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Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in
- mixedCase 9y agoTL;DR: It's just communism by another name.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoMeh. Seems to me like these are really the Vinge / Kurzweil crowd, and the offshoots of that trend. The commie connection seems to be the author's interpretation (unsurprising given the journal that's published the article).
- jressey 9y agoI don't think you read it. It is really complex and actually hypercapitalistic, and nationalistic in its basic form. It advocates for advancement of their perception of humanity over all else. The newest iteration even advocates for independent, authoritative nation states! I concede the article also discusses a branch that goes left, and yes it is probably closest to social democracy.
- mixedCase 9y agoFrom the article: "Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world." My notion of accelerationism before this article was "communists, disappointed after communism failed at taking over the west, advocating that more capitalism will inevitably show its failures and lead to communism". This notion persists after reading the article.
- uxp100 9y agoI think there are at least 3 different meanings of acceleration-ism, and you are conflating some of them. But the article is too, and once I read the article I started to as well. Is there hard evidence of an intellectual connection between Zelazny, Land, and Leftist Accelerationism? This kinda feels like left-anarchism vs right-anarchism all over again. Wildly different ideologies that share very little, except a name. I would think the leftist variant predates the 60s, ue_ in response to you found elements of it in Marx. Maybe this is a bad article.
- uxp100 9y agoWell, I realize now that there is a leftism->Land connection mentioned in the article. I was too harsh. But I still think there us conflation going on.
- WaxProlix 9y agoNot quite what the article talks about, but Accelerationism in communist/anarchist thought is the notion that you either permit capitalism to go off the rails without hindering it or even encourage it actively. The goal is to "show it for what it really is" and make things so unpalatable that a worker uprising is inevitable (or at least more likely). So in that view, an accelerationist could be a socialist who opposes things like minimum wage, universal health care, privacy rights legislation, etc.
- ue_ 9y agoI am a Socialist myself and I often talk with people who are accelerationists; I am divided on the issue personally. Accelerationism in the Communist sphere tends to align itself with policies against working within the democratic system to improve conditions, as you noticed even to reject social democratic policies. The other argument for this from their point of view is that it would encourage complacency of the workers to be having these social democratic policies, as some view Keynesianism did to the Western capitalist nations. An interesting point here is about Marx himself; he wrote: "Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country. "But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade." (Emphasis mine)
- naravara 9y ago>I am a Socialist myself and I often talk with people who are accelerationists; I am divided on the issue personally. By the time working people are miserable enough to unite and rebel it will already be too late. The rich and powerful will have the logistics and technology on their side to quash any rebellion handily. Social Democracy is the only way forward. The people on the bottom need to have the capacity to resist and you can only do that by keeping the relative power of each segment of society at rough parity so nobody can exercise dominance over another. The trouble with an accelerationist viewpoint is that even if the system collapses what comes out of the ashes won't be enlightened advancement and revolution, it will be a general regression into warlordism and feudalism. Even if Lefties win those fights you won't get anything like a Socialist society on the other side of it. The skill sets and temperament required to consolidate power among sociopathic warlords are not the skills sets or temperament you need to establish a just and egalitarian society. Quite the opposite, as you see by any country where communist insurgencies actually wind up in charge.
- defen 9y agoI was wondering if you could expand on this. It seems like a comment someone would make if they are either entirely unfamiliar with accelerationism, or if they have a deep understanding of it - I'm curious if you fall into either of those camps :) The reason I say that is that Land claims to be utterly opposed to communism - his favorite suggestion is that communists should be dropped out of helicopters into the ocean (cf Pinochet). On the other hand, I'm not entirely convinced that he's not a "deep cover" agent of socialism/communism - after all, that's where his sympathies initially were before his "conversion". For example it's possible he thinks accelerationism is the path to the predicted end-stage or utopia version of communism - a classless society with free access to the articles of consumption.
- ue_ 9y ago> his favorite suggestion is that communists should be dropped out of helicopters into the ocean (cf Pinochet). Very frighteningly, I see this suggestion echoed around seemingly seriously by certain groups of libertarians, especially on Reddit, and those libertarians on the "alt-right".
- steveklabnik 9y agoMany leftists of various stripes are quite against accelerationism, including many communists.
- omginternets 9y agoYou don't know what communism is, and it shows.
- dang 9y agoThat's both unsubstantive and uncivil, exactly the opposite of what we want here. We ban accounts that comment like this, so please don't do it again.
- omginternets 9y agoRespectfully, it's factual.
