https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

Justin Murphy: Is it fair to say then, that in some sense, one of the reasons that blockchain is so fascinating is because it is this overcoming of Kantianism that is also an overcoming of capitalism — philosophy in practice? Is that how you see it?

Nick Land: Well, that is how I would expect an articulate leftist to see it. I mean, I would not go that way at all. My position is that the stubborn vindication of Kantianism as the horizon of modern intelligence is the dominant phenomenon. I see blockchain as being Kantian. I mean, there’s, there’s obviously some kind of updating that happens through the process of technical implementation. But there’s nothing like the kind of overcoming that is seen in the history of German idealism leading into Marxism. I just don’t see that kind of thing at all. I think that you’ve got a much more stubborn isomorphism between the actual mechanism of critique and the process of the blockchain.

Who knows what’s down the road. But it certainly seems to me that it’s an intensive transition in the autonomy of capital, which I think can be translated into the robustness of these route-around processes. So, while there is a deep leftist objection to the blockchain, which seems to be very rational and coherent and on point, there’s the fact that it obviously is an escape route for capital, and that it makes a whole series of social projects based upon the domestication of capital become increasingly implausible.

Justin Murphy: While blockchain is clearly giving route-arounds for capital to escape, it’s also undeniably on the side of liberation from control, right? So if you’re against blockchain, if you want to suppress it and control it, and you generally see it as a bad thing, you can’t also pretend you’re interested in liberation from control structures. And I think that’s a very valuable and quite attractive by-product of the way that these theoretical notions are getting manifested in the technology.

Nick Land: I don’t think I would disagree with that. But it just seems to me that what is seen as the libertarian potential of these technologies, and its capitalist potential, are more or less synonymous notions, and that the dominant sentiment on the left is that these things are bad, and a language of liberation is the way that capital masks its actual process — in a language of emancipation that, taken from a leftist his point of view, is profoundly inadequate. It’s not sufficiently collective in its orientation and it’s extremely cold in terms of any questions of amelioration of problems of social disadvantage and underdevelopment. So I don’t see how anyone could disagree that there is a challenge to systems of control. I would have thought that the question is rather whether certain systems of control are actually required for the collectivization of emancipation, rather than it’s more Darwinian variants.

Justin Murphy: Some things might surprise me that don’t surprise you [laughs]. I guess perhaps the kernel of insight that was more promising in what I said is that it seems leftism — as that kind of sociological phenomenon that does still characterize the attitudes and behaviors of a fairly large number of human beings today — it still traffics in the connotations of liberation, and it seems to me that, a prediction that may emerge from this conversation about blockchain is that this will become increasingly less and less tenable as the technology becomes more widely distributed and it will become increasingly hard to deny that leftism is simply the break upon liberation in some sense.

Nick Land: Yeah, that language, it’s not that I’ve got any problem with it really, except it just sounds a little bit too triumphalist from the right. I do think, insofar as the language of liberation is about the ability to escape and route-around structures of control, then that is almost tautologically inevitable. I’m not really seeing a coherent objection. I’m not, as you know, the world’s greatest sympathizer of the leftist political orientation, and so I tend to see the language of liberation in leftist rhetoric as often quite sophistical. I don’t expect a lot of conceptual integrity from it. And I think the thing that blockchain is doing on this level, is that it just bypasses philosophical and political argument — people just simply do a route-around, it doesn’t require some sort of collective affirmation at the barricades or any such thing. So it seems to me the rhetoric around that is very obviously secondary in a way that isn’t true of a whole number of other socio-political projects, where the rhetoric and the political phenomenon are much more integrated.