Lunchtime For Fascists: Nick Land And The Uses Of Incoherence

Guest essay by Dr. Joshua Leon, reflecting on his lunch with a (seemingly) mild mannered travel writer who went on to become a neoreactionary hero

“Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM.”
-Nick Land, Fanged Noumena

In 2010 I visited Shanghai to write about the World Expo, a mega-event that attracted 73 million visitors. Expo construction required the eviction of 18,000 people to make way for national pavilions that were mostly demolished after the event, an exercise in moving fast and breaking things that repressed Western oligarchs can only envy. When I had lunch with Nick Land, he was one of a handful of enthusiasts boosting the Expo. He is now an influencer who gave the name “Dark Enlightenment” to an authoritarian movement that informs J.D. Vance and Steve Bannon, helps convert young Nazis, and is cited approvingly by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

While I was in Shanghai, Land’s wife, a China scholar, suggested meeting with him to discuss urban planning innovations at the Expo. I knew nothing about him, other than that he ran a guidebook company. This was before he gained currency in rightwing spheres as a self-described “hyper-racist” internet gadfly, trying to make democracy a dirty word.

The nervy, nice-enough man I met in 2010 at a Shanghai cafeteria felt nothing like the menacing online character that has earned him so much notoriety. On that day, he awkwardly helped my wife and I order vegetarian dishes, using his limited mandarin. He said little about his career in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, where his behavior reportedly grew increasingly erratic before he departed for Asia in the late nineties.

Land gave me promo copies of three guidebooks, Shanghai Basics, Shanghai 2009, and Shanghai World Expo Guide 2010. He edited them, explaining to me that he did most of the writing himself. Though dated, they are artifacts of a landmark year in the city’s history, when crowds the size of Boston flooded the Expo grounds each day. Reminiscent of Disney’s Epcot—itself modeled on World’s Fairs—the Expo featured acid-induced architecture on the theme of “better city, better life.” Each pavilion tried outshining its neighbor, led by the wonderfully wild UK pavilion, a sort of postmodern porcupine. United Nations development goals figured prominently in exhibits, which showcased green solutions meant to achieve them.

Scholars have tried to find consistency between Land’s travel writing and his brutalist essays, and there is some. Shanghai is an ideal setting for Land. Its governance structure resembles corporate authoritarianism, evidenced by its statist construction spree. Its modern aesthetics would inevitably appeal to Land, a Bladerunner enthusiast. Land also praised Chinese cities for their ethnic homogeneity, freeing them from “social terror.”

Shanghai World Expo Guide outlines the history of World’s Fairs (the antecedents to Expos), decrying postwar skepticism towards potentially world destroying technologies. Land couched the extravaganza in Shanghai as the testosterone injection that the fairs needed after decades of obscurity, an uncritical embrace of rapidly advancing technological disruptions.

This embrasure of futurism is vaguely consistent with the accelerationist philosophy that he espoused during his days as a liberal baiting, rave spinning rockstar in his circle of faculty at Warwick. If his persona stood out, his ideas were hardly new. Accelerationism has precedents in the bombastic manifestos of Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti and in Alvin Toffler’s schlocky bestsellers like Future Shock. Land’s iteration of this argues—or simply asserts—that humans will merge with AI. This is something that can neither be proven nor disproven—singularity was declared years ago, and Moore’s Law is not a law—but is fun to ponder.

Land inserts a conservative twist. Unregulated capital, which renders the proletariat obsolete, should be embraced as a force behind this brave post-human realm Land hopes will emerge. This is highly speculative, but also reifying. Stop worrying and love market forces and their enabling technologies. His professed disdain for politics (other than his own) stems from a belief that the inclusion of too many voices would delay the coming singularity.

***

As far as his guidebooks go, nothing in them distinguishes him from other commentators who marvel at the city’s rapid growth. The first impression for many visitors is the maglev train that rockets them from the airport. “Shanghai looks like the future!” Paris Hilton told reporters during a fashion event there, which is pretty much the core story Land told his readership.

