Land is also explicitly referencing Omohundro and his Basic AI Drives in his work, e.g.:
"Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics." [0]
"Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive." [1]
You threw this elsewhere but I want to reiterate here, this is a really impressive work! I'm glad someone is out here piecing together all the shards of the vase like this.
Thanks so much! This project ended up being far more involved than I expected, given how scattered and arcane Land's work is. It's always nice to get some appreciation!
The `noproc` option kicked me out of HN before I could respond, so I've been waiting 3 hours to say - this is fantastic stuff. Impeccable research and presentation! It's just... beautiful.
Perhaps tangential, but is that even based on some existing package for such publications, or is it an entirely custom frontend? I'll be happy to know more about how this project came to be, from both the technical and the academic perspective.
The frontend is built with Svelte (still on version 4) and SvelteKit. The project does not use any pre-existing package for publishing. The CSS is completely custom. The font is a custom build of Iosevka [0], which uses a diamond-shaped "0" to emphasize the centrality of zero in Land's work (e.g. Zero-Centric History [1]).
The project itself came about after a close friend sent me a picture of a Land book he had found at a library. I had read Land years ago - he was one of the reasons I got into coding - and it just struck me that I had never built anything related to his work. I was always fascinated by his capitalism = AI thesis, so I just dove back into his work and started building.
This is basically Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism and AI are identical.
> "I dunno. It's what the models said."
The obvious human idiocy in such things often obscures the actual process:
"What it [capitalism] is in itself is only tactically connected to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades us for its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage. We contemptuously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we have understood something about capitalism, rather than about what capitalism has learnt to think of the apes it arose among." [0]
Beyond timeline predictions, what's interesting are the Singularity's hyperstitional effects - how the very concept creates real causal impacts in the present:
"The Singularity prediction ripples backwards through waves of pre-adaptation, responding at each stage to eventualities that are yet to unfold. Change unspools from out of the future, complicating the arrow of time." [0]
I think what Accelerationism gets right is that capitalism is just doing it - autonomizing itself - and that our agency is very limited, especially given the arms race dynamics and the rise of decentralized blockchain infrastructure.
As Nick Land puts it, in his characteristically detached style, in A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:
"As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won't be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally — which is to say completely inevitably — the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You're finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh." [0]
Correct - Nick Land, often regarded as the father of Accelerationism, affirms Marx's fundamental insight that "the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative" [0], though his interpretation aligns itself with capital and its autonomization:
"Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital [...], has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means." [0]
I'm working on Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism and AI are fundamentally identical. [0]
Land's provocations and politics often serve as an excuse to avoid confronting his ideas on the convergence of markets and minds - especially for those low on decoupling. My bold claim: without engaging with Land, it's nearly impossible to grasp the current moment or anticipate what's coming next (e.g., the autonomization of capital).
AI is potentially the philosophical rupture as it might entail the automation of philosophy itself. As Nick Land put it in footnote 6 of Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy:
The techonomic horizon, for 'us', coincides with the impending crisis of historically-actualized artificial intelligence. Encapsulated within this by now manifest potential is the comprehensive automation of philosophy. [0]
AI also fundamentally challenges human identity:
The Human Security System is structured by delusion. What's being protected there is not some real thing that is mankind, it's the structure of illusory identity. Just as at the more micro level it's not that humans as an organism are being threatened by robots, it's rather that your self-comprehension as an organism becomes something that can't be maintained beyond a certain threshold of ambient networked intelligence. [1]
"Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics." [0]
"Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive." [1]
[0] https://retrochronic.com/#pythia-unbound
[1] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality