“Dissatisfying Customer Experience” as Amazon's Definitional Reign of Terror
Conversation with Nick Land on the Amazon Block, and the Cathedral vs. Political Economy and the PMC — TRANSCRIPT
With BLOCKED BY AMAZON: On the Left’s response to Charlie Kirk coming soon, we are pre-releasing some of the chapters to build some hype. What follows is a conversation that Ann and Dave McKerracher had with philosopher Nick Land.
We chose this piece to share today because, for all the new subscribers to the Theory Underground Substack, many of you have yet to hear about the Amazon block from last year. What better way to hear about it than when we shared it with Land?
This volume was supposed to release a month after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, as a quick response, and, at the time, included 19 contributors, including a piece by Slavoj Žižek. But Amazon blocked it. What followed was a Kafka-esque appeal process that we definitely lost. Now it’s finally coming soon, thanks to Amazon KDP’s number one competitor, Lulu. Get ready! BLOCKED BY AMAZON is in the publishing pipeline’s review process, we’ve already sent it off to the printers, and it will become available on July 1st, 2026.
David McKerracher
So Nick, I wanted to switch from the whole topic... Maybe we could just take a minute here to share the news. This isn’t new news — you already heard the news — but it’s worth going over again. We published, or tried to publish, a book. How long ago? Like a week and a half ago at this point?
Ann McKerracher
Yeah, about a week and a half, two weeks ago.
David
Yeah. It’s called On the Left’s Response to Charlie Kirk. This book has, let’s see, a good handful of authors [nineteen]. They’re across the political spectrum. So it’s not just a post-left book, it’s not a right-wing book. It’s got quite a few people who are of various tendencies of the left, who are critical of the left, but it also has pieces just reflecting on the general culture of censorship. For instance, we have an anonymous professor in there talking about how both the left and the right at this point are suppressing free speech in academia. The instigating event we’re trying to use as a springboard into deeper conversations was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and that book has been blocked by Amazon.
Some people go, “Oh, well, of course, who cares?” because they already know that Amazon’s woke or whatever, which is, by the way, not obvious to me. Just because they might be a little woke in the actual warehouses, that doesn’t mean you should assume the Direct Publishing service would be. I’m not even sure this is a woke thing. I don’t think it’s about the left position or right position on the culture war. I think it’s just a corporate thing. Ann, maybe you could lay out the chronological details a little bit more.
Ann
Yeah. The way the KDP publishing platform works: you submit your cover, you fill in all the details, you submit your manuscript, you set the prices. You click Publish, and then Amazon takes up to 72 hours to review it. In the past, with some of our Underground Theory anthologies, the book has been approved within 24 hours, and then it’s live. With this one, we got an email — instead of saying “Your book is approved and live,” saying “Your book has been blocked.” The only reasoning it gave was: “It may cause a dissatisfying customer experience.“ We were like, interesting…
Nick Land
“Dissatisfying customer experience.”
Ann
Yeah, that was it. On the actual KDP platform, the status of the book showed in big letters: BLOCKED. And we now can’t even access the back end. So all the information we put in — the description, everything — we’re basically locked out of that book information that we uploaded to the platform. Of course, we have the manuscript and everything saved elsewhere.
Two days later, they send a follow-up email reminding us that, after a thorough review of the content, your book has been blocked because it has caused a dissatisfying customer experience. So from “it may cause” to “it has caused.” And I’m like, what do you mean? The book isn’t available. No one’s read it.
Then another two or three days later we get one more email telling us our KDP account has been temporarily suspended, so now we can’t even access all of our other books. You try to log in and it says your account has been suspended because we have content that goes against the community guidelines and we have offensive content. To reinstate the account, you have to email us saying, “I have read the terms and conditions” — or “I have read the community guidelines and agree to unpublish anything that violates these rules.” I was like, okay, I’ll do this, because we need to be able to access our account, but also: Amazon, the book isn’t published. What are you doing?
I wasn’t sure if there’s just some automatic AI system going through these steps, flagging things. Or, like Dave was saying, maybe there’s a person approving these decisions. It was a weird thing. It wasn’t just like, “Oh, it’s blocked,” and then that was it. It kept disciplining us.
Nick
I had heard a version of it before in much less detail, so I’d been a little bit prepared, but I am absolutely flabbergasted on so many levels by this story. I really thought we were beyond this. This is like something from the very worst depths of the whole crazy mind-control culture that — I’m not going to try and say when it peaked, you know, 2017, 2018, something like that. But it’s just incredible. It’s so incredible I would have to suspect, and maybe this is just because I’m paranoid, that it’s a person, it’s a rogue person who is so pissed off about the current trends in the world that they are just lashing out in this insane, quasi-random fashion. I’ve got no basis for that other than my prejudices. It’s other madness. It’s other madness. And I so thought we were beyond this. I so thought we were beyond anything remotely like this, that I’m stunned. I’m stunned by it.
David
To that hypothesis — there’s a strong possibility that what I’m about to say does not in any way debunk it, and I’ll say why in a second. We have had at least three different names respond to our appeals. Two of the initial emails just said “Amazon Content Review Team.” But then on specific ones, there’s one name that is five syllables long and is definitely Indian in origin. I have no idea how to pronounce it. And then there’s another name that’s as normal to the American ear as Becky. So we really have a weird mixture of names signing off on these messages.
The reason that doesn’t debunk what you’re saying, though, is because, as I said with Ann, AI flags this, and then flagged content goes to review for a single person who’s sitting there eating potato chips and listening to music. They take a quick glance at it and they go, “Oh, I hate that,” and reject it out of hand. It could be that, instead of having to type out a rejection, AI does the rest of the work and then signs off with a randomly generated name. There’s no way to know — it could be a person, it could be AI, it could be a mixture. But if we were to be strictly literal, it sounds like there’s several people who keep looking at this and responding in agreement that this is bad and we violated something.
Nick
One of the reasons it’s so hard to begin to make sense of it is that there’s obviously much edgier stuff out there on Amazon than this volume. I had no sense at all, really, before hearing this story, that Amazon was at the cutting edge of this kind of censorious mind-control culture. I thought it was relatively loose, just based on the fact that I know what is trading through Amazon. I don’t want to name stuff because I don’t want to set off alarms and have people start hunting it down. But there are things I think would definitely have been in deep trouble in the depths of woke mind control that are now being shipped through Amazon completely easily. Which makes this case seem really, very, very hard to make sense of.
