As you say, Land demands that we check our argumentative skills, to refine our positions, and to basically figure out where he went wrong (as condescending as that sounds). This is how I felt when I started reading Land, but I got to the point where I felt like Land had articulated a deadlock that I certainly couldn't get around too easily, and I hadn't found a really convincing takedown of or even alternative to Land's central point. Helpful is Nick Srnicek correction that capitalism is something that we do rather than something that happens to us as if from without, as Land maintains. And yet there's something not entirely convincing here, for once you concede that there is a kind of death drive inherent to capitalism, or at least a fascination with the "outside" and a drive to deterritorialize the "inside," then Srnicek's distinction begins to fall apart.

For me, the idea that ultimately led me to back off from engaging with Land's work is expressed by Robin Mackay at the end of one of the articles you posted below, that philosophy has played an important role in capitalism's inevitable effacement of the human:

...In the name of a non-negotiable hatred for the fetters of the human, [Land] may have risked wholesale capitulation to the new powers (all-too-human) that take hold of the earth as soon as its old power structures are dismantled – and which make use of every base reflex of homo sapiens for their own, ultimately banal, ends. But to take this point of view is to avoid confronting the most potent aspects of Land’s thought. His heresy was twofold: it consisted not only in his attempt to ‘melt’ writing immanently into the processes it described, but also in his dedication to thinking the real process of Capital’s insidious takeover of the human (and the legacy of this process within philosophy) – and in admitting the laughable impotence of ‘man’ in the face of this process. In this respect he has not yet been ‘proved wrong,’ despite a recent upsurge in wishful thinking. His work still poses acutely – in a variety of forms – the challenge of thinking contemporary life on this planet: A planet piloted from the future by something that comes from outside personal or collective human intention, and which we can no longer pretend has anything to do with reason or progress.

This is for me the most difficult and disturbing idea in Land--that capital has linked up with the human libido and death drive in a productive annihilation of the human, integrating the human and the nonhuman. I imagine Land's dystopian dream to be a strange world in which no actual humans exist and yet robots meaninglessly perform the rhythms of capitalism as the banal legacy of the human. The point that is most disturbing about this, is that Land--as Mackay notes--believes that philosophy has played an important role in this destructive desire for the outside (expressed variously as the one, the ideal, God, noumena, Being, etc.). Philosophy in other words, has always dreamed of a world without humans, and has played an integral role in the eventual effacement of the human via capital. The only conclusion then--perhaps the reason why Land went insane and drifted to the reactionary right--is to affirm the annihilation of the human both as the culmination of the project of reason and philosophy and the capitalist death drive, for ends that as Mackay says, "have nothing to do with reason or progress." In this light, what seems to me to be the truly irresponsible, juvenile, and even nihilistic position is the affirmation of the human, against whatever legacy we might have beyond our all-to-human limitations. To affirm the human is to stubbornly reject the history of Western thought while still acquiescing to the now unstoppable force of capital's destruction drive. This is an idea that makes me shudder. It seems more daunting and formidable then something that can be used to sharpen one's argumentative tools. It's like there's nihilism on both sides. And I here I agree wholeheartedly with you that Land just doesn't seem to be worth it.

I'm curious to know what you think of this deadlock. For me, I'm already interested and invested in the continental tradition, so I can't really just dismiss Land's sources, mainly Bataille and Deleuze. And regardless of how far he ends up straying from them, he still seems to be recognizing a real problem, albeit a disturbing one--one that seems to persist despite even the easy dismissal of Land as insane.