- dang 9y ago"What communism is" is not a fact. Even if it were, not all statements of fact are civil and substantive, and that's the standard you need to follow here.
- dang 9y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments, especially not generic ideological tangents, which usually amount to trolling.
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- nottorp 9y agoI really don't see what the article's accelerationism has to do with the notion as used in Lord of Light. In spite of the Hindu religion references, that is definitely not a philosophy/politics book. It is Zelazny's best book in my opinion, and you can read it - it has little to nothing to do with the Guardian's article.
- WaxProlix 9y agoAbsolutely agreed. This seems to be a simple case of confusing a number of largely unrelated things just because the names given them are the same. If I were the author, I'd be embarrassed over spending so much time and proverbial ink over what is essentially a misunderstanding of concepts.
- gt_ 9y agoYes, very misleading. How unfortunate that this is the article's launching point for navigating the difficult critical concept. I am not very familiar with Zelazny but am very familiar with accelerationism discourse and can therefore add another confirming perspective that these are not usefully related.
- defen 9y agoIf I were to give my own tl;dr summary of accelerationism, I would say that they treat intelligence as the "good" of utmost value. In the accelerationist vision of the world, intelligence is a feature of the universe, a sort of higher-level organizing principle, and we should strive to maximize intelligence in whatever form. Accelerationists would be perfectly content with a world of ever more intelligent self-replicating machines taking over the universe, without regard to human life or happiness. After all, Nick Land's personal motto is "Coldness be my God" Everything else is what you get when you take "maximize intelligence" to its logical conclusion.
- accountyaccount 9y agoFor a while I was kind of on the "Ai is scary" train, but as I read into accelerationism more I've grown to accept that maybe it's ok if humans eventually become obsolete. It almost seems right.
- aerodeck 9y agoAnti-humanism is a very interesting strain of thought these days. Homo-Deus by Harari is my favorite example. The problem, of course, is that if we got where we are now by being humans, then how do we know we're far enough along to 'quit' being humans without going backwards? How do you know that 'giving up' isn't the same sort of intellectual trick that that Nazis played on themselves? How do you give up without giving up?
- accountyaccount 9y agoIdeally you create something that simply decides for you. If some human-created form of intelligence can best humanity through the lens of blind progression, then who are we to say?
- aerodeck 9y ago> lens of blind progression The problem is that there is no such thing as 'blind progression'. It will always be defined by someone or something, boxing all future progress into that person's biases. This is the same well-intentioned by inherently flawed utopian thinking as everyone else. I would totally sign my life away to an AI as long as no one was telling me that it was a sign of 'progress'. At the very least, no one should be profiting from it
- mannigfaltig 9y agoThere is always a fringe philosophy that had it right.
- woliveirajr 9y agoThis. Given enough <x>, there will always be a <x> that will outperform / be correct / have predicted / etc in <x> area.
- goatlover 9y agoAre they right in this case? I see the previous 70 years (1877-1947) as having more fundamental change than the last 70. It's hard to top electricity, automobiles, aircraft, penicillin, vaccinations, refrigeration, radio, tv, QM & Relativity as fundamentally transformative. Also, two world wars transforming the political map and doing away with the dynastic empires of the past. If you define the singularity as being unable to predict the future, then I would say that period of time would have been less predictable than any other time in human history.
- fhood 9y agoMore specifically, progress in physics has slowed dramatically.
- AnimalMuppet 9y agoSeems to me that, while QM became "understood" in that period, the transistor was only discovered in the last year. All the applications of the transistor came in the latest 70 years. There's also the discovery of the gene, and space travel. Those haven't transformed daily life as much as the inventions of the previous 70 years, but add in the transistor and it gets close...
- Sharlin 9y agoThis essay reads weirdly like it was transported from an alternate universe where the notion of accelerating human progress only occurred to a fringe group of mostly right-wing thinkers. I guess it reads like what articles about transhumanism and Kurzweil-style singularitarianism did read about fifteen years ago...
- jtmcmc 9y agoI don't think Zelazny or lord of light is largely forgotten. It's still considered an excellent scifi book!
- Animats 9y agoTwo words: Javascript frameworks. Now that's accelerationism.
- nabla9 9y agoMore like branchtionism. 1. New technological platform emergence, 5 years. 2. Rebuild basic tooling over 5 years. 3. Experiment with new possibilities for another 5 years. 4. Find out what the real improvements over previous platform were during next 5 years and settle for them. 5. Goto 1. With lessons learned from previous platform, but forgetting some earlier lessons.
