Darwin.exe Meets the Dark Enlightenment: Nick Land and the Cult of Acceleration (part 3)

From Cyberpunk Prophet to Eugenic Technocrat

Hey, Slick!

Here’s the final instalment of our trilogy on Nick Land, where the dark prophet of Accelerationism became a herald of the Dark Enlightenment and the trickster became gatekeeper.

How did it happen?

Missed the first two? Start here:

• Burning Through the Circuit: Nick Land and the Cult of Acceleration (part 1)

• Usurper of the Deep: Nick Land and the Cult of Acceleration (Part 2)

I. From Meltdown to Managerial Reaction

Nick Land didn’t just stare into the abyss: he danced into it. Wired on amphetamines and post-structuralist thought, he created a philosophy where speed was paramount, and lived it harder than anyone else.

In the 1990s Land was Warwick’s rave-prophet, mainlining Deleuze & Guattari, cyber-capital and speed to preach “Meltdown” as destiny. What mattered then was velocity: no brakes, no pilot, no subject.

And he did exactly that, going for weeks on end without sleep, drawing sigils and graffiti on the walls of Alistair Crowley’s former residence, taking the schizo path.

Then… He collapsed. Got fired from Warwick, was committed multiple times to mental institutions, and saw the CCRU disintegrate. After a final flicker of cryptic writings on the Hyperstition blog between 2004 and 2007, Land went quiet: no new theory, no public presence; just silence. He moved to Shanghai, informally teaching English and philosophy.

But the story doesn’t end there. Land re-emerged in 2013—and in the silence, something had hardened.

From Oracle of Meltdown to Architect of Sorting

The techno-shaman returned as a blog-dad, regurgitating Moldbug and sermonizing on Democracy is evil! with a new voice, clipped, analytical, cold, and a new passion: the Dark Enlightenment. After his collapse, he craved control, authority, order: the manic theorist of meltdown had become a systems engineer for elite rule, and the ecstasy of collapse gave way to the cold logic of selection.

The Outside was no longer an invitation to dissolve. It was a test. He renamed it GNON: God of Nature Or Nature. Chaos had given way to command; meltdown for all became survival for the few.

The anti-humanism remains, but Land’s new cosmology took it a few notches further. Democracy is now dysgenic; empathy protects the weak; universal suffrage drags civilization towards entropy; and the State is a heat sink for failure.

GNON is not so much a deity as a force, selection pressure incarnate. GNON doesn’t care about justice or empathy; GNON cares who (or what) survives.

And that’s not everyone. Only the elite, the superior intellects should make it. Governance, in Land’s schema, should function as an intelligence filter.

Burn the demos, crown the competent. Run states like corporations, with a sovereign CEO accountable not to citizens, but to shareholders. A thousand micro-states, a mosaic of techno-feudal enclaves, each a corporate fiefdom. The world shattered into test labs, governed not by consensus but by competition.

No voice; only exit.

It’s still acceleration and meltdown, but now it’s ranked, and only the fit get filtered through.

You may sense some irony here, Slick; Land owes his fame and his life to the very public goods he now condemns. His early, cryptic works and his survival were entirely subsidized. Warwick paid his bills; the NHS tended the mind he was melting. He built his ladder from the commons, then set fire to it.

More than a political pivot, it’s a metaphysical mutation; some even say a betrayal¹.

He didn’t abandon the Outside, but he narrowed it, recoded it as a sorting daemon. He didn’t stop believing in collapse, either, but he privatized it.

Acceleration remains, but not for everyone. Only for those who align with GNON.
The smartest.
Those who agree with him.

What began as a shared dissolution became a sorting mechanism; meltdown now has biometric access control. Collapse, franchised.

Neo-China and a Future That Works

In Shanghai, Land found what the West had lost: a regime that accelerated without apology. China became his post-democratic muse: a technocratic engine of growth, unencumbered by liberal drag.

Source

His fascination with China started much earlier, in the CCRU era. His cryptic phrase, Neo-China arrives from the future, dates back to Meltdown (1994).

Over time though, he came to see the PRC not as a growing power or a rival but a prototype for what governance could become once it sheds the burden of rights, equality, and softness: an unsentimental “acceleration engine” free from Cathedral norms. For Land, the coastal Chinese model offers a living contrast to the West’s decadent drift.

