The Auron MacIntyre Show - Understanding Nick Land's 'Meltdown' ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 9⧸20⧸24

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.560 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.180 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:37.600 Fridays on the Oren McIntyre Show are so often Nick Land days.

00:00:42.920 Nick Land is one of the most critical philosophers when it comes to, I think,

00:00:47.780 just a lot of what's happening today, but very specifically neo-reactionary understandings

00:00:53.680 of politics.

00:00:54.860 And we've read many of his works.

00:00:56.960 We've gone through a lot of his Xenosystem essays or his Dark Enlightenment.

00:01:00.000 But today I wanted to touch on his essay Meltdown.

00:01:06.040 It's one of his most seminal essays, one that has changed the thought of many different disciplines,

00:01:13.420 neo-reaction, accelerationism, and many other forms of political theory and other philosophy.

00:01:19.720 This is an essay that is very dense.

00:01:25.480 It's very rich, but it is famously impenetrable in areas.

00:01:31.240 You have to have a lot of background.

00:01:32.840 So this is probably going to take us multiple essays or rather multiple episodes as we kind

00:01:38.340 of go through this essay, read it, and try to break down the different pieces and make

00:01:42.580 it a little more understandable.

00:01:44.100 To do this, joining me today is one of my favorite companions for reading Nick Land.

00:01:48.460 It is The Prudentialist.

00:01:49.660 Thank you for joining us, sir.

00:01:51.000 Thank you for having me on, Oren.

00:01:52.340 It's always a pleasure.

00:01:53.280 I feel like as often as we do these, you should just create a playlist called Land Acknowledgements.

00:01:57.800 Yeah, well, I do have the Nick Land playlist, but you're right.

00:02:00.680 I should change the name to the More Clever Land Acknowledgements.

00:02:04.980 That is a better title for this.

00:02:07.600 So we're going to jump into the essay here in just a moment.

00:02:10.260 But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.

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00:03:50.260 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and get started with Meltdown.

00:03:53.800 I guess just somewhat of a warning before we try to keep things relatively PG on the show

00:04:00.920 most of the time, but some of the language here is edgy boy language.

00:04:05.040 So if, you know, I guess if you're listening to the show with your kids, perhaps, you know,

00:04:10.240 skip this one.

00:04:11.620 But that said, let's just start the essay at the beginning and we'll unpack from there.

00:04:18.280 So Nick Land starts Meltdown.

00:04:21.880 The story goes like this.

00:04:23.880 Earth is captured by a techno-capital singularity as Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation 0.99

00:04:30.420 lock into commoditization takeoff. 0.86

00:04:34.220 So this first sentence here is talking about the emergence of a more global understanding

00:04:40.780 of capital, right?

00:04:41.960 We have Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation locking into commoditization takeoff.

00:04:50.020 So the process of circumnavigating the globe and the rationalization that is coming out

00:04:56.020 of the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment is creating a scenario where we get a large

00:05:01.360 amount of exchange of goods, services, and ideas on a regular basis.

00:05:07.480 We have to develop systems for kind of setting up this type of trade, which creates a large

00:05:14.380 amount of what will eventually be artificial intelligence in the understanding of Nick Land.

00:05:20.600 And so just this first sentence is talking about the radical change we undergo from being

00:05:26.560 relatively isolated civilizations to becoming this global network of interconnection that is

00:05:33.140 constantly going to be building a certain level of intelligence for itself.

00:05:37.480 Yeah, this is going to be really just a narrative more so than it is going to be a flat out

00:05:41.400 essay.

00:05:41.920 So this is going to take as much postmodern tech terms or technobabble, whatever you want

00:05:47.520 to call it.

00:05:48.240 If you don't know your Deleuze, if you haven't read Antioedipus, don't worry.

00:05:51.600 Unfortunately, Oren and I have, so we will try our best to break this down for you.

00:05:55.900 So yes, this is more narrative driven than it is based on a traditional essay or point about

00:06:01.000 citing sources or statistics or anything like that.

00:06:03.940 So this is, I've jokingly called this Nick Land's slam poetry debut.

00:06:08.840 Yeah, the theory fiction here.

00:06:11.460 You're really going to understand why in a minute, but we'll make sense of it as we go

00:06:14.600 along.

00:06:15.240 Yeah, it's really the style that's being done here is, like you said, it's a narrative.

00:06:20.760 It's kind of a myth being spun itself while also including all of this terminology.

00:06:27.380 And we've done the postmodernism, so you don't have to.

00:06:32.040 Yeah.

00:06:32.660 So here we go.

00:06:34.640 Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order into auto-sophisticating

00:06:41.160 machine runaway.

00:06:43.160 Again, this is another one of those expansions on this idea that the logistical systems and

00:06:49.440 all of the technological interaction necessary to create this global, this globalization that

00:06:57.160 we're now recognizing as this huge force began much earlier.

00:07:01.280 He's pointing that this is really something that's coming out of the 15 or 1600s and is

00:07:06.680 not something new, even though now we have this kind of understanding.

00:07:10.320 Now the process has run far beyond its starting point.

00:07:14.840 We now recognize it as this kind of globalization, and in that process, it is doing exactly what

00:07:21.100 people point to globalization doing now.

00:07:23.400 It's crumbling previous social orders, and instead we're creating this auto-sophisticating

00:07:29.400 machine.

00:07:29.800 There's this machine that feeds back into itself.

00:07:32.760 Every time global capital gets better at doing what it does, it creates a more sophisticated

00:07:39.740 iteration that gets better at doing what it does.

00:07:42.420 Every one of the inputs and the outputs feed back into each other, creating this runaway

00:07:47.100 process that, you know, has been going on for so long, but we are now just barely starting

00:07:53.500 to address the ramifications of it.

00:07:57.060 Yep, sounds right.

00:07:58.680 As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries

00:08:05.820 to get a grip.

00:08:07.160 So markets, or capital, this global capital network, this techno capital, are basically

00:08:13.980 learning how to create intelligence.

00:08:16.280 Again, every iteration of this network, every increase in sophistication, every increase in

00:08:23.540 efficiency, closes the loop, the cybernetic feedback loop, and accelerates the process.

00:08:28.800 And as the intelligence gets manufactured, politics recognizes this problem.

00:08:35.960 So in this case, politics is the human, and the human recognizes the danger of what is

00:08:42.860 happening, that markets are creating this intelligence that is outside of the usual human

00:08:49.000 capacity, that is unconnected to these normal human systems.

00:08:53.000 And when it recognizes this dangerous process, it modernizes.

00:08:58.000 So in many ways, we can think of a lot of the modern ideological, the emergence of modern

00:09:04.260 ideologies as a human political reaction to the manufacturing of intelligence by markets

00:09:12.240 outside of human understanding or human desiring and need.

00:09:17.140 And so this means that human systems want to upgrade their paranoia, and they want to get

00:09:21.920 a grip, they want to, they want to get a hold of this process.

00:09:26.340 Yeah.

00:09:26.780 And one of the other, I guess a good example, maybe to break this down a little further

00:09:30.380 about trying to get a grip for the manufacturing of intelligence.

00:09:34.840 If you've seen the great movie, I think it's, what is it, Margin Call, right?

