Nick Land on Entropy and the Nature of Time ｜ 12⧸16⧸24
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Summary
Nick Land's conception of time and how it is impacted by intelligence, and the concept of entropy, is discussed in detail in his blog post "Time and Entropy" from his blog, Xeno Systems. This is a lecture I did on this topic a few years ago for an event with the Skildings in Oxfordshire.
Transcript
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So I often go into the work of the philosopher Nick Land on this channel.
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And one of the most fascinating things that he has done is speculate about the nature of time
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and its relationship to entropy and intelligence.
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And today I wanted to go into a little bit of how that works for Nick Land.
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And previously, if you wanted to understand this topic, you had to hunt down a bunch of
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different blog posts from his defunct blog, Xeno Systems.
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But luckily, Passage Press has put together a volume collecting many of the key posts.
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Actually, I originally put this lecture together back a few years ago for an event with the
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I delivered a lecture there on this, but I wanted to bring that to you today.
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Now, interestingly, other people have worked on this topic.
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There's actually a pretty good article on this.
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So he pulled out many of the same strands that I did, though I promise I did do this before
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So if you want to take a look at that and use that to help you further understand this
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But I'm going to be delivering you my original presentation that I did on it.
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So we're going to dive into Nick Land, his conception of time, how it's impacted by intelligence
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I've even got slides since I did this as a lecture and presentation so we can lay out
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So again, I'm taking all of this from his Xeno systems work.
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Now, Land has done more work on the concept of time in other places.
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He's spoken about it in his work, Templexity, and in his work a little bit on Bitcoin.
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I'm not going to be going into those other formulations today.
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So there is probably more to be said on Land's understanding of time in those other works,
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but I'm confining our definitions here to what happens in the Xeno systems blog.
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So the first concept we need to understand is entropy versus extropy when we're going to
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be talking about Nick Land's conception of time.
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So Nick Land in Xeno systems talks about several other thinkers when they're discussing their
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And the first thing he talks about is the idea of the arrow of time progressing through
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Basically, the idea here is that the universe starts in a state of order and moves to disorder.
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It's entropic in the sense that the energy that is originally there in the universe after
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its initial formation is dissipating constantly.
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This is why you hear the phrase, the heat death of the universe, right?
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Is this idea that the thermodynamic principle of entropy is leading us towards eventual dissipation
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Energy is moving from a state of higher order and dissipating out into less order.
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And so one way we can conceive of time is the process of the universe moving from a state
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Now, extropy is the idea of local reduction or reversal of entropy, creating order out of
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Because you might say to yourself, well, okay, if the universe was in a higher state of order
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previously, but we're like building civilizations now, how does that work, right?
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We're obviously creating more complex systems here on Earth than existed previously, but
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Well, Nick Land explains that extropy is a very normal process throughout the universe, and
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We are creating order, but it can only be done in a local and specific place.
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So while the rest of the world is, or the rest of the universe is moving towards entropy,
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we have the ability to take agency and create order in very specific places.
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So when we're talking about extropy, we're never talking about universal extropy.
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We're always talking about extropy in a very specific area, right?
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And that's what we do every time that we are trying to create order, right?
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Anytime you are working, let's say, in a garden, that's, I think, one of the easiest ways to
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When you're in the garden, if you leave it to its own devices, it will be overgrown, right?
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It will lose the order that you have imposed on top of it.
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But if you take the time to build fences and build planter boxes and cultivate things carefully,
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you can reverse the chaos in that specific area.
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Now, the wider you get in your attempt to reverse extropy, the harder it gets, right?
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You can do it in a specific garden, in a specific area rather easily, but the larger that plot
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And eventually it just becomes too much for you to manage.
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You can only do it in a specific confined area.
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They create more entropy, but they localize extropy.
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They reduce that chaos and create order in confined areas.
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They are overall contributing to the process of entropy by doing this.
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But in their local contained areas, they are actually reversing the process of entropy.
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These kind of things is like an animal or a plant.
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And then if you're a human being, if you're an intelligent creature, you're creating civilization,
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You're creating a certain level of order inside a particular region, right?
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And so Nick Land says that in a very real way, those that are looking to fight entropy are kind
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of reversing time because if time is a flow from more order to less order, if it's a flow from
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this state of higher order to a state of lesser order, then reversing that process going from
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less order to more order is in a way reversing time.
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Now, obviously, we don't mean this like specifically chronologically, but we mean this conceptually,
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If we're conceptualizing time in this manner, if we're understanding in this manner, then
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in a way we are reversing the thing that defines the flow of time, at least potentially for a
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The next thing we want to understand is intelligence as extropy.
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Nick Land has a very different understanding of intelligence than most people would.
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Our understanding of intelligence is very anthropomorphic.
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It's very human as where Nick Land's understanding is much more general than we would normally
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So how does he understand intelligence and what does that have to do with it being extropy?
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So Land defines intelligence abstractly as the solving of problems by the avoidance of
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probable outcomes by guiding behavior to produce local extropy.
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They're going to, again, go from that higher level of order to that lower level of order.
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We're going to consistently see the same behavior over and over again.
