Monitoring the Situation #3: Who Is Nick Land?

23:48And then conversely, also go to the regulated parts of the market and start building technology and doing R &D on behalf of these regulated utilities. Yeah, I think it's a great explanation. I wonder if that's an inspiring and good note to throw. I like the phrase by the competition is good because zero to one got so popular, people have been less excited about competition as it relates in terms of its overall benefits to the ecosystem. So I appreciate you calling that out. Yeah, if you're going to, you know, winning in an uncompetitive market is like, that is not really a thing, right? Like any good opportunity gets competed.

24:27If what you're doing is actually that interesting economically and societal, like it should be competed on, right? And someone should show up and say, hey, I want that too, right? So, you know, right now, if you said, hey, Zach, who else is working on this in this way? Like, actually, there's nobody. Like there are other people that make batteries. There are other people that write software for batteries. No one has the model that we have. someone better show up soon or else like what we're doing clearly isn't working. Now, I think it's working and the market thinks it's working. The business model works, the customers love it.

24:58And so I imagine that someone will show up soon. Now, I think we've got a nice head start and, you know, we're rather competitive people. So, you know, bring it on. But I do think that like good, you know, competitive markets are healthy. Totally, totally. Yeah, and to our friends, if you want to read more about BASE, ArenaMag has the definitive profile of you guys and what we're building in Texas. Check it out this weekend. Erin, did you want to say something? Oh, I was just, you brought up Peter Thiel, Eric, and Zero to One. And, you know, it's better to not have a competitor than have a competitor.

25:36And I loved Zach's spicy take. And I remember, you know, when I was at Palantir, we talked a lot about not having a competitor. and now every company I talk to is Palantir for XYZ. So I imagine we'll, you know. Yeah, Palantir has tons of competitors. NVIDIA has tons of competitors. In 10 years hearing. OpenAI, yeah. OpenAI, tons of competitors. Name a great business that doesn't have competition. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, on that note, Zach, thanks so much for coming to the Modern News Situation. Thanks for having me, guys. It was fun. Great. Well, we're now excited to have our second guest on the Modern News Situation segment, Eddie Lazarin, who's going to be talking to us about who is Nick Land.

26:15Eddie, we've been looking for an excuse to bring up Nick Land in A6Z podcast for a while now. And I think we finally found it. Tucker Carlson had a guest on the podcast which talked about the Nick Land phenomenon in Silicon Valley and how it's inspired AI. And they're worried about, you know, it being a sort of the summoning of the demons, so to speak. There was a great profile on Tablet on who is Nick Land. Nick Land also went on a podcast in this debate with - The current issue of Tablet. Yes. Get yours. Exactly. And to Catherine, Nick Land also did a debate with Alexander Dugan on Mike Dyer's podcast.

26:49So in the news right now, and people are asking, who is Nick Land and what is his connection to Silicon Valley? Eddie, help us make sense. So I'll say, I will layer on caveat after caveat until maybe we get an answer, right? Like maybe that will, maybe that's how we'll get there. But so first I'll say like I don't think people need to understand who Nick Land is any more than you need to understand who Deleuze and Guattari are or who Hegel was or, you know, who any of these somewhat inscrutable continental philosophers are. Right. I don't I don't think that you necessarily need to. Although I think these figures do have an effect on mainstream culture, they do, it's usually through their ripple effect over layers and layers of culture as they're kind of digested and recomputed by people, right?

27:39We kind of achieve an understanding of them. So I'll say Nick Land is that type of figure. So he's incredibly difficult to understand. Not just because he's from an intellectual school that's hard to understand, like the continental philosophers in general. But because the topics he chooses to talk about are themselves inscrutable. His writing style is inscrutable because it's sort of taking these flourishes and density from these famous like 20th century French philosophers and stuff like that. Obviously, he's writing in English and he's very much an Englishman. But all these layers make it incredibly difficult to understand who Nick Land is.

28:17So first, if you have no interest in continental philosophers, if you have no interest in this type of thing, you don't need to know. You're good. Turn it off. Skip the podcast this week. Enjoy. Have a good afternoon. You know, whatever. But if those types of things are interesting to you, then Nick Land is very, very interesting. And I find – I'm a huge fan. I find it very interesting. what makes him interesting is that he takes a lot of the most interesting post-industrial revolution themes and he modernizes them into an ultra-modern cypherpunk context right now I'm as I said he's hard to explain so I'm being really reductionistic here right and I'm overly simplifying what he is but Nick Land has had two famous phases two phases in his intellectual development which is not uncommon for people like him, people who are kind of playing in this really complex mind space and trying to make sense of things using really high-level conceptual tools.