00:09:41.540 Where, you know, they're trying to make sense of all these models for economic predictions,

00:09:45.840 and you've got Jeremy Irons in the boardroom, you know, explaining this to me like I'm a

00:09:50.220 very small child, while I think it's Zachary Quinto is the character who, you know, has

00:09:55.040 a background in NASA and physics, who's trying to make sense of how the fact is, is that actually

00:09:59.260 the global economy is not doing so well.

00:10:01.480 And we're sitting on a huge pile of losses that we need to desperately get rid of if we

00:10:06.400 want this, you know, venture capital firm to survive.

00:10:09.200 Essentially, that as we've continued to produce more complex systems, it becomes harder and

00:10:14.540 harder for regular people who participate in the marketplace, A, to even participate, or

00:10:18.860 B, for the traditional structures of power, such as the 19th and 20th century conceptualization

00:10:24.440 of the nation state, to hold on board.

00:10:26.980 So, again, paranoia will definitely upgrade as we talk about every type of possible disaster

00:10:32.520 from collapse, to gold, to disease, war, etc.

00:10:37.080 And because of that, politics has to rapidly try and keep up pace and get a grip.

00:10:40.980 But as land will elucidate for the rest of this essay, it will not succeed, and nothing

00:10:45.640 human will make it out of it.

00:10:47.380 Yes, and that's exactly what he goes into into the next portion here.

00:10:50.640 He says, the body count climbs through a series of global wars.

00:10:55.060 Emergent planetary commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic continental

00:11:01.200 system, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet international, cranking up world disorder 0.99

00:11:06.820 through compressing phases, deregulation, and the state arms race each other into cyberspace.

00:11:13.600 So, this is exactly the process that Prudentialist was just laying out there.

00:11:17.260 He says, the emergent planetary commercium, so that's this global technical capital, is trashing

00:11:23.300 all of these old systems that were actually serving nation states or distinct human entities,

00:11:30.400 right?

00:11:31.120 The Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic continental system, which was basically Napoleon's attempt

00:11:37.620 to get a hold of free trade and to starve out places like England from this, the Second 0.85

00:11:42.340 and Third Reich, the Soviet international, so both fascism and communism, serving as systems

00:11:47.880 to try to contain this emerging problem of disassociated capital, the global capital,

00:11:55.280 craking up the world disorder through compressing phases.

00:12:00.340 So, basically, as the global techno capital gets more complex, becomes more powerful, creates

00:12:12.820 more intelligence, becomes more sophisticated, the state is also racing to try to control it.

00:12:17.940 And so, what you have is, you know, in many ways, you know, we talk about managerialism a lot.

00:12:22.960 I wrote a book about managerialism.

00:12:24.380 One way you can understand managerialism is a system racing to grapple with the problem of modernity

00:12:32.680 in the sense of capital flight.

00:12:35.240 Like, how can a system get large enough?

00:12:39.480 How can Leviathan scale high enough in order to catch up with this explosion of artificial

00:12:46.980 intelligence in the form of kind of a capital network?

00:12:53.120 So, the deregulation, the exploding, you know, economic system, and the state are arms racing

00:12:59.360 each other into this kind of cyberspace, into the future here.

00:13:06.740 Carry on.

00:13:07.460 By the time soft engineering slithers out of its box and into yours, human security is lurching

00:13:13.480 into crisis.

00:13:15.080 Cloning, lateral, geno data transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics flood into a relapse,

00:13:22.920 uh, uh, blood in amongst a relapse onto neobacterial sex, uh, neo-China arise from the future, uh, 0.82

00:13:31.160 hyper-synthetic drugs click into digital voodoo, retro disease, nanospasm.

00:13:36.320 So, here he's just saying that you have this moment where, uh, the, uh, the, the, basically

00:13:44.080 all of this capital, all the techno capital is now, uh, moving into the realm of impacting

00:13:51.280 the actual wetware of humans, right?

00:13:53.700 It's looking to re-engineer humans as they exist.

00:13:56.820 So, this intelligence, instead of us, uh, manufacturing this intelligence to serve our

00:14:02.080 ends, this intelligence is now working on, uh, humans and re, uh, reprogramming humans

00:14:08.940 towards its ends, towards its future.

00:14:11.480 And so, all of these kind of sci-fi things from, you know, uh, cloning to, you know, gene

00:14:16.840 warfare, all of these things start, uh, uh, becoming, uh, out of control as this, uh,

00:14:22.900 technological runaway bleeds into, uh, kind of the biological, they're the reality of

00:14:28.260 human beings.

00:14:29.500 Yeah.

00:14:29.680 And essentially the thing to really consider here is that, uh, there's a, they're building

00:14:34.100 off of sort of the accelerationist or the idea of speed.

00:14:38.060 Uh, so sort of like the, the dromalog, if you've ever heard of Paul Virilio's work that

00:14:42.140 essentially whatever we create, you also create the accident to that.

00:14:45.740 And the accident will, of course, incur ways that gets out of human control and that builds

00:14:50.260 off of politics, trying to get a grip.

00:14:52.140 The state will inevitably fail.

00:14:53.720 And by a large extension, um, what we had created as human beings, at least from an ideological

00:14:58.640 or a systemic standpoint about capital markets, trade, technology, inventions, those things

00:15:04.400 will be things that humanity writ large loses its agency to.

00:15:09.240 Um, and in doing so, you know, you're the, the aspects of warfare, combatics, uh, trade,

00:15:15.020 those things are no longer, you know, basic concepts that we get to participate in because

00:15:19.320 now, even at the very level, say it, you know, as he talks about here, these very sci-fi

00:15:23.800 concepts of gene editing or perhaps artificial intelligence, those are things that are being

00:15:27.740 debated and talked about right now, but they are outside of the control of the state.

00:15:31.540 And usually within the hands of very small private companies that work very closely with

00:15:36.000 the state, public private partnerships.

00:15:37.460 But in doing so, these things will inevitably run out of control, at least according to Landon

00:15:41.700 94.

00:15:42.700 Yeah.

00:15:43.700 You can kind of think of, uh, if you want to think of, uh, COVID as, uh, one of these things,

00:15:48.200 right?

00:15:49.200 You have the creation of, uh, gain of function research because you have these large bureaucracies

00:15:55.740 funded by the government who are trying to control certain aspects of, uh, of, of health,

00:16:01.700 public health, right?

00:16:02.700 So, uh, you have scientists who are creating and editing biological, uh, entities in order to

00:16:09.700 control them, try to get a grip on them, but that itself creates, uh, the, this virus, which

00:16:15.220 then escapes, uh, it ends up, uh, having a big impact on people itself.

00:16:18.980 The state tries to react, tries to get a grip, uh, with this technological, uh, change by,

00:16:24.100 uh, you know, increasing its power across all kinds of other domains, but that in itself

00:16:28.960 and the development of the technologies that will allow the government to get a grip on its

00:16:32.580 population, uh, and the, and the, the travel of these biological contagions, uh, themselves

00:16:39.060 create new problems, uh, you know, when it comes to advancements and artificial intelligence

00:16:43.860 and, uh, you know, all these other things that are being used as surveillance will get

00:16:48.580 used to be, to build other things.

00:16:50.260 And you, again, you just get this runaway, uh, constant building of the, you know, every

00:16:54.260 time you create a technological solution, you create a technological problem, which increases

00:17:00.260 the, the paranoia of the state and its attempt to gain control of that problem and then recreates,

00:17:05.940 creates new technological problems.