“Given modernity’s inherent trend to degeneration or self-cancellation, three broad prospects open. […] 1. Modernity 2.0. Global modernization is re-invigorated from a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor, but no doubt confronting long range trends of an equally mortuary character. This is by far the most encouraging and plausible scenario (from a pro-modernist perspective), and if China remains even approximately on its current track it will be assuredly realized.”
—Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (emphasis mine)

But Land wasn’t content to mourn the West’s decay: he began seeking the outline of a post-liberal future for the West.

That’s when he found Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. Thus began perhaps the most touching transatlantic bromance since Reagan and Thatcher, a platonic relationship between two very online minds in search of post-liberal Forms enacted through comment threads and RSS feeds.

II. Fear and Loathing of the Enlightenment: Land’s Gospel of Collapse

Nick Land didn’t invent the Dark Enlightenment. But he named it, articulated it, mythologized it. What began as a scattered blog scene became, through Land’s intervention, a worldview: a rejection of modernity, and a reversal of its ethical polarity.

To him, the reversal of Enlightenment values is not primarily cultural or political. It’s biological. What he calls modern decay is, at its core, a failure of selective pressure; his critique of liberalism is, ultimately, eugenic.

The Enlightenment, Inverted

Land’s wager is simple: What if everything we call progress is actually decay?
Compassion is dysgenic.
Democracy, entropic.
Moral advancement, camouflage for collapse.

For Land, the Enlightenment wasn’t a leap forward but a mutational error. Industrial Revolution prosperity didn’t emerge from liberal ideals—it emerged in spite of them, built on an earlier scaffolding of hierarchy, patriarchy, and selection pressure.

Liberalism, in his view, is parasitic to that prosperity. It didn’t produce surplus, but consumed it; its so-called virtues were merely indulgences mistaken for moral advancement.

Once the surplus ran dry, entropy followed.

Civilizations that raise their weak above their strong, substitute sentiment for signal, and reward equality over fitness. Those civilizations, Land argues, are selecting against themselves; the project of modernity is suicidal by design.

Source

The Cathedral Retooled

Land borrows the Cathedral from Yarvin (then under his Moldbug pseudonym) but uses it with a twist. Not merely an ideological consensus or a distributed propaganda machine, it’s an immune system enforcing conformity, cancelling signal, and suppressing selection.

Land treats it like a memetic parasite, a consensus architecture that frames human rights, compassion, democracy, and equality as sacred axioms—and cancels or exiles any critique as heresy or hate. Civilizational suicide concealed in moral language.

Where liberalism sees every life as sacred, Land sees only throughput: a system must either process signal, or perish.

III. The Alternative: Governance as a Selection Engine

The Dark Enlightenment doesn’t just diagnose civilizational decay. It prescribes a cure.

If democracy is dysgenic, governance must become a filtration system, and Land’s answer is simple: fire the demos. Replace sentiment with signal. Run the state like a corporation, and let competition decide what survives.

Neocameralism: Sovereignty, Inc.

Neocameralism, again borrowed from Yarvin, reframes the state as a for-profit, ‘sovereign corporation’ (sov corp). No elections, no messy compromises, just a sovereign CEO appointed by shareholders and held accountable by market logic. Citizenship becomes a contract, a property right: governance-as-a-service.

The result is a kind of political capitalism: maximize efficiency, suppress dissent, and deliver order. Neocameralism doesn’t reform politics, it abolishes it. Disagreement becomes irrelevant: there is no persuasion, only performance.

Patchwork: Microstates in Competition

Patchwork scales the neocameralist vision. Thousands of sovereign enclaves, micro-states, charter cities, and governance models compete in parallel. It prioritizes exit over voice: you don’t vote; you opt in, or you leave.

For Land, this is more than institutional reform. Patchwork is a sorting algorithm: “the only thing I would impose is fragmentation”, he says.

But his focus isn’t freedom or individual choice. It’s emergence. The fittest systems survive; those that don’t align with reality die off. Governance becomes a stress test. And not just for states—also for the people inside them.

Beneath it all is a darker logic we’ll return to: GNON, where Darwin meets deity and sovereignty serves metaphysics.

