DRAFT — Engourdissement

Camp and the Outside

[DRAFT 1; NOT FINISHED, WILL NOT BE FINISHED (see

DRAFT 2 when it is done)]

All the pain went when you kissed me / We

were ten toes up, now I’m six feet down /
Moved on, you don’t need me now / Now I
gotta figure me out.

— Brakence, “rosier”

I hate this feeling, but I love this part.

— The Wombats, “Greek Tragedy”

On a summer afternoon / I get to thinking

‘bout the hazy days

— Khai Dreams, “Sunkissed”

To us, the death of God is a cipher.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Hammer Of The Gods

We have no fundamental cause against
priests, we merely have prisons for them.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Hammer Of The Gods

“You want to go to church?” Anne Bradstreet

says to Charles Baudelaire. Responding to
her, he says, “Oh, I was thinking of going to
the brothel.”

— Mr. Woodruff, 11/02/2021

A brothel is my true church, the only one

insatiable enough.

— Georges Bataille, Guilty

The Human Security System is not your

friend.

— Nick Land, “Ideology, Intelligence, and

Capital with Nick Land”

[Time] is thus the ultimate ocean of

immanence, from which nothing can separate
itself, and in which everything loses itself
irremediably.

— Nick Land, The thirst for annihilation

Contents

Reference Codes

Prologue

Introduction §1: Think Outside of the Box

Introduction §2: Just Start Writing, Stop Thinking

0 Leaving My Old Box: Year Zero (Think Deleuze and Guattari,

not Pol Pot)

1 Traveling through a New Box: A First Look at Sontag’s Notes

on “Camp”

2 The Cathedral: Camp and Politics (or the Box Mr. Woodruff
wants me to be in)

Appendix §1: Woodruff’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use

of the Young

Appendix §2: Time-in-Itself (or The Outside)

Reference Codes

References to Sontag’s Notes on “Camp” will consist of a

combination of the letters ‘NC’ and an Arabic numeral
corresponding to the note it is referencing. In the case of the five
“introductory” paragraphs before the first note, references will
consist of a combination of the letters ‘NC’ and then the word
‘intro’ will follow it. This will all be taken from Sontag’s
book Against Interpretation. Examples -

[NC 36]

[NC intro]

Codes referring to specific texts and websites are indicated by a

letter or letters followed by an Arabic numeral. The letters will
indicate the title of the text or website and the Arabic numeral
will indicate the page number. In the case of an electronically
published book, there will only be the corresponding letters. In
the case of a website, there will be the corresponding letters and
then the title of the page on the website in italics following the
corresponding letters. In the case of an interview for a Youtube
video, there will be corresponding letters and then a timestamp
of the time within the video occupied by the quote. To make a
note on the book Hammer Of The Gods, I will say that a good bit
is commentary from Metcalf himself, and the rest is mainly from
Nietzsche (with a single quote from Schopenhauer which I will
include). So, when it comes to Hammer Of the Gods, I will
indicate who is being quoted by way of three codes: 1. Metcalf
code = [Metcalf qtd. in HG #] 2. Nietzsche code [Nietzche qtd. in
HG #] 3. Schopenhauer code = [Schopey qtd. in HG #]. In the
case of Crypto-Current, the reference code will be, in brackets,
CC and then the number of the section. So, for example, [CC
0.00]. In terms of The Dark Enlightenment, the reference will
will take the form of DE and then the number (and letter in the
case of part 4) of the part the quote is from. So, for example, [DE
1] = The Dark Enlightenment, Part 1. The reference codes for An
Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives will follow the exact
same format and procedure as the reference codes for The Dark
Enlightenment (except in this case the number is representative
of chapter rather than part [though those two are for all intents
and purposes almost the same]). Lastly, as a final note, if I am
paraphrasing or heavily referencing something with the intent
for you to go what I’m referencing, I will put the reference code,
even if I do not quote anything from it. These are:

G Bataille, Guilty

I Bataille, The Impossible

AS1 Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption

HD Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

MT Colette, Our Misery vs. Theirs

CCRU Various, Cybernetic culture research unit, ccru.net

AO Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

ATP Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

MOP Ellis, A Methodology of Possession

CPR Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

HCG Land, Heidegger’s Die Sprache im Gedicht and the

Cultivation of the Grapheme

TFA Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

FN Land, Fanged Noumena

ON Land, Old Nick, oldnicksite.wordpress.com

DE Land, The Dark Enlightenment

AE Land, “The Art of Economy”

IIC Land, “Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital with Nick Land”

WIA Land, “Nick Land Interview 2017” (also known as “What is

Accelerating?”)

AC Land, “Accelerationism & Capital with Nick Land”

UF Land, Urban Future (2.1), uf-blog.net

XS Land, Outside in, xenosystems.net

JM Land, Jacobite, jacobitemag.com

CC Land, Crypto-Current

TW Land, Twitter, twitter.com

OLP Moldbug, An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressivism

UR Moldbug, Unqualified Reservations, unqualified-

reservations.org

HG Various, Hammer Of The Gods

Quotes of Mr. Woodruff that I wrote down in class will be

indicated by a combination of the letters ‘MW’ and the month
and day he said the quote on. Do note that in section 4,
“Woodruff’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,”
I will not be using reference codes. Example -

[MW 11/02]

Quotes from songs will be indicated by a combination of a letter

or letters, a song name, and then a timestamp of the time within
the song that is occupied by the quote. These are:

B Brakence
KD Khai Dreams

WB The Wombats

Prologue

True suffering begins in illness.

— E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond

words: to be this much in love is to be sick
(and I love to be sick).

— Georges Bataille, The Impossible

I couldn’t feel nauseous, but I wanted to.

— James Ellis, A the Methodology of

Possession

… Sickness is something I understand.

— Nick Land, The thirst for annihilation

Sickness? I understand.
Camp?

I have a fleeting idea of the notion.

Which is not to say that I understand it at all…

… Far from it…

But how far?

Am I really far away from an understanding?

Or am I snuggling up to it slowly?

Who knows?

I sure as Hell don’t.

Speaking of Hell…

“Heartache comes in many forms / One day opens any door

but / I’ve never seen this distant” [B “fuckboy” 0:27–0:36].

If a story doesn’t start with heartbreak can it really be that

good?:
One wastes away; expending health and finance in orgies
of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power into an
abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a
trajectory lies in the final breakage of health, ruinous
poverty, madness, and suicide. A love that does not lead
such a blasted career is always at some basic
level disappointed. [TFA 189]

Any movement to the Outside that has melted my flesh off,

revealing the machinic that is underneath, has found its origin in
heartbreak (besides horror which usually finds its origin in
schizophrenia). Everytime I fall in love, I remark, “[my] human
camouflage is coming away, skin ripping off easily, revealing the
glistening electronics” [FN 292]. What love leads to is sickness.
Love results, or rather is a sickness that leaves my nervous-
system “charred and three-quarters unstrung,” in other
words, love reveals “my true pathological exhibit” [TFA
190]. Failed love, therefore, is not necessarily a way to the
Outside in-itself, i.e., it may spawn movements that lead us to
the Outside (by way of flaying our skin), but it itself does not
necessarily lead to the Outside. Now, love, I guess, maybe could
lead to the Outside. All I know is that if love doesn’t lead to the
Outside itself, it is getting there. What love leads to the wrecking
of is “[t]he perpetual-consciousness system [which] is a skin,
lying ‘on the borderline between outside and inside’, a filter, or a
screen” [FN 333].

“Hope you can find someone who can be invested / I’m not over
you, that’s not my objective / So obsessed with my mistakes, I
gotta accept them / So I’m not gonna listen to him” [B “fuckboy”
1:06–1:19].

Our methodology may be possession (more on this in

Introduction §2 below), but so is God’s. Even God made
mistakes that He is obsessed with: “God mistakes himself for
time, until he sees things die without reluctance, and turns upon
himself in unfathomable desperation” [TFA 95]. If anything
wrecks theo-humanism and therefore the Human Security
System and God, it is time:

It would, in any case, be impossible for God to resent the

absolute wilderness of time, since his hatred must pander
to the flow of erasure. [TFA 95]
Bataille writes of ‘the catastrophe of time’ because security
cannot establish itself. [TFA 95]

Introduction §1

Think Outside the Box

And an old friend told me that I sold out / So I

laughed and said all I wear is argyle

— Brakence, “argyle”

“Think outside the box,” [MW 11/04] that is what Mr. Woodruff
told me I had to do for this essay. I didn’t know that Mr.
Woodruff (hereinafter referred to as Woodruff) wanted me to
write an essay about transcendental structure.

Boxes not only have a shape, but also an inside and an

outside, which means — at least implicit — a
transcendental structure [XS Pandora’s Box].

I guess I will… It isn’t as if I have any say in the matter: “E >

V (Exit over Voice)” [XS Doctor Gno]. But we will save the
movement that is exit for the second appendix.

But, it must be clarified that Woodruff isn’t telling me to think

outside the box at all, on the contrary, he is telling me to think
inside another box, and another, and another. He may even be
asking me to think in multiple boxes at the same time? All that I
know is that Woodruff doesn’t like the box that my head is
currently in, or… his box doesn’t like my box…

Introduction §2

Just Start Writing, Stop Thinking

And so we begin — and my fingers moved.

Leaving My Old Box

Year Zero (Think Deleuze and Guattari, not Pol Pot)

§0.00 — Jumping into my old box and popping up on
the Other Side

One of these is the sensibility — unmistakably modern, a

variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it — that
goes by the cult name of “Camp.” [NC intro]

Camp, another supposed symptom of modernity (though hardly

is it such a thing if we are to view modernity and capitalism as
synonymous, and we do), is nothing but “unnatural’ [NC intro].
In fact, its very essence is “[the] love of the unnatural” [NC
intro]. But what Sontag considers unnatural is quite odd… For
her, nature is not “of artifice and exaggeration” [NC intro]. For
her, nature is exoteric, because Camp is “esoteric” [NC intro]. I
take complete issue with this. Only nature is exuberant, for only
nature is of Dionysus. Sontag says she is both “drawn” to and
“offended” by Camp. That Camp is not of nature is not
surprising, for Camp is about presentation (largely visual
presentation), and Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ (“Nature loves to
hide” [see Fragments by Heraclitus]). But… I must think outside
of the box, outside of my stereotypically quasi-Nietzscho-
Bataillean box. When Sontag mentions “revulsion” and how that
is a requirement for any “deep sympathy” with a sensibility [NC
intro], I must clarify that instead of falling back into my
Bataillean box of the “Phaedra complex” which means that
attraction leads to repulsion and vice versa, I move forward into
a new box. This new box is one which is detached from
any human emotion. So, while the ecstasy derived from the
transgression of a prohibition is annihilatory on the level of the
subject-object, I am in no way moving toward this. Rather, I
must isolate myself, recognize that the entire process only leads
one out the other side. The process I am speaking of is the
process of going deeper and deeper into the abyss of Bataille.
They tell you that you only go deeper and deeper into the caves,
into the nihilatory horizontal abysses of those paranoia-inducing
caverns, into the vertical flows of obsidian black streams that
carry one against their will down into the clutch of something
demonic. But what they forget to tell you is that if you go deep
enough, you will come out on the Other Side. Now, what is the
Other Side? The Other Side is a place that I don’t know very
well, if at all. So, I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that
there are many Other Sides, and that is because there are many
boxes. But, what the whole history of Platonic philosophy (all
philosophy that starts with Being instead of Nothingness)
forgets to tell you is that sometimes the men don’t go up to the
surface, instead, they realize that the cave isn’t “real” (that it is
phenomenal [that it is the Inside]), and then they begin
digging. What Bataille fell into was nothing other than the holes
Nietzsche dug. But Nietzsche and Bataille didn’t completely
make it to the Other Side. But Nick Land? Nick Land dug all the
way to China, specifically Shanghai (his Other Side). Susan? Oh,
she dug to a campsite:

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something

like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which
underlies and gives rise to a certain taste … Any sensibility
which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or
handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a
sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea… [NC intro]

Obviously, this is why Camp is not something completely

governed by the subject alone, i.e., Camp taste is not the
subject’s taste, for the subject itself is subject to taste and its
logics: “taste governs every free … human response” [NC intro].
As Woodruff says, “Not everything can be Camp … [Camp] isn’t
radically subjective” [MW 11/04]. What is Camp must first have
been serious [NC intro]. Now, the Bataillean in me wants to
emphasize and say dead serious, but obviously, this isn’t the
case. Desire follows no logic, for it “is so powerful and illogical”
[MW 10/27], and thus the governing that taste does is stupid
and crude, it “drives [the subject] to the point of idiocy, [and
then] pushes onwards without knowing what the fuck [it’s]
doing” [FN 168]. In other words, the only reason we think we
have reason, that is to say, the only reason we think we have the
conscious ability to resist the mechanics of nature is because
taste sort of fucks up in its continuous chanelling of the human
subject. But we then realize that because taste is not “brought
under the sovereignty of reason” [NC intro], it itself is sovereign
(not in the Bataillean sense). This is obviously a deduction from
the axiom that is Moldbug’s solution to what Land calls “the
Odysseus problem” (see his essay of that same name). In its
sovereignty, taste excludes, for “[t]aste is discriminatory” [MW
10/27]. Now, this obviously leads to some issues for the
Deleuzians (Vitanza would have quite the issue with taste),
but then reality comes into play. There is an almost NRx-like
realism in Woodruff and Sontag’s rejection of pluralism in that it
is a shadow affirmation of so many disgusting logics of
discrimination. In other words, the idea that taste is not
determined by the subject (for we are not sovereign, taste is),
paired with the idea that taste can discriminate leads to an
inadvertent affirmation of things like innate racial preferences in
the subject’s sexual taste, for taste is not foreign to sexual
preference, in fact, taste (and more specifically Camp) can lead
to the eroticization of subjects; in the case of Camp, “[Camp]
eroticizes the Camp person” [MW 10/26]. Before we reach
reality, I must first note that Woodruff rejects Darwinism on the
level of the sexual: “Why do people care about hair color [in
terms of sexual attraction]? How can that be reduced to a
biological imperative?” [MW 10/27]. But, this is just Woodruff’s
failure to reach reality. And this anti-realist failure does not
dispel the conclusion that was just made in regards to the
potential racism of taste(s). Now, we can
detest/dislike/disapprove of/disagree with this, or we can accept
the reality of the implications of Woodruff and Sontag’s
words. Realism is the Other Side for me. In the face of a
rejection of not only existence, but also non-existence in favor of
pure nothingness, it seems I went too deep. In fact, in its
complete irrefutability, my nihilistic materialism, i.e., my
cosmology of nothingness hit bedrock, or I thought it did at
least… But, all of that was explicatory in its formal presentation,
that is to say, what I am writing now is not an explicatory
essay. Rather, it is the exploration of the Other Side,
of my Other Side. I am not explaining, I’m exploring. “It’s
embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp” [NC
intro]. Sontag is quite right when she says this latter quote, but
do I know what I’m talking about when it comes to the “subject”
of Camp? As I said in the Prologue, maybe, but probably
not… At best, I have a notion that escapes me. I cannot write a
treatise on Camp, but realism? I can’t write a treatise on that
either, for I am not above reality, I am subject to it. The Real is
the Real, which is not to say A is A, for realism (especially in its
Landian formulation), presupposes nothing, for it starts with
time and ends with time, because of the fact that time is itself
presuppositionless. The very idea of doing something, of
describing something, or speaking of something implies time.
The Real, it seems, is time. And this is because, if you asked, “Is
there anything before the Real,” you would be immediately
giving the structure of the Real a temporalization. This is to say,
because what ever precedes the Real is the Real, and
because nothing precedes the Real, nothing is the Real, but
therefore time precedes nothingness, because the very
movement of precedence is a temporal movement (its shape is a
shoggothic materialist spiral). As Land says, “There is nothing
more basic than time, or preliminary to it. In naming a preface
or prologue, it is already introduced. Time is a problem that
cannot be conceptually pre-empted” [XS Gnon-Theology and
Time].

