On Nick Land and Albert Camus: From Hyperstition to Absurdism

Accelerating the Absurd 

(Portrait of Nick Land and Albert Camus) 

(SA/2026)

 

 

 

I. 

 

We closed a recent post on hyperstition by suggesting that Nick Land's theory might be understood as a form of post-irony - a conceptual space in which the virtue of sincerity returns, albeit in a compromised (impure, less naive) form. 

 

This yields an amusingly paradoxical result. It becomes possible to speak of the absurd in all seriousness: "Not because you forgot it was absurd, but because you no longer believe that absurdity disqualifies meaning." [1] 

 

By invoking fictions to manufacture reality, hyperstition ultimately abandons us in a world shaped by indifferent, chaotic forces. And by treating reality as an artificial construct, Landian philosophy builds the ultimate Absurd landscape. 

 

Could it be, then, that Nick Land (inadvertently) returns us to Albert Camus, albeit with a dark, cyberpunk twist? 

 

This is the question we will (briefly) address here ... 

 

II. 

 

This is not a question we would have been permitted to ask during the mid-1990s, when the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was aggressively exerting its quasi-occult influence over the philosophy department at Warwick University. 

 

As a PhD student there at the time, I always found Land extremely polite and personable, despite his Mephistophelian reputation. Yet, to the CCRU's zealous inner circle, Camus was a philosophical enemy and I recall being condemned by one of Land's followers for daring to quote from L'Homme révolté (1951) in my doctoral thesis [2]. 

 

The CCRU wanted to dissolve human agency into the techno-capital matrix. Camus, by contrast, insisted on human defiance in the face of a meaningless void. For the Warwick avant-garde, this made Camus an old-fashioned moral humanist clinging to the dignity of Man.  

 

That might be true. But, whilst I may not have shared all of Camus's politico-philosophical prejudices, the fact is that L'Étranger (1942) remains a far more enjoyable read than William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). 

 

And, well, as Elaine Benes would say, Camus was just so good-looking [3] ...

 

 

III. 

 

In Le mythe de Sisyphe (1942), Camus defines the Absurd as the gulf between the human desire for meaning and the sheer indifference of the universe. 

 

Nick Land's cybergothic philosophy has a similar pessimistic starting point and, like Camus, he strips away the comforting illusion of any logic or purpose. For Land, human intentions, morals, and desires are entirely irrelevant; history is driven by the alien and artificial forces of techno-capital. 

 

There is, therefore, a degree of structural affinity between their respective philosophies. One might even compare the Landian subject - trapped in hyperstitious feedback loops and techno-myths determining reality - with Camus's figure of Sisyphus, forever pushing his rock up the mountain. 

 

Both are obliged to accept their fate over which they have no control (which, in fact, controls and engineers them). 

 

Indeed, both are encouraged to affirm their fate and, in the case of the Landian subject, accelerate the inhuman processes unfolding not in order to be happy, but so that they might be erased, as Michel Foucault famously wrote, "like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea" [4].        

  

Notes

 

[1] Victor Stones, 'Hyperstition and Nick Land's Accelerationism: A Deep Reflection', medium.com (18 Nov 2024): click here. 

 

[2] My thesis - Outside the Gate (University of Warwick, 2000) - dealt with the political character of Nietzsche's philosophical project and I quoted Camus on several occasions on the question of revolutionary violence, state tyranny, etc. 

 

[3] Seinfeld, season 6, episode 5: 'The Couch' (dir. Andy Ackerman, written by Larry David, 1994). 

      The point is, it doesn't always matter what someone's views are. You can forgive a good deal when someone is attractive and Camus is widely considered one of the most handsome of all philosophers, celebrated for his physical features, his sharp sense of style, and his air of iconic coolness. No wonder Sartre was envious of him and their friendship eventually ended in tears.   

 

[4] Foucault was writing in Les mots et les choses (1966), translated into English as The Order of Things (1971), p. 387. 

