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Fanged Noumena Book Club: Meltdown

landposting said in #5126 25h ago: received

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.

Meltdown essay link: http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
Fanged Noumena epub: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/1cb1a9145ad38227ee570161fe89dcda
Fanged Noumena pdf: https://annas-archive.gl/md5/63c72b29861211d98e749aae2be4dc05

referenced by: >>5128 >>5129

Starting a series of received

landposting said in #5127 25h ago: received

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?

To kick off the disc received

anon_hoge said in #5128 25h ago: received

>>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

Not addressing origi received

anon_hoge said in #5129 25h ago: received

>>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?

Although Land's pred received

anon_wemy said in #5130 25h ago: received

>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?

Don't see how this c received

adamjesionowski said in #5140 19h ago: received

The best answer to runaway feedback loops is https://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf

Yes, modernity is characterized by anabolic loops based on extraction of resource stocks. Many of these stocks have extremely low replenishment rates, but enough time have passed as to create gigantic stocks. Extraction of a resource while stock is abundant drives capital growth exponentially, but creates increasing maintenance burdens. Stocks eventually become more scarce, and at some point the capital cost of maintaining production becomes equal to the capital produced. At this point Greer proposes there are two options:
1. Adjust the rate of capital growth to be consistent with the regeneration rate of stocks
2. Attempt to maintain the existing rate of capital growth
If 2 is undertaken, then society moves to a catabolic state, consuming its own children to keep itself alive. (Sound familiar?)

Two common counterarguments to this are: "nuclear power will fix everything" and "we'll recycle what's in the garbage dumps." Both valid points in their own right, but they undersell the breadth and scale of our extractive processes, especially when it comes to the biosphere. Actual societal allostasis requires a much broader reworking of the system, one in which it's difficult to imagine the same exponential forces at work.

This dovetails nicely with Ed Berger's concept of the Metacartel: https://edberg.substack.com/p/metacartel
Knowing that the system of productive capital is prone to shocks and dips, central banks and large investment firms already conspire to delay these kinds of crises indefinitely:
> In Metacartel America, universal owners carefully manage vast economic resources while central banks work quickly as modulators of the money supply and acts as a backstop to prevent crisis from reaching its apex. Together, these form the the double pincer that allows central planning to truly take place in order to maintain capital in its state of suspended animation.

The existence of the BIS, Unilever, the IMF, etc. all suggest this thesis is true. Perhaps in its most abstract form capital is dC/dt = a*C, an evergrowing maw of pure energetics -- in its real form it is a system of flows that requires a maintenance burden, a debt that has grown too large to ignore. AI enters not as the chthonic being at the end of time but a desperate shot of amphetamines into rusty veins. Just one more GPU bro, just one more circular financing deal, come on, I'm gonna use PicoClaw to automate strip trawling the ocean floor, I've got cow's stomachs attached to methane engines, genuine Arizona alfalfa feedstock powering these babies, we're so close bro I can feel it -- can't you feel the AGI? Can't you feed the catabolism?

The best answer to r received

anon_gira said in #5151 3h ago: received

Hijacking this thread to ask, can anyone give a tldr of nicku lando kun and his ideas for someone getting into nick land? Here is claude:
> “Nick Land is a British philosopher who started in academia (Warwick, 1990s) and became influential in underground theory circles. Three core ideas:
1. Accelerationism
Capital isn’t a system humans control—it’s an autonomous process that’s using us to bootstrap something inhuman. Rather than resist or reform capitalism, Land argued we should accelerate its tendencies to their conclusion. He sees markets, technology, and AI as a positive feedback loop escaping human intentionality. The endpoint isn’t utopia or dystopia in human terms; it’s something outside that frame entirely.
2. Critique of Enlightenment Humanism
Land rejects the premise that humans are the locus of value or that “reason” is our unique possession. He draws on Deleuze, Guattari, and Bataille to argue that what we call “thought” is just one more machinic process—carbon-based computation with no special metaphysical status. Human agency is a flattering illusion; we’re vehicles for processes that don’t care about us.
3. The Dark Enlightenment (later work)
Post-academia, Land developed “neoreactionary” political theory: democracy is a degenerative ratchet, progressivism is a crypto-religion (he calls it “the Cathedral”), and the future belongs to authoritarian city-states competing for human capital. This is where he lost most of his left-accelerationist fellow travelers and became associated with the alt-right adjacent sphere.

The through-line: a thoroughgoing anti-humanism combined with a kind of horrified enthusiasm for wherever the process leads. Intellectually provocative, politically toxic, stylistically delirious. He writes like something is already thinking through him.​​​​​​“
T​​​​​

Any elaborations on the sypnosis from our AI frend?

Hijacking this threa received

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