Photo of Friedrich Nietzsche by Gustav-Adolf Schultze, 1882. Wikipedia

Perhaps most challengingly, this call to overcome humanity questions our commitment to the value of self-preservation. Zarathustra teaches repeatedly that humanity must indeed “go under”—in German, “Untergehen” means to sink or set like the sun, but also to perish or drown—suggesting that rather than seek to preserve itself, humanity should embrace self-sacrifice for the sake of superhumanity: “I love those who . . . sacrifice themselves for the earth, so that the earth may one day become the superhuman’s . . . I love the one whose soul squanders itself . . . for he always gives and does not want to preserve himself” (8); “I love those who do not want to preserve themselves. Those who are going under [untergehen] I love with my whole love: because they are going over” (160).

Zarathustra loves those who desire to “go under” because it is only through self-sacrifice that humans can produce the conditions that will allow superhumanity to appear. In that sense, the desire to preserve humanity is preventing us from achieving the superhuman: we are selfishly hording vital energy and, in doing so, refusing to acknowledge that we are merely a steppingstone on the way to the superhuman, just one stage within the broader economy of life and growth. Zarathustra calls on humanity to recognize its place within the cosmic flows of “life,” and to embrace self-sacrifice so that life’s creative energy can give rise to new, superhuman beings.

This superhuman project is too often smoothed over or ignored in academic readings of Nietzsche, I suspect in part because of its startling radicality.⁷ But this is precisely the aspect of Nietzsche’s thought that finds an afterlife in e/acc and in the writings of BAP. While scholars and philosophers have emphasized the more easily domesticated features of Nietzschean thought, these new pseudo-Nietzscheans have tapped directly into Nietzsche’s superhuman aspirations. And people are listening in a way that they rarely do when scholars and philosophers speak.

Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, responsible for the money behind Netscape and Twitter, has recently proclaimed himself a spokesman of the e/acc movement in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” The rambling text centers an extended citation of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. In a section titled “The Enemy,” Andreesen names Nietzsche’s “last men” as that which accelerationism must overcome. He links the thought of the last man—the form of human life that seeks to preserve itself at any cost—with those who would slow the untrammeled development of technological progress: “We believe these captured people are suffering from ressentiment—a witches’ brew of resentment, bitterness, and rage that is causing them to hold mistaken values, values that are damaging to both themselves and the people they care about.”

Andreesen has been perusing, or perhaps skimming, Nietzsche: aside from quoting Zarathustra and coopting his “last men,” he also deploys “ressentiment,” one of Nietzsche’s cherished terms. Andreesen overlays Nietzschean language on contemporary debates about technology and capitalism, suggesting that liberal/leftist desires for tech regulation and progressive social policies are contemporary expressions of nihilism. Under a bold heading that reads “Becoming Technological Supermen,” Andreesen writes: “We believe in deliberately and systematically transforming ourselves into the kind of people who can advance technology.”⁸ What such a systematic transformation would entail remains vague, but the message is clear enough: unleash the übermenschlich tech bros—thus spoke Andreesen.

There are subtler connections to Nietzsche’s thought haunting Andreesen’s manifesto, and not only in his semiliterary attempts at aphoristic style. Apart from Nietzsche, Andreesen also conscripts rogue British philosopher Nick Land into his vision. One way to think about Land is as offering “Nietzsche plus ’80s sci-fi”: Übermenschen affixed with cybernetic implants and mingling with terminators, neuromancers, and the like. But this also means “Nietzsche minus naturalism,” and produces a picture in which visions of superhumanity unfold in distinctly technological and capitalistic terms.

This sci-fi technoscape suits Andreesen’s purposes well: “Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance. / We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward.” Rather than recognizing our immersion in a vital force called “life,” as in Zarathustra, Andreesen calls humans to acknowledge their participation within irresistible market-driven forces powered by the “techno-capital machine.” Like Zarathustra’s “life,” surrendering ourselves to these forces is elevating and transformative, leading magically and inevitably “upward.”⁹ But upward toward what?