Beyond a shared techno-optimism, the contrast between Land’s travel writing and his philosophy tracts is jarring, even schizophrenic. Shanghai 2009 devotes a full chapter to the city’s ambitious solar and wind programs, while his earlier essays mock environmentalism. Another chapter details Shanghai’s complex social divisions, cautioning readers against stereotyping the city’s many discreet identity groups, with no mention of “social terror.”

Land’s guidebooks were good, loaded with the infotainment that has gone missing from the thinned out recent Lonely Planet editions. Its account of the city’s transformation reaches back to dynastic China. Interesting sidebars profile the lived experiences of locals, from Jewish emigres to small entrepreneurs, setting aside Land’s usual anti-humanism.

Shanghai 2009 is conspicuously coherent for a book by Land, even deploying verifiable statistics. There are sentences like this: “Since the opening of Shanghai’s economy began in earnest, starting in 1992, it has grown at a consistent double-digit rate, averaging almost 12%.”

Compare that with a Clinton-era essay reprinted in his collection, Fanged Noumena, which comments on economics in a ramble that is nominally about Nietzsche. The tangled passage analyzes US markets through—for some reason—the lens of Coke and Pepsi:

Since both companies are run by AI-based stock market climates human idiosyncrasy has been almost eradicated, with the state’s share of gdp falling below 5 percent. All immigration restrictions, subsidies, tariffs and narcotics legislation have been scrapped. A laundered Michael Jackson facsimile is in the White House. Per capita economic growth averages an annualized 17 percent over the last half decade, still on an upward curve.

Since his brand of accelerationism is predicated on intensifying financial flows, this would be the time to point out what is actually happening. Instead, this passage tries to be a thinking man’s weave, drowning in false statistics, and hiding vacuous nonclaims behind a salvo of undeveloped tangents. It’s a coolish sounding version of the hollow writing academia abets.

In Land’s oeuvre, it’s the writing from his guidebooks that stand out as passable commentary, raising the question of why he briefly cast himself as the straight man in his own weird play. One former student accused Land of running PR for the Chinese authorities, which is arguable. Publishing by foreigners is tightly regulated. The government was highly protective of the Expo brand, and wanted it to have a global image. From their perspective, Land’s partisan English-language guidebooks could be useful promotional materials.

Even so, it’s too bad Land left the tourism industry. Guidebooks are inevitably promotional, and Land sold the city in edifying ways. A bibliography in Shanghai 2009 points readers towards serious books about Shanghai, a tacit acknowledgement that there is more to be learned. His contributors came from spheres of academia and the arts that his movement wants to destroy, including a curator whose gallery was later shuttered for criticizing the Expo. You could even accuse them of being members of “the Cathedral,” the metaphor Land borrowed to describe institutions he doesn’t like, whose corrupt adherents are invariably motivated by bribery. (It’s hard to repeat the far right’s paranoid jargon with a straight face).

Besides, his books were useful. Hungry for local flare? Nick has you covered with restaurant options. Need coffee? He has a list of cute cafes. Weary after the day’s travel? “For a unique experience, try a blind massage,” suggests Shanghai Basics. That book’s overview of the landmark deco buildings on the Bund is great for architecture enthusiasts. And so on.

During the short period when I met him, Land did the most honest research of his career, even as his id was waiting to explode. In an ever-changing metropolis, readers could have used updates on the coolest new art galleries and attractive neighborhoods. Instead, what he produced in 2012 was Dark Enlightenment, a manifesto defending corporate monarchy and eugenics.

At this stage I confess to being conflicted about moving forward. Ignoring his message before it becomes metastatic is an option, as it could have been with La Naranja Mala. Writing about him at all risks sanewashing. His detractors offer more concise explanations of his political rambles than he does, lending it coherence. He is plainly an online attention seeker, foreshadowing essays with slithery sentences like “I generally seeks to spread dismay whenever the opportunity arises.” This is a tell, a signal that a bad faith argument is coming.

