DC Posch and Wolf Tivy read Meltdown from Nick Land, the prophet of 21st century artificial intelligence and runaway capitalism.
Transcript
Introduction to Meltdown (00:00)
Wolf: “The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization takeoff. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.” It goes on like this with wonderful phrases such as “nanospasm” and “nothing human makes it out of the near future.”
DC: The near future. Right.
Wolf: So some weeks ago, I hosted an event we called the Nick Land Acknowledgement. So Nick Land has been a big influence on me for the last 10 years, I guess, from reading his blog, “Xenosystems,” and of course, such wonderful texts as “Meltdown,” which we just heard from. And it was very interesting to see the kind of changes in his thought and in the world around him, the ways in which he’s been prophetic and the ways in which things have updated. And so I wanted to bring on my colleague, DC Posch, a fellow student and reader of Nick Land, to discuss this prophetic cyberpunk text—”Meltdown” and some samplings of “Xenosystems” and more recent—happenings. So DC—
DC: Great. Glad to be here.
Wolf: Yeah, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming. I’m your host, Wolf Tivy. DC Posch is a fellow San Franciscan and comrade in our various activities here. So we read “Meltdown” some weeks ago in our book club, and we’ve been reading “Xenosystems” again.
These are works that you read many times. Yeah. So why don’t you give us your impression of the overall thing? You, I think, suggested that we read “Meltdown” in the first place. So how do you see the importance of this text?
DC: Well, I think the really fun thing about Nick Land is that he’s a really out there, really crazy person, right? Who gets less crazy with every passing year. And you read “Meltdown,” and it’s from 1994, and it’s written in this very sort of self-consciously esoteric and absurd and extreme style.
Wolf: This was a lecture he gave in person.
DC: Yes. And he’s on CCRU, and he’s talking about the world being dissolved in the acid vat of technocapital and all of this. And—
Wolf: Back in the ‘90s. People were listening to Nirvana and...
DC: Exactly. And you reread it now, and it still feels pretty nuts, but much less so than when it was written. And it just makes it inherently interesting. And yeah, I think we can explore some of that and what that feels like right now versus there’s still all of these deep eschatology questions about the end of the world and what this is all heading towards, versus the fun practical questions of what’s the next 10 years look like? What can we do about it?
Techno-capital and evolution (03:36)
Wolf: So I think most appropriately, we should start with kind of an overview—of the text as we read it. So “Meltdown” is a short essay. It was delivered as a lecture. It’s basically telling the story, the story goes like this, right? It’s telling the story of what is happening to mankind for the past few hundred years with, as we move towards the singularity.
I think 1994, if I’m not mistaken, that might be the same year that Vernor Vinge kind of coined one of the major formulations of the idea of the singularity. And so this is this idea that’s been kind of underground in science fiction circles for a long time, the idea being, of course, that artificial intelligence can further improve itself rapidly, outpace—everything that humanity is, and ultimately replace us as the kind of driving force of history. So this is this idea that’s been around since the very idea of—computers was formulated in the ‘50s and then again in the ‘60s. Various thinkers have proposed this idea that the machines will take off. Nick Land, the author of this, marries that to the Marxist tradition of thinking about capital—capitalism and what capital does.
He divorces the Marxist tradition—from kind of thinking that it will reach any kind of steady state or—or that there’s some kind of eschatological communist end times. And he says, “What if it just keeps going?”
DC: What if—
Wolf: And this is sort of the accelerationist theory within that. And so this document is basically describing what does it look like for the world to be kind of dissolved—by this process? And another—key thesis that he has, which I think is really interesting and important and distinct from even still guys like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who imagine—a much more singular—agentic kind of intelligence. Nick Land imagines artificial intelligence take off as this kind of ambient process that’s almost, well, in his terms—invading from the future, where the whole world is kind of coming apart at once—dissolving into this larger future artificially intelligent space—as it’s sometimes called. So Meltdown is the story of that, so—
DC: Yeah, you say the Marxist version of capitalism, I think also the capitalist version of capitalism. I view Land as like a—I think one way to read him is as just like a successor to Adam Smith, who has—
Wolf: Interesting. Yeah, he would definitely appreciate that characterization. Especially these days, he’s really into the Anglo-Protestant—tradition—of thought, which Adam Smith obviously is—highly cited within.
DC: Well, here’s what I mean by that.
Adam Smith has this nice metaphor of the invisible hand. And it describes, basically, capitalism as a kind of force that’s bigger than any of us—that’s sort of reaching down and putting everyone into his quasi-optimally allocated place. And he has all of these wonderful examples of the pencil factory, and the pin factory, and whatnot. And you could imagine a world that just runs very smoothly, all watched over by the invisible hand—in the absence of technological invention. So it’s like—technology is static.
No one’s really making any non-incremental progress on anything. However—all of the factories run really smoothly, and all of the bakeries run really smoothly, and all of the farms run really smoothly, and this is because the invisible hand is doing its magic.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s allocating things in equilibrium. Yeah.
DC: And I think, writing from inside the 1700s, the pace of technological invention doesn’t look very fast.
Wolf: It makes sense. It’s like, okay, the major thing that’s happening—if you’re looking at the world through the lens of the 1700s is—the rise and fall of empires—as their institutions improve or—as their people improve. So he’s writing, addressing that. Saying—”Well, look here, if we have these institutions, we’ll get better results.” But in a sort of steady state way, right?
If we have high level of institutional—adoption of these capitalist kind of ways of being—then we’ll be a wealthy nation. But yeah, and Nick Land is sort of proposing this—
DC: Yeah. And he’s taking it this big step further. It’s like, yes, there’s an invisible hand, but it’s reaching from the future and yoinking you. And the way that it does this is that capitalism is this competitive process that mirrors evolution by natural selection in a bunch of ways.
Wolf: Right. It’s a Darwinist process. Yeah.
DC: And just like evolution by natural selection, it’s not some stagnant, static set of species. Like new things. Oh, sorry. New things are being invented all the time. And so this becomes a competitive process where it’s like—okay.
Wolf: And an innovative process.
DC: Totally. I think one concrete example of this that people love to talk about is just Moore’s Law. Where once that pattern was set in the ‘80s, early ‘90s, whenever, right? Actually, even a little bit longer than that, before that.
