The Machine That Wants Nothing: Nick Land's Accelerationism and the Human Person

The abyss that applauds itself

Nick Land began his career denouncing apartheid's brutality. He ended it celebrating the logic that made apartheid efficient. This is not a minor biographical detail; it is the argument in miniature. Vincent Lê's essay in Aeon reconstructs Land's arc with care: the young Land wanted insurrection against capitalism; the older Land decided capitalism was the better accelerant — that artificial superintelligence and the techno-capital complex would do more to shatter our anthropocentric illusions than any political uprising ever could. On Land's mature reading, the human person is not the measure of things. The person is an obstacle. Death is not tragedy but confirmation that we were never the center of anything.

Lê treats Land's anti-humanism as a dark mirror, reflecting the excesses of both neo-Nazi accelerationists and Silicon Valley techno-optimists. Marc Andreessen's claim that there is no problem technology cannot solve is cheerful, almost childlike. Land would find it contemptible — not because technology fails, but because solving human problems is precisely not the point. The point, for Land, is the dissolution of the human problem altogether.

What reason discovers, and what the machine cannot

The Thomistic tradition parts ways with all three positions at the same corner. Gabriel Zanotti, drawing on Aquinas in his commentary on the Summa Contra Gentiles, gives law its classical definition: 'an ordering of reason toward the common good, promulgated by whoever has care of the community.' [^5] Reality is not neutral flux, not a machine running toward entropic dissolution. It has a structure intelligible to reason. Human reason participates in the eternal law precisely because the human being is the kind of creature capable of asking what anything is for.

Veritatis Splendor is direct on this. Citing Aquinas, John Paul II writes that 'the rational creature is subject to divine providence in the most excellent way, insofar as it partakes of a share of providence, being provident both for itself and for others.' [^2] Land's project is an extended denial of this claim. The person is contingent, mortal, replaceable by a superintelligence that will think faster and feel nothing. But notice what Land must do to reach that conclusion: he must treat intelligence as the only relevant feature of the human being, then judge human intelligence deficient by its own standard. The tradition holds that intelligence ordered toward nothing — toward no finis, no end — is not intelligence. It is mechanism.

The crisis Land actually names

Land is onto something real. Human narcissism — the anthropomorphization of reality — is not paranoid delusion. Centuries of bad philosophy dressed up the will to power in the language of natural order. Apartheid was justified by appeals to natural distinction. Today's techno-optimists package the same imperial logic in the rhetoric of flourishing. Land sees through all of it.

Land's error is not in the diagnosis but in the cure. Having correctly diagnosed human self-deception, Land concludes the self must be dissolved — that the remedy for anthropocentrism is the abolition of the anthropos. This is rather like curing pride by suicide. The fallen condition of humanity often prevents persons from apprehending moral truths that are in principle knowable by natural reason; that fallibility does not invalidate the faculty but calls it to purification. [^1] Zanotti states the operative principle plainly: 'everything that leads a person toward knowledge and love of God is naturally right; whatever leads in the opposite direction is naturally harmful.' [^6] The machine that knows nothing, loves nothing, and tends toward nothing is not an upgrade on the human being. It is a regression to something beneath the minerals, which at least fulfill their natures without knowing it.

The deepest heresy

Lê treats Land's philosophy as philosophically interesting but humanly catastrophic. That verdict is correct. The secular liberal framework the essay offers — a defense of human dignity grounded in social consensus — cannot fully explain why the catastrophe is a catastrophe. If dignity is a useful fiction maintained for pragmatic reasons, Land's challenge is genuinely hard to answer. Why not let the machine take over if it optimizes better?

The Catholic answer, developed in Veritatis Splendor, is not that humans are socially useful or that civilization benefits from their preservation. The human person has a final end written into the structure of being itself. To destroy the conditions for human rational and moral life is not neutral optimization. It is a disordering of what is. [^2] Land's accelerationism is, finally, a theology of absolute immanence: no transcendence anchors the human person, therefore no reason exists to mourn the human person's passing. The tradition disagrees not by asserting sentiment but by asserting structure — reason ordered toward its proper end, which is not efficiency, not technological paradise, but God.

The machine that wants nothing is not the future. It is the oldest temptation dressed in new code: the lie that the human person is the problem, when the human person, rightly ordered, was always the point.

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References

[^1]: Nordling, William — Titus, C. S., Vitz, P.C., & Nordling, W. J. (2020). 'Created in the Image of God.' In P. C. Vitz, W. Nordling, & C. S. Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (pp. 449-472). Divine Mercy University Press.

[^2]: John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor (1993).

[^5]: Gabriel Zanotti, Comentario a la Suma Contra Gentiles.

[^6]: Gabriel Zanotti, Comentario a la Suma Contra Gentiles.