That said, Land’s quest to own the libs won him influence on the right, at least indirectly among prominent Republicans like Bannon. As Roger Burrows pointed out in an important 2018 essay, he has undeniable stature in the neoreactionary movement, ridiculously labeled NRx. He even retains respectability among academics who avoid engaging with his racist ideas. He would have none of this without the imprimatur that a university position—the Cathedral—gave him.

Let’s start with Fanged Noumena, published in 201l. It is now in its twelfth printing and has a following among philosophy enthusiasts of all stripes. This collection of essays from the 1980s to the 2000s generally speak to accelerationist themes. To critique it requires a search for patterns amidst word associations and technobabble that are made up or ripped from novels. Technofrozen! Qwernomena! Monocult gerontocrats! Hypervirus! Ethnovirus! Inorganic Thanatos! And on and on and on. Land does not write, so much as shout jargon in hopes that few will notice what little he was saying. There are pages of filler consisting of wingdings and drawings. What, then, is acceleration’s endgame? Maybe this:

Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-NOVA, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.

Or this:

Retinas slitted at night, viper-nests, slitherings, her
mother too…
Then fragments.
Amazon blood pollution.
Whilst we still have live young.
Scared to rape his own daughter for fear of the virus.
Tomorrow she dies.
Everything caving in…

Or this:

Beneath thermonuclear exchange-value lurks pacific war; displacing intercontinental nuke spasm with catatonal k-space traversed by artificial tensions from beyond the nirvana principle.

Or this:

65 million BC. The K/T-missile Pregnant with the Entity, slants in. 16 clicks per second.

Or maybe this:

I’m sorry, man, but I’ve got magic. I’ve got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time—and this includes naps—I’m an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground.

Perhaps this will get us further:

We work for the pope. We murder people. We’re Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they’re not ready for is guys like you and me and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom.

Okay, those last two quotes were Charlie Sheen, but does it make any difference? Land has no idea what acceleration looks like, and scattershot writing serves to evade explanation.

A built-in feature of Fanged Noumena is its repeated rejection of logos, a simple point he repeats in characteristically wordy ways. This reflects a standard bone of contention between continentalist philosophers and utilitarians, who emphasize reasoned objectivity over other forms of argumentation. Utilitarianism can be delimiting, but Land has no special take on those limitations. He resorts instead to dropping bangers about that “ideal despotic voice (Logos).” In effect, Land has inserted a slippery ground rule for his philosophical writing. Since any rational critique is an act of despotism, its author can’t be challenged.

Fanged Noumena unintentionally exposes problems with academic writing. There are made up words when existing ones will do. There are rafts of meaningless sentences that beg to be analyzed. Readers assume that any confident word-thicket signifies a brooding genius at work. Our minds redact the mean-spirited absurdities, finding patterns in whatever rings true.

***

Despite Land’s hatred for the Cathedral, the Cathedral dutifully filters out his hate speech. Academics amply cite him seriously. A continental philosophy school offers a seminar on his work, or parts of it. Its published reading list omits his defenses of white supremacy. Writing for a left press, philosopher McKenzie Wark wrote admiringly about Land’s escape from his institutional confines (although his department notably offered ample intellectual latitude).

Citing one of Land’s denunciations of universities as reproducers of privilege, Wark makes him sound almost woke. That leaves out the part of that passage where he fantasizes about colleges as “cyberian military targets,” whatever that means. It’s an all-too-common approach to this scholar-turned-ghoul that no one in polite academia knows what to do with. Wark’s piece quickly glossed over Land’s “writings in recent years as a prophet of neo-reaction.” Why?

I’m not going to say much about those texts, although they do pose questions for reading the early work. I’m not inclined to read Land, or anyone, through a teleology in which the later positions were always present in embryo.

