Pt.2 - Techno-Progressivism and God

A Normie's Guide to the Technocratic Era Pt. 2

The Origins of Techno-Progressivism

Techno-Progressivism (or as the “right-wing” strain of it is more commonly known, “accelerationism”) is said to have derived from the work of Nick Land.

Nick Land was a professor at Warwick University during the 1990s. The 1990s were the first wave of the Internet and 21st century technology, and there was a great deal of excitement about them at the time. Already, “cyberpunk” fiction such as Ghost in the Shell and Neuromancer were speculating about the effects of the Internet, the increasing influence of globalized corporations and governments, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Soon Warwick would become the academic hub of this 90s cyberpunk zeitgeist. In 1995, Land and his students created the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). A May 11 2017 article on the phenomenon entitled, “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in” describes the CCRU thusly:

The CCRU was image-conscious from the start. Its name was deliberately hard-edged, with a hint of the military or the robotic, especially once its members began writing and referring to themselves collectively, without a definite article, as “Ccru”. In 1999, it summarised its history to the sympathetic music journalist Simon Reynolds in the terse, disembodied style that was a trademark: “Ccru ... triggers itself from October 1995, when it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat ... Ccru feeds on graduate students + malfunctioning academic (Nick Land) + independent researchers ...”

The CCRU was influenced by electronic music, William Gibson, and the typical “cyber” fare of the 1990s.

In 1996, the CCRU listed its interests as “cinema, complexity, currencies, dance music, e-cash, encryption, feminism, fiction, images, inorganic life, jungle, markets, matrices, microbiotics, multimedia, networks, numbers, perception, replication, sex, simulation, sound, telecommunications, textiles, texts, trade, video, virtuality, war”.

Much like 4chan, the CCRU became a “meta-organism” of its own.

Former CCRU members still use its language, and are fiercely attached to the idea that it became a kind of group mind. Land told me in an email: “Ccru was an entity ... irreducible to the agendas, or biographies, of its component sub-agencies ... Utter submission to The Entity was key.”

Intellectually, CCRU was influenced in part by the socialist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus.

In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”.

These socialist thinkers echoed Marx himself, who acknowledged and even welcomed the accelerationist tendencies of capitalism. Like Deng Xiaoping (who Land would later praise as a great and visionary leader), Marx saw capitalism as a necessary step towards communism. He also saw in unrestricted technological innovation and free trade the potential to destabilize and weaken Capitalist society, thus creating fertile grounds for Marxist revolution.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

—  On the Question of Free Trade, Karl Marx, David McLellan, ed. (2000). Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford University Press. p. 296.

It is interesting that though “free trade” is often associated with the Right, we can see from this quote that this is not necessarily the case. It is perfectly possible to have a Left-Right consensus on this issue.

Although Land is a capitalist and Marx was a communist, both are progressives and materialists. Land is essentially a libertarian who extols the efficiency of the free market’s ability to distribute material goods, while Marx believes in dialectical materialism. Land believes in Techno-Progressivism, while Marx believes in a progressive development of the “mode of production” (in part due to technological innovation). Therefore, it is unsurprising that the two agree on much.

Land, who sees technological progress as the ultimate good, sees Capitalism as the most effective way to accelerate this process as much as possible. In “A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism,” Land envisions techno-capitalism as a “positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient.”

In socio-historical terms, the line of deterritorialization corresponds to uncompensated capitalism. The basic – and, of course, to some real highly consequential degree actually installed – schema is a positive feedback circuit, within which commercialization and industrialization mutually excite each other in a runaway process, from which modernity draws its gradient. Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche were among those to capture important aspects of the trend. As the circuit is incrementally closed, or intensified, it exhibits ever greater autonomy, or automation. It becomes more tightly auto-productive (which is only what ‘positive feedback’ already says). Because it appeals to nothing beyond itself, it is inherently nihilistic. It has no conceivable meaning beside self-amplification. It grows in order to grow. Mankind is its temporary host, not its master. Its only purpose is itself.

— A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism, May 2 2017, Nick Land (https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/)

In other words, techno-capitalism results in an infinite feedback loop that becomes impossible for mankind to control — the technological singularity.

Land welcomes this “nihilistic” “self-amplification.” Since there is no inherent value to human life, and since life only differs from non-living matter in terms of its “extropy,” and since “meta-organisms” have more extropy than organic life, then it does not matter if human life itself is destroyed in the process of runaway Techno-Progressive acceleration. In fact, Land welcomes the “disintegration of the human species” with the advent of super-human artificial intelligence. In “Meltdown” Land declares with glee that “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.” This might as well be the mantra of transhumanism.

In “Meltdown,” Land devotes a paragraph to an ode to “heat.” A prayer of sorts to the god of extropy, who fashioned life in his image.