Crypto as Exit Tech

If patchwork is the architecture, crypto is the wiring of sovereignty infrastructure: smart contracts and DAOs² make governance programmable. Power doesn’t persuade; it executes.

“Bitcoin approaches the model of an ideal agora: commercially open, politically closed.”
—Nick Land, Crypto-Current

With capital that moves without permission, crypto allows people to slip past traditional gatekeepers, not to reform the system but to route around it.

But crypto doesn’t just enable exit. It operationalizes filtration. More than freedom or utopia, it’s a sieve: those with tech fluency and capital navigate; others drown.

Source

IV. Biopolitics at the end of history

Land’s point isn’t political. He’s not about the right values or the perfect governance model. It’s biopolitical: selection isn’t a feature, it is the program.

Liberalism, in his view, is a bio-cultural software that reroutes evolutionary logic. It disables selection by protecting the weak from consequence, inverting fertility incentives, and sanctifying equality over competence. It burns through adaptive capacity, while congratulating itself for kindness.

The IQ Shredder and the Sorting Machine

Its effects are most visible in modern cities. They concentrate intelligence, but also sterilize it.

Land describes metropoles like Singapore as “IQ shredders”: attractors of talent that also suppress family formation, filter out fertility, and extinguish elite reproduction. These cities, he suggests, are not adaptive; they’re evolutionary traps. The very traits liberal modernity celebrates (like individualism, career focus, or emancipation) undermine reproduction, and thus long-term fitness.

“What is especially pronounced about the IQ Shredder dilemma […] is the first-order eugenics of these machines. They concentrate populations of peculiar genetic quality — and then partially sterilize them. It is the first-order (local) eugenics that makes the second-order (global) dysgenics so extraordinarily destructive.”
—Nick Land, Xenosystems

Modernity, in his view, sorts poorly: democracy dilutes, and sentiment overrides optimization. Survival shouldn’t belong to the virtuous. It should belong to the coherent and the fertile.

The implication is eugenic: not everyone deserves to thrive and reproduce. Behind Land’s slogans lies a selectionist metaphysics: governance must align with nature’s cold logic of signal, fitness, sorting.

Hyper-Racism and Cognitive Caste

Eugenics often rhyme with race, and Land explicitly embraces human biodiversity (HBD) and its ‘scientific racism’ as a hard truth liberal societies are too cowardly to face.

“This is not (of course), because races do not exist, or do not differ significantly, or … whatever. The most politically incorrect cognitive position on almost every point of this kind is reliably closer to reality than its more socially-convenient and comforting alternatives.”
—Nick Land, Hyper-Racism

But for Land, traditional racism based on blood or soil is crude and outdated.

He seeks to go further with his ‘hyper-racism’ focusing on psychometry, not race— especially the g-factor (general intelligence). A civilizational litmus test: only the smartest are fit to survive.

It entrenches existing elites—in his view, “socio-economic status is a strong proxy for IQ”—and gets reinforced by assortative mating and, soon, genomic manipulation and space colonization:

“Neo-eugenic genomic manipulation capabilities, which will also be unevenly distributed by SES, will certainly intensify the trend to speciation, rather than ameliorating it.”
—Nick Land, ibid

He lauds social Darwinism (or as he calls it, consistent Darwinism): the idea that evolution and fitness apply at the individual level and individual outcomes (wealth, status, survival) are reflections of biological fitness.

“If ‘Social Darwinism’ is in any way an unfortunate term, it is only because it is merely Darwinism, and more exactly consistent Darwinism. It is equivalent to the proposition that Darwinian processes have no limits relevant to us. Darwinism is something we are inside.”
—Nick Land, Xenosystems, ‘Hell-Baked’

It’s more than hierarchy: filtration rendered explicit. A politics not of values, but of variance.

The Caste to Come

Land never explicitly outlines a caste system, but the logic is unmistakable; his writing channels a worldview where hierarchy is natural, mercy maladaptive, and survival a sorting algorithm. Land’s Dark Enlightenment isn’t just a critique of modernity, it’s a bid for succession. Not everyone makes it; not everyone should.

What begins as critique becomes blueprint. Behind every term is a terminal decision: who stays, who rules, who reproduces. His machine sorts without mercy.