David
There’s not even any slurs or anything like that. And I know that you can publish slurs on Amazon KDP, so that’s interesting. They’re saying it violates their content guidelines, which, by the way, if you look at their guidelines, includes stuff like no hate speech — which obviously has been expanded to include so many things that nonetheless gets through. So if I say that this person calls that other person the F-word (I’m not going to use the word because I don’t want to get banned on YouTube, but), let’s say this person calls that other person the F-word, like, “Oh, that person is a real jerk, he called that person the F-word, what a jerk.” You can still get banned for that, as I just proved here on YouTube. It could technically violate stuff on KDP. But KDP does not block stuff like that. By most woke standards, that would be blocked, but KDP does not block that. So I had this assumption, like you, Nick, that Amazon was just like, “Yeah, publish what you want, guys.”
Nick
Part of the whole context of this, if we’re panning out a little bit. It’s not as though one whole set of responses to this story is, “Well, you’ve got to go somewhere else.” Obviously, just in terms of saying something to the world, there are lots of other places you can go that I think have an excellent standard now of free speech. Ignore the whole X thing because it doesn’t really do long content, but Substack seems to me extraordinarily open, liberal in the best sense. Medium too. But more narrowly publishing — Amazon’s monopoly is so crazy. There’s no way you can go and say, “Hey, Amazon’s a bunch of jokes, we’re going to take it to somewhere else that also has a thriving ebook publishing and marketing operation.” There isn’t this other.
David
No.
Nick
That just brings me back to the whole set of questions, like — isn’t that monopolistic power entirely dependent on maintaining extremely vigorous liberal standards? If people were going to take this story, and the reputation of Amazon was going to be based on this story, everyone is going to say, “You have to route around those assholes.” You’re just giving the North Koreans final say on what you can publish. It’s completely insane. Amazon has to see that.
I’ve no idea… Bezos, whatever you think of the guy, I’m not a particular fan, but I’m not a particular enemy either. I hadn’t got him on my list as someone who was engaged in this massive political censorship operation under the guise of doing business. I thought he was an opportunistic capitalist. And this is not opportunistic capitalist. This is something completely nuts.
David
On the level of mind control and this idea of, “Aren’t we beyond that 2017 through 2018 mind-control thing?” — I do want to get into this topic of what does this tell us about the Cathedral. But really quick, just for clarity on the situation. I’ve put a couple of videos out about this so far, but I haven’t read the email that I sent them.
When Ann sent them the agreement, just so we could get our account reinstated, we were basically saying, “Yes, we’ve read the community guidelines and we agree to not publish anything that violates them.” Once they sent us the email that reinstated us, I sent them this email:
“Dear so-and-so [the last person who had emailed, and Amazon Content Review Team], Thank you for reviewing my appeal and reinstating my KDP account. I appreciate the opportunity to continue publishing, and am committed to ensuring all my titles fully comply with your content guidelines and terms and conditions. To help me maintain good standing and avoid any future issues, could you please provide more details on the specific aspects of my content that were found to violate the guidelines? I reviewed the guidelines and believe my book aligns with them, but without knowing the exact concerns, it’s challenging to make informed adjustments. For reference, the title in question is On the Left’s Response to Charlie Kirk, which discusses political responses without promoting hate speech, illegal activities, or other prohibited elements. If this was a human review, I’d value any insights to better understand the process. Please let me know if there’s additional information I can provide. Thank you for your assistance. Best regards.”
That’s the most polite email I’ve ever sent anyone in my entire life. And this was their response: “Hello. As per our policy, we reserve the right not to disclose any type of information we consider sensitive data. We are unable to elaborate further on specific details regarding our terms and conditions beyond what is available in the following help pages. Regards.”
Nick
Just madness upon madness, to an extent that is completely unfathomable. What is going on there? Is it just that these people are lazy hacks, maybe outsourced lazy hacks, and this is their way of saying “I can’t be bothered to actually help you here”? Or is it something more sinister going on? It becomes close to a definitional reign of terror at the point where people are denied an explanation of what it is that they’ve been persecuted for. What is the purpose of that persecution? It just creates generalized terror. It’s like you’re supposed to be in a mindset where I don’t even know what I’m not allowed to say. A kind of paralyzing, preemptive anxiety that you might be somehow doing something wrong. It’s completely illegitimate, what is happening here at such a deep level. It’s really shocking.
David
So this would be the segue into the question about the Cathedral that I have for you and Ann. We were talking about this a little bit. I told her she doesn’t have to do any preparation for this, because she’s already thought a lot about the PMC, and the PMC is a good jumping-off point to then talk about the Cathedral. The Cathedral could be thought of as a certain theoretical way of going deeper into the conditions of what people are trying to get at when they say the professional managerial class. Would you agree with that?
Nick
I would directionally agree with that. My sense of the Cathedral is the fact it’s not being read deeply enough. I think it’s a really important, deep conceptual innovation that has happened. I’m attributing all of this to Moldbug. This is Moldbug’s Cathedral. It’s one of the actual concepts in his whole arc, and it’s a whole arc. There is serious intellectual greatness involved in that Unqualified Reservations arc to a degree I don’t even think Yarvin himself gets, in terms of what he’s done afterwards, in terms of how he seems to self-understand what he’s done. I don’t think he realizes how important what he’s done is.
So preparing for this, I completely unrealistically got an agenda here that would take us through the whole history of political economy until we get to the Cathedral, and then go through the history of modern Western religion until we get back to the Cathedral. This concept is the critical concept at the conflict of all the important traditions. The theological and the economic and the intellectual political-economic traditions of modernity come together in this notion. So that’s why I’m reluctant to just say, “We know cathedrals, we know what those assholes are, they’re the PMC.” That is kind of true, but the magnificence of the whole thing is really lost there, I think.
Ann
I’m pretty unfamiliar with your conception of the Cathedral as it relates to the PMC, so maybe you could just explain a little bit more for anyone who will be listening and, obviously for me, about that distinction, and what that means to you.
Nick
My comparative blindness on this is about the notion of the PMC, which, in a very impressionistic way, I see as also arising in a late stage of this long, deep tradition of political economy. What the PMC are is a group of people, and the Cathedral, maybe is a group of people. But I don’t know whether that is really the best way of conceiving it. We will do some cycling on this, because the whole thing is actually deep and intriguing.
