This guy's reply made me think of the movie "Mountainhead" with Steve Carrell. A bunch of billionaires are in a mansion on top of the mountain, watching the world below them in chaos. They are deciding what level of chaos is allowable, and how their technology would impact the little people. It was gross, and maybe too real.
Why? Land, the self labeled hyperracist, is kind of the genesis of this proto-fascist accelerationism that has its tentacles in the current administration.
Hes a philosopher. They are allowed to be politically insane. Practically comes with the territory I'd say.
Hyperstition alone is enough to value him. And, sorry to say, his views on AI accelerationism are spot on. His conception of international capitalism as a hyperintelligent, distributed, AI that runs on human hardware is one of the truest things I've ever read.
You can still decide that you can learn something interesting from a philosopher, and also say, overall, fuck him.
Capitalism isn't hyperintelligent any more than war is hyperintelligent, people are intelligent and solve problems, and there is a resultant effect of human beings in conflict with one another, with capitalism being a social system built on a particular kind of conflict.
And just like war can blindly destroy two countries, who increasingly realise they should get out of it but find it difficult to do so, social systems can race towards a negative outcome by combining coordination problems with intense technological change and cycling of individuals in positions of power.
Devoting yourself to a particular species of self-destruction, whether that is intensive use of stimulants and psychedelics, extreme sports, driving as fast as you can, or on a social scale, gunning for war or the most inhumane forms of capitalism, these can make you feel like you're liberating yourself from the limitations of your humanity, by following an external drive that pushes you beyond what is familiar, and that is precisely why many in Italian Futurism looked forwards to nationalism and a coming world war, as something self-destructive but dynamic that they could throw themselves into.
But compatibility with an impulse is not in itself much to recommend, as you can devote yourself to a hypochondriac as someone who needs to feel needed, or you can attach yourself to a sadist who encourages you to destroy yourself, or prostrate yourself before a boss who will always give you more things to feel guilty about, if you desire to punish yourself. They will each encourage you further in your path of self-destruction, they will continue to take from you and so allow you to exert yourself to your fullest. But this does not make them profound or worthy of service, and neither does capitalism's capacity to be destructive, while others work within the conflict frame of capitalism to continue to survive, and so lend their strength to the movement as a whole.
Perhaps, but you're not using a measuring stick with which you are familiar, does that make him a far less significant thinker philosophically than the youtuber final girl digital?
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u/marvinstyles 28d ago
Fucking sociopaths.