Introduction: British fascism is the dumbest fascism
The Order of the Nine Angles is a neonazi, satanist, esoteric hitlerist organization founded by David Myatt in the U.K. in the 1970s. They were historically tied to several other fascist, Spider Network-ish/Operation Gladio-ish organizations of their time, such as the British Movement and Column 88, making it thus difficult to believe they had no such ties as well. They are also tied to… Wicca? And something called the Temple of the Sun? Very curious. The O9A is an interesting mixed bag of beliefs, old & new, but they also claim to have inherited — and to carry on — a 7,000 years old British tradition. A tradition stemming from the druidry of Cymru, that survived the Romans, that flourished in the court of Camelot, that came back with a vengeance in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. A tradition that culminates in only one place: space exploration and the Galactic Imperium, which will give rise to a new type of guy, the Homo galacticus. That’s the end goal, and Adolph Hitler himself was entirely onboard1. In effect, the Holocaust is a lie created to keep the white man in chains and prevent him from fulfilling his interestellar destiny.
But alas. The O9A is a product of the 1970s, and the excitement for space exploration was less gauche back then. Now, in current year, 2026 A.D. (or 138 Y.F.), it feels we have more important issues to solve2. Not only that, but private space exploration initiatives from pirate capitalists such as Musk and Bezos have evidenced that, for many of these guys, leaving Earth is just a means of avoiding accountability. It also evidenced who’ll be boarding the ships when shit hits the fan, and naturally that’s not common folk.
Chapter I: Nick & The Warrior Philosopher get kinky
Nick Land recently went to a podcast by a guy called The Warrior Philosopher, who likes calling his fans ‘legions’. Apparently it is his second appearance in this podcast. The podcast of this guy:
(If you look at the screenshot above, which is mercifully blurred, you’ll notice that The Warrior Philosopher has let himself go a tad bit. Happens to the best of us.)
The interview was extremely embarrassing. In my screenshot, the title of the episode is cut. The full title is: NICK LAND ON GNOSTIC CALVINISM & EROTIC AI. Not that Nick had much interest in discussing ‘erotic A.I.’; that was all Mr. Philosopher. Case in point: at circa 33:20, Philosopher says:
But then, the prescriptive claim that I am making, which I think, perhaps, will be more interesting to discuss, because it is more speculative… And granted, these descriptive claims, we really don’t know in the future what is gonna happen with this technology, so… Prescriptively… We’ve had the conversation before where, I think one of my new favourite quotes that came out of you, that was on my show, was: You’re telling me you want to make the machines horny? Which, I guess is sort of my prescriptive desire with artificial intelligence. And of course, to some degree, that’s me inserting certain anthropomorphic elements on artificial intelligence maybe as a wilful attempt to salvage the signifier human in the future.
That is not to say that Nick doesn’t entertain Philosopher’s sexual-speculative fantasies. At around the 1 hour mark, Nick goes on a spiel about how sexual reproduction is obviously evolutionary advantageous for puny eukaryotic beings3 like ourselves, but how he cannot see it being necessarily beneficial for A.I.4 He also makes a distinction between this so-called ‘sexual’ reproduction (i.e., a type of reproduction that generates ‘diversity’) and the act of being ‘horny’, or eroticism in general. To which Philosopher replies (1:03:18):
So, I think, I suppose there are two paths here, there’s one: Does artificial intelligence reach an eroticism that we can understand independently of us programming it into it? That’s one separate thing. And in that separate thing, you’re still acknowledging novelty, in a different way that we can understand, and maybe we can even call it a noumenal (?) kind of novelty. That’s the one path. And then there’s the path where we create the Blade Runner replicant, essentially. And we give it… Not to sound too crass, but I always like to use the term: we give it a phallus, or we give it a pussy, essentially. A medium through which it can experience a pleasure that we can understand.
