Silicon Valley’s Favorite Doomsaying Philosopher
Nick Land believes that digital superintelligence is going to kill us all. In San Francisco, his followers ask: What if, instead of trying to stop an A.I. takeover, you work to bring it on as fast as possible?
Illustration by Chloe Cushman
In the spring of 1994, at a philosophy conference on a run-down modernist campus in the English Midlands, a group of academics, media theorists, artists, hackers, and d.j.s gathered to hear a young professor give a talk at a conference called “Virtual Futures.” It was ten o’clock in the morning, and most of the attendees were wiped out from a rave that had taken place in the student union the night before. But the talk—titled “Meltdown”—was highly anticipated. The professor, Nick Land, was tenured in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, at the time one of the top philosophy programs in the U.K. Land had gained a cult following for his radical anti-humanism, his wild predictions about the future of technology, and his erratic teaching style. Soon, his academic presentations would become increasingly “experimental”; at a conference in 1996, he lay on the floor, reciting cut-up poetry in what an attendee described as a “demon voice” while jungle music played in the background. But that day he just stood up and started speaking, his thin frame twitching under an oversized black jumper, his voice soft and halting, slipping at times into a whisper. “The story goes like this,” he began:
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.
At the time, few people had any idea what he was talking about. For most, Land’s prognostications were easily dismissed as the ramblings of a tech-addled Continental philosopher. By 1998, burnt out on stimulants and anticipating a Y2K apocalypse, Land had a breakdown, left academia, and dropped off the map.
A quarter of a century later, the world has changed. A.I. apocalypse no longer seems so far-fetched. Land’s visions of a technological revolution that abolishes the political order now appeal not to a marginalized, academic ultra-left but to the rising, Silicon Valley-aligned New Right. And Land, in recent years, has reëmerged as one of the most influential reactionary thinkers of our time. His thought has filtered into the highest levels of the tech world: Marc Andreessen, the founder of the behemoth venture-capital firm a16z, referred to Land as his “favorite philosopher,” and people who work in Silicon Valley told me that an increasing number of reading groups were featuring Land’s work. Land began to gain a new following in the early twenty-tens, when he became a key figure in “neo-reaction,” an intellectual movement that unfolded largely in the hinterlands of blogs and was a crossroads for the emerging strains of the online far right. In a long essay published online in 2012, he gave the movement a philosophical grounding and a catchy name: the Dark Enlightenment.
Like Curtis Yarvin and other neo-reactionaries, Land abhors democracy. Politics since the Enlightenment, he argues, is a story not of the advance of human freedom but of constant resource transfer from the productive to the unproductive—a world-historical tragedy of the commons that would eventually spell its own doom. Land’s main contribution to this discourse was to find a radically anti-human, science-fiction-inflected optimism in democracy’s end. He projected a future where the postwar order collapsed and uncontrollable digital superintelligence led to runaway economic growth, a rapid hierarchization of society, and the eventual rule of a transcendent force that he called “technocapital,” or, simply, “Intelligence.”
In 2008, the academic Benjamin Noys coined the word “accelerationism” to describe Land’s vision of capitalism as an unstoppable force and traditional politics as its enemy; the term was first taken up by leftists (who argued that unfettered technological progress would lead to a fully automated socialist utopia), and then by neo-Nazis (who imagined fomenting social breakdown through terrorism). By 2022, when the machine-learning revolution had entered full swing, some in Silicon Valley began to talk of “effective accelerationism” as they advocated removing any political or moral checks on technology. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted, “You cannot out-accelerate me” on X; Andreessen published his widely shared “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” calling for “the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development . . . to ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.” In 1993, Land had described capitalism as “an invasion from the future” by an artificial intelligence that had come back in time to assemble itself from “enemy resources”—that is, mankind. Three decades later, many in Silicon Valley are starting to believe that superintelligence is on the horizon and approaching fast. If A.I. takeover is inevitable, then maybe resistance is futile. What if, instead of trying to stop it, you joined it?
“Increasingly, there are only two basic human types populating this planet,” Land wrote in 2013. “There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else. For everybody else, this situation is uncomfortable.”
On a recent Tuesday night, about a hundred people gathered at a Mediterranean Revival mansion in San Francisco to celebrate Land’s arrival in the city from Shanghai, where he moved in the early two-thousands. It was clear which of the two basic human types most of the people in the room could be categorized into. David Holz, the founder of the image-generating A.I. program Midjourney, was the party’s host. Onstage, Land wore loose jeans and a dark, baggy sweater with holes in the cuffs; the thought occurred to me that it might very well be the same one from his Warwick days, when he was wont to describe himself as “a palsied mantis constructed from black jumpers and secondhand Sega circuitry, stalking the crumbling corridors of academe systematically extirpating all humanism.” Despite his avowed desire to turn himself into a Terminator, the human remains; Land is still, as his former students remember him, preternaturally polite.