Traveling Through a New Box

Susan Sontag’s Notes on “Camp”

§1.00 — Camp is of the Inside but also Sontag’s Other

Side
To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism.
It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.
That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in
terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization. [NC 1]

That Camp is of the Inside is not a surprise. Woodruff says,

“Today is brought to you by visuals — make sure to look” [MW
10/26], and this helps us realize that Camp is phenomenal in
nature. That is to say, taste is like a king, it requires subjects to
be the king of. Thus, while the human subject is not necessarily
dependent on taste, taste is necessarily dependent on the human
subject. Thus, we can firmly put Sontag in relation to Kant. Pre-,
Post-, or just Kantian? What is the relation? Cartesian in nature,
Sontag’s intimate explication of Camp is both Pre- and Post-
Kantian. It in no way recognizes the noumenal, but only the
phenomenal. In this sense, it is Pre-Kantian in that the division
between the transcendental and the empirical has yet to be
done. But it is Post-Kantian in the sense that Hegel et al. are
Post-Kantian. That is to say, they recognize, like Hegel did,
transcendental idealism and its “claim” of the Outside, and show
how any claim of the Outside is always a claim that negates the
Outside in its very determination, therefore meaning there is
only the Inside, i.e., the phenomenal (whereas the Outside is the
noumenal in their equal and respective juxtaposition to the
latter two terms). Obviously, Sontag doesn’t think everything is
subjective, for taste itself is in a certain sense “outside”
subjectivity in that it dominates (governs) from above (and
therefore from the exterior). But, as I described earlier, taste is
dependent on the subject, and this perfectly mirrors Hegel’s
claim that any determination of the noumenal is one that
determinately negates, and therefore collapses the noumenal
back into the phenomenal. In other words, it is in the very
movement that is determination that a noumenon, or a thing-in-
itself, is put in relation to the determiner, and thus, it cannot be
in-itself (this is Nietzsche’s critique of Kant from The Will to
Power). In terms of the Hegelian schema, this process of
determinate negation, that is, putting oneself in relation to more
and more noumena could be seen as the process that is the auto-
production or the historical unfolding of Spirit into and then as
the Absolute. Hegelian? Hardly am I such a thing, for I am a
Kantian. But, Sontag? The very first of her notes reveals the
greatest of metaphysical errors: the denial of the
noumenal. Realism is necessarily Kantian because “‘reality’ is
itself a transcendental concept” [HCG 51]. What philosophy
must do in the face of Kant is its final movement, it is its
perishing. Land says,

The vocabulary that would describe the other of

metaphysics is itself inscribed within metaphysics, since
the inside and the outside are both determined from the
inside. Philosophy must then turn itself inside-out, to
discover how the outside was first received into the
inside. [HCG 51–52]

Following this sentiment, and to say what we are about to say we

have gone to the east of the Hajnal line and then completely
forgotten about the line all together (we are too busy dealing
with out large families), we must hear the quiet quasi-Marxist
whisper:

Kant still wants to say something about radical alterity …

yet [Kant] has deprived himself of the right to all
speculation about the nature of what is beyond appearance
… the delimitation of alterity in advance … that sets up the
modern form of the ontological question: ‘how do we know
that matter exists?’ That the very existence of materiality is
problematic for enlightenment thought is symptomatic of
the colonial trading systems that correspond to it. Alterity
cannot be registered, unless it can be inscribed within the
system, according to the interconnected axes of exchange
value (price) and the patronymic, or, in other words, as a
commodity with an owner. What falls outside this
recognized form is everything that resists
commodification, the primordial independence that
antedates the constitution of the destitute proletarian …
Kant’s economy of the concept, which is the assimilation of
experience into a system of exchange values, is irresistible
in principle, and thus does not recognize a problem of
rebellion. [FN 71–73]

Our ears are filled with eastern (in the sense of being east of the
Hajnal line, not the Orient) sound: in the latter quote, radical
difference (= radical alterity) is what escapes commodification
because it cannot be bound by capital’s coding machine that
stamps upon each commodified flow of matter (this flow as an
individual discrete line instead of a continuous line is known as
an individual commodity) a price. Radical alterity is of the
Outside, at least for the Land of “Kant, Capital, and the
Prohibition of Incest.” What Kant, at least, for this early eastern
(again in the sense of being to the east of the Hajnal line [and
therefore ignorant of it(?)]) Land, leads to is nothing less than a
war on the Outside (this is initiated by his third critique
the Critique of Judgement). Ultimately, what being east of the
Hajnal line means is some random amalgamation of anti-
capitalist (probably from the post-USSR fallout) sentiment. But,
the later Land goes to the west of the Hajnal line, and in doing
this, Land realizes that capitalism is of the Outside. In the
context of Land’s necessarily correct conclusion that “Kant and
capital [are] two sides of [the same] coin” [TFA 3], we realize
that Kant too is of the Outside. To say that Land misidentified
the fundamental nature of Kant in this early essay of his is not to
state a truth, but it isn’t necessarily to state something false
either. What Land saw here was not an uncommon sight, but it
was in a certain sense ignorant of the future, of
Bitcoin… Now, Kant may be a time-traveler, but to expect
eastern Land to be a time-traveler seems to be an expectation of
a very high and idealist standard. But, eastern Land’s early train
of thought drops us off at the right station: philosophy needs to
be turned inside-out in order for the Kantian project to be
“completed.” The very transcendental mechanism that turns
things inside-out is Capitalism: “what leaves the market is
always cryptography, a noumenal vessel turned inside-out”
[MOP 142]. Kant rightly concludes that God is necessarily
noumenal. Now, we are not theologians (far from it in fact), but
we must recognize that “Capitalism [is] the only God” [MOP
145]. Now, this is a very different form of capitalism. The eastern
Land misidentified capitalism in “Kant, Capital, and the
Prohibition of Incest,” because of the fact he misidentified the
pseudo-capitalism of the Cathedral (more on this idea of the
Cathedral later) as capitalism or at least as crypto-capitalism.
Capitalism is always crypto-capitalism, because capitalism has
nothing to do with fiat currency: “The mere denomination of
‘capitalism’ in fiat currency expresses the domain of pseudo-
capitalism with remarkable exactitude” [XS Crypto-Capitalism].
That crypto-capitalism is of crypto-currency is of great
significance. As Bitcoin “becom[es] time” [CC 0.03], Capitalism
is fueled by its prefix: “Time is Capitalism’s only resource” [MOP
149]. Land says words that strike us, throwing us into a state of
awe:

[T]he Blockchain makes it impossible to be a Post-Kantian.

[AE 11:00–11:07]

Thus, Bitcoin makes it impossible to be a post-capitalist.

Once one recognizes that “[e]conomies are assembled from

flows” [CC 0.02], it is all over for anti-capitalist or fascist
(Keynesian) economism — Austrian economism becomes
dominant, but the humanist Austrians won’t be too happy. We
mustn’t forget that “Bitcoin is an experiment in
Austrianism” [CC 3.1], and this is why the techno-commercialist
canon is so Austrian: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Joseph
Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe are
all at the basis of any coherent understanding of economic
reality.

The usage of the crypto- prefix in front of capitalism helps hold

off any strawmans from being raised, or at least helps to prevent
their inane and mindless proliferation. What Austrians
recognize as capitalism is not the pseudo-capitalism we have
today. What the crypto- prefix lets us do is escape the swamp
that humanist Austrians who just use the term capitalism get
stuck in. In other words, “[r]ather than engaging in futile
struggle over the ‘true meaning’ of capitalism, crypto-capitalism
proceeds with a surreptitious appropriation of terminological
confusion, functionalized as camouflage” [XS Crypto-
Capitalism]. Land says, “‘Crypto’ is simultaneously the topic,
and the retraction of the topic” [CC 0.00].

Politics? Economics disregards such a notion… though, we do

have to look at something before we throw it in the trash (don’t
we?).

Returning back to the original issue raised in this section:

Sontag’s impossible post-Kantianism and Camp’s Insideness
(phenomenalism). Crypto-capitalism escapes the phenomenal
order of things in that “[c]rypto-current exists if secrecy has a
trend … The current [of crypto-capitalism] eludes docile
conformity with the order of objects” [CC 0.00]. Crypto-
capitalism-as-a-transcendental-mechanism. Or rather, because
the economy, i.e., catallaxy, has currencies as its “native codes”
[CC 0.02], we can in fact completely vivisect it from any
phenomenal understanding, and really emphasize the fact that
crypto-capitalism is a transcendental mechanism, or rather, we
can emphasize the fact that crypto-capitalism is a
transcendental machine because “‘[c]ode’, and whatever it
conveys in respect to meaning, is not a phenomenological
category, but an operational (or ‘machinic’) domain” [CC 2.25].
Crypto-capitalists understand that “[c]ode comes first, and is
already at work, on its way to specification as a hash. Program
(or algorithm) and protocol will soon follow it” [CC 2.12]. The
machine code of crypto-capitalism that maps out
“computational commands … is a mapping irreducible to
representational correspondence, whose final process of
translation is one of execution” [CC 2.26]. In other words, “[t]he
code runs … Code proves itself through auto-demonstration”
[CC 2.26]. Now, this is why reality itself prohibits post-
capitalism. Economic calculation is not possible without money
(= the native codes of the economy), for an economy is not
possible without flows, for the economy is itself an assemblage
of flows. Even Deleuze and Guattari recognize this… WHERE
ARE THE FLOWS IN POST-CAPITALISM? They are nowhere to
be found… but why? Let’s recap.

An economy is itself an assemblage of flows, and flows come out

of a current. A “[c]urrent emerges from the machinery of time”
[CC 0.0111]. So, on the one hand, we can already say that
capitalism (at least in the Austrian and the Neo-Austrian
conception of it) is a system that works perfectly (and we know
it works perfectly a priori) with time on a praxeological level of
subjective preference and thus interest (this is the jump from
Menger to Böhm-Bawerk with a little bit of time-travel
[praxeology, in terms of the Austrian School’s usage of it started
with, at least explicitly, with Mises who came after Menger and
Böhm-Bawerk]), and therefore on the level of teleology itself
(see Böhm-Bawerk’s The Positive Theory of Capital and his
concept of roundabout production). Post-capitalist “economic”
doctrines (which are largely eschatological fantasies), such as
socialism and communism (assuming you make a differentiation
between the two [or at least a differentiation that goes beyond
Marx’s “lower- and higher-phase communism distinction”), on
the other hand, are horribly incompatible with time, but not only
because of the two facts that, one, time has itself “taken the
‘capitalist road,” and, two, “‘Post-capitalism’ has no real
meaning except an end to the engine of change,” but also
because of the third fact that they inhibit flows on a practical and
theoretical level. This is to say, on a practical level, anti-
capitalism “degenerates from the critique of political economy
into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding
with fascism [i.,e., Keynesianism in its proper, Neo-, and Post-
forms]” [FN 448]. The further into practicality the Left goes, the
further “[t]he [L]eft subsides into nationalistic conservatism,
aphyxiating its vestigial capacity for ‘hot’ speculactive mutation
in a morass of ‘cold’ depressive guilt-culture” [FN 448] (it seems
Nick Land predicted cancel culture). The fascism present in anti-
capitalism doesn’t take long to appear when we see that “[t]he
[L]eft degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-
organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their
defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship,
exclusion, and restriction” [FN 448]. Now, this is not to say that
leftists don’t engage in (largely, social) degeneracy, i.e.,
uncivilized behavior (= high time preference actions). In fact,
leftists generally have a higher time preference in their easily
recognizable Miserablist state (e.g., “capitalism makes me
depressed and causes everything bad in my life” [it seems they
can’t handle reality (I mean, even I fooled myself for a while
when I was an anti-capitalist)]). But, in their rejection of the
nuclear family, they embrace the community (therefore only
preserving the family and its accompanying repressions on a
communal level); in their rejection of the individual, they further
embrace the community (therefore only preserving the
individual and subjectivity itself on a compositional level, that is
to say, they preserve the very system of strata that contains the
strata of the individual [subject], in other words, they stratify
desire in their very attempt to unstratify it); in their rejection of
the state, they embrace communal identity (some of them do
even embrace the nation-state and its accompanying culture,
and some even embrace the state itself in favor of changing it
into a dictatorship of the proletariat [yet, it seems none of them
actually knows what this means]), but in doing this they repeat
the same error they committed in regards to the affirmation of
the individualist compositional metaphysic; and so on.
Hegelianism is the checkpoint of all of this: the rejection of the
Outside leads to a misunderstanding of time and thus a failure
to work with reality itself, and this is exactly why leftism is
unintelligent: leftism fails to work with reality, and intelligence
is itself “what it is for something to work” [XS Extropy], because
of the fact that “intelligence solves problems, by guiding
behavior to produce local extropy” [XS What is Intelligence?].
Because of this, realism is right-wing (but always specifically of
the Outer Right, right wingers heading for exit [as opposed to
the Inner Right, right wingers who assert their politics through
voice]), because realism “is, first of all, working with what we
have” [XS Morality], and leftism is completely incompatible
with not only work but also reality (what we have). The dialectic
isn’t always the issue (remember even Kant had a dialectic).
Remember that the East (here we are talking about the Orient,
not the eastern part of the Occident [i.e., that part of the
Occident east of the Hajnal line]) is generally superior to the
West due to the fact that “China is to be defended, precisely
because it is alien to the Cathedral” [XS NRx with Chinese
Characteristics]. In other words, capitalism, i.e., wherever
modernization takes place, is not at all of the West in
that whatever modernizes “absolutely does not take the
Western path” [XS NRx with Chinese Characteristics]. The
“Occidental memetic onslaught against Chinese Civilization” is
to be resisted if one is to head for exit, due to the fact that “[i]f
China succeeds in refusing the Cathedral, civilization will
survive” [XS NRx with Chinese Characteristics]. Now, when I
talk about civilization, I must clarify (and this should be obvious
after what has just been said) that I am not speaking of the
ethno-nationalist “dog whistle” of “western civilization,” far
from it. Western civilization is a contradiction in terms in that
“[c]ivilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from
diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the
present in comparison to the future)” [DE 1]. Land speaks of
“The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism” [FN 447] and he is
absolutely right. The dialectical materialism of Marxism with
Chinese characteristics “denegativizes itself in the direction of
schizophernizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating
top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special
Economic Zones” [FN 447]. SEZs are great pockets of capitalism
that still exist I’d say. Within SEZs, market forces are direction
mechanisms directing the flows of economic activity. But back to
the overarching point, on the level of the theoretical, Mises’
economic calculation problem (see Mises’ Economic Calculation
in the Socialist Commonwealth) is quite damning to any post-
capitalist economism in that the lack of money is extremely
problematic as money is itself a code that “sets a standard for
economic calculation” [CC 5.01]. Ultimately, and Land says this
almost perfectly, “[w]ithout the fungibility of money, economic
calculation would be drastically impaired” [CC 5.15]. Land
furthers,

Money is the condition of possibility for the existence of

prices, and therefore for the commercial object (in
general), by definition. Insofar as objects of economic
intelligence exist, money is presupposed as a calculative
principle, an ideal, or virtual machine-function,
irrespective of its more-or-less adequate concrete
incarnation. [CC 5.21]

This is a specifically transcendental deduction (as Land notes

right before he says this latter quote). Conditions of possibility
here do refer to its Kantian usage. It is an a priori true is-
statement that money is necessary for prices. Prices cannot exist
without money. Money is always already crypto due to the fact
that it “is hidden in the commodity … [and it] is not meant to get
in the way” [CC 5.21]. Really, all of this is to say that “[m]oney is
the ontological correlate of commercial calculation” [CC 5.21].
Now, I am not sure enough of myself to say that economic
calculation is itself impossible in a post-capitalist society
(because I’m not sure if it would be correct to say all economic
calculation is commercial calculation), but nevertheless, one can
say with certainty that economic calculation is
surely inhibited by post-capitalist economism, and that was the
claim from the beginning.