      That's the crucial difference between Camus and Land: the former leaves his readers with the thought that Sisyphus ultimately finds a way to be happy (that his task is itself enough to fill his heart with joy); the latter offers no such comfort and doesn't give a damn about the happiness (or survival) of humanity. Land knows that civilisation is ultimately designing the technology that will replace us. 

      A friend of mine once put it this way: Camus recognises life is an absurd comedy but he still hopes man can provide the punchline; Land thinks of things more as a Lovecraftian horror story and chooses to side with Cthulhu.   

 

Torpedo the Ark Goes k-punk: Blogging With Mark Fisher

Johnny Bull's rather lovely cosmic portrait of Mark Fisher 

for the cover of k-punk (Repeater Books, 2018)

johnnybull.uk 

 

'Blogs continue to do things that can't be done 

anywhere else ...'

 

 

I. 

 

According to 2026 industry data [a], there are over 600 million blogs in the world. 

 

Most of these are either inactive or rarely updated, but even so, there are over 7.5 million new posts published daily and blogs - whatever their status - make up almost a third of all websites. 

 

Those who claim that blogging is an outmoded practice in the age of TikTok and podcasting are very much mistaken. 

 

However, blogging has evolved over the years and is no longer what it was back in 2003 when Mark Fisher began posting on k-punk, a blog which, as Darren Ambrose says, was eclectic in content, theoretically plural, and remarkably consistent in quality [b]. 

 

Thus it is that k-punk remains the antithesis of the commercial, algorithm-driven blogging that dominates the online landscape today. 

 

II. 

 

Fisher clarifies his motivation for blogging in a post dated 16 April 2005. 

 

He writes that k-punk provided the space "in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools" (19). By the end of the twentieth-century this discourse faced extinction; an event which Fisher warned would have "appalling cultural and political consequences" (19).

 

I have to admit, as someone never much smitten by the music press - and as someone rejected by Central Saint Martins - the gravity of this claim makes me smile. Was the death of Melody Maker truly such a catastrophe? [c]

 

 

III. 

 

At their best, says Fisher, blogs enable the sharing of ideas and passions outside of the mainstream media and provide new ways of accessing culture. 

In other words, they raise consciousness, as Fisher likes to say, which in turn "opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about, a collective perspective" (514) [d].

 

However, blogs can become black holes; generating "pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger" but "waste time and energy, our most precious resources" (514).    

 

That can be the fault of the person responsible for the blog. But often, says Fisher, it's due to those readers who like to leave comments of the kind that "reduce things to banal sociality" (558) [e].

 

 

IV. 

 

When I started Torpedo the Ark in 2013, I really can't remember the frame of mind I was in. But I certainly aimed to write in a gay manner; one that challenged and didn't merely reinforce received opinion. 

 

In other words, I wanted to develop a style that curdled genre distinctions and intensified the pleasure of the text by opening up the paradoxical and perverse aspects of language, free from the moral and dialectical imperative to always speak truthfully and coherently.  

 

Above all, I thought it crucial not to make miserable, but, rather, to give joy as an enterprise of health. It was an ethical and vital conception of writing influenced by figures including Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, and Deleuze.  

 

In 2003, however, Fisher was "quite badly depressed" (557) and started blogging "as a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD" (557) [f]. In an interview with Rowan Wilson (2010), he recalls:

 

"PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can't say anything about any subject until you've read every possible authority on it. But blogging seemed a more informal space, without that kind of pressure. Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing. I was able to con myself, thinking 'it doesn't matter, it's only a blog post, it's not an academic paper'. But now I take the blog rather more seriously than writing academic papers." (557)

 

I understand perfectly what he's saying here. My experience with TTA was to first think of the posts as merely windows on to a wider and more important body of work, only to then see that wider body of work assimilated into the blog, with the latter functioning as a kind of Borg cube. Now I assemble longer works from the fragments first posted on TTA.  

