The Auron MacIntyre Show - Understanding Nick Land's 'Meltdown,' Part 2 ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 9⧸27⧸24

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

00:00:31.980 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.880 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.420 So it is Friday on the Oren McIntyre Show,

00:00:41.700 and for those that are fans, you are familiar with what that means.

00:00:46.180 We have some theory Friday, often including my good friend the Prudentialist

00:00:51.220 coming on to break down a little bit of Nick Land.

00:00:53.440 And we began our dive into his kind of seminal essay,

00:00:58.720 meltdown last week.

00:01:00.960 So we're back at it again today because this is large and complex and takes a very long time to unpack.

00:01:06.800 And you desperately hope that you're right and not making a fool of yourself while you're doing it.

00:01:10.520 So Prudentialist, thank you so much for coming on, man.

00:01:13.300 Yeah, thanks for having me on.

00:01:14.380 It's one of the few shows we don't get to talk about current events and I don't get to rant about immigration,

00:01:18.160 but we're going to try and find a way to do it anyways.

00:01:20.140 I feel like I work that in at least two to three times a week,

00:01:24.200 but whenever you feel it necessary to jump in about the collapse of civilization due to mass migration,

00:01:30.460 feel free.

00:01:31.040 It's always a point worth making.

00:01:33.060 All right, guys, we're going to get into Nick Land,

00:01:36.180 picking up where we left off last week again in that essay meltdown.

00:01:39.960 But before we do, let me tell you a little bit about today's sponsor.

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00:03:23.820 All right, diving back into the essay here, Meltdown.

00:03:30.740 If you did not see the previous episode, I highly suggest that you do that.

00:03:36.420 This is something that requires a good deal of context at the best of times.

00:03:40.700 And so if you jump in right here on episode two, you might be a little lost and confused.

00:03:47.560 So we picked up in this section called Heat, or we ended in this section called Heat last time.

00:03:53.580 And the first paragraph we're looking at here is a quote from a postmodern novel.

00:04:00.880 It's Don, how do we say it?

00:04:03.120 Don DeLillo?

00:04:04.180 Don DeLillo or something like that.

00:04:06.640 Yeah, it's White Noise.

00:04:08.040 I've only read Lieber.

00:04:09.040 I don't know how to pronounce his name.

00:04:10.500 Yeah, I've never read any of his work.

00:04:12.320 So this one's a little out of left field for me, but I guess, you know, it does fit in

00:04:17.780 the context of what Nick Land is talking here.

00:04:20.320 So this section where I'm about to read is just this quote from this novel.

00:04:24.060 Heat.

00:04:24.680 This is what cities mean to me.

00:04:26.900 You get off the train and walk out of the station and you're hit with the full blast,

00:04:31.420 the heat of the air, traffic, and people, the heat of food and sex, the heat of tall buildings,

00:04:37.080 the heat that flows out of the subway and tunnels.

00:04:39.500 It's always 15 degrees hotter in the cities.

00:04:42.780 Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky.

00:04:46.520 The buses breathe heat.

00:04:47.980 Heat emanates from the crowds of shoppers and office workers.

00:04:50.960 The entire infrastructure is based on heat.

00:04:53.640 Desperately uses up heat.

00:04:55.800 Breathes more heat.

00:04:57.080 The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well

00:05:01.940 underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium sized city.

00:05:07.820 Heat and wetness.

00:05:08.920 Now, I don't have the particular context of that novel, so there might be a far deeper

00:05:12.700 meaning implied here, but I would surmise that this reference is here in no small part

00:05:19.020 because what we're about to read is going to focus a lot on entropy and extropy, the

00:05:23.700 dissipation and the following of heat flows and energy flows when it comes to the creation

00:05:29.540 of processes and civilizations.

00:05:32.260 And so I would imagine that the reference is connected to that, but there may be more there.

00:05:37.440 That's what I know.

00:05:39.420 Yeah, I haven't read the book either.

00:05:41.000 Like I said, I've only read Libra, but I think it fits perfectly well with all the other sort of

00:05:45.120 concepts we talk about both on your channel and mine, whether it be cities as IQ shredders or

00:05:50.740 just how capital or just immigration or virtually anything that comes together is only going to

00:05:56.440 accelerate the forces of the left, which is entropy.

00:05:58.840 An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem solving rips through the last dreams of

00:06:05.660 top-down prediction and control.

00:06:07.800 Knowledge adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does.

00:06:13.460 So over and over again from different angles, we're going to get this approach from Nick

00:06:17.960 Land about the creative chaos of this process breaking through human control on a regular

00:06:27.060 basis, especially when it comes to control of the economy, control of the production in

00:06:32.100 society.

00:06:33.500 And even knowing about this, understanding that this is part of what's happening in the

00:06:38.980 process does not slow it down.

00:06:40.980 In fact, it only accelerates it, and I think that's something we're going to see repeated

00:06:44.860 throughout the essay.

00:06:49.660 Capital is machinic, non-instrumental.

00:06:53.080 Globalization, miniaturization, scaling, dilation, and automatization, an automatizing, nihilistic

00:07:03.300 vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce.

00:07:10.300 And driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control, from status and

00:07:17.080 meaning to money and information.

00:07:19.940 So capital is machinic in the sense that it is not instrumental.

00:07:25.900 It's not serving a human purpose in this case.

00:07:29.700 When it talks about the nihilistic vortex, it's talking about the capitalism serving itself

00:07:36.780 and non-human ends.

00:07:38.140 It's only self-referential.

00:07:41.880 It's only about creating and making that process more efficient.

00:07:47.980 And so it's going to be removing itself from despotic command, from the command of humans,

00:07:54.040 from the command of human systems, that top-down control that he mentioned earlier.

00:07:58.020 And instead is going to become cyber-sensitive.

00:08:00.620 It's no longer interested in the human indicators of status and meaning, and instead is focused

00:08:08.240 on money and information.

00:08:10.180 So once again, separating itself from the human, separating itself from human incentives or

00:08:15.100 understandings, and instead becoming a process that drives itself and references only itself

00:08:20.560 through things like money and information.

00:08:22.880 Yeah, and I think that this is also illustrating the last forms of, you know, nation-state forms

00:08:29.160 of governments that we talk about.

00:08:30.500 So what might be considered, you know, top-down with respects to prediction that we were reading

00:08:35.060 earlier, or even just despotic command, essentially just one ruler or a centralized bureaucratic

00:08:40.580 state, now it's just everywhere.

00:08:42.840 So now we've transferred status, not just from meaning, but also say like landed gentry or

00:08:48.260 an aristocratic bloodline or any sort of, you know, higher strata classes.

00:08:53.140 Now everything's about information.

00:08:54.480 And you see this, whether it be about insider trading or how we witness like the Pelosi's

00:08:59.120 make a, you know, a lot of money by shorting visa right before Congress decides to investigate

00:09:03.360 it for, you know, antitrust laws.

00:09:06.120 And in doing so, information and money is really what's going to buy you power, and especially

00:09:10.400 in an environment where the human consciousness is now expanded.

00:09:14.440 I mean, a lot of this was also, you can build upon this from, say, McLuhan in the 1960s.

00:09:18.100 Like the speed of information of his time made you instantaneously aware of like famines

00:09:23.420 in India or what was going on in parts of Lebanon and Beirut.

00:09:27.940 Not much has really changed in that respect.

00:09:29.840 It illustrates, right, how we're instantly aware of people's lives halfway around the world.

00:09:34.760 And now with the 24-7 news cycle, and I was talking about this earlier this morning with

00:09:38.540 Conscious Karakal and his channel, that all of a sudden you have to be instantly aware

00:09:42.400 of what's going on at all times.