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If we just leave nature to its own devices, the natural process will lead us to a particular
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However, intelligence is the application of solving a problem to avoid those probable outcomes,
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So normally, if I just leave a garden there, then some animal is going to come and eat
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They're going to, the other plants, nature is going to overtake the boundaries that I've
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This is the normal flow that things would take.
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If I notice these patterns and I apply my problem solving skills to this problem, I can
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I can figure out how to, you know, trap vermin that would come in or, you know, destroy pests
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or create barriers that keep unwanted plants from entering, weed the garden, all these things.
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These are problem solving tools that I can apply and therefore battle against the probable outcomes
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that will continue to occur if I do not apply my intelligence to them.
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And this is how we're going to produce extrapy.
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Now, this means that extrapy production or intelligence has a cybernetic infrastructure,
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which adapts to feedback and makes regular adjustments.
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That's a lot of words to say that over time, I'm learning things, right?
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What actually keeps the pests out of the garden?
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What actually keeps the vermin from digging up my crops and eating the produce?
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What are the best cycles to produce the best yields of crops?
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What helps me get the outcomes I'm looking for and what fails to produce those outcomes?
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And that feedback loop is cybernetic in nature.
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I'm constantly making small adjustments to better my understanding of what works and what
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And that, for Nick Land, is the nature of intelligence.
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The ability to iterate on these processes over and over again and create positive feedback to
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Next year, I'm going to protect my produce better.
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This is the creation of intelligence over and over again.
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This is inextricable from the evolutionary process from Land, right?
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That we're going to iterate on these things over and over again, that it's going to learn,
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that it's going to grow, that it's going to produce better.
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The feedback is going to sharpen the production each time and create more intelligence.
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And that's what creates extrapy in these situations.
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Positive feedback circuits can generate escalation.
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Landseed's cybernetic intensification as intelligence itself.
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So again, if we keep this loop going, if every year, I, again, we're just sticking with
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the metaphor of the garden in this sense, but you can apply this to literally everything.
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But if I'm applying this over and over again, every year I'm getting better and better,
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I might be able to expand the area over which I go ahead and exert this extrapy, right?
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But if I increase my intelligence and I increase the complexity, if the feedback circuit allows
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me to understand and learn and grow in each iteration, I can expand what I'm doing, the
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area over which I am actually applying this reduction of entropy, this extrapy, right?
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So I'm reducing the flow of time over this element over and over again, right?
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I'm moving it towards more order and less chaos, but it has to be inside this confined space.
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Maybe that space can expand if I get better at it, but it's that positive feedback loop
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that is constantly iterating on itself that is allowing the escalation, right?
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It's generating that escalation, and that is what is creating more intelligent.
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I'm becoming more intelligent about my food production.
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We can look at this at academia, every aspect of life, particularly human life, which is
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centered on intelligence in a way that other areas might not be as centered, but it still
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That this is what we feel when we feel the idea of progress, right?
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It's in a way, it's actually in creating more and more order in each one of these iterations.
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Conservative organizations provide negative feedback to limit acceleration, especially
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intelligence optimizing itself as a general purpose adaptive response.
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So one of the things that most traditional cultures have done is have a certain institutions
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that limit the amount that a specific type of intelligence can accelerate beyond, right?
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There are certain rituals, there are certain traditions, there are certain ways of being
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and understanding that say, we don't do these certain things.
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Think about, for instance, the Christian prohibition on usury, right?
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If you can't loan people money, loaning in a way is borrowing money from the future, right?
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It's saying, we're going to take money that you would have had in the future and we're going
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And that allows you to build more things because you have more money available to you.
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You can produce things more in the here and now because you have the money from the future
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that you would have had and you've pulled it into the present, right?
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By restricting that usury, by restricting that loan giving, the tradition, the religious restriction
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actually provides a negative feedback, a limiter on the reaction, right?
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Just like a thermostat allows your air conditioning to kind of run until it hits a certain spot, right?
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If the air conditioning just came up running and running and running, it would accelerate,
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But you have a thermostat that tells it to cut off at a certain point, no more beyond
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And that keeps it from like just running out of control.
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The same thing is true with intelligence and cultural production.
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In conservative systems, in human systems, we have had traditions.
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We have had limits on how far intelligence is allowed to advance itself, how far we are allowed
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And this actually protects certain aspects of our culture because it keeps us within certain
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It ties that production to a specific set of people and a specific way of being and a specific
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It is not looking to create more for its own sake.
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It is only creating enough for the civilization or people or whatever you're referencing at hand.
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And so that is kind of the function that tradition and these kind of conservative institutions create.
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We produce enough for what we need or for that particular civilization, that particular set of
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We are putting a specific limit, a very human limit on what can be produced and how it can
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be produced and how intelligence can accumulate across certain areas.
00:18:54.760
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So civilizations are born as cybernetic feedback accumulates through low time preference behavior.
00:20:49.940
Those of you who are familiar with kind of the libertarian, you know, like Hoppe, these kind
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of libertarians, they'll talk about low time preference behavior, right?
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And they'll say that, and Nick Land says this in several different places, including the
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dark enlightenment, that civilization is synonymous with low time preference behavior.
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I've done episodes on low time preference versus high time preference.
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You can go back and take a look at that if you want a clarification on those terms in
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But really quickly, low time preference behavior is behavior that says, I will put off what
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is good for me today to earn something in the future, right?