[[ ]] Heat.

Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.

— Meltdown, Nick Land (https://web.archive.org/web/20241227105712/http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm)

The Extropy Institute

Not all Techno-Progressives eagerly embrace the abolishment of the human race. Some simply accept at a minimum the basic narrative of technological progress outweighing whatever negative effects it may cause. Others explicitly endorse transhumanism, but rather than taking the nihilistic approach of Land, they see it as more of an enhancement rather than abolishment of the human species, no different than other technologies in principle. An example of a less explicitly subversive form of Techno-Progressivism can be seen in the “Extropy Institute” of the early 2000s.

According to its document “Next Steps” from 2006:

ExI was formed in 1990 by Max More and Tom Bell with a mission to bring great minds together to incubate ideas about emerging technologies, life extension and the future. ExI's goals were to (1) develop an elegant, focused philosophy for transhumanism—the philosophy of "Extropy"; (2) encourage discussions and debates on improving the human condition; and (2) develop a culture for activists, energized and devoted to bringing these ideas to the public. The initiatives which realized these goals are (1) Extropy: the Journal of Transhumanist Thought; Principles of Extropy; Extro Conferences 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5; public forums such as the famed "extropians" and "extropy-chat" email lists; public presentations in the news, radio, televised documentaries, talk shows, and films; and the VP Summit of 2004 addressing the backlash from conservatives against technological advancements.

Although it does not necessarily share in all aspects of Land’s accelerationist philosophy, it lays out many of the same political policies endorsed by contemporary Techno-Progressives (such as the “Effective Accelerationists”).

A document from the Extropy Institute entitled “About the Vital Progress ("VP") Summit” from February 2004 reads:

Throughout history, the advancement of science has always been met with superstition and fear. For every improvement to the human condition, there have always been those who thought it would be better for things to remain in their former condition. This lead to the long Dark Ages, where no progress occurred at all. The Renaissance and Enlightenment finally broke us free from that grim era. Our struggles for human rights has taken us further. We were born into a world where perpetual progress based on science and creativity seemed inevitable.

However, recent years have seen a backlash against advancements toward extending health, enhancing intelligence, understanding emotions, and the ever-increasing control we now can take over our own destinies. We now face an unprecedented battle for the future of humanity. Groups intent on halting scientific advancement are growing in their political influence over governments and legislation. It is our opportunity to stand up and work towards ethical and safe development of science and technology and to ensure that it is available to all humanity.

Note the line “The Renaissance and Enlightenment finally broke us free from that grim era.” This is the calling card of all progressives of all stripes.

This is the same attitude that will later be shared by “Effective Accelerationists.” It is an inherently progressive view of history, which views “decelerationists” as dangerous, chauvinistic luddites. It is worth noting that just as transhumanist Techno-Progressivism can be supported by either the Left or the Right, this “backlash” can also come from either the Left or Right. When this document was written, it was assumed that this “backlash” would come in the form of the right-wing conservatives of the Bush era, but today it is typically assumed to take the form of “green” Leftists.

Recent years have seen a backlash against advancements toward extending health, enhancing intelligence, understanding emotions, and the ever-increasing control we now can take over our own destinies. We now face an unprecedented battle for the future of humanity. Groups intent on halting scientific advancement are growing in their political influence over governments and legislation.

One such group is the Presidential Bioethics Council, led by Leon Kass who once opposed in vitro fertilization. They have published a report known as Beyond Therapy that is aimed directly at deciding the future of many of our technology-dependent values and goals. The preface of the report states:

"In keeping with our mission, we have undertaken an inquiry into the potential implications of using biotechnology 'beyond therapy,' in order to try to satisfy deep and familiar human desires: for better children, superior performance, ageless bodies, and happy souls. Such uses of biotechnology, some of which are now possible and some of which may become possible in the future, are likely to present us with profound and highly consequential ethical challenges and choices. They may play a crucial role in shaping human experience in the fast-approaching age of biotechnology."

Many other organizations with similar goals have added their agreement to this report. These voices are often promoted in The New Atlantis, which seems appropriately named after the Platonic vision of a perfect, unchanging society now lost. This publication aims to shape "the nation's moral and political understanding of all areas of technology", but does so by opposing technological advances at every turn. These groups often use the sensible-sounding "Precautionary Principle" to block technology. This principle correctly warns that technology can be dangerous. But instead of focusing on methods to safely advance technology, proponents of this principle demand absolute proof of complete safety before any technology can be developed. This allows a variety of political extremists such as extreme environmentalists, extreme bioconservatives, and modern Luddites movements to block technological advancement based on scare-tactics and unproven "what-if" scenarios.

