dark enlightenment

dark enlightenment

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.
Bladerunner (1982)

The excellent The Dark Enlightenment by Nick Land is a must read for every media theorist, designer and researcher. Land was one of the researchers of the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit (CCRU) at the University of Warwick in the 1990s. A group of thinkers that shaped buro neue. Land’s Meltdown is one of the most important essays on the new world ever written.

The Dark Enlightenment is a political piece. A piece about the past, the now and most of all about the future. In the last sentence Land concludes: “it’s time to move on”.

“There is no essential difference between learning what we really are and re-defining ourselves as technological contingencies, or technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise, scientifically-informed transformations. ‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of the genome – for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect coincidence.”

As mentioned before The Dark Enlightenment is a must read.

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