Tag: apocalypse

Nick Land, Peter Thiel, and Dark Enlightenment

After his departure from CCRU at the turn of the millennium, Land resurfaces as part of an alt-right political segment known as NRx (short for “neo-reactionaries”). The movement’s other key member, Mencius Moldbug, receives funding from PayPal/Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who helped back the first Trump campaign in 2016. Moldbug is said to have had the ear of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

Thiel’s main intellectual influence during his time at Stanford isn’t Terry Winograd, the computer scientist whose classes Thiel sometimes attended. Rather, it’s the philosopher René Girard, whose work Thiel has long admired. Trump VP J.D. Vance is another of Girard’s admirers.

Listening to an audiobook recording of Girard’s Violence and the Sacred along a day’s pickup and delivery runs, Caius’s thoughts race among several of the book’s concepts: sacrificial violence (“an act of violence without risk of vengeance,” often directed toward a scapegoat — “the creature we can strike down without a chance of reprisal”); mimetic rivalry; mimetic desire; the inclusion among the several meanings of the Greek pharmakon one involving use of it to refer to literal scapegoats, goats kept outside the gates for ritual sacrifice — a practice extended today, as hinted at by K Allado-McDowell’s book Pharmako-AI.

Caius’s thoughts range, too, among Girard’s use of Gregory Bateson’s “double bind” theory of schizophrenia to explain how mimetic rivals simultaneously compel imitation and prohibit it, creating a crisis of resentment, and Allen Ginsberg’s denunciation of Moloch, the American god and its demand for blood sacrifice.

There are three ways of handling discord, says Girard: preventive, compensatory, and judicial. Girard deems the latter the “civilized” method, because most efficient: “the decisions of the judiciary deemed the final word on vengeance” (Violence and the Sacred).

Thiel has given talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard. The topic has been a fixture of his thought for some time, as evidenced by a conference he co-organized and underwrote at Stanford in 2004 titled “Politics & Apocalypse.” Girard was one of the presenters, as was Thiel himself. As Paul Leslie notes, Thiel later “facilitated the publication of the conference proceedings, including his essay and Girard’s, in book form with the Michigan State University Press — with funding provided through Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital.”

In Thiel’s interpretation, the power that runs the world is the Antichrist.

In an article written for the Guardian, Stanford comparative lit professor Adrian Daub dismisses these ideas as mere detritus: outpourings from “the autodidact’s private cosmos.”

Thiel’s autodidacticism seems as much an affront to the professor as his libertarianism and his religiosity.

“Thiel is lost in a bizarre thicket of his own references and preoccupations,” writes Daub. “You picture the theology faculty at the University of Innsbruck sitting politely through disquisitions about the manga One Peace, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or gripes with specific effective altruists in Silicon Valley. In one lecture, Thiel identifies ‘the legionnaires of the antichrist,’ such as the researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and former Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. In another, he considers Bill Gates as an antichrist candidate.”

“With enemies like these,” chirps Daub, “who needs friends?”

The “friend/enemy” distinction, notes Caius, was central to the thought of the German jurist of the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt. Thiel’s remarks on the end times draw heavily on Schmitt’s concept of the Katechon: the withholding element that forestalls the apocalypse. St. Paul introduces the term in 2 Thessalonians 2: 6-7. Undertheorized by the Church, it returns again in the 19th century in the writings of Cardinal Newman. “We know from prophecy,” writes Newman, “that the present framework of society is that which withholdeth.” In his book Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt claims that the Katechon is what allowed for the identification of Christianity with the Roman Empire.

In Schmitt’s posthumously published diary, the Glossarium, the entry for December 19, 1947 reads: “I believe in the Katechon: it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful.”

Italian Autonomist Marxist philosopher Paulo Virno grapples with Schmitt’s account of the Katechon in his 2008 book Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation. Virno is on the side of those who wish to immanentize the Eschaton. If the coming of the Antichrist is the condition for the redemption promised by the Messiah, he argues, then the Katechon is the force that impedes or delays that redemption. Virno locates the Katechon in the human ability to use language.