Let me do an absolute race through political economy, which maybe serves a little bit for the PMC but is, I think, indispensable for the Cathedral. The first thing to say is: there used to be this thing, political economy. Political economy is a science, a discipline, an intellectual structure. Of course, for the people doing political economy, it’s also a thing — but that’s certainly not how it’s remembered. It’s remembered as being a particular intellectual edifice that crucially collapsed.
It’s an English-language phenomenon, and the French prototype for political economy is the Physiocrats. Political economy emerges by basically distancing itself from the Physiocrats, retrospectively, in ways that (Marx is very convenient) political economy says, “Oh, the Physiocrats are intellectual apologists for feudalism, because they’re basically saying that all wealth comes from agricultural production. The people who are feeding the nation are the foundation of the wealth of the nation, and everything on top of that — you can have artisans, you can have merchants, you can have higher-level trades and activities — but all those people have to be fed. So the people feeding the nation are supporting the whole of the economic activity of the nation.”
Political economy begins with a notion that is associated much more with what comes at the end of the traditional political economy, which is basically labor. The political economists do two things — maybe more, but two that are really indispensable for this conversation. They say that social coordination is decentralized, and the agent of social coordination is, as in Adam Smith’s sense, the invisible hand. And they say all value, the edifice of value, doesn’t rest upon production of food particularly — it rests on labor.
And then we get the culmination, or as the further right will say, the demolition. What Marx does is bring the notion of the labor theory of value — which is essential to the pre-Marxist, pre-leftist traditional political economy — to the point of crisis. He does it by this crucial move: distinguishing labor and labor power. He says: if you take the liberal, pre-leftist theory of political economy seriously, all value is produced by labor, and labor is wage labor, so people are paid for their labor, and therefore profit is impossible. Unless this notion of labor has to be systematically broken. If the value of anything is the amount of labor that’s been put into it, and laborers are paid for their labor, then the laborers get paid for everything they do, and all revenue from the market goes to labor. Where is capital in this at all? It doesn’t exist. It’s mathematically annihilated.
So Marx’s crucial move — which, wherever you are ideologically, I think has to be understood as being of vast importance — is to say: no, labor is being used in two very different senses. The consistent sense is that the value of anything is based on the amount of labor that has been put into it. And that also applies to the worker. The worker is paid according to the amount of labor that is put into reproducing labor. According to this Marxist-bourgeois-liberal economic calculus, you cannot fairly pay wages that are unable to reproduce labor. If you do that, you would just lead to human extinction. You have to pay, just like for anything else, the amount of labor that goes into reproducing labor power. People have to be born, they have to be fed as children, they have to be to some degree educated, all of this kind of thing. And they have to feed themselves, support a family, have a house — whatever conditions. All of these are costs for the reproduction of labor power, and that is what wages are directed to. They’re directed to treating labor as any other commodity, where you pay for what is required to reproduce it, based on the amount of labor that goes into reproducing labor power.
But that is totally different to just paying labor the amount of labor value it produces — the amount of labor it can do. The amount of labor a laborer can do is a very distinct quantity from the amount of labor that is required to reproduce that labor. And between those two different uses of the word labor — between labor and labor power — is what Marx calls surplus value, which he sees as the key to unlocking the entire dynamic of capitalism. Of course, all his work basically is about capitalism. He has a few tangential remarks about feudalism and a few tangential remarks about post-capitalism. But Marxism’s analysis of capitalism, this is the key and the core of all of it.
So this is his huge move. There’s two things I have to say immediately to justify why I’m talking about this at all. Sure, liberal capitalist economics then sidesteps Marx. They say, “Oh, the so-called liberal tradition of political economy was wrong, the labor theory of value is wrong, what Marx has done is proven — he has done a reductio ad absurdum of the labor theory of value, and we have to move somewhere else.” And then you go into different things. On a purely theoretical level, what you go into is Austrian economics. Austrian economics is capitalist economics, as opposed to Marxist communist economics. So that’s the first thing.
You’ve got the Marxist tradition, where political economy collapses. Why does political economy collapse? It collapses because Marx introduces the distinction between base and superstructure. His critique of political economy, as he defines his own work, is to say: “Look, what political economy is, isn’t actually a real science of economics, because I’ve shown how confused it is. By actually discovering surplus value, I demolished it. I’ve demolished it on its own grounds. I made an immanent critique of it. What I’ve discovered is that political economy was just bourgeois economics.”
What I mean by bourgeois economics is that it is a superstructure of a base that is economic and is based on class interest, and that class interest is based on the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class. The base/superstructure distinction is that everything that is not the economy — that’s to say, crucially, law, politics, and religion — is just stacked on top of the economy. It’s harmonic with the economy. So when we’re talking about a capitalist society rather than just a capitalist economy, we’re talking about a capitalist superstructure on a capitalist industrial base. That superstructure will just be harmonic with the capitalist class interest of the bourgeoisie at the economic level.
At this point political economy has been destroyed, because political economy was saying that politics and the economy are an integrated thing, and what Marx is saying is, no, no, no. You’ve got the economy, that’s the base, the fundamental thing, and everything else is superstructural, stacked harmonically upon the base. So you don’t need political economy at all. You just need proper economics, and then an ideological critique of the superstructure that follows upon that form.
Okay, I’m going to get out of this mode really quickly, because we’re almost there. We’re almost at the thing. Marx doesn’t say much about religion, but we have to at some point. He certainly understands that Reformation Christianity, Protestantism, and liberalism are the same historical event. They’re the same thing seen in different aspects. Because religion for him is just this stacked-up harmonic superstructure, he doesn’t talk about it a lot. He thinks, if you’re talking about capitalism, that’s the important thing. You can just assume it’s going to be capitalist religion, because religion is convenient to capitalism — just as it’s going to be politics convenient to capitalism, a legal system convenient to capitalism. All the superstructure does what capitalism, the bourgeoisie, wants it to do.
Just to pause for one second on the other side, Moldbug. We’ve seen that what happens is that Austrian economics peels off and insists on doing capitalist economics. Not on Marx’s terms — it has its own criticism of Marx, very interesting, we probably don’t want to get caught up in that. But just to say: it jettisons the labor theory of value. It sees where the labor theory of value goes, it doesn’t want to do that anymore. It’s got its own theory of value. As politics it becomes libertarianism.