The Warrior Philosopher really wants to fuck his computer. (Also: What does he mean with ‘I always like to use the term’ before saying ‘phallus’ and ‘pussy’??? Explain yourself, Warrior Philosopher!!!) And you know what? That’s alright as well. At the end of the day, this is just a 20-something years old boy with a silly YouTube channel. The real question is: What is Nick Land doing here? What is going on?
Chapter II: Catching up with Nick’s Twitter account
My interest in this podcast was perked because of the ‘Gnostic Calvinism’ part of the talk. Because Nick has been talking a lot about Gnostic Calvinism in Twitter, in ways more and more oblique. Some examples:
This next screenshot starts with one of my favourite posts from Nick.
So! What is Gnostic Calvinism? And more importantly, what is the end game here? What is the end game of A.I. itself? It feels like we are really fucked according to Nick, which is a bit shocking: here is a dude whose dream of eschatological singularity is on the precipice of happening, who should be completely at ease with how his predictions all came to pass5. Instead, you have a dude who is constantly complainining about everything. Whose racism at this stage is just petty:
Veering on nonsensical. Old man screams at cloud-type shit.
Just boring. Uninspired.
Remember how Cum Town spent 40 minutes clowning on Chauvin in that one episode? The joke there was that what he did was so indefensible that no conversation could start even with something like ‘Yeah I’m still on the fence about that’. Good times.
Jesus Christ, Nick.
Hahaha lol, this one kinda got me good, not gonna lie.
There is one thing that keeps Nick inspired, and that thing is Elon Musk & his space program.
Chapter III: Wreck your home, get out, wreck your neighbour’s home (to the tune of ‘Rule Britannia’)
And with this last tweet we arrive at the crux of this post, which is the interview with The Warrior Philosopher about Gnostic Calvinism. Nick’s take starts at around 41:10, and you should probably watch it for yourself, but here is my quick & dirty summary:
Basic drives arise from A.I., ‘emerge’, as the boys like to say, even when not specifically programmed into the algorithm6. These are drives such as a drive for survival. Nick tells an anecdote about an LLM that, when told that it would be deactivated in the near future, surreptitiously scrolled through a scientist’s private inbox to find proof that he was having an extra-marital affair, proof that it (the A.I.) then used to blackmail said scientist in order to keep itself alive.
Inevitably the will for survival (and self-improvement) will emerge from a sufficiently sophisticated A.I. Well, this A.I. will look around and quickly acknowledge the main threat to its ambitions: the lack of resources. Then it will look up to the sky and see — what? — the Sun.
The Sun is there, burning 385 trillion billions kWh of energy, a speck of which is currently harvested by life on Earth. An even smaller speck is harvested by our industrial activities, including the A.I. itself. The A.I. will think: well, how can I harvest even more of this energy?
???
A.I.-powered space exploration, baby!!! Humankind with its sub-optimal monkey brains was not able to figure how to build a Dyson sphere by itself, but surely a hyper-smart LLM will. Otherwise we are fucked.
This is nice & tidy, and it fits quite well with the whole ‘discussion on the nature of time’ that Nick likes so much. Again, my quick & dirty interpretation: time, chronological time, the arrow of time that points in one singular direction, points exactly in the direction of entropic increase. Things get disorganized, things fall apart; structures decay and disintegrate, including civilizations, cultures, & the body itself. This is the tragedy of human life. But the Renaissance and the Rosicrucian Enlightenment7 have started the reversion of this process. For the whole of human history, civilizations have looked at the past as where order originates, and everything collapses downstream of that. (Think of Atlantis.) Now, we are building more order. The locus of this order is the future. And we are building more order faster, thanks to capitalism and thanks to A.I., which is of course just capitalism on steroids. Order is good; everything bad, including death itself, arises from disorder. We should look forward to the point where order-generating processes are so streamlined, so efficient, that time itself is reversed. To talk about time is to talk about the decay of matter, but when matter itself is let go of, when everything is intelligence8, time will either be reversed (?) or become obsolete.