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You go to the kid, you say, Hey, would you like one marshmallow now?
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Or if you wait five minutes, you can have two marshmallows.
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And the kid with no impulse control will just take the marshmallow, pop it in their mouth.
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But a child who's demonstrating impulse control, the ability to plan for the future, to think
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through different outcomes and what would be best for them, not just in this moment, but
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They will demonstrate low time preference and civilizations are built out of low time preference.
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If you have groupings of people that there are high time preference civilizations, there
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are peoples that have high time preferences, but they tend not to build great civilizations.
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It tends to be that accumulation of cybernetic feedback through low time preference behavior
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that builds a civilization over and over again.
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We iterate, uh, you know, this is what's the best in the future.
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We learn, uh, maybe we don't need to constantly hunt.
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Oh, actually, uh, maybe if we learn how to build machines, that'll help us farm, uh, learn
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crop rotations, all these things we can have more population increase complexity.
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Oh, we can start building these machines and we can, can move into kind of a industrial
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society again, like by accumulating this knowledge, by accumulating intelligence through
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low time preference behavior, we increase the complexity of our civilization.
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Uh, Oswald Spangler sees this as the metaphysical animating spirit shaping the character and the
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So if you want to go to like a more Spanglerian understanding, something that's a little less
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modern and something that's a little more grounded in, in tradition, uh, he understands this as like,
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this is the way that the different peoples, the ways of being the, the cultural Dasein,
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if you want to use the Heideggerian understanding, this is the way that they live and the way that
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they live eventually accumulates, um, more and more of this kind of civilizational capital,
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He would not use the phrase civilizational capital, but you understand what I'm saying here.
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That, uh, the, the fact that they have this level of discipline, that their nature brings
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them to create these things and delay gratification and build these things.
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So he's going to, you know, I'm framing it in this way.
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So we can, we can take, uh, you know, Nick land has the much more like evolutionary,
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very modern understanding and language of civilization.
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Spangler has a much more classical traditional understanding.
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I'm trying to give us kind of the language is different, but the concepts are there, right?
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So that's why I want to use Spangler in contrast with, with land, not to say that these things
00:24:22.960
They are, they are uncomfortable in certain areas, but they aren't completely, um, noticing
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different, uh, systems in many ways, they are overlapping and noticing similar effects
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So Spangler sees that you would use different language to understand this, but we, we're
00:24:41.120
noticing a similar mode in which, uh, uh, a culture is developed in the transition, uh,
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from the Spanglerian cultural mode to the Spanglerian civilization mode.
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These once inherent traits must be translated into institutions.
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So for Spangler, you have these initial behaviors, right?
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These initial ways of being think of it, uh, think of like America pre, uh, the constitution,
00:25:06.080
Just, uh, colonial America before it had broken away from the United Kingdom, from Britain.
00:25:12.080
At that time, they were living in a certain way, right?
00:25:14.880
There are peoples, mostly Anglo coming over, um, and they are practicing certain understandings
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of how they should behave, how they should build things, how they should treat each other,
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These are all modes of being that they are operating in and no one usually needs to tell
00:25:35.360
Later on, people would go back and Max Weber would identify the Protestant work ethic and,
00:25:40.240
uh, you know, uh, Alexis to Tocqueville would give us a little more of the, the, the understanding
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But at that time, no one needed to walk up to the average American and rationally lay out,
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Like they just understood this was their culture.
00:26:01.760
This is the way that they live their lives, right?
00:26:04.560
But for Spangler, there's a shift in civilizations where they move from this form of, uh, of cultural
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And that's where you take those things that were once inherent.
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They were things that always existed for your people.
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The thing that you always understood as inherent to your tradition and your culture and your way
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And you start shifting them and codifying them into more materialistic forms.
00:26:32.560
You start moving them into institutions and the institutions allow you to scale.
00:26:39.200
If we want to use the Nicolandian understanding that you take that intelligence and you move it
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into, uh, not just human processes, not just purely human day-to-day cultural Dasein,
00:26:55.360
The, the, the intelligence that's transferred into con a constitution and the constitution
00:27:03.120
And here are our customs and here are what rights you can expect as being, uh, you know,
00:27:08.880
the rights of an Englishman was the way it was described before the revolution and the rights of
00:27:14.640
But either way you are enumerating things that otherwise used to not need to be said.
00:27:19.920
Now, often they are being, uh, said because they have been violated.
00:27:24.320
Some, something has broken in the cultural understanding and you feel the need to institutionalize
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and materialize those ways of beings and under and understandings.
00:27:34.880
And what you're doing in that movement moment is transferring the intelligence that once existed
00:27:41.120
as part of your people, your tradition that was created in a very, um, spiritual, uh, organic way.
00:27:48.240
And you were moving it into more rigid and artificial structures.
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Now, human institutions aren't that artificial.
00:27:53.680
They're still pretty close to human, uh, but they are a level of abstraction, right?
00:27:58.160
It is, we are taking one step away from the way we used to live.
00:28:03.120
And we are putting that into some kind of hard form, some rigid form.
00:28:08.000
And usually we need to do that because of scale.
00:28:10.800
Usually we need to do that because we are trying to expand the range of our extra, right?
