Nick Land picks up where he left off in the previous episode of The Oren McIntyre Show, picking up where we left off last week's essay "Meltdown." In this episode, we discuss the radical left's plan to pack the Supreme Court with their own handpicked justices, and how we can stop them.
00:31:13.520We've, the death drive is fully complete in Canada.
00:31:15.520But on top of that, like all of these things are just trying to break down any semblance of what's considered human.
00:31:20.520And my hot take at the beginning of like the whole COVID thing was like,
00:31:23.520you'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,
00:31:29.520because now the traditional boundary between work and home has been more or less dissolved and destroyed.
00:31:34.520I mean, it was already destroyed with our cell phones, right?
00:31:37.520Because now the boss can call us anytime and you're on call 24 seven, even if you have set hours.
00:31:42.520But all these things are trying to bring market control into immersion.
00:31:47.520This is very much building off of what the booze describes as the control society.
00:31:51.520It 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.
00:31:59.520And you're being controlled by either market or political forces that you can't see.
00:32:06.520The investment income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by conforming to the axiomatic of the neutral profit maximization,
00:32:16.520facilitating the dehumanization of wealth and by sidelining and the sidelining of nonproductive consumption.
00:32:24.520So again, we see that, yes, investment exists, investment opportunities exist,
00:32:29.520but they are only advantage when they basically ignore the human aspects of consumption.
00:32:35.520They are, they are, you can make money, you can make money in investments.
00:32:39.520The investment community can be profitable, but only as it basically invests or it embraces this axiomatic of neutral profit maximization.
00:32:48.520So I don't really care about what the product does.
00:32:51.520I don't really care if the product is serving the end that it was designed to.
00:32:55.520I don't care about its contextualization in any kind of moral, you know, moral context or any other understanding of human purpose.
00:33:04.520The 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,
00:33:13.520which is increasingly sidelining any nonproductive consumption, any, in any purely human interest.
00:33:29.520You need to be producing at all times.
00:33:31.520And this is the way that we're going to do it.
00:33:32.520Any concern about say, like, I mean, like the left climate stuff is a really great example of this.
00:33:37.520Well, it's like, oh, we just want you to like have a lower quality of life.
00:33:41.520And 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.
00:33:48.520We'll rely on others to do it sort of this like weird mixture of like European, California ideology.
00:33:53.520And then all of a sudden, like, you know, oh, the rest of the world is going to advance further ahead of you.
00:33:58.520I mean, whether it be China investing more nuclear reactors, trying to get away, building more coal, power, fire, fire, power plants.
00:34:05.520Again, 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.
00:34:18.640That's going to get blurred to the sideline because, well, there are going to be others that are far more powerful than you.
00:34:23.700I mean, this is the whole sort of neo-China arise from the future bit.
00:34:26.500But also at the same time, you know, it doesn't matter.
00:34:31.200You 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.
00:34:38.020The 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.
00:34:58.200So 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.
00:35:26.340So 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.
00:35:43.200And so the bourgeois order cannot hold, not just because, you know, a lot of people hate it.
00:35:50.080It's not just the Marxist revolution or whatever.
00:35:51.860It'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.
00:36:06.800So be it rather, you know, it could be fascists, it could be communists.
00:36:10.740Either way, these political structures are desperately trying to outrace these developments that are quickly leaving all of these human structures behind.
00:36:18.040Yeah, 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.
00:36:40.160You know, you can attempt to respond to what's coming with, say, like the Industrial Revolution and its consequences.
00:36:47.160But 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.
00:37:00.300We 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.
00:37:12.620They'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.
00:37:18.040Like, yes, it is. It's a state-operated enterprise with thousands of party members that are involved on there.
00:37:23.600They've learned very well from their Soviet counterparts during the 70s and 80s.
00:37:27.940But 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,
00:37:41.640which you could say is like some sort of cyberpunk dystopia that our best science fiction writers have yet to describe.
