Xenosystems
by nick land
passage, 338 pages, $39.95
I read Nick Land’s Xenosystems on a sunny afternoon in California as Los Angeles burned to the ground. Wake up, log onto X.com, scroll through image after image uploaded by friends of houses on fire, brake lights backed up for miles as people evacuated the city, hillsides engulfed in cataclysmic flame. Switch apps to check in with loved ones. “Are you ok? Did you get out?” Turn back to the book and read: “By 2037 the harsh phases of The Upheaval have finally ended. Western Eurasia is ruined and confused, but the fighting has burnt out among the rubble. In the Far East, the Chinese Confucian Republic has largely succeeded in restoring order, and is even enjoying the first wave of renewed prosperity.”
Watching the infernos devour opulent Los Angeles neighborhoods, the future Land envisions felt disturbingly close. We are on the cusp of letting “the outside” in. Maurice Blanchot first employed that ominous phrase over half a century ago to name those forces beyond our comprehension and control that threaten to destabilize human existence. But the idea of “letting it in,” of welcoming this alien influence, is Land’s. It is the key to understanding his accelerationist philosophy. Maybe, we can imagine Land suggesting, the real problem with the Los Angeles fires is that they weren’t big enough.
Xenosystems consists of blog posts written mostly from 2013 to 2016 in which Land analyzes world events, economics, politics, race, religion, and the trajectory of mankind. The posts have been arranged according to theme by Passage Press, and the resulting book is an accessible and comprehensive introduction to accelerationism and “neoreaction” (NRx). Xenosystems offers a timely and chilling rebuttal to the mainstream liberal account of the processes and technologies reshaping society.
Land contends that capitalism is not merely an economic model: It is an autonomous, inhuman force that acts according to its own internal logic. It is the portal through which the outside will be let in. Technological progress and market-driven systems operate at such velocity as to render political control largely illusory. The world, under this account, is shaped not by human intention but by the impersonal calculus of rapidly advancing machinery and financial flows. Land refers to these forces as “xeno,” emphasizing their alien nature in relation to traditional human moral and political categories.
Take, for example, the issue of declining birthrates. Left-liberal outlets like CNN will insist that our best hope is to raise GDP and taxes to subsidize childcare. Right-liberal outlets like Fox, meanwhile, will agree with the premise that if women’s lives are made easier, they will choose to have more children; they’re just more likely to champion direct subsidies for families. But Land is interested in an aspect that’s invisible to mainstream liberals: Capitalism turns major cities into “IQ Shredders.” Major American cities attract the smartest and most ambitious young people and then incentivize them to prioritize the rat race over starting families. Fertility thus declines the most among those with the highest IQs; given the high heritability of intelligence, this amounts to “genetic incineration.” Permissive immigration policies—by which America and other developed economies “[skim] the human genetic stock” of other countries—ensure the destruction is global.
The solution Land entertains illustrates the dark utility of “letting the outside in.” He writes, “This genetic burn-rate is obviously unsustainable, so we need to convert the human species into auto-intelligenic robotized capital as fast as possible, before the whole process goes down in flames.” In other words, technologies like AI that replace human cognitive labor and technologies that amplify native intelligence will nullify the incentives fueling the IQ Shredder feedback loop. The trouble, as Land acknowledges, is that the solution is antihuman.
Although Land rejects the liberal framing of the left-right divide, he nevertheless finds the dichotomy useful. According to Land, what holds the right together despite its factionalism is “hostility to coercive egalitarianism and a sense that Western civilization is going to hell.” The infernos of Los Angeles are indeed a “hell” unleashed by progressive mismanagement. But Land doubts that much good can be achieved by conservative electoral victories, because our democratic political system itself is rotten—a pessimism shared by his interlocutor Curtis Yarvin.
Our system is unsalvageable because it is structured as a “degenerative ratchet.” In theory, democratic governance is meant to respond to the will of the people—it improves itself through feedback (voting, media coverage) on its outputs (laws, management). In practice, however, once a government learns how to shape public opinion, the system begins optimizing for control of opinion rather than optimizing for effective execution of the people’s will. Each new cycle of feedback and output constitutes a “click” of the degenerative ratchet that can’t be undone: Every attempted “democratic” solution to this problem simply produces another click, and the system is drawn deeper into the dangerous arms of the outside. Because of this, Land contends, the right should be less concerned with winning than with surviving.
But survival is complicated by the circular firing squad of conservative politics. According to Land, no matter how bad the left may seem to a given conservative, there is always someone in the conservative camp whom the conservative fears more than the left. The religious traditionalist fears the nationalists (“Racists!”). The nationalist fears the capitalists (“Globalists!”). The capitalist fears the religious conservatives (“Collectivists!”). Conservative disunity contributes to the degenerative ratchet, with the result that, as a popular meme puts it, Cthulhu may swim slowly, but he only swims left.
These same tensions exist between conservatism’s neo-reactionary corollaries: theo-nomists, ethno-nationalists, and techno-commercialists. Land, himself a techno-commercialist, believes these tensions are irresolvable within a democratic system, although a compromise might be achieved on the far side of the accelerationist horizon.
Land is very concerned with the limits of democracy. He regards egalitarianism and majority rule as impediments to the expansion of capitalist-technological systems—impediments soon to be swept away. While Land is in the vanguard of neo-reaction, he’s not looking to return to the past. Rather, he appears convinced that humanity’s future lies in embracing—rather than resisting—the dominance of complex technological systems. Ultimately, he argues, AI will rule over man. As Land writes, “Coldness, be my God.”
From a Christian perspective, Land is both Pollyannaish about humanity and too pessimistic about the current state of affairs, as might be expected of a recovering Marxist. He may now reject the political goals of Marxism, but he remains faithful to its metaphysics: History is at the mercy of inhuman processes like capitalism and technology. But he is wrong to deny the dimension of moral responsibility and human freedom. The human person, made in the image of God, is not merely incidental to accelerating processes. History is neither random nor deterministic, but a realm in which divine sovereignty and human agency coexist, however mysteriously.
Land’s writings compel us to confront the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the complex systems that construct modernity. His fault is assuming that there is no way to mitigate their dominance. The Christian affirms that all earthly powers—even markets and artificial intelligence—remain subject to a higher authority. We can and should engage responsibly with accelerating technologies rather than surrendering our will to them, lest the march of progress become a “degenerate ratchet” of ever greater moral abdication. In that spirit of sober engagement, guided by faith, we can read Xenosystems and profit from Land’s provocations. But these technologies do not mean we must abandon our commitment to truth, the common good, or love itself—which may save us all in the end, even Land.