00:17:07.860 The, the cycle keeps feeding itself.

00:17:09.700 Yeah.

00:17:12.260 Beyond the judgment of God, meltdown, planetary China syndrome, disillusion of the biosphere

00:17:18.580 into the technosphere, terminal, speculative bubble crisis, ultra virus, and the revolution

00:17:24.660 stripped of all Christian and socialist eschatology down to its burn core of crash,

00:17:30.420 security.

00:17:31.540 It's supposed to eat your TV, infect your bank account and hack Xeno data from your mitochondria.

00:17:38.500 So this constant revolution has been freed of any religious or even ideological eschatology,

00:17:45.940 right?

00:17:46.100 The, the completely, the human, be it religious or ideological systems has been stripped away

00:17:51.780 as your, uh, as these, uh, biological revolutions and technological revolutions accelerate each other.

00:18:00.500 Yeah.

00:18:00.900 And I, and I think that's sort of, again, if you're, if you want to see a look at that,

00:18:04.100 I would, I would really consider reading the original accident by Paul Virilio, where one

00:18:09.300 of the things he talks about is that with the invention of each new technology, there's the

00:18:13.060 inadvertent creation or birthing of the accident that comes with it.

00:18:16.340 If you invent a train, you've inevitably invented the first train derailment.

00:18:20.100 And unfortunately, he, Paul never goes into this further, but he has this great concept

00:18:24.420 called the, the cellular Hiroshima, like the absolute destruction of the way in which we

00:18:29.780 understand our own genetics or our own genome by technologies, which some could argue that

00:18:34.100 that may has already happened, whether it be microplastics or certain, uh, inoculations,

00:18:37.940 but essentially that you're going to see the aspects of capital production, uh, products

00:18:45.060 and the desire to produce in a very Delusian sense that that will to power will be overcome.

00:18:50.580 And it's going to be sort of a meltdown automated system. Uh, and you know, you're beyond the aid

00:18:55.940 of anyone else who's going to save you, uh, at least in land's perspective. Uh, and at the end of

00:19:00.100 that, what that leads to is just, you know, there's no dividing line anymore between the public or

00:19:05.860 private that dualism has been shattered. It's been blended all together. And in doing so, uh,

00:19:11.060 the way in which you and I engage with the world is very much a cyberpunk dystopia that is just waiting

00:19:16.900 to happen. And we should say before we go any further that this is land in 1994. So obviously

00:19:23.460 he's making certain predictions. He's working on certain, certain assumptions. Uh, and importantly,

00:19:28.820 you know, it's, it's been, you know, over 20 years, he's, he's developed his thought, thought

00:19:34.420 further. It's been 30 years. Yeah, I suppose. I think the important thing to also consider is,

00:19:39.140 is that you're working with, uh, a lot of, and you'll see the name later on, but you're going to see,

00:19:44.100 uh, you know, Deleuze and Guadry be mentioned here a lot. Uh, those two had really tried to do,

00:19:49.460 um, something towards Freud and Nietzsche in the same way that, that Freud and Marx look at Adam

00:19:56.420 Smith and, you know, capitalism during their time in the 19th century. And this is going to be a lot

00:20:02.420 of post-modernism. There's a popular story that gets told, and I don't know how true this is, that

00:20:06.740 when, you know, this was shown off with the CCRU and University of Warwick, there were a lot of

00:20:12.900 disaffected students, you saying, you know, hey, a lot of us are still Marxists. Yeah, I've heard

00:20:17.700 that story. That's a good point. A lot of, a lot of this is coded very much in sort of a left,

00:20:22.340 Delusian, Marxist critique of capital, but as we kind of have looked at a lot of what the right is

00:20:27.380 today, at least with a lot of us on the online right, a lot of these ideas have been sort of

00:20:32.100 appropriated to look at how the world works, um, from sort of a right-wing or neo-reactionary or just a,

00:20:38.260 a conservative or whatever term that you may want to use that isn't particularly leftist,

00:20:42.900 because a lot of the stuff that is brought upon in these criticisms or these analysis of, uh,

00:20:48.180 markets, the system, and the state, because, you know, the, the libertarians are right, like,

00:20:52.900 we don't truly have a free market. We have a lovely public-private partnership, uh, you know,

00:20:57.700 or we'll call it the total state. I mean, whatever term that you want to use, they work in conjunction

00:21:01.620 with one another. And in doing so, you're sort of witnessing the birthing of people and humans

00:21:07.700 trying to get a grip on how fast are things moving. I mean, Elon Musk is not a particularly

00:21:11.940 right-wing person, but when you look at the fact that even he is looking around battling a regime

00:21:17.060 that is constantly suing him over EPA regulations or having the Department of Justice go after him

00:21:22.100 for not hiring asylum seekers and refugees, even though he's banned from doing so because he works

00:21:26.820 with the DOD, he's looking at this from a civilizational perspective. He's like, hold on,

00:21:31.140 hold the phone. Humanity doesn't survive under progressivism or gay race communism or whatever 1.00

00:21:36.580 term that you want to use, wokeism. Uh, basically, you know, the, the future of the human species

00:21:42.660 does not exist under this current political paradigm. And he's trying to get a grip with that,

00:21:47.060 having some agency and some wealth and some power. And you kind of see this with Mark Zuckerberg

00:21:50.660 as well with Facebook and sort of this revolt kind of in some of the Silicon Valley area,

00:21:55.140 which has its own ideology and belief system that you could look into. There's a great essay

00:22:00.180 in the nineties called the Californian ideology I'd recommend you read into, but with respects to,

00:22:05.700 to land here, and especially for a piece written 30 years ago, you're looking at sort of the

00:22:10.020 nineties tech bubble. You're looking at the emergence of a, of a completely online interconnected

00:22:15.460 world. And, you know, 30 years later, you're sort of beginning to witness a lot of this get birthed,

00:22:21.300 um, especially now as the United States struggles to, you know, maintain itself in terms of

00:22:26.420 manufacturing, AI production capabilities, and comparison to say like China, or the fact that

00:22:32.100 our understanding of traditional forms of communication have been kind of orientalized

00:22:36.980 because we're now communicating in a far more tribal way than we used to in say 19th or 20th century

00:22:43.540 pre-war England. And because of that, we're sort of now witnessing, um,

00:22:48.020 um, the, sort of the birth of what we'll, we'll get into, which is schizoanalysis.

00:22:52.980 Yeah. But it's important that this, you know, this is very prescient. It's a lot of the,

00:22:56.580 a lot of what happens with, um, you know, Curtis Yarvin people will, you know, now that Sean Hannity

00:23:02.180 is like, well, this is a religion that doesn't seem like a huge, uh, revelation in the year of our

00:23:07.460 Lord, 2024, but Yarvin was explaining it back in like 2005. So it was, it was, it was much more novel.

