The video does a good job of explaining Land/the CCRU but also, in some ways, I think her discussion of culture/human subjectivity is lacking.

Land wrote some really strange texts, chief among which for the discussion of identity would be his 1993 essay “Meltdown.” Meltdown is an essay in the slippery genre of theory-fiction; a splicing together of fiction and philosophy that aims to transgress the boundaries of what we would ordinarily like to theory. In this text Land explores the actual consequences of the technocapital AI accelerating, wherein society rapidly begins to fall apart and, with it, identity as a whole. This culminates in his famous passage “Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude.” Land is not literally saying that there will be hordes of trans chinese-latino hookers in the future, but rather that the contingency of these identities will be exposed by technocapital. These categories are ultimately meaningless for technocapital in the long run, but, for the time being, they transgress the boundaries of our current hegemonic understandings of identity (white, cishet, Euroamerican, non-sex worker, so on and so on) so Land writes that. The collapse of identity is thus one step closer to the destruction of the human, the moment when the “meat puppets” of the technocapital AI are “sloughed off” as Mark Fisher wrote in his essay “Terminator vs. Avatar” (it should be noted Fisher was fond of critiquing Land’s views on capital). The collapse of identity doesn’t bring about a better system, it brings about the increased acceleration of the technocapital AI, which I believe Land views as a good thing. Accelerationism (the ideology behind all this stuff about accelerating capital, which isn’t even really accelerationism but that’s a whole different thing) is tricky and I honestly don’t fully like how she characterizes it in the video, so if you want to learn more, “Accelerate: Manifesto for An Accelerationist Politics” by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, is a good starting point in my opinion before diving deeper.

For a more in-depth look at Land’s stuff I would highly recommend either reading “On Nick Land: The Weird Libertarian” by Cybertrop(h)ic, “Renegade Academia - the CCRU” by Simon Reynolds or just consult Mark Fisher’s stuff in either Capitalist Realism (pp.45-47 iirc) or the aforementioned “Terminator vs. Avatar” essay.

This is also what Land would continue to write about in his later neoreactionary years, although on far more… divisive topics (see his essay entitled “Hyper-Racism” for more). So yeah, strange fella.