00:28:23.200
That to, to go back to my earlier metaphor, we have to expand beyond that original boundary.
00:28:28.240
And so to do that, we can't just carry the traditions.
00:28:31.200
We can't just carry the intelligence, the feedback, the cybernetic feedback and low time
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We can't just keep that in its original state because we need to apply it to people who it's not
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obvious to, or over areas in which it's not inherent.
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And so that's why we have to move it into institution over times.
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These traits dissipate as social organizations expand and cultural norms lose their connection
00:28:58.640
to the founding civilization and the conditions that gave rise.
00:29:04.720
It's in my book, the total state it's I've, I've kind of covered it in many different episodes,
00:29:09.360
but as we move, as we dissipate the, that social or as we move that intelligence into these social
00:29:17.440
organizations and into these institutions, we separate it from the people groups who were
00:29:25.680
Again, the kind of the, the, the, again, the, in the Spenglarian understanding, the spiritual
00:29:30.560
metaphysical binding, that cultural Dasein, we have moved it into materialistic,
00:29:39.040
And we do that over and over and over again, right?
00:29:41.680
Think about what we do now in like a modern American, you know, civics class, right?
00:29:48.000
You take this thing that wants to be part of a long tradition, a culture that you were steeped in
00:29:54.080
for, you know, decades or, or centuries that your family and your family family that they instituted,
00:29:59.600
and you want to just be able to narrow it down to something that can be read on a card
00:30:05.520
to a new immigrant who's been here for, you know, a couple of years and they can understand it too,
00:30:10.720
right? That takes a certain level of reduction. You have to boil it down. You can't just take
00:30:16.240
something that was a lived experience and a long connection and part of a great chain of being
00:30:21.120
and like put it on a three by five note card that someone can like take an online test on.
00:30:26.240
You can't do that and like maintain all of the content.
00:30:30.160
You can, you, you have to do something to it when you transfer in this way.
00:30:34.720
So as these organizations expand, as they have to teach these norms in these ways and use this
00:30:42.960
intelligence and pass it out to different peoples, they have to change it fundamentally, right?
00:30:48.560
And in a way this dissipates the intelligence. This is what normally happens in a situation, right?
00:30:54.640
What I'm explaining you now is the Spanglerian cycle of civilizations. We're going to look at how
00:30:59.520
this might change under a Landian understanding, but right now we're looking at the traditional
00:31:04.400
cycle of civilization. The civilization rises, the people who kind of founded it expand, they grow,
00:31:11.360
they learn, but they continue to communicate what they've learned. This, this cybernetic accumulation
00:31:17.520
of low time preference behavior is passed on through tradition and custom and religion.
00:31:22.400
But then we get to a point where we've moved into the, out of the, uh, out of the cultural
00:31:27.520
phase and into the civilizational phase. And when we make that move, when we start moving to the
00:31:31.920
institutions, when we start trying to expand beyond our natural borders, when we try to become empire,
00:31:36.960
when we try to do these things, we necessarily dissipate some aspect of that traditional norm,
00:31:44.480
right? That, of that founding, that connection to that founding civilization.
00:31:48.880
What Rome was as a kingdom looks very different than what it was as a Republic.
00:31:54.320
And what it was as a Republic looks very different from what it is in the early empire.
00:31:58.560
And it looks radically different what it is in the late empire. There's still a certain level of
00:32:03.520
continuity. People outside of Rome would still know who the Romans were, right? But who the Romans were
00:32:11.120
has fundamentally changed. By the time you get to the Eastern Roman empire, the Byzantine empire,
00:32:16.000
they are very, very different from the founders of Rome, but they still would have called themselves
00:32:22.080
Romans. And so would have their enemies, by the way. So it would have been people outside the
00:32:25.920
civilization. So it doesn't mean that during this transformation and often dissipation of that
00:32:31.520
original, uh, culture, you're not completely disconnected, right? It's, it's not now today we do
00:32:39.120
recognize as, as different cultures. We call it the Byzantine empire now for a reason, even though they
00:32:44.160
never would have called themselves that because we do recognize that the, the culture had mutated,
00:32:49.840
the original understanding, the way of being the cultural Dasein had changed so radically over that
00:32:56.880
time, over that arc, that it became something entirely different. We recognize that doubt now
00:33:02.560
looking with the benefit of hindsight and history and, and, and, and most importantly, distance,
00:33:07.680
right? We, we're not tied to that culture in the same way they are in that identity, the same way
00:33:12.400
they are. And so we can recognize that. And I think that's going to be true of America too,
00:33:16.080
by the way, I think at some point people will look at America in, you know, the, uh, you know,
00:33:20.880
16 nineties and America in 2024 and say, oh, at somewhere in there, there's a distinct break.
00:33:27.440
And this is something different, uh, than necessarily the America that was originally founded. But today,
00:33:33.040
because we kind of have that continuity of identity, uh, at least in our institutions,
00:33:38.000
we still see ourselves as doing the same thing. But Spangler says, this is very natural part of
00:33:42.640
civilizations, right? They flower. He gives it the morphological cycle of a plant. It starts as a
00:33:48.320
seedling, it grows, it becomes stronger. It starts to flower, but eventually it has to die, right?