00:09:43.740 And that creates a take economy. 0.95

00:09:45.300 So now information and money are ways in which we have power.

00:09:48.240 If you are an excellent predictor, let's say like our friend Battle Beagle on Twitter, who

00:09:52.900 makes these wonderful predictions that have a terrifying tendency of coming true about

00:09:56.940 the economy or global events, that that all of a sudden elevates you to status, gives you

00:10:01.460 power, gives you people consult to you for what's going to happen next.

00:10:05.280 And now with those forces moving faster and faster and faster, it's harder for the regular

00:10:09.400 person to understand.

00:10:10.320 And it now only serves itself and no longer has that instrumentality to where, oh, well,

00:10:15.020 like I create something, I get money, I can create a good for other people.

00:10:18.540 No, now it just builds upon itself.

00:10:20.200 And in doing so, it's sort of going to take out the old human model of what makes us exciting

00:10:25.860 or human or dynamic or innovative.

00:10:28.500 It's just going to say that is no longer part of the equation.

00:10:31.420 Humanity itself is a stumbling block.

00:10:33.120 Yeah, it's really is a radical revolution in the way that power works.

00:10:39.280 It's no longer tied to these very distinctly human markers.

00:10:43.060 Like you said, the landed gentry, the, you know, the people are part of the land.

00:10:47.040 They're, you know, they're, they're living in the cycles of the land.

00:10:49.800 They're the rhythms of the land.

00:10:51.340 Yeah.

00:10:51.420 They owe this fealty to, you know, someone who can move men in a very traditional sense.

00:10:55.900 Now all of this is digitized.

00:10:58.440 It's incredibly liquid.

00:10:59.780 It's incredibly rapid.

00:11:01.900 And the way that all of these things, even the human parts like status are organized,

00:11:07.340 are very different.

00:11:08.580 And so, yeah, it's just a complete radical revolution in the way the power is understood.

00:11:16.940 Let's see.

00:11:17.620 Where did I leave off here?

00:11:23.520 There we go.

00:11:24.280 Uh, it's function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleeconomy.

00:11:30.280 And that is, I've made sure to check my definitions here.

00:11:33.640 Uh, that's a, uh, that, that's a purple, purple, purple, but I may have definitions, but I can't

00:11:40.680 use words.

00:11:41.220 It's the purposefulness of a particular, uh, structure inside evolution.

00:11:46.560 So it's the evolution of something for a particular purpose.

00:11:49.360 Uh, machine code capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering 0.89

00:11:55.660 out the shit and bloodstains of primitive accumulation. 0.98

00:11:58.420 So once again, we see this idea of getting rid of the human. 0.99

00:12:02.480 We're, we're using the, uh, the, this idea of consumer control, right?

00:12:07.420 That, that consumer preference is, it becomes this axiomatic mechanism.

00:12:11.360 It becomes this really basic standard, uh, uh, for the way that things should be filtered,

00:12:15.800 the way that they should be understood.

00:12:17.180 But in that, uh, in that shift to this understanding of how things should be organized, it's laundering

00:12:23.720 out these, these very normal and human understandings of accumulation.

00:12:28.580 So we're, we're again, radically shifting the way that people, uh, select for things,

00:12:33.940 even in economic, uh, interactions.

00:12:36.960 Yeah, no, that's pretty much on, on, on point here is, is that anything that would launder out

00:12:42.240 parts of, uh, are the human understanding of what's important food, land, resources, water.

00:12:46.680 Yeah, no, we, we don't need that anymore.

00:12:48.920 The, the paperclip factory is up and running and it certainly does not need human hands.

00:12:53.940 Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure while the system as a

00:12:58.620 whole requires its inhibition.

00:13:01.380 Schizophrenia, disassociated consumers destined themselves as worker bodies to cost control.

00:13:07.380 And for those who aren't familiar, the, the idea of capitalism and schizophrenia, of course,

00:13:11.820 as we referenced last week, so much of what land is doing as part of, uh, Deleuze and Guattari

00:13:17.420 takes a lot of, uh, their work and, and anti-Odipus and a thousand plateaus and applies many of

00:13:24.040 the different concepts here.

00:13:25.240 And, uh, once again, we see this, uh, this, uh, uh, schizophrenic, um, nature of the process

00:13:31.780 where it, it is encouraging these maximal expenditures, right?

00:13:37.060 But it also, uh, requires, uh, their inhibition.

00:13:40.840 So the, the, these, these two things are cross purposes, uh, and then, uh, you know, the,

00:13:46.000 once again, the disassociated consumer destines themselves as worker bodies to cost control.

00:13:51.660 Yeah. And also, this is a really great sort of back and forth because you're seeing cost

00:13:56.120 control. So one might think austerity, but on top of that, you're talking about sumptuous

00:13:59.360 expenditures. So like the most lavishly kind of ways of spending is possible. And again,

00:14:04.100 money being a form of status, a lot of us end up seeing like majority of America, for example,

00:14:08.540 having thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars credit card debt, and which we're

00:14:12.680 trying to keep up with the Joneses, but also to maintain a lavish lifestyle. I mean,

00:14:16.420 even the poorest of Americans are not only obese, but can have an iPhone. And a lot of this is

00:14:20.280 due to Gibbs, but it does illustrate that, you know, we have a system that is in place to where,

00:14:24.940 well, really we're, we're desiring to produce in order for us to have these status, these things

00:14:29.960 that are going there and the things that would require us to, to be human or to enjoy may simply

00:14:35.340 the simpler pleasures of life, whether it be a family or, you know, sort of a teleological basis

00:14:40.100 and meeting, whether it be religion or something else, all that gets thrown out the window for

00:14:44.140 moving towards a higher purpose of production. And so we become a slave to that sort of production.

00:14:50.300 We desire that production in order to maintain status. It's, uh, it's gamed against us. You've

00:14:55.320 basically, as it says in the passage, become enslaved.

00:14:58.180 You can also see this in the dynamic that current states seem to want to set up with their economic

00:15:04.780 systems, where we're constantly encouraging people to spend as much money as possible, become as lavish as

00:15:10.880 possible. You need to constantly pushing your budget, leveraging yourself and incurring more and

00:15:16.020 more debt, you know, uh, make, making these large purpose, uh, purchases. We never want the economy

00:15:21.260 to slow down. We never want it to cool, but simultaneously we're encouraging austerity inside

00:15:27.260 the system. The state itself is recognizing the limits of its ability to constantly spend, uh,

00:15:33.480 especially in, in, in many of the programs that it's already made the, the individual, uh, completely,

00:15:39.160 uh, reliant on. So again, just this, this cross purposes, the system constantly requires,

00:15:43.900 uh, overspending and, and an abandonment of understanding of the future saving in, you know,

00:15:49.180 any of these low time preference behaviors, they're all bad for the economy in some sense.

00:15:53.480 Uh, but you would recognize that you actually do need that austerity, that, that, uh, low time

00:15:58.240 preference, uh, in the long run. And these things are constantly at odds and constantly clashing.

