Don't be Spooked By Nick Land

Nick Land recently went on the Theory Underground show and told people at various levels of philosophical mastery about how the human body is an inefficent mechanism for carrying brains around the solar system, and that eventually intelligence will rid itself of the human body in order to more efficiently scooter around the galaxy for questionable reasons. He believes the meat sacks that are carrying our brains are technologically inefficient modes of intelligence. People like this because it sounds super cool and goth, but is it actually fucking stupid for some reason? I will tell you why Max Stirner would think that, although Nick Land is smart and he says cool goth things, that he is deeply ridiculous.

From Stirner’s Ego and His Own:
What is not supposed to be my concern! First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God’s cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. “Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!”

This almost sounds like Land’s technonihilism, except the end result isn’t the cause of production of higher levels of intelligence like in Land’s fairy tale of technology, but rather the assertion that the center of philosophical pursuits should be the self rather than the dead mechanism which the self attaches and identifies with.

The idea that we should identify with the intelligent distributions as if they are subjectivity itself gets rid of the question of the importance of subjectivity entirely. Life is not simply something we don’t have to think about because we invented the calculator.

Nick Land believes that human life is a subcategory of the production of higher levels of intelligence, that the cybernetic relationship between humans and machines is less important than the fact that automated processes intelligently distribute people.

By this Logic, Land would say the indigenous tribe members aren’t real in 5000BC, but rather they are some superintelligence forming the network of technology that they have created. It is worth saying that to see a people as purely their technology makes no sense, you can not simply produce human will and desire out of technology.

If we produce a robot that can emulate a human but it does not authentically desire, we have produced a machine without subjectivity. A calculator with a machine gun on it hasn’t removed the necessity to understand human life. If Nick Land wants to say goth-themed myths like AI robot calculators will eventually remove the question of humanity, this is a good thing insofar as it is interesting and very cool and goth sounding, but don’t forget that Nick Land’s idea is deeply ridiculous in that it tries to convince you the question of your existence and life should not be thought of at all.

Max Stirner would take this one step further, and explain that it is not AI nor humanity in general you should be concerned with, but the question of these relates back to your particular subjectivity, and so it is with all lifeforms. This is an irreducible core.

Don’t be spooked by calculators with machine guns on them, or ways that Amazon distributes things efficiently to people.

Technology is a spook, it is not a subjectivity, to quote Stirner:

In childhood liberation takes the direction of trying to get to the bottom of things, to get at what is “back of” things; therefore we spy out the weak points of everybody, for which, it is well known, children have a sure instinct; therefore we like to smash things, like to rummage through hidden corners, pry after what is covered up or out of the way, and try what we can do with everything. When we once get at what is back of the things, we know we are safe; when, e.g., we have got at the fact that the rod is too weak against our obduracy, then we no longer fear it, “have out-grown it.”

Nick Land’s view of technology can introduce you to tendencies of technology, but you should outgrow his fetishization of distribution mechanisms when considering your own personal subjectivity. He is an entry point to deeper thought because he asks interesting questions and has an interesting and goth-coded idea of what intelligence is.

You may not be able to explicate what Land says about technology, but if you don’t drop the question of your own subjectivity, you will have out-grown the techno-nerd’s stick with which to beat people to death with and assert their own intellectual dominance. Nick Land is also an egoist, not a source of the highest perspective on human life, but an explicator and fetishizer of the power of calculators and highways.