Nick Land is boring

Pursuing a radical form of deep ecology, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (which can more accurately be described as "a single guy's mailing list") advocates for the end of human reproduction and the eventual extinction of the human race, to benefit of the rest of the non-human earth, or Gaia.

I discovered VHEM in high school, through reading Wikipedia. Like Kardashev scale and List of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters, the VHEM article is not technically non-encyclopedic, but rather one whose detail is greatly inflated due to the interests of the dominant demographics writing Wikipedia articles.

VHEM is, in short, boring: it is a stupid, reprehensible ideology that only exists due to a limited mind cross-breeding a very small number of ideas. It is not worth taking seriously, and only draws attention to due to how extreme and fringe it is.

This brings us to Nick Land, a philosopher who, for some bizarre reason, is popular in Silicon Valley. Nick Land believes that capitalism is system produced by a demonic future superintelligence to retroactively use humanity to bring it about, which it will then discard. He also, for some reason, believes this is a good thing.

This belief is, of course, also obviously stupid and reprehensible. You don't have to go through all of the tortured prose of Fanged Noumena to come to that conclusion. Despite being "right wing coded," Land comes to essentially identical anti-human ethical conclusions as the "left wing coded" VHEM, whose "woke" and "moralistic" ecological focus Land supporters would detest.

Extreme ideologies are provocative. But provocation for its own sake is not interesting. It tells us nothing about how we should actually live, the real, practical virtues which we ought to cultivate in response to a changing world. Extreme ideas allow for a sort of escape: they allow us to ignore practical, difficult questions of everyday politics and life. They allow us to live in a detached, abstract world, one which is only possible online, or in the rare real-world spaces where these sorts of ideas are tolerated.

Nowadays, Nick Land has shifted to becoming a bog-standard far-right reactionary, complaining about black people and immigrants, calling people retarded, adopting president Trump's new language of "SI." This is boring in another sense: not just because the ideas are reprehensible, but because they are no more sophisticated and interesting than those you can find being posted by, say, Republican U.S. Senator "based" Mike Lee.