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> Nick Land is nuts today, but he had good thoughts on tech before the early 2000s. Nick Land is not nuts, just way ahead of you and way ahead of most folks al
by armitron 4y ago
> Nick Land is nuts today, but he had good thoughts on tech before the early 2000s.
Nick Land is not nuts, just way ahead of you and way ahead of most folks alive today (as he was indeed "before the early 2000s"). If he seems nuts, it's due to abandoning the "human security system" and fully embracing "the outside", call him a shaman or a philosopher in the oldest and truest definition of the word (research into the nature of reality) if you'd like.
"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick’s first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea:
'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'
- dogman144 4y agoNot sure the point of the blurb other than yes that’s been his gist for a while, agree! He went nuts as in club drug fueled all night benders staring at binary on screen and then repeating it for weeks/years and the resulting breakdown. As in, he literally lost his mind by the end and his colleagues who have as much bonafides as him attested to it happening. Whether or not he’s recovered, idk. And then if I agree with his view today - I haven’t dug into them, idk.
- armitron 4y agoMy point was that rather than following what most contemporary pseudo-philosophers do (acdemically or otherwise), Land fully embraced the outside. How can one fully embrace the outside / discover radical new perspectives if one is firmly entrenched in human society and norms?
- dogman144 4y agoFair enough, I think! His participatory tech-art was really interesting and also I guess looked crazy from the outside (or inside haha)