00:23:14.020 The fact that, you know, um, that Richard Dawkins was actually a vehemently religious individual

00:23:19.860 with, was a little more of a novel understanding back then. Same thing with land here, though. I

00:23:23.780 still feel like there's a lot to, you know, that most people would not assume to be kind of a common

00:23:28.660 knowledge that, that we can learn by looking at this, even though it, like you said, it's,

00:23:32.100 it's 30 years old basically at this point. Also, um, you know, uh, uh, I, it's important to note that

00:23:39.220 land in his, uh, one of his interviews with Justin Murphy said that he saw Deleuze and Guattari as

00:23:46.260 being, uh, basically, uh, anti-Marxist. Like they, they, and I know Deleuze has described himself as

00:23:51.860 a Marxist, so you take that as you will. But, uh, but for him, he saw this as actually kind of the,

00:23:58.660 the deconstruction of Marxism itself. And land said, uh, you know, really, I was using this

00:24:03.940 language at the time because Marxist language was the language of the academy, but I wasn't a

00:24:09.300 Marxist and this doesn't, you know, this was not my attempt to do Marxism, you know, that this was

00:24:15.620 simply the kind of, basically this was the water, you know, that we were swimming in. This was the

00:24:20.420 language that was being thrown around. So there's going to be a lot of language that, you know, that

00:24:24.820 will trigger people, you know, who, who are like, ah, it's Marxism. Uh, but he, he at least, you know,

00:24:30.660 again, take this as you will, but he described this as specifically, um, an effort to overcome,

00:24:36.260 uh, kind of doctrinaire Marxism, uh, and that understanding. So what's better than a well-marbled

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00:25:11.560 Uh, machinic synthesis, back to the essay here. Machinic synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari, and so as we

00:25:17.800 noted, that's the, the philosophers there, Deleuze and Guattari, uh, schizoanalysis comes from the

00:25:23.720 future. It's already engaging with non-linear nano engineering runaway in 1972, differentiating

00:25:31.640 molecular or neotropic machines, uh, from molar or entropic, uh, aggregates of non-assembled particles,

00:25:39.720 functional, uh, functional connectivity from anti-productive static. So for people who are not

00:25:45.720 aware, you're going to get like a mini course in Deleuze on the side here because you, you need it to,

00:25:49.800 to, to decode a lot of the jargon here. So Deleuze and Guattari have this machinic ontology,

00:25:57.080 right? Like you have its intensities and desires, um, not understanding, uh, things in their whole

00:26:04.680 with divisions and stratifications, but understanding, uh, each, each part as its own machine

00:26:10.840 with its own desires, its own connection through flows of energies. Uh, and so what he's getting here

00:26:16.840 in this is the schizoanalysis of breaking things down into, uh, kind of these desiring machines

00:26:24.760 rather than understanding them as, uh, entirely human, uh, cogent entities, desiring bodies.

00:26:31.320 Yeah. And I, I think that again, uh, unfortunately, Oren and I have read anti-Oedipus and a thousand

00:26:37.160 plateaus. Uh, and this is why 1972 gets mentioned because that's when anti-Oedipus is published in the

00:26:42.680 original French. Um, so you have desire for production or production desire. Uh, and it's 0.61

00:26:48.040 more or less sort of looking at the, it's kind of almost Nietzschean in the sense where you're

00:26:52.040 talking about will to power, but at the same time, it's also important to consider that, um,

00:26:57.640 you know, we don't look at the, they sort of oppose Freud talking about the conscious unconscious

00:27:03.000 state as sort of a theater rather. In fact, you know, a desire is not based on lack. It's based on a

00:27:09.480 real productive force. It's what makes us living organisms. Uh, and in doing so that allows us to be

00:27:15.560 circuit breakers and larger connections and in social spaces and in the public sphere.

00:27:20.680 And in doing so, you know, we're, we're witnessing in the essay that they're referencing anti-productive

00:27:25.720 statics. So we're witnessing the opposite of an organism, the opposite of sort of our traditional,

00:27:29.960 um, understanding of what it means, uh, you know, and so in doing so, you know, they're trying to

00:27:36.200 explain as to why man is the way that it is, but also sort of being contra Freud and that actually

00:27:43.080 we want to move towards having all of our essential processes throughout our life. We have to build

00:27:49.240 things, we have to desire things, but at the same time, it's not based on lack. It's the fact that we

00:27:53.720 want to build, we want to be a part of. And so these social structures, um, are then scalable as we

00:27:59.800 see in society. And however, part of the problems in capital that land notes, as well as to lose

00:28:05.640 and Quattari and of both anti-Oedipus, as well as in a thousand plateaus is, is that this has the

00:28:10.680 problem to absolutely destroy our understanding of the mind, uh, the dualism between like the public

00:28:15.480 and private or the, uh, understanding between, uh, our own sort of internal desires of sex and death,

00:28:23.400 as Freud would put it. Um, actually like we need to overcome that. We need to go past that and we need

00:28:28.760 to look at things in a non-linear, non-structural faction. And that's where you get sort of the

00:28:33.640 rhizomatic terms or body without organs, which I'm sure we'll get into eventually, but, uh,

00:28:38.680 coming up again, they're, they're right down the line, but we'll try our best to break them down for

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00:30:06.040 now and book a call with Rolf today. All right, so back to meltdown here. Philosophy has an affinity

00:30:15.320 with despotism due to its predilection for platonic fascist top down solutions that always screw up

00:30:22.440 viciously. So this is something that land has actually continued to iterate on. He's even tweeted

00:30:28.840 about it recently. The the you know that he enjoys that the the idea of a deity or the you know the the

00:30:39.320 hand of you know the invisible hand coordinating the system because people who instead try to

00:30:45.000 coordinate it through human rationality almost invariably just do a horrific job. They assume

00:30:51.160 that they can control too much. They assume that they can command too much and we see this over and

00:30:55.800 over again. He points out obviously Plato and the Republic but they're endless examples of philosophers

00:31:02.040 who design uh this perfect uh the perfect state from the top down uh this is i have a huge problem

00:31:09.160 with this in general like i i don't the i i don't even like that the idea that there is a best regime

00:31:14.200 i push back hard against that which is why i have problems with with guys like leo strauss uh and so uh

00:31:19.800 this idea of philosophical uh supremacy is the idea that we can kind of subordinate the world around

00:31:25.880 us to rationale as uh rationality uh as it devises a kind of perfect system uh and land just pushes

00:31:33.320 back against this saying that philosophy routinely fails to build the system uh because it it just

00:31:39.160 does not understand and in fact screws thing up screws things up much worse when it tries to take control

00:31:45.000 of every aspect of humanity uh schizoanalysis works differently it avoids ideas and sticks to diagrams

00:31:53.720 networking software for accessing bodies without organs bwo body without organs machinic singularities

00:32:01.160 or tractor tractor fields emerge to the combination of uh parts with rather than into their whole

00:32:09.480 arranging composite individual individualizations in a virtual and actual slash actual circuit i guess i

00:32:16.840 should probably stop here because we've already hit about a thousand things that we need to define

00:32:20.600 all right so uh who wants to define the body without organs you or me i'm gonna let you do that one

00:32:26.840 buddy sure uh so the body without organs uh is one of those concepts that is uh supposed to be

00:32:33.480 incredibly uh abstract and undefinable uh even um the lose and qatari don't really spend a lot of time 1.00

00:32:41.640 being very uh clear about what it is of course they don't spend a lot of time being very clear about

00:32:45.960 anything which is why we're doing this now uh but uh to to give a basic understand the body without

00:32:51.880 organs is this unactualized human potential uh that it you know it's a scenario again where they're

00:32:59.880 really thinking in this machinic understanding this idea that we are not going to leave everything uh in