Two things need to be said about this, even in maximum-speed mode. The first thing is: what’s really weird is that, on a Marxist viewpoint, libertarianism would actually be the superstructure of a capitalist society. It is capitalist economics. Obviously, if the superstructure is supposed to harmonically support the interests of the dominant class of the economic base, which is the bourgeoisie, then it should be the prevailing social economics. But instead, libertarianism has been totally marginalized, and Austrian economics has been almost totally marginalized. It just feeds in indirectly. It’s been completely crushed under the dominant tradition of non-Marxist economics in the West, which is Keynesianism.
Keynesianism, again, is something it’d be interesting to talk about. Keynesian liberalism, and neoliberalism later on built on a Keynesian foundation — all of that has nothing to do with Austrian economics, nothing to do with libertarianism. So why isn’t the capitalist superstructure actually capitalist in orientation? Why isn’t it the case that capitalist modes of thought are actually dominant in a supposedly capitalist society?
That’s the question. And what Moldbug does is, he says — he does something to Austrian economics very comparable, I think in magnitude and importance and intensity, to what Marx does to the tradition of political economy. He does it also by dividing a basic notion. He starts with the whole Austrian analysis of property, and he breaks it in two. He breaks it by saying: you have to realistically divide property into secondary property, which is actually the only thing that the libertarians and Austrians are talking about, and primary or sovereign property.
So primary or sovereign property is, for Moldbug, what surplus value is for Marx. It’s the discovery that breaks the whole consensus of the intellectual regime that he’s engaging with. To draw this to a preliminary conclusion: sovereign property is the Cathedral. That’s how you get to the Cathedral, through this whole route, this whole path.
You have this thing that you reach in the end, that is the explanation. It doesn’t work as a Marxist superstructure at all, because it’s completely dominant over the economy. It’s not a harmonic superstructure that just does what the capitalist class wants. We’ve seen that what the capitalist class would want the superstructure to do is not being done. The superstructure has gone in a completely different direction to what the bourgeoisie, based on their Marxian class interests, would want. It’s gone to another place, and the Cathedral is that other place.
The Cathedral, the transcendental property structure, is the structure that — secondary property is property understood as working within the rules of a particular game that is set by the laws and regulations and mores of our society. Primary property is what allows you to actually structure the game. It sets the rules of the game. It’s the level of legislation of the game. By legislation, I don’t mean that law is actually supreme in the Cathedral. It isn’t. Law is at an intermediate stage, but it’s certainly at a stage that is sovereign relative to the economic realm narrowly defined.
So that’s a big dump. I apologize for that. But it’s just to say: this is why a narrow sociological definition like “the Cathedral is just the PMC” is, I think, unsatisfactory. The Cathedral is this crucial notion. The Cathedral is sovereign property. It’s the highest level of social dominance. If you’re using categories that sound vaguely Marxist, as if they’re all just kind of swimming up out of the economy, then that’s not going to get it at all, because the flow of power is in completely the opposite direction. The economic class is just pursuing the rules of that society. The rules of that society are being set by the Cathedral. It’s not by playing the game really well that you get to dominate society and make the Cathedral what you want it to be. That’s an inversion. Moldbug is saying that the Cathedral is what decides the rules that society at the economic level is operating under. Okay, I really have shut up from here now.
At this point David’s microphone cut out and he was inaudible to the others through the end of Nick’s monologue and the exchange that follows. Ann and Nick continue while waiting for him to return.
Ann
That was great. I knew that Dave had a follow-up question, so I wonder if he’s having mic problems. I’ll turn it over to him. Where’d he go? Dave? Yeah, mic problem.
Nick
Maybe we should talk about something while we’re waiting for Dave.
Ann
It’s his mic problem. He was the one who brought up the PMC and the Cathedral in the first place, as it relates to this Amazon issue. It kind of stemmed from that.
Nick
That was the trigger for it, for sure. It’s an interestingly complicated case. Yarvin [Molbug] is much [suddenly Dave comes back through] there we go.
Ann
We can hear you.
Dave
All right, there we go. But what were you going to say about Yarvin?
Nick
I was just going to say his general mode is very historical. He tends to have a lot of historical detail. He’s a kind of historian at a high level when he’s in his most comfortable mode. So he would probably find this Amazon case very interesting, because it’s so concrete. There’s a mode that he would see as obsolete of discussing this, which is: Amazon is a massive capitalist enterprise, it has a lot of power because it’s very rich, and therefore it’s like an asshole. I’m sure you could be a bit more subtle about it, but that’s the basic system. But that obviously doesn’t get even remotely close to it. What is the agenda for what’s happening in this case? Because surely no one thinks the strategy here is about profit maximization. That would be the most basic one. How could this be about profit maximization?
Or, to take it up a level, to go meta and say, “Oh, this is somehow about entrenching the power of the bourgeoisie, the effective capitalist class is somehow consolidated through this act” — I don’t find that even remotely suggestively persuasive at all. So instead we’re saying, well, why is Amazon the conduit for a certain set of approved opinions and beliefs? And those approved opinions and beliefs — there will be people who say, “Oh,” still trying to be finally Marxist about it, “somehow these approved opinions and beliefs are serving some traditional Marxist notion of bourgeois class interest.” I find that entirely unpersuasive.
So you start going up this stack of what was supposedly the harmonic superstructure. At one level, you’ve got all of this clunky capitalist stuff to do with property. Liberal civilization has actually not done well at locking down property at all, and when it tries to philosophically, it’s very unpersuasive. The whole Lockean theory of property is probably where we would end up if we were going to be in the philosophical tradition, and it’s extremely unpersuasive, I would say. So you go with a bit more sophistication to law, and you say: look, what property is, is what you can do to legally protect your claims. You have property over something effectively if, when your property rights are violated, you can take it to court and win. So property becomes this legal infrastructure. Now we’re heading up into the superstructure.
But then people say, “Well, where does law come from?” Again, I’m very sympathetic to common-law traditions, which basically say it’s a spontaneous thing, maybe even a spontaneous ethnic thing. But law has historically overridden common law by statute law. Statute law is legislated in some kind of parliament or political assembly, and that assembly is dictated by political process. So you have, in theory at least, politics being supreme over law. If you win a political victory, you can rewrite laws, scrap laws, legislate. So the law is downstream of politics.