Even in this early document, we can see the future battle lines being drawn. On one side, the Techno-Progressivists on both the Right and the Left, and on the other, the “extreme environmentalists” and “extreme bioconservatives.” The extreme environmentalists are concerned with the sanctity of the natural environment, while the extreme bioconservatives are concerned with the sanctity of our God-given human nature.

It is also notable that it mentions in vitro fertilization, apparently once a target of the conservatives of the Bush era and now advocated for by the Trump administration. This is further proof that Techno-Progressivism is not a strictly Left/Right issue. It is a division between those who are strict materialists and those who believe in the intrinsic value of both the natural world and human life.

According to the Extropy Institute, the burden of proof should always be on those who oppose a new technology, who must prove that the new technology will cause direct, demonstrable harm to the public. Otherwise, the default is that the technology should be adopted. In essence, this explicitly prioritizes technological progress over cautiously safeguarding human sanctity. That is the basic Techno-Progressive Consensus in a nutshell.

According to the popular and relatively clear version found in The Wingspread Declaration (1999), the precautionary principle states that:

“When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not established scientifically.

In this context, the proponent of the activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.”

An alternative formulation:

We should permit no new technology to be developed and no new productive activity to take place unless we can scientifically prove that no harm to health or environment will result.

…

All versions of the precautionary principle are inadequate for their purpose, and are systematically skewed against economic and technological progress and development. It can easily be wielded to prevent the introduction of all kinds of new technologies. A wide range of international environmental treaties and regulations already incorporate the principle and use it to restrict numerous activities. Alar, a chemical for regulating growth in apples, was withdrawn from distribution in 1989 following misinformed public clamor regarding its alleged carcinogenicity. Dr. Elizabeth Whelan has noted how the principle has been used to ban “a health-enhancing chemical like chlorine” because of doubtful “adverse effects on wildlife—or its effect in high dose laboratory animal experiments.”

The precautionary principle is a favorite tool of those who oppose medical applications of biotechnology as well as any form of agricultural biotechnology, especially genetically modified crops and livestock. GM foods and medical biotech have enormous potential for meeting global needs for improved health and adequate nutrition. The effects of a widely applied precautionary principle would be disastrous for countries that need to use pesticides or genetically modified crops to feed their populations.

…

What’s wrong with the Precautionary Principle?

The precautionary principle has at least six major weak spots. It serves us badly by:

1. assuming worst-case scenarios

2. distracting attention from established threats to health, especially natural risks

3. assuming that the effects of regulation and restriction are all positive or neutral, never negative

4. ignoring potential benefits of technology and inherently favoring nature over humanity

5. illegitimately shifting the burden of proof and unfavorably positioning the proponent of the activity

6. conflicting with more balanced, common-law approaches to risk and harm.

— The Proactionary Principle, circa 2004, The Extropy Institute (https://web.archive.org/web/20110316151449/http://www.extropy.org/proactionaryprinciple.htm)

“Weak spot” number 4 is particularly interesting. It assumes that humanity is at odds with nature, a common theme among Techno-Progressives. This is the opposite assumption of traditional philosophies such as Catholicism and Stoicism that emphasize harmony between man and nature, in the former case because the same God designed both. However, according to them, humanity is apparently not at odds with technology. The creations of God oppress mankind, whereas the creations of man liberate mankind. Or, in the case of Land, the relationship between man and technology becomes inverted and man’s purpose in life is to serve technology (rather than God) and not the other way around.

In another document entitled “Strategic Plan 2006” the Extropy Institute predicts several imminent threats to Techno-Progressivism.

2. What trends will affect The Proactionary Principle in the next 5-10 years?

a. Increase in biotechnologies for extending human lifespan.

b. Increase in legislation governing advanced technologies.

c. increase in lawsuits concerning outcomes of biotechnology.

d. Decrease in number of retirees due to healthy, vital older generation reentering the workforce.

3. What potential future events would radically change the future for The Proactionary Principle?

a. Isolating a gene that triggers cell degeneration which causes aging and eliminating in research studies with a positive outcome.

b. Mishaps with the development or applied use of biotechnology and nanotechnology.

c. Biotechnology’s genetic engineering may become a hero for humanity’s survival rather than feared by society.

4. What issues are being debated in the environment that could change the future for The Proactionary Principle?

a. The moral consequences of tampering with the human condition, affecting what it means to be “human.”

b. How to measure the pros and cons of advanced technologies such as nanotechnology and biotechnology.

c. Aggressive attempts by the religious right to gain massive advantage.

Once again, they predict that the threats to Techno-Progressivism will come from “the religious right.”

