Xenosystems Fragments: and a Gift from the Lemurs

by Nick Land

Fragments is a selection of recovered blog posts by Nick Land, following Xenosystems' dormancy and ultimate deletion. This second edition, with a "Gift from the Lemurs", contains additional works by Land added to the compilation.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics

364 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 2021

About the author

Land was a lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick from 1987 until his resignation in 1998.
At Warwick, he and Sadie Plant co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an interdisciplinary research group described by philosopher Graham Harman as "a diverse group of thinkers who experimented in conceptual production by welding together a wide variety of sources: futurism, technoscience, philosophy, mysticism, numerology, complexity theory, and science fiction, among others".
During his time at Warwick, Land participated in Virtual Futures, a series of cyber-culture conferences. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as “an anti-disciplinary event” and “a conference in the post-humanities”. One session involved Nick Land “lying on the ground, croaking into a mic”, recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background."

In 1992, he published The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. Land published an abundance of shorter texts, many in the 1990s during his time with the CCRU. The majority of these articles were compiled in the retrospective collection Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, published in 2011.

Land taught at the New Centre for Research & Practice until March 2017,

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".

Reviews

[Rhizomal Ennui · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its not suprising that Xenosystems has not received the favorable treatment by the world in the same way Thirst for Annihilation or CCRU essays did. Even for me there is a serious dissonance in watching Nick Land, the resurrected and the android spending several years of his life replying to comments made to his blog by the user 'Saddam Hussein' but there is nearly no incongruency in thought patterns of Land, he is lucid as ever and succesfully pulled of the transition from author and chronicler to blogger and activist. He was always insistent on not falling behind whatever new creation the next beat generation came up with. He succesfully rode one of the alternative currents of 80s (Cyberpunk) and then the one of late 90s (Internet Otherworldism). He then proceeded to pull the unexpected again and synthesized his thought with the Nrx movement which proved to be one of the only succesful thought monad set of the 00s that left any impact upon the world.

The content of the book espouses nearly nothing that Land hadn't said before. He got a heuristic set of ideas early in his life and used different sets of expressions to succesfully articulate it for both himself and to others. His experiment this time revolves less around the occult (contrary to what scarce few readers tended to think) and technocapital and more around the presence of information processors that is us and the current steadfasters of divine capital that is the human race. Since its a collection of blogposts he spends a lot of time writing shortform thoughts about MoreRight and Anissimov both of which stopped being relevant a long time ago. The rest of the material is high quality as it gets, posts like IQ Shredders, Nrx with Chinese characteristics, all the posts about Gnon and Triad Of NRx got some popularity but I dont think any of time has any relevance to engaging with Nick Land. Most of the fragments stands at the periphery of Landian thought in the same way Meltdown is. The most Landian parts of the book is when he writes about the Exit mechanics and the Outside In, its what got him attracted to Dark Enlightment and these thoughts stood as the only ideas of importance.

This book is recommendable as the rest of the Landian mythos which are included among books that are suprisingly not that deep. Land has a sober quality most of the time that only comes from either not having large ideas or not having any values. Regardless he is far superior to all who expresses non statements but his ideas lack any sort of grandiosity.

I really wish Nick Land and Anissimov continued their bickering. That Nrx continued to exercise thought experiments in MoreRight rather then in Urbit. That Outside In managed to reach outside the cybernetic cave complex and pulled me out too. Nick Land is no more though, so its all over.

[Fnaught · Rating 5 out of 5]

The unabashedly pro-Anglo, pro-linear time, pro-Republican (rather than monarchist), and pro-tech, antihuman alternative to the alternative right (palecons, cyclical time, Evola). It's great.

[Volbet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simultaneously sounding like a William Gibson character come to life and as a cautionary tale to warn against prolonged amphetamine use, Nick Land’s blog-work from the first half of 2010’s reads as both prophetic, profound, and completely disconnected from reality.

