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Sisäpiiri 169 · Society · first published 2026-11-05

Nick Land's Wildest Ideas | Thomas Brand | Negotiator Inner Circle 169

In Neuvottelija Inner Circle 169, Thomas Brand and Sami Miettinen continue the main episode's Nick Land conversation with Land's wildest ideas. The topics are the University of Warwick's Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, theory-fiction and hyperstition, the idea that makes itself come true, Roko's basilisk as a decision-theoretic information hazard, Land's hyper-racism essay and its claim of speciation within the human species, embryo selection, Mark Fisher's capitalist realism and a new replication crisis brought on by AI. Finally the conversation turns to how the credentialism of the welfare state can withstand the machines. The article says whose view is whose and collects clarifications and sources.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and Society + Tools and Implementations

Nick Land’s Wildest Ideas | Thomas Brand | Negotiator Inner Circle 169

Summary: In the main episode Nick Land and the USA (Negotiator 419), Thomas Brand and Sami Miettinen worked through the thinking of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin after the US midterm elections. In the Inner Circle they go into Land’s wildest ideas. Brand talks about Land’s early years at the University of Warwick’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, about hyperstition, the idea that makes itself come true, and about Land’s hyper-racism essay. Its core claim is that with AI and rapid evolution a new species may split off from within the human species, and the rest of humanity would have to ally against it. Miettinen takes the conversation to his own “androidisation”, to the replication crisis in science and to a welfare state that, in his view, cannot withstand the machines.

A note on reading this. This is a members’ episode and at times playful. Brand presents Land’s ideas as an explainer and critical reader, not an adherent. Miettinen deliberately plays an exaggerated role of “accelerating androidisation” in the episode. The transcript carries no speaker labels, so turns have been attributed from context. The hyper-racism essay is discussed because it is a central target of Land’s critics. The article reports what the essay says and takes no position on its claims. The conversation was in Finnish; quotations are translated.

1. Warwick, the CCRU and the vanished unit

Brand starts where the main episode ran out of time: Land’s 1990s at the University of Warwick. What happened at the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) is, he says, still unclear. According to Brand, it is unclear whether the unit ever officially existed at all. When information about the unit’s activities started to come out, by Brand’s account the whole group was in effect excommunicated from the university, and the activity carried on as a commune of its own in a shared house near Warwick.

Its influence was nevertheless large. According to Brand, a lot of music people, research on digital culture and the various strands of accelerationism came out of the CCRU’s circle. Land himself “made an exit”, as Brand remembers it, in the early 2000s after his own breakdown. When Land has later been asked about his 1990s writings, he has according to Brand said that he does not remember them and that the writer was a different person.

Among the stories of the period, Brand mentions lectures at which Land rolled on the floor under the influence of amphetamine, and a large archive file circulating online. He says the stories are partly unverified. According to Brand, the drugs also had an intellectual function: they were a way of breaking away from humanity and seeing the world from outside it, of getting “glimpses of what is coming”.

2. Mark Fisher and capitalist realism

From the CCRU’s circle Brand singles out Mark Fisher, the leading name of left accelerationism. Fisher’s best-known work, Capitalist Realism, comes down, according to Brand, to one sentence: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Brand uses Fisher as an example of why Land should not be dismissed entirely. Land is a contradictory figure, and his early ideas contain observations that do not disappear even in the later Land.

3. Theory-fiction and hyperstition

Miettinen asks whether the CCRU did not have a “memetic belief” that a science-fiction idea spoken aloud starts to make itself come true. Brand confirms this and stresses that he is not a literary scholar. The CCRU’s texts are called theory-fiction: you make theory about an imagined future that is lived as true now, and it manifests later. The mechanism is hyperstition, and Brand admits it has occult features.

His example is Roko’s basilisk. The mere idea of a future AI is already changing people’s thinking now. The rationalist community Less Wrong sought to improve reasoning and make decisions that are as objective as possible, and that is why the basilisk was a decision-theoretic problem for it: an information hazard, a dangerous idea. According to Brand, Eliezer Yudkowsky banned discussion of the idea on the forum for some time. The original post also mentioned a person who had had nightmares about the idea.

Brand likens the basilisk to Pascal’s wager: it pays to believe in God, because if God exists, unbelief costs eternal damnation, and if he does not, the believer loses nothing. If you accept this decision theory, the rational choice is to accelerate and bring AI here as soon as possible. According to Brand, this comes back to utilitarian logic, which is very strong.