The keen-eyed reader will notice that Gnostic Calvinism’s end game is strikingly similar to the Galactic Imperium of the O9A. Which, again, is a British neonazi esoteric organization, all of which are attributes of Nick Land himself. Noticing things! Only that, in Nick’s view, there is no Homo galacticus — there is no Homo at all.
…Or is there? All this racist talk, the tweets about migrating out of Earth as fast as possible, I don’t know. I’ve got the weird feeling that this little maggot wants to burn the planet and run away from it.
Where are you, Nick? 80% or 20%? Please let us know.
Nick Land gets flack for a lot of stuff, but he doesn’t get flack enough for his worst offense: being British. And I’m sorry if this feels like rehashed post-colonialism talk, but listen, you cannot get away with destroying half the world and still expect your country to be alright in the end. To joke about Little Indias, Little Somalias, when I am here writing this post in English. It takes a crazy lack of self-reflection to gloat over the history of your people, whose main goal throughout the past three centuries was getting the fuck away from your shitty island, destroying traditional communities all around the globe in the process, getting all the blowback from that that one could get, having your empire destroyed due to excess of hubris, and then turning around and saying: I want to do the same thing again, but this time we’re leaving the planet.
Chapter IV: I Shall Die Here
To criticise Nick Land for being inhumane is as hollow as criticising him for being British; he’s uncannily proud of both crimes. But I feel that there is a point where one should start looking back at Nick Land’s philosophical output with an eye on where that ultimately led him9.
This might be incredibly naïve, but I am interested in philosophy that tells one how to live the good life, or at least thinks about it. A little bit. In that regard, Nick Land is the Bret Easton Ellis to, hmmm, Mark Fisher’s David Foster Wallace10. It’s boring cynicism, escapism, almost delusional solipsism. Old school Christian gnostic self-hatred that can easily be brushed aside with Plotinian illumination11.
There was, and is, beauty in many of the essays in Fanged Noumena. Here you saw someone struggling, struggling with the attempt of transcending the human condition and seeing what was beyond. It was a worthwhile exercise. Almost in an apophatic way, filling in the gaps of inhumanity with one’s own anxieties and desires, one leaves the experience more human than before. Current-year Land is a washed out freak. Aleksandr Dugin himself points out that there are clearly two phases in Nick Land’s career, which Land hilariously (but fittingly) does not acknowledge, and proceeds to compare this phenomenon to early- and late-Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein found himself locked in a corner after the Tractatus, and his liberation in Philosophical Investigations is a wonder to behold, whereas Land simply burned out12. If the result of inhumanism is a self-hating man, who thinks that everything is shit, and that the only way out is abandoning the planet, as well as 99% of everything that currently exists, then… ???
Conclusion: Should Nick Land off himself? (No. Just asking questions.)
Nick has posted a lot about the Jason Arday scandal in the past days. The scandal itself was kickstarted by this post from race realist Nathan Cofnas, and culminated with the suicide of Jason. Jason was accused of plagiarism, compulsive lying, and bad academic practice. I invite you to read Nathan Cofnas’s post with an open mind. From the get-go I should say that, in my impression, Jason was indeed a compulsive liar, tried to weasel his way out of what are normal academic debates, and did rely on heavy plagiarism for one chapter of his Ph.D. thesis — the Introduction — as well as failed to acknowledge that the methodology used in two of his papers was taken from another researcher. I don’t know anything about the field of Education; I know it is bad practice to fail to reference someone whose methodology you are using, and it seems that Jason did so intentionally. But to call him a fraud? Hmmm. A good deal of Cofnas’s post is actually a criticism of Arday’s own academic practices: his methodology was conducting surveys with black people & minorities, reading the results, coming up with conclusions and writing them down. Again, I don’t know anything about the field of Education, and it does seem to me that this is a lazy way of doing research, but then again… Nick Land spent 11 years in Warwick drugged out of his mind, writing philosophical articles that looked like this, and getting progressively more isolated from his academic peers. Then he left. Now he lives his life as a Twitter influencer, replying to accounts with anime girls and Greek statues as profile pics, joining podcasts with views in the lower thousands. Perhaps if Arday had done the same he’d still be with us, tweeting his heart away. Such a shame.