00:16:03.000 Yeah, absolutely. Uh, capital histories, uh, machinic spine is coded, axiomated, and diagrammed

00:16:11.100 by a, uh, disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible inter, uh, uh, uh, in, indeterministic

00:16:19.220 and increasingly nonlinear processes associated, uh, successively with thermo, uh, thermotechnics,

00:16:26.340 which is the science of tracking the movement of heat, the flow of heat and energy, uh, signaletics,

00:16:32.920 uh, which apparently is a, uh, term that Deleuze uses in other work. I had not run into this

00:16:38.080 one specifically, uh, but it's talking about the way that images are processed and time

00:16:42.780 is understood when it comes to, uh, cinema in, in movies, the, the way that it's, uh, processed

00:16:48.080 there, uh, getting kind of signals and signifiers in, in that, uh, context, cybernetics, complex

00:16:54.240 system dynamics and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture captured by

00:17:00.660 a spiraling involvement with entropy D, uh, uh, uh, uh, deviations, camouflaging an invasion

00:17:07.420 from the future, launching, uh, back out of terminated security, uh, against, uh, everything

00:17:13.160 that inhibits the meltdown process. So this process of capital escape, this process of acceleration

00:17:20.600 is basically take, uh, you know, modernity represents itself as these different parts

00:17:26.840 of the, uh, the, the terminated security system, the, the human security system going back and

00:17:32.240 kind of retroactively eliminating anything that would actually stop the process. So in many

00:17:38.000 ways, the very attempt of the nations, uh, the, the, the, the human interests, uh, to control

00:17:45.780 this process, accelerates the process. It actually ends up annihilating, uh, the things that are most

00:17:51.320 effective in, in, in stopping the process as it goes along. Yeah. And I, it's funny, I can't help

00:17:57.580 but think of the immediate aftermath after, uh, September 11th, 2001, where president Bush is

00:18:04.060 telling everyone to go shopping. You know, you had those, those t-shirts that said, you know, uh,

00:18:08.160 terrorists aren't going to stop my shopping spree or my vacation. Like we've retroactively taken

00:18:12.780 like the national response to things is now just to spend. But on top of that, like the,

00:18:17.060 the purposes of say anything that could be, you know, seen as an outside of the system or an outside

00:18:23.600 marketplace way of existing in substance, whether that be, you know, religious communities or

00:18:29.100 purposeful, you know, commune or any kind of living that isn't sort of bought into this.

00:18:33.760 I'm not just saying that like communes are the only way that you get out of it. I'm not,

00:18:36.740 not advocating for that in this situation, but anything that is going to sort of put itself as a

00:18:41.380 bulwark against a system that wants you to be spending at all times and to be, uh, consuming

00:18:47.420 at all times and to let yourself more or less be essentially de-territorialized and deracinated

00:18:52.860 to where you are a brand identitarian. And that's just about it. And you see this quite happen in

00:18:58.040 America a lot for Texas, not only just due to immigration, but also just how we've marketed

00:19:02.360 ourselves that we went from say great, you know, sword and sandal style epics in the 1950s and 60s

00:19:08.320 about the Alamo or these wild Westerns, these like ways in which we were telling the stories

00:19:13.300 about America and ourselves. Now, really, if you look at Texas identity, it's more about things

00:19:17.460 like Whataburger, H-E-B, Buc-ee's, the Dallas Mavericks, the Dallas Stars, things like that,

00:19:23.180 less than they were these traditional rooted, um, in locations, you know, because we live here

00:19:28.900 style identities. And instead, um, we've allowed ourselves to essentially take what is important,

00:19:34.740 tradition, identity, relations to other people, family, and we've commoditized it to such a

00:19:40.260 format. And not just by we, but we also mean the system that we participate in, which is trying to

00:19:44.380 override us. It's now simply saying, okay, that doesn't matter. We can make this a market entity

00:19:49.760 and we're going to ensure that the idea of family formation, the idea of this, we're now going to

00:19:54.840 add on, you know, sort of this back catalog of things that come with it. Therefore, you know,

00:19:59.260 the likelihood of you having a successful resistance is not likely. I mean, it's kind of funny that

00:20:04.100 JD Vance was referencing a paper not too long ago about how car seats are contraceptives. I mean,

00:20:08.920 if you're wanting to look at a meltdown process to stop like family formation inhibition, like that

00:20:13.120 would be the way to look at it. There you go. Yeah, that's a good example. Hot cultures tend to 0.98

00:20:18.540 social disillusion. They're innovative and adaptive. They're all, they always trash and recycle cold

00:20:24.360 cultures. Primitive models have no subversive use. So, uh, Prudentialist and I were kicking this

00:20:31.200 back and forth before the stream. Not sure if hot cultures has any kind of technical meaning.

00:20:35.940 I was not able to find it beyond both of us stumbled on the same, like, uh, you know, really 0.98

00:20:40.460 dumb, you know, uh, gay race communism. You know, if you're, if it's a tropical culture, it's open and 0.98

00:20:45.620 everybody loves each other and they're, you know, cold cultures are mean and they're, you know, they 1.00

00:20:49.840 don't, they're not open to change and these kinds of things. Uh, but we, we both kind of agreed that we,

00:20:54.300 we think what, yeah, and of course this is not perfect guys. We're doing our best to,

00:20:57.780 to, uh, to try to understand the, the, uh, essay, but understand what I'm sure we're making mistakes

00:21:03.120 and somewhere, you know, uh, people are, are yelling at us, but we are doing our best. Uh,

00:21:08.480 so, uh, in this instance, it looks like hot cultures, unless it has some other technical

00:21:13.020 meaning that we're not aware of is talking about, uh, dynamic cultures, cultures that perhaps,

00:21:17.740 uh, you know, if you're the, want to put it in like a Pareto understanding that tend to be dominated

00:21:22.220 by, uh, type, type one, uh, residues, uh, people who are interested in constant combination,

00:21:28.260 uh, constantly trying to, uh, break apart and build new systems, these kinds of things.

00:21:33.540 And what he's saying is that, you know, the, the ones that are interested in, in innovation

00:21:37.840 and adaptation almost always end up trashing these, uh, cultures that are attempting to

00:21:42.940 resist it. Right. Again, you could think about something like the opening of Japan and China,

00:21:47.220 right? Like these are cultures that are trying to use traditional forms to be highly resistant to 0.99

00:21:53.260 the entrance of a more global culture of, uh, you know, capital and trade and, uh, ideas and,

00:21:59.300 and culture, all of these things flowing in. Uh, but he says that, you know, the, the primitive

00:22:03.720 models, they have no subversive use. And so therefore, uh, those cultures just get in,

00:22:08.620 getting trashed and recycled by the hot cultures because they're the ones that are constantly 1.00

00:22:12.120 trying to feed the revolution basically. Yeah. And the other thing too, to consider with say a

00:22:17.140 hot culture would be, um, anything that has the opportunity to, to resist, you know,

00:22:22.740 they say dissolution. And I think that that's what they're aiming for with hot culture, say

00:22:26.760 capital or any sort of, uh, enslaving type system. But I think that when you have a, a hot

00:22:32.200 culture, you're, you're striving towards dynamism. You're trying to resist the inertia of resistance.

00:22:38.180 And I think to some extent, you see that a lot in these conversations about vitalism in sort

00:22:43.000 of the American right, or at least in some parts of it, because if you're trying to be

00:22:46.780 adaptive and to be, uh, innovative and trying to survive this ongoing hellscape that you're

00:22:51.860 trying to survive and manage in, uh, you have to look towards the past and see if there's

00:22:56.080 anything, you know, or towards outside of the world and see if there's anything that's,

00:22:59.200 it's useful for you. And I think when we talk about like cold cultures that, you know, 0.96

00:23:02.840 they always get trashed or recycled that these primitivist models have no subversive use to

00:23:06.780 say capital. That's in part because I think you're not going to see, uh, out that they're not

00:23:12.760 going to have the same kind of immunological response to these ideas that say you and I do.

00:23:17.120 I mean, despite the fact that a lot of problems of what we would call wokeness have its origins in

00:23:21.520 post sixties America and the academy and our legal structure that most Americans who are on the right

00:23:27.020 have a stronger sort of immunological response to them than say, our, our friends in South Africa

00:23:33.700 or something like that. I mean, our, our, our resistance to CRT or like gay marriage or something like 1.00

00:23:39.780 that is going to be far stronger than say what we see across the pond or something like that.

