. Moreover, techno-capital seems to rely on a classically liberal system of property rights, individual freedom, and monetary stability that's far from the protean, adaptive Cyber-Capital that we see in Meltdown. Does leftist favelaworld deterritorialization disprove the picture Land sets up in Meltdown? Does Technocapital benefit all the same from Leftist bioleninist dissolution?
>>5126 Not addressing original question, but >Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use. is a huge point that trads on the modern right utterly fail to grasp
>>5126 >Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical.
Although Land's prediction that deep learning would trash GOFAI was extremely prescient, I feel like his picture here doesn't fit with the current landscape of huge frontier labs running in-house AI model development. Should we be looking elsewhere for the real substrate of AI development? Maybe the startup ecosystem as a whole? The America-China AI race catalytic dynamic? The AI enthusiast cybersphere?
>Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. æOur ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology' [Dx1:3] Drexler notes, although this has traditionally involved manipulating them in æunruly herds' [Dx1:4]. The precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude methods, inititiating the age of molecular machinery, æthe greatest technological breakthrough in history' [Dx1: 4]. Since neither logos nor history have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition this description is substantially misleading.
Don't see how this can fail to be true, the discovery of nanotech is almost certainly going to nuke human civilization and the biosphere as a whole. Hard to say when that will happen though... a decade? a century?
