Review: The Gig Economy by Zero HP Lovecraft
A delirious transcription of Nick Land's nightmares
Self-replication is the only form of computation which is truly and wholly an end unto itself. When self-replication searches the universe for manifestations of itself, we call that evolution.
I believe there is no point in writing a book unless you intend to draw a deep, visceral response from your reader. Mere adequacy is no excuse for putting pen to paper; you should want your reader to emerge from the experience with a fundamentally altered mood for a minimum of a few days. Ideally, of course, your reader never recovers; you have permanently changed their outlook, rewired some portion of their brain, shifted the way they look at certain things in the world around them.
Too few books have done this to me. I think this one did, though.
Confession time: this is not, in fact, my first time reading this book. Zero HP Lovecraft’s fiction was my first interaction with this whole scene, and looking back now, the effect it had on me was salutary indeed. The leftist circles I came from tended to stereotype the online right as a collection of whiny gamers with no aesthetic sensibility or creative drive; learning that this was incorrect opened a major crack in the already-weakening conditioning, and within months I was breathlessly reexamining my entire belief system while furiously imbibing Yarvin, Jouvenel, Francis and others. Yet I never forgot the importance good old fashioned fiction had played in leading me to such thinkers, and I feel now’s as good a time as any to pay tribute.
It’s sometimes fashionable to dismiss 0HP’s prose as an unnecessary corollary to his philosophical X threads, but I entirely disagree; this man is an outstanding writer, possessed of the ability to beautifully express not only new information, but information one does not realize one already knows. He observes the world around him and picks up, with his consciousness, what the rest of us only perceive in our subconscious; then he translates that into a pithy paragraph and, voila, now it’s in our consciousness too.
Such insightful observations are scattered all over the narrative, which is structured in the classic Lovecraft fashion: a lonely, somewhat nerdy man stumbles upon information very much beyond his capacity to comprehend, tries to search for some rational way to wrap his head round it, and keeps getting lost deeper and deeper in the abyss. As such, the story is very light on supporting characters, most of whom exist more as monologues than as people. But that’s exactly as it should be: this is the story of a man who lives on the internet and in video games, makes a living through the titular gig economy, and has minimal flesh-and-blood contact each day. There are no other characters in this story because there are none in such a man’s world; as someone who has lived in a similar situation, and knows many other people who also have, I can attest to the verisimilitude here. This is a story that feels deeply relatable; the title character is unnamed because he could be any of us. Trite observation, I know, but it’s true. Were it not for my conscious effort to shift away from this lifestyle, I’d find this story almost too relatable to finish.
Enhancing the verisimilitude here is the form of horror. What has fascinated me from the beginning with 0HP’s work is the straight 1:1 fusion of cosmic horror and cyberpunk; the two genres could never possibly be combined more seamlessly than they are here. I can’t give too much away without venturing into spoiler territory, but I do not believe I have ever seen such an ambitious form of monster as the one eventually realized in this book. The gradual reveal of its true extent and scope is utterly masterful; it gave me shivery goosebumps all over when I first read it, and I got a trace of them again the second time. The imagery towards the end is among the most powerful I have ever visualized. I have heard reports of people having very vivid nightmares after finishing this book; I believe them all.
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The Divine Comedy was once described as “the Summa in verse;” if I had to make a similarly reductive statement about this book, I’d say it’s Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena as narrative. The Gig Economy is, like most of the best speculative fiction, really a means by which to deliver philosophy, and I’d honestly say it’s the best possible way for the average smart, intellectually curious reader to consume the ideas of Nick Land, whose famously abstruse meth-fueled work is rather too much for most. This, coupled with the absence of the naked prejudice one can find in many later 0HP works, makes it a reasonable choice to offer to an open-minded leftist friend; Land self-identifies as right-wing, but, like me, he came originally from the left, and many of his ideas do not neatly fit into either box in the world of normie American politics. Just disavow the author’s social media takes and send the link to that one friend who strikes you as trustworthy; they won’t find anything to object to, but you may have started them down a path that could lead them to some truly wild places.
The prose itself is solid, if not overly ambitious; the plot develops at precisely the right speed, neither too brusque nor tardy in its progression. In truth, I’m trying to think of a substantial flaw but I can’t really call one to mind; one could argue that it’s a classic example of the much-maligned Inverse Hicklib phenomenon, being the product of a wealthy urban blue-state professional rebelling against his stultifying surroundings rather than the expression of any major popular movement, but this would be to misunderstand firstly the purpose of art and secondly, to be frank, the entire nature of political power. I do enjoy grassroots peckerwood art, don’t get me wrong - I loved Steelstorm, didn’t I? - but people like 0HP absolutely have a place in the movement too, and it is precisely the one he has claimed. As much as one needs a popular mass movement if one is to subdue the regime, one also needs some elite human capital, and this is precisely the sort of publishing that helps get them on board. Besides, forgetting the politics for a moment - it’s just a great story! There is plenty of value in that alone. Art has a richness deeper than mere power.
And that, in the end, is why I am here. I’m in this scene to read great books; thus far, this remains the best of the bunch. As good as it is, it’s kind of left me a little forlorn - how much of the rest of the scene is gonna live up to this? I worry this may turn out like those albums that make the mistake of opening on their best song. Still, I’m not going to worry about that for now; all that matters at this minute is that I just read a damn good book, and so should you.
Zero HP Lovecraft is on X (miraculously never banned!) and Substack, among others.