Both Neoreaction: A Basilisk and Postcapitalist Desire try to act as a vaccine against the Nick Land infohazard, but what i’ve found more effective is actually The Vision Of Escaflowne. (ymmv)

I think the mistake Nick Land makes is the same one as evil Isaac Newton / Emperor Dunkirk. It’s the same mistake that Scott Alexander makes in the second half of Meditations on Moloch. In complex systems, black swan situations are always possible and can create radical and permanent change.

Land has inured himself to a system he recognizes as horrible, and even writes an apologia for it, because he has convinced himself (by analyzing abstracted eye-of-god dynamics) that it’s inescapable. But escape always comes from the unknown & the unknowable.

Land (by failing to pay attention to the possibilities of minor literatures) has locked himself into a reductive view of alterity: his outsideness is always not just inhuman but antihuman in exactly the same mechanical way as capitalism. Real alterity engages the high weirdness of strange loops with consciousness.

(The key is that Escaflowne really leans into the way divination opens the door to high strangeness and time paradoxes.) And Hitomi learns that trying to control dynamic systems in a top-down way is counterproductive, and that instead she should be surfing the dynamics of the system of which she is a part.

Land talks about dynamic, diverse, and unpredictable systems but he always talks about them as though from an outside perspective, through a lens of predicting them based on a simplified…