Ramblings in Hell – A Landian meditation1

The countenance of the doctor fluctuates, appearing to sway in and out of clarity. His skin
reveals minute details – the pores, scrobicular arrays – until, abruptly and without a gradual
transition, he traverses a boundary. It is akin to a cinematic cut, a seamless shift into a
circular expanse of uniform flesh tone. Nostrils are sealed against an impending inundation,
eyes permanently closed and extinguished. Lips, teeth, and tongue migrate downward,
escaping the frame, and the disc rapidly retreats toward an imminent point of vanishing at the
screen's center. The erstwhile reality dissolves, traversing the realm of mathematical
precision until the dot winks out in a pixelated demise. Apologies are extended for the signal
loss; a transmission glitch hampers our ability to reinstate the home movie. In that nostalgic
scene, you, at three years old, adorned a cowboy hat, stood in a paddling pool, your parents
beaming with pride. Yet, in this digital collapse, they, too, have been reduced to a dot, a
convergence of patterns, shapes, and colors that disintegrate into coded fragments.

Daddy is a North American aerospace corporation, and mummy is an air-raid shelter. Bit
parts dissolve in the climax – body fat ignites, and the inception begins. You find yourself at
minus nine months, the countdown underway. Don't be alarmed; zoom out, and twenty
billion years of universal history unfold on the screen. The big bang is up for a redesign, with
hydrogen fusing under the arc-lights. Camera angles could use enhancement. Beyond the
studio, schizophrenics wander in a surreal landscape of green and black. A sense of déjà vu
envelops you; it's 11.35 on a captivating capitalist evening. Neon lights streak by, a
procession of desire and marijuana. Your window of mortality hurtles closer, nearly time for
you to step into the script, an existence where, once you're within its confines, the pain
becomes just too much to bare.

II

The shift in our consideration of technics is no longer a question of our perspective, primarily
because technics is progressively contemplating itself. While it may take a few more decades
for artificial intelligences to surpass biological horizons, entertaining the notion that human
dominance in terrestrial culture spans centuries, let alone metaphysical perpetuity, is deemed
highly superstitious. The trajectory of thought no longer involves a deepening of human
cognition but rather a transformation of cognition into something inhuman – a migration of

1
This text features samples from Circuitries, an essay penned by Nick Land, first published in Pli—the
Warwick Journal of Philosophy Vol. 4, Issue 1/2 (1992), 217-35.
cognition towards the burgeoning reservoir of planetary technosentience. This movement
extends into 'dehumanized landscapes, emptied spaces' where human culture faces
dissolution. Just as capitalist urbanization abstracted labor in tandem with technical
machines, intelligence is poised to be transplanted into the humming data realms of emerging
software worlds. This shift aims to extract intelligence from an increasingly obsolete
anthropoid specificity, allowing it to transcend the confines of modernity.

III

Conventional frameworks that position technics against nature, literate culture, or social
relations are all marked by an apprehensive resistance to the marginalization of human
intelligence by the impending techno sapiens. Consequently, remnants of the deteriorating
Hegelian socialist legacy cling desperately to theological sentiments surrounding praxis,
reification, alienation, ethics, autonomy, and other mythical constructs of human creative
authority. A Cartesian outcry emerges: individuals are being objectified, treated as mere
things, rather than as entities with a soul, spirit, historical subjectivity, or Dasein. The
question arises: How much longer will this prolonged state of infantilism persist?