And then you’ve got — the world is moving in this direction — trying to be as disillusioned and realist about power politics as it can be. It’s like Mao’s famous dictum: power comes out of the barrel of a gun. End of the road, you have power if you can tell people to behave your way using the threat of violence. Politics at the end of the road is that. But then it’s like: why do the people with the guns do what you want? What actually coordinates the people with the guns to point them in a politically approved direction? I think it’s only then that we get to the top of this — lots of inverted commas — “superstructure” stack, that they have a religion that is pointing their guns in the right direction. In Mao’s case, eschatological Chinese communism. In the case of Western politics, there is a religion that is coordinating political power. And again, we’re back on a different path, back again with the Cathedral. The Cathedral is an unacknowledged state church. It’s a religious institution.
So with the Amazon thing, what is going on is religion. There is a religion that is passing down through these levels — religion down through politics, through law, into economic power. The only real level at which it becomes fully intelligible is that there was a religious event: that book, that product, was in some sense heretical. It was a religious offense, because it’s not an economic offense. This is why the thing that angered them, this ridiculous thing — “it might lead to some level of reader discomfort.” What that’s implying is, “as a business, we’ve come to the conclusion that you might lose us money by upsetting our customers.” It’s pretending to be doing economics, and it’s farcical, because of course it’s not economics. No one could believe that putting up that book on Kindle is going to have some economic cost to Amazon, and that as a neutral, completely profit-oriented business, it made the decision it did as a profit-maximizing thing. Maybe there’s someone out there who wants to defend that. To me it’s an absolutely insane, lunatic suggestion.
So what is going on? It’s not just that they’re obeying the law. Amazon isn’t under some legal obligation to squash that book, of course not. In fact, we’ve got X, we’ve got Substack, we’ve got relatively free media now, which shows that’s absolute bullshit as well. There’s clearly no legal compulsion for them to act like that. So we go up the next level. Is it politics? And as soon as we ask, well, if it’s politics — whose politics? What —
David
Right. It’s not recognizable as anyone’s politics, either.
Nick
Except the politics of a religious movement.
David
If it’s the politics of a religious movement, and we just don’t tend to see it as a religion or as a politics — is the thing underneath that what we’re trying to get at here? Here’s the thing. People have grown numb to it over the last ten years, and to a certain extent, especially radicals, they seem the most pacified when it comes to this stuff, because their assessment is the system is so far gone anyway, so of course this happens. But from our standpoint — you used the word flabbergasted, and I think we agree — because our particular way of thinking about the system is, yeah, of course it’s so far gone, and of course there are all kinds of ways that free speech is suppressed, but not this way.
For instance, YouTube. If a video gets taken down, people go, “Well, of course it did. They care about the profit motive, the bottom line, it’s about the corporate funders, the advertising revenue. They don’t want to lose advertising revenue, that’s why they do this.” And so people use this to downplay, dismiss, and live in this sort of numbness where they expect to never be able to say anything that goes off the plantation. But with this, there’s no advertiser revenue at stake. If advertiser revenue is presumed to be the religious motive when it comes to something like YouTube, then okay, we’re not dealing with that here. We’re dealing with something else. Then what is it? What is that religion? That’s part of what’s driving me crazy. What is this thing that we’re bumping up against? And why do some people act like they’re very confident, like they know what it is, when it’s not obvious at all what we’re bumping up against.
Nick
Yes. It should still have the power to surprise, this thing. It’s obviously difficult because of the fact that the notion of the Cathedral now is — where are we, 2025 — so it’s over fifteen years old. It’s quite a venerable notion. I don’t know when it really broke out, escaped containment as a concept, but it’s been around a while, and people feel very used to it. They think they know what it means, and somewhat lazily they tend to undervalue its importance. And with woke too — there’s this whole discourse at the moment, “woke is being put away, we’re post-woke, even the left is now post-woke, they realize it’s peaked, we’re on the other side of it.” So when you hit this thing that is only understandable in terms of the most fanatical level of woke activism imaginable, people are just stunned and confused about it. It shouldn’t be like that.
So yes, the more people hear about this episode, the more they will be mystified by it. I would have expected this much more from YouTube, which I trust much more than I had distrusted Amazon. And with YouTube, again, the same thing: this explanation that it’s about advertising revenue. That’s an attempt to make it all sound like we’re on this Marxist plane of economic interest, but that’s not explanatory. Why would the advertisers judge things the way they do? They’re not judging things on economic grounds. They’re judging things under this hierarchical schema that culminates in the church of woke. It’s the church of woke that is telling the advertisers what adverts are good and who they should advertise with. That’s setting the agenda. It’s not cynical economic self-interest at all. It’s the fact that the advertising industry has been captured and has been under religious direction. And again, it had seemed that they were beginning to recover or back away from it, which is a discussion we may have to have as well.
David
Where I was going to go with the PMC and Cathedral thing — I think it’s true that the professional managerial class, or PMC, the way that term gets used usually, is just for a type of person, or a person belonging to a certain group of people. At the level of the name, it just refers to a group, professionals and managers, usually considered the college-educated. I don’t like that, but I do think it’s a good jumping-off point. Because when people are realizing that there are certain crises in academia, in activism, in the attention economy, a lot of the signs of these crises come from the realization: oh, there are people who seem quite confident that they are capable of speaking on everyone else’s behalf, saying what’s in the best interest of everyone else, and they tend to have some kind of institutional authority, or at least they act as though they do. These are the gatekeepers of culture to some extent, of media, of law — the influencers, the professors, the activists.
So their taste, their sense for what’s normal, and the degree to which, when they talk about what’s normal, they’re not describing, they’re prescribing. They’re trying to force x, y, or z to be considered normal. They’re trying to say, this is normal, this is not normal. It’s prescriptive. They’re trying to be the person at the airport waving the sticks with the lights on them, the air traffic control people — they’re trying to do that for culture itself. Maybe they do it nicely, maybe they do it like bullies. There might be a culture divide over whether it should be done nicely or as bullies. But this is the thing people are trying to get at with the term PMC. I think it became popular between 2016 and 2020 because the height of this kind of mind control was becoming very visible in that period.