- omginternets 9y agoNothing in the javascript world is forward-thinking, fast or forward-moving. (Except ASM.js ... maybe...)
- gumby 9y agoZelazny forgotten? I seriously doubt it, and Lord of Light is an extraordinary book, though it does suffer at the end from his chronic problem in bringing a story to a close (he's hardly alone in this affliction). But his prose...delightful!
- gt_ 9y agoIt's interesting seeing 'accelerationism' floating up to the hackernews crowd. Unfortunately, this article misses the lasting value of the theory in the arts where it flourishes as nothing short of an artistic movement. Accelerationism has only indirect relations to technology, intelligence, "progress" and is NOT to be mistaken for technological progress or "fast transhumanism" or "irresponsible transhumanism" or singularity chit chat. If this is what you have in mind, keep studying. I am steeped in the circle of artists and thinkers who have been toying with accelerationism, the most important of who are properly mentioned in the article (Marx, Noys, Land, Deleuze and Guittari, more) but the article ultimately misses the usefulness of the concept and waters it down into yet another transhumanist navel gazing and further sci-fi gargling. Accelerationism seems easiest grasped by American millenials and grey haired leftist philosophers, in other words those with a nurtured consciousness of mass consumer culture. Accelerationism is an angle of marxism most at home in aesthetic studies and pretty much nowhere else. Accelerationism usually reveals itself as a reflexive irony (with sometimes thick nuance) in it's aesthetic applications, related to exacerbated effects/affects of the commercial abstraction loop to the point where commercial abstraction is not only "there" but is the material of life experience itself. There are significant strains of culture that are out and out "accelerationist" style. I would argue accelerationism revives the Pop art torch in a truly Warholian manner and at contention with the desperate and defensive current state of institutional contemporary art. Vaporwave, post-internet, Dis Magazine, health goth, 2016 Berlin Biennale are at the least affiliates of accelerationist art and at the most it's representatives.
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- atemerev 9y agoIs there anybody here who _doesn't_ like technical progress and doesn't want it to go faster? We are still stuck on this little blue marble, with the entire Universe in our telescopes (hundreds of billions of galaxies, hundreds of billions stars in each), that we can see, but can't really visit. It almost maddens me. If we meatbags are too fragile to travel to stars, let's build immortal AIs who'll do it for us. I am going to die on this planet, like every other human being. But I hope that we can create new minds and new non-carbon lifeforms, better than us, who might be able to escape. I guess I am an accelerationist. But isn't it a natural attitude for any thinking mind?
- ABCLAW 9y ago>Is there anybody here is who _doesn't_ like technical progress and doesn't want it to go faster? Sure. I am quite glad we stopped iterating on nuclear weapon designs and I am quite fine with the state of the art not obliterating entire continents yet. I'm also quite happy we haven't done the R&D and optimization to lower the cost for mass producing neutron bombs too. I think you are too. I like technical progress that ameliorates the human condition. Some of it does. Some of it doesn't. Talking about the idea is difficult and complicated when you drill down beneath some trivial level, so people rarely bother, unless they, in one form or another, abstract that complexity away. If you do that, you're left with "progress is good!" and forget all the times when it wasn't or the reverse. Neither position is particularly interesting.
- atemerev 9y ago> we stopped iterating on nuclear weapon designs We didn't. Los Alamos is pretty busy this time of year. So is Sarov. > we haven't done the R&D and optimization to lower the cost for mass producing neutron bombs too. We had. And also, we were smart enough to put these papers on the shelf and not proceed with them. Say what you want about humanity, but 70+ years without a nuclear war is impressive, given our history. It became possible through continuous innovation in game theory, spy games, and yes, improving the deterrents. I think nuclear weapons will never be actually used in large-scale future wars, like chemical weapons weren't massively used in WW2. Progress is good. Wars are part of the progress. Wars themselves are bad, though, so some of the progress is spent to keep wars at bay, to not interfere with the progress.
- Apocryphon 9y agoAnother excellent piece on the ideology for the layman: "The Darkness Before the Right" https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac19 https://theawl.com/the-darkness-before-the-right-84e97225ac1... the same author's clarifying follow-up is good too, though with a lot more academic jargon: https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism-left-and-right/ https://pmacdougald.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/accelerationism...
- elevenfist 9y agoI guess libertarianism is on its last legs if they have to give it a new name and a fresh coat of paint. The bullshit is still simplistic, as always.