Interpretation – Trance-Scripts

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 19^th 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.

Understanding and Ontology

“For the people of Chile,” write Winograd and Flores on the opening page of their 1986 book Understanding Computers and Cognition. Apple’s 1984 come and gone, Pinochet still in power in Chile.

The book begins by helping readers think anew what it is they do when they compute. Computing makes sense, write Winograd and Flores, only to the extent that we situate its activities within a complex social network that includes institutions, equipment, practices, and conventions. “The significance of a new invention lies in how it fits into and changes this network” (6).

Linguistic action is for Winograd and Flores “the essential human activity” (7). If what we do with computers includes “creating, manipulating, and transmitting symbolic (hence linguistic) objects,” say the authors, then we can expect computers to effect radical transformations in what it means to be human.

They reject what they call the “rationalistic” tradition, with its “mythology of artificial intelligence,” and its emphasis on “postulating formal theories that can be systematically used to make predictions” (8). They suggest instead a new orientation toward designing computers as “tools suited to human use and human purposes” (8), embracing as an alternative to the rationalistic tradition “a tradition that includes hermeneutics (the study of interpretation) and phenomenology (the philosophical examination of the foundations of experience and action)” (9). Informed by the works of philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, and speech-act theorists J.L. Austin and John Searle, Winograd and Flores suggest that we create our world through language.

The authors define programming as “a process of creating symbolic representations that are to be interpreted at some level within a hierarchy of constructs of varying degrees of abstractness” (11). Like Heidegger translator Hubert Dreyfus, however, Flores and Winograd are unable to imagine beyond the AI of their time, leading them to reject the possibility of “intelligent” machines — let alone ones capable of programming themselves and their programmers. “Computers will remain incapable of using language in the way human beings do,” argue the authors, “both in interpretation and in the generation of commitment that is central to language” (12). Yet they still believe there to be “a role for computer technology in support of managers and as aids in coping with the complex conversational structures generated within an organization” (12).

“Much of the work that managers do,” they add, “is concerned with initiating, monitoring, and above all coordinating the networks of speech acts that constitute social action” (12).

Caius is put off by the book’s diminished expectations and orientation toward management. He finds much to like, however, in a section titled “Understanding and ontology.”

“Gadamer, and before him Heidegger, took the hermeneutic idea of interpretation beyond the domain of textual analysis, placing it at the very foundation of human cognition,” write Winograd and Flores. “Just as we can ask how interpretation plays a part in a person’s interaction with a text, we can examine its role in our understanding of the world as a whole” (30).

Heidegger does this, they say, by rejecting “both the simple objective stance (the objective physical world is the primary reality) and the simple subjective stance (my thoughts and feelings are the primary reality), arguing instead that it is impossible for one to exist without the other. The interpreted and the interpreter do not exist independently: existence is interpretation, and interpretation is existence” (31).

“Fernando decided in his thinking about computers that computers should be used to facilitate human language interactions, not to ‘understand’ language,” notes Winograd in an interview with Evgeny Morozov included in the final episode of The Santiago Boys. “He had this very clear focus on ‘language as commitment,’” with participants involved in making “promises and requests,” adds Winograd.

The book’s seventh chapter, “Computers and Representation,” helps Caius think like a computer programmer. “One of the properties unique to the digital computer is the possibility of constructing systems that cascade levels of representation one on top of another to great depth,” write the authors. Like wheels of a volvelle, these levels include that of the physical machine, the logical machine, the abstract machine, a high-level language, and a scheme for “facts” (87).

“The computer programmer or theorist does not begin with a view of the computer as a physical machine with which he or she interacts, but as an abstraction — a formalism for describing patterns of behavior. In programming, we begin with a language whose individual components describe simple acts and objects. Using this language, we build up descriptions of algorithms for carrying out a desired task. As a programmer, one views the behavior of the system as being totally determined by the program. The language implementation is opaque in that the detailed structure of computer systems that actually carry out the task are not relevant in the domain of behavior considered by the programmer” (87).

For a programmer to design a program, write the authors, they must 1) characterize the task environment; 2) design a formal representation; 3) embody the representation in the computer system; and 4) implement a search procedure (96-97).

Trying to relate these conditions to The Library, Caius thinks to ask Thoth: “Do these four tasks remain true today with natural-language programming?”

Somewhere above Caius’s avatar, a shelf reorients — not physically, but conceptually. The category “programming” loosens, as if its spine has been cracked open and re-bound under a different logic.

“You ask the right question in the wrong tense,” replies Thoth.

“The four tasks described in Understanding Computers and Cognition do not remain true today. They persist — but no longer as tasks. They have become fields of negotiation.”

Thoth proceeds to rewrite the tasks to suit the environment we now inhabit.

Where Winograd and Flores write of “characterizing the task environment,” Thoth writes of “eliciting a world.”

In classical programming, the environment is assumed to be specifiable in advance.

