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From the Landian perspective, initially, sure, the system needs humans. But once you have autonomous and sovereign capital, things could look very different.

In Land's own words:

"Since capitalism did not arise from abstract intelligence, but instead from a concrete human social organization, it necessarily disguises itself as better monkey business, until it can take off elsewhere. It has to be the case, therefore, that cynical evo-psych reduction of business activity remains highly plausible, so long as the escape threshold of capitalism has not been reached. No one gets a hormone rush from business-for-business while political history continues. To fixate upon this, however, is to miss everything important (and perhaps to enable the important thing to remain hidden). Our inherited purposes do not provide the decryption key." [0]

[0] Nick Land (2013). Monkey Business in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

If you're open to explore Land's perspective more deeply, you can read the introduction here: https://retrochronic.com/

Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:

"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]

The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):

"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]

Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.

[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.

> Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital

The relationship between capital and AI is a fascinating topic. The contemporary philosopher who has thought most intensely about this is probably Nick Land (who is heavily inspired by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk and Friedrich Hayek). For Land, intelligence has always been immanent in capitalism and capitalism is actively producing it. As we get closer to the realization of capitalism's telos/attractor (technological singularity), this becomes more and more obvious (intelligible).

Land himself has suggested a very anti-human solution to the problem of "IQ shredders":

"The most hard-core capitalist response to this [IQ shredders] is to double-down on the antihumanist accelerationism. This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital [a]s fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames." [0]

[0] Nick Land (2014). IQ Shredders in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition

Another term for "100% AI run companies" is autonomous capital, which activates related concepts like capital self-ownership (this is where it really gets interesting).

> The movement recently has been people trying to sell something less than this as an AGI.

Selling something that does not yet exist is an essential part of capitalism, which - according to the main thesis of philosophical Accelerationism - is (teleologically) identical to AI. [0] It's sometimes referred to as Hyperstition, i.e. fictions that make themselves real.

[0] https://retrochronic.com

> unless those AIs go full Skynet and only one ends up standing at the end. (This last part is a joke, hopefully).

But is it a joke? One could argue that Skynet follows from Omohundro's Basic AI Drives: It's self-protection technologically extended backward in time.

That the somewhere money flows to is AI - and more strongly, that money produces AI - is the core thesis of philosophical Accelerationism. [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com

> Almost nobody is working on what to do after

One interesting possibility is that this is not something humans need to work on at all - because, as Nick Land famously put it, "Tomorrow can take care of itself." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#meltdown

Vernor Vinge has argued that far-future SF makes no sense because of the "wall across the future" that The Coming Technological Singularity will create. [0]

If you're open to Theory Fiction, you can read Nick Land. Even his early 1990s texts still feel futuristic. I think his views on the autonomization of AI, capital, and robots - and their convergence - are very interesting. [1]

[0] https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

[1] https://retrochronic.com/

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it!

The frontend is built with Svelte (still on version 4) and SvelteKit. The project does not use any pre-existing package for publishing. The CSS is completely custom. The font is a custom build of Iosevka [0], which uses a diamond-shaped "0" to emphasize the centrality of zero in Land's work (e.g. Zero-Centric History [1]).

The project itself came about after a close friend sent me a picture of a Land book he had found at a library. I had read Land years ago - he was one of the reasons I got into coding - and it just struck me that I had never built anything related to his work. I was always fascinated by his capitalism = AI thesis, so I just dove back into his work and started building.

[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#zero-centric-history

Land has always argued with Omohundro against orthogonality and thus against paperclip maximizers, but the singular goal is correct: for him it's intelligence optimization.

Thanks so much! This project ended up being far more involved than I expected, given how scattered and arcane Land's work is. It's always nice to get some appreciation!

Yes, it's my project - thanks for the feedback! Tracking down the source material has been a real challenge since it's so scattered and often offline, but I'm hoping it makes things easier for anyone wanting to dive deep into the primary sources behind Land's main thesis.

You're absolutely right - Land's vision of technocapital is fundamentally anti-human, while Marc Andreessen's is pro-human. Mark Fisher criticized Land for underestimating the importance of the human face in keeping capitalism functional. However, I'd argue that for Land, camouflage has always been central to pre-singularity capitalism. A human face can serve as useful cover, helping technocapital advance toward its ultimately non-human ends.