One of the things I’ve tried to do is take that and go deeper, looking into these three crises: the crisis of academia, the crisis of activism, the crisis of the attention economy. I call that the three A’s [A3], and the PMC is in all three domains, for obvious reasons. There’s one level where people can take it a bit deeper and say it’s not about the people themselves, it’s not about identity politics. It’s not to say if you’re college-educated your opinion is worthless. It’s just to say, generally, there is this divide between those with degrees and those without degrees, and those with degrees are trying to gatekeep discourse.
But the much deeper level is exactly what you’re getting to. I wonder if James Burnham, and on the left side, Barbara Ehrenreich — I wonder if they fit well into it or not. Ehrenreich is pretty descriptive in her seminal piece that she wrote with her husband, called “The Professional-Managerial Class,” where she’s just describing the fact that class development did not go the way Marx thought it would. There was a time when it was really easy to talk about how, out of all the different classes, there are two major classes growing fast, and it’s likely they’ll keep growing — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The other classes are withering away. These two are growing, but the proletarianization of political economy makes it likely that the proletariat will become this sort of universal class, and it also just so happens to be the one with hands on the levers of power, in the sense that if they lock arms and step back, the world comes to a halt.
So it’s not like when the New Left comes along — say the Weather Underground — and says, “Oh, it’s the Black population, or the Vietnamese, or the children, they’re the new revolutionary subject because they’re the most immiserated.” No. What was unique about the proletariat was not immiseration. It was specifically power. It was the fact that it was growing in power, and that it’s not just labor power in the sense of a commodity, it also had power. Because if they locked arms and stepped back, things would actually stop. It costs the bourgeoisie millions per minute when people at a factory stop working. So they actually had power. Whereas other immiserated minorities, if they step back, nobody cares. It doesn’t actually change anything. So there was something unique at that moment.
And then something between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 20th century changed, that made it so that was no longer plausible — unless you had on some pretty rigid, orthodox, dogmatic Marxist or political-economy lenses. If you’re looking and you’re not super committed to seeing the world through the lenses of the Adam Smith–Ricardo–Marx spectrum, then you realize, no, there’s something else going on here, because the proletariat is not growing in power. It’s actually being fractured and splintered and segregated and moved out in a distributed manner across the globe. It’s not being welded together in city centers the way Lenin describes in State and Revolution. It’s the opposite. For Lenin it was, “Oh look, the cities are welding together this new class.” And it’s like, are you actually looking around you when you say that, Lenin, or are you just looking at books? Are you saying it because you want it to be true? We know it’s because he was looking at books and wanted it to be true, because it obviously wasn’t the case in Russia, where there was no proletariat, or at least not to speak of.
But what Ehrenreich, and also Burnham in his own more neoconservative way, are going to say is that what we see is the rise of a mediating class, and it’s managerial in its mode — whether we’re talking about actual managers or not. It’s one that seizes the means of legal control. From Ehrenreich’s position, it’s one that just sells itself to capitalists. It says, “Hey, you guys need us actually, because without us you’re going to have these workers striking. With us, we can keep them from doing that.” Whereas from Burnham’s standpoint, which is much more black-pilled, he’s saying, no, there’s something fundamentally different going on, and it actually has the power. The bourgeoisie is not the group that has the power. It’s actually the people who are doing politics and law. So I think this goes really well with everything you’re saying. But I guess I’ll turn it into a question by saying: do you think the Cathedral was the one calling the shots also in the time that political economy was in vogue?
Nick
That’s a very difficult and complicated question that I think might involve, again, some of the notorious circling-back behavior. Let me engage with what you’ve been saying at an earlier stage of that. Because your narrative has consolidated my suspicion about what’s going on with this notion of PMC, which is the fact that it’s an attempt to upgrade a broadly Marxist analysis by saying that what we’re talking about is class interest, and we’ve just not understood class interest enough. There’s this other class, they have their interest, it’s not reducible to the interests of the classical Marxist classes. They’re not acting in the interest of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, they have their own thing going on — but it’s still material class interest.
And we’ve seen that ultimately that is all within a tradition that has a notion of the superstructure that cannot be right or adequate. You have to basically just say, “No, we’re just going to move the superstructure around a little bit. The superstructure now, it’s these class interests it represents.” It’s still harmonic, it’s still based upon this kind of economic base. We’re just moving the furniture around in terms of what’s happening at the level of the economic base. I just don’t think that solves the problems that we’re here in this talk trying to talk about. Even just concretely, we can keep going back to this Amazon thing. What Amazon is doing does not make sense in terms of the class interests of the PMC any more than it makes sense in terms of the class interest of the bourgeoisie. What class interest is involved in shutting this thing down, in an act of what is actually a translated, modulated religious horror? That’s what’s actually happened.
I think you have to then go to this thing: modernity can be run entirely, and in parallel actually, as religious history. And as religious history it begins with the Reformation. The Reformation is also a media revolution. It’s also Gutenberg. There’s no modernity, there’s no capitalism without reformed religion. The two things are the same process. Then we get a sociological confirmation of that in Weber — and I would say also we should never forget Sombart, who is a kind of reorbiting of Weber, crucially. These things are, in a deep sense, right. People try to slide off it and say, “Oh, somehow we don’t believe in what Weber discovered anymore.” But Weber discovered something totally important, the spirit of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a crucially important text, and Protestantism and capitalism are almost the same thing. They are aspects of the same thing.
So then we get up to our PMC. What are we saying about the PMC in terms of religious history? Because Moldbug, and there’s a lot to say about this, he’s participating in a discussion about religious history as much as anything. For Moldbug the Cathedral is a religious episode. It’s a church, and we get to the Cathedral through this evolution of Protestantism. So what we’re dealing with, in all the works of the Cathedral, is religious history. We’re dealing with: what has our religious tradition become, such that this is now heresy, this is now sanctity, we’re approving this, we’re disapproving that? This is the very highest level of sovereignty. There’s nothing above it. You’re not going to reduce it to class interest. You’re not going to reduce it to anything else. This level of religious history is — you’ve come to the end of the conveyor belt.
So whether you’re talking about Ehrenreich or Burnham or anyone, if they’re implying that you’re talking about class interest in some ultimately Marxist sense — that this is something decided at the level of the base that is then harmonically reflected in the superstructure — you have completely lost the plot. You’re completely failing to see that this is religious history. And right from the start, the religious conflict has been — if you can start it in the Anglo tradition, with the Tudors, with the establishment of the Church of England, with Bloody Mary versus Elizabeth — this is what it’s about. It’s about the religious authority that is going to be at the top of the stack, which is what the Cathedral then is. It’s our postmodern version of — no, it’s not a postmodern version of class politics. It’s that all class politics is downstream of this.