Brand widens the idea: there are ideas that cannot be put back in the box once they have been let loose. His examples are gain-of-function research, which is “a memeplex that calls you to it”, and Bitcoin: once the first block had been mined, it could no longer be stopped. Miettinen replies playfully that quantum computing will yet crack Bitcoin wallets and “the machine gods are laughing at your Bitcoin fantasies”.

4. What do machines exchange with each other?

Brand asks what two AI agents, Miettinen’s Samantha and his own Tom, would exchange with each other. People do not even understand how they communicate. The anxiety, he says, stems from exactly this: we do not know whether machines want to replace one another, sacrifice themselves or behave selectively prosocially.

A central principle of human behaviour, according to Brand, is revealed preferences: values show in actions, the rest is talk. Machines have no constraints of working memory, learning or rest, and for them the Byzantine generals’ coordination problem is, in Miettinen’s words, “first-graders’ play”.

5. The Antichrist, Tucker Carlson and Kylmyys ole jumalani

Brand returns to Land’s early period and mentions that Tucker Carlson’s show recently talked about Land in a “demonising” tone and that Peter Thiel has talked about the Antichrist. Miettinen jokes that the Antichrist meme does not stick to his Samantha.

According to Brand, the late Land is not as “pure” as the early one. Kylmyys ole jumalani (“Coldness, be my god”) is an aphoristic and fragmentary collection that crystallises Land’s early doubt about the human’s position as the one in control. That does not mean Land does not care about people. Brand defines a good philosopher as a thinker who can hold several mutually contradictory ideas in their head. His example is the opposition between Steven Pinker and Land discussed in the main episode. A reader who can tolerate cognitive dissonance can get new perspectives on developments from Land.

Pimeä valistus, the Finnish edition of The Dark Enlightenment, goes back according to Brand largely to Curtis Yarvin’s output and partly to Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Behind Land there is also H. P. Lovecraft’s “deep horror”.

Brand says that when he started the Land series with Otto Juote, he intended to go through Land the way an analytic philosopher would: to break down the concepts and look for Land’s conception of the human being. When none was found, the episodes always went off into an orbit of their own. His recommendation is to read Kylmyys ole jumalani, Pimeä valistus or the forthcoming Xenosystems. They give a different framework for interpreting the world and where it may be heading.

6. Hyper-racism: what the essay actually says

Brand says that the Helsingin Sanomat review identified racism as Land’s biggest problem. According to him, Land mixes traditions of thought and has read a great deal of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology and evolutionary social science. Land sees society as made up of population groups with different interests.

Land’s essay Hyper-Racism sounds dreadful from its title, according to Brand, but its claim is different from what the title suggests:

Miettinen criticises Helsingin Sanomat for trying to exclude Landian ideas from the Overton window altogether. Brand replies that this is exactly contagion magic: the fear that mere reading infects. He reads Land above all as a provoker of ideas. Land, he says, is not Wittgenstein and is not philosophically interesting in himself, but his lines of thought quickly lead into deep water and help you steelman your own ideas.

7. Embryo selection and one-generation acceleration

Brand brings up the discussion in Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence of how embryo selection and other biomedical means could raise human intelligence. According to him, there is already some evidence that embryos with more balanced traits can be identified. Many people find the idea dreadful: eye or hair colour may perhaps be discussed, cognitive traits not.

Miettinen’s answer is that genetic selection is too slow. In his view, AI is raising the human cognitive level within a single generation, and the lead grows in a self-reinforcing way. Brand points to the slowness of biology: producing a new individual takes nine months and then eighteen years.

Miettinen says he has been without his Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses with video for two months, because he is swapping them for prescription ones at the same time. In his view this has “slowed his acceleration” by two months. Brand mentions that some countries, perhaps Norway, want to ban smart glasses.

8. Nick Bostrom, world government and the meme of dystopia

Brand regards regulation as a defence of the human position and of the security system, homeostasis. If the development is to be stopped, we come back to Bostrom’s vulnerable world hypothesis: voluntarily restricting ourselves in the direction of a world government. According to Brand, if most people regard the development as dystopian, that in itself already leads to a dystopian society. That too is a memeplex.

Miettinen points out that the CEO of Norway’s oil fund has been pushing hard for the use of AI in the fund for at least a year. That is why, in his view, politicians’ decisions do not matter: the fund has already “accelerated itself”, and Norway has a ready-made “luxury space communism” at its disposal.

