Let's read: Meltdown by Nick Land

In this post, I rewrite Meltdown into readable text.

Earth is stuck on a trajectory towards a singularity of technology and capitalism. It has been stuck on this trajectory ever since the renaissance, when humans started doing rational thinking, global trade over the ocean, and making commodity products. The global economic and technological sphere is getting more complicated, faster, self-improving, threatening old social order. The markets are getting smarter, and making AI and robots. Meanwhile, human governments are forced to adapt, modernize, and get paranoid, trying to keep up with the complications and figure out what is happening.

Global capitalism destroyed many empires and political systems, sometimes via massive wars. It has killed the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. This political destruction keeps happening, faster and faster, especially in cyberspace.

Biological engineering is a new and serious threat to the human security system. Think about all the terrible and new ways genetic engineering can mess up with what it means to be biologically human!

Neo-China arrives from the future. China will be powerful, technological, capitalistic, and more advanced than all other countries.

Harmut Rosa explains why modern societies keep accelerating

SPEEDCORE for proper mood!

This post started when I felt exhausted after reading Scale, especially after that chapter describing how modern cities are speeding up the bigger they get, rather than slowing down. So I looked around for explanation of why, and found

Of course, I watched it on 2x speed while playing an idle game at the same time. The game is World Idle (2015), and I actually think it's a good way to get a visceral feel for this. In this game, you play as the sole controller of a country's economy, and you are constantly pushed to keep the numbers in the green. But keeping the numbers in the green only means people reproduce and the country keep growing, and you are clicking frantically only to keep in the same place (just above starvation), all the while the economy grows.

This post mostly follows Appropriation, Activation and Acceleration: The Escalatory Logics of Capitalist Modernity and the Crises of Dynamic Stabilization (2017).

Accelerate without humanity: Summary of Nick Land's philosophy

I took note of the philosopher Nick Land from reading about posthumanism on Wikipedia.

A more pessimistic alternative to transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise. This is related to the view of "cosmism", which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity, as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".

I was intrigued by such boldness, so I read more. And turns out Nick Land's writing is sometimes easy to read but most of the times extremely hard to read, and probably garbage. I wrote this post so that you don't have to waste time wading through the garbage, looking for fragments of good poetry.

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.