An interesting “keynote participant” of the Extropy Institute’s “Vital Progress Summit 1” is Ray Kurzweil, who is known for his interest in longevity-enhancing drugs and his theories about “the technological singularity.” Since 1999, he has predicted that AGI will be invented by 2029. In his 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, he forecasted that the technological singularity — defined by him as a point where AI surpasses human intelligence — would occur by 2045. ​In his book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (2004), Kurzweil predicts that the technological singularity will allow humans to merge with advanced technology, thus achieving indefinite lifespan or digital immortality. He has taken extensive measures to ensure that he prolongs his life long enough to see this day, such as an elaborate daily vitamin regiment and frequent medical monitoring and interventions. It is not therefore hard to understand why he would be interested in accelerating the advancement of technology no matter the cost. He hopes that it will offer him an opportunity for immortality.

The Extropy Institute disbanded in 2006, after declaring its mission to “develop an elegant, focused philosophy for transhumanism—the philosophy of ‘Extropy’” and “develop a culture for activists, energized and devoted to bringing these ideas to the public” a success.

Accelerationism and the Alt-Right

One of the central figures of accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 1990s, and then abruptly left academia. “Philosophers are vivisectors,” he wrote in 1992. “They have the precise and reptilian intelligence shared by all who experiment with living things.” Iain Hamilton Grant, who was one of Land’s students, remembers: “There was always a tendency in all of us to bait the liberal, and Nick was the best at it.”

—“Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in,” May 11 2017, The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in)

In 2003, CCRU disbanded and Nick Land moved to Shanghai, where he continued to write for publications such as the Shanghai Star and China Daily. His published works from this period were full of enthusiasm for the Chinese nation, and libertarian musings on world politics.

If things had ended there, he may have faded away, CCRU becoming merely a footnote in the history of the Techno-Progressive movement, overshadowed by figures such as Ray Kurzweil. But in the early 2010s, he decided to weigh into the culture war between Wokeism and the nascent Alt-Right. This produced one of his most well known essays, “The Dark Enlightenment.”

Written in 2012, Land takes the side of the Alt-Right over the “social justice warriors.” The essay contains a very early description of the Alt-Right which had not yet completely entered the public consciousness outside of the Internet or perhaps political circles. It was at this time a very broad umbrella term for various factions of dissident, vaguely right-wing politics primarily consisting of edgy, politically-incorrect libertarians. One of these factions were ethno-nationalists such as Richard Spencer, which would eventually enter the spotlight during Charlottesville. But another was NRx (neo-reactionary), and their neo-monarchist philosopher Mencius Moldbug. It was this faction that appealed the most to Nick Land.

Mencius Moldbug was the pen name of Curtis Yarvin, which he used for his blog Unqualified Reservations. In UR, Yarvin critiqued modern liberal democracies as inherently unstable and promoted an alternative political framework called "neocameralism." Under neocameralism, government would function more like a corporate entity, where citizens are treated as customers or shareholders, and governance is viewed as a competitive service provided by a sovereign corporation. The CEO-monarch, unlike a democratically-elected representative, would not be encumbered by constitutional rights and procedural restraints, and thus could rule much more efficiently. Like Land, Moldbug was also an admirer of Dengist China.

While the Alt-Right was mostly an online phenomenon, it did coincide with an offline, political libertarian phenomenon that happened around the same time. This IRL political phenomenon was comprised of political factions of the Republican party which had been sidelined by the neocons, such as the paleocons, and importantly, many libertarians. In the late 2000s, libertarianism was a popular ideology, especially for those who were disenchanted by both the Democrats and the George Bush era neocons who dominated Republican politics at the time. The Alt-Right is covered from the perspective of this form of libertarianism in Michael Malice’s book The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics (2019), in which Malice draws a connection between the paleo-conservatism of Patrick Buchanan and libertarianism of Murray Rothbard to the Alt-Right.

Land seems to have taken a similar trajectory. He begins “The Dark Enlightenment” with a discussion hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute.

One milestone was the April 2009 discussion hosted at Cato Unbound among libertarian thinkers (including Patri Friedman and Peter Thiel) in which disillusionment with the direction and possibilities of democratic politics was expressed with unusual forthrightness.

Thiel summarized the trend bluntly: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In August 2011, Michael Lind posted a democratic riposte at Salon, digging up some impressively malodorous dirt, and concluding: The dread of democracy by libertarians and classical liberals is justified. Libertarianism really is incompatible with democracy. Most libertarians have made it clear which of the two they prefer. The only question that remains to be settled is why anyone should pay attention to libertarians.

Of interesting note is the early mention of Peter Thiel, also named in Michael Malice’s book as part of the same libertarian milieu of this era. He is also well known by now as one of Trump’s most influential donors, as well as a patron of underground right-wing and “post-left” culture (primarily in New York’s “Dimes Square” scene).