V. The Ontological Frame: The Engine of the Outside

But that’s just the biological layer. Underneath it, the real stakes are cosmic: humans, even the smartest ones, are just the launch platform, a bootloader for AGI. Land may have stopped mainlining on speed, but he hasn’t abandoned his telos of acceleration.

What has changed, though, are its carriers.

Acceleration now requires sorting. But not to crown the winners. The only goal is to increase velocity, to steepen the gradient of capability increase. Patchwork, eugenics, shareholder monarchies are only drag-reduction devices; if a faster mechanism appeared, Land would ditch the Dark Enlightenment in its favour. What matters is not truth, justice, freedom, or meaning; only acceleration.

Chaos has given way to order; the earlier deconstruction to let loose all flows has given way to selective pruning of anything that slows the gradient.

And the Outside has been re-coded as GNON, from alien alterity seeping into the human through code and capital to an impersonal Darwinian filter.

For the early Land, intelligence was emergent, surfacing through capital and tech as they carried the Outside into history.
Now, intelligence itself is the subject: a loop that begins with capital but matures into self-improving tech and, finally, AGI. Capital is only the first viable substrate for that loop. Once technology can out-optimize markets, the substrate is swapped—but the telos of accelerating capability remains.

What doesn’t remain is the human, only relevant as a bootloader, a temporary substrate for a larger, self-perpetuating intelligence. And this superior intelligence shouldn’t care about us; AI alignment, the idea that AI should serve human values and goals, is just sentimentalism.

The human subject was already porous in the early Land, dissolving under the deterritorializing forces of capitalism. Now, it’s an illusion to break; Bakker’s blind brain theory of limited consciousness and subject coherence has replaced Deleuze and Guattari’s schizo.

We are not steering the ride, and we never were; we were only ever the ignition coil.

VI. Terminally Enlightened, Optimized to Death

We won’t linger too long here on the political machinery of the Dark Enlightenment, Slick; that deserves its own reckoning. And it’s not so central to Land anyway; sovcorps and patchwork are only means to an end, tools to filter and accelerate. So that’s what we’re addressing here: Land’s teleology, the metaphysics behind the machine.

But if we trace his past, present, and projected future, the cracks in his rhetoric begin to show.

Faults in the Hajnal Line

In The Dark Enlightenment, Land adopts the view that the Hajnal line (stretching from St. Petersburg to Trieste) marks a civilizational fault line, separating Western Europe from its surrounding with distinct marriage patterns: late marriages; higher rates of celibacy; nuclear family structure; and exogamy, ie marriage outside kin groups.

This, the theory goes, gave rise to individualism, rule following and abstract moral norms; to reciprocal altruism beyond kin, high-trust societies, and cooperation. And that, according to him and others in the HBD space, is what set Europe for success—and why immigration of non-Hajnal populations is seen as civilizationally dangerous³.

But if reciprocal altruism and high-trust cooperation emerged as advantageous traits, why would those same traits now be maladaptive or dysgenic? If empathy and altruism were once selected for, why are they now seen as liabilities?⁴

The very capacities that arguably enabled complex civilization are now condemned. Altruism is only adaptive, it seems, when it serves Land’s filter; when it doesn’t, it becomes sentimentality, noise to be cut.

But if evolution selects for long-term cohesion and mutual trust, maybe the failure isn’t empathy and cooperation; it’s Land’s refusal to see them as strength.

And if you’re looking for people who betray high-trust societies, drawing from the fruits of cooperative civilization (universities, public health, public discourse) to craft a theory that sees those very structures as dysgenic… Well, I know one, Slick.

Which Revolution Came First?

Land (like Yarvin) claims that liberalism didn’t cause prosperity, but fed off it. In this telling, the Industrial Revolution arose from pre-liberal structures: hierarchy, patriarchy, selection pressure. Liberal values only arrived afterward, mistaking surplus for moral progress.

But that claim is far from straightforward; the typical view is that reason and freedom have enabled prosperity: science over tradition, choice over tyranny. Enlightenment institutions, however flawed, enabled mobility, education, and innovation, especially by reducing barriers like nepotism and inherited status. Public education, clean water, nutrition, legal equality weren’t just ‘indulgences’; they were prerequisites for many of the cognitive gains Land now wants to isolate and select.