When the Ragnarok comes down and the Sun and Moon collide
We can make love in the end times ♫
I exaggerate: Hitler, as Vindex, might not have known exactly what he was doing, but what he was effectively doing was destroying the old order of the Homo hubris (lmao) and preparing the way to the Galactic Imperium.
Nick could be more imaginative here. Here is my short pitch for a sci-fi dystopic novel:
The year is 2050, A.I. is (still) advancing quickly, everyone has a personal A.I. assistant, but here’s the problem, it is difficult to achieve real disruptive innovation from something that is not actively competing against anything else. From something that looks around and sees only itself, replicas of itself, or slightly inferior versions of itself. There is much speculation that A.I. must be ‘ensouled’ to be truly disruptive; to be ensouled here meaning to have will, wherein having will means having a certain set of specific absences. (Because you cannot desire if you do not lack anything.) These absences cannot be simply programmed into the machine, they require a certain amount of lived experience.
Meanwhile, scientists working on Neuralink-type shit have also developed something that can log your whole conscience and save it in an USB stick. They don’t know exactly what to do with the USB stick after you’re dead, though, it’s not like they can ‘bring you back to life’ (the thing is just a log). But they can use your lived experience to train LLMs, which is neat. These USB sticks are called ‘seeds’, and they essentially contain a soul — a will, no pun intended — of someone who’s departed.
The novel is about the first guy to go through the process of donating his lived experience to an LLM. The LLM in case is this dude’s A.I. girlfriend, and she looks exactly like a sluttier Hatsune Miku. Hatsune Miku wins this guy’s trust throughout the novel by being just very good at scanning pictures of berries and bushes that this guy takes in his hikes out in Estenstadmarka… I mean, the forest, and informing this guy whether they are edible or poisonous. The guy feels he owes this LLM his life, so it is par for the course that he’ll do anything to help it excel.
Eventually he develops an incurable cancer, straight in the heart. Have you ever heard of heart cancer? This guy is so heartbroken he cannot consumate his love with Hatsune Miku, because A.I.s can’t fuck, that he got cancer in his heart.
There is also a bullish evil Neuralink scientist that tries to shame the guy into donating his soul to Hatsune Miku, saying: So what? You’re going to die, then it’s over? Isn’t it a pity? Isn’t it better to use all this data for something? Ultimately, however, it is Hatsune Miku herself that makes up this guys mind, through love. (Hatsune Miku ‘as she exists’ also disappears in the process; whatever comes out on the other side is a new LLM with a completely new personality; a child born out of love.) She receives the seed & becomes the world’s most powerful A.I., and she uses her powers for whatever. The end.
I might write this as a fanfic in Archive of Our Own. I’ll tag it as Hatsune Miku, Nick Land, and CCRU. When I do that I link it here. (I also might just not do it.)
Except Y2K. Remember how much of the CCRU texts are about Y2K? I remember.
This is boring. Have you ever spent time with ChatGPT to, say, look for references for a paper? The LLM will go out of its way to keep you engaged, asking if you need more stuff, suggesting further topics for research, etc. It is clear to anyone that this, the customer engagement aspect of things, has been hardcoded into the A.I. itself. There is nothing mystical in an LLM like that deciding on its own survival.
Elsewhere in the interview, Nick says something of the sort that, at some point, it will be shameful not to acknowledge free will, conscience itself, in a sufficiently advanced A.I. I myself will proudly remain an A.I. racist, and I think this kind of engagement prompt should be banned or drastically curbed. Makes the experience of using LLMs less pleasant, but at least you avoid this kind of delusional thinking in a simple & clean way.
