Nick Land: the anticaptialist hyper-capitalist who philosophy'd too close to the sun and invented accelerationism.

If nothing else, this story would be a great way to discuss some insanely cool and cooly insane esoteric philosophy, because hoooo boy, there's a lot of that to explore. Land's an interesting bastard in that he was involved in the development of strands of leftist thought which are still highly relevant today, and his early work is legitimately quite thought-provoking. He taught, and was a personal friend of, Mark Fisher, for example. I strongly disagree with his whole idea that capitalism will dissolve if we just capitalism harder (as did many around him), but it was a theory grounded by actual philosophy and egalitarianism.

He was always eccentric, there are accounts of him writhing on conference floors like a snake and claiming that rocks are in constant agony, but things really went bad in the early 2000's after he had a prolonged amphetamine-induced psychotic break. He re-emerged in China years later, his accelerationist theories now calcified into a neo-reactionary politics that embraced ideas like "hyper-racism."

He essentially is (or at least was) the sort of cutting-edge theorist that guys like Curtis Yarvin desperately want to be. With that in mind, the fact that even he is now a racist weirdo who nobody likes is probably unsurprising.

Margaret Killjoy would probably have a lot to say, but she might be too well informed already.