AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

However awkward the acknowledgment may be, there is no getting around the fact that philosophy, when apprehended within the Western tradition, is original sin. Between the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, it does not hesitate. Its name is indistinguishable from a lust for the forbidden. While burning philosophers is no longer socially acceptable, our canonical order of cultural prohibition—at its root—can only consider such punishment mandatory. Once philosophers are permitted to live, established civilization is over.

An ideology out of the Nick Land / CCRU universe, which (insofar as I understand it, which isn't much) acknowledges the equation of AI and capitalism, but scoffs at the attempts to somehow hold back the impending changes.

He seems to be something of a conservative and a nostalgist for lost forms of meaningfulness (without being right-wing at all AFAICT). A sharp critique of the present but I'm not sure what he has to offer in its place. He reminds me of Christopher Alexander but Alexander had a program. His opposite would be Nick Land who sees the digital revolution as equally destructive, but also an inevitablity that should be embraced in all of its horror.

Gnon is basically Nick Land 's version of Moloch. Scott refers to this piece On Capturing Gnon and Naive Rationalism and also Capturing Gnon

One of Land's celebrated concepts is "hyperstition," a portmanteau of "superstition" and "hyper" that describes the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Hyperstitions are ideas that, once "downloaded" into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Nick Land describes hyperstition as "the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies".

Nick Land

03 Nov 2021 - 06 Mar 2025

variously described as 'rabid nihilism', 'mad black Deleuzianism', ' Accelerationism ', and 'cybergothic'.

He's later become a neoreactionary which made him seem much less interesting to me

I finally got around to reading The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land | The Dark Enlightenment. Well, skimming. My god, is that boring and mediocre, just basically a review of Moldbug and a tour of even duller wingnuts like John Derbyshire. Hard to believe the guy who wrote that was ever interesting.

The early Land was edgy because he was pushing the envelope of what philosophy even was, and producing some truly visionary insights. The latter Land is edgy because he pals around with neo-reactionaries like Moldbug who sell repackaged racist and fascist ideas as if they were something new and daring.

OK this was pretty damn prescient for 1994! He really did see all this shit coming