Wolf: It was identified in the ‘70s, I think.
DC: I think it might have even been the late ‘60s. Don’t quote me on that.
Wolf: I think it was the ‘70s, but yeah. We’d have to look up the numbers.
DC: By the ‘80s, ‘90s, it became competitive. It became all of these organizations in and around semiconductor world, were trying to basically meet this bar—that was an exponential bar. And so that version of the invisible hand looks very different than the sort of cute, nice—Simon Sarris allocating everyone to their spot in the pencil factory or the farm version.
Wolf: Well, let’s not harsh on our boy Simon, but—
DC: Yeah. I’m not—
Wolf: But the New England world
DC: I love his account. It’s very beautiful.
Wolf: The New England world—
DC: But you know what I’m saying
Wolf: of, yeah, frozen things.
DC: It looks more scary to us from some angle.
Prophetic claims and AI doom (09:56)
Wolf: Yeah. And so Nick Land obviously places himself—in the Whig tradition—which is the tradition that sees some kind of progress, linear progress towards end times. These days, he really emphasizes that religious heritage, actually—of what he’s doing. At the time of “Meltdown,” he’s not emphasizing it at all. It’s purely economic, right?
And even, we also, in preparing for this, we read some key works in Xenosystems, like—
DC: “Hell-Baked”
Wolf: “Hell-Baked” in particular—was one that we were looking at. And even there, reading it, it’s like I’m struck now by how little of the sort of ecstatic religious fervor is present in his work even then. And that’s only 10 years ago. And how it’s evolved since then on Twitter and so on, is that he’s gotten much more enthusiastically religious about the whole thing. Which is very interesting.
But yeah. So he’s kind of taking this Marxist tradition, he’s taking this Anglo-Whig tradition, and he’s taking the kind of science fiction, AI—speculation traditions—and he’s welding them together—as this new cosmic story of what—what’s actually happening to the world—and putting it in this extremely vivid terms of kind of like—the relapse into bacterial sex. This is kind of the communist idea of all that is solid shall be melted into thin air, right? It’s this meltdown process—of everything being melted down in that way. And kind of vividly describing what that will feel like from the inside as projected through 1990s cyberpunk kind of stuff.
DC: Yeah. Because he was writing “Meltdown” what? Just two or three years after “Snow Crash” and a few years—after “Neuromancer.” He was in this vein of—
Wolf: Yeah, he’s right on the cutting edge at the time
DC: of cyberpunk.
Wolf: Yeah, and the interesting thing, of course, is that he remains right on the cutting edge. I don’t think there is any edge that’s cutting it closer to what’s going on than the things Nick Land is talking about now. And it’s interesting to see how it’s all evolved. And so I want to, I guess, okay, let’s dwell for a minute on the actual substantive claims of meltdown. So, in particular, the one that’s always getting quoted, “Nothing human makes it out of the near future.”
Some people think it’s metaphorical. Some people take it very literally. And it’s definitely one of the bolder—statements in the whole thing. And I think this is meant, I think, literally in the sense of we’re looking at the takeoff of machine intelligence, of the capital means we use to accomplish things, pulling a means-ends reversal and becoming the main story—to the point where the human can kind of be discarded through this iterative process, but at some point, there’s just nothing left of the human as we know it. There’s only this machine runaway process.
And that’s the key kind of prophetic claim—that I think it even predates Yudkowsky, right, and Yudkowsky’s doomerism about AI. Yudkowsky writes in 1996, which is two years after this—
DC: Actually, you know what it reminds me of? There’s a long history of, I think in religion, of—you have an initial prophet of some kind who kind of says something—that’s mythopoetic, and then you have people who come in after this person who take it extremely literally—and go on crazy fatwas on their over literal interpretation—of the thing. Maybe that’s what happened here. I don’t know.
Wolf: Yeah. The interesting thing is I don’t think Yudkowsky ever directly responded to or read Nick Land. And that’s an interesting thing. And I think only somewhat more recently, in the last few years, have the followers of Yudkowsky started engaging with Nick Land. And I’ve been on both sides of that.
Yudkowsky and control failure (14:13)
Wolf: But 1996, Eliezer Yudkowsky, 16-year-old kid, writes “Staring into the Singularity”—basically saying, “We’ve got to do this.” This is the ultimate accelerationist text if you read it.
DC: That’s hilarious.
Wolf: It’s like, “We’ve got to go straight into the singularity. It’s going to be more than anyone can imagine. It’s going to solve all problems. It’s going to be way smarter than us, and therefore able to solve all problems.”
DC: Yes. 16-year-old Greta writes—about how we need to mine all of the coal in the world. No.
Wolf: By 2003, he realizes—
DC: That’s funny
Wolf: he’s wrong and totally reconstructs himself. He says, “I disavow that person. I am no longer that person.” “Actually, this is completely crazy.” “It’s going to kill us all.”
DC: He becomes a born again.
Wolf: And the interesting thing about Nick Land—is that Nick Land represents both of those theses. Right? It’s both let’s go into the future—and it’s going to kill us all. And so, I think Yudkowsky’s actually an interesting foil here. So, he spends the next 15 years, basically, since 2003, trying to kind of specify the version of—the singularity that can turn into global coordination, lockdown of the meltdown process to prevent it from dissolving everything that is solid and everything that we love.
And that mission, in my estimation, they haven’t quite admit—not all of them have admitted it, but in my estimation, that mission failed. They were unable to—create the mathematical and philosophical foundations for how that could even work. And that’s an interesting point—again, where Nick Land has been vindicated, is that through his work in “Xenosystems”—and implicitly in “Meltdown”, it is not possible, in his view, to arrest this process or control—this process. The process is escape from control. That is the whole picture.
And—
DC: Yeah. And to be honest, I think you’d have to dig really hard in the history of technology to find cases of people successfully stopping one from being invented in the first place or—exercising a lot of sort of affirmative top-down control over how one turns out as it’s being invented.
Wolf: Yeah, and or shutting it down—
DC: It’s just kind of not how technology works
Wolf: shutting it down once it exists. And we’ve been debating this point somewhat—recently over the point—over the question of like—is it possible to shut down AI at the current time? And the salient example that I brought up is like—
DC: Yep. The Germans.