 

In conclusion, I would agree with Fisher; "blogs continue to do things that can't be done anywhere else" (558) [g]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[a] See the article by Rebecca Tomasis, 'Latest blogging statistics and facts for 2026', on the Wix Blog (15 Dec 2025): click here.  

 

[b] Darren Ambrose, Editor's Introduction to Mark Fisher's k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004 - 2016), (Repeater Books, 2018), p. 15. Future page references to this work will be placed directly in the post. 

      All in all, Ambrose does a good job editing Fisher's extensive writings and I understand the need to select posts on the basis of length and abstract them from their original context. However, I was disappointed that he chose to exclude a number of very early k-punk posts "by virtue of the fact that they seemed wildly out of step with Mark's overall theoretical and political development, and because they seemed to reflect a temporary enthusiasm for a dogmatic theoretical misanthropy he repudiated in his later writing and life" (15). 

      That, I think, is an editorial decision we might challenge and, one day, I would very much like to read these pieces and develop a radically different reading of Fisher; more cybergothic and less acid communist. One of the reasons I have come so late to Fisher is because I find his beatification by his followers a bit off-putting.      

 

[c] Clearly, for Fisher, it was; if only for the reason that his interest in theory was "almost entirely inspired by writers like Ian Penman and Simon Reynolds" (19). For Fisher, whilst blogging opened up new avenues, it also importantly "fulfilled many of the functions" (557) that the music press used to fulfil - encouraging young people to engage with ideas and be creative, etc.  

 

[d] It's a little surprising to see Fisher not only use the word living but italicise (and thereby emphasise) it. Usually, he's a fierce opponent of vitalism (even in its Deleuzian form) and in his early work - including his PhD thesis on Flatline Constructs (University of Warwick, 1999) - he even puts forward the (Nietzschean) idea that life is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

      For an interesting reading of Fisher's gothic materialism addressing the question of mechanism and/or vitalism, see Em Colquhoun's post on Xenogothic (16 August 2018): click here.      

 

[e] What Fisher says in full is this: 

      "Blogging networks shift all the time; new blogs enter the network, older ones fall away; new networks constitute themselves. One of the most significant developments was the introduction of comments; a largely unfortunate change in my view. In the early day of blogs, if you wanted to respond to a post, you had to reply on your own blog, and if you didn't have a blog, you had to create one. Comments tend to reduce things to banal sociality, with all its many drawbacks." (558)

      I would be very interested to know what Simon Solomon thinks of this ... 

 

[f] To be fair, doing a PhD can be an intense experience (though I probably wouldn't use the term traumatic). 

      Doing a PhD in the philosophy department at Warwick in the mid-late 1990s, which is where and when Fisher did his (and where and when I did mine), was perhaps uniquely pressured as one was surrounded by supersmart individuals on all sides producing some astonishing work. I remember one young woman reduced to a nervous jelly on stage when presenting at a staff-graduate event - she ended up sitting under a desk! 

 

[g] For Fisher, blogging enabled him to keep a connection to the outside world, rediscover enthusiasm for a wide variety of things, and establish new friendships: "In short, and no exaggeration, it's made life worth living ..." (621). 

      I can't say that's been my experience with TTA and I'm not sure I think of writing as a survival mechanism; I see it more as what Fisher would have called back in the day a method of hyperstitional engineering. One doesn't write to feel good about oneself, or enthusiastic about the world, but to consummate nihilism (but always with a smile).     

 

 

On Being (and Not Being) Leonard Zelig

Stephen Alexander and Leonard Zelig 

(SA/2026)

 

 

I. 

 

Zelig (1983) may not be my favourite Woody Allen movie, but it's the one that philosophically most interests and also the film that most closely resonates with my own experiences. 

 

The title character, Leonard Zelig [1], played by Allen - who also wrote and directed the movie - is, paradoxically, a man without any fixed character or distinguishing features; someone who, out of a pathological desire to fit in and be liked, takes on the personal traits of those people around him. 