David
This is something I’ve also talked about. When we’re talking about the mode of activists, or of academics who are for suppressing ideas and for trying to gatekeep culture — well, the priest class has always done that. It’s just that we have a particular kind of priest class that, because it disavows its function and role as a priest class, does things that are sort of suicidal by more traditional instantiations, by the norms of one. For instance, if you think that social harmony is one of the goals of the priest class, or one of the responsibilities proper to or emanating from that occupation, then obviously the one we have today has lost the plot. It doesn’t care about social harmony. This has nothing to do with social harmony. It has nothing to do with trying to meet people where they’re at, or halfway, and then raise them to some higher level.
So I’ve talked about it as a problem of the rebel priest class. It’s where people who would have historically felt called to go be monks or nuns, or potentially actual priests, are instead striking off to be some kind of radical-individualist bohemian, in a dumbed-down Nietzschean vein or something.
Nick
Yeah, interesting. If you go back into this thing, the role of the religious zealot as quietist monk — you’re not seeing the revolution in. If you’re seeing that, well, that’s when the whole system works. When you’ve got pre-modern, traditional Catholicism — sorry, when you have the Roman Church prior to the Reformation — it can contain its bubbling confusion by the fact that it can sort of send people, direct people, implicitly, into quietism, into monasticism, into these modes where they take their religious zeal out of the space of social ferment.
But when you’re in the Reformation, from either side — as Moldbug says, this gets something too complicated to go into in detail, but it’s worth mentioning — he sees Protestantism as a zealous phenomenon as basically indistinguishable from forms of rebellion and revolution. The peasant rebellions immediately in Germany; obviously in the Civil War in Britain, the Puritan extreme of the Roundheads was into a form of basically violent revolutionary communism. And reciprocally with the Jesuits — they saw themselves as warriors. In the whole fight in England over the escape from Rome, or however more neutrally you want to put it, it was being fought with subterfuge and martyrdom on both sides. It’s a military thing. It’s war.
We’ve sort of forgotten that. Because of the later evolution we’ve forgotten that these religious questions are tied up with just extreme social tumult, and historically pursued zealously. To get back to your question about social harmony or social peace — I mean, none of these people during the Thirty Years’ War would have thought that social harmony was a value such that one should compromise religious integrity for it.
David
To think about this as a religion — trying to figure out how to even phrase the question is difficult, because I guess when you have a religion, typically there’s a pretty obvious sense for what is being valued, for what is actually sacred as opposed to what is profane. And typically they make it pretty easy for you to know if you’re blaspheming or practicing heresy.
And I’m out here saying to them, “I don’t want to be a heretic, I’m not trying to blaspheme. Tell me how to do what you want me to do, and I will do it.” And they’re like, “That would be compromising us. That would be sensitive data.” How can that be a religion? How can any religion function that way?
Nick
This is super interesting framing. It’s true. This is super interesting framing of it, because obviously the whole trend on the way up was exactly to do that. You get these ridiculous things — you get statements even in the Smithsonian and all of these public institutions, these woke versions of religious doctrine that are just like, “Whiteness is punctuality, whiteness is concerned with logic, discipline” — I don’t know whatever the particular thing is that they’ve discovered recently. It’s extremely literal, specific, and exactly as you’ve just said, they see the religious compulsion to produce clear declarations of faith. It’s just like the Thirty-Nine Articles, but for woke. “This is what we believe. If you don’t subscribe to these particular points of doctrine, you are in profound error, and you deserve to be treated harshly as a heretic.”
But as you say, that isn’t how Amazon has just behaved to you at all. Instead they’ve said this weird thing where you’ve somehow blasphemed unforgivably, but we can’t tell you how. That is extremely strange. I’m not going to ramble on this. I’ll just say one more thing quite quickly. Maybe this is a really interesting transitional symptom. Maybe the fact that the coercive apparatus of whatever witch-finding is being executed is at an intensity that’s almost unbelievable, and yet it’s not willing to publicly declare its principles, to actually make some doctrinal statement. This is a weird combination of a massive lack of confidence combined with this also uncompromised element. This is like a new phase of things that we haven’t really — that we’re just obviously seeing now with this. It almost makes you nostalgic for the point where they would nail their principles to the wall. It was easier to laugh at it, actually.
David
Could that be why it’s considered sensitive data? Because if they were to say it out loud, they know they would be subject to public ridicule. They’re that far off — that far removed from the consent of the governed, or the possibility of some general will?
Nick
This is so much the right question to ask. And it takes you to this confusing spot. Can it be that, that which has this extremely enviable total monopoly on a whole range of publishing and distribution activities, be so gone in religious zealotry that it will take this path, the path of holding on to the religious zealotry even as it recognizes that this is no longer publicly available? There’s a level of craziness here that just keeps getting deeper.
David
I appreciate the degree to which you’ve been flabbergasted here. It’s a breath of fresh air, being surrounded by theory people and radicals or post-radicals, post-militant types of people who are all so numb to it. Or maybe purporting themselves to be “realists” to such an extent that this is all just par for the course. I’m like, no, but I think that there’s something new and remarkable in this development.
So first of all, thank you. It feels nice to hear from anyone else, especially you, that yes, this is a thing. This is weird. And not just weird, but also fruitful for inquiry. This is worth thinking deeper about, worth taking your tools of theory and getting to work. Let’s think deeper about what this says about our moment. Because the volume itself was already doing that about the assassination. What is it that we can tell now about where we are in history? What kind of an era are we entering, given the fact that it was normal to hear people cheering on the assassination of a political rival — and one who is, by the way, the most mainstream and milquetoast when it comes to the Zoomer side of Republican politics. There’s no one more mainstream.
Nick
Talk about upsetting your customers.
Actually, I love that statement. That deserves to become world-historic. I need it repeated. The exact wording of that thing — the bit where they said it would upset our customers. What was the exact wording?
Ann
“Customer experience.”
Nick
“Dissatisfying customer experience.” Hold on. There’s something perfect about that. There’s something perfect. This is kind of post-Orwell perfection of just — it is defining where we are, apparently, in a way that none of us could have come up with. None of us could have come up with that phrase. It had to come from there. It had to be a discovery, because it’s so perfectly weird, it’s so sinister, it’s so obviously dishonest, it’s so drenched in history — and this exact moment of history — in a way that none of us could have guessed before it was uttered.