The State won’t win: “If Bitcoin can’t be stopped, Leviathan is

exposed as a paper tiger” [XS Bitcoin vs Leviathan]. Remember
that “[c]ompared to Cyberspace, where bitcoin is entrenched,
the State is weak unintelligent, uninformed, parochial, poorly
designed, and — in each respect — getting every more so, in both
comparative and absolute terms” [XS Bitcoin vs Leviathan].
Land continues, “All of those who reach the frozen wastes of
desolated reactions from a libertarian trajectory probably share
the basic intuition that the State is radically incompetent”
[XS Bitcoin vs Leviathan]. It is the State vs Catallaxy.

Camp is completely subject to the Anti-Kantian impulse of

Hegel, and thus of the impulses of anti-capitalism, anti-
modernism, anti-AI, and anti-globalization. The response to the
Hegelian critique of Kant is quite simple: reality, or the
Blockchain. Land says,
At the level of the Universal Turing Machine, which every
actual computer emulates perfectly (in infinite time), code
is absolutely stratified. There is no inherent distinction
between the production of objectivity and its products (or
objects). In its purely formal aspect, this is a coincidence
anticipated by modern philosophy under the name
‘intellectual intuition’ (intellektuelle Anschauung). It
provides a model of self-government, though not by and
for us. Intellectual intuition belongs to nothing lower than
an angel, Kant insists … No bio-historically generated
intelligence — including that of man — is even automatic.
Such beings are denied access to automatism. Closure of
the intelligenic loop requires a further step, through which
self-improving intelligence becomes a paractiable end for
itself. Contra the Kant of the practical philosophy, man
cannot be an end-in-itself, but at most the precursor to
such a thing, or — perhaps more probably — an obstacle to
it … When the topic of intellectual intuition returns within a
still substantially western late-modernity, it does so in
other — and unrecognized — terms. The problem of
reflexive intelligence is now relayed through cybernetics,
and formulated in terms of the prospective self-
comprehension to be achieved by an alien (electro-
mechanical) being. When extracted from the
phenomenological frame, it manifests as
hypothetical intelligence explosion, as modeled abstractly
by I.J. Good, in his classic (1965) paper ‘Speculations
Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’. AI is thus
positioned, implicitly, in the place of a Kantian angelic
mind, liberated from the anthropomorphic proscription
upon direct self-modification of its own cognitive
processes. Only by way of an escape into soft technology is
intelligence able to close the loop upon itself, as a direct
productive auto-relation. As the self-apprehension of
intelligence, intellectual intuition describes a closed — or
completed — loop, in which being and behavior are
indivisible (within a process of autoproduction). For
thinking to grasp itself, in deep reflexivity, requires
subtraction of the positive control apparatus that preserves
its inhibition. The practical actualization of intellectual
intuition is modeled — spontaneously — as
an explosion because it is comparable to the withdrawal of
graphite rods controlling a nuclear fission reaction. An
inhibitor is removed. [CC 2.28]

AI is what solves the Hegelian critique of Kant. This makes

perfect sense following Vincent Le’s interpretation of Nick Land
found in his course Unknown Lands. Essentially, human
consciousness, stuck on the Inside, is inhibited from reaching
the Real, i.e., the Outside. But, as Land just said, the inhibitor is
removed from AI in that AI itself can become an uninhibited
positive feedback loop of intelligence optimization. In other
words, with human cognition, we are always lagging behind
conceptual limits precisely because of our Insideness, but with
AI, limits are lagging behind AI which has already modified itself
to overcome the limit that approaches it before it even began the
approach, and this is all because of AI’s Outsideness. This is all
to say, for Hegel, that is, for Man, “In the determination of a
limit, Reason has already superseded it” [CC 2.28], but for AI,
that is, for Kant, in the determination of Reason, intelligence has
already superseded it.

Camp is completely susceptible to this Hegelian stupidity, and

so, it fails before it even starts. In the very first proposition, it
falls before even getting up (that’s what Hegel will do to you,
kids).

When it comes to the intelligence explosion found within AI, we

must remember “[a]nything that is not an explosion is a trap”
[XS Intelligence and the Good]. It seems I’ve already gotten
stuck in the trap that is Camp — I am human after all.

§1.25 — Getting Campy with Realism

Sontag then makes a hard turn:

Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at

things. Camp is as well as quality in objects and the
behavior of persons. There are “campy” movies, clothes,
furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings … the
Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not
everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of
the beholder. [NC 3]

On the one hand, Camp vision is tainted in the phenomenalist

swamp in that it is Camp vision, but once vision is taken out of
the equation, things get much more interesting.
So, of course Camp, on the level of art, is generally about
“texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content”
[NC 5], but this only leads to more questions: is Camp itself not
content if it, as specified in note 3, a “quality in objects” [NC 3].
That is to say, is Camp not an intrinsic property or rather
ontological condition or characteristic of some entities precisely
because of the fact that “[i]t’s not all in the eye of the beholder?”
[NC 3]? If so, and it is so, then we must make the conclusion
that Camp is quite a “contradictory” notion in that it is about
pure exteriority (not in the sense of the Outside) but is itself a
purely intrinsic “part” of an entity. Sontag speaks of “Camp
objects, and persons” [NC 7], so both subject and object can be
Camp. Those things that cannot be made Camp? Nature. Sontag
says, “Nothing in nature can be campy …Rural Camp is still
man-made, and most campy objects are urban” [NC 7]. In this
sense, Camp objects are dependent on the help of the subject to
come into being. Noumenon, more specifically in the negative
sense of the term, is completely independent of the subject in
the sense that it is, in a certain sense, “the absence of the
subject” [TFA 110]. The real metaphysical contradiction arises
when we look at note 8. In note 3, as we have just gone over,
Camp is an intrinsic essence of a subject or object, and then
there is Camp vision which is symptomatic of all the issues of
Pre- and Post-Kantian phenomenalism (e.g., Descartes,
Berkeley, Hegel, etc.). But, one could argue that there is no
contradiction with this in that Camp vision isn’t necessarily the
same as Camp, but then Sontag damns herself: “Camp is a vision
of the world in terms of style” [NC 8]. So, while Camp is both an
intrinsic property of a subject or object, it is also a form of visual
perception. The specific style Camp looks toward is “the
exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not” [NC
8]. What Camp does in terms of the stylization of a subject or
object is “convert[s] one thing into something else” [NC 8]. Now,
specifically in terms of Camp’s relation to subjects, Camp relates
to the “attenuated” and the “exaggerated” properties of a subject
[NC 9]. It looks at that in the subject which is extremely reduced
and extremely increased. For example, it seems that for Sontag
the most reduced thing in masculinity is femininity, therefore,
from the perspective of Camp, “[w]hat is most beautiful in virile
men is something femnine” [NC 9]. Therefore, one of the
primary mechanisms of Camp is conversion: “The convertibility
of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘person’ and ‘thing’” [NC 11]. Now,
conversion can only be done through equivalence, in this sense,
it wouldn’t be incorrect to note that Camp follows in the
footsteps of capitalism, at least, from the perspectives of Marxist
(e.g., Marx) and Post-Marxist (e.g., Lyotard [libidinal period]
and Baudrillard) analysis. The equivalence between terms is
achieved through the fact that “Camp sees everything in
quotation marks” [NC 10]. Sontag says, “To perceive Camp in
objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role”
[NC 10]. Because of her usage of Being, we can confirm that
Camp is ontological, and because of her usage of perception, we
can confirm that Camp is also of phenomenalism. To further, the
contradiction that we’ve spoken of earlier within Camp is this
very internal opposition within the very concept of Camp: Camp
is both an intrinsic ontological property of an entity independent
of the subject’s presence and a form of phenomenal perception
that requires the subject’s presence, and it is with this that Camp
both perpetuates non-transcendental idealist metaphysics and
transcendental idealist metaphysics. Now, things get even more
complicated because of the fact that “[s]ome people can’t see
camp” [MW 11/04]. The complication that arises is the fact that
not all subjects therefore have an external realm of objects with
the intrinsic property of “Campness.” In this sense, Camp
undermines transcendental idealism even further. The other
complication that arises has to do with the subject’s cognition
itself. If some people can’t see camp that would only be because
either, one, it doesn’t really exist (this is the former complication
we just brought up), or, two, their cognition of intuitions derived
from perceptual sensibility is different from
another’s structurally. What I mean by this is that
consciousness has limits because of the fact that the cognition of
intuitions derived from perceptual sensibility can only verify
itself, or at least it seems this way, through concepts derived
from the cognition of intuitions derived from perceptual
sensibility, therefore making consciousness necessarily circular
in terms of any justification for its existence. The limit to
consciousness is therefore experience itself, in other words, if we
are to try to determine consciousness’ objectivity reality which is
to say if we are to try to assert as a fact that consciousness is
always transcendental (for reality is a transcendental concept),
we would have to completely abstract consciousness from
experience and then derive something to assert consciousness’
objectivity. I know I am repeating myself, but bare with me. This
is all to say, consciousness has an inherent limit, and this limit is
the verification of itself, and to do such a verification, one would
have to use knowledge not derived by way of consciousness,
which is to say not by way of cognition, and, therefore,
ultimately not by way of perceptual sensibility. What this all
leads to is the conclusion that consciousness is limited in the
ability to verify itself and to be able to verify itself it would have
to have knowledge that doesn’t come from experience, which is
to say, it would have to have knowledge derived from a non-
sensible intuition (also known as an intellectual intuition). Now
the issue is that Kant thinks that “such an intuition, namely, an
intellectual one, is entirely beyond our faculty of knowledge”
[CPR 259]. This is why noumenon, in the negative sense, is a
reality: “The concept of a noumenon is also necessary to prevent
sensible intuition from extending to things in themselves; that
is, in order to limit the objective validity of sensible knowledge”
[CPR 260]. Now, what Kant is supposing here is that there is
something that sensible intuition does not extend to, as
noumenon is “all the rest to which sensible intuition does not
extend” [CPR 260]. But, we have already shown that there is
something sensible intuition does not extend to: its warranting.
Thus, “[t]he concept of a noumenon is, therefore, only
a limiting concept, and intended to keep the claims of
sensibility within proper bounds” [CPR 261]. We have just
established transcendental idealism, and therefore a vast part of
Camp has fallen into the state of paralogism. Furthermore, in
relation to Camp, what this means is that all consciousnesses
have a noumenal Outside to their phenomenal Inside. But this
noumenal Outside is consciousness’ warranting and because
Camp is not outside the bounds of sensible intuition, one could
not claim that people cannot experience Camp, for if one did,
they would be experiencing Camp. Having an understanding of
Camp can be acquired through communication. For example,
you can tell me that Camp is, as Nolan would say, being “YASS
SLAY,” and I therefore now know what Camp is, and I can
therefore see things that are Camp when I see things that are
“YASS SLAY.” What this means is that Camp has nothing to do
with objects outside of us, and cannot actually be a subject
independent property, because Camp is not of those positive
noumena which are those objects outside of us, or that one can
warrant that they are outside of us because of the fact positive
noumenon is “an object of a non-sensible intuition” [CPR
259]. Thus, Camp falls into phenomenalism completely and
Sontag cannot at once claim Camp is a mode of sensibility and
then objects independent of sensibility.

The Cathedral

Camp and Politics (or the Box Mr. Woodruff wants me to be

in)

§2.00 — Camp and Politics

How did we get into this mess? [XS The Monkey Trap]