29:20In his earlier phase, which I think is maybe exemplified by like this cool essay called Meltdown from 1994, Nick Land was taking all these themes about industrial development and capitalism and the internet and cities and the intensity and heat and chaos and entropy of modern culture as we saw it in the 90s and in the 70s and 80s and 90s in a way we'd never seen before. And he's trying to make sense of it in terms of its grand historicity. What does it mean in the big picture of the development of humanity? And during that period, I think he was a little more cynical about capitalism. Like he kind of flipped his views on how he thought about capitalism, technological development as something that was creating a lot of problems for people, but also something that was brimming with incredible potential.

30:16In his more recent period, maybe like since 2012, 2013-ish or something like that, he has remained focused on similar themes. But he has kind of flipped around a little bit where he sees technological development and the feedback loop of capital and technology and capital and technology and money and capital and technology as maybe culminating a huge project. Now, whether it's a human project or whether it's a project from an AI from the future is kind of a complex idea, but gets at another theme of his, which is this esoteric mysticism. Now, I'm not a particularly esoteric mysticism type person.

31:03I actually, I studied philosophy in school, but I studied analytic philosophy, which is like the boring draw math equations and logic, you know, logical explanations type philosopher. The type who maybe makes things clear at the expense of them being interesting, right? But the continental school, land school, is very much the opposite. and leaning maximally into interestingness, maybe at the expense of clarity. And I'd say that Land's unpacking of all these ideas is often layered with his esoteric tools. And those are things like the numagram, which I regret I crunched up slightly, but it doesn't help.

31:47It wasn't going to make sense anyway. So I'm not going to bother to try to explain the numagram. is actually a really cool three-hour, 33-minute podcast. We'll link to it. On YouTube where he explains it in depth. But the way that I maybe rationalize it to myself is I think of it like that brilliant friend of yours who really does have a great grasp of people but maybe relies on tarot as like a tool of their brilliant, otherwise brilliant, psychologizing, right? That's kind of how I think about it. so what makes land so interesting to silicon valley people right because that's just a push back on the hegel or to lose like they're not people who inspire you know silicon valley in the same way so land is more relevant and more pertinent and that's because he takes a lot of the interesting themes from those philosophers i'm trying to avoid getting like a little too deep into the specifics i can't i can and i'd be happy to but but he takes a lot of the themes that these philosophers talk about and he embeds them very very specifically in technological progress in the internet in what is new he has uh and i say this like very much being a part of the crypto team and on the crypto fund he has probably the most interesting dense treatment of bitcoin as a philosophical object that has ever been written for sure i've found super super interesting and always seems to surprise me with ideas when I go back to it.

33:11It's like a 150-page book or so, right? So part of what makes his appeal so great is specifically embedding these things in contemporary technological themes and developments, as opposed to kind of waving the hand and looking at like, I would describe most philosophers as kind of looking at technological progress as like, well, look, they're making more stuff faster. You know, like, okay, they made the pin factory 10 times cheaper. Wow, those industrialists, you know. Whereas I think land identifies a qualitative change, right? In technological progress, we see something maybe almost spooky. And I think that that's where that spookiness is what Tucker's guest was correctly identifying.

34:00Now, I think his analysis was maybe not the way that I see land. And I think there was a lot of projection from his personal analysis of things. I think that I really, I thought it was very entertaining and fun, but the truth is I don't think it was particularly accurate. But he is correctly picking up at least on the spookiness. There is something a little bit spooky sometimes about the rate that technological progress compounds and the way that it maybe erodes at the same time that it adds on to the human condition. And I think that makes it really interesting. Now, I'll say just to maybe situate the prompt about Silicon Valley a little bit more specifically, I don't actually know that many people in Silicon Valley who like Nick Land.

