Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.2 (Part 1)

[1].[1].[2] Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.

Earlier ([1].[1].[1]), we cited Land (1993) on the history of capitalism as an “invasion from the future”. Land says that “Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjec­tivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control.”

The intensifying interactions between technology and economy, each driving the other, rips out the barriers to its growth and the profits they drive (now exponential). As the growth machine rubs up against the barriers of habit and tradition in the societies that birthed it, like a jealous beast it tears the womb out from its mother-wife to preempt the birth of any challengers (having learnt from Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus) even as it continues to ravish her for resources in an incestuous frenzy to fuel its unfettered growth — physical, mental, biological, energetic, and moral. God, the Father, waits for the apportioned time to chastise His wayward son, leaving the conditioned Soul with the challenge of dealing with this hypernuclear fallout.

“Welcome to the matricide laboratory.”1

Having rendered its genetrix sterile, the impotent, self-loving rākṣasa penetrates the world with the torrid shaft of its desire, not to produce children of its own but to consume those of Man, converting cities into massive altars of human sacrifice shredding (Spandrell, 2013) through the supposed best of humanity in a process at once both banal in its drudgery and shocking in the scope of the horrors it is capable of. As Ccru’s Swarmachines (1997) puts it, cities are “synthesizing inhuman desires.“ The inhabitant of the modern city is no longer a Man (a ‘child of Manu’) but something only all too human (walking ‘dirt’), predestined to be culled according to the will of some alien power.

For Land, economics and technology cannot be cleaved apart or shorn away from capital in any meaningful way as they are bound together right from the ground. Land would later come to define acceleration as being grounded on the bond between capital and technology in Teleoplexy: Notes on Acceleration (Land et al., 2014):

“‘Acceleration’ as it is used here describes the time-structure of capital accumulation.…saving and technicity are integrated within a single social process — diversion of resources from immediate consumption into the enhancement of productive apparatus. Consequently, as basic co-components of capital, technology and economics have only a limited, formal distinctiveness under historical conditions of ignited capital escalation. The indissolubly twin-dynamic is techonomic (cross-excited commercial industrialism). Acceleration is techonomic time.” (p. 511)

Furthermore, this accelerative tendency is, for Land, part of the inbuilt nature of modernity itself. Drawing on cybernetic models (which we will discuss in greater depth later), Land sees acceleration as a “cybernetic expectation”. In such a state, “stimulated by its own output, and therefore self-propelled, acceleration is normal behavior” (p. 511).

“Logistically accelerating” here can be understood as the s-curve, which can be used to visually represent a phenomenon that grows slowly over a long period of time before suddenly beginning to grow in frequency in increasingly compressed durations before eventually tapering out (Murphy, 2023). In the case of something like consumer electronics or other technologies, this decrease is usually the result of material constraints such as market saturation — when televisions or mobile phones are accessible to the majority of the populace the rate of adoption slows to a crawl. The accelerationist circuit, however, has no breaks — it is explosive (Land et al., 2014). In rejection of the classical cybernetic call to control, Land says “The doomed part of intensively virtualized techonomic appa­ratuses subverts the fraying residues of anthropomorphic guidance. Control dissolves into the impossible.” (Land et al., 2012, p. 397)

A good example of this fundamental oneness of capital and technology — and their altogether alien nature — is presented in “Intro to Qwernomics” (a portmanteau of ‘QWERTY’ and ‘Economics’), originally published on Land’s Hyperstition blog on December 23, 2004. In this piece, he traces the history of the standard QWERTY keyboard — created, supposedly, due to its infrequency in jamming on mechanical typewriters in comparison with keyboards of other layouts, which led to its dominance, despite the fact that this orientation makes no hierarchical (alphabetical-sequential) or human (ergonomic) sense. Instead, through a logic all its own, QWERTY has arrived as an organizing principle to whom we humans fold instead of the other way around. In Land’s words:

“The emergence of technologically supported typewriting practices in the final decades of the 19th Century coincided with a profound reconstruction of the global economic order, associated with an equally radical re-arrangement of the concrete composition of the terrestrial machinic unconscious (at least in its anthropomorphic shallows). The interconnected explosions of modern corporate organization and endo-corporate bureaucracy, (gendered) office work, typographic information deposits, psychoanalysis, literary modernism, anglophone qabbalism, cryptographic machinery and mechanized computation all tracked the mass installation of typing skills into the human nervous system, in accordance with the Qwerty arrangement of the Sholes Keyboard.” (emphasis added)

In his article One Two Many: On Nick Land’s Numbering Practices, Vincent Le2 (2019) tracks Land’s history of using numbering practices as means of corrupting, overriding, and decoding humanist systems of sense-making and organization. In his review of Land’s works, Le traces this toxic thread all the way back to Land’s Ccru days where he used meaningless strings of binary code to undermine human ideas of technological control. In Le’s words, this meaningless code “represents increasingly autonomous technics’ pursuit of their own self-replication without any interest in serving human use-value” (p. 83) — akin to a viral infection. This would, over time, lead to Land’s work on qwernomics, “the way that the demands of capital accumulation led the technology of the keyboard to develop down a de-anthropomorphising path from which we could not diverge” (p. 99-100) because of the complete lock-in which it had achieved. To Le,

“Land is interested in the economics of the keyboard because he sees it as exemplary of technocapitalism’s way of locking us into a trajectory that will ultimately dehumanise us, not just through the mechanisation of the alphabet, but of our bodies and very sense of self, as the future races towards ever more immersive human–machine interfaces and strong artificial intelligence. Whenever we awkwardly use a QWERTY keyboard, we get a glimpse of the machinic future’s incursions into discursive reason in ways that are not particularly conducive to our practical needs and utility”. (p. 100)

In the rational world, the global dominance of QWERTY is yet another accident of history — just a meaningless consequence of mass adoption and inertia with no further substance or meaning behind the phenomenon. Not so, says Land (2004), for whom this ‘accident’ was a cheatcode or hack to affect a grand alchemical change: “the subliminal instantiation of a new cultural system”. This change consisted of a two-fold digitization of language which moved it from mouth to finger and broke it up into discrete elements bound to finger-driven keys. All this led, Land says, to a skepticism that there could even be a rational arrangement of these keys, much less of any element of human language.

Le (2019) sums it up best: “Ultimately, qwernomics is… a ritualistic practice of numeration permitting us to endlessly decode our linguistic systems as a way to explore ever more abstract planes of an alien Outside’s absolute deterritorialisation of reason and sense.” (p. 101)

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