The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:
I think it is helpful to replace one word in Land's point to render it more sharply
>Mammon propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms.
Convincing us that we are sovereign entities was a brilliant move. Eliding our mimetic nature encouraged us to give up the battle before it was even fought, turning our children's mimesis and whole childhood into mammon worshiping factories of conditionality reduction.
It's ironically because of the reality principle that we are so vulnerable to virtualization. Our ability to replace an immediate good with a symbolic good correlating to the future was immediately vulnerable to hijack, to preference falsification.
hmm if Picoeconomics is right that immediate gratification can only be delayed through imagination hacking hyperbolic discounting, mammon/capitalism must fundamentally be a failure of the imaginary to be addressed by augmenting it
(related to Tolkien's mythos and the decline of Faerie?)
I wonder if the first 3 quoted paragraphs smuggle in an infinity and therefore devolve into eschatology. I.e. assuming the singularity of the "digitocommodification" is an inevitable exponential instead of an s-curve, and any reasoning beyond that point becomes as internally-consistent-but-externally-useless as the Deleuze/Derrida/etc. you rightly decry.
I'm totally with you on warding off the Kegan level (mine+10) at all chances, though.
it's definitely an s-curve at some point, there's only 10^70 atoms in our galaxy to rearrange! but whether the curve stops looking exponential before or after human cognition has been superseded in all relevant domains.
it seems like we have plenty of headroom as far as abstract computation goes - Earth could easily support 10^10 more matrix multiplications than are currently performed. but maybe we'll soon not be bottlenecked on abstract computation but rather on sensors and precise manipulation of matter, and that's a much slower process? digitocommodification is just picking up low-hanging fruit unlocked by massive infrastructure investments in semiconductor manufacturing and the internet, which will soon run out? It's certainly possible, though not the way I'd bet.
Not saying I disagree w/ wrestling with the *current* runaway optimization problems we have (hello shareholder value). I just have this sense that these are more waves of s-curves we muddle through, and reasoning about a resulting infinity mostly enthralls us because of our religion-shaped-hole than any other reason.
re: "Land goes the full way and identifies the deeper process as “capitalism”"
Daniel Barcay (who's also part of our mutual shared Discord) had an incredible point on this. Sadly he made as a Q&A at a Long Now talk, so it may be lost to the ether. Essentially: capitalism is only a meta-ethic. It's a tool for federated resource allocation. We may err drastically (a type error) when a society *uses* capitalism as its ethic, but that's an error of application, not of capitalism!
Many such cases (i.e. nearly all of academia) make this point. It rhymes with the attention economy problems: There's a tool/system/incentive (capitalism, social media) that can be used for great purposes, but run amok when we don't situate them within an ethic and let them define their own ethic self-referentially.
I like this - the fault is not with capitalism or with intelligence but with the wisdom of its users. The CCP is certainly trying to wield capitalism as a mere resource allocation tool, without assigning it the ethical significance it has in the US; we'll see how that works out.
However, perhaps a tool that is so destructive when misused - in fact, one that systematically undermines the wisdom of the user - should not be built or used at all! This was Ivan Illich's point in "Tools for Conviviality" - modern industrial tools are nearly always dehumanizing in application and we should just build different ones.
I just don't buy this about capitalism. For all its flaws the human default is not Denmark it's the Congo. I.e. most currently proposed alternatives are utopian, not protopian.
Land’s “machinic desire” and the inevitability of enshittification are both examples of Moloch-like dynamics. Systems like capitalism, measurement, and algorithmic optimization push nearly everyone to maximize short-term gains or chase metrics, even when this erodes long-term value, well-being, or meaning.
That’s why I live in Spain: the culture here—and across the Mediterranean—shows a real resilience against these machinic addictions. Social connection, generosity, respect for tradition, enjoyment of life, and human-scale businesses act as cultural inoculations, protecting people from the endless descent into the AI-driven pit of optimization.
depends how you're engaging with it, I think! As an author, there's a way of engaging - maximizing follower counts, likes, subscription revenue etc - that is fully captured by the "numbers-go-up" virus.
I'm not really sure how distraction fits into this picture, though. Perhaps it's the shadow side of virtualized desire - all that unfulfilled REAL desire has to go somewhere, it's painful to experience it, so you distract yourself, either through the "numbers-go-up" state or the Marl state
I think it is helpful to replace one word in Land's point to render it more sharply
>Mammon propagates virally in so far as money communicates addiction, replicating itself through host organisms whose boundaries it breaches, and whose desires it reprograms.