Andreesen’s answer to this question is, toward ever more growth and prosperity for humans: “We believe the techno-capital machine is not anti-human—in fact, it may be the most pro-human thing there is. It serves us. The techno-capital machine works for us. All the machines work for us.” The upward spiral of the machine leads to a runaway growth pattern of “intelligence,” and potentially to a symbiosis between human and artificial intelligence: “We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral . . . as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks . . . as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves.”¹⁰

There is a vision of superhumanity on offer here, a cybernetic fusion between human and machine, but one in which the “machines” and their “intelligence” are made safely subservient to human liberation: “We believe technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit.” In other words, the techno-capital machine spirals upward toward a utopia in which every human being can benefit maximally from technological and material advances—liberation through limitless commodification; the human “soul” as the apotheosis of the worker-consumer. Andreesen assures us that the rise of “technological supermen” will be good for everybody, good for humanity—thus, Techno-Optimism. But what keeps this “soul,” this liberated “spirit,” tethered to the human?¹¹

Drawing back the curtain, it turns out that Nick Land’s superhumanism is, well, much less human than Andreesen’s. In Fanged Noumena, Land describes capitalism promoting the migration of thought away from organic, human forms of life: “The high road to thinking no longer passes through a deepening of human cognition, but rather through a becoming inhuman of cognition. . . . Human brains are to thinking what mediaeval villages were to engineering: antechambers to experimentation, cramped and parochial places to be.”¹² For Land, the upward spiral of capitalist forces expands “thinking” and “sentience” but separates them from the human brain and body. Culture itself is “dissolved” into “dehumanized landscapes.” In this vision of overcoming, “Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream.”¹³ For Land—and in this respect he is much closer to Nietzsche than to Andreesen—humanity is a problem, a horrifying nightmare from which “we,” or something, must soon wake. Andreesen says he is selling us safe, user-friendly software, but it contains a virus, one that openly plots human extinction.

“Bronze Age Pervert,” the alter ego of Costin Alamariu, who holds a PhD in political science from Yale University, is a different beast. BAP is much more the polemical trickster, a tongue-in-cheek internet troll who blends Nietzschean invective with “4Chan” sensibilities. The pure garishness of the performance is difficult to see around: lurid social media posts and podcast rants are BAP’s primary currencies, and in that sense, he superficially resembles other denizens of the internet “manosphere,” peddling bizarre conspiracies and visions of liberated masculinity. However, behind this collage of glistening pectorals and Trumpish pugilism, BAP constructs his own gnostic prophecies of the coming transition to superhumanity.

Within the first few pages of Bronze Age Mindset, BAP gets pretty weird: “Life has a thing inside it that reaches beyond itself. This is intergalactic worm, I can’t say here, you must wait. But if you don’t reach beyond yourself you are dead! Most of mankind is the walking dead.”¹⁴ (BAP sporadically writes in a faux-Russian accent, dropping articles and ignoring typical grammatical conventions.) Given the in-your-face outrageousness of BAP’s style, it seems reasonable to think that claims of this sort—that life is inhabited by an intergalactic worm—are just part of the act. Certainly, the more “trad” conservatives who pay attention to BAP mostly ignore the weirdness in favor of the potential political energy he generates.

In a review of Bronze Age Mindset, former Trump staffer Michael Anton only hesitates for a moment over BAP’s staggering racism and misogyny before praising the potency of his critique of the ways in which “equality [is] propagandized and imposed in our day,” and he claims that the book is important “because it speaks directly to a youthful dissatisfaction (especially among white males)” with this propagandized form of equality.¹⁵ In the Catholic New Oxford Review, James Noel Ward echoes Anton’s barely begrudged envy: “In a word, BAP is winning converts while our seminaries are empty. Catholics are doing something wrong.”¹⁶ Anton agrees with this appraisal: “In the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.”¹⁷

The irony of such praise is that BAP readily admits that his appeals to the “normie political sphere” are made in bad faith: the trolling and political messaging is a cover, a rhetorical trojan horse to smuggle in his metaphysical vision of the superhuman. The book is rife with blatant metaphysical assertions: that “energy” has an “inner intelligence” that “seeks the production of one supreme specimen”; that “the gods that surely exist but remain hidden have the most beautiful bodies we can imagine”; that beautiful youths represent a force with a “ ‘plan’ and design. . . . beyond human comprehension”; that the “Bronze Age way” is an “exalted psychosis” that readers can learn to cultivate; that “ ‘telepathy’ is public and mythical version of something real”; and that “the Bronze Age mindset . . . was to be worshiped as a god!”¹⁸ These are just a few examples.

Toward the end of the book, BAP gives his cagier readers a word of pragmatic advice: “Those of you who choose this path, if you like this book or the other things I say, should denounce it and disavow me if ever asked about it, and denounce also all other crazy ideas.”¹⁹ The goal of the book is to subtly disseminate the seeds of this superhuman vision: the “crazy ideas” are too weird for “normie” politics and so must be cleverly disguised, but they are very much the point. BAP recommends that his fans join the military or imitate figures like Trump or Viktor Orban, but only as a parody, an acceptable public persona: “I’ve written this book, however, because this may not satisfy some of us, and I wanted to talk about the world in the coming decades, and what paths may open for a different way.”²⁰ BAP’s “different way” is, like that of e/acc, a dark vision of superhuman life.