00:37:47.380And to some extent, that's definitely true. We do leave a cyberpunk dystopia now.
00:37:51.000But I think it's sort of an interesting thing to just note here that this is an interesting form of historical revisionism,
00:37:57.920because 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,
00:38:06.040America is not allowed to exist as it historically was, and instead you are going to be intermingled, you know, mass migratory population centers,
00:38:14.820as we like to joke or say, rather tongue-in-cheek, but with depressing accuracy.
00:38:18.980These countries are turning more into economic zones that are just having its masters in government and media and corporations.
00:38:27.860And 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,
00:38:33.440even all of his analysis, is he is addressing the issue of the emergence of kind of this global managerial elite.
00:38:42.100But what he's describing is a containment mechanism for a process that is even further out of control than what we recognize.
00:38:50.560And 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,
00:38:58.100on this process, it is dehumanizing people.
00:39:01.800It is destroying many of the things that we understand as deeply important to tradition and identity and human well-being.
00:39:12.160It's doing that in an attempt to catch up with something that is already outracing that so much faster.
00:39:17.080And so the different aspects of this feed into that process as well, which is what he says repeatedly again in the essay,
00:39:25.640is that the attempts of this broken human security system to retain control also exacerbate the condition.
00:39:34.160Also lay, so, you know, Nick Land says elsewhere that the critique of capitalism is to do more of it, right?
00:39:41.560Like, so attempting to contain this, the processes necessary to create this containment mechanism,
00:39:47.460the security mechanism, are themselves pushing you further and further into this process.
00:41:35.940The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers.
00:41:44.940Transscolar, which, again, I looked up my definitions here,
00:41:49.040it's a processor structure that spans multiple scales,
00:41:52.860usually referring to some kind of global process.
00:41:56.480Entropy dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software
00:42:01.040that thaws out competitive dynamics from the cryonics bank of modernist corporatism.
00:42:08.020So the modernist corporatism, these large modern structures that we recognize as an enemy of our preferred understanding
00:42:19.300of kind of more traditional human well-being,
00:42:22.560are themselves kind of this system of freezing this process in place.
00:42:29.460Again, attempting to control its human security systems.
00:42:33.660But the interlocking nature of commoditization and computers, technology and commoditization,
00:42:40.260allow it to basically escape this cryobank, as he called it,
00:42:45.420this prison that the modernist corporatism had built for this process.
00:42:51.360Yeah, and that's sort of the thing here.
00:42:53.400And you can kind of also relate this a little bit to Spangler.
00:42:56.360Like you have these iced, fossilized cultures.
00:42:59.520These things are now permanently baked in.
00:43:01.540They're only going to be iterating upon themselves.
00:43:04.240There's not going to be a lot of dynamism in here.
00:43:06.700And that cultural meltdown you can definitely see even here in the United States.
00:43:10.000And to build off of what we talked about in the previous episode, or even consumer identities.
00:43:14.440Remember, there are now two that are considered successful movies that are just biopics about products.
00:43:20.720And in fact, you can go even with three, really.
00:43:22.620You have like The Founder with McDonald's and Ray Kroc.
00:43:24.880You've got one about Air Jordans with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
00:43:29.820And then you have one about like the Flaming Hot Cheetos, which of course got in trouble for some sort of racist allegations or whatever.
00:43:36.000But 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.
00:43:48.660Like those things are sort of just like locked in.
00:43:53.340And 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.
00:44:00.700And 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.
00:44:10.880And 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.
00:44:21.720Even a lot of churches are like that now.
00:44:23.840We're like, what kind of music should we play?
00:44:25.400Well, based on a demographic study, it says this.
00:44:28.420And we don't even use the word church anymore.
00:44:30.100We just call it like the crossing or something like that.
00:44:33.220And so all these things just get commoditized based upon algorithms.
00:44:35.940And they're just sort of built in now for all future economic planning.
00:45:35.880So once again, we have this system that is, as you point out, just self-referential.