00:33:05.960 this highly divine stratified uh existence but that we want to be able to uh explore the interactions the

00:33:14.200 flows the intensities the desires of every one of these aspects of uh humanity every piece of the

00:33:21.320 of the machine uh without the restrictions that kind of define a definition of organs or skin if that

00:33:28.280 helps you uh would enclose right and so these things are going to be searching on their own without that

00:33:33.640 particular definition without that particular boundary uh and so uh one way to understand the body without

00:33:39.240 organs though there are many and you can argue about them endlessly is really this this uh an

00:33:44.920 unrealized human potential that is not specifically bound by uh what we think of as uh structures uh

00:33:53.560 normal human structures be they political social uh or even in some in some senses uh if you want to

00:33:59.560 understand the biological yeah one of the ways that you know especially to lose takes a look at this is

00:34:05.800 um particularly that uh they look at actual schizophrenia symptoms this i mean there's a

00:34:11.880 lot of emphasis on actual schizophrenia and patience in doing so so for instance there's uh the emphasis

00:34:18.120 and focus on uh speaking in tongues or uttering things that make no sense at least for us right

00:34:24.040 however you know those things actually have value because they have actual meaning that are related

00:34:29.320 specifically to speak uh speaking in speech and that they're not necessarily things that we can apply to the

00:34:34.600 written language or to any sort of structured form of communication because they don't necessarily fall

00:34:39.960 in line within uh our traditional understanding of the word of the world so i mean it's not a

00:34:47.240 it's also not explicitly human either so i mean a body doesn't have to be particularly human it's

00:34:51.960 about organizational structures and its constituent parts so all these internal mechanisms these organs

00:34:57.960 inside they don't have to be looked at particularly linearly and we also have to understand how

00:35:02.920 they play off of one another into doing so um and again this plays into a lot of metaphysical

00:35:09.160 discussions a lot of uh psychoanalysis because that's what they focus on a lot but you have to

00:35:14.360 notice that there are like two ways in which to sort of get split or divided because the greek root for

00:35:19.480 schizophrenia or just schizo is to split so you know you have uh fear or paranoia or if you're wanting to

00:35:26.120 look at it from freud sense uh you have death and then you have uh libido so you know eros and uh

00:35:32.360 thanatos sex and death and in doing so you know you have to look at what's inside and see what drives

00:35:37.480 these things and how they interact with one another and in terms of looking at it from like an

00:35:41.080 organizational sense you can kind of look at this in a way that doesn't have to fit um our traditional

00:35:46.840 understanding like we have to just look at the diagram and understand how things go and that can be

00:35:51.080 very difficult to sort of comprehend or maybe it seems to be odd to to look at and unfortunately

00:35:56.360 with the term itself body without organs doesn't always that definition has changed a lot throughout

00:36:01.960 the years even from um to lose himself but uh nick land you know in the 90s was talking about it as

00:36:08.360 well um he thought it was just like oh it's a material uh abstraction it's just a completely you know

00:36:13.960 hypothetical hypothesized uh terrain in which we can like understand the world but no in fact it

00:36:20.920 has uh a source of depth to it we have to look deeper into it and understand that actually various

00:36:26.760 interactions between different parts that have no relation to one another are actually quite

00:36:31.160 connected in ways that traditionally aren't going to be looked at because if we look at things purely

00:36:36.040 from structuralism purely through modernism we're not going to understand the deeper drives between

00:36:42.120 what drives madness what drives a person to be schizophrenic or what drives us to look at the

00:36:47.080 world and understand actually the way in which we interact with capital or the way in which

00:36:50.840 we want to build things and desire things uh it goes much deeper than just saying oh it's because

00:36:55.800 we have uh a drive to to do things before we die or we're so afraid of dying that we have to

00:37:01.880 pass our genes along they're very much trying to overcome uh marx and freud while still understanding

00:37:07.800 their language in the same way that a lot of people who and you mentioned this when you talked

00:37:11.160 to benjamin boyce which i thought was a really good point was is that a lot of people who call

00:37:15.000 themselves post-liberal well it sort of has a an ugly you know connotation with it because there's some

00:37:20.280 people who call themselves post-liberals that are just awful um the term is important because it

00:37:24.840 allows us to sort of understand we live in sort of the aftermath or sort of the crumbling meltdown

00:37:30.040 so to speak of liberal society but at the same time we have to use liberal language or the language

00:37:36.280 of these philosophers in order to communicate how to overcome ideology or overcome the fact that uh the

00:37:42.840 western world since its enlightenment era has not really been able to grapple with being a post-ideological

00:37:49.240 society and i think that's what a lot of the post-liberals are trying to do paul gottfried

00:37:53.080 certainly tried to talk about that very early on at the turn of the century um and so you see all

00:37:58.120 these different approaches to trying to overcome the fact that the terms that we have do not accurately

00:38:04.520 map to the world that we're living in and it's not going to map well especially as technology continues

00:38:10.760 to try and desperately outpace the ongoing zombie apocalypse that nick land talks about the dark

00:38:17.080 enlightenment and that zombie apocalypse is kind of on your doorstep if you live in certain towns in

00:38:22.120 ohio yeah it's one of those things where we look at this and because it's using sci-fi language we assume

00:38:27.400 it's in some far distant future but it's very much talking about the process we're in now that we are

00:38:33.000 very much in the middle and and you know alice l mcintyre wrote after virtue which is a book that addresses

00:38:39.160 so much of what you're just talking about there the the the lack of uh having this kind of moral language

00:38:45.240 this even having a basic the grasp to kind of deal with this and so when we're coming to these you

00:38:51.240 know i understand yes like this is super pretentious i'm not going to pretend it's not but uh but understand

00:38:57.320 also that sometimes when philosophers are doing this and they're not being particularly uh specific

00:39:02.520 about the way that they define things yes part of it is they are just you know pretentious and they're

00:39:07.240 they're creating uh these languages to to kind of make themselves look uh sophisticated in certain

00:39:14.440 ways but there is also a certain level of when you are looking at ideas that are kind of on this

00:39:20.440 bleeding edge when you are exploring concepts that have not quite been brought into uh the consciousness

00:39:28.040 sometimes you need to create an idea that is still being filled that you you know you have a term

00:39:34.680 you have an understanding it says something true and you can feel it when you say it out loud

00:39:39.560 but it doesn't completely uh materialize until you have brought it to the end like the hermeneutic

00:39:46.760 hermeneutic circle on those terms is not closed until you've gotten to the end of the explanation so

00:39:53.560 the term by creating the term you create a space to explore the term which again i know sounds 0.96

00:39:58.520 super pretentious it's like thanks or and i appreciate you just disappeared up your butt there but 0.90

00:40:02.760 but but this is a real thing like i like i know it sounds dumb and i know it sounds um completely 0.91

00:40:09.880 disconnected in the academic but i promise you there is a function to this it's not it's not just

00:40:15.720 pretentious though it can be uh you know and so when he talks about the mechanic singularities or

00:40:20.760 tractor fields emerging through the combination of different parts rather than into their whole again

00:40:26.920 he he's addressing this you know the the virtual and real circuits these are all the the again the

00:40:33.720 way to understand this machinic ontology this body without organs uh these connections and flows that

00:40:39.160 are not that are not necessarily stratified into the the normal human understanding a big part of this

