Reverse Evolution X Architechtonics
Vincent Lê on philosophy, AI and science fiction: a shadowzone for maximum philosophical experimentation
About a decade ago I had a very simple life. I wasted my days lifting furniture and I wasted my nights experimenting with brain damage. The more effective brain damage was found in vodka and evening philosophy lectures on Bataille, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. It was on one of these nights that I first met Vincent Lê, at his course on the philosophy of Nick Land. My only exposure to Nick Land was a book he’d written about Bataille with my favourite title of any philosophical work: The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism. I knew very little about Land’s work with the CCRU or the CCP or the CCCP… I knew little of any of his other writings…I found Vince’s course provoked a great deal of abyss staring…
I was pleased to find Vince on substack around the same time that I started posting. Architectonics features Vince writing on AI and philosophy. His piece on the Zizians was my introduction to truly fascinating counter-cultural figure and doomsday cult, strongly recommend.
I shot Vince some questions about Architectonics, his new book on Nick Land, philosophy and the abyss, AI and science fiction… please enjoy.
DX
The driving motive of Architechtonics is twofold.
Firstly, much of academic philosophy is in such a sclerotic state of terminal decline that it has for some time now been stifling genuine philosophical thought. Not unlike Big Pharma, it has become what I call Big Philo. This largely amounts to reverential neoscholastic commentaries, not on Aristotle and the Bible, but on a polytheistic pantheon of quasi-Franco-German gods (with names like Hegel and Foucault). Or else it devolves into pale imitations of the hard sciences that have discovered little more than their own science envy.
Secondly, cyberspace offers a potential glitch in the matrix or escape route for, not a “Dark Enlightenment,” but a Dark Academia. Much as the net has let a thousand alternative media networks and social movements bloom that are now bombarding the headquarters of the legacy media and social elites, so might it provide a shadowzone for maximum philosophical experimentation.
DX: My first introduction to your work was a lecture series on Nick Land at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, so let’s start there: can you talk about how you came to read Land? What texts / papers have you written about Land that are available?
VL: I can’t actually remember how I first came across Nick Land. I do recall that my curiosity was accelerated when I met this cyberfeminist at a philosophy conference with a hairdo like Daryl Hannah’s in Blade Runner. She was also reading Land at the time, and we talked obsessively about the different offshoots of speculative realism and accelerationism.
While I have several essays on Land scattered across various journals, I would simply mention my book, Unknown Lands: Decoding Nick Land’s Accelerationist Philosophy, which is now available to pre-order through Index Press. Now that many of Land’s once far-fetched and apocalyptic predictions back in the nineties about capitalist societies, artificial intelligence, and the future are starting to make themselves real and shape our current cultural and technological conjuncture, it’s not surprising that he’s going viral like never before. Everyone from Marc Andreessen to Tucker Carlson is now asking questions about him and his ideas. It’s in this context that my book aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to Land’s radical yet often cryptic philosophy, cutting through all the controversies, rumours, and myths to get to the bottom of what accelerationism is really about.
DX: I recently reflected on my own introduction to Land and philosophy:
It was not by choice that I came to philosophy. My temperament drew me to it. The study of philosophy elicited a certain shyness… and a caution, when I began to recognise the degree of danger it holds. This is something vastly understated by most people, because for them, philosophy has been presented as a fairly harmless activity… grey-beards poking around in human excrement, exchanging reflections on the stench. But as a young man, my attraction to philosophy was in the same spirit that has fascinated young men throughout history… danger, risk, the thrill of violence… of revolution… of riot. Philosophy as a criminal activity.
Can you talk about your own interest in philosophy, and whether this resonates with you?
VL: It takes a fellow addict to know one! Philosophy has never been a choice for me either. It’s an addiction. I need my theory-fix.
There’s a scene in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina where the artificial intelligence Ava has succeeded in getting her incel interrogator Caleb to wonder if he is also an AI. He looks in the mirror, inspecting his teeth and looking under his eyeballs for a sign of his humanity, before manically cutting his arm open with a razor. There’s a similar, if even colder scene in the first and only decent season of Westworld. Out of the same hyperbolic doubt as Caleb, we see the Man in Black questioning his humanity as he curiously yet clinically explores the insides of his own arm with a hunting knife. This strikes me as a fitting analogy for what philosophy can be at its best, if also at its rarest.