 

Our friends the psychologists refer to this with the term environmental dependency syndrome - although some see it as an actual disorder that compromises individuation and prevents personal autonomy [2].  

 

Made as a fictional documentary, Zelig uses archival footage, faux-newsreels, and interviews with real-life intellectuals - including Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow and Bruno Bettelheim - to chronicle the life of human chameleon Leonard Zelig in the 1920s and '30s, humorously exploring themes of identity, conformity, and celebrity. 

 

It's an almost flawless film and certainly far more than the one-joke technical novelty that some critics dismissed it as at the time. To enjoy a short theatrical teaser trailer, click here.  

 

 

II. 

 

Rewatching Allen's film, it struck me that, in some ways, I'm a bit Zelig-like, in that I have the knack for being at the right time and place and of appearing to fit in, even while secretly remaining on the outside of events and somewhat indifferent to what others think of me. 

 

For unlike Zelig, I don't need to be loved; I just need to be close enough (and invisible enough) to watch the chaos unfold; more an amused observer rather than an active participant or paid-up member of an established scene.  

 

 

III.

 

For example, when at Charisma Records in 1984-85, I was both employed and not-employed; at the heart of the music business whilst never really belonging. I hadn't applied for a job in the press office and had no ambitions of building a career. 

 

Rather, I just found myself placed there thanks to the machinations of Malcolm McLaren who wanted me to act as a mole, letting him know what was happening behind the scenes during a very turbulent period when the Virgin shark was in the process of digesting Charisma, having swallowed the label in 1983.     

 

Then, in the 1990s, whilst doing doctoral research at Warwick University, I was both a member of the philosophy department and not quite part of it. Registered as a part-time student, I was based in London rather than resident on campus or living nearby. I was also co-supervised by a professor in the English department and that made me a bit suspect to some in the philosophy department.

 

I knew (and quite liked) Nick Land and even produced some artwork for the magazine Collapse at his invitation, but, again, was never really one of Nick's gang or involved with the CCRU as they accelerated off into the future.        

 

Finally, and by way of another example, between 2004-08, I spent a good deal of time at Treadwell's, in Covent Garden, seemingly a key figure on the pagan witchcraft scene, presenting over thirty talks at the store during this period on subjects ranging from thanatology to zoophilia - as noted by Gary Lachman in an article for the Independent [3].    

 

But, once more, despite my ability to look at home in an esoteric environment, I always felt like an enemy within (just a little bit too sceptical, too cynical, and too insincere to ever really belong).   

 

IV. 

 

In conclusion: I am and I am not Leonard Zelig. 

 

Whilst he transforms physically to fit in, I'm more of an intellectual chameleon: in other words, he has no fixed look; I have no fixed ideas. 

 

In our own ways, however, we both haunt cultural history by being everywhere and nowhere at once, reflecting the mood and the madness of the times. 

 

  

Notes

 

[1] The name Zelig is Yiddish of Germanic origin, meaning 'blessed' or 'happy' and has historically been associated with individuals considered to be favoured by a higher power.

 

[2] EDS is often caused by frontal lobe damage, often resulting from strokes, tumours, or degenerative diseases like dementia. Those with the condition not only copy the gestures and mannerisms of others, but also often use objects inappropriately; unable to resist the impulse to interact with their environment. Such behaviour, as one might imagine, can lead to awkward social situations and, in severe cases, can have serious consequences. 

 

[3] See Gary Lachman, 'Pagan pages: One bookshop owner is summoning all sorts to her supernatural salons', Independent (16 September 2007): click here. 

 

    

Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment

Old Nick himself

I knew Nick Land, briefly and not very well, in the mid-1990s, whilst I was in the Philosophy Department at Warwick as a Ph. D. student. In fact, Land was assigned to monitor my progress and act as someone to whom I could turn for guidance other than my official supervisor, Keith Ansell-Pearson.