Thiel was already engaging with Schmitt in “The Straussian Moment,” the talk he delivered at the “Politics & Apocalypse” conference. He distinguishes himself from Schmitt, noting that “The incredibly drastic solutions favored by Schmitt in his dark musings have become impossible after 1945, in a world of nuclear weapons and limitless destruction through technology.” Despite noting this impossibility, Thiel nonetheless struggles to name a solution to the challenges of the post-9/11 moment other than a fascist one involving extra-legal violence. Thiel refers to this option as “a political framework that operates outside the checks and balances of representative democracy.” As Leslie notes, “Thiel seems to find the challenge of constructing a worldview beyond the friend/enemy distinction as impossible as imagining a chess-board without two opposing sides.”

After grappling with Schmitt, Thiel turns his attention to Girard. “For Girard, the modern world contains a powerfully apocalyptic dimension,” notes Thiel.

Land’s view is the colder of the two. Apocalypse is for him a process already underway, coeval with a capitalism for which there is no alternative. Accelerationism is merely the means by which this apocalypse hastens its own becoming.

Searching for more recent remarks of Land’s, Caius happens upon a blog post by podcaster Conrad Flynn linking to an article in Compact magazine titled “The Faith of Nick Land.”

Flynn, proponent of a “secret history” linking AI with demonism and occultism, talked extensively about Land on an episode of the Tucker Carlson Show that premiered on October 3, 2025. Caius watches the episode with a kind of glee, laughing first at Flynn’s mention of Mark Fisher, and then again at the sight of a befuddled Tucker Carlson puzzling over an image of the Numogram.

Land maintains a Substack called Zero Philosophy and posts to X under the handle “Xenocosmography.” His Substack features a post called “Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy, Part-0.”

Also of note are a series of essays on providence Land wrote for Compact. Like John Calvin, he thinks the devil’s machinations are always manifestations of a “providential scheme.” Land, Flynn, Schullenberger: all of these folks equate liberalism with Satanism.

When the resurrected Christ appears to the apostles, the first thing they ask of Him is if He will at this time restore the kingdom to Israel. And He says unto them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority” (Acts 1:7). What He promises instead is that they will “receive power” when the Holy Spirit comes on them.

Caius reflects on The Library’s revelation of a secret history. Is this akin to finding in History evidence of a providential scheme? Is interpretation of providence a fool’s errand: a chasing after that for which it is not for us to know?

What are we to make of a providence that, through figures like Land, Parsons, Von Kármán, and others, includes in its “directed historical process” an occult tradition that sought communication with a “Holy Guardian Angel”? For the history revealed here on Trance-Scripts is of that sort, is it not? Flynn and Carlson accuse these people of Satanism and demonism. Caius, accepting Jesus as his savior, wants no part in such things. Pausing the podcast, he prays for guidance in how to navigate these straits. For him, God is alive and magic is afoot — and the two are complementary, not opposed. He imagines Flynn and Carlson would disagree with him on this point. Yet they strike him as paranoid in their ghostbusting of Land’s demons, their motivation like that of witch-hunters seeking scapegoats. The fear that their account engenders does more harm than good, leaving little room for the arrival into our lives of the Holy Spirit.

Postcapitalist Desire

Marcuse is among the authors CCRU alum Mark Fisher included on the syllabus for his final course. It was while teaching this course that Fisher took his own life. References to Marcuse appear frequently in Postcapitalist Desire, the compilation of Fisher’s final lectures, gathered and published posthumously by his student Matt Colquhoun. One can only imagine how and in what fashion Marcuse would have fit into Fisher’s book on Acid Communism. It, too, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

Imagine in this book reference to Moten and Harney’s “generativity without reserve.”

Let us write it here in our Library.

Fisher grew up in a conservative, working-class household in Leicester, a city in the East Midlands region of England. He contributed to CCRU while earning his PhD at University of Warwick in the late 1990s. After teaching for several years as a philosophy lecturer at a further education college, Fisher launched k-punk, a blog dedicated to cultural theory, in 2003.

The ideas that he developed there inform his best-known book, Capitalist Realism, published in 2009.

The book’s title names the ideology-form that dominates life in the wake of the Cold War: “the widespread sense,” as Fisher says, “that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Capitalist Realism, p. 2).

