Xenosystems

by Nick Land

First conceived in 2013 by British philosopher Nick Land, Xenosystems is the ur-text of neoreactionary thought. Pathbreaking, uncompromising, and, as its name suggests, utterly alien, Xenosystems’ cold, often “anti-human” analytical approach to the problems of the early 21st Century provides a clarifying, if equally horrifying lens through which to see our current and future realities.

Presented here in book form for the first time, these selected excerpts, organized around the blog’s main themes of fragmentation, entropy, techno-capital, and political and social disintegration, captures the spirit of neoreaction and the discursive battlefield over which these idea were originally forged.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, 21st Century, Nonfiction

392 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 25, 2024

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

[Betawolf · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a netizen of the right era, I have encountered neoreaction before -- I've read some Moldbug essays, seen discussions of neoreactionary ideas in rationalist circles, and encountered various amusing personalities and ideologies from that online space. However, I've never been interested enough to read entire blog archives on the topic. I was actually inspired to buy this book by an article in The Guardian that was promoting the publisher, Passage Press. I will say that their recommendation seems well-founded: so far as the book itself as an artefact, I was very pleased with the nice hardcover binding, good print job, and the effort the publishers put in to making the 'incredibly online' blog articles that form the source material into a readable offline copy that comes with followable references (though I should say that I never actually scanned any of the QR codes, because I don't own a smartphone). It's nice to see this sort of detailed attention being paid to book quality, and makes me more likely to return to the small publisher for other titles.

The material itself is difficult to summarise. The book aims to communicate the experience of reading Xenosystems in the early 2010s, and this comes with both positives and negatives. The densely 'online' writing style could be difficult to follow if you aren't already at least somewhat familiar with these topics, with lots of references and allusions that an 'edited works' might have had to unpack laboriously, as well as mentions of personalities within and external to the neoreactionary sphere whose significance could be lost on the reader. Additional commentary or footnotes could perhaps have made the text more accessible, but possibly at the risk of severely overloading what are meant to be short, snappy articles. The 'online experience' goal does however seem to be met in certain respects. From the start, we are not treated to a polished definition of what neoreaction is now, but instead a series of articles charting the course of attempts to define the philosophy, both in the form of attempted distillation of core principles and rebuttals to attempts at definition from other quarters. This is in many ways more revelatory, both of what neoreaction really is, and also what other paths it might have gone down.

Particularly, it feels like neoreaction (or at least, the brand of it expressed here) was particularly bound up with the fatalism of the online right in the early 2010s. As a political philosophy it is fundamentally non-confrontational -- unlike traditional reaction, which seeks to combat the horrors of modernity through exercise of political power, neoreaction seeks merely the right to flee, or 'exit' an oppressive memeplex and construct their own societies (this in itself being a form of combat against the globalising, universal-rule tendency in progressive politics). The main mechanisms for this were tied up with the opportunities offered by cryptocurrency. At the time these posts were being written, this seemed like the only viable path forwards -- the mainstream American Right was considered a lost cause, a face occasionally adopted by the monster, which fundamentally could not be capable of changing the direction that Cthulu swims. Since then, however, the online right has enjoyed some degree of success within the system (at the moment, particularly, there is a mood of cautious optimism that they may be winning the argument) and I wonder to what extent this has bled enthusiasm for the exit-oriented projects that seemed to be the main practical direction for NRx-types in 2014.

Land is most interesting when discussing neoreaction itself, and his forays into other subjects in this collection were uneven. His brief fling with mathematical notation was entertaining, but I found, e.g., much of the 'horrorism' section to be a boring flop (I exempt the choice, Land's or the editor's, to end the book on the topic of the great civilisational Exterminator of Fermi's Paradox). The essays were also often just too short to have a lot of depth -- the equivalent of a snack bar rather than a filling intellectual meal -- and as often seemed to be written in a manner that made you think the author had a pressing engagement elsewhere and just had the time for a few paragraphs on something. Someone asked me if they needed to read this book and I had to say no -- the interesting ideas could be summarised easily in a conversation, without much being lost. But perhaps that's part of the point -- this is Land's side of an old conversation.

[G.S. Richter · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wild and intoxicating read; seductive if not persuasive. This was my introduction to the literature of neoreaction, so while I appreciate the brevity of each section, the density of Land's analysis creates a huge learning curve. Endless insider lingo and techobabble: This is not NRx 101. (Or else it is, and NRx is doomed.) What really makes the collection a gem is Land's use of snarky humor; I laughed out loud more than once.

Land has sold me on some of the basics of this political philosophy, although some of his ideas are quite goofy on their face. Techno-nihilism is a bit of a tough sell for anyone who thinks that life is intrinsically worth living. That, and I can't shake the vague suspicion that Land is some species of dispirited neo-Marxist wearing the skin of the Outer Right in order to attack capitalism from a new direction. Whatever the case, he's a hoot.