What a mess… My entrance into politics was as far from simple

as it could be: 2015 comes around and my parents, living in
Alabama, of course support Trump, and therefore, as
an impressionable (and trust me, I believed most things my
father told me, no matter how conspiratorial they seemed)
young eleven year old, I too supported Trump. Nationalism was
very different for me though. I saw nationalism as upholding our
nation’s values and not the nation itself… it seems I didn’t accept
the supposed co-dependence of the two. Once 2016 came
around, my latent national idealism (in the sense I valued the
ideals, i.e., the values of the nation rather than the nation itself)
caused me to champion life, liberty, and property (rights)! By
the time I was twelve years old, freedom was the only metric for
my politics — and the more the better! I just assumed freedom
to be everyone’s supposed value because how could one argue
against free speech while freely speaking and therefore freely
moving and ultimately acting? The maximization of freedom
was my political axiom. This lead my down toward Ayn Rand’s
Objectivism, but I didn’t like her critique of anarchism very
much, so by the time I was in eighth grade, now fourteen years
old, I was an anarcho-capitalist in the common fashion of the
Austrian School (I particularly liked Robert Murphy). Over late
2018 and the first half of 2019, triggered feminist SJW owned by
facts and logic videos pervaded all the media I consumed. On the
level of my political beliefs and their related axioms, my only
“hold up” on complete freedom was being pro-life, because I
believed the unborn child had a right to life. But, by the end of
the summer of 2019, i.e., the summer between eighth grade and
freshman year, I became radically skeptical of moral beliefs. The
only thing that came out of that summer was a degenerating
mind in terms of coherence. I entered into nationalism, anti-
feminism, but I only viewed nationalism in a certain
compositional sense. I was never a nationalist in the sense I
cared about my nation, rather, I was against globalism, what I
thought was collectivism on the global scale, in favor of
nationalism, what I thought was individualism on the global
scale. My geopolitical stance was done through induction,
specifically the abstracting of my beliefs of individual human
actors to the global scale. My opposition to feminism was
founded in my belief that everyone was already equal under the
law. I didn’t care much for sociology it seems… But, I quickly got
into the radical philosophy of Max Stirner, and I almost
immediately abandoned the pro-life position, and even
pondered about anti-capitalism. Eventually, toward later
September or maybe early or late October of 2019, I got sucked
into left anarchism and Marxism. What took place was my
reimagining of what freedom was, and I determined that
complete freedom is incompatible with capitalism. What also
took place was nothing but a repetition in my rejection of
liberalism (which has only been repeated and never stopped [I
have never been a liberal]). Against liberalism and intersectional
analysis, I was an orthodox marxist, historical/dialectical
materialist (I didn’t realize the two weren’t completely the same
thing — seems I read too much Lukacs), class reductionist, and I
also felt that I had taken Marxian state theory to its limit, and
therefore I also considered the state itself as an instrument of
capitalism, effectively making me an anarchist as well. I read
some Marx and some Kropotkin, and others… By November I
had gone through a “breakup” or, at least, what was really just a
jumble of miscommunications and poor timing. So throughout
the first part of December, I got into Schopenhauer, Mainländer,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and E. M. Cioran. Eventually I entered back
into politics from philosophical pessimism, but by the time the
pandemic rolled around (the spring break of my freshman year,
so March 2020), I had rejected the left out of my bloodstream in
favor of post-left anarchy. Wolfi Landstreicher (also known as
Feral Faun and Apio Ludd) and Max Stirner were my guides
here. Then I fell into Bataille, then Baudrillard (I coined, or
believe I had coined the phrase [of course people said it before
me, but I had never heard anyone say it] “we will never escape
capitalism” which was alternatively said as “we will never escape
capital”), then Lyotard (of his libidinal period), and finally back
to Bataille accompanied by Nick Land. What put me on this
route wasn’t my axiom of freedom, I had dropped that. Rather, it
was a motivating logic. The logic my belief followed as a will-to-
extremity, i.e., find the most extreme doctrine. But, by the time
2021 rolled around, I again went through a break up and
abandoned politics for a while in the sense that philosophy,
again, became my main focus. The readings of Bataille (I had
dropped Nick Land) that took place in the Indian Springs School
Library were instructive and tedious. But little did I know,
spring break was going to be transformative… During spring
break I read more than I ever had before, and I began regularly
writing. I realized I had written over 100 pages on Bataille
cumulatively by the end of the break, and with this realization I
began to write my book on Georges Bataille and his beliefs (as
well as extrapolations from them). The first thing I read cover to
cover in a continuous sitting was Nick Land’s book on
Bataille, The Thirst for Annihilation. I, to this very day,
consider that book to be better than anything Bataille wrote in
that it expressed exactly the final conclusion of Bataille’s work:
death. In other words, Bataille wrote that book and died, Nick
Land had to come back from the dead to retrieve that book —
and come back from the dead he did! I went through Bataille
throughout the rest of my sophomore year (and Mr. Griffin
thankfully indulged my interests) as well as the entirety of the
summer. By the time I came out of it junior year already slapped
me in the face and screamed “Wake up! It’s time for school!”
August and September were just repetitions of the summer
months, but October was different… October led me to write
some crazy things, synthesize ideas, and ultimately, discover the
dark truth of Bataille’s system: total expenditure: death. But
with Bataille done, what else did I have to do? In November, I
finished responding to the remaining critiques of him, and
finished my final and definitive interpretation of him. Now, I’ve
just moved onto Land completely. And with that movement, I
have also completely embraced the techno-commercialist sect of
the Dark Enlightenment. My, or, rather, what is playing me’s
current political logic? Exit. Exit toward the Outside.

Sontag says that politics is apolitical, but is it really? She says,

To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an

attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes
without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged,
depoliticized — or at least apolitical. [NC 2]

But is this not what postmodern politics is (modernity doesn’t

have politics because capitalism is anti-political)? Who looks at
content anymore? Certainly not the American public. Sontag
gets Camp wrong on her second note… But she only gets Camp
wrong because she gets politics wrong.
Trump is most definitely Camp in the sense that he was never
about content but completely style, and his style and its effect
was viral (on both sides). Both progressives and conservatives
fell ill to his viral effect and it sure replicated. Genuinely, the
Trump presidency felt like a fever dream to me. Time didn’t
really hit me until Biden got elected in that once Trump got out
office, the Cathedral ran out of fuel, that is to say, the media for
once didn’t have something to talk about. Once in paralysis, the
Cathedral stopped doing things, and time started to begin again.
Now, this is not to endorse Biden, for he too is a proponent of
the Cathedral, but it is surely true that Trump gave the Cathedral
more to eat then Biden.

Land tells us that Trump certainly isn’t a neo-reactionary

[XS The NRx Moment]. To suggest that Trump was in any way
neoreactionary is to be “on drugs” [XS The NRx Presidency].
Techno-commercialism does not put forward Trump as a
representative, nor even America. On the contrary, Land says,
“Abolish the Union. Only disintegration is worth doing”
[XS Proposition Nations]. If Trump is a nazi, and some think he
is, then Trump is not neoreactionary because whereas “the Alt-
Right is rotten with Nat[ional]-soc[ialist] retards” [XS The Alt
Right is Dead], the New Reaction will never be. What Trump
really did was “a continuation of Neoconservative geopolitics”
[XS Why Iran?], he just seemed to add a populist and
specifically counter-cultural bend to it. Of course, and even my
friends (such as Finn) succumbed to this, there is a particularly
odd affinity, or at least there was, between Trump and Left
Accelerationists and Land notes this [XS SMOD]. To further,
Neoreaction does not lead to Trump, nor the right-wing
terrorism that came in his wake (we will go over why Land
doesn’t support political terrorism in a moment), rather, that is
“what democracy leads to” [XS The Fear]. Trumpian right-wing
populism is certainly not of the New Reaction. For Land, and
this is key, “Satoshi Nakamoto is pretty much the only ‘person’
so far who comes out of the 21st century looking good. Building
and Exit Machine [Bitcoin] — that’s really something” [XS The
Fear]. Genuinely though, “[a]nything not on a blockchain will be
senseless noise” [XS Trump on Syria], and Trump certainly isn’t
on a blockchain. The idea that neoreactionaries supported
Trump caused Land to “shudder with disbelief” [XS Out of the
Popcorn Zone]. But, back to the Campiness of Trump.

Once it is established that politics is less about content (reality)

than style, then it isn’t hard to see that Camp is extremely
political. Sontag makes another error in regards to this in note
15: “Art Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with
Camp … Art Nouveau is full of ‘content,’ even of a political-moral
sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by
a Utopian vision … of an organic politics and taste” [NC 15]. But
hardly are politics and morals content, in fact, the vast majority
of politics and morality are nothing more than stylized rhetorical
tools in that the rhetorical usage of morality can help further
one’s politics through the capture of supporters. And,
revolution? What is more about style than that?

Land perfectly expresses what I am talking about:

Endless conversational stimulation is to be found in the
fact that the most basic distinction of modern politics is
profoundly incomprehensible, and at the same time almost
universally invested. Almost everybody thinks they
understand the difference between the Right and the Left,
until they think about it. Then they realize that this
distinction commands no solid consensus, and exists
primarily as a substitute for thought. Perhaps the same is
true of all widely-invoked political labels. Perhaps that is
what politics is. [XS Right and Left]

Maybe in Sontag’s day politics actually were about something,

but today? Hell no. On the level of teenagers and younger adults,
what captures them completely is identification: “What is your
political ideology?” Political ideology is seen as something on a
spectrum, or on a grid (political compass). What has completely
captured modern day politics is, for example, memes. Politics
isn’t about actually content but about what spreads the fastest,
i.e., what political ideology in the form of a meme is the most
contagious. I genuinely do not think that it is controversial to say
that one of the reasons Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential
Election is because the memes were on his side. In this sense,
Donald Trump is absolutely Camp, that is, free of content, but at
the same time, he is absolutely political. The fact Trump is
known more for tweets than his policy should immediately help
realize that within the Cathedral, postmodern politics is
dominant, which is to say, content (= facts?) is nowhere to be
found. That politics itself has become about mimetic artifice and
ideological identification is not controversial, and should not be
controversial. Now, I must say that I believe that people identify
and believe in something if it just makes sense to them (I mean
for Heaven’s sake, Neo-Hegelians define truth as that which
satisfies the mind, i.e., that which “just makes sense”). Land,
well, he just makes sense to me. The Dark Enlightenment is a
controversial text, but a lot of what is said reflects my
experience. For example:

The left thrives on dialectics, the right perishes through

them. Insofar as there is a pure logic of politics, it is that.
One immediate consequence (repeatedly emphasized by
Mencius Moldbug) is that progressivism has no enemies to
the left. It recognizes only idealists, whose time has not yet
come. Factional conflicts on the left are politically dynamic,
celebrated for their motive potential. Conservatism, in
contrast, is caught in between a rock and a hard place:
bludgeoned from the left by the juggernaut of post-
constitutional statism, and agitated from ‘the right’ by
inchoate tendencies which are both unassimilable (to the
mainstream) and often mutually incompatible, ranging
from extreme (Austro-libertarian) varieties of laissez-
faire capitalist advocacy to strains of obstinate,
theologically-grounded social traditionalism, ultra-
nationalism, or white identity politics. ‘The right’ has no
unity, actual or prospective, and thus has no definition
symmetrical to that of the left. It is for this reason that
political dialectics (a tautology) rachets only in one
direction, predictably, towards state expansion and an
increasingly coercive substantial egalitarian ideal. The
right moves to the center, and the center moves to the left.
[DE 4c]

From my experience within many, many political communities

over the years, this is absolutely true. In fact, I have never heard
anything about the nature of political communities more true
than this. The Left quite easily has the advantage in that their
values are generally unified. Even the “Post-”Left itself is a
critique of the Left for not being anti-capitalist, anti-civilization,
etc., etc. enough. Post-Left and Post-Marxist critique of the Left
is done because the Left doesn’t achieve its goals, but the Post-
Left politic and Post-Marxist politic does achieve these goals
(and more). Left unity has always been a thing in that everyone
on the Left agrees generally on one thing: anti-capitalism. The
Right? They do not agree on a single universal thing. Again,
from my experience, the transformative potential of “left-wing
infighting” is great in that it leads to three things: 1. Support for
a certain group that is involved in the infighting 2. Being against
infighting and therefore the groups that are infighting and 3. A
return to progressivism. In terms of the first thing, this is
obviously true, and my days as a post-left anarchist confirms
this. In terms of the second thing, this is obviously true, in fact,
people that initiate critique can be chased out as an “infantile
disorder” in that they disrupt socialist unity. In terms of the
third thing, this is absolutely true in that when progressive
liberals see mass infighting they do not participate in
participation in or opposition to infighting, rather they sit on the
side lines. Either way, in all three cases, the Left grows… Right-
wing infighting, however, is absolutely different in that there is
no third option, nor is there a second option. There is no
universal goal of the Right, thus no right-wing unity can be
broken. In other words, being a right-winger requires
participating in infighting, therefore one could never oppose
infighting (and actually be taken seriously). There is no third
option in that a return to progressive liberalism is considered a
return to something outside of explicit anti-capitalism, though it
is implicitly anti-capitalist, therefore meaning that there is
always a bubble to retreat to, and this bubble already secretly
agrees with what it is retreating from (the explicitly anti-
capitalist Left). In other words, progressive liberals have been
critiqued by the Left since the beginning, so continual critique of
them is not seen as infighting, or at least, there is a higher form
of infighting that critique of progressives is not. In other words,
the explicitly anti-capitalist Left does not consider progressives
to be leftists, therefore meaning they aren’t infighting.
Ultimately, nothing like this is afforded to anyone on the Right
because returning to the general right-centrist or neo-
conservative position does not save one from critique from
fascists and anarcho-capitalists alike. Land is absolutely correct
here to an unbelievable degree. But then Land continues to say
the truth:

Regardless of mainstream conservative fantasies, liberal-

progressive mastery of American providence has become
unconstestable, dominated by a racial dialectic that
absorbs unlimited contradiction, whilst positioning the
Afro-American underclass as the incarnate critique of the
existing social order, the criterion of emancipation, and the
sole path to collective salvation. No alternative structure of
historical intelligibility is politically tolerable, or even —
strictly speaking — imaginable, since resistance to the
narrative is un-American, anti-social, and (of course)
racist, serving only to confirm the existence of systematic
racial oppression through the symbolic violence manifested
in its negation. To argue against it is already to prove it
correct, by concretely demonstrating the same benighted
forces of social retardation that are being verbally denied.
By resisting the demand for orchestrated social re-
education, knuckle-dragging ‘bitter clingers’ only show
how much there still is to do. At its most abstract and all-
encompassing, the liberal-progressive racial dialectic
abolishes its outside, along with any possibility of
principled consistency. It asserts — at one and the same
time — that race does not exist, and that its socially-
constructed pseudo-existence is an instrument of inter-
racial violence. Racial recognition is both mandatory, and
forbidden. Racial identities are meticulously catalogued for
purposes of social remedy, hate crime detection, and
disparate impact studies, targeting groups for ‘positive
discrimination’, ‘affirmative action’, or ‘diversity
promotion’ (to list these terms in their rough order of
historical substitution), even as they are denounced as
meaningless (by the United Nations, no less), and
dismissed as malicious stereotypes, corresponding to
nothing real. Extreme racial sensitivity and absolute racial
desensitization are demanded simultaneously. Race is
everything and nothing. There is no way out. [DE 4c]
All I propose in relation to this (other than its utter correctness)
is to update it in accordance with the Leftist Singularity (see the
blog post of the same name) as it has been ten years since The
Dark Enlightenment was written. Today, instead of it being a
racial dialectic alone (though it is still 100% predominately a
racial dialectic), the dialectic now encompasses LGBTQIA+
people, women, indigenous peoples, asian people, people of
hispanic origin, transgender people, etc. and their
corresponding oppressions. “Gender doesn’t exist, yet it also
exists as a social construct.” “There is no definition of what a
woman is, yet we must defend women.” “Anyone can be trans
even if they don’t physically transition or come out.” All of these
commonly heard things within progressive circles reflect the fact
that the liberal-progressive dialectic has encapsulated identity as
a whole in accordance with the positive feedback process that is
the Leftist Singularity having looped around over the years. And
can we just note that the fact Land brought up the liberal-
progressive use of the United Nations as an authority (for
example, on if universal human rights are metaphysically
existent) is absolutely on point! So, what Land calls the racial
dialectic, I will call the dialectic of identity and this is identity in
the sense of identity politics obviously. The liberal-progressive
dialectic of identity absolutely predicates itself upon
contradictions: race isn’t real, yet race is real in its social
construction; gender isn’t real, yet gender is real in its social
construction; pronouns have nothing to do with the gender of
the person (yes, this is an increasingly common take), yet using
the wrong pronouns constitutes the act of misgendering; and so
on. Now, because this dialectic is predicated
on internal contradiction (as all dialectics are), it is impervious
to any form of external contradiction (opposition). To oppose
this dialectic through voice (we opt for escape through an exit
from the race-based politics of the Cathedral by way of human
biodiversity or HBD for short, but more on this later), is to only
fuel it, for it is clear that if you oppose the course of the dialectic
(which is, as described by Land, “the sole path to collective
salvation” achieved through progressive politics and the identity
constituting the dialectic itself), then you are whatever ‘ism’
corresponds to the identity you are opposing, questioning,
contesting, etc. For example, if you oppose the racial dialectic,
you are racist; if you oppose the dialectic of gender, you are
sexist, transphobic, etc.; and so on, and so on. This is one of the
many reasons that the only option is not an option at all, not a
course of action, not political organization achieved through the
employment of voice, rather, the only option is exit. Now, what
the dialectic of identity, and therefore liberal progressivism,
opposes is capitalism — which is exactly why progressivism
is implicitly anti-capitalist. Land explains how it opposes
capitalism: “Policies broadly compatible with capitalistic
development, oriented to the rewarding of low time-preference,
and thus punishing impulsivity, will reliably have a disparate
impact upon the least economically functional social groups”
[DE 4c]. Now, Land points something out, and I want to confirm
it: “Of course, the dialectic demands that the racial aspect of this
disparate impact can and must be strongly emphasized (for the
purpose of condemning incentives to human capital formation
as racist), and at the same time forcefully denied (in order
to exactly the same observation as racist stereotyping” [DE 4c].
But what can we do then? In the face of the dialectical
constitution of the Cathedral, only one thing can be done: exit.
Exit in this case is ultimately therefore an anti-dialectical
movement.