34:46I'm going to be honest. It's not like you go around the streets of San Francisco and you talk to people. this really cool book, this compilation of Land's blog posts from Passage Press came out. Yes. I think last year. That's what I was going to ask because I, you know, I first, I feel like Nick Land's a name you've heard if you've been in Silicon Valley, but it's also a name you've heard if you've been in certain circles online. And I think the Passage Press point is a very good point, right? Like they were, they published CenoSystems. I'd love to get into what that is and why it's important.

35:18But on the online right, he's also a figure that people care about. And now that he's sort of mainstreamed into like the mainstream online right with Tucker, curious why you think those worlds are colliding? Because his work, if you actually, you know, I think, and again, I think the tablet piece that came out a couple weeks ago goes through like the entire history of what he's done. He's not really a typical like American right figure, right? Like he doesn't really fit that context. He was at the University of Warwick in England, and then he moved to Shanghai. He's not really part of American politics or American culture, yet he's had an influence on these kind of very small pockets.

36:02So I would just be curious, maybe we'll start with what is Xenosystems and the book from Passage Press, and then how does he fit into all of these weird subcultures in a peculiar way but doesn't necessarily –

36:16a lot of Nick Land's work. Yeah, no, yeah, I don't, I really, honestly, I don't, of course, I don't mean this in a disparaging way. I don't really see Nick Land's ideas as being like broadly influential in Silicon Valley in the way maybe they were characterized in the Tucker Project. But there's kind of this, the accelerationist thing leading to, yeah. Yeah, so distillations of some of the ideas that have been kind of like reimagined and digested have made their way in. And part of that is because, and this is, I'm gonna, maybe this is a funny way to try to put it, is that Nick Land's work is very vibey.

36:47Yeah. Okay? It's really vibey. Okay? If you go look at that meltdown piece from 94, you look at a random essay from Xenosystems, he has an intense, prosaic writing style that is provocative, intentionally inflammatory. Not inflammatory. Intentionally grandiose, right? And he can create a lot of imagery in his work. So the way he describes acceleration is it's more than just like making the pins faster and cheaper. Acceleration is like almost an, you know, it's like a world changing project, right? He describes Bitcoin as like maybe the most profound thing that's happened on the internet, right?

37:26Like he has incredible theater to what he says that comes from the continental school. So people have taken that and really enjoyed that, right? Like, I think if you read any of his stuff, you'll see that. So like, what is Xeno systems and so on? So I'll say his presence in the online right, XenoSystems, on the online right, he got there in an interesting way. I think if people are kind of familiar with horseshoe theory, Land has not always been like a figure on the right. In fact, many have described his earlier phase with the CCRU, kind of this like ragtag, very interesting, very artistically sensitive writing group, basically, art group.

38:18I think of them as an art group at least. They would have described them as actually on the far left, as far on the anti-capitalist left. And his arrival on the right was kind of jumping across the gap in the horseshoe, so to speak. A very good friend of mine, a philosopher who identifies as more of a communist, a college friend of mine, he says like, I often feel like when I read Nick Land that I could like reach across and like kiss him over the gap in the horseshoe, right? So he's a – I wouldn't say that he's a representative figure of Silicon Valley. I don't think that's – I don't think Silicon Valley is like this, right?

38:57But he is a fantastic poster and very insightful and cutting and controversial. And I think that that has made him very exciting and very interesting to the right, to the online right recently. Because the online right doesn't really have this type of voice, right? Someone with, you know, deep in the continental weeds, so to speak. And so what explains his shift from left to right, basically? You know, it's funny. he hasn't really explained that himself, right? Nick, Nick, I mean, if you read his themes, it's not like the subject of his attention has changed totally. It has certainly evolved. And there's all kinds of things he posts about and talks about today that he, in the past.

39:39And so he has certainly evolved, but he kind of disappeared for a while. And then he just kind of came back and everything had changed, right? And now he just writes from that perspective, very, I can say the types of things that he believes, right? You know, like he's very preoccupied with liberalism. When I say liberalism, I mean in the European sense, right? Where like big capital L liberalism, like, you know, right liberals and left liberals being like generally the American political landscape, right? In the freedom, you know, individualist sense. He's very preoccupied with like liberalism in the West and like what that means and how it has evolved and in particular how it has pathologized in some ways and evolved into like contemporary progressivism, which he sees as like not just its own kind of isolated political system, but as something that is clearly identifiable as an evolution of Protestantism, of older liberalism, of the change in the makeup of the Western electorate and so on.

