Nick Land & the Politics of Acceleration (w Michael Downs)

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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).

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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.

• 00:00:00

  Hi, I'm Benjamin Studebaker. Hi, I'm Michael Downs. And this is Political Theory 101. So today on Political Theory 101, we're going to be talking about Nick Land. And we've got Mikey Downs on. He's recently written a book about Nick Land and Slavoj Žižek. The book is called Capital vs. Time Energy, a Žižekian Critique…

• 00:14:53

  He. He. In all his periods of thought, ultimately just wants us to have the strength to accelerate the process, to let capitalism, you know, bring bring forth the future. And even if that future means a future without us. Right. Now, the thing is, he at some point, like in the 90s, he would just affirm that. And…

• 00:29:13

  Like we can, our bodies can cog 20,000 degrees. Like that's where he would talk about the, these forces in the universe. That are so beyond us beyond our conceptual apparatus, beyond our sensory apparatus, that whatever they're doing forms this wild libidinal outside. And ultimately it is what produces everything that…

• 00:42:58

  The new earth. And this would be. Some sort of. Situation. Let's call it that. Wherein. Bodies. And matter. Were free. To experiment. And desiring production. Which is their concept of desire. Is this kind of. Free play. Of productive desire. It's free to do. What it wants. Right. It's not held back. By any type…

• 00:57:34

  And that these facial features... Established what counted as the face. Right? The metric through which everybody is to be measured. And they were all for undermining faciality. All for decoding this. And undermining this kind of imperial face or imperial identity. And Land himself said he hated when Facebook took…

• 01:10:21

  And they control the surplus. They control all factors. And more or less, it seems to operate the way that state capitalism did in the Soviet Union. I don't know if you agree that the Soviet Union and its economy was state capitalism. But I wanted to ask you about this whole thing, what you think about the SOVCORP…

• 01:24:26

  So, and I mean, Jarvin himself, it's not like he he's not a Landian in the sense that he thinks that ultimately like the transcendence of the human transcendence, going beyond the human is a good thing, but he certainly is for he places security as a far more fundamental value and, you know, people on the right…

• 01:45:34

  stuff i think he makes valid points against democracy but i'm sorry there's g jack is anti-democracy you don't have to be right wing to be anti-liberal democracy in certain ways uh so you know he can make a valid point about you know the problem with political correctness or liberalism etc fine but uh for me though…