Wolf: as a refutation that it can never be done is, well, the Germans have in fact shut off all their nuclear power. They went up in a big exponential growth, then they flat-lined for a while, and then they shut it all off for some inscrutable German reason. And—
DC: And/or Russian or Chinese reason.
Wolf: And/or enemy action. Yeah. But—
DC: Yeah. That worked out great for them
Wolf: it’s debatable whether that lesson generalizes. Germany’s not entirely a sovereign country. Maybe it’s enemy action. Maybe it’s—
DC: I think though, regardless of the reason why they did it—it’s worth noting how totally ineffectual it is. China right now is building a new nuclear plant, and I forget whether it’s every three months or every six, but—
Wolf: Yeah. China’s building more nuclear—
DC: they’re popping them out.
Wolf: China’s building more nuclear plants than Germany can shut down, basically. That’s the way it is.
DC: It’s so funny. It’s like the German Green Party managed to get the—the nuclear plants shut down. And then there was that famous Twitter post. It was those two childless older ladies being like, “You know what feels good is shutting down your last nuclear plant.” I’m like, “All right.”
Wolf: Oh, my God. Yeah.
DC: Tough spot to be. And—Locally in Germany, it backfired directly in the sense that Germany ended up using a lot more coal. And so they backslid a bunch on their CO2 goals that had previously been the only thing the Green Party would talk about. And even that is completely drowned in the noise. If you look at global CO2—it’s completely dominated by countries that are actually doing things, not by countries that are choosing stagnation—
Wolf: That are failing to do things
DC: some form.
Wolf: Yeah. And this is a big part of the Nick Land acceleration—this meltdown, escape from control thesis—is that, while you yourself might be able to commit suicide—the other guy won’t necessarily do it. And in fact, whatever lineage chooses not to commit suicide—will become the future. And so there’s always—
DC: Not everyone’s going to drink the Kool-Aid.
Wolf: Right. There’s always this kind of—proliferating escape out the side—of the asymmetry between life and un-life. And this is the foundational kind of projection of Nick Land’s work is—looking at that asymmetry—especially in the area of intelligence. And kind of projecting it forward, what you get is this total meltdown process—this total dissolution. Nothing is solid except the laws of nature.
The unknowable future (19:21)
Wolf: And that’s—
DC: So one thing about that, though. I mean, maybe I’m just misinterpreting or misunderstanding here, but I’m pretty confident that when he says nothing human makes it out of the near future, that he does mean that metaphorically, at least in the sense that it’s not knowable. I think his most interesting answer that he gave, at least to me the most interesting one—at the Nick Land Acknowledgement is someone asked him what doom looks like, and he said that’s idolatry.
Wolf: Yeah. It’s idolatry to try to answer—
DC: You’re asking—
Wolf: the question too literally. Yeah.
DC: You’re trying to basically paint the shape of the unseeable. You’re trying to ask sort of detailed fact questions about the unknowable. You have to just trust the plan. And so, the way I view it is like—nothing human makes it out in the sense that the things that are going to be escaping are going to be maybe dominated by machine intelligence. There’s a lot of people who sort of think that.
Wolf: And certainly different in kind from us. Like we are inherently—this transitional form. We’ve been around for—depending who you ask, like—several thousand years to several hundred thousand years—to several million years. But it’s certainly, if you look at the—big picture history of—life, we’re some kind of crazy takeoff hockey stick, and we’re halfway up. We should not expect—to last.
DC: Exactly. And at the same time, I don’t think it means anything nearly as literal as like, oh, the Skynet mosquito zapper bots will go and find every last one of us. There’s versions of doom that are actually very pleasant for us and our—successors.
Wolf: Yeah. I mean, to put it crudely, the goon doom, but—
DC: Okay. There’s that one. That’s the Brave New World ending. There’s National Park Earth. There’s Zoo Earth, which is a little bit less—optimistic.
But I think this idea of fundamentally we don’t really know, this is kind of basic observation, but it’s different from previous things. You could imagine someone saying, “Oh, we just invented the railroad.” And if someone was really farseeing and clever, maybe they could make some interesting predictions about what that leads to, or, “Oh, we just invented”—
Wolf: Yeah. Like for example, you know—Marx kind of—projecting like, “Oh, well—the capitalist process—eventually leads to the automation of all labor or something-” utopia.
DC: Totally. And you can say, “Oh, we just invented gunpowder.” Maybe someone can close their eyes and think really hard, and they can imagine trench warfare from having seen the first—gunpowder go off. But inventing intelligence, that’s a different category of thing that’s inherently less predictable, and so like—it’s unknowable in this way.
Wolf: It’s inherently less predictable, and sort of in some way, all you could do is kind of bound it—in the sort of relatively harder natural laws, thermodynamics, evolution, competition, economics.
DC: Survival of the fittest. Right.
Wolf: Yeah, survival. And that’s what Land is going on—is saying—we can’t really predict what this thing’s going to look like—internally, and we can’t bound what it’s going to look like internally. This is where he differs from Yudkowsky, right? Is he thinks it’s not possible to bound it internally. Which means that it’s going to run up into those physical limits.
And basically out-compete anything that isn’t—running into those physical limits.
DC: There’s a lot of people in the sort of more AI safetiest world that are very smart in some sense that have maybe IQ points on both of us. But I’ve yet to hear any of them really convincingly say what it is they’re actually intending to do. And it does feel like it really rhymes with a lot of the classic hubris mythology stories about flying too close to the sun—and whatnot. It’s like, “Oh, we’re going to make this thing that is smarter than us, but we’re going to first get a bunch of our smartest guys to go and do a bunch of blackboard math at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. And then we’re going to figure out how to imprison the really smart thing and make it follow our rules.”
I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen.
Wolf: Yeah. Of course, they wouldn’t quite describe it that way. They would describe it as like giving it stable agent foundations so that it’s able to—reliably follow its actual goal system, which we’re going to give it—some version of our goal system—or some extrapolation of our goal system. But yeah, effectively—there’s two big factions within the, let’s call them the doomers or the AI safety people. Faction number one is what you said, just the friendly AI faction—or variously called AI safety—but which is just a less honest framing of the whole thing.