Land cites Moldbug throughout the essay and extrapolates on his anti-Democratic politics.

Lind and the ‘neo-reactionaries’ seem to be in broad agreement that democracy is not only (or even) a system, but rather a vector, with an unmistakable direction. Democracy and ‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state. Whilst ‘extreme right wing’ governments have, on rare occasions, momentarily arrested this process, its reversal lies beyond the bounds of democratic possibility. Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool. This is a reality that the left applauds, the establishment right grumpily accepts, and the libertarian right has ineffectively railed against. Increasingly, however, libertarians have ceased to care whether anyone is ‘pay[ing them] attention’ – they have been looking for something else entirely: an exit.

Perhaps Thiel, and later the rest of the Techno-Progressives who would follow in his footsteps, considered President Trump this “exit”?

As a Techno-Progressive, Land has a disdain for universal human rights. After all, because humans are simply high-extropy matter, it does not follow that they should have any particular sanctity. Land characterizes human rights as just another product of the Social Justice Progressives and their “big government” regulations.

To comprehend the emergence of our contemporary predicament, characterized by relentless, totalizing, state expansion, the proliferation of spurious positive ‘human rights’ (claims on the resources of others backed by coercive bureaucracies), politicized money, reckless evangelical ‘wars for democracy’, and comprehensive thought control arrayed in defense of universalistic dogma (accompanied by the degradation of science into a government public relations function), it is necessary to ask how Massachusetts came to conquer the world, as Moldbug does. With every year that passes, the international ideal of sound governance finds itself approximating more closely and rigidly to the standards set by the Grievance Studies departments of New England universities. This is the divine providence of the ranters and levelers, elevated to a planetary teleology, and consolidated as the reign of the Cathedral.

Both Land and Moldbug correctly view human rights as a hold-over from Christianity. This they view as a terrible, regressive, decelerationist force in society.

In European classical antiquity, democracy was recognized as a familiar phase of cyclical political development, fundamentally decadent in nature, and preliminary to a slide into tyranny. Today this classical understanding is thoroughly lost, and replaced by a global democratic ideology, entirely lacking in critical self-reflection, that is asserted not as a credible social-scientific thesis, or even as a spontaneous popular aspiration, but rather as a religious creed, of a specific, historically identifiable kind:

[quoting Moldbug]

… a received tradition I call Universalism, which is a nontheistic Christian sect. Some other current labels for this same tradition, more or less synonymous, are progressivism, multiculturalism, liberalism, humanism, leftism, political correctness, and the like. … Universalism is the dominant modern branch of Christianity on the Calvinist line, evolving from the English Dissenter or Puritan tradition through the Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and Progressive movements. Its ancestral briar patch also includes a few sideways sprigs that are important enough to name but whose Christian ancestry is slightly better concealed, such as Rousseauvian laicism, Benthamite utilitarianism, Reformed Judaism, Comtean positivism, German Idealism, Marxist scientific socialism, Sartrean existentialism, Heideggerian postmodernism, etc, etc, etc. … Universalism, in my opinion, is best described as a mystery cult of power. … It’s as hard to imagine Universalism without the State as malaria without the mosquito. … The point is that this thing, whatever you care to call it, is at least two hundred years old and probably more like five. It’s basically the Reformation itself. … And just walking up to it and denouncing it as evil is about as likely to work as suing Shub-Niggurath in small-claims court.

…

The ideological credibility of radical democratization is not, of course, in question. As thinkers ranging from (Christian progressive) Walter Russell Mead to (atheistic reactionary) Mencius Moldbug have exhaustively detailed, it conforms so exactly to ultra-protestant religious enthusiasm that its power to animate the revolutionary soul should surprise nobody. Within just a few years of Martin Luther’s challenge to the papal establishment, peasant insurrectionists were stringing up their class enemies all over Germany.

Without acknowledging mankind’s God-given human dignity, progressive ideologies always lead to a society in which humans are treated as fodder to move forward a progressive agenda (on the Left) or to social Darwinism (on the Right). This was the case with the eugenics movement and the Nazis.

Land characterizes “democracy” and human rights as a parasitic outgrowth of Techno-Progressivism, which only serve to drag it down.

Democracy consumes progress. When perceived from the perspective of the dark enlightenment, the appropriate mode of analysis for studying the democratic phenomenon is general parasitology.

Quasi-libertarian responses to the outbreak accept this implicitly. Given a population deeply infected by the zombie virus and shambling into cannibalistic social collapse, the preferred option is quarantine. It is not communicative isolation that is essential, but a functional dis-solidarization of society that tightens feedback loops and exposes people with maximum intensity to the consequences of their own actions. Social solidarity, in precise contrast, is the parasite’s friend. By cropping out all high-frequency feedback mechanisms (such as market signals), and replacing them with sluggish, infra-red loops that pass through a centralized forum of ‘general will’, a radically democratized society insulates parasitism from what it does, transforming local, painfully dysfunctional, intolerable, and thus urgently corrected behavior patterns into global, numbed, and chronic socio-political pathologies.