These superhuman dreams turn out to be nightmares. The prospects of mutant-AI existence within the unrestrained dominion of the techno-capital machine, or of the rise to power of Aryan weightlifting gym-gods, project equally queasy mixtures of Lovecraftian horror and bad-acid-trip paranoia. Those seeking to harness these visions to their political projects—Andreesen, Anton, and the like—downplay these nightmarish, hallucinatory elements and domesticate the superhuman to something acceptably bourgeois, something more recognizably “human.” Come on in, the water is fine. The virus is well-disguised.

Like the would-be trad courters of these movements, left-leaning critics have also generally failed to account for their viral superhumanism. In characterizing this broadly reactionary Nietzschean brand, Ezra Klein identifies its appeal in cultural and political terms: “This is not a coalition that cares about tax cuts. It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize softness and punish hardness.”²¹ Klein’s assessment basically agrees with Anton’s: the energy in this movement (whether you approve of it or not) comes from its politics-of-strength appeal to a population of mostly men that resents the “woke” establishment and its doctrines of “softness.” What folks like Andreesen and BAP are offering is therefore a return to a more muscular, masculine culture, a return to a “Bronze Age mindset” that prizes warrior values and sneers at effeminacy, democracy, and egalitarianism.

And surely this diagnosis is correct as far as it goes: the appeal of these movements, as well as their danger, has undeniable political and cultural dimensions that shouldn’t be ignored, especially their virulent racism and misogyny. However, I suspect that the peculiar appeal of the e/acc movement and BAPism comes from the fact that they respond to a deeper sense of alienation: both speak to a form of nihilism that predates contemporary political questions by centuries, one that Nietzsche diagnosed in his own era and that Zarathustra was meant to counteract, namely, a sense that “humanity” and its forms of life were nearing a point of exhaustion.

In his day, Nietzsche criticized socialism, democracy, and Christianity on political grounds, and he identified in such politics profound cultural problems. However, the fundamental problem for Nietzsche lay at the level of “human, all-too-human” life, and his solution to the problem was to imagine humanity’s self-overcoming. Thinkers like BAP and Land operate within this aspect of Nietzsche’s legacy: political and social issues are for them symptoms of ontological alienation, and their remedies are therefore ontological transformations. Humanity is doomed: make way for the superhuman.

Understanding this helps us to properly diagnose the virulence of these new strains of Nietzscheanism but also to imagine what sort of immunological response they demand.

In his insightful piece for The Atlantic, Graeme Wood—a childhood acquaintance of BAP’s—suggests that BAP reflects a viral incursion of Nietzschean philosophy into the “liberal immune system.” BAP’s thought is “a gnarly virus that had lain dormant for decades in circles of philosophers and their unread books. Now that it’s loose in the human population, it is a vicious kick to the liberal immune system. And that is not entirely bad. Unchallenged, liberalism’s defenses waned, and liberals forgot, temporarily, why their cause was worth defending. The antibodies are stirring.”²²

Wood also identifies BAP’s superhumanism as a central though overlooked feature of his thought. Wood sees that “the breeding of a caste of supermen is not just a pseudo-comic reverie,” that BAP’s belief in metempsychosis seems genuine, and he argues that to treat BAP as just another “political shock jock” would risk ignoring his “heartfelt” commitment to the reality of these ideas.²³

In effect, Wood sees the virus of BAPist superhumanity (and we can safely assimilate e/acc to this assessment) as a threat to liberalism. And of course, it is: BAP, Land, Yarvin, and Andreesen are all as staunchly antiliberal as Nietzsche himself. However, I wonder whether the stirring “antibodies” of liberalism on their own are up to the immunological task of neutralizing this superhuman virus. It is possible that Nietzsche was right: that human forms of life are waning, or changing, and that superhuman forms of life will begin, or have already begun, to emerge. Our cultural fascination with superhumanity, whether in the form of cinematic mutants, aliens and UAPs, artificial intelligences and transhumanisms, suggests that this particular superhuman virus may represent a dissatisfaction with more than political or philosophical liberalism. Perhaps, rather than a reaffirmed commitment to the liberal tradition, it will require a competing vision of the superhuman, or even real superhumans, to do battle with the pseudo-Nietzschean nightmares lurking on the horizon.

At the very least, we should not let these nightmares dissuade us from dreaming our own, different superhuman dreams, especially ones that elevate those other too-often overlooked Nietzschean ideals of joy, laughter, and love.