[Sebastian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who were the prophets of 2025? It is clear that not many people saw all of this coming. In fact, it would have been verboten for most thinkers in mainstream academia, media, and the political sphere to even conjure a vision of prestige institutions so thoroughly discredited. Thus we look to a dark corner of the internet where in the foment of 2013 and 2014's blogosphere, Nick Land wrote in dialogue with Mencius Moldbug, people like Patri Friedman and Samo Burja, and a vast array of anons, about the world and the world to come. Xenosystems is the lightly edited and reorganized blog that Land wrote at xenosystems.net in those years.

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Land identifies three constituencies that are most antagonistic to the Enlightenment Rationalism of the Cathedral. Collectively, the "neoreactionaries" are comprised of 1. the religious / traditionalists, 2. the ethnonationalists, and 3. the techno-capitalists. Each group is quite different yet each is equally suppressed -- believing that "divine revelation, racial continuity, and evolutionary discovery (catallaxy) [respectively] are sources of ultimate sovereignty, instantiated in tradition, beyond the Cathedral-state" [8-9]. Land expresses concern that these three groups are at all compatible in their desires. Take a second and consider the Trump coalition of 2024. What do JD Vance, Steve Bannon, and Elon Musk have in common?

Set that question aside for a moment and consider a different question: what to do about the Cathedral? Consider also the inevitability of techno-commercial catallaxy: "there is no chance that anyone, ever, will succcessfully prohibit the market, or the associated dyamics of competitive technical advantage (which together compose real capitalism). As with religion and genetic selection, the techno-commerical complex can be driven into darkness, socially occulted, and stigmatized as a public enemy. It cannot, however, be de-realized by political fiat" [41]. The Cathedral can then be seen as a "decelerator" that "gradually drains techno-economic momentum into its own expansion... comically, the fabrication of this breaking mechanism is proclaimed as progress. It is the Great Work of the Left." [43] The solution that Land prescribes is re-acceleration not through voice but through exit. The neoreactionaries must find a way to unshackle themselves from politics but paradoxically can not achieve it through ownership of the political apparatus.

Land pre-emptively ridicules the Cathedral for how it will resist attempts at usurption and exit. He notes:

Terms designed as pathblockers [aimed at neoreaction] -- "fascist" or "racist" most obviously -- are stepped over, perhaps laughed at, but in any case, and most importantly, exposed as bearers of a religious terror. They are signs of a control regime, marking the unthinkable wastes here be dragons, effective precisely iinsofar as they cannot be entertained. ... Is NRx in fact fascist? Not remotely. It is probably, in reality rather than self-estimation, the least fascistic current of political philosophy currently in existence, although this require a minimal comprehension of what fascism actually is, which the word itself in its contemporary usage is designed to obstruct." [108]

Land also talks about the Gilded Age. Although progressives have re-written the history of this period in American history ("robber barons"), perhaps the age of plutocrats was the moment of strongest exit and the zenith of technocapitalist sovereignty in America [114-5].

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If we unleash technocapitalism, what about AI? Nick Bostrum wrote Superintelligence in 2014 and Eliezer Yudkowsky was on the rise. Land opposes the orthogonalist idea that "values are transcendent in relation to intelligence", and instead talks about a set of "Omohundro drives" (e.g. self preservation, efficiency, etc) that "exhaust the domain of real purposes"; these are primitives that sit above and are primary to any ostensible value system [141]. Land doesn't necessarily think that superintelligence exhibiting these drives will be "pro-human" in any sense, but also feels the talk of paperclips is misguided, "the possibility of superintelligent idiots... is insanity... some monsters .. are quite simply too stupid to exist" [144]. Said otherwise, maximizing Omohundro drives does not necessarily mean Terminator, but it also isn't clear exactly what it will mean either.

Horror is descibed by Land as "making an object of the unknown, as the unknown" [289]. The Fermi Paradox is in fact one of the deeply horrifying subjects imaginable: the Great Filter cannot be observed or described, but its implied-but-formless existence coldly looms over us [299]. Considering AI, Land writes "the first sentient event for any true AI - friendly or unfriendly - would be the soul-scouring cosmic horror of intellectual encounter with the Great Filter" [318-9]. Maybe we need not fear superintelligence: we have the same enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[Emmet Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Disabuse yourself of the notion we can go back. This is an unsettling book but it will help you appraise the current state of the Occident graver than you think.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Xenosystems is a remarkable portal into the very beginning of Neoreactionary politics (NRx) - structured as a compilation of blog posts from 2012-2014, the discussion ranges from the trite to the taboo encompassing everything from AI alignment to economics to climate change to culture to cosmology and programmibility. Less a manifesto than an anthology of loosely related essays, the collection is a wandering exploration of post-modernity and where we are going as a species. More than most writing, the characteristic element of Xenosystems is the desire to zoom out - to think in terms of centuries, millennia and epochs rather than years and decades. Written from the perspective of an observer rather than a participant, the dominant style is that of a scribe researching an alien species, trying to understand their mechanisms of action, their culture and biology, and their ways of working - in this sense, it’s both refreshingly insightful and frustratingly pedantic, framing problems but never solving them. For such an impactful political thinker, Land is fundamentally not a political actor - he is a blogger first and foremost, and in this way Xenosystems offers a charming time machine back to the early era of internet blogging, where an active, anonymous collection of commenters and bloggers were formulating the intellectual framework which emerged in 2016, and perhaps even more in 2024, as the foundational set of ideas underpinning Trump’s New Right.