Moldbug and Land attack a glaring hypocrisy of Social Justice Progressives. As atheists, they have no basis for why humans deserve the “human rights” that underlie the social justice that they advocate for.

[quoting Moldbug]

My belief is that Professor Dawkins is not just a Christian atheist. He is a Protestant atheist. And he is not just a Protestant atheist. He is a Calvinist atheist. And he is not just a Calvinist atheist. He is an Anglo-Calvinist atheist. In other words, he can be also described as a Puritan atheist, a Dissenter atheist, a Nonconformist atheist, an Evangelical atheist, etc, etc.

In this way, Moldbug and Land are much more consistent than the Social Justice Progressives. They accept atheism with all of its inherent consequences, including the abolishment of “human rights.”

[quoting Moldbug]

However, you can’t keep a good parasite down. A community of Puritans fled to America and founded the theocratic colonies of New England. After its military victories in the American Rebellion and the War of Secession, American Puritanism was well on the way to world domination. Its victories in World War I, World War II, and the Cold War confirmed its global hegemony. All legitimate mainstream thought on Earth today is descended from the American Puritans, and through them the English Dissenters.

Given the rise of this “really ugly bug” to world dominion, it might seem strange to pick on tangential figure such as Dawkins, but Moldbug selects his target for exquisitely-judged strategic reasons. Moldbug identifies with Dawkins’ Darwinism, with his intellectual repudiation of Abrahamic theism, and with his broad commitment to scientific rationality. Yet he recognizes, crucially, that Dawkins’ critical faculties shut off – abruptly and often comically – at the point where they might endanger a still broader commitment to hegemonic progressivism. In this way, Dawkins is powerfully indicative. Militant secularism is itself a modernized variant of the Abrahamic meta-meme, on its Anglo-Protestant, radical democratic taxonomic branch, whose specific tradition is anti-traditionalism. The clamorous atheism of The God Delusion represents a protective feint, and a consistent upgrade of religious reformation, guided by a spirit of progressive enthusiasm that trumps empiricism and reason, whilst exemplifying an irritable dogmatism that rivals anything to be found in earlier God-themed strains.

Land also dabbles in race-realism, which at the time was his most controversial opinion. I wonder how many ex-CCRU fans from the 1990s — back when organizations like the Extropy Institute saw close-minded conservatives as the biggest threat to Techno-Progressivism — had become blue-haired SJWs by 2012, and had to subsequently disavow him.

The example of Dawkins really gets to the heart of the Social Justice Progressivist contradiction. Without God, on what basis are the races “equal”? In a Christian paradigm, one can easily be a race-realist without it logically leading to any violation of anyone’s human rights. All men possess an equally human “soul” and thus can claim the right to equal human dignity, even if our earthly bodies genetically differ. Someone can be intelligent or dull, weak or strong, and yet be equal in the eyes of God.

However, when God is removed, there is no remaining sense in which all men are equal. In fact, natural selection operates on the presumption of inequality. Those who are unequally intelligent, strong, or otherwise genetically fit have the right to take what they can, and those who are not have the right to suffer what they must. If there are groups of people, racial or otherwise, who are less genetically fit, then there is no purely scientific barrier to oppressing them at the behest of one’s own genetically superior group, or even to removing them from the gene pool entirely.

To sustain this transcendent moral posture in relation to racism is no more rational than subscription to the doctrine of original sin, of which it is, in any case, the unmistakable modern substitute. The difference, of course, is that ‘original sin’ is a traditional doctrine, subscribed to by an embattled social cohort, significantly under-represented among public intellectuals and media figures, deeply unfashionable in the dominant world culture, and widely criticized – if not derided – without any immediate assumption that the critic is advocating murder, theft, or adultery. To question the status of racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is to court universal condemnation from social elites, and to arouse suspicions of thought crimes that range from pro-slavery apologetics to genocide fantasies. Racism is pure or absolute evil, whose proper sphere is the infinite and the eternal, or the incendiary sinful depths of the hyper-protestant soul, rather than the mundane confines of civil interaction, social scientific realism, or efficient and proportional legality. The dissymmetry of affect, sanction, and raw social power attending old heresies and their replacements, once noticed, is a nagging indicator. A new sect reigns, and it is not even especially well hidden.