00:23:44.800 And to witness that sort of colonization by entropic forces means that maybe these old school 0.99

00:23:49.520 models aren't going to help us as much as we want to. And in doing so, we're kind of witnessing both,

00:23:54.560 uh, struggle in this like death grip against modernity, but by extension, accelerating capital.

00:24:00.080 An excellent point. Uh, the Turing tests, uh, monitor, uh, monetary is it.

00:24:06.000 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from winners,

00:24:10.960 I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there 0.99

00:24:17.000 with the Italian leather handbag. Is that from winners? Ooh, or that beautiful silk skirt.

00:24:22.420 Did she pay full price or those suede sneakers or that luggage or that trench, those jeans, 0.99

00:24:28.020 that jacket, those heels. Is anyone paying full price for anything?

00:24:32.220 Stop wondering, start winning. Winners find fabulous for less.

00:24:37.180 I'm just going to destroy all the words today.

00:24:40.260 Monitorizing power tends to, uh, uh, effacement of specific territorial features as it programs

00:24:46.860 for migration into cyberspace. Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom

00:24:52.980 of underdevelopment. That's going to be a really important phrase there. Reformatting primitive

00:24:57.380 behavior as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something

00:25:03.220 to be overcome, a problem, a drag, which of course you'd already hit on earlier, but it's this idea

00:25:09.320 that by turning, you know, uh, by going ahead and, uh, turning power into this, um, monetized voice,

00:25:17.420 uh, force, you can remove the specific territorial features. You can remove the specific features,

00:25:23.760 uh, that are binding, uh, capital and these energies, uh, to the, uh, uh, to the human,

00:25:29.820 to the specific, the particular, and you can tear that apart, uh, as, as you prepare things to move

00:25:35.660 into cyberspace. Capital is only retaining those anthropological, or anthropological, uh,

00:25:42.160 characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment. So capital that is still serving humanity,

00:25:48.040 capital that is still taking on human characteristics, is only capital that is underdeveloped. It is only

00:25:53.840 retaining those because it has not, uh, yet shed itself of those characteristics. And so it's

00:25:59.560 reformulating these primitive behaviors so they can be, uh, they can be, uh, dissipated through

00:26:05.180 artificiality. You can channel those impulses into something artificial and further remove them,

00:26:10.400 remove these vestigial human characteristics from the capital process.

00:26:14.380 I mean, a really good example of this would be, say, trying to expose, I think there was already

00:26:19.280 an article about this where I think Starlink was brought to some, you know, distant, you know,

00:26:23.880 cut off Polynesian tribe or somewhere in like the East Pacific area. And, you know, like a week or two

00:26:30.160 later, all of the men were addicted to just hardcore pornography because they had never been

00:26:34.240 exposed to that before. And so now you've basically turned yourself into a particular species of

00:26:38.880 beetle that confuses its female counterpart for just like a brown glass bottle. And it sends it 1.00

00:26:44.320 into overdrive. And so, you know, these subversive models that we might say, oh, if we just return

00:26:48.760 to this sort of past, like, you know, tribal structure, maybe this will work. But when we

00:26:52.680 look towards say the underdeveloped or the third world, that doesn't necessarily hold up. And

00:26:57.560 instead inside of our own system, as we're trying to fight back against it, we fall into these traps

00:27:01.680 of artificiality, whether it be parasocial relationships, whether it be sort of the take

00:27:06.140 economy, constantly monetizing predictions and takes, but at the same time, what makes humanity

00:27:11.240 human, whether that be rooted in some belief in a higher power, whether that be the desire to

00:27:16.400 procreate and to move on. Instead, we're going to inhabit a world where, well, it doesn't matter

00:27:21.180 if I have children, we can, you know, bring in more people as someone like Peter Slyhan might say in his

00:27:25.660 book, The End of the World is Just Beginning. But in this case, all that's doing is accelerating the

00:27:29.860 fact that, ah, you know, people who belong to a certain place in a certain territory and borders,

00:27:34.440 that doesn't matter. You are all equally replaceable widgets.

00:27:37.460 Back to our essay here. Commoditization conditions, conditions define techniques as substitute for

00:27:46.460 human activity, counted as wage costs. Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality

00:27:53.900 of the proletariat, displacing it into the direction of cyborg hybridization and realizing 0.97

00:27:59.200 the plasticity of labor power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body quantifies

00:28:06.520 as productivity, sophisticated at the interface. WorkTrack's thermodynamic is nigentropy,

00:28:13.520 I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce this, nigentropy, which I guess is just extropy. 0.95

00:28:19.520 It's just the reversal of entropy. I'm not sure why I chose that particular term. Extropy is a lot easier to say.

00:28:25.520 But anyway, by disassociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences

00:28:32.520 from pedals, levers, and vocal commands through the synchronization of production line tasks and time motion programs

00:28:40.520 to sensory motor transduction within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artificial environments,

00:28:47.520 capturing minutely adaptive behaviors for the commodity. Auto cybernetting market control

00:28:54.520 guides the labor process into immersion. So once again, we're talking about, in this case,

00:28:59.520 the dehumanizing of the labor process itself by dismantling it down into its consistent,

00:29:06.520 its constituent parts, breaking it down as minutely as possible and maximizing each one of these,

00:29:12.520 breaking down the processes and re reassembling them in the most efficient manner.

00:29:18.520 We are creating this scenario where we're dehumanizing the labor process and making it as efficient as possible

00:29:25.520 to serve, again, non-human ends. You have auto cybernating market control guides the labor process into immersion. 0.64

00:29:33.520 You're taking it away from its interest in serving the human, serving those human oriented, even market conditions.

00:29:43.520 And instead, the market is auto cybernating. It is making these small adjustments constantly, internally,

00:29:51.520 self-referentially, only interested in what increases its power, increases its efficiency, increases its reach.

00:29:59.520 Yeah. And I think one of the things to take a look at here, though, like the negentropy, which is just, you know,

00:30:05.520 what might be called negative entropy or in statistics, it's usually associated with distance to what's considered normal.

00:30:11.520 How far are you, have you deviated from the average or the mean?

00:30:15.520 And so, I mean, thermodynamic negentropism is, you know, by disassociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences,

00:30:22.520 from pedals to levers, vocals, like all this assembly telling you that now we're going to make sure that you are constantly on board,

00:30:28.520 being produced at all times. No longer can you work from home on your computer or no longer can you work from home in your office.

00:30:34.520 But now you're, if your camera is on, your eyes are being tracked.

00:30:37.520 You notice this on some of those more strict work from home environments,

00:30:40.520 that they're measuring how active you are on your computer. They're measuring your keystrokes.

00:30:43.520 You have to be working at all times. And in doing so, you know, the, as it goes back towards the, towards the end here, you know,

00:30:49.520 sensory motor transduction with increasingly complex and self micromanaged artificial environments.

00:30:54.520 I mean, whether it be the workspace or you can, you have your little cry room inside like the Amazon wish fulfillment area.

00:31:00.520 I like how Amazon has reinvented the suicide booth from Futurama, except it's free or like, well, we see it in Canada too.

00:31:07.520 It's state sponsored, but again, all of these things.

00:31:10.520 It's healthcare, buddy. That's healthcare. Yeah, it's healthcare. That's right. True, true.

00:31:13.520 We've, the death drive is fully complete in Canada.

00:31:15.520 But on top of that, like all of these things are just trying to break down any semblance of what's considered human.