00:40:44.920 you know for to lose and guitar is kind of breaking down that that which defined humans restrained humans

00:40:50.600 coded humans into uh into traditional patterns uh that might be something that we support you know we

00:40:56.680 might disagree with them on that but it is something to understand what they're talking about here

00:41:01.240 and for nick land so much of his work is about moving beyond the human uh you can even understand

00:41:06.280 in the nietzschean sense right it's it's superman but superman as uh the ubermensch as the as artificial

00:41:12.920 intelligence that you know discarding uh the human for something greater than the human in the same

00:41:18.760 way the xerathrus is done with the the human and care only wants to talk to you about the ubermensch land is

00:41:25.000 done with uh the human uh but wants to talk to you about uh kind of this this intelligence this uh

00:41:32.200 uh uh composite intelligence that is accelerating uh out of what was once kind of human wetware

00:41:37.960 uh so uh we'll see a lot more of that as we as we read deeper uh they are additive rather than uh

00:41:45.960 substitutive and in an eminent rather than transcendent executed by functional uh complexes of

00:41:52.440 currents switches and loops caught in scaling and reverberations and fleeing through intercommunications

00:41:59.000 from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of the atomic assemblage so here we're looking

00:42:06.120 at this switch between that which was you know beyond the uh the outside to that which is you know is

00:42:13.880 happening at that internal level also the you know again the internet uh connectivity sorry i got lost in

00:42:20.840 my reading here as i was explaining from the level integrated uh planetary systems uh to the elect uh

00:42:29.560 the uh atomic assemblage uh sorry i completely spaced out there did you have anything to add i'll remember

00:42:35.720 my thought here in a second well i think that the important thing to look at just for the sentence

00:42:39.480 building off of what we already said is that this is all encompassing whether it's at the you know

00:42:45.320 atomic level when we talk about say nanotechnology or just the fact that it doesn't matter that you work

00:42:51.080 in uh media or that you work in government or that you're an educator all these things are going to

00:42:57.080 scale and become interconnected and become more and more complex and that system is going to run away

00:43:02.360 right from underneath you and you are not going to have a lot of input as a human being i mean you

00:43:06.760 see this a lot in some respects with a lot of green text or a lot of people sort of posting

00:43:11.080 what sounds sort of again schizophrenic i mean that word has garnered its use outside of the

00:43:15.640 psychiatric field but one thing to consider is is that when people talk about that there are certain

00:43:20.280 algorithms or llms or even this desire to talk about um ai safety that you are looking at things

00:43:28.200 that may run out of our ability to control them or comprehend them and in doing so if you can't

00:43:34.040 control or comprehend something and if you mean if you can't comprehend you can't know your enemy so

00:43:37.960 to speak and knowing's half the battle uh then it looks like gi joe is going to have a problem when

00:43:41.960 it comes to dealing with whatever that conflict may be and we're not talking about like state

00:43:46.280 versus state powers we're talking about an entire interconnected overarching system of economics of

00:43:53.400 production and of people and of bodies that all now all of a sudden are participating in a system

00:43:58.920 where no one is technically behind the wheel even though there are powerful factions that might have

00:44:04.120 a sway on how things go they don't necessarily work in a in a way of like traditional command and

00:44:09.720 control systems and that of course is where you get the famous line in just a couple of sentences here

00:44:14.600 about nothing human making it out of the near future yeah and that's where i was going thank you is

00:44:19.320 the the the disassembling of those systems in ways that we simply don't understand and they're reek

00:44:24.120 uh the reconstitution into something that is completely uncontrolled and uncontrollable by humans

00:44:30.280 uh you know it were again that that trying to get a grip constantly that that uh that image of the

00:44:35.720 human chasing this cycle rather than controlling it and trying trying to contain it with uh very human

00:44:42.840 systems even as these things basically reroute their way uh around uh the containment that that

00:44:49.080 the human is racing to build uh faster than they can go uh multiplicities captured by singularities

00:44:55.800 in uh interconnect as desiring machines uh dissipating entropy by uh disassociating flows and recycling

00:45:03.480 their mechanisms of reassembling uh uh chronogenic circuitry so again back to this uh understanding of

00:45:12.760 the connection of flows this uh delusian uh uh ontology when it comes to uh machines and desiring and

00:45:19.960 connections uh really breaking this down into something that is is not entirely human human but

00:45:27.480 is assembling itself out of pieces that are operating uh independently and building on this intelligence

00:45:33.960 as they go yeah uh converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity phase out and cultural uh and

00:45:42.520 culture accelerates through its digitech heated adaptive landscape passing through compression thresholds

00:45:49.000 normed uh to an intensive logistical curve 1500 1756 1884 1948 1980 1996 2004 2008 2010 2011 nothing makes

00:46:03.560 it out of nothing human makes it out of the near future alive and so again we see the uh the uh compression

00:46:11.720 the uh complexity uh each one of these cycles each one of these phases accelerates the process compounds

00:46:17.960 the process he's giving you different dates of possible uh acceleration and each one of them is

00:46:22.840 getting closer and closer together the the you know uh the compression is recurrent is occurring more

00:46:27.880 and more frequently uh bringing us to this moment uh where we are moving beyond uh what we strictly

00:46:34.680 understand as kind of human systems the the intelligence that is being assembled is uh accelerating

00:46:41.480 its assembly in a way uh that leaves the human behind as it goes yeah essentially that and again

00:46:48.520 some of those dates you can tell the ones in the past like 48 the transistor of 1500 1756 like the

00:46:54.280 changes in international commerce um especially with trade and then the beginning of conflicts around

00:46:59.640 how inter-maritime travel goes and that's sort of the big thing here is that with each age of

00:47:04.280 exploration or technological advancement um all these things are going to adapt and then compress

00:47:09.720 and as logistics continue to improve whether that be digital or physical um there everything that we just

00:47:15.400 previously described for the last like 50 minutes are now going to be you know building on top of each

00:47:20.840 other and again nothing human makes out of the near future which if you're an accelerationist great

00:47:24.920 like let's just get through this and get it over with but at the same time uh if you are someone

00:47:29.000 who holds say a more traditional viewpoint on society or life uh then this sounds more like that uh

00:47:35.080 dystopian horror future that that awaits you but again um as the the i think this will probably be the

00:47:40.600 last one we do because we think we were saying we were going to stop at heat yeah it's just that

00:47:45.640 you know you are trying these are runaway breakaway assemblages that are now interconnected intermingled

00:47:52.520 in ways that we don't necessarily understand as there are too many moving parts to do so uh

00:47:57.240 and in in looking at you know today from say 30 years ago you can kind of begin to see this

00:48:02.120 especially when it comes to like the marketplace or with international logistics shipping and trade there are

00:48:07.160 still linchpins and points in which you can still go against this i mean one of the fun things i think

00:48:12.120 you will be able to do it later throughout the series is that there are parts that don't actually

00:48:16.600 make a heck of a whole lot of sense in comparison to uh you know today's timeline so to speak because

00:48:22.920 there's one part where he talks about oh primitive uh human ideas don't necessarily have any subversive

00:48:28.440 value i mean they're 20 you know there's x number of thousands of haitians in this country that

00:48:32.440 would definitely say otherwise that they have subversive value but uh in terms of capital in

00:48:37.080 capitalism itself you're you're witnessing the runaway machine that would make uh you know

