Nick Land: the Alt-writer

My PhD supervisor turned out to be satan

by Nicholas Blincoe / May 18, 2017 / Leave a comment

Nick Land (YouTube still)

It is quite something to discover, a quarter of a century too late, that your old PhD supervisor is satan. I was a 24-year-old research student at Warwick when I met Nick Land. He was just four years older and brilliant, if remarkably immature even by my twenty-something standards. He disappeared around the turn of the century, landing in Shanghai, and I heard nothing more of him for years. I never expected him to resurface as one of a select group of bloggers who informs the worldview of Steve Bannon—profiled in this month’s Prospect—and the direction of the Donald Trump White House. An article in the Atlantic in February traced the evolution of the alt-right back to a circle known as NRx, or neo-reactionaries, that includes Nick alongside others with spooky death metal handles like Mencius Moldbug.

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Comments

DX
August 9, 2017 at 07:05
The use of the "satan" needs justification.
io
November 5, 2017 at 23:06
He doesn't live up to the satan description in your writing. Democracy isn't a religion. It's a form of organizing government. The worship of it is to engender loyalty of the masses. Clearly there are a lot of people making good arguments against it. The data also shows that democracies perform quite horribly in countries and cities with low IQ populations. Also, China is a concrete rebuttal to the notion that democracy must be the one and only path to modernization. Formulate better arguments.
TR
November 18, 2017 at 19:43
For this author Nietzsche is 'Tolkien crap' and Burroughs 'immature'. Well, for established (mostly anglo-saxon) idiots, both in the world of philosophy and literature, they certainly are, even nowadays. Bigotry of the Chaplains, in their Ivory Towers, will be reality-checked once again.
Stephen
December 14, 2017 at 08:00
I quite enjoyed your article, it gives me a lot of background on the Nick Land phenomenon. Some small criticisms: referring to Nietzsche as only "Tolkien crap" is disingenuous. For one, I think it may be lost on some readers what you mean by Tolkien crap. I believe you are referring to the theory that Tolkien was a racist, and his different races in his book are in support of racial hierarchy. This is essentially a misreading of Tolkien's book as some kind of allegory, which is the one thing he absolutely hated when people do. He meant it only to be a story. Secondly, your comment about Nietzsche is even more problematic, if more justified. Identifying Nietzsche only with the ideology of the "strong should prevail over the weak" is a very big misinterpretation of his work based on how Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche (his sister) put together his work after he went insane, and then how the Nazis misused his work. Nietzsche deplored anti-Semitism, and famously broke with Wagner because of Wagner's support of it, hated nationalism, etc. Even so, the extent to which Nietzsche is still misused and embraced by the right wing makes your comment about Nietzsche lamentably understandable.