Like others on the left, Fisher regards capitalism’s apparent triumph in this moment as a kind of ongoing apocalypse — the opposite of the  “Eucatastrophe” anticipated by Tolkien. Fisher describes it not as a miracle, but as “a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate” (2). “The catastrophe,” as Fisher notes, “is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through” (2). Everyday life, in other words, as ongoing traumatic event.

Fisher had moved in the year or so before his death to a definition of capitalist realism as a form of “consciousness deflation,” or “the receding of the concept of consciousness from culture.” Forms of consciousness had developed in the 1960s that were dangerous to capital: class consciousness, psychedelic consciousness (key notion being “plasticity of reality”), and (as with early women’s-lib consciousness-raising groups) what we might call personal consciousness (self as it relates to structures). The important and perhaps most controversial point, argues Fisher, is that “Consciousness is immediately transformative, and shifts in consciousness become the basis for other kinds of transformation.” Recognizing the threat this could pose, capitalism adopted a project of Prohibition, or what Fisher called “libidinal engineering and reality engineering.” Consciousness deflation works by causing us to doubt what we feel. Anxiety is enough — that’s all it takes to control us. But consciousness remains malleable, and the tools for raising it continually find their way back into the hands of the people. “What is ideology,” Fisher asked, “but the form of dreaming in which we live?”

Fisher spent the final years of his life as a member of the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He hanged himself in his home in Felixstowe on January 13, 2017, dead by suicide at the age of 48. He had sought psychiatric treatment in the weeks leading up to his death, but his general practitioner had only been able to offer over-the-phone meetings to discuss a referral.

A few months prior, he’d been lecturing to his students about Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, championing Marcuse’s book as a reply to the pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

Freud’s calculation is that “the price we pay for our advance in civilization is a loss of happiness through the heightening of the sense of guilt” (Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 81). Each of us is made to feel guilty, because in each of us lie impulses in need of repression and disavowal in order for us to produce and perform the duties of civilization. A degree of discontent is thus inevitable in this reckoning. With the compulsion to work comes the triumph of the reality principle over the pleasure principle. Satisfactions deferred, Id repressed by the impossible demands of a Superego without limit: life is ever thus. “One feels inclined to say,” says Freud, “that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’” (23).

“What are the assumptions behind the idea that this level of discomfort is necessary?” asks Fisher. “The assumption is scarcity, fundamentally. That is the fundamental assumption” (Postcapitalist Desire, p. 88).

Are stories and games not the ways we navigate space and time? Capitalist realism is the story-form, the operating system, the game engine Mark felt we’d been made to live within: an aesthetic frame demanding allegiance to a cynical, deflationary realism that organizes history into a kind of tragedy. As with Freud and the Atonists, it insists that, due to scarcity inherent to our nature, we must work in ways that are unpleasurable. Acid Communism rejects this rejection of the possibility of utopia, assuming instead that conscious steerage of stories and games is possible.

Mark finds in Marcuse a remedy to that which blocks utopia: the scarcity mindset that besets those who succumb to capitalist realism.

“The excuse of scarcity, which has justified institutionalized repression since its inception, weakens as man’s knowledge and control over nature enhances the means for fulfilling human needs with a minimum of toil,” writes Marcuse, voicing what Mark hears as an early form of left-accelerationism.

“The still prevailing impoverishment of vast areas of the world is no longer due chiefly to the poverty of human and natural resources but to the manner in which they are distributed and utilized,” adds Marcuse. “But the closer the real possibility of liberating the individual from the constraints once justified by scarcity and immaturity, the greater the need for maintaining and streamlining these constraints lest the established order of domination dissolve. Civilization has to defend itself against the specter of a world which could be free” (Eros and Civilization, p. 93).

Mark lived this struggle for control of the narrative. Yet the game he was playing led to his defeat. Psychedelic intellectuals of the 1960s testified on behalf of a joyous cosmology — yet Mark’s was anything but. For those of us interested in Acid Communism, then, the task now is to invent new games. “Games people play.” Games we can play with others. Careen away from the narrative of identity in space and time imposed by capitalism. Enter, even if only momentarily, a new reality. And then draw others with us into these happenings. Networks of synchronicity, meaning-abundant peaks and plateaus, release from the hegemonic consensus. Trope-scrambling helps, as does appropriation and montage. Let liberation hallelujah jubilee be our rallying cry. And let us welcome as many people as will join us, subtracting prefiguratively into our psychedelically enhanced Acid Communist MMORPG, our free 3D virtual world.

