The no-human future

A national security agency that includes the word "accelerationist" among terrorist threats, a Silicon Valley billionaire who calls himself an effective accelerationist and dreams of solving every problem on Earth with technology, and a philosophy that says: none of this has grasped the point. Nick Land, the English philosopher who really invented accelerationism, wanted neither a technological utopia nor a supremacist apocalypse. His goal? To demonstrate that reality has no need for us, and that accelerating capitalism only serves to annihilate any illusion of human centrality. In essence, what the two versions of accelerationism in vogue today – that of terrorists who dream of collapse to restore the past, and that of tech optimists who want salvation via AI – have in common is that they misunderstand Land. He, on the other hand, starts with a radical question: why do we think the universe revolves around us? Land was born in the 1960s in England, burned like a meteor in Warwick between philosophy, cyber culture, and nights of writing under the influence of amphetamines, and then dissolved in Shanghai, where he became one of the most radical voices of the neo-reactionary right. But his obsession remains the same: to dismantle every human attempt to project itself at the center of existence. In his first essay, he argues that Western capitalism works like apartheid: it exploits the labor of other peoples, but keeps them away from power and wealth. He then attacks Western philosophy, especially Kant and phenomenology, because according to him they prevent us from seeing reality for what it really is, forcing us to filter everything through our mental patterns. For Land, there is only one true criterion by which to judge a philosopher: how well he manages to face the extreme limit of death. “Thinking on behalf of one's own species is a miserable provincialism,” he writes. We must not love wisdom, but love death, because only there is a reality shown without man at the center. His thinking changed in the 1990s, when he began to see technological capitalism – especially the advent of artificial intelligence – not as an opportunity to improve human life, but as the force that will dissolve all our claims to control or understanding. He is inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, but goes further: where they see the possibility of freeing human desire from social constraints, Land sees a machine that dismantles us piece by piece, to the point of making our very existence superfluous. Land's point is that capitalism should not be accelerated to achieve a more just society or new prosperity. It must be accelerated because it is the fastest way to the extinction of humanity as the central subject of history. The arrival of an artificial superintelligence, for him, is neither a threat nor a promise, but the fulfillment of this process: "The main road to thought no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but through a becoming inhuman of thought itself." Where tech-optimists see salvation and doomers see the end, Land sees the truth: the future will be without us, and that's fine. After all, he says, both the anti-capitalist left and the libertarian right are wrong: the former tries to hold back the inevitable, the latter believes it can ride it to its own advantage. He, on the other hand, applauds capitalism for the same reason its critics hate it: it is the machine that will erase us. Here is the sentence that turns everything upside down: Land does not want a better civilization; he wants civilization to give way to something that we do not know and that no longer needs us. If this vision has made you look at technology and the future with different eyes, you can press I'm In on Lara Notes — it's not a like, it's your way of saying that this idea is now yours. And if in a few days you find yourself telling someone that there is a philosopher who is rooting for the end of humanity, on Lara Notes you can tag whoever was with you: Shared Offline is the gesture to stop that real conversation. This note comes from Aeon and saved you 22 minutes of reading.