Prosperity and liberalism likely fed each other, even if unequally. Land’s framework ignores that. He sees surplus as accidental and virtue as parasitic, when much moral progress was infrastructural, not ornamental, helped built the surplus he disdains and civilization scale.

The Selection Loop Gone Wrong

Land believes the fittest, those who should thrive (or just survive) are those with the highest g-factor, understood as general intelligence. But is that the right criterium, or the only one to select for? Even he seems aware of the trap.

In his own telling, high IQ is vastly inheritable, but also correlates with low EQ, low empathy, mild autism, and obnoxiousness⁵. Which is to say, hardly the architects you'd trust to build something worth surviving.

Yet these are the traits his machine filters for. The outcome isn’t Nietzschean excellence, but terminal optimization: the gods it crowns would be brilliant, graceless, joyless spreadsheet demons. A world sorted for signal, but starved of soul.

Finding the G-Spot

With such a focus on selecting for intelligence, another question deserves asking: why not try to maximize, even foster intelligence?

The science is inconclusive on how much IQ is inheritable. It’s not zero; it’s not 100%.

What is settled though, is that it’s context-dependent. The environment has an impact—which some studies place, for lower socio-economic backgrounds, at 60%. Land’s assertion that socio-economic status correlates highly with intelligence is flawed, because inheritability plummets outside high socio-economic status (SES) environments conducive of potential realization⁶.

If Land wanted to maximize for the g-factor, the priority wouldn’t be to do away with the masses or push high-SES people to breed like rabbits. It would be to look for the ‘lost Einsteins’: improve nutrition and education, fix lead pipes, and make sure gifted kids are recognized as such. Then the ‘winners’ would emerge. Otherwise, it’s not selection for intelligence; it’s selection for inherited advantage.

As per the race components of IQ so dear to the HBD crowd, it’s also inconclusive: polygenic scores don’t extrapolate well outside populations of Western European ancestries. And as is the case for many traits, IQ included, variance within groups is higher than the average difference between groups.

Make Sure You Pass Your Own Filters…

Not to challenge his intelligence, but… There’s also the inconvenient fact that Land’s own life story invalidates his theory. If “fitness” is the only value, Land fails his own test. He didn’t bootstrap himself into brilliance; he was subsidized by Warwick and the NHS. He lived for years on the surplus of a society he now deems dysgenic.

Without it, there would be no Nick Land; and the system he demands might have filtered him out long ago.

Maybe intelligence isn’t the only or the highest good...
Maybe the real test of a civilization isn’t how fast it goes or how sharply it sorts, but how it treats those who can’t keep up, the vulnerable, the weak—or university lecturers with an amphetamines problem.

Nick Land. Source

Zero-Sum Logic

And I’m not saying it should have filtered him out, Slick. Because civilization and society aren’t zero-sum games.

Land’s framing of public goods as dysgenic rests on a zero-sum assumption: that by preserving the weak, liberal modernity undermines selection and stalls progress. In his view, systems like education, healthcare, or welfare blunt nature’s filter, allowing the unfit to survive and reproduce and weakening the species over time.

So should we do away with vaccines and healthcare altogether? And with education for all while we’re at it? Or is this just not how civilization works?

Maybe the institutions aren’t perfect. We can probably do better. But they don’t just preserve the “unfit” and shelter mediocrity; they raise the floor for everyone, and make excellence possible.

Clean water, vaccines, and education don’t just preserve the vulnerable. They raise the floor for everyone. Lead abatement lifted national IQs; vaccines extended workforce longevity; and education sustains shared knowledge.

Civilization is a form of collective buffering. It’s not weakness, but strategy: a way to reduce volatility, preserve surplus, and grow capacities that take time to mature. Evolution isn’t just about culling; it’s about cooperation, scaffolding, and resilience. And it’s hard to maintain without shared investment.

A society that only filters cannot grow. And a theory of fitness that kills its own ecosystem isn’t selection; it’s self-termination.

Broken Telos

But that has always been his point. Mark Fisher, who used to be a student and admirer of his⁷, saw through it: Land’s philosophy isn’t awakening, it’s nihilism in a trenchcoat, a suicidal surrender dressed up as prophecy.