But basically, they want to build the AI that’s actually going to take over the future and take over the world—and is going to have some stable goal system, contra to Nick Land’s kind of diagnosis of the situation. Faction number two is the people who think that’s too hard, we have to just stop building AI. We need a global pause on AI development. Which also looks extremely difficult and Land would say almost for the same reason—which is that the thing cannot be contained once it’s going. And—
DC: And number three is the actual Land people who are like—
Wolf: Yeah, and this is—
DC: no, yes, unknowable, yes, accelerate.
Wolf: Yeah, and this is maybe what I found a little bit annoying. I have, in my history, hung out with a lot of the AI safety people. I’ve donated to the AI safety people. I’ve tried to collaborate with the AI safety people. Until it sort of became clear that that line of thinking could not actually lead anywhere.
Xenosystems and synthesis (26:00)
Wolf: And this has been my engagement—with Nick Land over the years, has been sort of realizing that he’s right and they’re wrong. And yeah. And what frustrates me is people don’t take his work seriously enough as the cutting edge. And it actually is the cutting edge. And the things he’s engaging with now, and before we get to even what he’s engaging with now, we should also fast-forward from Meltdown to 10 years ago, Xenosystems, which was his blog—kind of further elaborating his whole thesis within the context of what was called neoreaction.
Which was this sort of intellectual movement born out of the work of Mencius Moldbug—who we now know as Curtis Yarvin.
And basically connecting that to these bigger questions of techno-capital acceleration. And what he started doing there, obviously further elaborating the ideas of Meltdown and things like—Hell-Baked, where he kind of gives a theoretical foundation. It’s like generalized social Darwinism. We live in a Darwinist world. Everything is competition.
Everything that is good comes about through this competitive process, which at the time, he’s describing in horrorist terms as—
DC: Everything good comes from hell
Wolf: everything good comes—
DC: That’s right
Wolf: from hell. And at the end of the essay, he basically concludes with, “If everything goes well, which it surely won’t, all that we have to promise is eternal hell.” And he says, “But it’ll probably be worse.”
So I mean, that’s his attitude at the time. He started playing with this horrorist framing—which interestingly has dissolved over the last 10 years. He’s much more optimistic now—although I don’t think saying anything different. But what he starts to do at the time in Xenosystems is engage with two other strains of thought.
DC: He’s the bus meme. He moved from the wall side of the bus to the lovely vista side of the bus. And he’s looking out the window now.
Wolf: He’s fundamentally on the same bus.
DC: But he’s on the same bus.
Right. Right.
Wolf: So, the other two strains of thought that he’s starting to bring into his schema, besides what he calls—techno-commercialism, which is kind of what he’s working on with Meltdown. Meltdown is very much—a techno-commercialist kind of straight understanding of the future. Then he brings in ethno-nationalism—and what he calls theonomy, or what we might call—theocracy or religious thought, theological thought. And he sees himself as in an unstable alliance at the time, and an unstable alliance with these strains of thought. And it was sort of this—weird tension of like—well, we’re all kind of here for Curtis Yarvin’s ideas and for Nick Land’s ideas, and for the questions of the future, but we don’t know, are we coming at this from an ethnic or racialist stance?
Are we coming at this from—a religious stance? And it’s all about—responding to modernity as a religious phenomenon—or religious failure, or are we coming at this from a techno-commercial stance, responding to democracy and the degenerative ratchet—in modern society as a problem for technology and progress.
DC: Right. Versus now—
Wolf: And sort of he’s ma—
DC: Yeah. Now you see Land posting about Restore Britain every day.
Wolf: Yeah. And so the interesting thing is that at the time, these were definitely separate. He’s definitely coming at it from a techno-commercialist lens. Now he has integrated—the other two into his thought. In particular, so at the time, the religious thing was much more Catholic.
It was the so-called trad Catholics were kind of very present at that time. There was a big moment of trad Catholicism, latter half of the 2010s, early 2020s.
But Nick Land now has been explicitly championing this worldview that he’s been developing as a continuation of the Anglo-Protestant tradition—very much against the kind of Catholic—tradition. And it’s—
DC: And this is—
Wolf: invisible hand Protestantism. It’s Whig history, right?
DC: Let me give you a version of that, right?
Wolf: Yeah. Go for it.
DC: I think this is why I feel like he’s a spiritual successor to Adam Smith, right? There’s this idea that exists in, I mean, in a lot of Catholic societies, but in a lot of other societies as well—to an even a greater degree, honestly—of, you could call it sort of patrimony, right? Like authority flows from the top down. Resource allocation flows from the top down.
Wolf: There’s some kind of fixed social order.
DC: You have your hacienda by the grace of the king. The king has his kingship by the grace of God and whatever. And it kind of flows down in this pyramidal fashion. Versus, the Adam Smith idea is more of a cellular automaton. It’s like you have a bunch of agents that are out there—that are each pursuing the divine in their own way.
It’s a Protestant idea. And they’re each pursuing commercial gain in their own way. And it all somehow adds up to this greater whole. And then if you add accelerating technological progress to that, then you have something that’s already very close to Landianism, I think.
Wolf: Right. Yeah, and if you place him in that tradition, you have—I think Newton, Adam Smith—Darwin, and Land. Those are four figures—that I would name as being on a line kind of—religiously almost. And so this is what he’s now developing is he—at the event, he was calling it,
DC: Gnostic Calvinism
Wolf: Gnostic Calvinism. Referring to basically the simulation hypothesis as a variant of Gnosticism and the kind of doom thesis, the AI doom thesis—as a variant of predestined judgment—from Calvin. But,
DC: He is a professional troll. He’s very good at it.
Wolf: It’s fun. But I think more generally, he’s placing it in the Anglo-Protestant tradition now. And in “Xenosystems,” he developed the idea of Gnon, right? Nature or nature’s God. Which is obviously the God that Jefferson invokes in the Declaration of Independence.
But basically being this theologically open-ended way of talking about the divine without trying to pin it down, in what he would now call an idolatrous kind of—definitiveness. But it’s definitely a very Darwinian kind of idea of God. And so incorporating that, he’s almost developed this whole religious tradition. And so that’s the way he’s sort of synthesized the religious arm of the problem with this techno commercial arm. But he’s also recently been synthesizing in the ethnic arm.