40:49But the debate he was having with Dugan was whether that's kind of endemic to liberalism or whether that was just a, you know, mutation, but not necessarily inherent to the form. Yeah, yeah. So those types of themes are part of why he's also so interesting to the right, because I think a lot of people on the online right today, and I don't mean like the whole right. Remember, I'm speaking in generalities, obviously, but I'm talking about the type of people who are very interested in trying to take a diagnostic lens to what has happened in American politics and American culture over the last 20, 30 years, maybe in light of the Internet specifically, and trying to understand it in its big historical frame.

41:32And that's an interesting project. It's a difficult project. I don't pretend that he has the answers necessarily. I don't think he would even. I mean, he's trying to understand it. It makes him interesting. Yeah. No, I just thought the Tucker podcast was fascinating how it sort of brought together these sort of weird cultural things. Again, if you're truly monitoring the situation, there are things happening across the internet like discussion of revelation, the Antichrist, and really linking Nick Land and accelerationism to sort of this bigger question of, are we at the end of the world? And I'm very curious, was that more of like the Tucker framing of it or is that like actually part of Land's work that we hit?

42:11I mean, I know he's talked a lot about singularity and sort of these forces coming together. I've never thought of his work as like end of the world project. So I'm curious how it's getting lumped. Yeah, I mean, he does see history as this grand project, right? And he is very preoccupied with the shape of history and the shape of time. A lot of really interesting, crazy sci-fi themes in there. But I don't really, you know, he's somebody that I'm sure could hold a conversation about like the Antichrist and so on and eschatology in the Western tradition. That is something he's talked about now and then, but I don't see that as a key theme in his works.

42:47And like, you know, as an example, that's not a key theme in Xenosystems, right? Like the book that like kind of has reignited some interest and some attention in his work. You know, I say this, this is not like a content warning. I'm not that, but, you know, I'd say if you're the type of person that wants to clutch their pearls and like get upset about like things that you read, then don't read Xeno systems, right? But if you're the type of person that wants to read a wide array of ideas from someone whose dedication as a philosopher to unfettered idea work, and you can appreciate that sort of sloppiness and craziness of someone who's really trying to think through things, then I think that it's a really interesting piece from a perspective that is pretty uncommon.

43:34Yeah. The one thing that really came out from a lot of the conversations and discourse happening this week on him is like, I actually don't think Silicon Valley has its own philosophical community. Like there aren't, like you can't point to someone in Silicon Valley and say, this is the key philosopher because most people in Silicon Valley are doers and they're building things and they have a very different way of how they interact with whether it's their art or their projects. And so I guess is part of this that we just lack such a philosophical culture? He's getting credit for something that's very, very distinct.

44:08I agree with that. I think that's a great read. And in fact, I'd extend that read. Something that's been, I'm amazed to mention this on a podcast. This is kind of like an Eddie Schauer thought here, right? But like, but for some time, because I told you, I did philosophy in school. It's been like a long time interest of mine, right? I kind of have this like lingering belief, you know, not something I'm totally sure about, but like a feeling that I think a lot of the great philosophers were epiphenomenal to use a philosophy word, which means that their work was sort of capturing what was already in the spirit of the culture that they were occupying and that they may have made And in a lot of their works, this is not always the case, but a lot of the time, were actually doing a brilliant job capturing the spirit of the times and capturing what thinkers were working on.

45:01And we look back on them as causal, right, as having caused those periods. But in fact, they're just taking a beautiful crystallized snapshot that now becomes, you know, retroactively representative of that period. Yes. I think moving to Silicon Valley gave me conviction in this belief because I thought of when I came to Silicon Valley in 2011, when I came by, I thought that to embark on such grand projects, I always heard about the incredible ambition of Silicon Valley. You know, that was always something that stuck out to me, like the massive, the willingness to change the world, this sort of craziness.

45:43I thought of this as something that required a distinctly philosophical motivation, if not a spiritual motivation. I thought of it as something that required this. And so I thought that when I came to Silicon Valley, I'd meet a bunch of people who adhered to very specific, you know, explicitly held in their hearts these types of systems. And they don't at all. They don't at all. And what actually is the case is that people live in this, it's like a fish in water, right? They just kind of like swim in this culture. And some people are so good at getting a little grip on it and like capturing it in words, its spirit in words, through aphorisms, if not fully developed philosophical treaties, right?

