Mildly Interesting

[Nick] Land described capitalism not as a system we operate but as a kind of autonomous intelligence, a self-amplifying process that learns, mutates, and reorganizes the world toward ends no person or parliament controls. We could call it, in older language, an egregore: a thought-form that has taken on a life of its own and now thinks through us. Land’s decisive claim was that this process has no outside. There is no Archimedean point left to stand on and push against, because the process has already metabolized every such point. To critique it, in his chilling phrase, is simply to feed it. The critique becomes one more energy source, one more product.

You can watch the metabolism work in miniature, every day. The revolutionary becomes a face on a T-shirt. The punk scene becomes a clothing line. The searing documentary about consumer culture streams between advertisements for sports betting and Ozempic. Deleuze and Guattari named this flattening, disembedding function of capital in the 1970s. Later, Mark Fisher would call the mature condition capitalist realism, the state Žižek summed up in the line that “we can now sooner imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Every act of opposition is digested and sold back to us. The egregore has consumed the outside.