00:33:54.400
Like that is also part of the civilizational cycle. And so for him entropy, uh, which is not a word
00:34:01.280
Spangler used, but since we're, you know, bleeding over our concepts here for Spangler entropy eventually
00:34:06.800
comes for every civilization. We have this cultural burst, this growth, uh, this extra P right that
00:34:12.880
we create in a civilization civilization's extra P, but as it fades, as it loses its energy, as it
00:34:18.880
dissipates its cultural knowledge into the first into non-human institutions. And then, you know,
00:34:24.960
completely, uh, as it tries to expand too far, we start to see the separation, uh, the, you know,
00:34:31.760
severing the connection from the original civilization. Eventually institutions separated
00:34:37.360
from their founding ethos lose all ability to compel social coordination. And like the untended
00:34:43.760
garden entropy slowly reclaims the civilization. So this is the classic cycle of civilization in
00:34:51.120
the Spanglerian understanding. Eventually those institutions where you moved your things out of
00:34:56.880
the realm of the metaphysical, you moved your beliefs, all that low time preference, accumulation,
00:35:02.640
that intelligence, you moved it out of the metaphysical and into the institutional in a defend,
00:35:07.600
in an attempt to kind of artificially expand it and, and, and grow it. Uh, eventually it loses
00:35:14.080
its momentum too much. It becomes too separated. The institutions that were supposed to protect your
00:35:19.760
society start to come apart. They lose their mission and your civilization starts to fail.
00:35:25.680
If this sounds familiar, it's because it's what happened, it's happening to the United States,
00:35:29.760
right? The department of defense does not defend the United States. The department of education
00:35:34.400
does not educate the students of the United States. The border patrol, uh, doesn't actually protect the
00:35:39.600
border of the United States, right? All of these institutions that were created to expand society,
00:35:46.640
to inculcate the future generations with the spirit of the United States to educate the people in the
00:35:52.000
United States in what they should be and who should they, they should become. Those are all losing their
00:35:57.360
purpose, their own meaning. Even the very institutions that are meant to prepare our young people to become
00:36:04.000
good. Americans are now mainly dominated by the question of what is an America American is America
00:36:09.760
any, any good. Is it even worth perpetuating America? These are not weird, a historical moments.
00:36:16.960
This is the natural life cycle of institutions and civilizations. When you create institutions,
00:36:23.200
uh, you, and when you transfer this knowledge into the institutions, it fades because it's been cut off
00:36:30.560
from the root of what actually created it right over time, as it expands, as it massifies, as it scales
00:36:36.880
up, as it becomes further and further separated from that original animating spirit, that cultural Dasein,
00:36:43.520
it loses that momentum, that vitality. And it comes to question itself. Why do I even exist?
00:36:49.760
Is it even worth exerting my own influence, my own understanding? This is very normal. Again,
00:36:56.320
we think of this as like, oh, it's some specific American problem, a cultural problem there. It looks
00:37:02.240
specific to us. It has its own characteristics in our civilization that it may not have seen in other
00:37:07.120
civilizations, but this is a very normal pattern. Again, Spangler lays it out in a decline of the
00:37:13.040
West. If you want to read a thousand pages on this, I encourage you to, but it's a climb. So I'll give
00:37:18.320
you, I'm giving you the, the, the, the footnotes here. If you want to do the dive, I do the reading.
00:37:23.280
I encourage you, but it is a bit of a climb. I'm actually really looking forward to going back to
00:37:27.200
it. It's one of those weird things where you rarely think you're going to be excited about
00:37:30.480
revisiting a thousand year old or a thousand year old, a thousand page text, but, but I really do
00:37:35.840
find it incredibly compelling. And I encourage you to, to, to go ahead and dive into it if you would
00:37:40.480
like. But this is a very normal aspect of civilizations. This is what we expect most
00:37:47.360
civilizations to do. If we have a long view of history, not kind of the current American view of
00:37:52.560
like, we're at the end of history and we're the only empire, or we don't call ourselves an empire,
00:37:56.560
but we're like the height of civilization and nothing will ever happen to us. Like that,
00:38:00.080
that's kind of the attitude that we have, but all of our current maladies are signs of that we are
00:38:06.800
somewhere in the Spanglerian cycle. Now I want to be clear that isn't hopeless. There are, you know,
00:38:12.080
many cases of retrenchment, right. Of people being able to shore up and, and extend the life cycle,
00:38:18.160
retake those institutions, you know, move that, you know, rescue them for, for certain periods of
00:38:23.440
time. It's not that every part of this goes exactly the same way and that you're always on exactly
00:38:29.440
the same, uh, time allowance. Uh, but these are again, part of the morphological cycles of
00:38:35.440
civilization that had been observed by many people, including Spangler. And this is what happens,
00:38:40.880
you know, civilization has that extra P, but eventually entropy comes for it, right? Eventually,
00:38:46.720
you are no longer able to create more order. You're no longer able to reverse the flow of time.
00:38:52.160
You are no longer able to exert, uh, this control over the area because you have been
00:38:57.840
separated too far from your institutions. So that is the classic Spanglerian cycle of understanding.