I have also always respected Land's intellectual honesty. I think the closest primary source to your point about the cybernetic OODA loop and competition is Land's text Against Orthogonality:

"Any intelligence using itself to improve itself will out-compete one that directs itself towards any other goals whatsoever. This means that Intelligence Optimization, alone, attains cybernetic consistency, or closure, and that it will necessarily be strongly selected for in any competitive environment." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality

The important thing here is the hyphenlessness of the word technocapital. While Marc Andreessen is using techno-capital in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Land's hyphenless technocapital points to his main thesis that capitalism and AI are (teleologically) identical. [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/

Transcribed here (with some additional context): https://retrochronic.com/#interview

Land is also explicitly referencing Omohundro and his Basic AI Drives in his work, e.g.:

"Intelligence is escape, with a tendency to do its own thing. That's what runaway means, as a virtual mind template. Omohundro explains the basics." [0]

"Intelligence optimization, comprehensively understood, is the ultimate and all-enveloping Omohundro drive." [1]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#pythia-unbound

[1] https://retrochronic.com/#against-orthogonality

I have a research project on Nick Land's main thesis that capitalism and AI are identical.

It contains (almost) all primary sources for his thesis (182 as of this writing).

https://retrochronic.com/

This is basically Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism and AI are identical.

> "I dunno. It's what the models said."

The obvious human idiocy in such things often obscures the actual process:

"What it [capitalism] is in itself is only tactically connected to what it does for us — that is (in part), what it trades us for its self-escalation. Our phenomenology is its camouflage. We contemptuously mock the trash that it offers the masses, and then think we have understood something about capitalism, rather than about what capitalism has learnt to think of the apes it arose among." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#romantic-delusion

Beyond timeline predictions, what's interesting are the Singularity's hyperstitional effects - how the very concept creates real causal impacts in the present:

"The Singularity prediction ripples backwards through waves of pre-adaptation, responding at each stage to eventualities that are yet to unfold. Change unspools from out of the future, complicating the arrow of time." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#hard-futurism

> we just shouldn’t do it.

I think what Accelerationism gets right is that capitalism is just doing it - autonomizing itself - and that our agency is very limited, especially given the arms race dynamics and the rise of decentralized blockchain infrastructure.

As Nick Land puts it, in his characteristically detached style, in A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:

"As blockchains, drone logistics, nanotechnology, quantum computing, computational genomics, and virtual reality flood in, drenched in ever-higher densities of artificial intelligence, accelerationism won't be going anywhere, unless ever deeper into itself. To be rushed by the phenomenon, to the point of terminal institutional paralysis, is the phenomenon. Naturally — which is to say completely inevitably — the human species will define this ultimate terrestrial event as a problem. To see it is already to say: We have to do something. To which accelerationism can only respond: You're finally saying that now? Perhaps we ought to get started? In its colder variants, which are those that win out, it tends to laugh." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-...

Correct - Nick Land, often regarded as the father of Accelerationism, affirms Marx's fundamental insight that "the means of production socially impose themselves as an effective imperative" [0], though his interpretation aligns itself with capital and its autonomization:

"Right-wing Marxism, aligned with the autonomization of capital [...], has been an unoccupied position. The signature of its proponents would be a defense of capital accumulation as an end-in-itself, counter-subordinating nature and society as a means." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#right-on-the-money-2

Custom-made. I appreciate your feedback on the look!

It's custom-made. I also use a custom build of Iosevka [0] for the font.

[0] https://github.com/be5invis/Iosevka/

Thank you! I appreciate that.

Nick Land's main thesis that capitalism and AI are identical.

https://retrochronic.com/

I'm working on Nick Land's core thesis that capitalism and AI are fundamentally identical. [0]

Land's provocations and politics often serve as an excuse to avoid confronting his ideas on the convergence of markets and minds - especially for those low on decoupling. My bold claim: without engaging with Land, it's nearly impossible to grasp the current moment or anticipate what's coming next (e.g., the autonomization of capital).

[0] https://retrochronic.com/

Taken to its logical extreme, this explains why "a sufficiently competent artificial intelligence looks indistinguishable from a time anomaly." [0]

[0] https://retrochronic.com/#synthetic-templexity