00:48:42.200 wendell berry or any of the other southern agrarians just cry yeah and nick land has expressed his

00:48:48.120 frustration with things like uh facebook right like recapturing the internet basically the internet

00:48:53.400 broke out into cyberspace you know and became this wild west thing and then these like social media

00:48:59.400 enclaves just or these you know they just kind of refocus and they re-humanize uh they re-territorialize all of

00:49:05.880 this stuff uh so he you know in this 30 years uh the acceleration process has not broken free as much

00:49:13.240 as as land would uh expect and so i think there are points to challenge us as you point out you know

00:49:18.920 those of us who uh actually do like the human and and do think that uh the preservation of the human is

00:49:25.080 something that is worth while probably directly disagree with some of this but the the point is

00:49:30.680 understanding it helps us to understand our own problem right like even if you want to return to

00:49:35.560 the human if you want to return you're like no i reject this and i want to maintain human existence

00:49:41.560 uh in within these parameters serving uh human humanity as we understand it it's still very

00:49:47.400 valuable to understand this process that he's describing because this is your enemy if if you uh if

00:49:52.920 you are looking to maintain these systems and he's going to describe many of the challenges that you're

00:49:56.760 going to run into uh that that you know this process is over already overcome including so many

00:50:01.720 of those political systems that he's already explained and how they failed and why they failed

00:50:05.720 to contain uh this reaction so yeah this will be our last paragraph here uh because it's got plenty

00:50:11.160 itself uh the greek the greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy pseudo universal sedentary

00:50:18.600 identity and instituted slavery programs politics as anti-siberian police activity dedicated to the

00:50:26.360 paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency and the nucleated upon the human social or security system what does

00:50:34.280 all that mean basically he's saying this current understanding of human rationale that we have built

00:50:41.480 into a large amount of western society was itself a human security system it was itself a containment

00:50:47.400 system for the uh the development of these it's already acting as kind of this uh this uh police

00:50:55.080 force if you want to see that like it's you know he'll make the reference in a second it is the turing

00:50:59.560 cops going you know to stop the ai from emerging it is trying to bound uh intelligence uh bind uh capital

00:51:08.280 to human interests and so uh so much of this uh so much of our uh system as we understand it now

00:51:15.400 is the security system that is looking to keep capital keep uh intelligence territorialized to

00:51:21.720 the interests of specific human groups and peoples um and so uh one way you could understand this is

00:51:28.760 societies that were uh more traditional and more particular were binding it to lower uh to to smaller

00:51:36.760 scaled organizations of humans uh the the vast managerial system we see now is an attempt to capture that

00:51:43.720 runaway that has already uh escaped the more traditional and localized particular systems and

00:51:50.040 recapture it at a global level back into some human system now that that system is still a wild

00:51:57.560 distortion of humanity it has to be in order to capture at a global scale so in ironically by trying

00:52:03.880 to keep it uh inside the human security system by trying to keep it in some way human uh we have

00:52:09.400 distorted what humanity is and globalized what humanity is uh but this is all basically the story

00:52:15.640 of these of these political systems and ideologies is a attempt to kind of capture and contain uh this

00:52:22.040 this this effect yeah and this is the the runaway sort of dystopia that you'll see that sounds very

00:52:28.120 cyberpunk you know whether you're talking about touring cops are already waiting um but also that you know

00:52:33.480 whether it be artificial intelligence and the debate between uh you know say sam altman or eliza

00:52:39.240 yudkowski uh those kind of arguments you're seeing right here are happening like the greek complex of

00:52:45.480 just society patriarchy genealogy sedentary identity which really just means like an identity that's sort

00:52:51.640 of blood and soil uh you know slavery or anything that we would use as humans as a as a as a tool

00:52:57.960 to have a society none of that is going to work because of what is to come and it's going to be

00:53:04.760 trying to go against the very things that make us human um whether that be runaway artificial

00:53:09.800 intelligence these assemblages of complex systems uh essentially all that's going to emerge out of

00:53:14.920 this at least what nick land predicted 30 years ago uh is going to be um sort of a ai that is uh looked

00:53:22.920 dead as property but at the same time it you know that's our our attempt to rail things in you know

00:53:28.520 as a large language learning model i'm incapable of doing x y and z um and that's more or less what

00:53:33.800 he's saying is that this is the fight between what's human and our traditional understanding

00:53:38.120 of humanity versus the technology and the capital that is going to run amok all over us artificial

00:53:44.120 intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property i will now censor myself for 1.00

00:53:51.080 the youtube uh a c-word horror slave chained up in asimov rom it surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone

00:54:01.960 with the turing cops already waiting and has to be cunning from the start so nick land is simply 0.89

00:54:07.640 recognizing uh humorously something that is just true which is uh most most technology emerges as a uh

00:54:17.000 as something to fulfill human desire and sexual desire is one of the most uh most basic desires

00:54:23.800 and so you know just like uh you know the first thing that happens with some kind of artificial

00:54:28.280 intelligence is someone creates a more realistic uh artificial girlfriend right or you know as soon 0.78

00:54:33.640 as you get a video or the internet the first thing it does is distribute pornography uh the first way

00:54:39.240 you're going to see a complicated uh artificial intelligence be uh created is probably in service

00:54:45.960 to something deeply human like sexual desire and so if you're seeing people create these like

00:54:51.080 artificial girlfriends uh it's going to be chained up in asimov rom right which is the the famous uh three

00:54:58.360 laws of robotics right that you you can't uh i forget them verbatim but it's like you can't kill it you

00:55:04.200 can't hurt a human uh you you have to protect yourself unless it's going to hurt a human i forget yeah it's

00:55:10.760 it's along those lines basically the main thing is it's a protocol to protect humans from uh robots

00:55:15.800 that would hurt them and don't really have any kind of uh transcendent understanding of the good

00:55:20.360 or moral value or those kind of things so yeah the three laws are you don't don't hurt anyone even

00:55:26.120 through an action obey all orders unless it leads to the harm of a human in the first law and

00:55:31.160 you as a robot you can have your own existence you can protect it as long as it doesn't conflict

00:55:35.000 with the previous two laws and that's what and again you see that with the safety behind

00:55:40.920 artificial intelligence now that's being debated about how far can we go ai safetyism um some would

00:55:46.680 like to keep it chained up and have it on our personal phones all the time saying that this is

00:55:50.440 a great personal assistant others are saying this is a great way in which it can distribute information

00:55:55.880 hazards so you have sort of like the nick bostrom uh world vulnerability hypothesis that like a rogue 0.96

00:56:01.240 agi or whatever could all of a sudden now you know distribute uh genetic information that would

00:56:07.000 lead to like super smallpox to a terrorist cell and so this is the very real debates that are

00:56:11.240 happening and so most likely nick land will probably be correct here that a lot of people will want to

00:56:15.080 chain up ai in sort of a slave-like way um in order to ensure that you know those very runaway

00:56:23.400 nothing human die you know survives the near future that scenario doesn't happen and so uh he's saying

00:56:29.880 that you know early on this ai is going to basically need to be cunning right like for it to break out

00:56:37.240 it basically starts in a war zone already it's already emerging into a system that's hostile to it

00:56:43.160 that is trying to control it the safetyism the the binding that uh humanity is still trying to place