However, as a Techno-Progressivist, Land also has no reason to support ethno-nationalism. Instead, he views ethno-nationalism as a form of luddite traditionalism. Why would he care about preserving a particular race, when he does not even care about replacing all of mankind with meta-organisms?

Of course, biological evolution is not like this at all. It is an actual complex process, not a principle. The way that it takes place can, and indisputably does, change with time. This is of utmost importance because the process of evolution advances as it proceeds (Campbell, 1986). Preliving matter in the earth’s primordial soup was able to evolve only by subdarwinian “chemical” mechanisms. Once these puny processes created gene molecules with information for their self-replication then evolution was able to engage natural selection. Evolution then wrapped the self-replicating genomes within self-replicating organisms to control the way that life would respond to the winds of selection from the environment. Later, by creating multicellular organisms, evolution gained access to morphological change as an alternative to slower and less versatile biochemical evolution. Changes in the instructions in developmental programs replaced changes in enzyme catalysts. Nervous systems opened the way for still faster and more potent behavioral, social and cultural evolution. Finally, these higher modes produced the prerequisite organization for rational, purposeful evolution, guided and propelled by goal-directed minds. Each of these steps represented a new emergent level of evolutionary capability.

…

For racial nationalists, concerned that their grandchildren should look like them, Campbell is the abyss. Miscegenation doesn’t get close to the issue. Think face tentacles.

Land also predicts that the politically incorrect Alt-Right will eventually win the war against the Social Justice Progressives.

Guess what? The war on political incorrectness creates data-empowered, web-coordinated, paranoid and poly-conspiratorial werewolves, superbly positioned to take advantage of liberal democracy’s impending rendezvous with ruinous reality, and to then play their part in the unleashing of unpleasantnesses that are scarcely imaginable (except by disturbing historical analogy). When a sane, pragmatic, and fact-based negotiation of human differences is forbidden by ideological fiat, the alternative is not a reign of perpetual peace, but a festering of increasingly self-conscious and militantly defiant thoughtcrime, nourished by publicly unavowable realities, and energized by powerful, atavistic, and palpably dissident mythologies. That’s obvious, on the ‘Net.

Accelerationism: a Hyper-Progressive Critique of Progressivism

While Land spends most of “The Dark Enlightenment” decrying “progressivism,” his critique is really only limited to Social Justice Progressivism. As the essay’s critique of Dawkins and his Christian moral baggage demonstrates, his main problem with Social Justice Progressives is that this Christian moral baggage prevents them from being even more progressive.

Contrary to what his essay suggests, progressivism is not a solely Leftist phenomenon. It has both a left-wing or right-wing variant, as well as a left-wing and right-wing opposition. After all, the accelerationists of the time of the Extropy Institute feared the decels on the conservative Right. And if the Social Justice Left is holding back technological progress because it retains some of its Christian morality from its historical antecedents, on the Right you have actual Christians.

While decrying "progressivism," Land is himself the biggest progressive of them all. An "accelerationist" progressive, a super-progressive, a progressive more progressive than Richard Dawkins — who is left behind in the dust.

The contradiction of Land's ideology becomes more apparent at the end of the essay. Continuing with his false dichotomy between “left” quasi-Christian social justice warriors and “right” libertarians, Land extends this dichotomy into the sociological question of “nature vs nurture.”

The central dogma of the Cathedral has been formalized as the Standard Social Scientific Model (SSSM) or ‘blank slate theory’. It is the belief, completed in its essentials by the anthropology of Franz Boas, that every legitimate question about mankind is restricted to the sphere of culture. Nature permits that ‘man’ is, but never determines what man is. Questions directed towards natural characteristics and variations between humans are themselves properly understood as cultural peculiarities, or even pathologies. Failures of ‘nurture’ are the only thing we are allowed to see.

Because the Cathedral has a consistent ideological orientation, and sifts its enemies accordingly, comparatively detached scientific appraisal of the SSSM easily veers into raw antagonism. As Simon Blackburn remarks (in a thoughtful review of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate), “The dichotomy between nature and nurture rapidly acquires political and emotional implications. To put it crudely, the right likes genes and the left likes culture …”

…

Either nature expresses itself as culture, or culture expresses itself in its images (‘constructions’) of nature. Both of these positions are trapped at opposite sides of an incomplete circuit, structurally blinded to the culture of practical naturalism, which is to say: the techno-scientific / industrial manipulation of the world.

Acquiring knowledge and using tools is a single dynamic circuit, producing techno-science as an integral system, without real divisibility into theoretical and practical aspects. Science develops in loops, through experimental technique and the production of ever more sophisticated instrumentation, whilst embedded within a broader industrial process. Its advance is the improvement of a machine. This intrinsically technological character of (modern) science demonstrates the efficiency of culture as a complex natural force. It neither expresses a pre-existing natural circumstance, nor does it merely construct social representations. Instead, nature and culture compose a dynamic circuit, at the edge of nature, where fate is decided.