The writing compiled in Xenosystems Fragments is, unsurprising, texts from the now defunct blog of the same name, which primarily deals with Lands political reawakening from quasi-Marxist cybertheorist to a prime example of the libertarian-to-reactionary pipeline. Although, Land prefers to work within the framing of Neoreactionary politics and the Dark Enlightenment. And with that Land means that his political epistemology is to be based on a radical (or some might say base) materialism, where everything to be reduced to its basic factual foundation, be it mathematical, biological, etc.
In practical terms, it means that Land’s political project reads like Hans-Hermann Hoppe wearing a VR headset. It’s the economically libertarian monarchism proposed in Democracy-The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, but in the landian tradition it’s mixed with cybergothic nihilism.

Although, one thing that stands out as a major methodological hole in Land’s project is based on his relation to history.
If there’s anything that Land is famous for it’s for crystalizing the idea of accelerationism, that the negative aspects any given system should be nourished, as to make them overheat and implode. Now, I would argue that such an idea, which is central to Land’s entire project, is based on a Hegelian-Marxist historical necessity, a linear view of history which leads to some sort of synthesized goal. But in this collection of blog posts, Land makes it clear that to be considered a Neoreactionary, one has to base their political understanding on a Spenglerian cyclical history. So, a fundamental concept in Landian politics seem rather contradictory and not thought out very well.

[Errata Stigmata · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yep, it's definitely still the same Land. I tend to enjoy reading his material, though his strength as a thinker and writer has always been of the hype(rstitional) variety, transmitting a jolt of excitable energy with his tendency to get right down to the bullshit, that keeps one's eyes glued to the page. The ideas he ends up with are never fully up to snuff though, and much of this is just sad DARK neckbeardism (with Chinese rice cracker crumbs coating his fingers as opposed to hot Cheetos).

[Tvrtko Balić · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's certainly gems in this coal mine, but it's still mostly a coal mine. This probably sums it up the best. It took me a while to rate this book because I first read it and then I listened to it on youtube. On youtube you can find a playlist of chapters of this book narrated by an AI voice, which is in a way fitting for Nick Land. Consuming it this way also made it possible to compare the likes and dislikes ratio of individual videos/chapters/blog entries. Apparently, out of some 150 chapters I gave a like to more than 60 of them. That is still less than half, but it gives you some sense of how much of this book I think is good when pulled out of the context of the book. And even some chapters I didn't like have some insightful or at least interesting points until they are employed in the serves of reaction in a way that seems like a stretch. The two biggest problems with the book is 1) that it's just a collection of blog entries so of course the quality is going to lag behind other things that were actually meant to be published as books and 2) that it's just sad seeing Nick Land being reduced to a Mencius Moldbug fanboy. There are criticisms of Moldbug here as well, but they remain on the quality to which Moldbug has dragged Land to. So dispite everything I just didn't like the book as a whole and I can't give it three stars.

[Medhat ullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Xenosystems Fragments operates as a hyper-dense matrix of conceptual provocations, delineating an ontological cartography of alien systemic dynamics and their recursive intrusion into socio-political, technological, and temporal architectures. Deploying an epistemological arsenal grounded in post-humanist speculation, Land deconstructs anthropocentric paradigms, reconfiguring them within the machinic phylum's self-propagating autopoiesis.The term Xenosystems encapsulates the alienating otherness of emergent systems—cybernetic, computational, and socio-economic—whose trajectory of hyper-accelerative intensification dissolves classical structures of governance, temporality, and subjectivity. The Fragments, inherently aphoristic, function as modular nodes in an ever-expanding network of anti-teleological inquiry, foregrounding disordered temporalities, machinic recursion, and non-linear politico-economic feedback loops.Land’s oeuvre in this domain articulates a speculative chronopolitics where liberal-democratic orthodoxy is destabilized by neoreactive critiques, while technocapital’s alien intelligence subsumes the human into a metastable continuum of immanent collapse and creative destruction

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Considering how MTG and Gaetz want to raise the voting age, I’m not sure how there’s no connection between alt- right and NRx.