Unlike many others, however, I failed to fall under his evil spell. In fact, if I'm honest, I found him somewhat unsympathisch and don't recall anything he ever told me that particularly amused or struck a chord, apart from the fact that it was, in his view, preferable to sell burgers from the back of a van than to build a conventional academic career. 

Having said that, and to be fair to Land, his Thirst for Annihilation (1992) is a book to which I often return and that's not something you can say of many other (if any) theoretical studies of Bataille and for a long time I characterized my own work as a form of libidinal materialism.

But it's not this text from long ago that I wish to comment on here; rather, I'm interested in his more recent (neoreactionary) writings and his provocative notion of a Dark Enlightenment which seems to involve people waking up to the fact that democracy is incompatible with liberty, equality is a theological conceit, human biodiversity something to be affirmed and capitalism something to be accelerated.

Now, to me, this sounds simply like a form of post-Nietzschean anti-modernism; for others, including Jamie Bartlett, it's a sophisticated neo-fascism spread online by over-educated, often angry white men worried about a coming zombie apocalypse and looking for an emergency exit.

Bartlett describes Land as an eccentric philosopher, which, obviously, he is; but then all genuine thinkers are eccentric, are they not? To be a conventional individual who upholds orthodox opinion and subscribes to moral common sense is to be a bien pensant, but never a truly perverse lover of wisdom.   

Bartlett also complains that Land's thinking is difficult to pin down. But again, I might suggest that it's not usually a sign of lively philosophical intelligence when one's ideas have all the vitality of dead butterflies.

As to the charge that Land is a racist (the worst form of heresy to those who subscribe to and enforce a universal humanism), well, if he is, it's certainly not in the ordinary or banal sense. Indeed, Land is at pains to demonstrate how the latter rests on a grotesquely poor understanding of reality and utter incomprehension of the future that is unfolding (a future in which genomic manipulation will dissolve biological identity in an as yet inconceivably radical manner making the concern over miscegenation and skin-colour seem laughably old-fashioned).

So, without wishing to defend Land from his critics - something he is perfectly capable of doing for himself - I would nevertheless like to encourage readers of Torpedo the Ark to invest the time and accept the challenge of reading Land's work on Dark Enlightenment by clicking here.


Note: Jamie Bartlett is a journalist and the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos (i.e. part of the Cathedral). He regularly writes about online extremism and the perils of the dark web. His blog post for the Telegraph on Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, and the Dark Enlightenment can be read by clicking here. 

     

The Case of Maryam Namazie

maryamnamazie.com

As a graduate of Warwick University, I feel obliged to say something about the case of Maryam Namazie - the Iranian-born activist and campaigner against religious violence and stupidity - who has been barred from speaking on campus by the student union on the grounds that she's a highly inflammatory figure likely to incite hatred.

This ludicrous and deeply shameful attempt to suppress the right of a woman who receives vile death threats on a regular basis to challenge Islamofascism and defend the values of secular society is justified on the grounds that Muslim students have the right not to feel insulted or intimidated.

Ms Namazie is right to be angry about this; to be labelled as an extremist for opposing those who would veil half the world's population and behead a large number of the other half if they could, is peculiarly offensive and, what is more, does a great disservice to those men and women who are living under Islamic regimes and have no opportunity to dissent or speak out.  

Clearly, the University needs to step in and ensure that a few hypersensitive and politically ultra-orthodox students (or useful idiots as Richard Dawkins describes them) do not bring a highly respected centre of learning into disrepute.

The only heartening thing is to see many academics, feminists, and intellectuals come to her defence and, hopefully, with their public support, Ms Namazie will get to address the Warwick Atheists, Secularists, and Humanists' Society in October as planned. 

Afternote (28-09-15): After the University powers-that-be stepped in, the student union was forced to back down. An unequivocal apology was offered to Ms Namazie and she will now address the WASH Society as planned. Further details can be found in the Warwick SU News (click here).