Convincing us that we are sovereign entities was a brilliant move. Eliding our mimetic nature encouraged us to give up the battle before it was even fought, turning our children's mimesis and whole childhood into mammon worshiping factories of conditionality reduction.
It's ironically because of the reality principle that we are so vulnerable to virtualization. Our ability to replace an immediate good with a symbolic good correlating to the future was immediately vulnerable to hijack, to preference falsification.
hmm if Picoeconomics is right that immediate gratification can only be delayed through imagination hacking hyperbolic discounting, mammon/capitalism must fundamentally be a failure of the imaginary to be addressed by augmenting it
(related to Tolkien's mythos and the decline of Faerie?)
like a "false superego" instead of a "false idol"
I wonder if the first 3 quoted paragraphs smuggle in an infinity and therefore devolve into eschatology. I.e. assuming the singularity of the "digitocommodification" is an inevitable exponential instead of an s-curve, and any reasoning beyond that point becomes as internally-consistent-but-externally-useless as the Deleuze/Derrida/etc. you rightly decry.
I'm totally with you on warding off the Kegan level (mine+10) at all chances, though.
it's definitely an s-curve at some point, there's only 10^70 atoms in our galaxy to rearrange! but whether the curve stops looking exponential before or after human cognition has been superseded in all relevant domains.
it seems like we have plenty of headroom as far as abstract computation goes - Earth could easily support 10^10 more matrix multiplications than are currently performed. but maybe we'll soon not be bottlenecked on abstract computation but rather on sensors and precise manipulation of matter, and that's a much slower process? digitocommodification is just picking up low-hanging fruit unlocked by massive infrastructure investments in semiconductor manufacturing and the internet, which will soon run out? It's certainly possible, though not the way I'd bet.
Not saying I disagree w/ wrestling with the *current* runaway optimization problems we have (hello shareholder value). I just have this sense that these are more waves of s-curves we muddle through, and reasoning about a resulting infinity mostly enthralls us because of our religion-shaped-hole than any other reason.
re: "Land goes the full way and identifies the deeper process as “capitalism”"
Daniel Barcay (who's also part of our mutual shared Discord) had an incredible point on this. Sadly he made as a Q&A at a Long Now talk, so it may be lost to the ether. Essentially: capitalism is only a meta-ethic. It's a tool for federated resource allocation. We may err drastically (a type error) when a society *uses* capitalism as its ethic, but that's an error of application, not of capitalism!
Many such cases (i.e. nearly all of academia) make this point. It rhymes with the attention economy problems: There's a tool/system/incentive (capitalism, social media) that can be used for great purposes, but run amok when we don't situate them within an ethic and let them define their own ethic self-referentially.
I like this - the fault is not with capitalism or with intelligence but with the wisdom of its users. The CCP is certainly trying to wield capitalism as a mere resource allocation tool, without assigning it the ethical significance it has in the US; we'll see how that works out.
However, perhaps a tool that is so destructive when misused - in fact, one that systematically undermines the wisdom of the user - should not be built or used at all! This was Ivan Illich's point in "Tools for Conviviality" - modern industrial tools are nearly always dehumanizing in application and we should just build different ones.
For sure -- some tools are dangerous by design.
I just don't buy this about capitalism. For all its flaws the human default is not Denmark it's the Congo. I.e. most currently proposed alternatives are utopian, not protopian.
Land’s “machinic desire” and the inevitability of enshittification are both examples of Moloch-like dynamics. Systems like capitalism, measurement, and algorithmic optimization push nearly everyone to maximize short-term gains or chase metrics, even when this erodes long-term value, well-being, or meaning.
That’s why I live in Spain: the culture here—and across the Mediterranean—shows a real resilience against these machinic addictions. Social connection, generosity, respect for tradition, enjoyment of life, and human-scale businesses act as cultural inoculations, protecting people from the endless descent into the AI-driven pit of optimization.
Love the focus on unity and continuity here. Is subtack distraction or addiction?
depends how you're engaging with it, I think! As an author, there's a way of engaging - maximizing follower counts, likes, subscription revenue etc - that is fully captured by the "numbers-go-up" virus.
I'm not really sure how distraction fits into this picture, though. Perhaps it's the shadow side of virtualized desire - all that unfulfilled REAL desire has to go somewhere, it's painful to experience it, so you distract yourself, either through the "numbers-go-up" state or the Marl state
banger.
The Right to Prompt! Hacker Ethic 2.0 Propaganda Book https://zizekanalysis.wordpress.com/2025/09/28/hacker-ethic-2-0-propaganda-book/