Trouble is, essays like “Hyper-racism” and Dark Enlightenment flow logically from his earlier writings. They are not digressions. As applications of accelerationist ideas, they are closer to Fanged Noumena than his Expo writing, which Wark’s piece chose to discuss anyway. So somehow a guidebook about a theme park is relevant but calls to end democracy aren’t?

Fanged Noumena shows some of his evolution, and then slams on the breaks at 2007. The editors introducing the latest edition, published in 2024, depict an iconoclast challenging the sensibilities of conservative philosophy and leftism alike. They then leapfrog to his Expo writing without mentioning Dark Enlightenment, which had been published for more than a decade.

“Hyper-racism,” written in 2014, is a glaring omission from Fanged Noumena, as it reveals what we’re accelerating toward: outer space. He predicts that only genetically superior elites with higher “SES” (Socio-Economic Status) are fit enough make it there. He points out that “ordinary racists” are right to identify racial subspecies. What they don’t understand, for all their fears of racial mixing, is that breeding still reflects SES, leaving an “inferior pole” with genetic “refuse” at the bottom. The human refuse gets left behind. “The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different—and becoming ever more different—it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status,” Land concludes.

Of course there are no qualifiers needed. Hyper-racism is just racism, rooted in junk science that was debunked a century ago. Anti-politics in Dark Enlightenment is another word for politics Land likes. And, oh boy, does Land love Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin/Moldbug is the bro-hero who favors replacing the US government with a monarchy.

Land credits Yarvin for realizing that democratic systems would never let libertarianism dominate, prompting his conversion to NRx, which portends throwing out electoral politics altogether. A full-scale enlightenment emerged when billionaires led by Peter Thiel, shockingly, spoke out against democracy for all the constraints it imposes on their own power. “For the neo-reactionaries, democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself,” Land wrote.

Gov-Corp is its replacement, with CEO as king, which would magically “concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country. No voice, free exit.” The latter fragment is a far-right mantra. “Voice” is NRx-speak for inclusive politics. Citizens would be customers. If they feel dissatisfied, they could exit the authoritarian polity, perhaps in a rocket. Not coincidentally, Dark Enlightenment tediously defends the white flight that caused urban decay in U.S. cities. Flight, after all, is the only unalienable right, according to NRx.

Inasmuch as he makes a case for this, Land is back to being unable to look up basic statistics. He makes an unsourced claim that authoritarian capitalism guarantees 5 to 10 percent growth. In contrast, his hated democratic socialism saddles us with little to no growth.

For the most part, Dark Enlightenment is an exercise in how to say terrible things while evading responsibility for them, the kind of vacuous argumentation that’s popular on the right. I’m just asking the questions! The result is longwinded meta-discussion that goes nowhere. Channeling Yarvin/Moldbug, Land avoids a full-frontal defense of Hitler by defending the right to defend Hitler, then retreating into muddied prose. Liberals have censored any attempt at balance, declaring Hitler an anti-Christ, laments Land. A defense of free speech, of course.

“To question the status of racism as the supreme and defining social sin, on the other hand, is to court universal condemnation from social elites,” Land complains.

I’m not so sure. If we had lunch again, I’d ask Land if he still feels like he’s losing now that Fascism has entered the Cathedral, or if he spies an opportunity. His higher profile compatriot Yarvin is a Harvard invitee and is on Thiel’s payroll. Thiel in turn hobnobs with the president. Pundits on all sides would love to see glamor shots of themselves in the New York Times, or get the chance to cut a rug at Trump’s Coronation Ball. Could Land, the man who named the movement, be next up? Turns out there is money to be made for telling the world’s most insidious billionaires exactly what they want to hear.

Joshua K. Leon is chair of Political Science at Iona University. His latest book is World Cities in History: Urban Networks from Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire (Cambridge University Press).