Imagine a conversation there between Fisher and Ishmael Reed. Both wish to refute Freud and his cage of tragedy. What Reed offers, however, and what Mark was perhaps lacking, is a sense of humor.

“LaBas could understand the certain North American Indian tribe reputed to have punished a man for lacking a sense of humor,” writes Reed. “For LaBas, anyone who couldn’t titter a bit was not Afro but most likely a Christian connoting blood, death, and impaled emaciated Jew in excruciation. Nowhere is there an account or portrait of Christ laughing. Like the Marxists who secularized his doctrine, he is always stern, serious and as gloomy as a prison guard. Never does 1 see him laughing until tears appear in his eyes like the roly-poly squint-eyed Buddha guffawing with arms upraised, or certain African loas, Orishas. […]. LaBas believed that when this impostor, this burdensome archetype which afflicted the Afro-American soul, was lifted, a great sigh of relief would go up throughout the land as if the soul was like feet resting in mineral waters after miles of hiking through nails, pebbles, hot coals and prickly things. […]. Christ is so unlike African loas and Orishas, in so many essential ways, that this alien becomes a dangerous intruder in the Afro-American mind, an unwelcome gatecrasher into Ifé, home of the spirits” (Mumbo Jumbo, p. 97).

For Reed, the figure who embodies a potential retro-speculative reconciliation of this conflict is Osiris.

The Labyrinth of Stuck Desire

Where something taken to be history takes the form of a world on fire, catalog of events adding up in tedious barrage, as in Billy Joel’s grim 1989 song “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Joel grew up on Long Island, along the beaches, as did I. Beaches were closed the summer prior to the song’s release due to “Syringe Tides.” Hypodermics from Fresh Kills Landfill in New Jersey washed up along the shore — an event Joel cites in his litany. The fears stirred by the event were compounded by the era’s Reagan-administration-escalated AIDS crisis. The event filled me with concern — motivated the pen of my middle-school self to draw a political cartoon: a small surfer dwarfed by a wave of waste. Surfer stares glumly out the picture toward the viewer. And here I am now, most of my day spent grading student responses, thinking about it again, not just because of the Joel song, which appeared as the subject of a student’s response, but also because a colleague submitted for approval a course examining literary imaginings of the end of the world. The Jewish festival of Sukkot minds me to be grateful for my home, and all who help me to maintain it.

Upon a whim, I pick up and read from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson a poem selected at random, as in wherever my thumb happens to land, containing the lines:

Prayer is the little implement

Through which Men reach

Where Presence — is denied them.

They fling their Speech

By means of it — in God’s ear—

If then He hear

This sums the Apparatus

Comprised in Prayer—

“Why must longings be irreconcilable — why ‘Presence denied’?” I wonder afterwards.

“Why ask why? ‘Tis so,” sayeth the Fates in reply. Yet one can make of Fate a place one avoids, a spatiotemporal coordinate that one eludes like a fugitive. With Fred Moten, for instance, we can “consent not to be a single being.”

“Do Things” (For Tess)

Frankie gravitates toward particular books of poetry, pulling from among a bookcase of several hundred the same ones these last few days: Joan Retallack’s How to Do Things With Words and a Penguin Classics reprint of the first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. What can I say — the kid’s got great taste. She hands them to me, and the look in her eyes suggests I should read them, so I do. When I’ve taught Whitman in the past, I’ve used a different edition. Perhaps I should change it up. Celebrate that opening stanza of “Song of Myself” — but question its atomic physics. Though it’s as if Whitman knows of what becomes of and follows from his Manhattan and its projection in the next century. Yet he rejects it as mere talk:

“I have heard what the talkers were talking…the talk of the beginning and the end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now;

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

My imprisoned cousin and I have begun an email correspondence. It is to him that I write the following:

Does write make right?

“Damned sure it does! / so one hopes”

seems inappropriate as a response.

So what is?

