Accelerationism & Capital with Nick Land

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: stage-1 acceptance ruling — lane open-web-talk approved for opus-only hosting; mp3 tier deferred pending a disk volume). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:02

  This episode I'm going to be speaking with Nick Land, who is a philosopher, writer and blogger. We're going to be speaking about accelerationism, capital and number. First question is the typical hermitics question that I've kind of devised, which kind of gives you five thinkers. And I think it kind of brings…

• 00:04:15

  I think that's roughly correct. Yes. I think, I think that the minimal, the most abstract, abstract definition is that it's positive oriented cybernetics. So, and I think even. Oh, man. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. uh in its kind of in its incarnation that i have been sort of tracking and involved with to some extent…

• 00:11:13

  So what happens to the human in your future, your vision of the future? Well, I think it's a very interesting question because I think humanism is itself something that we haven't, we've only begun to see what humanism will be and what I think a good place to start with this. I'm not saying that there's a we wouldn't…

• 00:17:07

  I mean, I'm, I'm thinking particularly at this, at this point of Mao Zedong, who, who has this notion that capital just brings up like mushrooms everywhere, because as soon as, sorry, um, who are you, who are you thinking of it cut out? Mao, Chairman Mao, the great helmsman, yeah, who I think is, is actually very…

• 00:27:53

  is laid out in like do we have agency or don't we have agency you know is there free will or not is is time deterministic history deterministic all of that seems to me just confused you know it's it's not the it's not the way it's rather that that whole structure is an antinomy that is the symptom of a fundamental…

• 00:38:47

  and kind of and math in general as a kind of um a metric for for accelerationism yes it is doing that already i mean you know that's i think really it's crucial to say that it's like it's not that we theoretically have to come from outside and say hey let's try this that's what it's doing you know it's it's built…

• 00:49:43

  think that yes that's the connection so yes okay there's a yeah there's this this is just a strange connection there okay um is there is a anything else that you're you're thinking of that you'd like to to bring in in relation to accelerationism or or um philosophy um oh i don't know i think that that might…

• 01:00:52

  become a kind of fantasy literature because there's a wall across the future when you hit this when you hit intelligence explosion um things change in a way that completely exceeds any imaginable human capacity for uh anticipation um and i think that this is you know when nietzsche is being rigorous about ubermensch…