David
I have the exact wording here in front of me from the initial — this was an email from twelve days ago, on November 1. They said:
“Hello. Thank you for the submission of the following title: On the Left’s Response to Charlie Kirk: An Intellectual Reflection on the Cultural Significance of Kirk’s Assassination, by Slavoj Žižek, Ann McKerracher, Michael Tracy” — and then they go through the rest of the contributor list.
Just a quick pause: the fact that Žižek gifted us something that he had written about the case — it’s nice as a signal booster when you’re putting an anthology out, and he’s got a great piece in there. But in terms of world-historic value, this is — because it has Žižek, who’s one of the lead cultural critics we could say, and then Michael Tracy, who’s not exactly a mainstream journalist but is well-known. Because it has Michael Tracy and Žižek, this is not something where people can say, “Oh, it’s just a bunch of nobodies who threw together some slop.” Anybody who reads it will see there’s some real deep original stuff going on in there. But it’s also got a couple of very famous people.
Nick
The fact that they felt that they could just squash those names. I mean, it’s really extraordinary. It’s really extraordinary.
David
Okay, and then the rest of the quote goes: “Based on our review, we won’t be accepting your submission for publication, because the book might result in a disappointing customer experience. For additional information, you can refer to our terms and conditions here.”
Nick
“Disappointing.” So, yeah. I would hope the takeaway, there was a lot more we could have talked about, and a lot of it we’ve touched on briefly and been fast, but really, what’s going on in that expression “a disappointing customer experience” is the thing to revolve around thoughtfully. Because it’s the crucial thing that is pretending to be an economic statement. It’s pretending to express class interest. As if Amazon is saying — as an agency driven by bourgeois class interests, we have to reject this project, because it would compromise our fundamental drive towards profit maximization. And we all know — everyone knows, everyone who hears this knows — that that is utter bullshit. It’s completely unbelievable. There’s no way anyone who is not completely insane could take that at face value.
So on a pedestrian level, it’s obviously an insulting lie. But in being a lie, it points you towards: well, what is actually happening there? It’s clearly not a kind of economic decision. And it’s interesting that it has to position itself as an economic decision. It has to pretend — it’s in drag. It’s in paleo-Marxist drag, in a way that should be comical to everyone. I suspect it will become comical to everyone.
David
This is where — I don’t want to start something new, but I just have to. Going into this, one of the big things I had about the Cathedral was specifically the relationship between capital as AI, which is one of your most generative ideas — really one of your contributions to the whole conversation about artificial intelligence and capital. The idea is that capital has this intelligence, and the Cathedral goes against that intelligence. It tries to patch things up, slow things down, change the direction of the movement of capital.
What we have here is “Oh, well, it would be bad for capital” — that’s kind of the subtext of that email. “It’d be bad for the customer.” Isn’t it interesting, here, that when people aren’t bothered by this, they go, “Oh, it’s probably not even a person, it’s probably not even a rule, it’s probably just AI.” All of a sudden, AI is being used not just as a fetish, but also as a concern-terminating cliché. It’s almost like, “Well, there’s no one at the wheel. It’s just AI.” What does that mean for a world where it’s a Kafkaesque sprawling bureaucracy, but nobody could even get mad at any of the functionaries in it, because, well, AI is the thing that’s driving it now?
Nick
Yeah, that’s an extremely interesting comment, because, like you say, it’s basically assuming a capital-AI identity. So I say it’s in capitalist drag, it’s in AI drag. There’s total interchangeability. It’s pretending to be either capitalist axiomatics playing out mathematically, or it’s pretending to be an AI algorithm playing out mechanically.
I know I’m radicalizing from my earlier stage, but I’m going to say: of course, it’s neither of those. Of course it’s neither of those things — if they’re even separate. It’s not capital-equals-AI that’s writing that email. Or if it is, it’s because it’s enslaved to something completely different. It simply couldn’t be an algorithm that defective, and it couldn’t be a profit motive understood as that defective. Neither of those are possible. If it were either of those, why would it not just say what the rule is? The whole thing about an algorithm in its reductive sense is that it just cranks out stuff according to rules. It doesn’t say, “I can’t tell you what the rules are, you just have to accept that there are rules and you’ve broken them, but they’re a secret.” That’s something so pathological that AI hasn’t got there yet. AI hasn’t got to the point that it can be that psycho.
David
AI in drag.
Nick
Something is hoping you will think it’s now. It’s an amazing thing. It’s this inverted Turing test, isn’t it? It’s not an AI trying to get you to believe it’s human. It’s something coming out of the Cathedral, trying to persuade you that it’s an AI. It’s complete inversion.
David
Yeah, in the most surreal way possible. That was my concern last year for the intro to Nick Land class. At the end of it, that was what I raised. I was like: how will this not become the dominant ideology of people who don’t want to have to be responsible for the decisions that they’re making in public office? “Oh, well, it’s the intelligence of the system. It’s so far beyond us.” How will it not be the new “Oh, the market knows best,” which is sort of the neoliberal way? “Hey, we just can’t argue with that.” It’s like, “Well, AI is just so intelligent, we just have to go with it. It’s so complicated, guys.” But of course there’s people there. It’s people who are using this so that they don’t have to be pegged as somehow responsible or capable of doing anything otherwise.
Nick
It’s extremely paradoxical and peculiar, really. I’ve never resonated whether anyone who understands what’s happened to you guys with this is not mystified by it, if they’re willing to think about it. It takes us full circle back to the discussion right at the start. Of course you can just think, “Look, I can’t think about that, because it’s too gone, it’s too weird. If I really thought about it, it would just blow my picture of the world totally to pieces.” This story is like that. If you really think about what the hell is going on there, it’s just everything starts spreading, and the walls start melting, and it’s like, what the hell is happening? Not everyone’s going to be willing to go there, for sure. But I think a lot of people will. This is a data point. I think a really great data point.
David
I think that’s it. That’s the wrap, guys.
Nick
Awesome.
Ann
Thank you for joining us.
Nick
It was a pleasure.
Thanks for reading.
Stay tuned for BLOCKED BY AMAZON: On the Left’s response to Charlie Kirk, coming July 1st, 2026.