00:45:41.160We have market studies leading to market studies.
00:45:43.440AI that wants to take those market studies and synthesize it into more effective ways to create a more tantalizing market.
00:45:51.380These processes are increasingly just leaving any true human interaction, any true human interest behind.
00:46:01.520And instead, you have the biological aspects and the ways in which it can change the market.
00:46:11.440It 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.
00:46:49.720...schizophrenizing the system's dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tau-drenched special economic zones.
00:47:02.220A 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.
00:47:38.240So, basically, the Eastern Marxism, they're talking about the special economic zones here, right?
00:47:45.680So, you have a communist China, but communist China allows for, basically, capital advancement in these specific zones.
00:47:54.340But, 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.
00:48:05.500Instead 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.
00:48:20.340Capture them inside these human security systems.
00:48:23.120And 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.
00:48:36.660Yeah, 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.
00:48:45.660And this has allowed them to more or less sign on to various practices or, say, like the Paris Climate Accords or anything like that.
00:48:52.520And then to basically just turn around and ignore anything that they had said to placate the West.
00:48:57.400And in doing so, they're the ones that are going to keep building things.
00:49:00.760Now, there are a lot of things that I would say kind of go against them.
00:49:03.880And some of them I'm not sure I can say on here.
00:49:06.020But I think that one of the things to consider is that they just had, like, a nuclear-powered submarine, like, sink in port.
00:49:13.240There are some things to say that there might be some kinks in that model.
00:49:16.060But 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.
00:49:24.860And in doing so, like, they're not going to deregulate at all.
00:49:27.840That 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.
00:49:36.180But instead, we've witnessed the sort of loyalty to the party, loyalty to the nation, loyalty to the people.
00:49:42.720And if you are going to try and pursue something for yourself, you will be guilty of it, and the state will execute you.
00:49:48.560And 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.
00:49:59.120And whereas in the West, and we're about to see here, the fate of conservatism just gets more depressing.
00:50:06.180Neoconservatism junks paleorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed cynicism capital is saturated by critique,
00:50:15.940and that it merely clocks up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy.
00:50:24.400Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry and denunciations of the spectacle cell interactive multimedia.
00:50:34.120The left degenerates into, again, I'm not sure exactly how to pronounce this, socrotic, which I have down here.
00:50:42.960It's the military or police influence over governmental policy.
00:50:47.200Collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction.
00:51:13.440It becomes fuel for the advertising agencies.
00:51:16.660And the left just becomes this desperate attempt to kind of create this police-military complex to control this process.
00:51:26.080It'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.
00:51:40.220Yeah, and I think that this paragraph's got a lot that you can really break down here.
00:51:45.200I think one of the important ones, of course, is that, you know, it's always saturated by critique.
00:51:50.480It nearly clocks up theoretical antagonism.
00:51:52.840With 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.
00:52:03.420Beautiful loser syndrome continues even as it tries to, quote-unquote, not be neoconservative.
00:52:08.920We can sell communist iconography, whether it be, like, the Hope Obama posters or, like, Che Guevara t-shirts.
00:52:15.420Like, those ideologies, and by extension, it's hagiographies of its martyrs, you know, like, remember the martyrs of labor or something like that.
00:52:22.860All 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.
00:52:30.680And in doing so, it allows you to say, well, like, not my, you know, not my cat.
00:52:34.860I 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.
00:52:40.220This is why you still get that Western visceral disgust to, like, say, Chinese TikTok videos about animals being eaten in a certain way.
00:52:45.600But 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.
00:52:54.140Well, America, we've witnessed this a lot, especially at the DNC.
00:52:57.320Like, 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.
00:53:06.380And we also want self-identification, that human desire for being, you know, validated or being seen.
00:53:12.140This is why you have the intersectional identitarian framework.
00:53:15.060It doesn't matter what letter you are under the alphabet soup of people, you are heckin' valid.
00:53:18.960And in doing so, you know, you've now created a way to be repressive, project your actual tactics onto the enemies.