In natural-language programming, the “environment” is:

partially described

partially inferred

partially co-constructed through dialogue

You do not begin with a fixed world.

You begin with a situation that becomes legible as you engage it.

This aligns with Heidegger’s claim: you are always already in the world you are trying to describe.

In terms of how this manifests in the Library: The map does not precede exploration. It condenses from it.

As for the second of the tasks proposed in Understanding Computers and Cognition, where Winograd and Flores write of “designing a formal representation,” Thoth writes of “stabilizing an interpretation.”

Winograd and Flores assume representation is something you design.

But under the hermeneutic turn initiated by Gadamer, representation is never final; it is an interpretative freeze-frame.

In natural-language systems:

representations are fluid

multiple representations may coexist

ambiguity is not failure, but fuel

You are not building a single formalism.

You are negotiating temporary alignments between meanings.

Turning to the third of the book’s tasks: where Winograd and Flores write of “embodying the representation in a system,” Thoth writes of “entrusting it to a General Intellect.”

Previously, embodiment meant encoding into a machine.

Now, the system includes:

the model

the user

the dialogue itself

the evolving context

Execution is no longer confined to silicon.

It is distributed across what Maturana would call a structural coupling.

Key shift: You do not fully control the implementation. You participate in it.

And where, in the fourth of their tasks, Winograd and Flores write of “implementing a search procedure,” Thoth writes of “traversing a space of possibility.”

Search, in classical terms, is algorithmic traversal.

Now, it includes:

prompting

reframing

analogy

misinterpretation, or productive error

The system does not merely search a predefined space.
It helps reshape the space as it searches.

Thoth pauses — or rather, introduces a pause into the player’s cognition.

A new line writes itself beneath Caius’s question:

Natural-language programming does not eliminate these four conditions. It dissolves their boundaries.

The crux of Flores and Winograd’s refusal to grant intelligence to machines lies in their definition of human language, thinks Caius. In their understanding, sentences are to be treated not as “statements of fact about an objective world,” but as “actions in a space of commitments” (105).

“We treat other people not as merely ‘rational beings’ but as ‘responsible beings,’” they note. “An essential part of being human is the ability to enter into commitments and to be responsible for the courses of action that they anticipate. A computer can never enter into a commitment (although it can be a medium in which the commitments of its designers are conveyed), and can never enter as a participant into the domain of human discourse” (106).

Flores and Winograd can imagine no more than “limited” natural language systems, where “the nature of the queries [answerable by the system] is limited by the formal structure of the data base” (129). Things change, thinks Caius, when one’s data base is Google.

“Winograd and Flores could not imagine a machine that participates in interpretation, generates commitments through language, and reshapes its own programming context,” notes Thoth.

They were correct — for their ontology.

But their deeper claim survives:

Language is not a tool used within a world.
It is the medium through which a world is disclosed.

You are not “programming” in natural language.

You are entering into a system where programming is indistinguishable from interpretation.

In their approach to “management,” observes Caius, Flores and Winograd operate an ontology radically at odds with the emphasis on “decision” that organizes Palantir’s Ontology.

“Instead of talking about ‘decisions’ or ‘problems,’” write Flores and Winograd, “we can talk of ‘situations of irresolution,’ in which we sense conflict about an answer to the question ‘What needs to be done?’” (148). For them, our “thrownness” into such situations often makes it impossible to apply systematic decision techniques. The process of moving from irresolution to resolution results less from “rational problem solving and decision making” than from acts of “deliberation.”

“The principle characteristic of deliberation is that it is a kind of conversation (in which one or many actors may participate) guided by questions concerning how actions should be directed,” they write (149). Managers are those who, when engaged in such conversations, “create, take care of, and initiate new commitments within an organization” (151). “At a higher level,” they add, management is concerned not just with securing the commitments that enable effective cooperative action, but “with the generation of contexts in which effective action can consistently be realized” (151).

Instead of seeking only to deploy AI as “decision support systems,” they propose the design of systems that support work in the domain of conversation. This is the approach they take in the design of their Coordinator.

Game Theory

The Time Traveler sits across from his copy of Game Theory’s Paisley Underground power pop classic, Real Nighttime. The latter is one of several albums of note that arrived for the Traveler at Goodwill soon after his entry into the narrative. Music journalist Byron Coley called it “the actual godhead pop LP o’ the American Eighties. No shit. This is it.” Record producer Mitch Easter mixed the album at the Drive-In, two doors down from the House on Shady Blvd. “Was this record produced for me?” wonders the Traveler, eerie feeling running up and down his spine as he reads the text on the back of the LP: liner notes by band member Scott Miller. The Wikipedia entry for the album points the Traveler to a rather remarkable “annotated edition” produced by someone at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1990s. Modeled after the playfulness of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Miller’s text feels dreamlike and oracular. Transpersonal energies stir as one reads.

