The Singularity Is Not Near

William Shakespeare Contra Nick Land

Have the Lofty Powers really “got this”?

And how would we know if they did? If behind everything lies not a unitary principle, but chaos, then every time we think we have it — would it not slip away? Is reality not a kind of shoggoth?

I try and hold reality in the palm of my hand. It pours greasily down through my fingers. I squeeze it and it slips out. I can’t catch it. It doesn’t stay still long enough for me to even know what it is.

For Nick Land, reality is produced through metaphysical chaos. Instead of a single divine principle, such as the One from Plotinus, or the Christian God, there exist what he calls the Lofty Powers, chaotic entities from which arises, spontaneously, the orderly reality we live in. This occurs through the principle known as “catallaxy,” a concept from Austrian school economics which is used to describe how a chaotic system like capitalism can produce order without the need for centralization. Basically, the system will congeal around a certain order, then shift and change to produce a new order, and so on.

In theory, this should mean that Land’s vision is one of uncontrolled chaos, where everything is in a constant state of becoming. J.G. Ballard is a helpful voice to bring in here, as his writings reveal a world where people, civilization, even morality are all subject to relentless change, producing new combinations in ways that seem to us, in the here and now, as horrible. Ballard’s work, like Land’s, is nihilistic to the extreme: it reveals us as being subject to forces much larger than ourselves, and which, often enough, do not have humanity’s interest in mind.

Furthermore, Land believes the ultimate goal is that humanity creates an artificial superintelligence, leading to the Singularity, and, almost certainly, the irrelevance of humankind. Thus, accelerationism: If capitalism mimics the processes by which metaphysical chaos produces order, thereby making capitalism the economic system most in accordance with reality, and if reality (or the principles producing it) desires the emergence of the Singularity, then capitalism is the means through which this Singularity will arise. An unregulated capitalism, furthermore, would only accelerate this, as every attempt to slow capitalism down only retards our advance toward this ultimate destination.

But there’s a tension here between a metaphysics of chaos and what appears to be teleology. Even if order does spontaneously arise out of chaos, it’s not clear that this order would have a direction, in the sense that it’s learning and improving with each iteration. And yet Land famously states that “capitalism is artificial intelligence,” meaning that capitalism is “inherently epistemological,” that it’s learning. If it’s learning, then it’s gaining a greater understanding of the truth of things, which means it’s coming closer and closer to a more perfect form. And if that’s the case, then capitalism, we might say, is making progress.

***

Land believes the Lofty Powers can be understood, however imperfectly, through occult channels. Their plan manifests in the political sphere. The political sphere is guided along until, inevitably, it will become what it was always meant to be.

Land has seen the future.

***

Macbeth is told a prophecy, in which he’ll become king. All he has to do, to hasten this, is to kill the man currently occupying that spot.

Lady Macbeth thinks he should do it. And why not? It’s clear that if they can get away with it, they’ll have power beyond what they ever could have imagined. And what’s more, it’s almost certain they will get away with it, if they follow Lady Macbeth’s plan. So why not?

Macbeth succumbs, of course — but fulfilling his part in the cosmic narrative does nothing to help him. He becomes haunted by visions. He sees the void at the heart of reality and describes it as a kind of Azathoth. He is undone by forces beyond his control, killed and remembered as a bloodthirsty tyrant. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth hallucinates blood on her hands and kills herself.

The machinery ticks on. People don’t fill roles so much as their roles fill them. Even when we think we understand, our understanding fails us: Every person falls to the machine’s procession, becomes replaced by another, and is, more often than not, forgotten.

An odd thing to say about Land is that he sees the abyss but flinches. Somehow he still manages to find meaning and purpose, even if it’s unhuman, chaotic, terrifying. Shakespeare does no such thing, however. Shakespeare sees the abyss and reveals its true nature. An endless procession of horrors, recursive history, human beings as the objects in a cosmic puppet show, living and dying for nothing.

***

In Shakespeare, every attempt at understanding the machinery does nothing to help you. You can’t be its friend. It doesn’t care about your whims or desires. There’s not even anything you can do to spare yourself.

Here, we may think of Job. Job tries to understand the Divine Plan. In response, Yawheh says (from the KJV): “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? Or who hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? Or who laid the corner stone thereof; When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Job is nobody. Pius, sure, but nobody. How could a nobody understand the Divine Plan? Aquinas says we could spend our entire lives trying to understand a single fruit fly and still not exhaust everything.

But Job’s revelation is much tamer even than the one in Lear. After all, what is the old king expected to say upon arriving with Cordelia’s corpse — “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord”?

Lear to Job: “Must be nice.”

***

I sit down with my tarot cards. The Thoth deck, Crowley’s creation. I see the pattern laid out in front of me and know what the divine has planned. I can do nothing to stop it. But I can surf the wave.

Later, while drowning, I puzzle over the fact of my imminent demise. This wasn’t what I thought was going to happen. Did I not understand the system?

***

We think we understand the Lofty Powers. We think we can see them working through our politics, slowly allowing reality to congeal into history’s ultimate fulfillment. With our understanding, we can set the acceleration in motion that will allow this to happen largely unimpeded. We’ve determined the desires of the gods, after all. We’ll do their bidding, just as we were always supposed to.

But it turns out to be a trap. We fulfill the role of the prophet, the king, whichever was required of us. But those roles are built to be tragic. The Lofty Powers puppet us toward our inevitable conclusion, undone by the machinery. Every one of us winds up dead in a glorious finale, destroyed by our hubris.

The acceleration never happens. It was never meant to. We were meant to believe in it, and to think ourselves responsible for shepherding it in existence. But in doing so, we were meant to die.

What follows is recursion. The plot begins anew. The same as it ever was.

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