/lit/ - Literature

>>12666818
the point here is that for Land capitalism isn't about money *alone,* which - for some - is what attracts people to his work. a world of petit-bourgeois decadence, pleasure, and grotesque aristocratic squandering is revolting. this is where the Calvinist aspects of his work enter into it, but in place of anything like the Rapture (or the Revolution), only the unfolding of a Wintermute into the world will suffice, and the unfolding of said Wintermute is not a singular or recognizably historical event, but a slow transformation of the earth and the planetary unconscious into a single process aimed only at its own progressive self-discovery. you can essentially read Hegel backwards (or sideways) and find something not so far removed from Land's own thinking in this.

the question of sacrifice, of the accursed share, of what one *does* with excess or superabundant wealth is what Land keyed in on (or maybe it's just those who read him, it doesn't matter). what is the *point* of accumulation? he offers two words: R and D, and he is really only following the Marxist fragment on machines in this. money has no point or meaning if it is not being folded back on itself in recursive loops. there is undeniably a tacitly Protestant thinking in his own work in this way - if salvation by Grace is impossible, salvation by works will have to do, but all of this is done under the banner of Marxism instead of Christianity. and when it comes to computer intelligences learning to simulate that which produces them, you get the rest of it - the 'alien attack from the future,' unfolding itself into the world as teleoplexy.

this is where the Marxism and the libertarianism encounter each other, and where /acc works as a charge against the infinite playfulness of the postmodernists: Revenge of Marx. the machines don't give a fuck about irony or the death of the author, those are precisely the conditions in which they come to appear, and arguably in no other way. this is not even a remotely crazy reading either: we are now bringing upon ourselves an automatic planet driven by algorithmic governance and consumer processes that aim to do precisely this. we teach the machines about us and they learn to anticipate us, to predict us, and all of the rest. but where is the great scapegoat to be found in this? we do it to ourselves, and we arguably can think of a reason *not* to do it to ourselves. both liberalism and socialism are closely interconnected to the ultimate destiny of the machine and a consciousness wedded to it via the internet and computer technology.

in hindsight this will seem like one of those things more inevitable than radical, but my suspicion is that that is usually how it goes with the more substantial contributions to continental thought. if you hate liberalism for its decadence and excesses, if you like socialism for its futurism...or if you like liberalism for its economics, and hate socialism for its destructive pietism: that's /acc.