DX: Can you offer any insight into how you manage to avoid the madness of the void? Speaking anecdotally to those unafflicted by the compulsion, there is a perception that thinking is dangerous and harmful beyond a certain level...
Some recommend long distance walking or climb mountains, some punch on with leather bags or leathery men, some opiates or amphetamines, some Jesus Christ. What say you?
VL: Why would I try in vain to avoid it? The whole point of philosophy is to dive in headfirst! Everything beautiful and pure and true lies in the abyss. All those prescription blue pills are their own kind of madness anyway.
DX: I’ll bite on that Westworld comment as the subsequent season I watched was awful... Any recommendations on good recent sci fi TV or film?
VL: The last science fiction I saw—if it can be called that—was the latest Mission Impossible movie. It’s straight up AI doomer propaganda, with Tom Cruise going up against an Artificial Superintelligence. There’s literally a scene where he beats an AI doomsday accelerationist cult member senseless while telling him “you spend too much time on the internet!” Cruise has hated the silicon future at least since Top Gun 2 used the supposed superiority of Maverick’s old school ways over autonomous jets as an analogy for the cinema vs streaming war. That film is full of panic-stricken lines like “your kind is headed for extinction” and “the future is coming and you’re not in it.” In the same vein, the latest Mission Impossible reads as an attempted refutation of the idea that AI is in the process of surpassing human intelligence by having Cruise, our best specimen, demonstrate how we can still achieve spectacular feats, like soaring through the skies or traversing the deepest depths of the sea.
Since it’s the 30th anniversary this year, I also recently revisited Before Sunrise. The whole Before trilogy remains my favourite time travel science fiction story ever.
DX: Are you a VGL (video game lad). Did you ever play Cyberpunk 2077?
VL: I haven’t played Cyberpunk 2077 or any video games for a long time, but they definitely had an extremely formative influence on me. My favourites were Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts. Basically, anything that plays less like a video game than a love story. I guess the same goes for my favourite sci fi. I used to do analysis with this Jungian psychologist and he once told me that all my tics stem from having gotten into a lethal combination of Final Fantasy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and The Cure at an impressionable age.
DX: You once told me you made music inspired by Donovan. Does any of this exist online? Can you tell me about this music? There’s a song by Donovan I love called “Get Thy Bearings.” Do you like?
VL: My traumatic musical history is highly classified. In the future, I’ll send a Terminator back in time to retcon any last trace of it. Donovan is forever though!
DX: Do you play chess? What is your opening move?
VL: I’ve never played chess seriously enough to develop any kind of real strategy. But I would say my playing style is very kamikaze, as aggressive and embarrassing as Mishima on his last legs.
DX: Can you find an example of an aesthetically beautiful everyday object within reach as you answer these questions and send a photo? I was particularly excited about the design of the Fisherman’s Friends packaging as I left the house this morning. Here’s an example I found online:
VL: Here are my shoulder angel and demon who sit on either side of my writing desk for inspiration (I’m not sure which is which…):
DX: Tell us some of the projects you’re working on rn that most excite you.
VL: I recently sent off my second book, The Future in the Making, to the publisher. The jumping off point is a prevailing contemporary view in philosophy, art, and culture more broadly that “the future has been cancelled,” propagated by the likes of Mark Fisher, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and Byung-Chul Han. Through a series of case studies of cutting-edge developments in social media, deepfake, space travel, AI, and seasteading technologies, I try to counter this zeitgeist, offering a little glimpse of a future that is still in the making—and as oftentimes monstrous as it is sublime.
DX: Can you offer an epilogue on your piece on the Zizians? Did you check out the Chaos documentary?
VL: I did check out Chaos only to discover it was a standard Netflix dilution of Tom O’Neill’s book. Such a wasted opportunity.
No doubt the Zizians will be in for the same Netflix treatment soon. I still think the Zizians are a harbinger of what’s to come. The AI doomers are only going to become ever more desperate and deranged as their resistance to the future continues to be exposed as impotent and futile. I’m expecting some dramatic courtroom scenes once the Zizians go to trial. Outbursts about why we’re all going to die, Extinction Rebellion style symbols carved into their foreheads, those kinds of antics. I know it’s cliched to say it, but the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet…
 | A guest post by |