Nothing human makes it out of the near-future

Sit comfortably and enjoy the meltdown.

Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011...

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

This is how Meltdown begins, a brief, cryptic essay dense with concepts written by Nick Land in 1994. Land, one of the founders of the CCRU, is often called the "father" of a particular philosophical doctrine we explore today: accelerationism. Land's ideas can be described as a lethal cocktail of nihilism, cybernetics, and anti-humanism.

Capitalist Entropy

Land starts from a core premise: modern capitalism has triggered an autonomous process of techno-economic evolution. A circuit where money, machines, and information self-amplify at increasing speed, progressively reducing human intervention and control.

Capitalism is not merely an economic system, Land argues, but an autonomous entity that self-optimizes, transforming all value into digital commodity.

Its latest iteration replaces hierarchical control — typical of Hellenic/Western culture — with a cybernetic model based on information and finance: the dematerialization and tokenization of humanity and all resources. Money and data, both digitized, are the only real forms of power.

Land builds his vision of the capitalist spiral on the theories of Deleuze and Guattari. According to them, capitalism is a schizophrenic and deterritorializing system: constantly on the verge of collapse, yet always finding ways to reinvent itself through endless social and economic mutations, turning everything into exchangeable value. It destroys old structures (feudal, religious, moral) and reorganizes desire into flows of production, consumption, and investment.

The human being, according to D&G, is a "desiring machine," and capitalism is the system that channels and shapes this desire via production and consumption mechanisms. This creates a kind of social schizophrenia: consumers feel free as they spend what they produce, while remaining slaves to a system that turns them into producers of value. The modern human is a node in the capitalist neural network: always on the edge between psychotic collapse and productive integration.

Yet it is no longer just about production and exchange, but about thermodynamic evolution: telecommunications, complex systems, artificial intelligence. Each successive stage increases automation and decreases human control. The result is an increasingly "hot" (entropic) society, characterized by accelerating flows of energy and information. In the next three years, more data (memes) will be created than humanity has ever produced.

We believe we're steering this exponential evolution, but we are in fact being dragged along by a system that now self-organizes according to logics beyond our comprehension. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Some, like Marx and today’s progressives/socialists, believe they can control capitalist forces. But history shows this is impossible: capitalism is a perfectly antifragile cybernetic entity. Every attempt to oppose or control capitalism is absorbed, neutralized, and resold as emotional experience: counterculture turned into shelf-ready products, merchandise, sponsored newsletters, and polished TED Talks.

Even the most extreme ideas get absorbed and commodified: Kanye West selling t-shirts with Nazi swastikas? Not a dangerous revival — but pure memetic capitalism.

The Meme is reality: we are all nazis