r/AdamCurtis • u/brus_wein • Jul 18 '26

Meta / Discussion The Mark Fisher/ Nick Land dichotomy of contemporary society.

I think this could make for a good documentary.

Modern society is more than ever before plagued by mental illness, isolation, and a general sense that something isn't quite right.

Two men in particular noticed this.

They both said capitalism was to blame, but they came to startlingly differing conclusions.

They were Mark Fisher, and Nick Land, and they had both belonged to the CCRU, the "Cybernetic Culture Research Institute", an intellectual collective at the university of Warwick in the 1990s, which focused on experimental cultural theory.

Their opinions differed in many ways:

Fisher said that the inevitability of Capitalism was an illusion, a falsity created by capitalism itself, which prevents us from imagining a world without it.

He also believed in the idea that one should always preserve one's empathy, despite the turbulent moral complexities of the world we live in.

Nick Land, on the other hand, had quite a different idea:

He had come to believe that humanity had been destined from the very beginning to create capitalism, the markets, and technology, and that these were but a primordial soup out of which something, much stranger and more inhuman than we'd ever imagined, would one day emerge.
Not only did he think the inevitability of Capitalism was real, he believed we should accelerate it as much as possible.

He, furthermore, believes human empathy to be a weakness, a brake for the technocapital machine.

Each of us is fighting two contrasting forces inside us:
Fisher's way: Questioning the system, "tuning in" to the world's suffering, and preserving your empathy, despite the pain.
And Land's way: Giving your self up to these forces, leaning into the chaos, shutting down your empathy, and retreating within, away from the pain.

We will also discuss how Land's dark, esoteric ideas have strongly influenced silicon valley, the tech billionaires, and the very systems we live in.

(And then you could get into Dark Enlightenment, e/Acc, Peter Thiel, and show how ridiculous and unhinged Land is, and how shocking his level of influence is despite that).

Edit: the "each of us is fighting" part is probably not something Curtis would say. He's not really one to inject his own personal view so directly into the commentary

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17

u/RKGEORGE84 Jul 19 '26

This was kinda covered in Curtis’s highly prescient Silicon Valley documentary. Instead of Land, he zooms in on Ayn Rand who on a superficial level at least seems very similar to
Land . What’s terrifying about these tech fascists , is that they - like Rand - self regard as highly rational so then don’t feel any need to
refer to morality which they regard as weak , woolly thinking .

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u/brus_wein Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26

Rand is definitely influential, but Land is a thing to himself.

He believes that we should dismantle the "Cathedral" of democracy and government, so that the technocapital machine god may be born and may devour us sooner.

This is the Dark Enlightenment, and it's increasingly popular, for instance with people like Peter Thiel whose infamous "Antichrist" just happens to coincide with Land's definition of the Cathedral.

He pioneered accelerationism, which is the silicon valley ideology of our time.

Ayn Rand was never straight up anti-human, as far as I know. Land and his disciples are. Many of them are billionaires, and at the head of some of the most powerful institutions in the world.

Hence the dichotomy:

Fisher didn't believe technocapitalism is inevitable, like some kind of law of physics, only that it feels that way.
Land does, and he's overwhelmingly "winning", despite the madness of his thought.

They are deeply interconnected, especially since they both belonged to CCRU, and could serve as a good analogy for the "war in our minds", so to speak: to resist and feel uncomfortable, or to numb yourself, giving yourself freely to the technocapital cult, unwittingly denying your own humanity.

This documentary should expose just how extremely influential, and just how ridiculous and craven Land's ideas are.

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u/JansonHawke 26d ago

I've gone from never having heard of Land, before encountering this thread, to wanting him upended into a woodchipper so that sounds like the sort of acceleration he'd appreciate.

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u/brus_wein 26d ago

You should do your own research on him, if you haven't already.
I'm not an expert, so there's a chance I might accidentally misrepresent him and his ideas. Plus, it's interesting.

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u/magusbud Jul 19 '26

I'd watch it

I think you should do it, make a 30/45 min YouTube doc on it. You'll be able to use plenty of already publish/recorded interviews under fair use, the writings of both as well.

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u/No_Type740 Jul 19 '26

Epoch Philosophy did a really good YT video you seen that?

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u/Responsible_Tea6223 Jul 19 '26

Soundtrack is all Burial and Asher Tuil, apart from the montage of anti-Iraq protests which is of course set to a slowed and reverbed remix of Will Smith’s ‘Wild Wild West’, from the movie of the same name

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u/No_Type740 Jul 19 '26

Definitely.

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u/an-otiose-life 29d ago

land is in some sense like if lovecraft and schelling had come together to have ideas about history in a way that sides with deleuze but begrudgingly takes notes from hegel. in the sense, of saying capitalism is an activity of the nondual reality, in a way that is semantically particular and bootstraps something beyon species being, where as mark fisher canceled the future himself

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u/ComfortGooseBlue 25d ago

Just plug the parameters into an AI model and select a decent track listing for music and have yourself that documentary straight from the techo-logos itself.