00:31:20.520 And my hot take at the beginning of like the whole COVID thing was like,

00:31:23.520 you're actually going to see this really weird line get blurred between your workplace now being in your home or in your office in your bedroom,

00:31:29.520 because now the traditional boundary between work and home has been more or less dissolved and destroyed.

00:31:34.520 I mean, it was already destroyed with our cell phones, right?

00:31:37.520 Because now the boss can call us anytime and you're on call 24 seven, even if you have set hours.

00:31:42.520 But all these things are trying to bring market control into immersion.

00:31:47.520 This is very much building off of what the booze describes as the control society.

00:31:51.520 It gives you the idea that you're in charge and you're in control, but actually your desire to produce your desire to be a body is now being used against you.

00:31:59.520 And you're being controlled by either market or political forces that you can't see.

00:32:04.520 Back to our essay here.

00:32:06.520 The investment income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by conforming to the axiomatic of the neutral profit maximization,

00:32:16.520 facilitating the dehumanization of wealth and by sidelining and the sidelining of nonproductive consumption.

00:32:24.520 So again, we see that, yes, investment exists, investment opportunities exist,

00:32:29.520 but they are only advantage when they basically ignore the human aspects of consumption.

00:32:35.520 They are, they are, you can make money, you can make money in investments.

00:32:39.520 The investment community can be profitable, but only as it basically invests or it embraces this axiomatic of neutral profit maximization.

00:32:48.520 So I don't really care about what the product does.

00:32:51.520 I don't really care if the product is serving the end that it was designed to.

00:32:55.520 I don't care about its contextualization in any kind of moral, you know, moral context or any other understanding of human purpose.

00:33:04.520 The only way that I'm going to, you know, the, the, the incentive structure for my investment is going to be by basically just this profit maximization,

00:33:13.520 which is increasingly sidelining any nonproductive consumption, any, in any purely human interest.

00:33:20.520 Yeah, absolutely.

00:33:22.520 I mean, it does.

00:33:23.520 It's like the, it's like that mean that's been going around.

00:33:25.520 It's like, oh, I guess we're making triangles now.

00:33:27.520 Like the system does not care.

00:33:29.520 You need to be producing at all times.

00:33:31.520 And this is the way that we're going to do it.

00:33:32.520 Any concern about say, like, I mean, like the left climate stuff is a really great example of this.

00:33:37.520 Well, it's like, oh, we just want you to like have a lower quality of life.

00:33:41.520 And we're actually going to purposely de-industrialize ourselves in order to like transition this economy completely online and to be a service-based economy.

00:33:48.520 We'll rely on others to do it sort of this like weird mixture of like European, California ideology.

00:33:53.520 And then all of a sudden, like, you know, oh, the rest of the world is going to advance further ahead of you.

00:33:58.520 I mean, whether it be China investing more nuclear reactors, trying to get away, building more coal, power, fire, fire, power plants.

00:34:05.520 Again, while you're complaining about, say, oh, the status of the economy or the sort of like, you know, sort of socialist eschatology that comes with, you know, we must insert utopianism now by a Green New Deal or whatever.

00:34:18.640 That's going to get blurred to the sideline because, well, there are going to be others that are far more powerful than you.

00:34:23.700 I mean, this is the whole sort of neo-China arise from the future bit.

00:34:26.500 But also at the same time, you know, it doesn't matter.

00:34:30.060 You need to be producing something. 0.99

00:34:31.200 You will accept the austerity because you're just going to be a cock that we can easily replace by bringing in more Syrians or something. 1.00

00:34:38.020 The cyberpunk security of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeoisie control in the late 19th century, provoking technocratic corporatist, i.e. fascist and social democratic political structures in allergic reaction. 0.94

00:34:58.200 So we talked a little bit about this in the previous stream, the first section, but the emergence of what we understand now as many of these kind of managerial systems, while they are themselves increasingly inhuman and they drive people to become increasingly inhuman, they are in many ways a desperate attempt of humanity to attempt to recapture this process.

00:35:26.340 So the technocratic corporatist process is really attempted, is an allergic reaction to this escape of this planetary commercium that Nick Land is describing, this process escaping the control of the bourgeois.

00:35:43.200 And so the bourgeois order cannot hold, not just because, you know, a lot of people hate it.

00:35:50.080 It's not just the Marxist revolution or whatever.

00:35:51.860 It's also the desire to make sure that these processes still serve human ends, that states and these other entities, these human-centered entities continue to maintain a degree of control.

00:36:06.800 So be it rather, you know, it could be fascists, it could be communists.

00:36:10.740 Either way, these political structures are desperately trying to outrace these developments that are quickly leaving all of these human structures behind.

00:36:18.040 Yeah, and this is an interesting bit of, say, post-structural or maybe even just sort of the post-modern Marxist-oriented lens that they're talking about history, that, you know, the world of the cyberpunk techno-corporatist future that we're getting to, the reactions of social democracy, communism, fascism of the 20th and the 19th centuries.

00:36:40.160 You know, you can attempt to respond to what's coming with, say, like the Industrial Revolution and its consequences.

00:36:47.160 But also the simple fact is, is that, you know, now what we have seen is, is that, well, populations are just now in these sort of medical military corporations, a neo-mercantilist foreign policy or like they're very kind of like neo-colonialist.

00:37:00.300 We use resource extraction. We see this far more with, say, also with the Chinese, just as much as parts of the United States' economy, I would say more so than China nowadays, with a lot of its initiatives doing less and less localization. 0.76

00:37:12.620 They're really resistant to that. I mean, even Tencent is a good example. Like, oh, it's, you know, it's a Chinese-owned company.

00:37:18.040 Like, yes, it is. It's a state-operated enterprise with thousands of party members that are involved on there.

00:37:23.600 They've learned very well from their Soviet counterparts during the 70s and 80s.

00:37:27.940 But on that part, like, your reactions and new ideas of government are simply trying to respond to forces that are allegedly outside of whether it be capital's control or this entropic force of what capital is going to bring about,

00:37:41.640 which you could say is like some sort of cyberpunk dystopia that our best science fiction writers have yet to describe.

00:37:47.380 And to some extent, that's definitely true. We do leave a cyberpunk dystopia now.

00:37:51.000 But I think it's sort of an interesting thing to just note here that this is an interesting form of historical revisionism,

00:37:57.920 because there are many that would say, well, like, actually, no, like, we operate under sort of a Marxist post-war consensus that advocates that Europe is not allowed to exist,

00:38:06.040 America is not allowed to exist as it historically was, and instead you are going to be intermingled, you know, mass migratory population centers,

00:38:14.820 as we like to joke or say, rather tongue-in-cheek, but with depressing accuracy.

00:38:18.980 These countries are turning more into economic zones that are just having its masters in government and media and corporations.

00:38:27.860 And that's why I find Nick Land so interesting, even though I may not agree with all of his ins or all of, you know,

00:38:33.440 even all of his analysis, is he is addressing the issue of the emergence of kind of this global managerial elite.

00:38:42.100 But what he's describing is a containment mechanism for a process that is even further out of control than what we recognize.

00:38:50.560 And so while we see the power that the state is wielding in its attempt to kind of get a grip, as he says repeatedly in the essay,

00:38:58.100 on this process, it is dehumanizing people.

00:39:01.800 It is destroying many of the things that we understand as deeply important to tradition and identity and human well-being.

00:39:12.160 It's doing that in an attempt to catch up with something that is already outracing that so much faster.

00:39:17.080 And so the different aspects of this feed into that process as well, which is what he says repeatedly again in the essay,

00:39:25.640 is that the attempts of this broken human security system to retain control also exacerbate the condition.

00:39:34.160 Also lay, so, you know, Nick Land says elsewhere that the critique of capitalism is to do more of it, right?