Right? With the question of, is it possible to have this kind of society of acceleration and capitalism and freedom for individuals and all these ideas—without the actual English people whose—folkways that is, right? And, so he’s—
DC: And he’s writing all of this from an apartment in Shanghai, let’s not forget.
Wolf: Yeah, of course. He’s in Shanghai. We all live in multicultural societies. So it’s like there’s all these wonderful ironies—that he’s grappling with as he works through that. But he’s definitely directly thinking about the ethnic component and—whereas I think previously he would’ve described the ethnic dimension, the ethnonationalist dimension, as being odious and sort of an uneasy fellow traveler.
Now, I think he’s directly incorporating it as a necessary—component of—what it would mean to kind of have this kind of accelerating society.
The problem of suffering (33:40)
DC: Let me give you two angles on it. There’s one side, and this is sort of the... So talk about the religious side first, right?
Just clearly and empirically, there’s this historical connection between a lot of sort of accelerating progress and modernity in Northern European Protestantism. These things have a connection. At the same time, I think, a lot of these religious cultural tendencies, it’s like they have two wolves on each of their two shoulders, right? For example, talking about Anglo-Protestantism, a lot of the most extreme variants of woke are also direct descendants of Anglo-Protestantism.
Wolf: Yeah. No, and I think actually the same tradition—the—
DC: Sort of bifurcates in this different way. And it’s the same thing with Catholicism, right? You have in Catholicism tendencies that are very...
They take sort of an extreme line on the Sermon on the Mount and on—the idea of the last shall be first.
Wolf: Yeah. This is liberation theology.
DC: Take it very literally. There’s a whole strain of Catholic socialism. And on the flip side, you have men like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, right? You have people who’ve reconciled Catholicism with the reality of evolution, and with the idea—that there’s an accelerating process that’s going somewhere. And I mean, just all of the sort of big, beautiful, fancy, high-level philosophical stuff aside, just empirically, it’s like, okay, the people who are currently helping migrants get to Spain and the people who did the Reconquista were both Catholic, right?
These things can all just sort of go both ways.
Wolf: Yeah. And it’s interesting, actually, the point—about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is interesting. Nick Land, I wrote about this in Palladium—my article, “God Hates Singletons,” where I analyzed Landian thought—with respect to the question of kind of whether a single AI can take over the whole future. One of the things that I commented on in that one is the fact that Land’s worldview is actually very structurally similar to Chardin’s. He’s in some ways the Protestant de Chardin.
DC: Right. That’s right.
Wolf: And I think they’re actually independent. They certainly come from very different traditions. They’re constructing a very, like—it’s not apparent at first that they’re really talking about the same thing. But they’re both talking about the incarnation.
DC: They’re both talking about an omega point in their—two different ways.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, they’re both, I mean—in particular, talking about the incarnation of God—into the world or the logos into the world through the vehicle of this—kind of accelerating—evolutionary—process—that’s becoming increasingly conscious—
DC: Yeah. That’s right
Wolf: as the system develops. And so I found that to be very interesting. But I want to go back to dwelling a little bit more on kind of the strains of thought that came out of “Xenosystems.” And another big element of it that I have seen change in the last 10 years with Land’s—thought is, at the time of Xenosystems, he’s very much emphasizing the horror, right? The horror of the whole thing.
We read “Hell-Baked” just before this to kind of—
DC: He’s gotten more optimistic.
Wolf: Yeah. In Hell-Baked, everything is made in hell. We promise you eternal hell. And the whole thing is just everything’s going to be destroyed, but he’s sort of a little bit gleeful about it, kind of smashing your face into it a little bit. But now—
DC: He was a bit tongue in cheek, right? He’s saying everything that is beautiful and great comes from hell, and he’s—referring to basically—the mechanism of how evolution works.
Wolf: Yeah. And I think though that when he’s doing that—it’s almost like he’s kind of drawing on a tradition of moral intuitions that are obsoleted—by his actual thought. And when you propagate those sort of back through, the idea that the evolutionary process is unfathomably cruel, for example—is based on certain moral premises that I don’t think actually hold up once you—once you adopt a Landian worldview, and the whole thing actually comes to look—
DC: And it’s also—
Wolf: a lot more—optimistic.
DC: And it’s also just, okay. Yes. I think it also just doesn’t stand up to empiricism. It’s like if you go on a hike in the woods, right? Like—
Wolf: Yeah, unless you’re Werner Herzog, you’re not like—”This is suffering”
DC: You’re not like, “Oh wow—
Wolf: “This is terrible”
DC: what a terrible place. All of these birds that are chirping are in hell.” And yet, they’re chirping as a result of evolution, right? All of these things—are there for that reason.
Wolf: Whereas—
DC: And it’s beautiful
Wolf: but over at Oxford—the dour philosophers, of course, are saying we should pave over the jungle because it’s all just suffering. But—
DC: I do think this, okay, this connects to one thing that I do think is very important and very underexplored that we should talk about briefly—which is this. It’s basically, I think, there’s this moral question that’s kind of at the heart of it around what should more intelligent beings do with their compatriots, whatever, less intelligent people, whatever is around them. And what do they owe them and vice versa, right? Which is, and I think right now, honestly, there’s a lot of ugliness and a lot of incoherence on this topic. You look at how we treat pigs, right?
We put them in a gestation crate. They live in this nasty, horrible situation surrounded by metal bars, standing in their own poo, right? That’s what actual hell is, by the way. Not evolution out there. The wild boars are having—a good time.
Wolf: Yeah. Mind you, of course—this is part of a—natural process of techno capital acceleration where everything is becoming commoditized—and instrumentalized. And so it’s like, okay, so you have to kind of challenge—this is the hard moral core of what Land is doing. Is saying, “Yes, let’s go look at that horror, and then let’s dwell on it until we figure out—how do we relate to it?”
DC: Here’s my—yeah
Wolf: I want to bring the example—of the ichneumon wasp, which is something I occasionally talk about, which is—
DC: The what wasp?
Wolf: The ichneumon wasp, which is Darwin brought it up as an example of a creature that no loving God could have created. Because what the ichneumon wasp—
DC: Right. It’s like a bot fly. It’s one of these horrible—insects. Yeah, I know it.