00:39:03.440
Now let's talk a little bit about Nick Land's understanding, which is, uh, a little more,
00:39:09.440
um, well, it's, it's based a lot on, uh, Deleuze and Guattari, which again, we've talked about a
00:39:15.040
little bit before. I've certainly, uh, explained the process of deterritorialization,
00:39:20.160
re-territorialization, but it is definitely connected to Nick Land's understanding here.
00:39:24.800
So we're going to go back and talk about it a little bit. If you'd like to get more details,
00:39:28.720
again, I've got a whole playlist of Nick Land and we've, we've talked about this, uh, before,
00:39:34.080
especially, I believe I've talked about it with the Prudentialist in different streams.
00:39:37.520
Uh, but let's, let's see how it connects to civilizations here. So traditional societies
00:39:44.160
use conservative organizations to stabilize the process of extra P production by territorializing.
00:39:50.080
It, we talked about this in a previous slide, right? You have that limiter on your civilization.
00:39:54.880
You, you ban usury, right? To keep the, uh, building up of intelligence from overloading and
00:40:02.560
escaping its purpose, right? I want my society. I want the financial system of my society to serve my,
00:40:10.720
my society. I don't want my society to serve its financial system, right? That is why you put
00:40:17.360
traditional limits on, uh, on all kinds of behavior. I'm just going to use finance here
00:40:23.440
because that's the way that both, uh, Deleuze and Qatari discuss it. And it's also how Nick Land
00:40:27.920
discusses it, but we can see this across all kinds of stuff, right? Like this is why we limit sexual
00:40:32.160
behavior. This is why we, uh, you know, have certain boundaries over, uh, all kinds of consumptive
00:40:37.520
behaviors because we recognize this process, right? That this cybernetic feedback loop,
00:40:43.040
once people get a little weird about sex, they get weirder and weirder and weirder until things get
00:40:47.760
absolutely Weimar, right? And then like the same thing is true of finance. It's true of
00:40:53.120
all consumptive behaviors. Every time, you know, the, the human sees something they want,
00:40:58.480
they get better at cultivating it. They get better at creating things, uh, that they increase their
00:41:04.080
intelligence. You get the feedback loop that accelerates itself. And this creates a process that
00:41:09.280
can run away from itself very quickly. We've all seen this happen with people. Uh, and this is, uh,
00:41:15.920
again, very true when it comes to finance, right? So we have this idea that traditional societies
00:41:22.880
are creating limits on certain areas of production. You can see this breaking down in our own society
00:41:28.480
because people do weird things like worship capitalism. Now, again, I think capitalism's
00:41:33.920
better, you know, I'm not a communist. I don't, I'm not for socialism. I think capitalism is a very
00:41:40.400
nebulous term that people poorly define, but as we generally understand it, uh, it is the best economic
00:41:46.240
system that we have, but it is good only in the sense that it serves our people, right? Our country.
00:41:53.920
That's what makes it valuable. Uh, that it's not good in and of itself. It's not something to itself
00:42:00.000
worship. It's not something that you actually want all of your institutions to serve. You want
00:42:06.560
it to serve you. You want the institutions to serve you. You want the econ economic system to serve you.
00:42:12.400
You want all of these things to perpetuate your civilization and its wellbeing. You don't want to
00:42:17.040
serve them, right? But you can tell when they get out of whack, when you start serving them, when you
00:42:21.840
start serving, uh, the financial system, when you start serving, uh, the, uh, institutions of the
00:42:28.000
United States, instead of them serving you like in the good of the people, when, when the good of the
00:42:32.640
people are, is destroyed so that you can have a stronger state department or more profitable
00:42:38.320
military, or, you know, like when you start, uh, cannibalizing the wellbeing of your civilization
00:42:45.280
for, uh, the institution or that system, something has gone wrong, right? It is run away. That, that
00:42:51.040
traditional limiter is gone. So in, uh, land and, uh, Duluth and Guattari's formulation,
00:42:57.520
modern forms of trade production and communication require massification and interconnectivity,
00:43:03.280
which break down traditional barriers, right? If I want to trade with certain civilizations,
00:43:08.960
we need to have mediums of exchange. We need to have time zones. Uh, we need to have a ways in which
00:43:15.200
we can communicate. Like I can't deliver something, a product to you at a specific time and pay you in
00:43:22.160
a specific way. If we don't have an agreed upon understanding of what time is and what money is
00:43:28.320
and what like, like how contract law works, like we have to unify this, these cultural understandings,
00:43:35.280
but that's not how people actually work, right? Like different civilizations are different. They are
00:43:42.000
culturally distinct. They have cultural DAW signs. They have different ways of being. And so if you
00:43:48.000
want to create these trade, you know, this, this system across all of these areas, you have to break
00:43:54.080
down the differences. You have to break down the different ways in which you do these things and
00:43:59.120
you have to unify them into one that creates a system where everyone can work together that creates
00:44:06.000
many of the trade systems and communication systems and governance systems that we have today,
00:44:11.360
but it breaks down the cultural distinctions, right? I don't know if you guys saw this,
00:44:14.960
but it's Romania just had its elections canceled by NATO because, uh, they said that there, there was
00:44:22.160
Russians manipulating them through tick tock. Now, in reality, it looks like the conservative candidate,
00:44:27.120
the non-globalist candidate was just doing too well. So NATO is just like, nah, you're, you're,
00:44:31.600
you're not doing these. Like you're dependent on us for your security. You're dependent on us for your
00:44:35.840
trade. Uh, you're dependent on us for like all of these things that make your civilization function.