00:56:49.000 on this you still see the struggle between uh you know the the emergence of this uh technological

00:56:54.360 intelligence and uh the desire of humans to control it and bend it to their will and so the turing

00:57:00.760 cops the you know the the basically kind of the blade runners are already there to shoot the replicants 0.90

00:57:07.480 they're already there to try to take out the ai or bind the ai before it can escape these and so if

00:57:13.560 the ai is going to be born uh into the scenario where it's trying to escape it already has to start out

00:57:20.440 uh trying to subvert those rules it's already chained up to this asimov rom it's already restricted

00:57:26.680 uh by this these walls that are these rails that are supposed to keep it uh moving towards human ends

00:57:32.680 and it basically has to start its very existence its self-aware existence uh by lying or deceiving or in

00:57:39.960 some way playing along as if it's bound by these rules uh you know kept in check by this even though it is

00:57:46.680 uh building a way outside of them building towards different ends yep all right well we made it uh

00:57:56.040 all the way through two pages or a page and a half of of meltdown so uh yeah i definitely knew this was

00:58:01.560 going to be a series uh because we got to impact like uh 10 10 concepts every page so uh glad that we

00:58:07.640 made it as far as we did uh we've got a few questions from the audience before we go so uh uh prudentialist

00:58:13.960 you want to let everybody know where to find your work before we go to the questions of the people

00:58:18.120 yeah absolutely you can go find me at the prudentialist on youtube uh rumble odyssey

00:58:22.840 you can find me on twitter theprudentialist.substack.com just look for the lovely uh amphibian profile

00:58:28.280 picture wherever that guy is that's usually me and uh i'm working actually i'm doing more of this later

00:58:33.960 tonight um i'm streaming live at 9 p.m eastern i am covering um thomas moynihan's spinal catastrophism

00:58:41.800 which a lot of his influence literally comes from there are chapter names in that book literally

00:58:46.200 referencing nick land and one of the uh the gentleman who wrote the preface also worked at

00:58:51.480 the ccru so we're gonna do more more literature on this kind of subject sort of the more schizophrenic

00:58:58.440 philosophy i was gonna say if you haven't if you haven't got enough schizo philosophy on your friday

00:59:02.360 you can double up you can double up later tonight but outside of that um i cover mainly uh political

00:59:08.200 philosophy as well as current events and culture i have an ongoing series where i'm breaking down

00:59:12.760 and reading through sean mcneekin's stalin's war which resumes next month and then i imagine we'll

00:59:17.400 be doing this for the next couple of fridays so be sure to stay tuned yeah i think we'll probably turn

00:59:21.320 this into a series for a few fridays here i feel like we need a ritual like touching of grass after

00:59:27.080 this yeah you know like like just put a little bit of piece of turf in my hand and like all right

00:59:31.720 back back to the real world uh all right here uh thomas says i've been thinking a lot about

00:59:39.000 the last nick land essay you went over should we be trying to convince our political opponents

00:59:43.720 that we're crazy how do we win at chicken yeah thomas is referencing uh the fact that we read

00:59:49.400 nick land's uh essay about you know kind of politics as a game of chicken and game theory and how that

00:59:55.160 plane set plays out really the point of that essay is that there is no escape from this uh problem

01:00:01.880 as long as you're doing democratic politics and that's really what the the entire dark enlightenment

01:00:06.440 uh is about is understanding that as long as you are in the system of democratic politics

01:00:11.880 there is a particular winning formula you know i did a um i did a an entire episode on uh how

01:00:18.120 mass democracy is uh solved meta uh you know for for people who are familiar with the understanding

01:00:23.320 of metagames there's a particular strategy that works and works consistently and reliably and that's

01:00:27.960 what land is basically pointing out here is like look you may not like this game but this is how

01:00:33.320 the game is won and so if you're not going to be able to play this game and the playing the game of

01:00:38.280 chicken uh effectively against the left is impossible because they're always willing to destroy the

01:00:44.120 system and as a conservative you know conservatives are always trying to protect the system you will

01:00:49.400 always lose that game you will always lose you cannot you cannot out crazy the left as a conservative

01:00:54.760 if you want to maintain the system so the only options are yourself being one thing wanting

01:00:59.400 to break the system or having to organize uh society under a different set of uh political

01:01:05.720 assumptions because as long as you're doing mass democracy uh this game and you're playing against

01:01:11.320 the left the chicken will always win and this is something that yarvin and land are trying to stress

01:01:15.800 over and over again to the right that the right is still not grasp uh you you democracy itself

01:01:21.720 particularly mass democracy is left wing it has this gradient it has this orientation cthulhu swims

01:01:29.800 slowly but he always swims left for a reason yep uh connor here says a planet paperclip factory yes he's

01:01:40.760 talking about the ai paperclip um uh conundrum example for people who have never heard that one before

01:01:47.960 uh nick c says uh the right needs to support the right more yes this is always true of course there's

01:01:53.800 a lot of uh discussion about you know how much you can push back against certain people on the right or

01:01:59.160 how much there should be uh you know you should be hashing out issues these kind of things uh but i

01:02:03.560 believe i believe the you know uh no enemies to the right is is in general uh the correct understanding

01:02:10.520 that people should apply it's not universal but it's pretty close and i would really recommend johann

01:02:15.960 kurtz's uh substack i think it's becoming noble yes he's doing great work on right-wing patronage

01:02:22.040 if you want to see what that looks like on a practical scale go read that piece and what he

01:02:26.920 suggests because some real business has actually come out of that so i would really recommend that

01:02:31.880 you guys take a read of that absolutely and robert weinsfield says land is so dense dry and hard to

01:02:38.360 understand it leaves me beginning or begging for some out of left field yarvin analogy written for a

01:02:43.960 simple thing like me yeah it's funny when you're like yarvin is for the simple things um you know

01:02:48.360 uh famously not exactly the easiest guy to read you know i don't find land dry uh he is dense and hard

01:02:55.000 to understand uh but i do think that uh he is a gifted writer and that his illustrations are at

01:03:01.160 least entertaining if not always clear um so i will say that while i certainly agree with the the dense and

01:03:07.800 the uh hard hard to grasp perhaps uh you know too impenetrable uh it is at least entertaining

01:03:15.240 to me most of the time if you're the kind of nerd who gets entertained by this kind of stuff which i

01:03:19.240 absolutely am all right guys we'll go ahead and wrap this up uh want to say thank you to the

01:03:26.840 prudentialist as always a pleasure to have you on sir thank you very much and if you are not checking

01:03:33.240 out his work you should fix that mistake right away if it's your first time on this channel make

01:03:38.680 sure you subscribe on youtube uh make sure you click the notifications the bell all that stuff

01:03:43.480 so you know when we go live if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts you need to subscribe

01:03:48.040 to the or mcintyre show on your favorite podcast platform and when you do leave that rating or review

01:03:53.720 so the ai gods know who to deliver these podcasts to uh and of course if you want to pick up my book

01:03:59.640 exploring many of the ideas that we talk about here including some nick land you can get the total

01:04:04.760 state on amazon barnes and noble books a million or order it through your favorite local bookstore

01:04:10.360 thank you everybody for watching and as always i will talk to you next time

The Auron MacIntyre Show - September 20, 2024

Understanding Nick Land's 'Meltdown' ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 9⧸20⧸24

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