Writer and producer Conrad Flynn recently appeared on The Tucker Carlson Show to discuss Nick Land.[1]
Nick Land, “the father of accelerationism”,[2] influential in some Silicon Valley circles and among the new right, treats society as a system that cannot be reformed but only rebooted through collapse (“meltdown”).[3] He believes in the role of capitalism and technology in the undoing of democracy, egalitarianism, and humanism.
Land’s early work was basically Lovecraftian cyberpunk, where capitalism is its own “artificial intelligence” bringing about a post-human world. For Land, history is driven by techological (“machinic”), capital, informational and natural forces, rather than human intention. Humans are a transitional substrate for eventual machine intelligence.[4]
Land coined the term “Dark Enlightenment” (NRx), which refers to a neo-reactionary movement that favours libertarian city-states where corporate power is the main organizing force in society.[5] He also coined the term “hyperstition” — referring to ideas or narratives that inevitably lead to their actualization or reality in a self-fulfilling way.[6]
While Land is a techno-materialist, his work is suffused with the occult. He draws on Bataille (post-structuralist philosopher who believed in the inversion of the sacred and the profane),[7] Lovecraft (cosmic horror; universe is vast and uncaring), and Curtis Yarvin (anti-academic; absolutist).[8] There’s cosmic pessimism, an “exit” through a kind of demiurgical intelligence (capitalism and tech), creation through destruction, and chaos magic (hyperstition). His Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was a collective (like a lodge) based in cyberpunk, Gothic horror, numerology (“the Numogram”), and yes, even demonology (money, language and code are run by “machinic or libidinal agencies or memetic infection vectors” that are autonomous currents in the world). The CCRU devolved into rave culture and drug abuse.
Land was influenced by (and further influenced) Curtis Yarvin, who also influenced Vice President J.D. Vance,[9] Peter Thiel (Palantir),[10] Steve Bannon (Breitbart),[11] Michael Anton (Trump’s Director of Policy Planning),[12] and Marc Andreessen (one of the new owners of TikTok).[13]
So Land’s philosophy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. His framework of acceleration, anti-democracy, singularity, creative disruption/destruction, post-humanism, and human limitations as “bugs not features” (á la Harari)[14] is mirrored among tech bros, venture capitalists, and futurists. Land himself is barely prominent, as he is obscure and unorthodox, but his ideas have made their way into the orbit of very important people. In a sense, Silicon Valley has a domesticated and sanitized Landism. But these ideas are evidently anti-human, pessimistic, deterministic, inevitably autocratic, and perhaps driven by darker, unseen forces.
[1] Tucker Carlson, “The Occult, Kabbalah, the Antichrist’s Newest Manifestation, and How to Avoid the Mark of the Beast”, YouTube, https://youtu.be/K_czibJylWs
[2] Alexey Chistyakov, “Philosophy of Accelerationism: A New Way,” RUDN Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2022): 229–238, https://journals.rudn.ru/philosophy/article/view/32115
[3] Land, Nick. “Meltdown.” CCRU Writings. Warwick: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, 1994. http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
[4] Ibid.
[5] Daniel Miller, “Who Is Nick Land?,” Tablet Magazine, October 5, 2025, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/who-is-nick-land
[6] Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011), 554.
[7] “The Thirst for Annihilation, a monograph devoted to the writer Georges Bataille”. See Daniel Miller, “Who Is Nick Land?,” Tablet Magazine, October 5, 2025, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/who-is-nick-land
[8] Ibid.
[9] Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ‘Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” The Guardian, December 21, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump
[10] James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets
[11] Joshua Tait, “Mencius Moldbug and Neoreaction,” in Key Thinkers of the Radical Right: Behind the New Threat to Liberal Democracy, ed. Mark Sedgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 187–203.
[12] Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ‘Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” The Guardian, December 21, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/21/curtis-yarvin-trump
[13] “Curtis Yarvin Interview,” The New York Times Magazine, January 18, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html
[14] Bilal Muhammad, “Yuval Noah Harari, the Gilgamesh Project, and the Science Industry”, Berkeley Institute for Islamic Studies, https://bliis.org/essay/yuval-noah-harari-the-gilgamesh-project-and-the-science-industry/
