Nick Land & the Politics of Acceleration (w Michael Downs) (3)

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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…

• 00:14:51

  And he, in all his periods of thought, ultimately just wants us to have the strength to accelerate the process, to let capitalism bring the power to the world. And he views humanity as really a kind of allergic reaction to change, bring forth the future. And even if that future means a future without us, right? Now…

• 00:29:31

  And ultimately it is what produces everything that is, but it's unconscious to us. We can't get a hold of it. We can't integrate it into our conscious psyches. It's just beyond our comprehension. And somebody could say, well, it's beyond our comprehension. How are you talking about it? Yeah, but it's almost like…

• 00:46:06

  But this, Benjamin, this is where we get into all these problems. It's like, okay, so the idea is that humans are supposed to, select the state they live in, like they choose what coffee shop they're going to go to. Okay, so they don't get a vote, they have no voice, but they can leave whenever they want. But…

• 01:00:45

  So I don't know where he's really at with all of that. Even though he wouldn't think it would work to preach it because the Democratic public would never sign on to it, which can lead people to think that there might be a conspiracy going on or that these guys and the CEOs, the oligarchs might be in some sense…

• 01:14:07

  You might have a state which massages in some way the relationship, but it would do this for the purposes of maintaining order. Ultimately, it wouldn't do this out of some genuine need to do what you want or do what you believe in. It seems to me that this kind of Hobbesian notion of the state is at the center…

• 01:27:16

  But then ultimately, because we human beings don't prioritize survival and necessity, we therefore are unnecessary. And do not deserve to survive. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. You know, okay. Hold on. I forgot. Okay. Just popped in my head. There is, there's something about Nick's essay, dark enlightenment. I…

• 01:46:47

  That causes this to come about. We've got to wrestle with it. So I'm glad that you're wrestling with it. And that book capital versus time, energy, as you Jackie and critique of Nick land is available. It's available right now. It's a cool book and you get a lot of, of pages for your money. That's true. All right…