According to the self-reinforcing presupposition of modernization, to be understood is to be modifiable. It is to be expected, therefore, that biology and medicine co-evolve. The same historical dynamic that comprehensively subverts the SSSM through inundating waves of scientific discovery simultaneously volatilizes human biological identity through biotechnology. There is no essential difference between learning what we really are and re-defining ourselves as technological contingencies, or technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise, scientifically-informed transformations. ‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of the genome – for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect coincidence.

Land quotes Simon Blackburn’s remark that "the right likes genes and the left likes culture." He then claims that this is a false dichotomy as culture is also ultimately a result of a natural process, and this culture can also affect our genes. Thus, it is more like a feedback loop. The ultimate expression of culture, says Land, is technology, and his ultimate project is to use technology in order to modify our nature via transhumanism.

He implies then that there is no truly “natural” form of nature, but that nature is “a social construct” that can be modified by the human intellect and will. In the absence of God, man becomes the ultimate master of nature, free to mold it in his image.

To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its technology. This is neither hereditarian determinism, nor social constructivism, but it is what both would have referred to, had they indicated anything real. It is a syndrome vividly anticipated by Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis trilogy is devoted to the examination of a population beyond the bionic horizon. Her Oankali ‘gene traders’ have no identity separable from the biotechnological program that they perpetually implement upon themselves, as they commercially acquire, industrially produce, and sexually reproduce their population within a single, integral process. Between what the Oankali are, and the way they live, or behave, there is no firm difference. Because they make themselves, their nature is their culture and (of course) reciprocally. What they are is exactly what they do.

This ultimately puts Land, for all his edgy race-realist talk, strictly in the "Leftist” camp. He is simply a Leftist of another stripe. After all, it was the original Leftists of the French Revolution who were opposed not only to the Crown in favor of democracy, but also to the Church in favor of atheism.

In contrast to Land, the perennialist religious view is one of harmony between mankind’s human nature given to him by God, and the natural world which was made according to God’s designs. Land himself is well aware of this.

Religious traditionalists of the Western Orthosphere are right to identify the looming bionic horizon with a (negative) theological event. Techno-scientific auto-production specifically supplants the fixed and sacralized essence of man as a created being, amidst the greatest upheaval in the natural order since the emergence of eukaryotic life, half a billion years ago. It is not merely an evolutionary event, but the threshold of a new evolutionary phase. John H. Campbell heralds the emergence of Homo autocatalyticus, whilst arguing: “In point of fact, it is hard to imagine how a system of inheritance could be more ideal for engineering than ours is.”

Accelerationism and Israel: Exit as the Only Human Right

The neo-reactionary philosophy of Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug was far more palatable to Silicon Valley venture capitalists than the ethno-nationalist, populist, or Christian-nationalist factions that came out of the Alt-Right. It was also more palatable to Trump’s other group of supporters: the Zionists. This group shares a similar disdain for Christian notions of “universal human rights.” As Land writes:

Even more than Equality-vs Liberty, Voice-vs-Exit is the rising alternative, and libertarians are opting for voiceless flight. Patri Friedman remarks: “we think that free exit is so important that we’ve called it the only Universal Human Right.”

To the Zionists, particularly Yarom Hazony’s National Conservatism, Trump also provides them an “exit” — this time from international governance through groups such as the International Criminal Court and the UN, who have too often meddled in Israel’s actions in Palestine.

Per Hazony, theirs was a conservatism that rejected liberalism’s commitment to abstract universalism and confidence in the power of human reason, favoring instead the bedrocks of tradition: family, religion, nation, hierarchy, order.

— Light Among the Nations, Sep 28 2023, Jewish Currents (https://jewishcurrents.org/light-among-the-nations)

Hazony sees liberalism as an international approach to politics, one that plays with gimmicks such as the idea of a universal human nature to foster supra-national government.

…

Hazony thus defends nationalism as the broad political worldview to which Israel, England, and the United States now adhere, in contrast to the United Nations or the European Union.

—“The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony” Cato, Fall 2018, (https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/fall-2018/virtue-nationalism-yoram-hazony)

Thus, it makes for a very convenient alliance. Michael Anton, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, JD Vance and others have personal ties to both the Techno-Progressives and Zionists.

Next In This Series

In the next installment of this series, we will examine how the Techno-Progressive “accelerationists” became the leaders of a transformed Trump movement. Once a symbol of “anti-establishment populism,” Trump would soon become the leader of right-wing Techno-Progressivism, as the goals of accelerationism, capitalism, and geo-politics synchronized with one another in a perfect singularity.