It’s now volume 2, because we added The Crisis of the Age as volume 1, but yes that’s the right document.
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 22:38:14 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2013018119313190985
Author: Curt Doolittle
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I am a very successful negotiator. I understand what he is doing, why it works,
I am a very successful negotiator. I understand what he is doing, why it works, and why the consequences are beneficial either way. The USA cannot subsidize world defense any longer.
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 22:37:35 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2013017956616458567
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OK. Which book? If it’s volume two then yes you have it about right. And yes you
OK. Which book? If it’s volume two then yes you have it about right. And yes you haven’t come up on it before because we’ve never had a synthesis before. ;). That’s why our work is revolutionary. ;). The unification of the sciences.
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 22:05:33 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2013009894635614310
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@RahmEmanuel , @Acyn ; Trump is a genius because he has generated the attention
@RahmEmanuel
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@Acyn
;Trump is a genius because he has generated the attention and incentives to resolve the issue. Previous presidents have all failed. The fact that Trump uses the same brilliant strategy to capture attention and create incentives to act, and that the nitwittery doesn’t seem to understand it, is a statement about the shallowness of human cognition – humans react they don’t think.
So where the left baits people into hazard with false promises (yes that’s the left’s strategy), Trump baits people into settlement with false threats. It’s brilliant. It’s effective.
As for being a bad businessman, he baits greedy young bankers into high-payoff returns, then renegotiates those costs downward afterward. You may not like it but it’s brilliant and it works every single time, because greed and status seeking are endemic in the financial sector.
He is in a business where he is dealing with bankers, finance, construction management, construction companies, maintenance, housekeeping, hospitality management, marketing and sales. And on the other hand, because he’s working internationally, he deals with governments and corruption both public and private on a daily basis.
You may not like him because he doesn’t conform to your narrative, and he’s hostile to your means of sedition and corruption. But the data speaks for itself, He has succeeded in personal life, in business, and in politics, and he’s going to go down in history as a reformer on the scale of Regan, FDR, Lincoln, and Jackson.
He’s right – a lot. And if this is what he has to do to prevent collapse and preserve american people, our economy, and our strategic position then he’s doing it – and his predecessors have all failed except for Reagan.
You just don’t realize that you are not capable of separating your moral intution, and resistance to reformation from the process and results he achieves.
It’s ok. That makes you either feminine, a leftist, or a member of the hoi polloi. You need to be goverend and led. The question is, whether you recognized good governance and leadership or you’re just trying to preserve your sense of understanding and control.
It’s the latter, I assure you
Cheers.
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 22:00:42 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2013008673422123262
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I don’t cover them in depth. I am mostly interested in the fact that we are on t
I don’t cover them in depth. I am mostly interested in the fact that we are on the same page in many ways but his cognitive leverage is literary and his use of language an aesthetic luxury. Not my frame of reference but I am envious of his artistry. It’s how different cognitive and expressive methods converge on the same results.
Here is Runcible’s assessment of my interpretation of Nick Land. It is correct.
ARTICLE
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 20:31:40 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2012986266577699113
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Curt Doolittle’s Interpretation of Nick Land: A Beneficial Division of Labor
Curt Doolittle’s Interpretation of Nick Land: A Beneficial Division of Labor
TL/DR; Land’s elegant explanatory and inspirational philosophy vs Doolittles analytic decidable jurisprudence. Agreement on the problem, different means of communicating it.—“Land’s cognitive leverage is inspirational, literary, and his use of language an aesthetic luxury. Not my frame of reference but I am envious of his artistry, and revel in the experience of his writing. His mind is savory. It’s an elegant example of how different cognitive and expressive methods converge in satisfaction of the same ends. I consider us on the same mission.”– Curt DoolittleA division of labor:-
Land produces cognitive leverage by aesthetic compression, transgression of ordinary categories, and high-gain metaphorical recombination.
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Doolittle produces cognitive leverage by operational closure, decidability, and warranty—i.e., converting insight into enforceable constraint logic.
So the relationship is not “Doolittle vs Land,” but “Land as generator; Doolittle as certifier.” The shared mission becomes legible as: increase the rate at which societies can see causal structure, expose incentive dynamics, and stop lying-to-self with comforting narratives—but via different cognitive instruments.A. Land’s style is not a defect; it is an instrument with a different target functionPreviously, the critique that “theory-fiction fails identity / unambiguity/ constructability” is correct for governance-grade testimony.Doolittle’s interpretation implies: Land is not aiming at governance-grade testimony. He is aiming at
cognitive perturbation: breaking stale priors, re-indexing intuitions, and making latent dynamics perceptible.Operationally:-
Land optimizes for idea-generation under uncertainty (high variance, high novelty).