00:39:41.560 Like, so attempting to contain this, the processes necessary to create this containment mechanism,

00:39:47.460 the security mechanism, are themselves pushing you further and further into this process.

00:39:53.300 And he continues that a little here.

00:39:54.880 He says,

00:39:55.140 So he's saying, yes, they are creating these, you know, these kind of large global entities.

00:40:21.920 They're bringing more and more people under the control.

00:40:24.760 They're breaking down many of these ideas.

00:40:27.200 But what they're really creating is, you know, is these government structures with these medical military complexes,

00:40:34.160 which are neo-mercantilists.

00:40:35.780 They're trying to, in some ways, recontextualize those activities to the benefit of at least the zones of control that they have, right?

00:40:42.500 So they are trying to, if not nationalize, because they're destroying the idea of the nation,

00:40:48.260 then, I don't know, can I make up words here?

00:40:51.100 Hyper-nationalized or, you know, chase these larger structures, these larger entities,

00:40:57.020 and still find a way to sublimate the kind of economic activity to the interests of those entities.

00:41:03.820 So they're creating entities that we recognize as unhealthy for human flourishing,

00:41:10.840 but still entities that are at least in some way serving the human,

00:41:15.400 as where the capital process, the accelerationist process,

00:41:20.580 is trying to take it entirely out of that context.

00:41:22.960 Like you said previously, you know, removing those vestigial anthropomorphic aspects of the economy altogether.

00:41:32.440 Yeah, absolutely.

00:41:35.940 The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers.

00:41:44.940 Transscolar, which, again, I looked up my definitions here,

00:41:49.040 it's a processor structure that spans multiple scales,

00:41:52.860 usually referring to some kind of global process.

00:41:56.480 Entropy dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software

00:42:01.040 that thaws out competitive dynamics from the cryonics bank of modernist corporatism.

00:42:08.020 So the modernist corporatism, these large modern structures that we recognize as an enemy of our preferred understanding

00:42:19.300 of kind of more traditional human well-being,

00:42:22.560 are themselves kind of this system of freezing this process in place.

00:42:29.460 Again, attempting to control its human security systems.

00:42:33.660 But the interlocking nature of commoditization and computers, technology and commoditization,

00:42:40.260 allow it to basically escape this cryobank, as he called it,

00:42:45.420 this prison that the modernist corporatism had built for this process.

00:42:51.360 Yeah, and that's sort of the thing here.

00:42:53.400 And you can kind of also relate this a little bit to Spangler.

00:42:56.360 Like you have these iced, fossilized cultures.

00:42:59.520 These things are now permanently baked in.

00:43:01.540 They're only going to be iterating upon themselves.

00:43:04.240 There's not going to be a lot of dynamism in here.

00:43:06.700 And that cultural meltdown you can definitely see even here in the United States.

00:43:10.000 And to build off of what we talked about in the previous episode, or even consumer identities.

00:43:14.440 Remember, there are now two that are considered successful movies that are just biopics about products.

00:43:20.720 And in fact, you can go even with three, really.

00:43:22.620 You have like The Founder with McDonald's and Ray Kroc.

00:43:24.880 You've got one about Air Jordans with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

00:43:29.820 And then you have one about like the Flaming Hot Cheetos, which of course got in trouble for some sort of racist allegations or whatever.

00:43:36.000 But like the fact that you have three different films that are now more recently come out and are focusing heavily upon product and brand biopics and their biographies and the men and women behind them in order to buy and sell and hawk more product.

00:43:48.660 Like those things are sort of just like locked in.

00:43:50.620 We are frozen in loving our brands.

00:43:53.340 And I think that you joke all the time that your students, when you were still teaching, could identify brands more than they could famous people or monuments or histories.

00:44:00.700 And that stuff is now just going to be moving constantly towards, as it says, towards the end of this paragraph at the top, you know, market escalations based on the computer.

00:44:10.880 And all those things are just going to tell you that, oh, well, what we're dealing with now are algorithms and data points that large language learning models will tell us, well, this is the ideal way to sell something.

00:44:21.720 Even a lot of churches are like that now.

00:44:23.840 We're like, what kind of music should we play?

00:44:25.400 Well, based on a demographic study, it says this.

00:44:28.420 And we don't even use the word church anymore.

00:44:30.100 We just call it like the crossing or something like that.

00:44:33.220 And so all these things just get commoditized based upon algorithms.

00:44:35.940 And they're just sort of built in now for all future economic planning.

00:44:39.960 Absolutely.

00:44:40.880 Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively imminent to cyber capital functionality.

00:44:49.160 So it's the process that is creating itself is also being influenced.

00:44:53.080 It's imminent in the sense that it's constantly feeding back into itself and changing the process, readjusting the process.

00:44:59.960 The causation is internal, not external to the process.

00:45:03.000 It's no longer human.

00:45:04.780 It's inside that functionality.

00:45:07.040 Neoclassical equilibrium economics is assumed by computer-based non-equilibrium market escalation.

00:45:14.820 Themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, suboptimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence.

00:45:23.100 As digitally micro-tuned market metaprograms mesh with technoscientific soft engineering, positive non-lineary rages through the machine.

00:45:34.180 Cyclonic torsion moans.

00:45:35.880 So once again, we have this system that is, as you point out, just self-referential.

00:45:41.160 We have market studies leading to market studies.

00:45:43.440 AI that wants to take those market studies and synthesize it into more effective ways to create a more tantalizing market.

00:45:51.380 These processes are increasingly just leaving any true human interaction, any true human interest behind.

00:46:01.520 And instead, you have the biological aspects and the ways in which it can change the market.

00:46:11.440 It can not just the market, but the person that can actually engineer a better consumer in the sense of direct biological intervention, along with the technological advancements that are, again, speeding up that consumption cycle.

00:46:25.900 So, back to our meltdown here.

00:46:32.080 The superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. 0.92

00:46:35.540 While Chinese materialists' dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenic...

00:46:44.540 ...excitement with schizophrenia.

00:46:49.720 ...schizophrenizing the system's dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tau-drenched special economic zones.

00:47:02.220 A re-hegalianization of Western Marxism degenerates from the critique of political economy into state-sympathizing monotheology of economics.

00:47:16.320 ...hiding, citing with fascism against deregulation, the self-subsidized into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxating into vestigial capacity for hot speculative mutation in a morass of cold, depressive guilt culture.

00:47:38.240 So, basically, the Eastern Marxism, they're talking about the special economic zones here, right?

00:47:45.680 So, you have a communist China, but communist China allows for, basically, capital advancement in these specific zones.

00:47:54.340 But, again, it does so only in the attempt to try to bend them, turn that towards the interest of the nation, towards the Chinese process.

00:48:05.500 Instead of siding with deregulation and the opening of the market, it basically, as it said, siding with fascism in the attempt to try to control these things.

00:48:16.480 Turn them to the will of the nation.

00:48:18.100 Turn them towards a human purpose.

00:48:20.340 Capture them inside these human security systems.

00:48:23.120 And so, he actually says the left becomes the nationalistic conservatives because they're trying to control this process in some kind of weird subversion of Marxism.

00:48:36.660 Yeah, and keep in mind that you're looking at sort of the state-owned enterprise system that we see sort of out of China in the special economic zone.

00:48:45.660 And this has allowed them to more or less sign on to various practices or, say, like the Paris Climate Accords or anything like that.

00:48:52.520 And then to basically just turn around and ignore anything that they had said to placate the West.

00:48:57.400 And in doing so, they're the ones that are going to keep building things.

00:49:00.760 Now, there are a lot of things that I would say kind of go against them.

00:49:03.880 And some of them I'm not sure I can say on here.