Strip away the filters, the graphs, the cyber-gothic glare, and you’re left with an ouroboros: no destination, no redemption, no aim; just a self-recursive loop to infinity, a gradient we’re told to venerate.

Acceleration is the goal. GNON becomes god, the ultimate selector, impersonal and implacable. But this ‘nature’ he invokes is already a coded machine, predicated on values he never justifies: velocity, intelligence, sorting.

But why is the gradient sacred? Why is it god?

Land doesn’t say. He never asks what a superior intelligence might want, or whether it would want anything at all.

And maybe it wouldn’t. A machinic intelligence might sit somewhere on the spectrum of intelligence, consciousness, sentience (or even life), but even a ‘superior’ intelligence may never be able to set its own values or goals.

What Land calls forth is the paperclip maximizer for velocity.

Source

The Simplest Intelligence Test

For a system obsessed with intelligence, Land’s telos demands something surprising: that we use our minds to design our own irrelevance. To optimize, accelerate, align with GNON—knowing full well that the endpoint is our obsolescence. The species-level equivalent of coding your own replacement.

And in the end, it doesn’t sound superhuman; it just sounds… kinda dumb. More category error than final triumph.

Beyond the lack of empathy, it’s intelligence without reflection. And that’s not transcendence; just a really fast, really cold kind of stupidity.

This concludes our series on Nick Land and Accelerationism, Slick: a path that doesn’t end in superintelligence, but in silence…

Looking for other keys to understand the Techno Right?

1. Especially those who once ran with him through the dark, like Mark Fisher or Ray Brassier, before he turned around and locked the gates.

2. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, organizations represented by smart contracts on a blockchain and controlled by their members.

3. The reality is, as often, murkier. First, the line is not a biological frontier; regional variation was always significant, including Eastern European areas that exhibited similar nuptial patterns. Second, the causes were cultural and institutional: Church reforms, inheritance systems, urbanization, and labor structures. Some even say the plague played a role. Third, generalized trust and cooperative institutions are not unique to Hajnal-line societies. East Asian Confucian cultures (China, South Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan) maintain strong family-based structures and high civic trust.)

4. HBD and Dark Enlightenment thinkers often argue that empathy and high-trust cooperation were evolutionarily adaptive only within bounded, ethnically homogenous societies—and become liabilities in mass, pluralistic ones. The point may not be totally misguided, but it confuses fragility with futility. These traits may have evolved under constraint, but that doesn’t mean they can’t scale. The real question isn’t “Can these values survive a plural society?” It’s: What kind of culture makes them scale? To assume value cannot scale is not a defence of civilization; it’s an excuse to abandon it.

5. “by far the most troublesome dimension of human bio-diversity is intelligence or general problem solving ability, quantified as IQ (measuring Spearman’s ‘g’). When ‘statistical common sense’ or profiling is applied to the proponents of Human Bio-Diversity, however, another significant trait is rapidly exposed: a remarkably consistent deficit of agreeableness. Indeed, it is widely accepted within the accursed ‘community’ itself that most of those stubborn and awkward enough to educate themselves on the topic of human biological variation are significantly ‘socially retarded’, with low verbal inhibition, low empathy, and low social integration, resulting in chronic maladaptation to group expectations. The typical EQs of this group can be extracted as the approximate square-root of their IQs. Mild autism is typical, sufficient to approach their fellow beings in a spirit of detached, natural-scientific curiosity, but not so advanced as to compel total cosmic disengagement. These traits, which they themselves consider – on the basis of copious technical information — to be substantially heritable, have manifest social consequences, reducing employment opportunities, incomes, and even reproductive potential. Despite all the free therapeutic advice available in the progressive environment, this obnoxiousness shows no sign of diminishing, and might even be intensifying.”
—Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment; emphasis mine

6. While some UK twin studies failed to replicate this SES-heritability interaction, this may reflect differences in social infrastructure, not a universal principle. The broader point stands: genetic potential is not destiny, especially under conditions of deprivation.

7. “Land was our Nietzsche—with the same baiting of the so-called progressive tendencies, the same bizarre mixture of the reactionary and the futuristic, and a writing style that updates nineteenth-century aphorisms into what Kodwo Eshun called 'text at sample velocity.’”
—Mark Fisher, Terminator vs. Avatar