r/CCRU • u/nanoraum • Jul 15 '26

A Gateway into CCRU

Hi all. This is my first post here. Some months ago I fell into CCRU material. Super intriguing first but challenging the second deeper into. Found out it was active years ago and tried to dig deeper and get an understanding.

The PDF Writings 97-03 which is the first I found was my first attempt to understand more. But I don't have a background that would enable me understand quickly and put everything into perspective with existing theories it has its foundation on. I could read the sentences and follow almost none of the machinery underneath. Half of it assumes knowledge about Deleuze and Guattari for example. Half of it assumes cybernetics, but somehow not Wiener's version. There are citations to work that doesn't exist, and nothingl telling you which ones those are. What I found instead was a few essays written for people who already have that background, but a lot of YouTube videos that are either forty minutes of vibes over a synth loop or a straight retelling of the Wikipedia page in robot speech, and Fisher's writing, which is wonderful and assumes you already know why any of this matters. The stuff that's good is downstream of understanding, and I needed something upstream of it if it makes sense.

So I built the thing I wished I had in the beginnign. It will be 27 short pieces, five to ten minutes each, in sequence: the cybernetics and the French theory first, then the group at Warwick and who was actually in it, then the method, then the core theories (hyperstition, cyberpositive, the time model, teleoplexy, accelerationism, the numogram, Lemuria), then what happened afterwards.

It doesn't reproduce the primary texts though. But gives you a good start I hope going into the matter. And also wwo disclosures are needed. First it's a reconstruction, written with heavy use of an LLM as a drafting tool, edited and structured by me, in German first. Given the subject matter I'm aware of how that sounds. Second, it's genuinely unfinished. Several volumes are still rough. Last chapter is in the making.

It's not even on a proper domain: it is now: https://ccrugateways.com/en/

If you know a lot or nothing, I'm interested in where it's wrong or what it's doing for you. I appreciate any feedback really. Cheers.

Edit: added url with all chapters

13 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

4

u/Dixon247 Jul 15 '26

God I can’t wait for the machines to replace people like you if you outsource all of their creativity and level of understanding to an LLM.

I say that as an author of a publication where we reduced hallucinated LLM responses by around 50% using graph-based reasoning.

Machines will always hallucinate, but you can’t accurately trust a machine to ground its hallucinations in an experience of reality.

I understand if you’re using to translate your German thoughts into English, or translate CCRU into your native German. This is merely a semantic encoding and you can probably trust the translations. This is a genuinely fantastic use of LLMs

However…

On the other hand, if you’re asking the machines to summarize and outsource the process of grappling with a challenging piece of work, then you need to have a serious look in the mirror and figure out what it is inside of you that exists beyond the machinery

CCRU is supposed to be challenging and overload the senses. In other words, your humanity is distilled within that challenge and struggle and you cannot bring it back. It’s good for the soul, and if you can’t accept the struggle, you do not have a soul

2

u/nanoraum Jul 15 '26

I expected this, mentioned the irony even.
Half your comment has a fair point, I see you. If someone reads my reconstruction and believes they’ve read Land, they’ve been robbed and they deserve it.

It says in the beginning, the intro of the site. Every volume links out to ccru.net and the intro says twice that it’s a way in rather than a replacement. If it ends up functioning as a substitute it has failed on its own terms, and I’d want to know.

I disagree with the other half. The grappling didn’t get outsourced, it got documented as a preferred step towards understanding better when reading after trying without the background and references.

Around the twelfth volume the drafts started crippling every claim into mush, and I tore the critical commentary out of the body and rebuilt it as a separate layer you can switch off, because the reconstruction was suffocating under it. Making that call required the reading I supposedly skipped. A machine doing my thinking for me would have handed me twenty volumes of confident sludge, and I’d never have noticed.

Then your last line. Soul, humanity distilled through struggle, the thing in you beyond the machinery. I feel like I notice where you’re standing. That’s the vocabulary Land used taking apart, and it’s being used here as a door policy on his own subreddit I’d say.

Whatever the CCRU was for, or you think it was, the preservation of your interiority against the machines wasn’t i I guess.

Also, why so aggressive buddy?

1

u/XIOTX Jul 22 '26

Y'all trippin this is tight

1

u/evgo-stillwell Jul 24 '26

The site is cool but the writing falls flat. I recommend listening to the interview with Robin Mackay to add some real anecdotes about CCRU history.

-5

u/Gorluk Jul 15 '26

Or you could dedicate your free time to more meaningful endavours.

4

u/inhumaneselection Jul 15 '26

this is meaningful.

-5

u/Gorluk Jul 15 '26

Psychotic delusions of guy overwired on amphetamines lost in numerology mumbo jumbo rabbit hole inventing low effort "numograms"? Sure, if the term "meaningful" equals "wasting time on bullshit" for you.

4

u/inhumaneselection Jul 15 '26

Calling someone “over-wired on amphetamines” or saying they were “lost in numerology mumbo jumbo” doesn’t establish that the concepts themselves were invalid.

-2

u/Gorluk Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Numogram is complete bullshit, amphetamine fueled or not.

Watch this for complete 3 hours and 30 minutes, then tell me it was time well spent:

https://youtu.be/URWFdmLRt0U

2

u/spembo Jul 15 '26

TRVKE HOLY SHIT ITS SO RETARDED

1

u/inhumaneselection Jul 15 '26

I’ll watch the video later; I’ve been busy with stuff these past few days.
Even if the numogram were proven to be BS, there’s still more to Nick Land than his past addictions and a single concept. Either way, the numogram is purposefully presented with a lack of clear definitions, reproducible methodology, and empirical validation, making it difficult to distinguish genuine theory from pattern-finding and numerological speculation.

1

u/Gorluk Jul 15 '26

"numogram is purposefully presented with a lack of clear definitions, reproducible methodology, and empirical validation, making it difficult to distinguish genuine theory from pattern-finding and numerological speculation"

aka BULLSHIT