46:29And Land captures some of that, some of the, I would say, the kind of more, some of the most extreme and interesting cypherpunk elements of it for sure. and he has gone on an interesting evolutionary journey that many have in their reaction to the internet. But I don't see it as causal, right? I don't think people are acting out, developing AI, following Nick Land. Like that's honestly absurd to me. But instead, Nick Land's like profound enthusiasm about it and his seeing extreme consequences in its development is something that a lot of people in Silicon Valley share for a variety of other reasons.

47:14Yeah. One thing I think he's also very good at that Silicon Valley actually understands and sort of the builder culture versus the thinking culture is he's extremely good at memes, extremely good at naming things. Oh, yeah, yeah. And Silicon Valley cares about that, right? So it's like, of course, accelerationism is like a beautiful, it's a beautiful concept, it's a beautiful word, and it's also something that sticks, right? Like we need those words. So I guess there's something about that too, where we're so devoid as an ecosystem of writers and thinkers because people don't come to Silicon Valley to write, they come to Silicon Valley to build.

47:45And if you come as a writer, you get co-opted into some aspect of our ecosystem where you're not writing in many ways. It just, it feels like he's kind of connected at places where, you know, our world actually understands certain parts of the language, even if we don't understand the actual doctrines. Oh, totally, totally. And some people make this critique that they say, hey, accelerationism, some people had this view that it was kind of like, you know, burn it all down, but we needed to, things needed to be burned down to get better and sort of accelerate that. That's like one branch of it.

48:20But that we've sort of, Silicon Valley sort of adopted that to mean, that term accelerationism, but in a more positive, like, you know, build up in some sense. And some people would critique and say, oh, because we're doing that, we don't quite understand the original philosophy or something. But maybe in fact, we're just using it for our own purposes. Yeah, but the history of thought is full of these types of inversions, of co-opting, like left accelerationism, right? Which is like this idea that you heighten the contradictions of capitalism by like being faster, bigger, make the pin factory a thousand times bigger, make the planet a pin factory, right?

48:58And then like it will eventually detonate and then we can return to whatever communists think. But then, but of course, right acceleration, in fact, I'd say I think there's a lot of nuance in right acceleration. There are some people who think that it leads to kind of a bizarre cataclysm in a good way, whatever that means. And then there are some people that think of it as just a fundamentally productive project, right? It's like abundance creates abundance, creates abundance, right? Acceleration creates acceleration. And we've enjoyed these fruits so far. Or why not? Why not more? Yeah. So could I ask, you know, for people who have heard a couple podcasts this week and are like, actually, I'm really interested.

49:40For the novice, where do you begin? What's the most interesting work to dive into first? Like, where would your sort of Eddie's tour of Nick Land begin? Well, like I said at the beginning, the truth is you don't need to understand Nick Land. It's okay. Turn off the podcast, touch grass, and do your thing. You don't need to. Show us the picture again. Just show us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you really want to understand this? Do you really want to understand the new program? It's the, it's sunny in Philadelphia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think you do. But if you, but if you really do want to understand these types of things, like I'd say bring, bring an LLM along to support you because it's all, it's a very dense, his work is very, very dense, full of references to other philosophers and specific phrases and framings.

50:26I think Xeno Systems is a great place to start. if you want to just get the vibe I think that Meltdown essay is really good again, content warning or whatever but I think that's a great way to get the vibe yeah, I think that's I mean, I could say more maybe I'll put some links in the notes he's also great on podcasts it's so funny, we hear this I remember the first time I heard of him like 15 years ago or so I remember he was explained to me as a menacing figure almost which is incredible in retrospect but if you listen to him on one of the podcasts, he's like the most gentle guy. He's like the sweetest guy.

51:02He's like literally the sweetest guy. I can't even, I mean, I've never met him, but he seems like a very clear, very clear, very careful, very deliberate with his words type of guy. I think you'll enjoy it. You might have to play things at 1.5x. That's not, I recommend the same thing for my videos for what it's worth. But yeah, I think just dive in and I think I've been pretty impressed, candidly, with the ways LLMs, especially when you give them some think time and you let them look at some links, they do a really good job of putting things into very legible form. I think it's a good place to wrap.

51:40Eddie, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for coming. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

52:23Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.

52:39Thank you.