In a 2014 blog post entitled Capital Escapes, Nick Land observes that many political questions boil down to one, simple binary:
Can capital flee, or not?
So long as capital can abscond from particular geopolitical territories, "governance" is ultimately moot. Moving might have transaction costs, but those transaction costs decrease—and the payoffs to escape increase—with technological acceleration. Technological acceleration asymptotically collapses every political issue into one.
An interesting implication emerges from Land's insight, which few have noticed.
So long as capital can escape, there is no self-interested reason to worry about the degeneration of government institutions. There may be altruistic reasons to worry, but—owing to the correlations between IQ, agency, and capital accumulation—anyone who adequately comprehends Western political degeneracy is ungovernable by Western political degeneracy. Individuals are no longer forced to share the same fate as other individuals, and nations are no longer forced to share the same fate as other nations.
Within America, it no longer makes sense to forecast the future in terms of shared national consequences. We'll see techno-capital acceleration toward material power and security on the one hand, and on the other hand we'll see ruination worsening daily. But the ability for high-capital, high-IQ population clusters to virtually and materially separate and secure themselves is ever-increasing for deep, structural reasons.
It is remarkable, then, how much of all public discourse is essentially meaningless. Just about every author, news anchor, influencer, and "thought leader" assumes the framework of some shared, national fate.
Instead, we must learn to make what Land calls "split-future forecasts." In his above-mentioned essay, recently collected in Xenosystems (Passage Press 2024), Land elaborates:
"If capital cannot in reality flee, then progress and regress are simple alternatives. Either nations advance as wholes, in a way that compromises—on an awkward diagonal—between the very different optimisms of Whigs and socialists (Andreessen), or they regress as wholes, destroying techno-economic capability on the down-slope of social degeneration (Greer). Only if capital escapes, or practically decouples, does it make sense to entertain extreme pessimism about socio-political trends, alongside a robust confidence in the momentum of technoeconomic innovation. The escape of capital is thus an intrinsic component of split-future forecasts, in which squalid ruin and techno-intelligenic runaway accelerate in inversely-tangled tandem (Cyberpunk, Elysium)."
Ten years after Land wrote this essay, the fundamental durability of cryptocurrency leaves little doubt about the all-important political question.
The continued persistence of self-enforcing distributed ledgers suggests that capital has already been durably deterritorialized.
As new functional capacities are built with blockchain systems—radicalizing a process for which Bitcoin was only a proof of concept—it is high-time that we start learning how to make "split-future forecasts."