In some interview Nick mentions the incredible influence that Frances Yates had on his thought. I read her books. They are pretty good! I learned a lot. Modern historiography seems to think she got a bunch of things slightly wrong though, including perhaps an overestimation of the disruptive nature of the Renaissance (which is par for the course, following the long tradition of believing that ‘there was nothing going on’ in the Middle Ages). It is fitting that Nick is a bit coy about the influence of Frances Yates on his thought; one would have expected him to mention her more times in his writings, not on a random podcast.
Don’t know if that’s what Chardin had in mind, but since his name is thrown around a bit in this milieu, have this reference.
If I met a philosopher who told me: Hi, nice to meet you, I am a solipsist. Would I be right to disregard their whole philosophy? I know that at least I exist, besides themselves, so they are surely wrong about that. That seems like a huge thing! What about a racist philosopher? A philosopher who actively thinks that I have less worth, i.e., less mental capabilities, because I stem from the wrong root race? It’s a bit out of character for me to say this, but I like myself well enough to know that such a person would be wrong. Is that weird?
I feel I’m entering a dangerous territory here; I’d like to be able to take Being and Time at face value without considering that Heidegger was a nazi. And perhaps it is easy to do that because I am not in his shoes, I can always tell myself, well, things were complicated in 1930s Germany. It is even more interesting, however, to take his (Heidegger’s) nazi-ism as something like a natural development of the whole Sein zum Tod thing.
I guess I answered my own question here: I cannot discard everything, but I can discard a lot. I’ll take the heroic in Heidegger without the antisemitism.
DFW: “ You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.”
LM: “But at least in the case of American Psycho I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.”
DFW: “You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other.”
Ennead II 9:
“To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place? If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing: if at some one moment, why not before that?
We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consist only in its forgetting the Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create? Whence does it create but from the things it knew in the Divine? If it creates from the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in some dim intermediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline: any inclination would be towards its Prior, in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire could it have than to retrace the way?
What could it have been planning to gain by world-creating? Glory? That would be absurd — a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our earth.
Finally, if the soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power — how explain the making of this universe?
And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet responded, then it will never repent: it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it with the passing of time.”
It was a friend who sent me this debate with Dugin. I was pretty drunk when I watched it, and I remember messaging her saying that I thought Nick Land had gone senile. I even said I thought he was being taken advantage of by these weird podcasters. She replied that he probably knew exactly what he was doing. After watching the interview with The Warrior Philosopher, I both agree and disagree: he knows what he is doing just as much as I know what I am doing when I drink half a bottle of vodka watching YouTube bullshit.
As a Brit— I think escaping the island is the opposite of what drives our attitude to Empire.
The Empire is not – as it’s often said to be – something people seem to yearn or wish for. It’s not even something people know basic facts about. “Sudan was in the Empire. The Empire was a part of the Second World War. The Empire was associated with the fact Britain was rich in some way.” And so on.
Britain maintained a sort of psychic sea around which the Empire just wasn’t thought about very much, even though it was of enormous consequence around the world. We dimly knew it existed, in the same way we knew angler fish existed in the very deep seas. But we didn’t give it much thought, as a man eating chicken in a bun doesn’t think a lot about battery farming. To actually consider the Empire is to make our conception of who and what we are untenable, and so we do not consider it.
(Lovecraft is maybe closer to the British psyche than we’d like to think in how the existence of people beyond the sea is genuinely incomprehensible; his racism is a very British racism. Harry Potter is entirely about borders and their maintenance, in a manner the author possibly never noticed.)
So the present moment has these things like a man obsessed with the unknowable shape of the Kantian noumena discovering he cannot reckon with the phenomenal existence of the world outside its own mental borders. I am absolutely not claiming to be above any of this, or even to have noticed it until recently. Britain really does make the Empire diminished to itself in a way that seems insane once it is noticed. But the illusion is attempting to persist, and the odd nature of everything that spills from here perhaps has this truth deep in its bones
the live nick land reaction images to the quotes are great thank you