I will note that further coming from my experience, once a

liberal-progressive explicitly becomes anti-capitalist, they
become a Miserablist. In fact, it leads to a cringe inducing
aesthetic which is why I do not hesitate to say Camp is a
fundamentally leftist notion. Now, here is the interesting thing,
to the Miserablists, my friend Colette’s essay Out Misery vs.
Theirs is in no way cringe. In fact, I used to be a Miserablist
when I was a Marxist a couple of years ago. Furthermore, I was a
Miserablist sporadically, and that is how few Miserablists are,
for the Miserablists that aren’t on the edge of the fence about
their misery are most Miserablists because they see their misery
as eternal, i.e., “every second in this capitalist hell hole is
alienating, inducing mental illness, and eventually the
proclaiment of ‘I want to kill myself!’ in the wake of capitalist-
induced depression,” and it all ends in suicide (the only way out
[but if they are truly just a downer they can take Lyotard’s
argument that death is not an external alternative to capitalism
but an interior part to mean not even death helps us escape
capitalism[). Nevertheless, Colette’s essay is just a perfect
representation of Miserablism. Firstly, Land, in his essay
“Critique of Transcendental Miserablism” (found in Fanged
Noumena), identifies that what the Left is now doing is taking
any admitted “benefit” of capitalism and “install[ing] a limitless
cosmic despair in its place” [FN 623]. This is the Miserablists
fundamental movement: “Admit that capitalism will outperform
its competitors under almost any imaginable circumstances,
while turning that very admission into a new kind of curse” [FN
623]. For example, the Miserablist will say, “we never wanted
[economic] growth anyway, it just spells alienation, besides,
haven’t you heard that the polar bears are drowning …?” [FN
623]. Now, Land explains that because capitalism is so
interwoven with desire one must see that “the suffering of desire
turned to ruin, the name for everything that might be wanted in
time,” [FN 624] is identified as the fault of capitalism. The odd
thing is the fact that if you want to acquire something, whether it
is an experience, thing, etc., “capitalism is the most reliable way
to get it, and by absorbing every source of social dynamism,
capitalism makes growth, change and even time itself into
integral components of its endlessly gathering tide” [FN 625].
The Miserabalist syllogism that follows all of its premises and
conclusions is this: “Time is on the side of capitalism, capitalism
is everything that makes me sad, so time must be evil” [FN 626].
THERE WE HAVE IT! The Miserablist’s fundamental maxim is
“capitalism is everything that makes me sad” [FN 626]. Now, is
alienation fact? I suppose so, I mean… I’ve felt alienation. When
I got in my car crash and realized I’m going to have to pay off the
insurance, alienation is all I “felt.” Or, at least, the supposed
negative psychological effects of capitalism were what I felt. But,
we do not reject capitalism for inducing psychosis, that would be
a rejection of horror (something we cannot do). What the
Miserablists despise is intelligence due to the fact that they want
to do anything but working (and intelligence is problem solving,
it is extropy production, and extropy is what it means for
something to work). I have the car crash and thus the problem of
debt, and intelligence is the only way I can solve the problem,
because, again, that is what intelligence is. This is why Land sees
that if you desire something, capitalism is the best way to get
there. In other words, capitalism is intelligence, and achieving a
goal without intelligence is impossible. Most Miserablists are
also left accelerationists, i.e., to get out of capitalism, we have to
use it against itself, which is to say, go through it. All left
accelerationism reveals to us is that capitalism is the only
answer, it is just that they fail to realize that processes of
(technomic) acceleration only lead to capitalism because of the
fact that acceleration is almost synonymous with capitalism and
modernity. In the end, alienation, or rather, the negative
psychological effects of the car crash were not caused by
capitalism but because of something wholly other than
capitalism: if capitalism is problem solving then the creation of
the problem through the car crash was not at all capitalism’s
fault. In this sense, it is only the creation of problems that causes
immense alienation, and in terms of work specifically, it is the
fact that you can not put the future solution to the problem over
your misery in the now is precisely why you are miserable, which
is why the source of misery is high time-preference and the
solution to misery is low time-preference, and therefore
roundabout production is the method of problem solving on an
economic level, and in a certain sense, roundaboutness is capital
teleology. Woodruff expresses the movement toward high time-
preference behavior when he asks those people who restrict
themselves from things, “Why so serious?” [MW 11/04]. What
the Miserablist generally claims is that, through acquiring anti-
capitalist notions by way of reading anti-capitalist theory, “you
are past the point of no return, why you’re in too deep; you know
too much” [MT]. I would have probably agreed with this just a
couple months ago, or maybe a few, but like I said, I came out
the other end. I returned to what I was in 2019 and before: a
capitalist. I did return, and there was always a tension, always a
joy in knowing capitalism wouldn’t be escaped. In other words,
when Colette says “Ignorance is both a blessing and a curse”
[MT], I just can’t agree. Knowledge doesn’t equate to
intelligence, and knowledge may be slavery (Bataille is
thoroughly correct when it comes to nonknowledge [as well as
everything else; the only reason I moved away from him is three
things: 1. He is not a time traveler and in no way could have
anticipated (or at least, Bataille was not equipped at the time to
anticipate) capitalism (in the Landian sense) 2. On a
cosmological level, time necessarily complicates the cosmology
of nothingness which uses and expands Bataille and 3. I have,
and always will, care about warranting. Bataille is the (correct)
conclusion if the conclusion that nothing can be warranted
(including the conclusion that nothing can be warranted;
nonknowledge “solves” this problem). But, if one could solve the
truth bind (that truth is always supposed in trying to prove a
theory of truth true, therefore making it circular), the logic bind
(logic requires warranting, and that would [seemingly] require
the use of logic), the experience bind (concepts derived from
experience have no epistemic validity, nor do metaphysical
claims based on concepts derived from experience have validity
because confirming the validity of experience through concepts
derived from experience is circular), and lastly the hermeneutics
bind (one can’t escape language and linguistic meaning is
subjectively determined, meaning no objectivity is present)]),
but obviously subjectivity (at least from a Bataillean position)
requires knowledge, so it is non-unique in terms of Miserablists
and those who are, at least to the Miserablists, “sheep.” What
type of thing one knows about doesn’t necessarily cause the
epistemic enslavement a subject undergoes (in the sense Bataille
talks about it), so the Miserablist (who, at least from my time
being one, surely doesn’t know a lot stuff the “sheep” know
about) is not unique or special, like they think they are. Colette’s
description of typical leftist revulsion to the American political
system is, ironically, ignorant of the fact that leftists largely
collapse back into practicality because of the dialectic of identity
and their wanting to not be socially ostracized. The other leftists
who don’t affirm the dialectic oppose it and thus affirm it
inadvertently. What the Miserablist does is see nothing but, and
this shouldn’t be surprising, misery: “our society is built around
[the two-party system] and [therefore] our society is shit” [MT].
Now why is our society shit for the Miserablist? Multiple
reasons: “sexualized 11-year-olds,” “mentally ill 12-year-olds,”
“abused 13-year-olds,” “14-year-old drug addicts,” we are all
“heartbroken, or carry some burden with us” [MT]. Essentially,
besides the youthful degeneracy, “[s]omething weighing on us …
makes us want to collapse to the ground, and give up. Climb to
the roof, take the pill, you get the gist” [MT]. Here is the thing…
We don’t require knowledge about why these kids are doing
these things to feel anguish at them. Now, if your argument (and
this is Colette’s argument) is that because we know the cause is
inescapable (one cannot escape capitalism), that is different,
because a different anguish is produced. Colette says, “We write
essays about it, we read books that god knows no one else
glances at. We do all of this just to learn about why we are so
unhappy, and why everything is terrible in our society. And that,
my friends, is why we are so miserable” [MT]. We must realize
that it is all about accepting reality. If the reality of the matter is
that capitalism is not escapable, then we must accept reality (for
there is nothing else we can do). But this shouldn’t be a defeatist
surrender, because surrendering to an unbeatable supposed
opponent requires intelligence (and therefore you are already
being a capitalist). Rather, it is an exit from untruth (anti-
capitalist Miserablism), which is something to celebrate:
capitalism, and Land once said this on his twitter, is the best
mechanism to reach truth, and in fact, capitalism may be truth
(in that Bitcoin is truth).

Because my experience has, for some reason, become relevant to

this essay, let’s talk about the political compass for a moment.
Land says something which has is so extremely true:
“Ideological categorization is the astrology of politics” [PPD and
r/K]. Throughout 2018–2019, one’s political compass result
defined them. Where you were on some two-axis (four-
quadrant), four-color square was all the rage. If something held
politics back, it was dogmatic adherence to one’s political test
results (and the scars seem to have only started healing now, but
then again, they are probably going to get slashed again…).

Sontag describes Camp as having a “democratic esprit [spirit]”

[NC 47]. Founded through the supposed fundamental
“equivalence of all objects” [NC 47], Sontag concludes that
democracy is contained within universalism, and Sontag is quite
right. But this only opens it up to critique. Fundamentally,
nobody or rather no two things are equal, characterized by
countless differences. No two people are equal, and this is a fact.
Land notes succinctly, “The fall from liberty into democracy
takes only a single false step” [XS Slippage], and this begs the
question: “Is Camp one of those single false steps?” Firstly, why
is democracy preferred by the Cathedral (and it is)? The
preference comes from the false claim that democracy “offers an
alternative to violence as a mechanism for regime change”
[XS Twitter cuts (#68)]. But we can see through all the crap:
what democracy actually offers is a principle: “Violence is only
illegitimate when it is employed to resist leftward progression”
[XS Twitter cuts (#68)]. That is the false defense of democracy
and this obviously comes from liberal-progressives. On the other
side, specifically the Outside, “[t]he Outer Right provides the
formal critique of democracy” [XS Twitter cuts (#68)]. So, what
is the Outer Right’s critique?

Now that I have returned back to the (or rather arrived at the
Outer) Right (it took a couple years), I must accept that “the
right can never agree about anything” [XS Flavors of Reaction].
That both the Right and the Left contain an “entire ideological
cosmos” [XS Flavors of Reaction] cannot be contested. Being a
part of the New Reaction (which may seem old at this point, but
let me assure you that techno-commercialism [i.e., the sect of
the New Reaction I identify with] is always in with the new
because capitalism is change), I am not necessarily politics,
rather, I side with “the anti-political ‘camp’” [XS Flavors of
Reaction]. My cause is “depoliticization” [XS Flavors of
Reaction] (in that catallaxy negates politics?). Now, the Dark
Enlightenment or Land’s “part” of the New Reaction is heavily
strawmanned. In no way do I or Land endorse what are
identified as right-wing terrorist attacks because “[a]cts of terror
taint a cause [and] its supporters” [XS Cui bono?], and only
invoke sympathy for the attacked, as well as cause other groups
to fear attack, therefore meaning the cause and its supporters
that did the attack only gains more opposition. Nor are I and
Land fascists, for what the Dark Enlightenment “has as its most
essential tendency the insistence upon an alternative to
fascism” [XS On Goulding]. Land sees Neoreaction as
“the least fascistic current of political philosophy presently in
existence” [XS Hell-Baked]. The Dark Enlightenment doesn’t
have a future ideal society (in the sense that patchwork is
achieved in exit, because patchwork is exit) to be achieved
through meticulous political praxis and organizing. We are not
Utopians: “Beginning with a model of an ideal society is a
procedure that already has a name, and a different one:
Utopianism” [XS Neoreactionary Realism]. On the level of
political philosophy, we recognize that “[t]he real problem of
political philosophy does not lie in the conceptual effort of
modeling an ideal society, but in departing from where we are,
in a direction that tends to the optimization of a selected value”
[XS Neoreactionary Realism].