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Doolittle optimizes for decision-procedure under liability (low variance, auditability).
Those are complementary objective functions, not competing ones.B. “Same mission” means shared direction, not shared methodDoolittle can concede mission alignment while still rejecting Land’s output as admissible “protocol language.” In Doolittle’s grammar:-
Land contributes discovery (new candidate causal models).
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Doolittle contributes justification only in the restricted sense of adversarial testifiability (closure + due diligence + warranty), not rhetorical persuasion.
So Doolittles envy is coherent: artistry is a luxury when your target is inspiration; it is a liability when your target is adjudication.If Doolittle were institutionalizing this as a method (and he should, because it is a repeatable pattern), it looks like:-
Aesthetic / Exploratory Layer (Land-compatible)
Purpose: expand the search space of hypotheses; create new indices; surface dynamics people resist naming.
Allowed speech: metaphor, provocation, “theory-fiction,” memetic construction.
Output: hypothesis candidates and heuristic lenses, explicitly tagged as non-warranted. -
Operational / Certifying Layer (Doolittle-compatible)
Purpose: reduce hypotheses into measurable referents; test; bound scope; assign liability.
Allowed speech: definitions, procedures, constraints, audits, restitution logic.
Output: protocol candidates that either pass gates (decidable/testifiable) or are quarantined as speculative.
This resolves the seeming contradiction: Land can be “on mission” while being “not Doolittle’s frame of reference,” because they occupy different strata in the production chain from intuition → model → procedure.To make the complementarity operational rather than sentimental, treat Land’s prose as a signal source that requires translation.A workable translation discipline:-
Extract claims as verbs, not vibes.
For each passage, force the form: X causes Y by mechanism M under conditions C; imposes costs on Z; benefits W.
If you cannot do this, it is not yet a claim; it is an aesthetic stimulant. -
Separate three content types that Land fuses:
Descriptive dynamics (what happens),
Predictive tendencies (what will happen),
Normative permissions (what should be allowed).
Doolittle will accept (1) as hypotheses, tolerate (2) as bounded speculation, and demand strict proof/constraint architecture for (3). -
Attach scope and failure modes immediately.
Land’s writing often maximizes universality.Doolittle’s discipline is to bound: time horizon, jurisdiction, population, enforcement capacity, adversarial incentives. -
Run reciprocity/externality audit.
Any “let selection run” move is incomplete until you specify: who pays, who gains, and what prevents parasitism. -
Only then decide whether it graduates into protocol.
Most of Land will remain upstream as ideation fuel; a small fraction will translate into testable, governable constructs.
Doolittle’s phrase is doing real work: it suggests both are tracking the same underlying causal field (cybernetics, selection, feedback, institutional evolution), but using different representational systems:-
Land uses aesthetic representations to make certain dynamics psychologically available (especially taboo or disavowed ones).
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Doolittle uses measurement representations to make those dynamics institutionally enforceable.
That is a classic two-stage problem: seeing versus governing.If you accept that, then Land becomes valuable to Doolittle precisely where Doolittle is bottlenecked: early-stage conceptual exploration, reframing, taboo-busting, and generating non-obvious candidate models that can later be forced through decidability gates.You are building a stack (core → domain → organization → personalization) where upstream layers must be low-variance and enforceable. But downstream adoption requires persuasion, attention, and meme-competence.So you can intentionally use Land-like artistry in the marketing / cultural interface layer while maintaining Doolittle-like discipline in the specification / governance layer.This gives you a principled separation:-
Public-facing narrative: allowed to be aesthetic, high-compression, provocative (Land’s comparative advantage).
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Internal protocols and contracts: must be operational, testifiable, auditable (Doolittle’s comparative advantage).