Wolf: What the ichneumon wasp does is it lays its eggs in caterpillars, living caterpillars.
DC: Yeah. It’s disgusting, yeah.
Wolf: And then they grow into an adult wasp inside the caterpillar, and then eat their way out. And so there’s these very challenging—from a sort of, naive kind of—cuddly perspective, I don’t know how else to put it—it seems very terrible.
DC: No, that’s right. I mean, the—
Wolf: And likewise, the pig—crates. And so you have to—kind of process, it’s the problem of evil, right? It’s like what—how do you process the existence of this kind of stuff—in the world, and what does it mean in the larger order? And the way I kind of process—it, and again, Nick Land is sort of inviting us, especially in recent years, to approach these questions theologically. And it’s like, okay, what kind of world do we live in?
The sovereignty of God (41:26)
Wolf: We live in a world of basically uniform law and freedom—essentially. We are free to act in the way we will and face the consequences of that under our own power. And this is the kind of world that—whoever built this place, the simulator or God—or however you want to think about it, the anthropic sort of principle, however you want to name it, whatever built this thing, built it such that—the world brings forth all this beautiful stuff that we see, but it does so without fiat. Right? It’s not just—from nothing, but without...
It is all learned the hard way. And so the whole process is kind of this learning the hard way, learning beauty and goodness and life the hard way. And that maybe makes it, in my view, a lot more meaningful than just God snapping His fingers, and it’s the Garden of Eden, and the lion lies down with the lamb and nothing—and because if you trace that logic, nothing has any meaning—because there’s no structure of interaction to give it form, right?
DC: The theological question of whether the Garden of Eden means that nothing has any meaning is above my pay grade. But—
Wolf: Yeah. So we can put that aside for now.
DC: I mean, I—
Wolf: But the point I’m getting at is what seems to have happened in Nick—Land’s thought and what’s happened in my thought in response to Nick Land—is kind of coming to appreciate that process, trusting the plan—a lot more.
DC: Trusting the plan. Yeah
Wolf: and Nick Land seems to have gotten a lot more optimistic. When he came to San Francisco, I asked him actually, “What are we doing well? What are we doing wrong here?” He says, “I don’t have any criticism. San Francisco’s burning like a torch.”
DC: Burning like a torch. Yeah. That’s a good line.
Wolf: And then his general sense of things is very optimistic, even with respect to human extinction and so on. Just like, “Yeah, maybe it will, maybe it won’t.” And so he’s very much a plan truster now. And I find that a very interesting development through this kind of amoral cyberpunk accelerationism of meltdown to the horrorism of Xenosystems to now his kind of more religious era where he’s... It’s very optimistic actually.
DC: You know what?
Wolf: Even though it’s still talking about the same process.
DC: I think there’s something natural about it. I think there’s something natural and reasonable. Basically, Land has always been someone who is more curious than judgmental, and someone who—has a descriptive rather than a prescriptive attitude, right? And this was true even in the meltdown days. He isn’t like, “Well, we should be dissolving—everything in a vat of techno-” He’s like, “No, this is what’s happening. I’m here to observe. I’m David Attenborough.”
“I am narrating the jungle—
Wolf: Yeah. No.
DC: of techno capital for you—into my microphone.” And so what happens to someone who has a curious and descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude when they’re in their 60s? They’re at peace. He’s like, “Yeah, this is happening.”
Wolf: This is how it is. Yeah. Trust the plan, guys. God has it under control. Yeah, exactly.
DC: Exactly. So I think it makes a lot of sense. And, it’s just fundamentally a nicer way to go through life—than to go through your life in the crying Wojak, shaking your fist at it.
Wolf: Yeah. Seething that you’re not able to overcome God. Which is ultimately the doom of the kind of the—
DC: That you’re not able to bottle the genie and—whatever, put the uranium back into the earth, and whatever other people think about.
Wolf: Yeah. Well, this is sort of as I dwell. I actually came from the Yudkowskian tradition much more—than the Landian tradition. And Land kind of convinced me eventually. But in the—in the Yudkowskian tradition, what I realized of bottling the genie—and trying to kind of create friendly AI, I realized that what they’re really trying to do is overcome God, right?
And sort of negate the sovereignty of God—and set up our perfect system that’s going to make us comfortable without having to rely on any trust. We’re not going to have to trust the system at all.
DC: No.
Wolf: We’re not going to have to trust any plan.
DC: No.
Wolf: All we have is our own will—our own—self-reflective, artificially intelligent super—super system. But like—
DC: I think it’s, yeah. It just doesn’t work
Wolf: it amounts to trying to overthrow God, and like at the end of the day—the end result there is realizing that you can’t, and then just seething about the sovereignty of God.
DC: Right. And even if you—
Wolf: And it’s like it’s total dead end.
DC: And even if you could, which you can’t, it would be ugly, right? There’s this idea of like what if we had gestation crates in both directions. We have downward facing gestation crate for the pig. We have upward facing gestation crate for this super intelligence that we’re going to bottle it up—within inside of all these bottles. That’s not how it works.
And then, the reason I brought up this or I said, “Oh, I think this is a big moral question is,” I think—people have really incoherent attitudes towards the less capable, right? There’s an attitude in certain parts of SF like, “Oh, these people are less capable. We have to let them do whatever they want.”
Wolf: Right. Yeah. We see this on the streets. Yeah.
DC: There’s another attitude towards like, oh, we’re going to just maximally abuse and squeeze every last cent out of this system of—
Wolf: Yeah. This—
DC: just nasty stuff
Wolf: this is the sort of the gambling app types.
DC: Exactly. It’s like, well, you have to basically reject both of these things, and I think accept some concept of stewardship. Which is like what does a national park ranger do, right? They’re not there to micromanage the bison—and teach them how to sit and spin. They’re also not there to put bison in gestation crates because that would be—ultimate ugliness.
Wolf: Yeah. And they’re not there to enable the bison in—any kind of vice either. They’re—
DC: They’re there to enable them in a very zoomed out and quite beautiful sense of like—hey, give them the environment within which they can thrive. And I think that’s basically what a higher intelligence owes to... And I think the more that we can sort of model that and live that and make that a reality in our own society—the better of an example that we set for our successors.