What the New Reaction arises out of is a reactionary recognition

that progressivism is to be critiqued but that a simple reaction
that completely reverses the process that is “progression” is
impossible [XS The Idea of Neoreaction]. In its critique of
progressivism, Neoreaction recognizes its one enemy: the
Cathedral. But before we get into the concept of the Cathedral,
how do we recognize it? Quite simple: through Moldbug’s
axiomatic political analysis. Here is his axiom: “anything that
appears to bind sovereignty is itself in reality true sovereignty,
binding something else, and something less” [XS The Odysseus
Problem], or, in other words, “[a] constrained authority is a
superseded authority, or delegated power. To limit government
is to exceed, and thus supplant it. It follows that … the task of
realist political theory is to identify the usurper” [XS Rules]. For
Moldbug and Land, the identification of the usurper is found in
recognition of the Cathedral. The ideologues of democracy may
preach that it is the People who are sovereign within democracy,
but Land says, and he is correct when he says this, “The
sovereign instance within democracy is that social organ that is
able to effectively shape the opinion and direct the opinion of the
People” [WIA 11:21–11:35]. Akin to Foucault’s notion of
biopower, Land describes the Cathedral’s “essential power”:
“mind control” [WIA 11:56–12:03]. He goes on to say, “[the
Cathedral’s essential power] is to be able to establish and
maintain and direct moral intuitions and the notions of
legitimate social order” [WIA 12:03–12:18]. What the Cathedral
can do if it can control the People is control democracy, and that
is exactly what it does, and exactly why it is the sovereign within
democratic society. This was, as Land describes, what the church
did, thus progressivism is a religion! If progressivism is a
religion, and it is, then it has its respective heresies. The biggest
heresy around is reality. In the context of the realism of the Dark
Enlightenment, race usually comes into the question in the form
of race realism. In other words, beyond misogyny, beyond
homophobia, beyond transphobia, and beyond all other
oppressions that have entered into the oppression olympics,
racism is seen as one of the most, if not the most treacherous
heresy. Now, what reactionaries tend to do is speak their mind,
that is to say, voice over exit, and they do this by stating things,
for example, in response to black people accusing them of
racism such as “We’re not racists, you’re hoodlums” [DE 4a].
Now, if the Cathedral is a church, racism one of its heresies, and
Neoreaction as its opposition, then does the Dark
Enlightenment not need to repeat what the reactionaries say
above? Hardly. Racism is like a terrorist attack, it only fuels the
Cathedral: as Land says, “To identify America’s race problem
with white racism is the stereotypical liberal position, whilst
identifying it with black social disfunction is the
exact conservative complement” [DE 4a]. As Moldbug says in
the very first chapter of An Open Letter to Open-Minded
Progressives, “I mean neither [progressivism nor
conservatism] has any consistent relationship to reality” [OLP
1]. Therefore, in opposing the Cathedral through political action
(= voice), one seems to only fuel it — so this seems even more
similar to Foucault’s notion of power, as I said earlier. This is
why the neoreactionary does nothing (= exit), but more on this
later. Back to the subject of race, Land speaks of “racial horror”
which is not at all “racial terror,” i.e., being afraid of another
race, rather, racial horror is “[h]orror of the very phenomena of
race” [XS White Fright]. Now, it seems that Land believes in
HBD, or human biological diversity. Now, HBD is “not reducible
to racial variation,” and can be “equally concerned with human
sexual dimorphism” [XS White Fright]. In other words, Land
believes in “comparative human genomics” [XS White Fright].
Many see HBD as race science, which translates into scientific
racism, because it believes that race exists, and therefore causes
racial horror. But the idea of race is not necessarily problematic.
What Land emphasizes is that HBD is supported by reality, and
thus, he supports it. But is HBD racist? That is the question. The
answer? Definitely not. Firstly, HBD is not particularly about
race. Secondly, “HBD is uniquely horrible to White
people” [XS White Fright], and if we look at this from the
perspective of progressivism, one cannot be racist to white
people. Thirdly, HBD is about difference, and this disrupts all
forms of white nationalism because white nationalism “finds
itself stymied at every turn by universalism” [XS White Fright].
Fourthly, what HBD actually “takes race out of the equation, by
demolishing the edifice of ‘disparate impact’ grievance remedy”
[XS Five Stages of HBD]. Fifthly, HBD really is nothing more
than a disgression from the race-politics of the Cathedral
[XS Five Stages of HBD]. To further, Land explicitly notes that
he is not a proponent of “race ‘realism’” [XS Zacked]. He does
not believe that white supremacy and markets go together, or
that we should head toward “racial purity” (whatever that
means) [XS Zacked]. All Land believes is that, on a descriptive
level, “[p]eople are different” [XS Dark Moments]. Now, he
believes that some white people are “different” from other white
people, just like some black people are different from other black
people (to say they are the same and unified is to fall into a
confusion of race and ethnicity, as well as universalism [ethnic
universalism can become an issue as well (univesalism
in almost all cases is generally an issue); for example, anti-
semitism is a theory of ethnic universalism in terms of the
Jewish ethnicity]). The Hajnal line is a good example of this.
Western Europeans may look the same as Eastern Europeans,
but do they have different cultural tendencies toward different
ways of living and different practices? Yes, of course, but
only generally. It is only in general, that is, according to the
data, that this is true. This is not a universalist sweep or a
universalist claim, far from it in fact. That people are different is
distinctly not universalist. I don’t believe it would be
problematic to say that the way people have lived over
thousands of years now influences the actions and behavior of
their descendants. What would be problematic is the universalist
assertion that people are inherently this way, not because of
genetic reality discovered through scientific research, but rather
because of some “thede,” i.e., “the substance of a group identity”
[XS Thedes]. Land would say it is an error to try to generalize
thedes “to include all self-conscious human groupings”
[XS Thedes], and he is right. Sexuality, class, etc. need to be
dropped, for these have nothing to do with genetics (at least, to
my understanding they don’t). What thedes are to even be used
in relation to are ethnicities which “correspond to real
populations, and to cladistic structures” [XS Thedes]. HBD has
to do more with ethnicity than race. Whereas white supremacy
has to do with race, HBD has to do with “ethnic genetic[s]”
[XS Thedes]. For Land, “[r]acial solidarity does not follow
necessarily from biorealism” [XS Questions of Identity]. For
Land, any appeal to a “World Brotherhood of Europeans”
[XS Questions of Identity] is nothing less than white nationalist
universalism, which is something he is opposed to. HBD
is not something Land uses with prescriptive force, rather it is
just a description of humanity’s genetic reality. Now, one could
argue that race is a social construct (I’m not sure that Land
would disagree once HBD’s exclusion of the subject of race is
pronounced), and people in American politics sure do. I have
argued this. I’m sure you have argued this. If we are to follow
Sontag and her standards HBD in its implications aren’t
problematic. She herself affirms human difference, and
acknowledges that different groups of people have different
proclivities toward different actions and behaviors, and she does
this when she says, “While it’s not true that Camp
taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity
and overlap. Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a
peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes” [NC 51]. Then
she explicitly references groups when she says “For every
sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it” [NC 52].
In this sense, HBD can be a mode of Camp vision in that one can
use HBD to recognize the positive correlation between Camp
taste and homosexual taste. Human difference though, for Land
and Moldbug disrupt any idea of human equality, whereas (I’m
assuming this) Sontag does not. Universal human equality is
identified by both Land and Moldbug as a cornerstone of
progressivism, and thus they oppose this. But while progressives
deploy universal human equality in a normative and prescriptive
manner, Land and Moldbug, deploy human inequality derived
from human difference in a completely descriptive sense. Land
says,

Human inequality, in contrast, and in all of its abundant

multiplicity, is constantly on display, as people exhibit their
variations in gender, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, size
and shape, strength, health, agility, charm, humor, with,
industriousness, and sociability, among countless other
features, traits, abilities, and aspects of their personality,
some immediately and conspicuously, some only slowly,
over time. [DE 4b]

For Land, this means that human difference isn’t a social

construct in that it is real because it has real effects. Land’s
invocation of human inequality is very apparently not in the
sense that someone is better than another because they are a
man, or white, or a woman, or something else, etc., and this is so
very clear when he says, “People are not equal, they do not
develop equally, their goals and achievements are not equal, and
nothing can make them equal” [DE 4b]. Land is repeating the
common maxim that “everybody is different” (a maxim
progressives do love to spout), except there is a difference with
his repetition compared to the progressive’s repetition of the
maxim: Land actually means it. The point of progressivism and
progressive political policy is to reduce human inequality. For
Land, this could genuinely only be done through selective
breeding, and he is right. This leads us to his idea of hyper-
racism. Land rejects racism because of time: “The problem with
ordinary racism is its utter incomprehension of the near future”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. The future will have “capabilities for
genomic manipulation” that will “dissolve biological identity
into techno-commercial processes of yet-incomprehensible
radicality” [XS Hyper-Racism]. Land identifies that the
“universal humanist position,” i.e., the progressivist position, is
“[t]he antiracist” [XS Hyper-Racism] (I know things are getting
uncomfortable but bear with me). Land sees that the conclusion
of the antiracist position is “a program for global genetic
pooling” [XS Hyper-Racism]. Anti-racists quite literally have to
erase genetic diversity through proto-assortative mating, i.e.,
selective breeding. And they must do this because it is only
through “homogeneous intermixture” that “the realization of a
true, common humanity” will take place [XS Hyper-Racism].
This is why the antiracist position is not only anti-racist in the
sense of racism as racial prejudice but also in the sense of racism
as the belief in or the ideology of the reality of race. Thus, the
ultimate conclusion of the antiracist position is “[r]ace will
not exist” because they will be “reduced, by practical politics and
libidinal indeterminacy. Into relics of contingent historical
partition” [XS Hyper-Racism]. So what about the racist
position? Land certainly doesn’t hold such a position. The
difference between Land and racists is the same difference
between Neoreaction and Reaction: one, the latter, fuels the
Cathedral through voiced opposition (not in the sense of writing
blog posts that contain critique, but in the sense of voiced
political advocacy, specifically advocacy for change), and the
other, the former, does nothing (to the horror of the Cathedral,
its priests, and the rest of its congregation). For Land, the
conclusion of the racist position is “a conservation of
(comparative) genetic isolation, generally determined by
boundaries corresponding to conspicuous phenotypic variation”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. So, just like the antiracist, the racist must
achieve their goals through selective breeding, and specifically,
in the case of the racist, the prohibition of certain mating
(mating between two people of difference races) as well as the
endorsement of certain mating (mating between two people of
the same race). For the progressive it is in a way the inverse. The
racist position is not only racist in the sense of racism as racial
prejudice but also in the sense of racism as the belief in or the
ideology of the reality of the race, i.e., race realism (and Land
explicitly notes this). Race realism sees “consistent patterns of
striking, correlated, multi-dimensional variety between human
populations (or sub-species)” [XS Hyper-Racism]. So, again, we
must extricate Land from race realism in that it is not
specifically about race, but purely about human difference. In
fact, the recognition that statistically one can see patterns of
different behavior correlated to certain groups of the total
human population through multidimensional variable analysis
is not problematic. I don’t believe that it is problematic, and I
don’t believe that it is problematic because that is just the fact of
the matter, it is the reality of things in that it is reality. I can not
choose what multivariate statistics reflect. So, even if, Land
believes in HBD (which is not race realism, as he clarifies), and
he does, he in no way deploys reality in a normative manner,
and this is another distinct difference between him and race
realists. On the one hand, the progressives detest the facts “[i]f
the facts are [for them] morally wrong” [DE 4b], and on the
other, the reactionary (I’m using this here in the way Moldbug
uses the term conservative embraces the facts if the facts are
easier replicated than things that aren’t true [OLP 1]; but on a
whole other Cthulhoid body, that is, on the other tendril, Land
embraces the facts because he doesn’t contest reality. Where
Land differs even more from race realism is in its projections
about the future, and this is of key importance, because of the
fact that time legislates the facts. So, let’s see what Land thinks
the future holds and then, therefore, what he holds to be true
(i.e., let’s see what the reality of the matter is). What the future
holds for Land is genetic filtering and this found in “the theory
of assortative mating” [XS Hyper-Racism]. For Land,
“Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification” [XS Hyper-
Racism]. But the result of assortative mating that is genetic
diversification is “neither the preserved diversity of ordinary
racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. Both racism and anti-racism tend
toward selective mating (or breeding), rather
than adaptive mating. What assortative mating leads to is “a
class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a
vector toward neo-speciation” [XS Hyper-Racism]. This is to
say, assortative mating leads to not only the creation of classes
and thus separations of populations into those newly created
classes, but also the formation of a new species within the
evolutionary process (this is what neo-speciation is). In this neo-
speciatonary sense, what assortative mating leads to is “the
disintegration of the human species, along largely
unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. Essentially, those in the highest class, i.e.,
the elite, will be able to self-filter, and in this sense, “[t]he
genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different [from the
lower classes of humanity] and becoming ever more different
[from them, rather] it is explicitly superior according to the
established criteria that allocate social status” [XS Hyper-
Racism]. According to Land, the racist, with their “ordinary
racism,” is not “remotely able to process” [XS Hyper-Racism]
such a thing happening (and this thing that is happening is
humanity “coming apart, on an axis whose inferior pole
is refuse” [XS Hyper-Racism]). This process is also “a
consummate nightmare for anti-racism [and anti-racists]”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. This process is neither antiracist nor racist,
rather, it is “trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways
that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. Essentially, “[n]eo-eugenic genomic
manipulation capabilities … will certainly intensify the trend to
speciation, rather than ameliorating it” [XS Hyper-Racism]. But
what is so interesting is the fact that “racists and anti-racists can
be expected to eventually bond in a defensive fraternity, when
they recognize that traditionally-differentiated human
populations are being torn asunder on an axis of variation that
dwarfs all of their established concerns” [XS Hyper-Racism].
For Land, the Cathedral (antiracism) and its Reaction (racism)
come together to fight against Neoreaction (hyper-racism;
though note that hyper-racism is not racism in the sense of
racial prejudice, but in the sense of believing in race and its
reality, but its future reality will be nothing like what we have
now). The main point that I want to construe is that capitalism
in a technomic (technological and economic sense) is going to
radically change how we view race: “capabilities for genomic
manipulation dissolve biological identity into techno-
commercial processes of yet-incomprehensible radicality”
[XS Hyper-Racism]. Land is not a racist in the sense that his
view lies with the future: “cyberpositive circuitry loops time
‘itself’, integrating the actual and the virtual in a semi-closed
collapse upon the future … How would it feel to be smuggled
back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent
conditions?” [FN 317–318]. Land furthers, “The virtual is not a
potential present further up the road of linear time, but the
abstract motor of the actual … Time produces itself in a circuit,
passing through the virtual interruption of what is to come, in
order that the future which arrives is already infected,
populated” [FN 357–358]. Hyper-racism is just heat, just
another part in Modernities “invasion from the future” [FN
445]. In other words, Land sees “the future as an agent” [WIA
15:16–15:18] what Land This is all to say, Land recognizes that
time is reality (in a certain sense), and race is subordinated to
reality in its reality, therefore, Land is not a racist in the sense of
an ordinary racist, that is to say, he does not have racial
prejudice. On the contrary, Land is a hyper-racist in the sense
that the technonomic mechanisms of capitalism lead to the
future coming into the present, and this future is nothing less
than the breakdown of our current conception of race (therefore,
he cannot be a racist in the ordinary sense, nor can capitalism)
— meltdown. But what about his views in terms of the present
alone (assuming we must momentarily separate it from the
future)? For Land, “Diversity is good, which is to say robust,
and innovative” [JM Disintegration]. When talking about dog
breeds he says, “A world without mongrels would be a poorer
world. Mongrels are often advantaged by special and even
superior qualities” [JM Disintegration]. So, because a mongrel
is just a dog with no specific or definable breed, we can abstract
this onto the level of the human (because Land is not
anthropocentric). After this abstracting has been done, we can
recognize that in no way does Land desire races to become
separated, rather, he wants diversity to be promoted. In this
sense, he is not advocating for the mass genetic pooling of the
antiracist because that would be a movement toward
homogeneity, and “[h]eterogenesis is at all times the superior
ambition” [JM Disintegration]. What Land wants is “a world of
tendential speciation or increasing genetic diversity”
[JM Disintegration] which is not racial diversity, for even within
the same race, such as the white race for example, genetic
diversity can be particularly abundant. Land’s speech about
rhizomes in the footnotes to his article “Disintegration” is telling
in respect to where he is heading toward (and coming from).
Returning back to The Dark Enlightenment, Land sees that
most people who take the time to educate themselves HBD are
“significantly ‘socially retarded’, with low verbal inhibition, low
empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic
maladaptation to group expectations” [DE 4b]. Land dubs (I’m
assuming he includes himself in this group because he himself is
educated in HBD, or rather that he holds the positions they do)
these people as “obnoxious,” and asks, “[w]hy can’t obnoxious
people get a break [from social consequences]?” [DE 4b]. He
outlines a clear division between ‘the Sociables’ and ‘the
Obnoxious’ and recognizes that the sociables often exclude the
obnoxious from social activities and practices (e.g., marriage,
business, groups, political office, etc.) through usage of “slurs,
ostracizing and avoiding them” [DE 4b]. Ultimately,
“‘[o]bnoxiousness’ has been stigmatized and stereotyped in
extremely negative terms” [DE 4b], and they have been so
excluded to the point they create different labels for themselves
(e.g., “socially challenged” or “differently socially abled” [DE
4b]). The ultimate issue is that because of the fact that the
Obnoxious aren’t sociable, they have never been able to
politically mobilize themselves (but, for Land at least [and he
was extremely right about this], the Internet will change this
[and it did (see 4chan and their incredible political
organization)]). Land sees that from the perspective of the
Obnoxious, “[i]f an individual has certain characteristics, the
fact of belonging to a group that has similar or dissimilar
average characteristics is of no relevance whatsoever” [DE 4b].
Land gives us an example: “An Ashkenazi Jewish moron is no
less moronic because he is an Ashkenazi Jew” [DE 4b]. In this
sense, what the Obnoxious are saying is that the direct
information that can be determined about an individual is not in
any way gained through indirect information about the group
that said individual is a member of precisely because the latter
indirect information is indeterminate, it does not determine
anything about said individual. But, Land sees that for the
Sociables, this latter fact “is not obvious at all” [DE 4b].
Therefore, “[t]he failure to understand stereotypes in their
scientific, or probabilistic application, is a functional
prerequisite of sociability” [DE 4b]. Land explains perfectly why
the common usage of stereotypes outside of the HBD
community (comprised of the Obnoxious) is incorrect: “To say
that someone is ‘black’ is to say something about them, but to
say that someone is ‘a black’ is to say who they are …
Stereotypes, however rigorously confirmed,
are essentially inferior to specific knowledge in any concrete
social situation, because nobody ever encounters a population”
[DE 4b]. So, what Land is saying is that for sociability to take
place, one must socialize another within interaction, and within
the process of socialization, knowledge about the one who is
being socialized does not come from them but from society. This
is to say, within the process of socialization, a person is no
longer a black person, but a black. In other words, the way the
Sociables’ usage of stereotypes is incorrect because of the fact
that one is an individual and not a demographic, which is to say,
I am a white person but I am not a white, i.e., the collection of
the statistically derived behaviors that white people are generally
recognized to have. Like Land said, people encounter
other individual people, nobody encounters a group of people (a
population) in the form of an individual person as that would be
a contradiction. Therefore, we can know a priori that the
incorrect and very common application of stereotypes is always
inferior to non-stereotypically derived knowledge because one
encounters determinate individuals and not indeterminate
populations. Even following these statistical stereotypes Land
doesn’t necessarily go against any population. When talking
about the paradoxical nature of white identity, he sees that “it is
almost exactly weak ethnic groupishness that makes a group
ethnically modernistic, competent at ‘corporate’ (non-familial)
institution building, and thus objectively privileged / advantaged
within the dynamic of modernity” [DE 4d]. In this sense, white
ethno-nationalism is the exact thing that Land wants to avoid.
Therefore, we can note that the statistics derived from HBD in
no way put Land into a position of normativity. Land doesn’t
believe in the is-ought but let us note that it still doesn’t enter
into objectivity because, as Land specified, the indeterminate
statistical data tells us nothing about the actual defined nature of
a person. This is why he says they are “objectively privileged /
advantaged” [DE 4d]. He isn’t saying people to the west of the
Hajnal line are normatively above people to the east of it. Nazi is
not of modernity and this is why it will be “out-modernized,” i.e.,
“defeated” [DE 4d]. Land finishes with this “[i]dentity politics is
for losers, inherently and unalterably, due to an essentially
parasitical character that only works from the left. Because
inbreeding systematically contra-indicates for modern power,
racial Übermenschen make no real sense” [DE 4d]. It is done:
Nick Land is not a racist.