00:49:06.020 But I think that one of the things to consider is that they just had, like, a nuclear-powered submarine, like, sink in port.

00:49:12.060 Like, it did not go well.

00:49:13.240 There are some things to say that there might be some kinks in that model.

00:49:16.060 But at the same time, you are witnessing the kind of outright subversion of sort of, like, Western-style forms of, like, social regulations, social democracies, and Marxism.

00:49:24.860 And in doing so, like, they're not going to deregulate at all.

00:49:27.840 That was not the hope that we were going to see out of a lot of sort of Beijingologists at the turn of the 21st century. 1.00

00:49:36.180 But instead, we've witnessed the sort of loyalty to the party, loyalty to the nation, loyalty to the people.

00:49:42.720 And if you are going to try and pursue something for yourself, you will be guilty of it, and the state will execute you.

00:49:48.560 And so we're going to enforce this top-down and embrace what comes with us, which is this sort of cold, global system in which we're going to try our best to wrangle in doing so.

00:49:59.120 And whereas in the West, and we're about to see here, the fate of conservatism just gets more depressing.

00:50:05.260 Yes, it does.

00:50:06.180 Neoconservatism junks paleorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed cynicism capital is saturated by critique,

00:50:15.940 and that it merely clocks up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy.

00:50:24.400 Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry and denunciations of the spectacle cell interactive multimedia.

00:50:34.120 The left degenerates into, again, I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce this, socrotic, which I have down here.

00:50:42.960 It's the military or police influence over governmental policy.

00:50:47.200 Collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction.

00:51:01.940 The real danger comes from elsewhere.

00:51:04.120 So, once again, it's talking about how communism has basically just been subsumed into this system.

00:51:10.740 You can sell it.

00:51:11.660 You can sell its iconography.

00:51:13.440 It becomes fuel for the advertising agencies.

00:51:16.660 And the left just becomes this desperate attempt to kind of create this police-military complex to control this process.

00:51:26.080 It's given up on some of its more revolutionary aspects and the desperate hope to kind of regain control over this process and turn it to the interest, once again, of the nation or the governing entity.

00:51:40.220 Yeah, and I think that this paragraph's got a lot that you can really break down here.

00:51:45.200 I think one of the important ones, of course, is that, you know, it's always saturated by critique.

00:51:50.480 It nearly clocks up theoretical antagonism.

00:51:52.840 With inconsequential redundancy, it feels like a lot of the sort of commentary space with conservative ink, but also in the same way that, like, the Republican Party just reifies itself to say, well, we won't stand for this.

00:52:03.420 Beautiful loser syndrome continues even as it tries to, quote-unquote, not be neoconservative.

00:52:08.000 Still very much is.

00:52:08.920 We can sell communist iconography, whether it be, like, the Hope Obama posters or, like, Che Guevara t-shirts.

00:52:15.420 Like, those ideologies, and by extension, it's hagiographies of its martyrs, you know, like, remember the martyrs of labor or something like that.

00:52:22.860 All of that becomes something that which you can just hop onto, and it becomes this, like, kitchified fan identity that you can buy into and you can trade with.

00:52:30.680 And in doing so, it allows you to say, well, like, not my, you know, not my cat.

00:52:34.860 I don't want that to be the thing that we're going to sacrifice on the altar, but instead we'll allow it to happen elsewhere.

00:52:40.220 This is why you still get that Western visceral disgust to, like, say, Chinese TikTok videos about animals being eaten in a certain way.

00:52:45.600 But instead, like, that threat always being from elsewhere, I mean, this is everything that's being mentioned here about what the left is going to degenerate into.

00:52:52.080 Self, family, community, and nation.

00:52:54.140 Well, America, we've witnessed this a lot, especially at the DNC.

00:52:57.320 Like, the left was trying to project themselves as the real Americans, the real Christians, with the real family values, even though we advocate for the murdering of children.

00:53:06.380 And we also want self-identification, that human desire for being, you know, validated or being seen.

00:53:12.140 This is why you have the intersectional identitarian framework.

00:53:15.060 It doesn't matter what letter you are under the alphabet soup of people, you are heckin' valid.

00:53:18.960 And in doing so, you know, you've now created a way to be repressive, project your actual tactics onto the enemies.

00:53:25.920 That's why you see every Democrat pundit being like, Trump will weaponize the FBI against his political enemies.

00:53:30.980 It's not like you don't do that against white people anyway. 1.00

00:53:33.140 And the real danger comes from elsewhere.

00:53:34.900 It doesn't come from the left.

00:53:36.160 It comes from the, as, you know, the President Biden had said, the most, you know, vile threat to American security as it is.

00:53:42.040 It's like white supremacy, despite the fact that it really isn't.

00:53:45.920 But this is the way where we are.

00:53:47.080 This is how the left has degenerated since Land talked about this in, what, 1994, or 30 years later.

00:53:53.500 And some of this has kind of been pretty accurate.

00:53:56.280 Yeah, again, it's an essay at this point that is 30 years old.

00:54:00.960 So a lot of these predictions are prescient.

00:54:03.380 I think a lot of it still holds up.

00:54:05.900 But, of course, it's not going to be perfect.

00:54:07.940 He has himself expressed frustrations with some of these understandings.

00:54:12.580 And so this is not set in stone.

00:54:15.040 This is itself a snapshot of a certain time, a certain read on the way that history was going to move.

00:54:21.040 I think it's valuable in that it still gives us a lot of insights and can even, even in its failures, show us where things might have gone wrong, what he misunderstood about a process or what he didn't predict about some of these changes that would come.

00:54:33.460 So it is certainly an interesting thing to review in light of that as well.

00:54:37.720 But that said, we will go ahead and stop here because we're approaching an hour.

00:54:41.780 Still leaves us plenty.

00:54:43.060 So don't worry, guys.

00:54:43.820 We've still got a few more Theory Fridays of Unpacking Meltdown.

00:54:47.460 If you haven't gotten enough of your schizophrenic, you know, political philosophy, then don't worry.

00:54:53.040 We'll be serving it up for the next couple of Friday episodes.

00:54:57.480 But moving over to the questions of people, actually, before we move to the questions of people, Prude, where can people find your work?

00:55:03.780 Well, as always, Oren, thank you for having me on.

00:55:05.720 It's always a pleasure to chat with you, my friend, as well as to your wonderful audience.

00:55:08.920 You can find me over on YouTube, on Twitter or X, as you like to call it, Substack.

00:55:13.120 As the Prudentialists, just look for this lovely amphibian and you will find me most of the time.

00:55:18.980 I am live on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. Eastern.

00:55:22.780 I do a show called The Visual Archibelago.

00:55:24.400 I write a variety of articles.

00:55:25.880 I had one just out earlier this week for the Old Glory Club about that lovely phrase, nothing ever happens,

00:55:31.120 as sort of a way that people try to keep out news and psyops from their mental system and good psychic hygiene.

00:55:38.620 But on top of that, you know, I was just live earlier this morning with our good friend, Ens van Seil, from Conscious Caracol in South Africa.

00:55:45.260 We talked about the 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week news cycle and what that means in the digital age

00:55:50.880 and how it feels like history and our perception of time is always going faster.

00:55:54.700 It fits very well with this little stream that we just did here, if you're interested.

00:55:59.760 And by all means, you can, like I said, find me anywhere where The Amphibian is.

00:56:03.360 And I appreciate coming on, as always, Oren.

00:56:05.540 Absolutely. Only the finest frogs here on the show.

00:56:08.580 Let's go to Perspicacious Heretic here. 1.00

00:56:11.040 He says, I acknowledge my part in adding hard words to say.