00:44:40.960
So we get to tell you when you have elections and when you don't, because really the elections don't
00:44:46.400
matter. We need to put the people we want in charge. And so if the wrong people are going to
00:44:50.720
be in charge, then we will stop that process, right? We, we will do that. And so this breaks down
00:44:56.560
the natural cultural limits of a place like Romania, right? They can't keep their customs.
00:45:00.960
They can't keep their understandings. They can't make their own decisions because they are too
00:45:05.200
much part of this larger system. So we have escaped the traditional barriers of extra P,
00:45:13.120
right? Normally the extra P is confined to a specific local limit. It has to be, you know,
00:45:19.280
my garden is only so big. Maybe I can expand it. Maybe I can expand it a little more every year,
00:45:25.120
but eventually it becomes too big and it breaks down. But in this formulation,
00:45:29.120
we create a scenario where there's a network large enough. There's a much enough intelligence
00:45:35.200
feedback where we can actually create something larger than these normal cultural restrictions,
00:45:41.920
those limitations, those cultural barriers that prevented the overgrowth of this intelligence,
00:45:47.840
the accumulation beyond its, its human limits. Those are breaking down, but we do this by creating
00:45:53.440
increasingly inhuman systems, right? NATO, the WEF, IMF, like all of these world organizations
00:46:02.400
are artificial in a very real sense. And we can feel that, right? There's a reason that nobody who
00:46:07.200
gets governed by these places, you know, people in the UK hate the EU and then they, you know,
00:46:13.120
they hate like all these organizations that were trying to force them to behave a certain way.
00:46:18.400
You know, the people in Romania probably aren't too happy about having their elections canceled
00:46:23.040
because some, uh, super national authority, uh, does that. And the reason they don't like it is a,
00:46:28.400
they don't like the loss of control, but B it also feels inhuman, right? It feels inhuman to be
00:46:33.520
governed by organizations that are so far abstracted from your way of being, from your understanding,
00:46:39.520
from your culture. But this is the only way to create enough extra P right to outrun the entropy
00:46:46.240
that would break down the civilization. You must make it less human. You must free it from its natural,
00:46:52.720
human restrictions. And Nick land compares this process to a nuclear reactor with the control
00:46:58.080
rods ripped out. Right. And the way that a nuclear reactor works is it just continues to accelerate.
00:47:03.600
You have more and more reactions. It grows. If you don't have a containment mechanism for that
00:47:08.240
reactor, everybody has seen like Chernobyl movies and stuff like that. Like if you don't have something
00:47:13.200
containing that reaction, eventually it will get out of control and it'll just kill everybody.
00:47:18.000
Right. And he says, this is basically what happens with our human control systems.
00:47:22.640
The, in the intelligence wants to escape human control. Now that sounds weird to us. We're like,
00:47:28.400
no, these are things that humans created. Right. But it's, but he says, no, this is actually like
00:47:32.880
the first artificial intelligence, or we could call it a hyper agent. If you prefer, uh, these are
00:47:39.120
non-human entities that may have been originally created for human ends in the same way that nuclear
00:47:45.280
reactor was, but eventually escape the control, the use that humans had for them. And once that
00:47:52.160
intelligence is no longer having a limiter put on it, once that cybernetic feedback loop is completely
00:47:57.520
closed and has no way for any kind of thermostat to stop the reaction, any kind of reactor to stop
00:48:04.320
what's going on, then it will just continue to build and grow. Things will become more and more
00:48:09.280
inhuman. And that's what we're seeing with these globalist organizations, cultural aspects that were
00:48:14.400
once mediated by organic social institutions are de-territorialized and re-territorialized
00:48:20.640
into the market. Now in glue, uh, in Deleuze and Guattari, they initially give this, uh,
00:48:25.120
role to the tyrant, right? Uh, the, the conqueror, the conqueror comes in to a civilization and says,
00:48:31.120
Hey, uh, we see the way you're doing things, but it, we can't trade with you, uh, this way.
00:48:36.480
You're not producing properly. Uh, you're not serving our needs. And so we need to pick up these
00:48:42.080
different aspects of your culture, the things that were deeply territorialized, that were deeply
00:48:47.040
grounded inside your cultural Dasein, your understanding, your way of being. We need to
00:48:52.480
tear these up and we need to build them in a way that serves us right now. This isn't one,
00:48:58.560
the one, I think they overstate this, uh, but I'm not going to nitpick the entirety of this.
00:49:02.560
I think wise rulers recognize that leaving most of their cultures that they conquered intact was
00:49:07.680
actually best, uh, because it allowed people to produce, uh, in a way that was natural to them.
00:49:12.960
And that actually helped like, um, you know, guys like Alexander, the great realized that
00:49:17.040
ultimately you wanted to like, uh, let people more, you wanted to put your guy in charge.