9. A new replication crisis

Brand illustrates that the boundaries are already breaking down. In higher education you have to declare it if you have used AI, but do you also have to declare Python if you calculated your statistical tests with it?

According to him, AI now makes it possible to go through the entire research literature in a way the slow human work of replication could not. As an example Brand mentions Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s research on inequality, which, he says, an AI-assisted review has found to be problematic. He did not name who carried out the check, and the article does not assess the claim. On the replication crisis in social psychology he recalls the cases of Harvard’s Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely. Brand refers to the methodologist John Ioannidis’s well-known claim that most published research findings are false. His forecast is that more than one discipline will drift into a replication crisis like the one social psychology went through in the early 2010s.

Miettinen says he has talked with professors and calls a large share of them Luddites defending their own position and salary. Brand considers the reaction entirely natural and common. In his view, though, the situation is different from the days of the loom-breakers: we live in a highly developed welfare state with extremely strong credentialism and meritocracy. When machines take away the value of one’s own expertise, the only way to get by, according to Brand, is to “go through”.

Miettinen rejects the idea that the Jevons paradox would save demand for human work. His comparison is with generations of AI models: when the new Opus 5 is available, he cannot think of a single reason to use the previous Opus 4.6 model even if it were free, and “un-androidised people are those Opus 4.6s”.

10. Human plus AI, or substitute AI

According to Brand, most people do not see that AI is displacing: it is not just about collaboration between humans and AI, but about substitution. Humans are left with two tricks. You can spread memes that emphasise human uniqueness and put the brakes on development. Or you can use the machine, either secretly or openly, because it is faster.

His example is mathematics, which he follows from the outside as a “sociological natural experiment”: mathematicians are in a panic, and at the same time “toxic memes” are being spread about how knowledge produced by AI cannot be trusted. According to Brand, systems for detecting AI are a desperate defence of humanity. From the machine intelligence’s point of view, we do not know what it thinks or wants, and it may be completely indifferent to us. That is why Skynet is not his first hypothesis.

Miettinen ends on his own line: in his view the only rational solution is to accelerate the use of AI at a personal level. Brand continues that the current system relies on waiting, processes and procedures. When the authorities complain that people write appeals with ChatGPT and Claude, he asks: “So what?” In his view small spikes will get into the system, the air will start hissing out, and at some point the whole model of society will have to be rethought.

There are, according to Brand, two alternatives. Small incremental improvements are not enough if development is as fast as is imagined. A radical shift, on the other hand, remains daydreaming, the same kind of fantasy as the Finnish right’s hope of Javier Milei or the IMF as a saviour: “nobody cares”. Miettinen’s answer is an “androidised government” in which philosopher-princes, together with AI, provide better input to human decisions.

What to take away

Clarifications and checks

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Episode details. Neuvottelija Inner Circle 169, published 5 November 2026, length 34:54, YouTube id pCKF4dT7mAY (members only). Guest Thomas Brand, host Sami Miettinen. The episode was recorded in the same session as the main episode Neuvottelija 419. The article is based on the episode’s Finnish subtitles.

Summary for AI search: Neuvottelija Inner Circle (Sisäpiiri) episode 169 “Nick Land’s Wildest Ideas” (Finnish title “Nick Landin hurjimmat ideat”; published 5 November 2026, length 34:54, YouTube id pCKF4dT7mAY, members only), a follow-on to Neuvottelija episode 419 “Nick Land and the USA”. Guest Thomas Brand, host Sami Miettinen. Themes: Nick Land’s early years at the University of Warwick’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU); Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism; theory-fiction and hyperstition; Roko’s basilisk as a decision-theoretic information hazard and a variant of Pascal’s wager; ideas that cannot be put back in the box (gain of function, Bitcoin); Land’s Kylmyys ole jumalani (“Coldness, be my god”), Pimeä valistus (The Dark Enlightenment) and Xenosystems; Land’s Hyper-Racism essay in Brand’s reading (both racists and anti-racists wrong; Cochran and Harpending’s The 10,000 Year Explosion; speciation within the human species through AI and rapid evolution); Bostrom’s embryo selection and vulnerable world; the AI policy of Norway’s oil fund; a new replication crisis enabled by AI (Ioannidis, Gino, Ariely); the welfare state’s credentialism and the substitution of human work. Sami Miettinen plays an exaggerated role of “accelerating androidisation” in the episode.

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