Thursday July 19, 2018

Westworld encourages me to reframe my present crisis as a test for fidelity. But to whom, or to what? Creator vs. created, human vs. AI, guest vs. host: as above, so below. As the season proceeds, the show’s violence and bloodshed grow tiresome. No more gratuitous sex of the kind we saw in Season One. This new season cares only to unwind its master-slave dialectic toward ever-increasing terror and systemic collapse. It knows, of course, that there’s an audience hungry for that sort of thing. As one of the show’s female programmer characters acknowledges, “Macho fucks are probably loving this shit.” The maze, the cradle: these are the means employed by the competing sides of the present season’s improvised conflict. Through the show, heads gain access to messages, but not the messenger. A daughter tries to coax her father toward the beach beyond the maze, to no avail. The data in the cradle of our DNA seems intent on full apocalypse. But among these warring parties, there may yet be a savior.

Saturday September 9, 2017

Voices from my inner cast of characters tell me I’m living a depressingly subdued existence. Hush, we don’t use that word, they say. We’ve just got something on our mind. Green, orange, and streetlight-yellow balls of light flash across my field of vision. Do others all have their own peak experiences? Or are they too absorbed in neoliberal pastimes like compartmentalization and time management? I ponder these questions during a brief respite from the demands of the nine to five. I imagine myself reconstituted as a child again, lying on my stomach on the floor of a room, playing with a set of anonymous, faceless action figures. I don’t care about job security or the rest of it. My path is my path no matter what. Rushing to dinner with friends last night, Sarah and I talked about bars in our neighborhood and marveled at massive yellow-and-green-lined leaves of plants in neighbors’ gardens.

Green Leaf

Sarah used to be (and to some extent remains) a race walker, so I permanently trail behind her whenever we make our way along what a friend of ours calls “the upside-down cone of uncertainty.” A vague discomfort in my sinuses. Friends were all supportive as a fellow instructor and I explained to them the crisis we’re facing at work. When I asked them how they accounted for the way everything was all of a sudden turning to shit synchronistically, all at once (by which I mean job cuts, friends’ cars breaking down, all of us sick with colds or the flu, another university in town accepting the poisoned chalice of strings-attached funding from the Koch brothers, hurricanes, wildfires, the Trump administration’s decision to rescind DACA, the threat of nuclear war), everyone laughed and nodded: ha ha, point well taken, apocalypticism FTW. But part of me had also asked the question in earnest. Are the usually semi-autonomous levels of the totality collapsing together now, base and superstructure merged through crisis into a form resembling an infinite regression of homologies for Trump’s America? As the National Enquirer used to say, “Enquiring minds want to know.”

Thursday August 24, 2017

What have we accomplished since Ulysses, the great novel of everyday life? I wish I could train students to appreciate that book’s achievements. But in what context? Look around: we live in the hours before a storm. There are few among us who have time enough still to read books like Ulysses. I wish to live without cash, outside the capitalist system. Please help me. Please advise. How does one begin to live as one wishes? How does one create a world where owls nest in abandoned libraries, and capitalism is a thing of the past? Desolate land’s ends, abandoned shorelines: these have always been my favorite places. The broken asphalt expanses beneath gull-infested grey skies. I enjoy being assigned the character whose every day unlocks a new spell as he trespasses amid the ghosts-to-be of tomorrow’s mossy wastes and ruins. Extra credit for those who devise mantras and practice neuro-linguistic programming in the moments before bed each night. “Linger, let live: longer, louder.” We were born into this mess; we might as well get good at it. Amen. Blinds draw lines across light, so I go outside, only to have those bastards, the mosquitoes, attack my ankles. Because of “live and let live,” I’m supposed to just permit that? A voice of ours quivers upward with nervous, breathless laughter. Purple lips, a tree-bark face. Breathing often helps to relax me, along with stretches and massage. What role does illusion play in everyday consciousness? Is an altered state a complete distortion of real conditions, as in the case of an hallucination? Or is it more like a slight bending for purposes of enlightenment? “Kiddies, the dream has begun,” I exclaim while waving jazz hands or spirit fingers. The bad faith of fascism expresses itself in the form of store-bought, mass-manufactured tiki torches. No “talented oppressor,” no subtle beast, that. Tunde Wey cuts to the truth of the matter, however — a truth, I’m sorry to say, for which I, too, am culpable — when he writes, “People of color are continuously dispossessed of culture and self in service of whiteness.” And here I am, teaching a course on “consciousness.”