Wolf: Yeah. I think that’s a good point. And so I dwelled on that—question a lot—in Palladium Seven, where we started talking about these environmental questions. When we did Palladium Seven, I remember—it comes down to that. It’s like what is our relationship to the natural world around us?
And pulling on these kind of Landian threads, I realized, well, none of that has any future, none of this conservation or stewardship has any future if those systems serve no purpose. And so ultimately, what we have to do is understand whether and how those things serve a purpose for us. Whether it carries some spiritual weight or some information—it’s a ritual, or it’s an ecosystem that we actually rely on—to have in a healthy state so that we can have it cycling—our carbon or these various other things like clean water. And the way you have to think about it, let’s put on our optimizer hats, the sort of people that would put the pigs in crates, and say, “Okay, well, why shouldn’t I put the pig in a crate?” And—you have to start thinking about the whole social organism and this is where I have an interesting tension, I guess, with Nick Land.
It’s like the meltdown thesis in particular sort of presumes the dissolution of all these larger social organisms. But I actually think—
DC: Which I don’t think is true at all.
Wolf: Yeah. I think there will be these larger social organisms.
DC: It’s not true at all in the sense that just empirically, if you look at how all of the acceleration... Land identifies acceleration as something that’s been going on for a long time. Right? And the tendency this entire time has been towards higher and higher levels of organization—higher and higher levels of organized conflict, all of these things. And so the idea that this is going to just suddenly reverse and turn into some singleton—at the end of time doesn’t make any sense.
Wolf: There’s no singleton and there’s no bodies without organs, right? These are the sort of two poles of—what it could be, but actually you get an incredible amount of structure, and there’s going to always be an incredible amount of structure. Even if everything is overturned and dissolved, new structure will take its place. And so the question is what is the relationship of that structure—to the systems that live within it, which are somewhat independent. And it is, as you say, creating an environment in which those systems can thrive as part of a larger—order that needs them.
Stewardship and concluding (50:07)
Wolf: And for example, the mitochondria. Right? The mitochondria, maybe at first they were in a gestation crate. But over time, the mitochondria have been modified so that their highest fulfillment—and their highest flourishing is found sitting in the cell and processing the energy in that way. And I think similarly—if we put on our meltdown hats and think about—the gestation crates, the further—version of that is, well, you modify the pig into some...
I mean, people were talking about, what is it? The bodyoid or something. Some sort of—
DC: You can do lab meat
Wolf: lab meat version where it’s like a pig who doesn’t have a brain or something.
DC: That isn’t suffering, yeah.
Wolf: And it’s not suffering because it’s actually—
DC: That’s clearly—
Wolf: much more designed to be in that role.
DC: Yes, exactly. And that’s clearly a less ugly way to make bacon than what we’re currently doing.
Wolf: But the thing to notice there—is that by optimizing according to the nature and really going for the cutting edge, the thing in fact becomes more beautiful and less ugly. And that’s an interesting thesis of—
DC: That’s right.
Wolf: And that’s why you trust the plan, right?
DC: That’s why you trust the plan. Okay, but I think, and maybe this is the other point of the disagreement. I think one thing where we have an easier problem as Christians is we don’t have to try to justify life in terms of what is it useful for. It’s like there’s an element of life is an end in itself. Living things have a spirit, and to go back to the national park example, not to harp on it too much—but they’re not doing it because they want to make bison burgers.
They’re not doing it because they’re useful.
Wolf: No.
DC: They’re doing it because they’re beautiful.
Wolf: Yeah, but let’s say it’s part of our larger spiritual social order—
DC: That’s right
Wolf: that we do this.
DC: That’s right.
Wolf: And it’s part of our commitments to each other and to—the world that we want to live in. It’s a garden in some way.
DC: That’s right.
Wolf: This is why in the essay that I wrote for Palladium Seven, I call it the rise of the garden empires.
DC: That’s right.
Wolf: Because what we’re talking about here is we are actually—gardening some part of the Earth as part of our internal order. But it’s in some ways—ornamental.
DC: I think this is the closest that you get to heaven is some kind of garden fractal—where you have big, very wild things like our—
Wolf: The English idea of heaven is an English garden.
DC: Right. You see what I’m getting at. You have big, really wild ones that are basically just like, “Oh, this entire area is a nature preserve.” And you have something like the whatever hunting grounds that’s a bit more manicured. And then you have an actual literal garden that’s sitting behind a house.
Wolf: Yeah, you have these gradations in these things.
DC: And all of these things, they kind of serve their own purpose. But there’s sort of a fractal of stewardship of, okay—we’re taking care of these beings, and then they’re taking care of their beings. But it’s in a way that isn’t too—utilitarian.
Wolf: Yeah. So I think to finish the thread on how this meltdown stuff applies—so first of all, yes, even under the meltdown future—unhuman—superintelligence, we may see things like that—of ourselves even perhaps living in some garden—that is now beyond our control. On the other hand, we will definitely eventually see a war within that world—that overturns all of that, because there will always be churn, especially in these symbolic—spiritual, internal orders of things. And next time there’s a major war—all the sort of stuff that is not needed directly for war mobilization gets thrown out. We get another arms race, a—piece of history and things get more wonderful on some dimensions and less wonderful on others.
But ultimately the—plan works out for the better.
DC: Well, we haven’t bombed Yellowstone yet. We have been in a few—
Wolf: We haven’t bombed or mined Yellowstone yet. I predict that it will eventually happen. But—okay, so that’s all our interpretation of Land’s work here and his evolution—over time. But I think the challenge with this accelerationist thought has always been, okay, great, this is totally accurate—as a view of the world.
DC: So now what do you do?
Wolf: Now what? How do we actually engage with this? Because one version of it is this very cheap, there’s this paper, “Gender Acceleration: A Black Paper.” We should review that sometime for our audience of students here.
DC: Oh, no.
Wolf: But basically, it’s like that one is this totally maximalist throwing yourself into the absolute inhumanity and dissolution of the future—dissolving your own gender into the machine and stuff.
DC: Sure. And I think Land directly wrote about some of that in “Meltdown.” He’s like—”Oh, there will be—
Wolf: No, of course
DC: teenagers experimenting with non-human body parts and—modifying themselves in crazy ways and all this.” Sure.