Now, Land is not a racist (in the conventional sense), he isn’t a

fascist, he isn’t a Trump supporter, he isn’t a lot of the things
people call him. So what is he? He is a “Social Darwinist”
[XS Hell-Baked]. Social Darwinism is the proposition that
“Darwinian processes have no limits relevant to us. Darwinism
is something we are inside. No part of what it is to be human can
ever judge its Darwinian inheritance from a position of
transcendent leverage, as if accessing principles of moral
estimation with some alternative genesis, or criterion” [XS Hell-
Baked]. From a cosmological perspective, Land’s Cosmic
Darwinism is identifiably materialist: “We are a minuscule
sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival
monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a
pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite” [XS Hell-Baked].
The Iron Law of existence is that if you try to escape these
cosmological Darwinian processes, you will be “undoing” the
very “work” that is attempting to escape [XS Hell-Baked]. In
other words, if, even for a second, we exit Darwinian processes
then “we degenerate” [XS Hell-Baked], and this “applies to every
dimension and scale of existence: phylogenetic and ontogenetic,
individual, social, and institutional, genomic, cellular, organic
and cultural” [XS Hell-Baked]. Because the very consequence of
Social Darwinism is that “everything of value has been
built in Hell,” [XS Hell-Baked] we can conclude that “[t]here is
no machinery extant, or even rigorously imaginable, that can
sustain a single iota of attained value outside the forges of Hell”
[XS Hell-Baked]. Thus, what the Dark Enlightenment “has to
offer the world [is] Eternal Hell … But it could be worse (and
almost certainly will be)” [XS Hell-Baked]. Modernity is always
going to be symptomatic of this Iron Law, we will call it the Law
of Hell or LoH for short, because of the very fact that “modernity
is a social condition defined by an integral trend, summarized as
sustained economic growth rates that exceed population
increases, and thus mark an escape from normal history, caged
within the Malthusian trap” [DE 4e]. This is why modernity has
an “inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation” [DE 4e].
But we are only talking about “modernity 1.0.” What about
“[m]odernity 2.0?” [DE 4e]. In modernity’s decay,
postmodernity arises and this is where “Malthusian limits
brutally re-impose themselves” [DE 4e], and postmodernity is
the world of the Cathedral. So, how do we stay on track or rather
get back on track to modernity 2.0? Land says that we firstly
need to get rid of democracy and replace it with at the very least
constitutional republicanism, but obviously patchwork is the
end goal in that patchwork is itself exit. Secondly, the
government needs to be downsized as much as possible, or, at
most, it needs to be downsized to its “core functions” [DE 4e],
and then obviously “turned corporate” in the exit that patchwork
is. Thirdly, Land wants to abolish central banking and have the
return of hard money instead of fiat money. Nowadays, Land
would probably say this: the relationship between constitutional
republicanism and patchwork is the same relationship between
hard money and Bitcoin — that relationship being the former as
getting “there” and the latter as “there,” i.e., exit. Lastly, Land
sees that the government is to get out of any discussion of what
we are to do on a monetary and fiscal level — and this obviously
follows his third point, as without central banking
macroeconomic state monetary policy becomes impossible to
do. Thus, what Land wants is a liberation of the economy and
therefore an exit out of the Cathedral into catallaxy. But because
“capital is always neo-capital” [FN 262], modernity is always a
neomodernity.

Returning back to the area of Social Darwinism, we can say that

“[l]iberty without Social Darwinism is an abomination in eyes of
Gnon [Nature or Nature’s God]” [XS Quote note (#170)].

§2.25 — On Progressivism’s Satan

The latter section was interesting to write specifically because
I’m submitting this paper to the Cathedral itself: what Moldbug
calls the Cathedral follows Land’s image of it as a system of mind
control, but Moldbug specifically raises it to the level of
pedagogy, he says, “[progressivism] is maintained and
propagated by the decentralized system of quasiofficial
‘educational’ institutions which we, here at UR, have learned to
call the Cathedral” [OLP 9]. In this sense, this very paper is
being presented to the Cathedral in that, following Moldbug, one
of the Cathedral’s institutions is school. Now, the latter section,
and specifically its comments on HBD were hard to write in that
I’m treading on thin ice, that is, I’m walking on a very thin line
when I write about things that have to do with race, ethnicity,
etc. Heresy is incredibly taboo. So, why not just go all in: Hitler
is the religion of progressivism’s satan. Woodruff made
comments about Hitler during our unit on Camp. For Woodruff,
making Hitler Camp is something he has an “aversion to” [MW
10/27]. In his words, “It’s hard to ‘YASS’ at [Hitler]” [MW
10/27].

In The Dark Enlightenment, Land sees that Hiter is the limit of

moral progressive thinking: “Hitler perfectly personifies
demonic monstrosity, transcending history and politics to attain
the stature of a metaphysical absolute: evil incarnate. Beyond
Hitler it is impossible to go, or think” [DE 4]. What Hitlerism is
normally looked at as is Nazism, but it is really the view of Hitler
as the limit of ethico-political thought: “Did anybody ever need
to ask why the reductio ad Hitlerum works?” [DE 4]. Now, this
is not to endorse Hitler, far from it. Instead, what it reveals is
that Nazis are absolutely brain-dead (but not in the sense of
zombies. Any support of Hitler (the greatest heresy) reifies the
Cathedral to the highest degree a heresy can. In this sense, nazis
are completely complict in what they oppose, and political
efficacy has been, for them at least, a dream since the 1930s and
40s. Any neoreactionary that says they are a nazi doesn’t know
what Neoreaction (the Outer Right) is, disregard the emetic
chicken shit that they vomit from their mouths.

§2.50 — On Communism, Exit, and Patchwork

Though I never called myself one, in fact, I called myself

everything but it — post leftist, post-anarchist, general
economist, and so on — I was certainly a communist before my
return to capitalism. Bickering over what communism is wasn’t
really worth my time, which was the only reason I posed myself
as an anti-communist in (im)pure Bataillean fashion. Now,
Bataille was certainly not a communist per his definition of
communism, but that is just it: it is always the definition of
communism that gets people caught up. If communism is
defined in the way Marx defined it, i.e., as “the sublation of the
present state of things” then I certainly was a communist, or
maybe a post-communist in that the element of sublation
present in Marx’s formulation certainly implicates dialectical
finality — something my thought was completely foreign to
because everything comes out of zero again. But, nevertheless, if
we go with the even more relaxed definition of communism as a
stateless, classless, moneyless society then I certainly was a
communist in that I did not desire subjects at all. Of course, if
communism is the sublation of the present state of things then it
is not a mode of production in the “proper sense,” rather it must
therefore be a mode of expenditure. In this sense, communism,
following specifically Marx’s formulation, can be smuggled (and
yes it must be smuggled because Bataille is certainly not a
communist in his opinion) into general economics. Bataille
certainly was a post-capitalist, and, in fact, he
even explicitly endorses post-capitalism in the first volume
of The Accursed Share, Consumption: he says that “we need to
think in terms of a peaceful evolution [from capitalism]” [AS1
186] which can done through the Marshall Plan which is
“external to capitalism” [AS1 185]. When our idea of
communism is extricated from productivism, and it certainly
can be (Bataille is proof), then communism becomes applicable
to my old beliefs. I wasn’t a progressive though, at least, not in
the sense Land and Moldbug use it. But, I must say that I always
flirted with the Austrian School even after my departure from it
back in 2019 — in this way my return to Austrian economics
really was inevitable. What Land and Moldbug see as
communism seems absurd from the communist perspective:
Moldbug says, “America is a communist country”
[UR Technology, Communism and the Brown Scare]. The
classic response to this would come out of the mouth of so many
in the political communities I’m in, as well as my dearest friends
who are communists: “HA! Don’t you know that communism is
a stateless, classless, moneyless society? America can’t be a
communist country because a “communist country” is a
contradiction in terms.” Now, obviously, Moldbug and Land are
operating within a realist framework when it comes to politics,
so history, rather than political idealism, i.e., Utopianism, is
incredibly important. Therefore, when they define communism
as they do, are they wrong? No, of course not. But what they fail
to realize is that communists are, in large, not political
philosophers, that is to say, they don’t really think about exit too
much (in fact, some communists believe exit from capitalism is
impossible… yet, they are still communists [these communists
are almost always transcendental miserablists (see Nick Land’s
“Critique of Transcendental Miserablism” found in Fanged
Noumena)]), but nor do they really think about voice either
(some communists believe both exit and voice only serve to
reproduce capitalism). All they do is dream of a society beyond
our own which is why all post-capitalists are communists and all
communists are post-capitalists. In this way, even fascism gets
pulled into the communist group, which, for Land, certainly isn’t
an absurd thing (“Fascism is the highest stage of communism”
[XS AIACC]), but to the communists? Oh boy, is it absurd! What
I have recognized is that when it comes to the rather idealist,
that is, Utopian communists, the New Reaction doesn’t have a
lot of explicit critiques. But, when it comes to critiques of
practical (I use practical here because no communist is a realist)
communists, they have that covered I’d say — mainly because
they have fine critiques of central planning which is generally
seen by practical communists as one of the only viable
alternatives to capitalism (an alternative to capitalism it is.
Viable? No.). For example, Land recognizes that central
planning is cybernetically untenable (whereas markets are
perfectly compatible with cybernetics [in a certain sense, they
are cybernetics]) because “[p]lanning is the creationist symptom
of underdesigned software circuits, associated with domination,
tradition, and inhibition … All planning is theopolitics, and
theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp” [FN 299]. But it seems
we need to formulate critiques of Utopian communism then, no?

On the level of practicality, Utopian communism is obviously

not tenable. Land explains, “‘Means’ and ‘relations’ of
production have simultaneously emulsified into competitive
decentralized networks under numerical control, rendering
paleomarxist hopes of extracting a postcapitalist future from the
capitalism machine overtly unimaginable” [FN 625]. In other
words, the means of production were never capitalism in the
sense that capitalism has never (only) been “the private
ownership of the means of production,” nor have the relations to
production determined by the mode of production itself ever
been capitalism either. Capitalism is AI and this is why
capitalism and its machines (which it itself is) have
“sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist
utility” [FN 625]. AI has been “incarnating market mechanics
within their nano-assembled interstices and evolving themselves
by quai-darwinian algorithms that build hypercompetition into
‘the infrastructure’” [FN 625–626]. It is actually quite ironic that
praxeology, the study of human action, will outlive humanity
(see the episode “Entrepreneurial Super-Intelligence:
Praxeology in the Age of A.I.” of The Human Action Podcast).
Land even notes on twitter that “praxeology is entirely derivable
from Omohundro Drives,” [TW Praxeological AI] i.e., the basic
drives of AI outlined by Steve Omohundro. When capitalism
outlives humanity, Austrian economics will have been proven
correct once and for all in that praxeological dynamics will
determine any remaining forms of catallaxy to a higher and
higher degree (in accordance with how many times we’ve gone
through the positive feedback loop that is intelligence
explosion). On an ideal level (that is, completely non-practical
level), what critiques of communism do we have? Land’s specific
issue with Utopian politics is that “[t]here’s no practical way to
get to it” [XS Neoreactionary Realism]. As I said in my
theoretical infancy: “We cannot escape capital.” Now, I was
right, but not because of the reasons I held at the time. Rather,
there is no possibility of escaping capital because capital is
escape:

Well, while you’re flatlining, since it seems to be recording

my babblings here, I would just respond a bit to your exit
from capital, because it seems to me that formulation is, I
would say, a transcendental error, you know. Capital is
pure exit. You can’t exit from exit. It’s something that is not
imaginable, you know. If you’re exiting then effectively
then you’re doing capital. And, I think any notion of exit
from capital is therefore conceptually incoherent, and
when experimentally actualized it becomes sociologically
incoherent. [AC 22:02–23:01]

This is the issue with any Utopian communist idea: it

isn’t ideally achievable (nor is it practically achievable either).
But, this is not to say that exit is impossible, for exit is what is
impossible (people tend to lose their voice after talking for
prolonged periods of time); it is just that exit from capitalism is
a contradiction in terms. Exit is capitalism and vice versa.

Capitalism is fundamentally different from Utopian communism

in that capitalism is in no way Utopian but radically realist due
to the fact that “[a]n escape-based society, unlike a utopia, is
structured in the same way it is reached” [XS Neoreactionary
Realism]. So, because capitalism is exit, it is already achieved in
exit. In this sense, it is achieved in the very movement of
heading toward it (which is simultaneously the movement of
exiting the Cathedral). This is why “[r]ealism is the negative of
an unfounded pretense to knowledge” [XS Neoreactionary
Realism] in the sense that Utopian politics have the unfounded
pretense to the knowledge of the future. What is contrary to
Utopian politics is patchwork, i.e., “[the basic idea that] as the
crappy government we inherited from history are smashed, they
should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds,
of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each
governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to
the residents’ opinions. If redients don’t like their government,
they can and should move. The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice’”
[UR Patchwork 1].