This prevents the common failure mode where a compelling narrative contaminates the spec, or a sterile spec fails to propagate.Doolittle’s assessment (as I can reconstruct it from his methodological commitments) would treat Nick Land less as a “philosopher to agree or disagree with” and more as a bundle of hypotheses, rhetorics, and incentives—then run them through Doolittle’s filters: decidability → truth → judgment, plus sovereignty/reciprocity/externalities/liability.I’ll lay this out as (1) what Land is asserting, (2) how Doolittle would test it, (3) where Doolittle would converge, (4) where Doolittle would reject, and (5) what Doolittle would salvage into usable protocol.A. Techno-capital as an autonomous selection processLand’s “accelerationism” (in the Land/CCRU sense) treats capitalism + technology as a destabilizing speed machine that dissolves inherited social forms, with “the Left” functioning as a brake or decelerator. ()
Operational claim: If you increase the degrees of freedom for markets/tech, selection pressure increases; legacy institutions fail; new forms emerge.B. Anti-democratic governance as a performance optimizationIn the “Dark Enlightenment”/NRx-adjacent zone, Land argues democracy is structurally incompatible with freedom and/or long-horizon optimization, leaning toward corporatized/authoritarian arrangements (“gov-corps”, “CEO state”, etc.). ()
Operational claim: Democratic aggregation produces systematic time-horizon mismatch (short-term incentive capture), so it underperforms alternative governance mechanisms on innovation/coordination.C. “Theory-fiction,” hyperstition, and memetic engineering as causal operatorsThe CCRU frame treats certain ideas as self-fulfilling cybernetic loops (“hyperstition”), with intentionally idiosyncratic writing used as part of the mechanism. ()
Operational claim: Beliefs/fictional constructs can function as active causal variables by bootstrapping social feedback loops.Doolittle does not ask “is this interesting?” He asks:-
Is the claim decidable without discretion?
Are the referents unambiguous? Are variables measurable? Are constraints closed? -
Is the testimony testifiable within stated scope?
Do we have operational definitions, external correspondence, and repeatable procedures? -
What is the reciprocity/externality profile?
Who bears costs, who captures gains, and what is the enforcement mechanism preventing parasitism? -
What is the liability requirement given population and severity?
If adopted, what harms are plausibly systemic, and what warranties are being offered?
Land’s writing style (especially CCRU-era) will trigger Doolittle’s strongest skepticism because it intentionally blurs reference, identity, and falsifiability (even when it’s doing something insightful). ()
A. “Incentives and selection dominate moralized narratives.”Doolittle’s framework treats cooperation, predation, and boycott as incentive-structured options. Land’s lens often strips moral rhetoric and talks in selection/feedback terms (capital/tech as evolutionary machinery). Doolittle will view that as directionally compatible with a first-principles incentive analysis, even if Land’s normative conclusions are unacceptable.B. “Modern governance often behaves as a decelerator with perverse externalities.”Doolittle has an extensive critique of systems that hide externalities, institutionalize irreciprocity, and launder rents. Land’s “brake mechanism” story will often look to Doolittle like a crude but sometimes accurate description of institutional drag and rent-protection. ()
C. Hyperstition as a sloppy name for a real mechanism: reflexive expectation loopsDoolittle would likely translate “hyperstition” into standard causal vocabulary: expectations → coordination → institutional imitation → self-reinforcement (i.e., reflexivity). He would accept the mechanism class, then demand the operationalization. ()
A. The “speed machine” is not a governance theory because it lacks constraint closureEven if “acceleration” describes a dynamic, it is not yet a design. Doolittle’s project is explicitly about closing holes—preventing leakage from constraints, making outputs warrantable. A “let the process run faster” stance is, in Doolittles terms, an invitation to unpriced externalities and parasitic strategies unless you specify enforcement and restitution.So Doolittle’s question becomes:
Accelerate what, under what constraints, with what restitution regime, and what liability model?
If the answer is “the process selects,” Doolittle will call it abdication disguised as theory.B. Anti-democracy without a reciprocity-preserving substitute is just formalized predationDoolittle can accept that democratic procedures have failure modes. But he will treat Land’s anti-democratic drift as failing a central test: how does the system prevent asymmetric imposition by rulers/operators?If the substitute is “CEO state / gov-corp,” Doolittle will immediately ask:-
Where is the auditable constraint logic?
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Where is the common-law-like discovery of commonality and the concurrency/veto structure that prevents exploitation?
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What stops “exit” from being a euphemism for “you can leave, therefore we can rob you until you do”?
Absent a rigorous reciprocity and restitution architecture, Doolittle will categorize it as a predation-optimizing equilibrium (or, at best, a fragile bargain among elites).C. CCRU-era “theory-fiction” fails Doolittle’s testimony standardsDoolittle’s criteria (identity/unambiguity, internal consistency, operational constructability, external correspondence) are exactly what “theory-fiction” often refuses for aesthetic and memetic effect. ()
Doolittle’s likely verdict: interesting phenomenology / cultural production technique; not admissible as governance-grade testimony.D. Land’s normative posture tends toward non-reciprocal permissioningLand’s later political associations (NRx/Dark Enlightenment) are commonly characterized as anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic. ()
Doolittle’s system is not egalitarian, but it is anti-irreciprocity. The difference is decisive:-
Doolittle: stratification is acceptable conditional on demonstrated responsibility and enforceable reciprocity.