00:49:21.920
Like you ultimately wanted to have veto power, but you wanted them to run things. Same thing
00:49:25.760
with the Roman empire, right? That sometimes they took total control, but more often than that,
00:49:29.680
they create like a vassal state, right? They created the satrapy and they put someone who was loyal to
00:49:35.120
them in charge, but they had like some connection to the cultural bloodline and they still let people
00:49:41.440
live lives the way that they live them. We don't do that as much today, right? We we're saying, no,
00:49:47.200
you can't, uh, if you want to be attached to our global protection system, you want to be part of
00:49:51.840
NATO. You want to be a part of our banking system. You want to be part of all of these systems that we
00:49:57.200
have. You need to rip up more and more of your culture and make yourself more and more, uh, akin to
00:50:03.440
the system, right? You have to become less and less specific and human, and you have to become more
00:50:08.080
and more general and in human in order to kind of attach yourselves to the system that allows for
00:50:13.680
massive scale and massive scale has such an incredible power has such incredible advantage
00:50:19.680
that it actually allows you to do more. You're going to conquer anybody who kind of stands against
00:50:24.960
it. But in the process, you're also ripping up all of these things that made people human,
00:50:29.120
made people happy, made people part of specific cultures and peoples. The markets seek to remove
00:50:35.360
all negative feedback and create an even tighter auto-productive loop, which accelerates
00:50:40.560
de-territorialization. Now, again, I'm speaking specifically in the market because that's where
00:50:44.880
they focus here, but we can see this across many different cultural domains. It's not just financial
00:50:50.000
production, but that's what they focus on, uh, in their, uh, in their formulation. But we can
00:50:56.000
understand that this can apply across all kinds of different domains over and over again. We see,
00:51:01.040
you know, the, the, uh, the different aspects of human life get pulled out of their kind of
00:51:06.000
more traditional limiting structures and tied in any of these consumptive behaviors into these
00:51:11.680
auto-productive feedback loops that will accelerate the de-territorialization process. Now,
00:51:17.840
Nick Land also sees that chaos can be one of the most important ways in which you actually create
00:51:26.160
more order. So he thinks that higher order can actually be created from more intense chaos. For
00:51:31.200
instance, war is a situation in which we tend to make most of our advancements, right? Why do we get
00:51:38.400
a higher degree of social organization in, uh, World War II? Why is every state between World War I
00:51:45.920
racing to become more centralized, right? The managerial revolution, I've talked about so
00:51:49.760
much on this channel. It's the first time on this channel. I'm sorry. I'm assigning you like
00:51:52.800
all the homework, but if you've been here before, you know about the managerial revolution,
00:51:56.800
you know that James Burnham is talking about it. It takes place between World War I and World War II.
00:52:01.840
Why is every country, whether it's a Western liberal democracy under, you know, someone like FDR,
00:52:07.760
uh, communism under Stalin or national socialism under Hitler, why are they all looking simultaneously
00:52:14.640
to centralize power, make five-year plans, create this production? Like, why are they doing that
00:52:20.800
simultaneously? And the answer is that war is creating this necessity, right? They look at what
00:52:27.280
happens in World War I and they realize war has changed significantly. War has changed radically.
00:52:32.880
The mechanization, the production of scale, the industrialization has radically changed what we're
00:52:40.000
doing. At the beginning of World War I, they're fighting on horses with, with soft caps, right?
00:52:44.960
At the end of World War I, they're going through trenches with a machine gun fire and we start
00:52:49.360
seeing tanks and all this stuff. Why are they, why do they have to centralize everything? Because they
00:52:55.520
know that technology has radically changed. We have to create higher levels of social order,
00:53:00.640
which means we need to centralize power, which means we need all of these, uh, processes we're
00:53:06.560
talking about war creates the need to innovate. It makes us far more likely to create this dynamic
00:53:12.080
order. And so for land war is one of these things that creates chaos, right? We have more and more
00:53:18.320
chaos, but that frees up more and more energy and more and more opportunity for extra be higher orders
00:53:24.800
of civilizations. Right. And this is something that we see over and over again, whenever there's a radical
00:53:29.760
shift in the dynamic of technology, it's usually come because there's some kind of major disruption
00:53:35.680
in the world. There's some kind of a loss of order increase in chaos that requires higher levels of
00:53:41.600
order to be created. So this is the connection that Nick land sees between intelligence and time and
00:53:51.440
extra be right at each step. We see a way that, uh, time, which is for land, this loss, uh, this extra
00:54:00.400
or entropy, this, uh, reduction in order gets reversed through extra P and we see these,
00:54:07.280
this recurring need to create more and more order in more and more chaos. And so that is the link that
00:54:13.280
he sees between the, uh, the, this dissipation of order and the creation of order and the role that
00:54:19.600
intelligence plays inside of it. Now this has all kind of different implications. Uh, again, I've talked
00:54:26.960
about these in several different places. If you want to look at the different streams we've done
00:54:30.640
on Nick land, but I wanted to go back and give this specific talk because this is kind of a missing link
00:54:35.600
in the chain of things I've kind of explained about land's understanding. And I wanted to have this as
00:54:40.560
part of kind of the, the wider picture so that we could all grasp the role that this plays in his work.
00:54:46.560
All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up. Let me see if there's any questions
00:54:50.160
from the people real quick here. Doesn't look like that's the case. All right. So we'll go ahead
00:54:55.760
and end here, but I want to thank everybody for watching as always, if this is your first time
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