Future Now Making the Machines of Tomorrow - Nick Land

Provenance

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.

Listen

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.

• 00:00:07

  Hi, everybody. Very good to see everybody here, of course. Five minutes, 300 seconds, obviously nowhere near enough time. Easy answer, print some. It's listening to what's going on here, that's not so hard. We've got organ printing already, crank it forward a bit, do some brain printing, mash them all together into…

• 00:01:21

  But it's a statistical argument that it's almost inevitable that actually everything that is going on right now is already happening in an artificial time environment. I'm sure I've had my 300 seconds. I'll just wind it up to say the question of whether technology happens in time or time happens in technology…

• 00:02:47

  They have the same origin. Even though that's really got lost. Which is that the more you find out about something, the more you learn about something, the less you believe it. That's very odd, I think, for people. The modern mind tends to think the more that you learn about something, the more you understand…

• 00:03:52

  So I think that these sort of questions, they might seem, of course, extremely arcane, but ultimately, I think they're the questions that are being raised when you say, how much can you actually design or plan things? And to the extent that you feel you can do that, it's because you think the kind of structures…

• 00:05:36

  So if I can, I know this is not quite a question, but if I can ask you to just speak when you think about your own work and how the future plays, if you can think about this mixture of terror and fear and also seduction and desire. There's a particular dimension of horror that I think people will identify with quite…

• 00:06:56

  And those two things together is quite a comfortable world for people. But obviously the odd thing about that egg example is that there are eggs. You know, I mean, if we were living in a universe where eggs can get smashed and they can never get built, then exactly why would we want eggs and why are there eggs…

• 00:08:03

  And I think the example which probably people will recognise from the movies is that moment in the second Terminator movie, when there's an almost indestructible liquid metal robot trying to kill and chase and kill people, they release some liquid hydrogen or some extremely cold thing and freeze it, and then smash…

• 00:09:08

  It's just happening over a timescale and in a distributed way that you're not recognising it over that same vivid shock. And it seems to me this kind of technology and the kind of things that go on here very much have that actually going on under the surface, and there's a lot of room for some deep, horrific affect…