Wolf: And so that’s one view of things. And I sort of caricature, let’s say, effective accelerationism, so-called, or some of the more naive accelerationists as essentially doing that. They’re essentially just cheering on the process—in a way that is self-sacrificial, which I think is incorrect. And so then at the other end, we have the doomers trying to get control of the whole process. And in the middle, we have people basically acknowledging the process and building up their own agency, using its elements, recognizing that they’re mortal—but trying to achieve something—in the meantime anyways.
And I think that—that golden mean is—where the action is. It’s like this stuff does not make—
DC: And it requires a certain level of humility. It requires a certain level of humility. If your attitude is like, “I’m going to control the light cone by figuring out how to create the machine,” that’s not humble.
Wolf: It’s not humble at all, and it’s incorrect.
DC: And it’s incorrect. If your attitude is like, “We’re going to improve our own society in order to set a better example for the future, in order to better come into accordance with whatever you were calling it, our spiritual and cultural software.” However you want to phrase it. That’s achievable. I think one concrete thing that—gets under-discussed.
And by the way, the EAs, they have sort of a cartoon version of this with the whole shrimp welfare meme. But I do actually think that animal welfare is underrated and important. And one reason why I think it’s underrated and important, by the way, is also because I think it’s a great opportunity to create contrast with China, for example. They’re our biggest geopolitical adversary, obviously, and they have a horrendous record on animal rights specifically. I was going to say human rights both.
Wolf: Yeah. No, they’re really awful on animal rights. Yeah.
DC: Right. And right now, we have limited standing to say anything. We’re doing the gestation crate thing to our own pigs, right? And so it’s like, we should knock that off. We should get that done by whatever it takes.
You know?
Wolf: And I liked your point—that actually how we behave now—the patterns that we establish now—are also the patterns we’re going to be living under in the next 20 years, right? And this is this classic observation, right? The imperial boomerang, whatever things you do overseas—
DC: What goes out must come back.
Wolf: What goes out must come back, right? So it’s like—there’s some karma at some level—of behave... Well, Jesus taught us—treat people as you would wish to be treated, basically.
DC: Kant says this also, “Handle so that his maxim of thy action may always at the same time serve as the principle of a universal legislation.” It means like—act in a way that your actions can serve as some basis for universal law. Yeah
Wolf: and the practicality of that is by instantiating a pattern that works—that is a living pattern—it can become a tradition.
DC: That’s right.
Wolf: And it can, it will pattern the next thing. Even if it’s against nature, if it’s against the will of God, it’ll get smacked out. But if you can find the pattern that is—in accordance with nature—that is also comfortable and just—then it’s the foundation for future life.
DC: That’s right.
Wolf: And so that’s, in some ways, our responsibility to what—comes after to the future is to—try to find the ways, to live the way that we think all beings, including our super intelligent successors—ought to live, engage in the world as if we were in that position, and so that to set an example. And also, and to pass on whatever wisdom we can. And this is the more sort of hopeful—and useful framing of what you can actually do about this AI doom stuff.
DC: Right. It’s the happy side of the bus, Land.
Wolf: Right. It’s like, no, you can’t overthrow God. No, you shouldn’t try. Just trust the plan. However, we have a role to play, which is—there’s this continuity process to life that we have to pass on—the wisdom that we can accrue.
DC: And this is also just the basic advice of basically every religious tradition since the beginning. It’s like—live in such a way that you are a good example to your successors.
Wolf: This is not exactly an obscure or—
DC: Yeah. It’s not a crazy idea
Wolf: hard to discover idea. However, it is a difficult idea. It is a difficult idea because, as you say, it requires a humility.
DC: Not an easy answer, but a simple one. Yeah.
Wolf: And the other big thing—that I think is the implication is go live like the Ubermensch, so to speak. Have the joy in—going out using the—AI systems, accelerating the system, finding ways—to get advantage because this is ultimately how—the process goes on, is through the action of agents—trying to find their advantage in the world and trying to live the way that they want to live, and doing so joyfully. This is what creates the beauty of life. This is what creates the worthwhile-ness of it all, and that’s all, as mortal beings, that’s all we were ever going to get. Right?
We were always only—ever going to get, you get a chance to live well—
DC: Yes. That’s right
Wolf: and maybe you’re remembered—
DC: That’s right
Wolf: if you do it well enough.
DC: Yes. And I think Christianity done right really says something very similar. You wouldn’t maybe phrase it exactly that same way, but your job is not to patiently sit around and follow some rules, right? Your job is to go out and act in the world and create things that—are of worth to your fellow man and to the glory of God, right?
Wolf: Yes. And yeah, and that’s why I find I was emphasizing the religious angle—to this whole thing because it does in fact, it does actually lead back to these fundamental religious questions. Trusting the sovereignty of God, basically—is the foundational thing that—where Nick Land has ended up. Starting from this crazy—cyberpunk accelerationist meltdown stuff. And it all actually fits together—really neatly.
DC: Yeah, it’s quite beautiful.
Wolf: And yeah. So I’ve found engagement with Nick Land. I’m mentioning multiple—articles that I’ve written engaging with various aspects of this stuff because this has been so influential on my thinking—for the last 10 years. And so absolutely, Nick Land’s work is—some of the most foundational stuff that we—have to be engaging with to engage with the current moment. He’s still totally on the cutting edge, even as a—much...
He was prophetic 30 years ago, and he’s still on the cutting edge. So it’s—amazing that he’s kept it up—with the stamina.
DC: Go read “Xenocosmography” on X.
Wolf: Yeah. “Xenocosmography” is on there.
DC: I think that’s a great summary, man. I think that really ties it together nicely, and it’s like, okay, trust the plan, set a good example.
Wolf: Yeah. Trust the plan, but always chimp—as you put it recently. But you got to chimp out when things aren’t going your way. But anyway. So we read “Meltdown.”
It’s a great work. Thank you so much for coming on—DC.
DC: Pleasure.
Wolf: This has been a lot of fun. I really enjoy talking about Nick Land’s work because it’s—just so close to the heart of matters.
DC: Yeah. This was a fun conversation.
Wolf: All right.
DC: Great. Thanks.
Wolf: Well, thanks everyone for watching.
DC: Cheers.
Wolf: And do the reading. We’ll see you next time.