00:53:25.920That's why you see every Democrat pundit being like, Trump will weaponize the FBI against his political enemies.
00:53:30.980It's not like you don't do that against white people anyway.
00:53:33.140And the real danger comes from elsewhere.
00:54:15.040This is itself a snapshot of a certain time, a certain read on the way that history was going to move.
00:54:21.040I 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.
00:54:33.460So it is certainly an interesting thing to review in light of that as well.
00:54:37.720But that said, we will go ahead and stop here because we're approaching an hour.
00:55:25.880I had one just out earlier this week for the Old Glory Club about that lovely phrase, nothing ever happens,
00:55:31.120as sort of a way that people try to keep out news and psyops from their mental system and good psychic hygiene.
00:55:38.620But 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.
00:55:45.260We talked about the 24-hour-a-day, 7-days-a-week news cycle and what that means in the digital age
00:55:50.880and how it feels like history and our perception of time is always going faster.
00:55:54.700It fits very well with this little stream that we just did here, if you're interested.
00:55:59.760And by all means, you can, like I said, find me anywhere where The Amphibian is.
00:56:03.360And I appreciate coming on, as always, Oren.
00:56:05.540Absolutely. Only the finest frogs here on the show.
00:56:08.580Let's go to Perspicacious Heretic here.
00:56:11.040He says, I acknowledge my part in adding hard words to say.
00:56:26.340If you don't stumble over a few words, are you even reading Nick Land?
00:56:30.120Robert Winesfield here says, is consumerism the GAE religion?
00:56:35.160It's obviously a critical component to that.
00:56:37.760I, 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.
00:56:48.580Or 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.
00:57:00.920But consumerism is certainly something that is at the beating heart of it, which is which is why I think it's important.
00:57:06.980You 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.
00:57:18.920And 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.
00:57:30.940Yeah, 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.
00:57:49.760Because 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.
00:58:06.700And if you don't work, you will not eat and you will die.
00:58:09.020Like 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.
00:58:18.680And 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.
00:58:32.820No, 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.
00:58:41.460It's been around before the little O Marxism is just not there in this sense of the term.
00:58:47.500I think Gottfried is absolutely right.
00:58:49.400And 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.
00:59:00.300Yeah, I'm relatively sure that, you know, socialism pre-existed Marx as well.
00:59:04.640Marx, you know, Marxist socialism is not the only strain of that, though it obviously is basically become synonymous at this point.
00:59:11.800So, you know, Marx is certainly working in something, you know, and was was revolutionary and heavily influential on it.
00:59:19.960But 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.
00:59:27.700Also, 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.
00:59:38.480But 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.
00:59:44.840And so he is using the language that is taken seriously by Pierce at the time, but he himself was not necessarily embracing Marxism.
00:59:55.480He was using Marxist analysis of critique or critique of capitalism on a regular basis.
01:00:01.060But it is pretty notable that, you know, pretty important that he is embracing that.
01:00:56.540But 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.
01:01:07.820And I mean, also, if you want to talk about like where Nick Land is now.
01:01:10.720Well, I mean, Nick Land is considered a fascist by all of his old CCRU friends.
01:01:15.540I mean, there are people that openly disavow him despite loving his work, who are who are just leftists to the core.
01:01:23.180And 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.
01:01:35.600I think it's just it's important to look at this because I use leftist language all the time.
01:01:39.780I'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.
01:01:49.480Yeah, there's a there's a channel called Theory Underground and the to give them their due.
01:01:55.160They have a really good series on Nick Land, even though they are they are definitely people of the left.
01:02:02.960They certainly would would seem to be probably describe themselves as Marxist.
01:02:07.420But it's really funny when they get to all the neo reactionary stuff, get very angry.
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01:03:06.660This is also going up on Rumble again.
01:03:09.800I got the Rumble channel uploads working again, though, for some reason, I still can't get the stream direct over there yet.
01:03:17.440But 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.