The internet is a truly wild place (for exposing my own ignorance as well as other things). I'd never heard of this fellow, Nick Land, who apparently has written quite a lot and perhaps was responsible for popularizing the term accelerationism.
According to Land, capitalism is already AI within a broad definition of AI. Inspired by the Austrian School of Economics and its idea that capitalism is an information processing system, Land has simply updated the concept of an information processing system with that of AI. In this view, capitalism is an unplanned, intelligent machine that solves distributional problems that the individual participants themselves cannot understand or solve.
I'm curious about this concept. Perhaps curious enough to read a little more.
On a separate note, I've been noticing that much of the popular writing these days (Matt Levine, Noah Smith, etc) has a tone of friendly simpleness that I like to call Gumpian. It's a tricky style of writing that, done well, lures you into believing the writer is just as stupid as you, while in reality they've got a lot going on. It's very compelling and I find my own writing shifting in that direction. Then you come across guys like this Nick Land fellow (and whoever authored this Retrochronic blog) and it's like two-thirds incomprehensible on the first pass:
Land models the teleological convergence of capitalism and AI on the horizon of the Singularity as a convergent wave or an extropic process.
Refreshing -- or just bad writing?
Land himself is slightly clearer, but still not at all writing in the Gump-mode:
The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What's being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it's the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it's not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it's rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can't be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence.
About
This project attempts to contribute to research on Accelerationism by making available all the primary sources for its creator Nick Land's central thesis that capitalism is AI.One of the biggest challenges in conducting a primary literature review on Nick Land is that his writings are scattered across multiple platforms and formats, making it difficult to establish a definitive bibliography. Unlike traditional philosophers who publish primarily in academic journals, books, or well-archived sources, Land's output is far more fragmented.In addition to being highly fragmented, a substantial amount of Land's online writings are offline, e.g., his two main blogs — Urban Future and Xenosystems —, as well as some publications he wrote for, have been offline for a number of years, making them difficult to discover (fortunately, Uriel Fiori has preserved a lot of Land's work through his Reignition project and @doomcrypt provides a comprehensive CCRU data hoard).Land's unique writing style makes reading the primary sources mandatory. What he wrote about the anti-theo-humanists in Western thought and their "extreme sensitivity for what is icy, savage, and alien to mankind" is certainly true of his own texts as well, which seem "to come from inside the machines — which is to say, outside us". Land blends the genres of Theory and Science Fiction into the new genre of Theory Fiction, which enhances the "understanding of capitalism allowed by the fictional engagement with the most extreme possibilities of techno-capital."
Theory Fictionsuggests that the author takes great pleasure in inventing terminology. Understatement of the day. I don't mind it in a SciFi book, but it makes it really hard to go through as non-fiction. I think thatGumpianis more useful for those among us that perform their magic on the periphery of nerd and normie, but the intended audience for these works is in my opinion out of the question to be normies.