§2.75 — Some Comments on Horror

I said we would return to what the political project is for the

neoreactionary in relation to the Cathedral, and here we are! The
only response to the Cathedral is to horrify it, that is to say, put
it in “paralysis” [XS Horrorism], and the only way this can be
done is through doing “nothing,” “despair[ing],” and
“[s]ubsid[ing] into horror” [XS Horrorism]. We know that
progressive praxis will do nothing, so we just give them horror,
we tell them, “Nothing that you are doing can possibly work”
[XS Horrorism] precisely because it is incompatible with reality.

If anything has affected me the most in my life it is

horror. Horror has affected me more than love, more than
heartbreak. Heartbreak may put one crying on the bathroom
floor seeking death, but horror? It puts one huddled up in the
corner, frantically crying, but also trying to get ahold of oneself.
If my paranoia ever gets too bad, it devolves into psychosis. My
paranoia-induced psychosis is only worsened by “[t]hose empty
capes of darkness that make their home in [my] peripheral
vision” [MOP X], “things being to appear from the rifts within
the cosmos” [MOP X]. James Ellis is so right when says, “man’s
psyche exists on the limitrophe of madness at all times, we are
perpetually minutes from insanity, we all know it” [MOP X].

At the very limit of thought is horror, and horror is always

noumenal in that “the potential for an unknown limit calls forth
a cosmic horror” [MOP X]. If capitalism and desire are not
differentiable, and nothing suggests anything to contrary, then
horror is at the apex of capitalism because, “[w]hat’s met at the
apex of desire is horror, pure horror; horror at the incalculable,
irredeemable, and irrational reasoning behind the actions of
desire-in-itself” [MOP X]. Ultimately, because “[i]t no longer
seems plausible to assume that the relation between capital and
desire is either external or supported by immanent
contradiction” [FN 339], it is easy to conclude that “[t]he
senselessness of desire is found within death” [MOP X], because
“death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent
function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine
part” [FN 266]. In no way will capitalism die — the death of
capitalism is an eschatological fantasy.

Horror cannot be spoken of just like Being cannot be spoken of

in the sense that it is “defined,” as Heidegger correctly
concludes. Terror, however, can be described, just as being can
be described. Ellis explains, “terror is to horror what being is to
Being” [MOP X]. Induced within me at just the mention of those
peripheral entities that induce terror in my mind are tears. One
night, probably in September or October of this year, I was
talking to a couple of my friends about horror and its relation to
my paranoia, and the psychosis that is always a derivative of it. I
couldn’t even call those entities which induce terror into me
“things.” Even the very little task of giving those entities a
description that is not extremely formal, as entity is much more
“formal” than thing,” caused me to break out in tears. Naming
those entities was impossible, and even the name of “that thing”
felt too proper. Now, this terror-induced crying was not a
wailing. It is completely silent, and cannot be stopped. In fact, I
cannot feel myself cry. It is like bleeding while on adrenaline
after you are wounded: you don’t notice you’re bleeding until
you feel the blood with your hand; you don’t know you’re crying
until you feel the tears with your hand. Terror is in this sense a
“comfort,” and even Ellis describes it as such. Horror, however,
is not like terror in that terror is empirical, it is phenomenal.
“Pure horror is transcendental, real horror is the unfiltered Real
puppeteering from behind the unknowable curtain” [MOP X].
Ellis further explains,

Horror remains on the spectrum of possibility, a primarily

existential mirrored transcendental development targeted
at the frontier of consciousness. The potency of horror
fluctuates upon a subjective apprehension, a state of Being
which expires in the impossible confrontation of cosmic
horror. [MOP X]

Compared to the horror of the Outside, even Gnon, i.e., Nature

of Nature’s God, is “laughter and love” [XS Exterminator]. The
Exterminator that leads humanity, as well as everything else
(because nothing escapes it as Land rightly notes), to its
extinction exists, and we know that, but we know “nothing at all
about what it is” [XS Exterminator], and for Land, this makes
the Exterminator “the archetype of horroristic ontology”
[XS Exterminator]. As Land says, “Ontological density without
identifiable form is abstract horror itself …. The unknown
condenses into a shapeless, predatory thing” [XS Exterminator].
While “things” is almost impossible for me to say in relation to
those entities of pure horror, “the Old Ones,” used by Lovecraft,
is even worse, for it is impossible for me to use such a name.

This invasion from the Outside, from the Absolute Outside,

is the distilled essence of horror. [WIA 38:47–38:58]
The history of capitalism is indisputably a horror story…
[XS Abstract Horror (Part 2)]

Appendix §1

Woodruff’s Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the

Young

I grew up in the swamp.

— Mr. Woodruff to another student in class,

11/05/2021

Yeah [of course I said a lot of good quotes

Evan], I’m a pretty clever guy.

— Mr. Woodruff after I told him he said some

pretty good quotes, 11/11/2021

I didn’t know I was such a muse.

— Mr. Woodruff after I showed him my

anthology of his phrases I wrote down during
class, 11/12/2021

1 Today is brought to you by visuals — make sure to look!

2 [Camp] eroticizes the Camp person.

3 If it’s mean, if it is ridicule, then it isn’t Camp because Camp is

about loving the subject matter.

4 Taste is discriminatory.

5 I don’t see this gulf between [unintentional and intentional

Camp].

6 There is a limited supply [of unintentional Camp].

7 Desire is so powerful and illogical.

8 [Camp] has to do with esoteric references that people won’t

get.

9 It’s hard to “YASS” at [Hitler].

10 It’s hard to [make Hitler Camp] without being insensitive.

11 I think one can see the Camp in Hitler.

12 I’m not into that, but I’m into how into it you are.

13 Drag queens [in 1964] were the first lines of resistance.

14 Camp appears to be apolitical because it is slight in content.

15 Camp uses fairy dust to disarm things.

16 Propaganda is stylization.

17 There is a dismissiveness [in ridicule].

18 [Ridicule is] a way to establish one’s own thing.

19 [Art becomes pornography when] explicit content [begins to]

add no value.

20 A lot of pornography is going to posion your future

relationships.

21 [Email is] the big thing! Email! You can like [use it] chat!

22 I thought I was just living in the future … [America Online]

wasn’t Camp back [in the 1990s]. Now[adays] it is [Camp].
That’s what time can do.

23 There is no moral dimension in interpretation.

24 [The wound of Jesus that Thomas is to touch] is mind-

bending to me.

25 [Jesus’ resurrection] also means we no longer have a place to

mourn. The body is gone.
26 If you have physical proof of something, [then] no leap of
faith is required.

27 There is such exquisite alienation in [the painting called The

Scream].

28 God has left the building.

29 [T]his is a world of brutality and suffering that has left us

incapable of believing.

30 [People crap on stuff] because they are too afraid to love.

31 You can pepper things with a little cringe. But a tsunami of

cringe? No.

32 There is something very bourgeois about philistines.

33 I like Camp because you get to play with fire without being
burned.

34 The only reason you aren’t endorsing rape, posion, dagger,

[and] arson, you predictable little shmuch, is because you don’t
have the balls to.

35 [Let’s take] a little walk towards Hell[:] it just gets grosser

and grosser, [but] we love it.

36 Let’s get in the gutter, and let’s like it.

37 We have to be very invested to feel the weight of something.

38 [Camp] isn’t about good and evil. [Camp] is about

enjoyment.

39 You know who hangs out in the theatre? The gays!

40 Not everything can be Camp… [Camp] isn’t radically

subjective.

41 Some people can’t see Camp, period.

42 Purely instrumental [music] doesn’t have content.

43 [Go] have passions and go deep into them. [But,] using one’s
passions or pleasures to denigrate other things … is the limiting
factor.

44 [Why do you restrict yourself from the pleasures of life?]

Why so serious?

45 How low of [a] taste can you get? It’s poop jokes.

46 Life is full of pain and ugliness.

48 Laughter and enjoyment are the boons of life.

49 I’m invested in your investment.

50 [T]ake those darker than thou truths and make them darker.

51 If Camp isn’t tragedy, then I am.

52 Think outside the box.

Appendix §2

Time-in-Itself (or The Outside)

Time has framed everything and nothing. All that has been, all
that is, and all that will be exists in time. All that hasn’t been, all
that is not, and all that won’t be isn’t in time, yet still nothing is
actively structured temporally. Thus, time is presupposed by
everything in that if I ask what is before everything, I have
already structured its possible antecedent temporally as well as
everything temporally. Now, the obvious answer is nothing.
Nothing came before everything. The question then becomes
what came before time. Nothing and its possible antecedent
have been structured temporally. The final question to ask then
is what is this possible antecedent that precedes nothing? The
answer is simple: time-in-itself.

Now, just because time lays everything and nothing out, doesn’t
mean time is a master, or a slave owner. The idea that “time has
imprisoned us” [HD 65] is a false one that is bred out of a heart
broken pessimism, and I would know. I can assure you that time
doesn’t heal wounds, but I can also assure you that time’s role
was never to stop your pain and suffering. Land sees it best:
Each year is a cyclical time unit of death and revival, and
in this it is a primordial teacher, in a way that no scripture
could ever be. [UF The Shape of Time (Part 2a)]

2019, a year of living and then death; 2020, a year of revival,

living, and then death; 2021, a year of death, revival, living, and
I feel as if I am dying again…

In the first introductory section, I spoke of how this essay is still

stuck within the Inside, but that doesn’t mean the Outside isn’t
doing its own thing…

One mustn’t just leave the Outside out, but bring ‘it’ in. This
movement of the Outside coming in is a diagonal movement and
is thus a line of flight…

Diagonals are lines of flight. [FN 524]

… and thus, we are drawing a diagonal line, bringing the Outside

in. “[D]raw a line of flight,” [ATP 9] Deleuze and Guattari tell us.
The line of flight, in the context of the Outside coming in, is a
“passageway” [ATP 12] that is nothing less than the
diagonalization process (which we will get into in a moment).
“Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf,
becoming-inhuman, deterritorialized intensities: that is what
multiplicity is” [ATP 32]. The line of flight we are drawing here
is the Outside becoming-in. Now, that is not to say that the
Outside is becoming-the-Inside, rather, all that I am saying is
that the Outside is “invading” the Inside. But we must remember
what I said in the first introductory section. We must remember
exit. The Outside coming in is the same as exiting the Inside.
Therefore, diagonalization is exit.

There is no issue with lines of flight… except maybe when the

Amphidemonic lemurs steal them to go greet their
Xenodemonic lemur friends on the Outside:

High on IG, flirtin’ with a couple homies / I said I’m too

eager, couldn’t keep you and she told me, “Keep it lowkey,
only rule is staying open” / I’m like, “Where’d my line go?”
You just stole it. [B “fwb” 0:35–0:45]

According to lemurian demonism, each demon is itself a

swarm … Demons can be characterized by the various rites
(routes, or routines) that they draw through the hyper-
time of the maze. [CCRU “Pandemonium”]

But then again… the Inside has been getting too hot. Land says,
“An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-
solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and
control” [FN 444]. Acceleration is a line of flight out of the
Inside (because capital is of the Outside) and this acceleration is
our “[h]ot revolution” [FN 448]. Deleuze and Guattari elaborate
on this “hot revolution,” as Land calls it:

So what is the solution? Which is the revolutionary path?

Psychoanalysis is of little help, entertaining as it does the
most intimate relations with money, and recording —
while refusing to recognize it — an entire system of
economic-monetary dependences at the heart of
the desire of every subject it treats. Psychoanalysis
constitutes for its part a gigantic enterprise of absorption
of surplus value. But which is the revolutionary path? Is
there one? — To withdraw from the world market, as
Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a
curious revival of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might
it be to go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that
is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and
deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet
deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the
viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly
schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the
process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as
Nietzshce put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t
seen anything yet. [AO 239–240]

It is time to exit:

It’s gettin’ crowded for a nerd like me, I need space,

rerouting, they reserved my seat. [B “sauceintherough”
1:14–1:20]

Time may not be the first thing not in that it isn’t first, but in
that it is completely axiomatic only due to the seemingly
limitations of human cognition. AI that can have non-sensible
intuitions could potentially be emancipated from both time and
space on both levels in that to say positive noumenon behaves
like objects do in phenomenal space is always going to be a
transcendental error. So, to extricate that noumenal space is the
condition of objects known through non-sensible intuition is
problematic, and therefore an extrication of noumenal time too
is problematic.

That Bitcoin and the Diagonal Method are the two things that
will lead to the next Coperncian revolution in philosophy is not
contestable, for Bitcoin not only allows for truth to be “proven”
or rather “asserted” in a non-circular way, but the Diagonal
Method allows, following Bitcoin (thus, the Coperncian
revolution in philosophy really ushers forth from the Blockchain,
for an assertion of logic in a non-circular manner, or rather, for
“[n]on-tautological apodicity is the crucial (diagonal) trait” [CC
5.1]. What diagonalism allows for is simple: the amelioration of
contradiction and thus the establishment of the end of
philosophy (through Bitcoin). As Land says, “‘Contradiction’ is
mechanically dynamized as stabilization within a negative
control loop, or as escape momentum in a positive one”
[ZP Note on Diagonal Method 45]. And, instead of
contradiction, or circularity, or tautology, there is “diagonal
equilibrium” [ZP Note on Diagonal Method 46]. To end, I’ll
quote Land twice more:

By the strictest conceivable (i.e. transcendental) principle,

nothing beyond the blockchain has authority in relation to the
blockchain, or could have. Were this not the case, a ‘trusted third
party’, or organ of transcendent oversight, would remain
operative such that — reciprocally — the minimum conditions
for the realization of Bitcoin would remain inaccessible. In other
words, the Bitcoin protocol is transcendental because it is
essentially beyond appeal. The idea of a superior tribunal is
immanently nullified by it. Furthermore, not only is the Bitcoin
blockchain transcendental, and thus unsurpassable. ‘The buck
stops here’ in an ultimate definition. A certain ‘end of
philosophy’ is thus reached. To argue otherwise is once again to
propose an actual, or merely possible, court of appeal where
there cannot, in principle, be one. There is nowhere to take a
case against the blockchain and its statement of reality unless to
a manifestly — i.e. effectively — inferior authority. All stubborn
metaphysical commitments to the contrary case lack a realizable
criterion, and can only regress to politics as a proxy. They might
— and in fact will — be entertained, but no one will seriously bet
upon them. Their enforcement requires escalating coercion,
destined to reach levels that can only eventually prove
impractical. [CC 2.83]

Bitcoin is nothing less than a semiotic restoration — an

Occidental analog of the Confucian rectification of signs — and
actually something more, because it is irreducibly innovative (on
the efficient model of critique). For the first time, the
securitization of a sign, as an economic token, has been
understood. Meaning becomes hard currency. The immense
philosophical revolution is implicit: it can be emonstably made
impractical to lie. Thus, by a negative and ‘merely technical’
route, all prior discourse on truth has been bypassed. With
Bitcoin, there is now a truth engine. The consequences are not
easily delimited. Even if Bitcoin remains to be definitively
comprehended as the long-anticipated end of philosophy, there
has never previously been a more convincing model for it. We
know, from around the back, what truth is now. [CC 3.84]

here is usually a Lemur willing to chat about it.

— Nick Land, “Outsideness on Twitter”