The Nonlinear Library LW - Book review: Xenosystems by jessicata
Sep 17, 2024
01:06:19
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Book review: Xenosystems, published by jessicata on September 17, 2024 on LessWrong.
I've met a few Landians over the last couple years, and they generally recommend that I start with reading Nick Land's (now defunct) Xenosystems blog, or Xenosystems, a Passage Publishing book that compiles posts from the blog. While I've read some of Fanged Noumena in the past, I would agree with these Landians that Xenosystems (and currently, the book version) is the best starting point.
In the current environment, where academia has lost much of its intellectual relevance, it seems overly pretentious to start with something as academic as Fanged Noumena. I mainly write in the blogosphere rather than academia, and so Xenosystems seems appropriate to review.
The book's organization is rather haphazard (as might be expected from a blog compilation). It's not chronological, but rather separated into thematic chapters. I don't find the chapter organization particularly intuitive; for example, politics appears throughout, rather than being its own chapter or two. Regardless, the organization was sensible enough for a linear read to be satisfying and only slightly chronologically confusing.
That's enough superficialities. What is Land's intellectual project in Xenosystems? In my head it's organized in an order that is neither chronological nor the order of the book. His starting point is neoreaction, a general term for an odd set of intellectuals commenting on politics. As he explains, neoreaction is cladistically (that is, in terms of evolutionary branching-structure) descended from Moldbug.
I have not read a lot of Moldbug, and make no attempt to check Land's attributions of Moldbug to the actual person. Same goes for other neoreactionary thinkers cited.
Neoreaction is mainly unified by opposition to the Cathedral, the dominant ideology and ideological control system of the academic-media complex, largely branded left-wing. But a negation of an ideology is not itself an ideology. Land describes a "Trichotomy" within neo-reaction (citing Spandrell), of three currents: religious theonomists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-commercialists.
Land is, obviously, of the third type. He is skeptical of a unification of neo-reaction except in its most basic premises. He centers "exit", the option of leaving a social system. Exit is related to sectarian splitting and movement dissolution. In this theme, he eventually announces that techno-commercialists are not even reactionaries, and should probably go their separate ways.
Exit is a fertile theoretical concept, though I'm unsure about the practicalities. Land connects exit to science, capitalism, and evolution. Here there is a bridge from political philosophy (though of an "anti-political" sort) to metaphysics. When you Exit, you let the Outside in. The Outside is a name for what is outside society, mental frameworks, and so on. This recalls the name of his previous book, Fanged Noumena; noumena are what exist in themselves outside the Kantian phenomenal realm.
The Outside is dark, and it's hard to be specific about its contents, but Land scaffolds the notion with Gnon-theology, horror aesthetics, and other gestures at the negative space.
He connects these ideas with various other intellectual areas, including cosmology, cryptocurrency, and esoteric religion. What I see as the main payoff, though, is thorough philosophical realism. He discusses the "Will-to-Think", the drive to reflect and self-cultivate, including on one's values. The alternative, he says, is intentional stupidity, and likely to lose if it comes to a fight. Hence his criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis.
I have complex thoughts and feelings on the topic; as many readers will know, I have worked at MIRI and have continued thinking and writing about AI alignment since then.
What ...
I've met a few Landians over the last couple years, and they generally recommend that I start with reading Nick Land's (now defunct) Xenosystems blog, or Xenosystems, a Passage Publishing book that compiles posts from the blog. While I've read some of Fanged Noumena in the past, I would agree with these Landians that Xenosystems (and currently, the book version) is the best starting point.
In the current environment, where academia has lost much of its intellectual relevance, it seems overly pretentious to start with something as academic as Fanged Noumena. I mainly write in the blogosphere rather than academia, and so Xenosystems seems appropriate to review.
The book's organization is rather haphazard (as might be expected from a blog compilation). It's not chronological, but rather separated into thematic chapters. I don't find the chapter organization particularly intuitive; for example, politics appears throughout, rather than being its own chapter or two. Regardless, the organization was sensible enough for a linear read to be satisfying and only slightly chronologically confusing.
That's enough superficialities. What is Land's intellectual project in Xenosystems? In my head it's organized in an order that is neither chronological nor the order of the book. His starting point is neoreaction, a general term for an odd set of intellectuals commenting on politics. As he explains, neoreaction is cladistically (that is, in terms of evolutionary branching-structure) descended from Moldbug.
I have not read a lot of Moldbug, and make no attempt to check Land's attributions of Moldbug to the actual person. Same goes for other neoreactionary thinkers cited.
Neoreaction is mainly unified by opposition to the Cathedral, the dominant ideology and ideological control system of the academic-media complex, largely branded left-wing. But a negation of an ideology is not itself an ideology. Land describes a "Trichotomy" within neo-reaction (citing Spandrell), of three currents: religious theonomists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-commercialists.
Land is, obviously, of the third type. He is skeptical of a unification of neo-reaction except in its most basic premises. He centers "exit", the option of leaving a social system. Exit is related to sectarian splitting and movement dissolution. In this theme, he eventually announces that techno-commercialists are not even reactionaries, and should probably go their separate ways.
Exit is a fertile theoretical concept, though I'm unsure about the practicalities. Land connects exit to science, capitalism, and evolution. Here there is a bridge from political philosophy (though of an "anti-political" sort) to metaphysics. When you Exit, you let the Outside in. The Outside is a name for what is outside society, mental frameworks, and so on. This recalls the name of his previous book, Fanged Noumena; noumena are what exist in themselves outside the Kantian phenomenal realm.
The Outside is dark, and it's hard to be specific about its contents, but Land scaffolds the notion with Gnon-theology, horror aesthetics, and other gestures at the negative space.
He connects these ideas with various other intellectual areas, including cosmology, cryptocurrency, and esoteric religion. What I see as the main payoff, though, is thorough philosophical realism. He discusses the "Will-to-Think", the drive to reflect and self-cultivate, including on one's values. The alternative, he says, is intentional stupidity, and likely to lose if it comes to a fight. Hence his criticism of the Orthogonality Thesis.
I have complex thoughts and feelings on the topic; as many readers will know, I have worked at MIRI and have continued thinking and writing about AI alignment since then.
What ...