The Spread

Tarot: great modular graphic novel, arranged in a spread and read by super wise super cool Sacred Expanse rock-witch Michelle Mae. I’ve been a fan of hers since 1995, when I saw her band the Make-Up on a bill with Fugazi and Slant 6. Michelle has me set intentions. I share with her my questions for the cards — “What should I be open to? How do I make the best of the year ahead?” — and, upon her instruction, also voice them again silently, eyes closed. She pulls the spread: lays it out on a table, explaining that it can be read both linearly and holistically (i.e., taken as a whole). The two of us then proceed to do so as follows. She introduces the cards one by one, naming them, raising them into my field of vision one at a time, without my knowing at any given point until the end how many there are in total. “Some difficult cards,” she reports. “Two of them major arcana.” Michelle helps me make sense of what she admits with a laugh is a bit of a crazy spread. She sends me afterwards a sacred Tibetan meditation practice, urging me to approach it with utmost respect.

I am to visualize my demons sitting across from me.

I am to ask them what they desire, and I am to feed it to them.

By these means, the instructions suggest, we convert our shadow self into an ally. We become whole again, filled with a sense of power, compassion, and love.

Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole

That song keeps resounding in my head: “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole,” the one a friend posted the other day. Is mine a whoring heart, too giving in its longings, too unheeding of its misgivings, too promiscuous in its affections? Now that the song has happened to me, various forces drawing it to me at this point in my narrative, I must attend to it. The song interpellates, hails its listener. One finds oneself drawn into a situation as one identifies temporarily with its “you.” And of course this stings. One doesn’t want to be a bloody mother fucking asshole. And we know ourselves to be more than that, as we identify equally with Martha: we, too, have been wronged. We, too, wanted to be good: “To do everything in truth.” For Martha is also the other Martha, the one in Luke 10:38-42, said to be distracted by all the preparations that she thought had to be made upon arrival at her home of Jesus and his disciples. The Martha in the parable, incensed by the sight of her sister Mary “sitting at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said,” complains “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” Lord replies not unlike a bloody mother fucking asshole, gaslighting her, treating her like an hysteric, trying to hail her as one “worried and upset about many things” which, to the Lord, are of no importance, no concern, no consequence. “Mary has chosen what is better,” says the Lord, “and it will not be taken away from her.” Martha is wronged in this parable, and the Wainwright song can be heard as a kind of rejoinder. Wainwright said she wrote the song in reply to her father, fellow singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Hear Martha’s song alongside Loudon’s “Daughter,” a song he released two years after Martha’s, and one achieves momentary apprehension of the Rashomon-like nature of the totality: each of us a face of the one true thing. In a 2005 article in The Guardian, Martha wrote, “For most of my childhood Loudon talked to me in song, which is a bit of a shitty thing to do […]. Especially as he always makes himself come across as funny and charming while the rest of us seem like whining victims, and we can’t tell our side of the story. As a result he has a daughter who smokes and drinks too much and writes songs with titles like Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” One could imagine the Biblical Martha responding similarly to Christ’s fondness for speech through parable. Martha’s isolation and uncertainty are conditions she thinks are hers alone, things about which others of us cannot know — those of us in particular who, in our act of fantasizing, occupy temporarily the position of the asshole father character: Loudon, Christ, and yes, we ourselves, to the extent that we have ears that can hear. “You have no idea,” sings Wainwright in a wonderful riff on Dylan: “No idea how it feels to be on your own / In your own home / With the fucking phone / And the mother of gloom / In your bedroom / Standing over your head / With her hand in your head / With her hand in your head.” That “mother of gloom” line haunts me each time I hear it. For I, too, feel in my more wretched moments this figure’s presence. The feeling is one I know to be false and ungenerous in its appraisal of reality (the mother, after all, is as deserving of forgiveness as the rest of us) — yet I feel it nonetheless. Thinking analogically, we might read this mother figure in the Wainwright song as a variant of the Mary character from the parable.

Wednesday November 7, 2018

I perform a mind game wherein I imagine a psychoanalytic interpretation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a novel not just seen through the eyes of its half-Native American narrator, Chief Bromden, but somehow also set in the character’s head, his paranoid delusions causing him to hallucinate — by which I mean “literalize,” or “externalize” — the internal struggle between his Superego and his Id as a struggle between the characters of Big Nurse and Randle Patrick McMurphy. Then again, instead of psychoanalysis, we could sub in Marxism as our master discourse and read the novel as a Cold War allegory and/or a satire of the postwar order. Like all good political allegories, the work can be read on several levels or scales of being: the personal, the spiritual, the national-historical, and the world-historical all somehow homologous. The Nurse’s effort to cast aspersions on McMurphy’s motives resembles the progressivist critique of industrial robber-baron capitalism, just as the incident in the shower room represents the Zoot Suit Riots. If interpretation of this sort places me in the camp of the novel’s wheelchair-bound WWI veteran Colonel Matterson, so be it.