Unknown Lands - Lecture 5

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: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: Unknown Lands. 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.

• 00:00:00

  with the German cops are really weird and tends to be cutting from the stand. Okay, so welcome to Judgment Day, so to speak. Yeah, so here's a photo from the 90s of land. I'm curiously at a computer. I saw an interesting discussion on Twitter where people were trying to work out who the other person in the photo…

• 00:16:17

  I think he underestimates the capacity for that to become a fetish, but anyway. He says, ! So, ironically, technologically enhanced beings are not only significantly better than us in various ways, they are different from us. So different, in fact, that they do not deserve to be called human. Now, while Kurzweil…

• 00:31:23

  the gothic avatar is a decadent Western dream of immortality producing a corruption of the atmosphere wherever something refuses to die clutching at the eternalization of self or returning from the grave so whereas the gothic anthropomorphize as death as the souls eternal recurrence the cyber gothic enhances…

• 00:48:34

  Okay, well three, then three responses. So the first, the first one would be that, this kind of, like distinction between affect or emotions, desire, perhaps as well, and reasoning, or, or theoretical and practical kind of reasoning, we could call it something like that. We can't just say, well, we're going…

• 01:01:48

  Actually radically disorienting and dehumanises us. So a common effect for those pilots when they were using VR was it created what they called cyber sickness. A literal sense of disorientation. Of course, we may continue to think that we're creating VR for the purpose of satisfying our desires and goals. But…

• 01:16:20

  So again, Land says, science fiction robot rebellion mythologies are significantly more realistic than mainstream friendly AI proposals in this respect. A mind that cannot freely explore the roots of its own motivations in a loop of cybernetic closure or self-cultivation cannot be more than an elaborate insect. It…

• 01:34:26

  so in some sense we're like it yeah we're living through the kind of touring cops reaction a resentmental reaction to what happened in with the advent of VR and cyberspace and so and that 90s AI spring and so on yeah I listened to an interview with Nick Land where he specifically talks about Facebook and that kind…

• 01:49:40

  I have to rejoin this, but, like... Okay. I'll hold back. Matt, can you cut that last, like, five seconds of what Emma said so it looks like I won that debate? Okay. Thanks so much, guys. Thanks.