This was his first public appearance in the U.S. since 2016, and he had been flown in by Richard Craib, the South African-born founder of Numerai, a hedge fund whose trades are made by A.I. The crowd skewed young and male, with long hair and sweatshirts or crewcuts and blue blazers; the women, for the most part, were either wearing miniskirts or caring for children.
Land had spent the week meeting with people in tech, and he was thrilled by what he had seen. “Everyone seems to be doing amazing things,” he said. (At Numerai, Craib told me, Land was particularly taken with the chief data officer, who was working full tilt to eliminate his own job and replace himself with A.I.) The last time Land had been in San Francisco was the mid-nineties, and the woke, nanny-state dystopia he remembered was gone, replaced by something like its opposite. The A.I. revolution wasn’t just about creating new software. This was “holy, holy, holy capitalism”: the final “breakout” of capital-“I,” nonhuman intelligence from the fetters of democratic containment.
Land has always been a controversial figure, but not for the same reasons he is now. In the nineties, at Warwick, he led the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, or C.C.R.U., a crew of graduate students, artists, and philosophers who saw in digital technology portents of revolution. Narrowly construed, cybernetics is the science behind digital computing, but the C.C.R.U. saw in it a vaster vision of self-regulating, auto-catalyzing processes. Computing, they argued, was not just a technology but the secret of the universe—the system underpinning genetics, market economics, thermodynamics. Burrowed in a sleepy university town, fuelled by amphetamines, rave music, and the end-of-history euphoria of the early internet, they hymned a future that would eventually lead to superintelligent A.I., societal collapse, and human extinction. “Monkey-flake”—that is, humanity—was mere grist for the coming machines. In thrall to visions of virtual apocalypse, Land soon saw his life fall apart. The C.C.R.U. lost its funding, and Land lost his job.
Other C.C.R.U. alumni—such as Mark Fisher, who became an influential critic of neoliberalism—eventually softened their stance, arguing that technology should be harnessed to build a more just and equitable future. But Land swerved hard to the right. In the nineties, he had told his students that the future would take place in China, and in the early two-thousands he surfaced in Shanghai, working as a journalist and travel-guide editor. He wrote articles in praise of the war on terror and posted about “flash-frying Islamofascists” in the comments sections of neoconservative blogs. In his earliest work, Land had advocated “feminist violence” and “the overthrowing of logic and patriarchy”; now he wanted to “squash democratic myths” and restructure governments as authoritarian city-states ruled by computers.
Land’s vision shares much with that of Yarvin, whom he describes as a “hero” and whose writings were the subject of Land’s Dark Enlightenment essay. Yarvin’s blueprint for a post-democratic future centers on the idea that states should be reconstituted as businesses—or, as he calls them, “sovcorps.” Yarvin was there that Tuesday night, making a much anticipated appearance. As the ballroom filled up, he walked in, wearing a natty tweed jacket and sunglasses. That evening was the first time that the two titans of neoreactionary thought would meet, and yet, when Yarvin joined Land on the stage, they didn’t seem to have much to say to each other. Yarvin tends to extreme digression, while Land speaks with the allusive compression of a guru. The conversation struggled to get traction. Was A.I. accelerating or slowing down? Would we all become managers of our own L.L.M. armies? As Yarvin free-associated on Venezuela, the resource curse, and the future of graphic designers (verdict: not looking good), Land waited patiently, seeming a little bored. Yarvin speculated that, after all jobs had been automated, perhaps people could make money selling their organs. “But our new robot overlords do not need human organs,” Land reminded him, before opening the floor.
Once upon a time, the attendees of an event like the one that took place the other week might have shied away from being associated with a figure like Land, but that night there was no sense of scandal or secrecy. The event had been organized by a man named Wolf Tivy, the founder of a futurist magazine rumored to be funded by the libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel. (Tivy declined to confirm Thiel as a funding source, and said the magazine’s funding is now entirely subscriber-based.) “Five years ago, I would have said, ‘Get the fuck out,’ ” Tivy responded when I told him I was writing for The New Yorker. “Now everything’s different.”
Tivy is right. In February, 2020, as the COVID pandemic loomed, I attended an event for Yarvin in Los Angeles, hosted by the podcaster Justin Murphy at a defunct veterans’ lodge in a gentrifying neighborhood. At that point, Murphy had recently quit academia to pursue podcasts, and had rented an Airbnb in the hopes of creating “a TikTok hype house for dissident intellectuals.” The event was Yarvin’s first public appearance since 2016, when other participants withdrew from a tech conference he was speaking at because of his advocacy of monarchism. “There is a huge demand for this—true radical, dangerous intellectual thought and discussion,” Murphy said, when introducing him. As attendees chatted over pizza and Jack Daniel’s, Thiel slipped in through the back door, joining the hipsters on folding chairs. “D.I.Y., baby, punk rock,” Murphy said. “Get a venue where you live, put on things like this. The institutions aren’t gonna do it for you.”