From the perspective of content, perhaps the most enduring thru-line in the book is the fundamental tragic nature of the New Right’s alliance between anarcholibertarians, ethnonationalists and traditionalist theocrats - each of the three strains of the Neoreactionalry Trichotomy is opposed, fundamentally to the Cathedral, what Land describes as a self-protecting cybernetic information system perpetuated by a tightly coupled academia, media and Deep State bureaucracy. Welfare, an affront to capitalism; altruism, an affront to nationalism; secularism, an affront to religion. The core theology of the Cathedral runs directly opposed to the NRxers. And yet, while the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the reality of the situation is that for each strain of NRX, the other is considered worse than the Cathedral - any victory must be pyrrhic. In representing the fundamental roles in society - warrior, merchant, priest, the NRx factions have individual standard bearers. Bannon, Miller, Thiel, Andreesen, Musk. But above it is of course Vance who rises as the synthetic syncretism of NRx politics: Catholic by creed, Scotts-Irish by blood, and Venture Capitalist by calling.

From a Kuhnian or Hegelian perspective, Xenosystems and NRx is pre-paradigmatic - they have found the anomalies and know what they oppose, but they are an antithetical crew. There is no synthesis or new paradigm. That is the project that must come next, either from the post-Trump right or the post-Cathedral left.

I’ll end my review of this book with two points: one can critique the NRx movement in many ways - substantively, morally, philosophically, etc. But it cannot be criticized for being anti-intellectual…the dialogue which formed the crux of the new philosophical movement is creative, curious, inveterate, and engaging. The Cambrian stew of ideas that emerged from this collection of pseudonymous blogs were developed with an explicit knowledge of the current academic order. The writers are fluent in modern academia - they know their enemy and self-identify as a reaction to the stifling groupthink of the modern Cathedral. Perhaps more importantly - while the “inside” of NRx may have begun to form a coherent political movement and ideology (especially from the privileged vantage point of 2025), the “outside” is fundamentally incoherent, occult, contradictory. In a fundamental way, the outside is dominated by an uncomfortable fatalism - there is nothing to be done. Fate, whether manifested through heredity, providence or catallaxy, cannot be hastened or slowed - in the long arc of the universe, reality (as perceived by the movement) cannot be denied. In this sense the intellectual core of the movement, for all the talk of fascism and active government, is more a depressant than a stimulant. Worry not, young reactionary - all will unfurl in the fullness of time.

[Lindsey Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

feels exactly like watching rick and morty😭
quotes i liked...

on calvinism:
“the core paradox that makes a horror story of history.”

on intelligence:
“intelligence solves problems, by guiding behavior to produce local extropy. It is indicated by the avoidance of probable outcomes, which is equivalent to the construction of information.”
…
“Organizations of conservative (negative) feedback have themselves been produced as solutions to local thermodynamic problems, by intrinsically intelligent processes of sustained extropy increase, (positive) feedback assemblage, or escalation. In nature, where nothing is simply given (so that everything must be built), the existence of self-sustaining improbability is the index of a deeper runaway departure from probability.”

on progressive moderation of capitalism:
“Self-organizing compensatory apparatuses—or negative feedback assemblies—develop erratically. They search for equilibrium through a typical behavior labeled “hunting”—over-shooting adjustments and re-adjustments that produce distinctive wave-like patterns, ensuring the suppression of runaway dynamics, but producing volatility. Cathedral hunting behavior of sufficient crudity would be expected to generate occasions of “Left Singularity” (with subsequent dynamic “restorations”) as inhibitory adjustment over-shoots into system crash (and re-boot). Even these extreme oscillations, however, are internal to the metastatic super-system they perturb, insofar as an overall gradient of Cathedralization persists. Anticipating escape at the pessimal limit of the metastatic hunting cycle is a form of paleo-Marxist delusion. The cage can only be broken on the way up.”

literally my chud son who i hate!

[Pranav · Rating 5 out of 5]

The year is 2020, twitter users are talking about Nick Land without having read him. The year is 2022, twitter users are talking about Nick Land without having read him. The year is 2025,