00:56:15.180 Yes, I appreciate that.

00:56:16.700 Hopefully, you know, it's an adventure when you're having to read something like this live.

00:56:21.200 It's a fun land. It's a land acknowledgement. It's fine.

00:56:24.000 That's right. It's all part of it.

00:56:26.340 If you don't stumble over a few words, are you even reading Nick Land?

00:56:30.120 Robert Winesfield here says, is consumerism the GAE religion?

00:56:35.160 It's obviously a critical component to that.

00:56:37.760 I, you know, I really think that gay race communism is probably the best amalgamation of kind of what it means to have the empire and its belief system as we have now. 0.99

00:56:48.580 Or progressive secular humanism is one of my favorites to describe kind of the overarching, you know, metaphysical to the extent that even believe that that exists belief of the of the current order.

00:57:00.920 But consumerism is certainly something that is at the beating heart of it, which is which is why I think it's important.

00:57:06.980 You know, Paul Gottfried constantly harps on this, that while it might be communist, it's not specifically Marxist in its embrace of it actually embraces capital for all of its its work.

00:57:18.920 And that's why just just dismissing this as Marxism is a bad understanding, because if it was Marxist, it would not have it would not have so radically embraced the process that Marx himself was was not a huge fan of.

00:57:30.940 Yeah, and I think that's a really important point to hammer home is, is that while the word communism might be a 19th century, you know, new phrase that does come from Marx and Engels, there is a big difference between what one person might call communism versus like the traditional, you know, little O orthodox Marxism that you still see some people cling on to.

00:57:49.760 Because if you even go back to like, you know, the Virginia colony before it was like failing, you know, there were people like so desperate for fairness and our fair share of things that people would wait till sundown so they could scurry what little they could to eat in private before there was, you have private property, you have land, you're going to work.

00:58:06.700 And if you don't work, you will not eat and you will die.

00:58:09.020 Like before any sense of like what we would consider to be that sort of like waspy, capitalistic, Protestant work ethic marketplace, like we had communism in numerous other places.

00:58:18.680 And I think that it's important to look at that because those old degenerative bring everything down to mush and we will fight each other for the last resource isn't necessarily just a Marxist idea of trying to reject and have a bourgeoisie free society.

00:58:32.820 No, like the whole idea that we can just, you know, destroy the haves and make sure that the have nots get what they want and then we'll, you know, have this perfect society. 1.00

00:58:41.460 It's been around before the little O Marxism is just not there in this sense of the term.

00:58:47.500 I think Gottfried is absolutely right.

00:58:49.400 And I think history is a good way to look in the past towards these other kind of achiliastic, utopianistic experiments that existed way before Marx and are not just unique to the West.

00:59:00.300 Yeah, I'm relatively sure that, you know, socialism pre-existed Marx as well.

00:59:04.640 Marx, you know, Marxist socialism is not the only strain of that, though it obviously is basically become synonymous at this point.

00:59:11.800 So, you know, Marx is certainly working in something, you know, and was was revolutionary and heavily influential on it.

00:59:19.960 But it's not an idea or a notion or a system that is entirely new to him and not just birth it from the ground up.

00:59:27.700 Also, I noticed in the chat people saying that, you know, the essay sounds Marxist, which I just want to remind people, we certainly addressed that in the first one.

00:59:38.480 But remember, Nick Landis said first, you know, he used a lot of Marxist language because that was the language of the academy at the time.

00:59:44.840 And so he is using the language that is taken seriously by Pierce at the time, but he himself was not necessarily embracing Marxism.

00:59:55.480 He was using Marxist analysis of critique or critique of capitalism on a regular basis.

01:00:01.060 But it is pretty notable that, you know, pretty important that he is embracing that.

01:00:06.060 He is saying, I am with this process.

01:00:08.020 This process is inevitable.

01:00:09.720 This process is inescapable.

01:00:11.960 In fact, this process is the process by which we overcome the human in a very Nietzschean sense.

01:00:17.900 And so in that in that way, I'm actually citing.

01:00:20.720 So so even if he's using a Marxist analysis to some extent, he's only doing it in the sense that he is citing with capital.

01:00:27.780 They had a citing with this process of trying to reach the outside.

01:00:32.120 And so in that sense, yeah, sure.

01:00:34.400 You have Marxist language being thrown around here.

01:00:36.820 People will will will will smell that.

01:00:39.440 But but, you know, he he is only doing that in the sense that that was what was being spoken at the time.

01:00:44.500 And also he is citing against the quite definitively the goals that someone like Marx would have.

01:00:52.060 Yeah.

01:00:52.260 And remember, Deleuze himself never called himself a Marxist.

01:00:55.380 He didn't utilize the language.

01:00:56.540 But again, he's trying to not necessarily just critique Marxism, but also apply his own views to it in the same way that like Freud or Marx themselves looked at Adam Smith's idea of capitalism and the wealth of nations.

01:01:07.820 And I mean, also, if you want to talk about like where Nick Land is now.

01:01:10.720 Well, I mean, Nick Land is considered a fascist by all of his old CCRU friends.

01:01:15.540 I mean, there are people that openly disavow him despite loving his work, who are who are just leftists to the core.

01:01:23.180 And at the same time, I think that, you know, just by the simple fact that Nick's work is considered kind of foundational to a lot of people who would not consider themselves traditionally right wing, but definitely have right wing beliefs.

01:01:35.600 I think it's just it's important to look at this because I use leftist language all the time.

01:01:39.780 I've read a lot of the stuff that he's citing, but I was sure as hell would not identify with with Marx or with anyone that wants to destroy my country or my people or anything like that.

01:01:49.480 Yeah, there's a there's a channel called Theory Underground and the to give them their due.

01:01:55.160 They have a really good series on Nick Land, even though they are they are definitely people of the left.

01:02:02.960 They certainly would would seem to be probably describe themselves as Marxist.

01:02:07.420 But it's really funny when they get to all the neo reactionary stuff, get very angry.

01:02:12.560 It's all very dismissive.

01:02:14.540 They don't they don't bother to interact with the material because it's just too right wing.

01:02:18.340 So, yeah, even if you even if you they found, you know, Nick Land worth, you know, like 15 hours of dissection.

01:02:26.180 But, you know, they they still disavow large chunks of his work.

01:02:29.820 So if that does anything for you, there you go.

01:02:32.980 Let's see.

01:02:34.260 Constant manifold.

01:02:35.460 I'm not schizophrenic.

01:02:36.660 I just appreciate the culture.

01:02:40.080 Very good.

01:02:41.240 All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.

01:02:43.540 Thank you, everybody, for coming by.

01:02:45.380 I hope you have a great weekend.

01:02:47.460 Again, if this is your first time on the channel, of course, make sure that you subscribe.

01:02:51.880 Click the notifications, the bell and everything when you know that so that, you know, when we go live.

01:02:56.640 Of course, if you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the or Mac entire show on your favorite podcast platform.

01:03:02.980 And if you do leave a rating or review, it really helps with the algorithm.

01:03:06.660 This is also going up on Rumble again.

01:03:09.800 I got the Rumble channel uploads working again, though, for some reason, I still can't get the stream direct over there yet.

01:03:16.180 So the streams will go up after.

01:03:17.440 But if Rumble is your preferred method of consumption, along with Odyssey and Blaze TV and YouTube and the podcast, you have so many ways to watch this.

01:03:27.000 All right, guys.

01:03:27.500 Thank you, everybody, for watching.

01:03:28.880 Thank you, Prude, for joining me once again.

01:03:30.960 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - September 27, 2024

Understanding Nick Land's 'Meltdown,' Part 2 ｜ Guest： The Prudentialist ｜ 9⧸27⧸24

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