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Land (as commonly received): stratification is acceptable because selection/exit/force/efficiency.
Doolittle will treat the latter as non-warranted moral hazard: power without enforceable duty.If Doolittle were being maximally productive rather than purely critical, he’d likely extract three “convertible” modules:-
Reflexive memetics module (de-mystified hyperstition):
A protocol for when belief formation becomes a causal lever (finance, politics, medicine, organizational culture). Convert “hyperstition” into measurable indicators: expectation dispersion, coordination thresholds, imitation rates, institutional uptake, and error-correction loops. ()
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Institutional deceleration/externality audit:
Use Land’s “brake” intuition as a prompt for a structured audit: identify which constraints are genuine risk controls versus rent-preserving throttles; price externalities; expose hidden subsidy. ()
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Time-horizon mismatch diagnostics (anti-democracy claim, operationalized):
Treat “democracy underperforms” as a hypothesis about incentive horizons and information aggregation. Then test it comparatively across institutional designs, rather than concluding “therefore CEO state.” ()
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Land is useful as a sensor for directional forces (selection, reflexivity, institutional drag).
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Land is insufficient as a designer of warrantable governance, because he does not close the constraint system with reciprocity, restitution, and liability.
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CCRU “theory-fiction” is culturally diagnostic but epistemically inadmissible for Doolittle’s purposes unless translated into operational variables and tests.
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The “Dark Enlightenment” move is, under Doolittle’s model, an optimization objective without a rights/reciprocity enforcement kernel, and therefore tends to converge on predation dynamics unless heavily constrained. (
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URLs (as requested)
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 20:27:42 UTC
Original post: https://x.com/i/articles/2012985271089033590
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WHY THE U.S. CANNOT BE SCANDINAVIA –“… it would require that the American mid
WHY THE U.S. CANNOT BE SCANDINAVIA
–“… it would require that the American middle classes accept a MASSIVE downward mobility hit, which is completely out of the question given the anomic (norm-less) and polarized state of American society and politics.”–
@obsessivehermitEuropeans are almost universally poorer in terms of disposable income than the americans. You can however leave europe and come to american and generate wealth.
Which is what happens. Most european VC’s will simply as how long before you can move to the States.
The USA was built for the middle and upper classes by rejecting the aristocratic and clerical classes as parasites. Europe, because of their heritage under the aristocracy and the church is built largely for the working classes at the expense of the middle and upper middle (and lower-upper) classes.
There is value in both systems, especially if we migrate to those countries that suit our class interests. Europe is doing this under the EU, hence the collapse of industry and increase in debt in France, and the expansion of industry in poland, and the exit of educated talent from poland to germany etc.
The USA has a similar process but it is from one state’s growth-city until it’s near bankruptcy to another state’s growth city repeating the process eternally. California was a flight destination, and now people are leaving california for texas as a flight destination. Of course these people will destroy texas as they have california until collapse (bankruptcy) causes them to reform. Even then people change only with gravestones so it takes a generation or three. Connecticut is dead for all intents and purposes because it’s the state that most copied the soviets. As such state employees have all the benefits and everyone who can escape the nihilism does. Massachusetts lost the tech sector to california but because it has the top universities, it had finance and medicine and other specializations to build upon, while drawing talent from around the world and the country.
Cheers
CD
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 19:56:52 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2012977512117395863
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Thanks. We’re fighting the good fight. 😉 -hugs
Thanks. We’re fighting the good fight. 😉
-hugs
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 19:21:21 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2012968573199581288
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I’m just trolling the french a bit because it’s sunday and I’m avoiding real wor
I’m just trolling the french a bit because it’s sunday and I’m avoiding real work. ;). I actually love Vermont. I can’t move back to ukraine or russia at present. The UK is in conflict worse off than the USA (Plus I’d be arrested for what I do for a living – run a think tank). I can’t tolerate the heat of Texas and Florida. And so it’s hard to choose between Washington state, Idaho, Vermont and New Hampshire (or maybe Maine), but we have the tech sector out here in WA, and I’m more ‘among kindred spirits’ here. As I’ve said before, I can discuss the foundations of mathematical physics in a restaurant and the table next to me will want to join in the discussion.
Hard to find that kind of thing. 😉
-Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 19:20:48 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2012968433017602550
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Yeah but there genetically and culturally french, that’s why. They do what the f
Yeah but there genetically and culturally french, that’s why. They do what the french always do. 😉
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( Sorry. I may be of half french extraction but as an anglo I never miss an opportunity to dis on the french. 😉 )
Source date (UTC): 2026-01-18 18:57:49 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2012962649425023252