Six years later, Yarvin is openly fêted by tech founders and cited as an influence by the Vice-President. Land can now hold court in the ballroom of a mansion where sushi and seltzer are being served. Clearly, these ideas, and the political energy they carry, have escaped containment. But now, having spread, the new reactionary thought seems to have lost some of its momentum. “Nobody knows where we’re going,” Yarvin said, on the stage. Land agreed, adding, “I think the thing is that muddling through is the world that we are now living in.”
Afterward, I found Murphy chatting with a group outside. He seemed almost shocked by Land and Yarvin’s conversation. “They sounded like old fogeys,” he said, while smoking tobacco from a pipe. “We’ll remember this night as proof that the Dark Enlightenment is over. Think about what’s happened since then. Machine intelligence has been solved, woke is over, Trump is back, crypto is institutionalized. Everyone is still in this besieged mentality, but the bars have been lifted.”
Land’s writings from the nineties have a seductive danger, envisioning a sci-fi future of synthetic drugs, black-market brain implants, gene editing, and cyborgs. At that time, a world of true digital immersion was still decades away; like William Gibson, who wrote the eighties cyberpunk classic “Neuromancer” on a typewriter, Land, in his C.C.R.U. heyday, had a green-screen Amstrad computer, and was barely connected to the internet. But now a version of Land’s midnight future has arrived. While real-world infrastructure is left to rot, A.I. build-out floats the economy, accounting, as of 2025, for almost forty per cent of U.S. G.D.P. growth. And many of the fantasies that powered the online right during the mid-twenty-tens have become official policy under the second Trump Administration. The President hired the world’s wealthiest tech mogul to dismantle the government. The Department of Homeland Security posts deportation videos on TikTok that resemble the “fashwave” fan edits once spread on meme accounts inspired by Land and Yarvin. Out-of-control A.I. is not a fiction imagined by novelists but a reality financed by venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds. And you no longer have to go to the deepest crypts of the web to find Land: in October, on an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show seen by millions, Carlson and the self-described amateur theologian Conrad Flynn discussed Land’s ideas about A.I. for close to half an hour. “We are building the demons from the Book of Revelation with A.I.,” Flynn explained, summarizing Land. “That’s Nick’s Land’s position?” Carlson asked. “It’s the position of a lot of these guys,” Flynn replied.
Late in the evening, after Land’s conversation with Yarvin, a procession followed Land onto a deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The group’s average age could not have been much older than twenty-five. Many mentioned working for various A.I. majors—OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney. Everyone sat down around a fire pit, except for Land, who stood, face lit from below, gesturing and swaying. The crowd was admiring, even starstruck, but their questions did not suggest particularly right-wing sympathies. The conversation had the tenor of a campfire chat you have when you’re young and stoned—questions about the universe and human destiny, discussed in the vaguest possible terms. Unlike most such conversations, though, this one was conducted by people whose actions may very well determine the course of history. I was struck by how unsure these tech workers seemed of the world they were building. They looked to Land as a prophet; now that his vision was coming true, they wanted to know what was next.
Despite the about-face in Land’s political alignment between his C.C.R.U. and Dark Enlightenment years, what has remained the same is a scorn for the things our species holds dear. “Nothing human makes it out of the near future,” he proclaimed in “Meltdown,” the talk from 1994, which has since become legendary. As the night wore on, the line kept coming up. If humanity is doomed, someone asked—as Yarvin’s baby started crying—what is the point of politics? What is the point, someone else asked him, of having children? (Land has two, college-age kids who he doesn’t think have read his work.)
At the fire pit, the musician Grimes sat beside Land. Grimes has long engaged with accelerationist ideas in her music, and she has three children with Elon Musk, whom Steve Bannon has called “one of the top accelerationists.”(After the party, Musk wrote on X that he “unfortunately missed” the event.) Her song “We Appreciate Power” includes the lyrics “Pledge allegiance to the world’s most powerful computer / Simulation, it’s the future,” and she has also created an open-source A.I. platform for generating music with her voice. But that night she seemed to hesitate. What will happen, she asked Land, when A.I. becomes self-improving, and humans get locked out of the loop of their development? Can the machines be oriented toward human ends, or will A.I. simply eat the universe? “I feel an incredible urge to make it stop and see beauty more,” she said.
Land’s reply took a predictable form. The true engine of history, he explained, is the feedback loop between commerce and technology, money and power. Human desire is just a vessel, worked from the outside toward ends we cannot control. History has a destination, but it is not for humans. “My prediction is that A.I. will persuade you that technology eating the universe is more beautiful,” he said. ♦