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Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land

You’re basically one of the leading thinkers of what we might call the school of thought that’s known as accelerationism. Accelerationism is something like the view that contemporary history is changing at an exponential rate, technologically and economically, and that this rate of change confounds nearly all of our traditional concepts for thinking about society and economics and politics. If someone on the street walked up to you and asked you “What is this whole accelerationism thing?” is there a kind of key essence or upshot that you would add to what I just said?

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Alien Capital

There is a famous scene in the movie Alien where engineer Brett is chasing a cat in the space ship’s engine room and unexpectedly runs into an alien. So do the spectators, who see an adult alien for the first time—even a bit sooner than the character since the creature descends from the ceiling behind Brett’s back while he is staring into the camera and courting Jones, the cat. I believe our attitude towards capital to be quite similar—we are Brett the moment before he turns around, we sense something unbearably, monstrously alien behind our back, yet we still behave as if we were only chasing a cat. The alien capital in the title stands for alienness, for the eighth passenger aboard a spaceship with seven humans. The capitalist economy we are more familiar with also encompasses classes, entrepreneurs and employees, banks and finances etc. and something else, something alien.

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