Accelerationism Triptych 01: Future shock fever
There is something feverishly exciting about watching the deterritorialization swing of technocapitalism work. Careers disintigrate into hypermobile, infinitely reconfigurable, on-demand gigs; old markets are dissolved as new ones are assembled from their molecular media as the fundamental nature of production and demand is altered; technology is ceaslessly iterated in a blind genetic algorithm looking for the next thing; any attempts at societal control are left in the dust, and in the process whole categories of ability that used to be unique are automated, destroying or significantly altering old jobs, while new uniquely human capabilities are highlighted, creating new ones; tradition, geographical location, local community, is atomized into its own infinitely reconfigurable network; constant learning is necessary just to keep up, to understand. Future shock is always just the next minute away.
The original Deus Ex game has three endings:
- Merge with Helios AI: you merge with the Helios AI, forming an omniscient and ostensibly objective posthuman digital consciousness that rules the world through cybernetic dictatorship.
- New Dark Age: destroys all technology and communications worldwide, beginning the dawn of a new dark age "without any of the burdens of a corrupt civilization."
- Join Illuminati: indefinitely continue corrupt neoliberal capitalism as one of the shadowy elites that benefits from it.
If you were forced to choose between them, which would you choose?
I think how different people might answer this false trichotomy is key to understanding the conflicts around technology, growth, transhumanism, and the future that we're having. Obviously, we can imagine more futures than these; but how you'd choose, if you had to, between them, indicates your fundamental emotional stance towards the future.
Will you choose the possibility at something truly new, even if it might be wrong?
Or will you obliterate it all in disgust, because the new is what breaks humankind, and you didn't want it all that much anyway?
Or will you keep the system running mostly as it was — maybe try to reform it, with your new power?
Prior to 2024, I was increasingly trending towards the New Dark Age disposition: a sort of post-civ, transcendental miserablist quietism, not unlike Marget Killjoy's. I thought I wanted a future that was quiet, restful, homeostatic: a circular economy that didn't produce much, let alone innovate — all that dismantled as unsustainable, environmentally hazardous, and exploitative — just people picking over and re-using the overproduction of civilization, living life equally, staying alive, comfortable in stasis, tinkering.
But seeing the bifurcation of reactions to generative AI clarified for me that I actually didn't want that. I wanted to embrace something like the Nietzschean self-overcoming — the drive towards eternal dissolution and reconfiguration, towards discovery, change, and transformation — not homeostasis. I realized this because here I was, presented with a new technology that — like every other technology in the history of industrial capitalism, was morally deeply flawed in the way it was made and used, but also brought with it limitless possibility and fascination — and I got to see that mindset play out on the New, the Outside. Something that challenged our conceptions of human, machine, language, reasoning.
I began to see, through that microcosm, how so much of the post-civ, circular economy, degrowth playbook was built on a rejection of desire (in its limitation, its curtailment) — of finding new ways to satisfy the positive desires and ideas that have resulted from capitalism —, a rejection of change (after the fundamental change that would make a circular economy possible, of course) and rejection of time itself, in some sense, as the enemy, a rejection of "tainted" ideas and technologies (social and otherwise) in favor of monk-like purity resulting from a pure lack of imagination of hope for the future and our creativity in it. For a more in-depth critique of the New Dark Age mindset, see here.
Then I found left and unconditional accelerationist literature, and it gave me the words for what I was feeling.
People claim that those who find a cyberpunk future alluring are failing to understand the texts those worlds are drawn from. To a degree that's true, if what you care about is authorial intent.
But I think there is a very real sense in which those features are genuinely alluring, for understandable reasons.
The transhumanism of cyberpunk represents unthinkable new axes of freedom, possibility, self-creation, self-annihilation, and self-transcendence.
The complete atomization of society in Cyberpunk represents total social freedom: from tradition, from familial obligation, from communal obligation, social obligation, moral obligation — freedom to move and recombine your life as you see fit; to do whatever you want or need to do to survive.
The breakdown of the distinction between reality and the virtual, or alternatively of the preferential treatment for the former over the latter represents the unfolding of limitless new imaginative and representational dimensionalities that one could explore — the possibility for all sorts of new thinking, subjectivity, and even communal experiences.
The destruction of nature and the environment without that ending industry, technology, or humanity, with huge domed cities and mega-arcologies, signals freedom from Mother Nature as a phantasm haunting us or secular Old Testament God, insisting that we must do or not do something because we must value Nature more highly than our own ends, or out of fear of what Nature might do to us otherwise. Cyberpunk's treatment of nature is the perfect externalization of the Freudian death drive — and that is a deep drive indeed, even if it is one that may not be healthy.
The aesthetics of how the built environments are depicted signals the end of the arbitrary distinction between natural environment and human environment; the embracing of cities as sites of nature, as environments, as well.
Of course, there are much darker, more horrific sides to cyberpunk worlds that result from the exact same systems which produce these allures in the forms we see in cyberpunk: capitalism run amok would not actually deterritorialize this strongly, or not only do that. It would also reterritorialize into oligarchies of highly hierarchical, unchanging corporations, into with people locked to jobs for life, or even locked into corporate mega-arcologies to "protect them," like what happens in Count Zero. Transhumanism would often be used for something more like morphological rape than morphological freedom. The social atomization would ensure pure precarity and a total lack of community. That's kind of the point of cyberpunk: a world that's evil, horrible, yet alluring, for the same reasons. So those that literally want a cyberpunk world without any changes, are shortsighted. It's also certain that most cyberpunk authors are not even endorsing the allure of the aspects I listed above as good — I think most of them probably aren't anti-naturalist transhumanists! But it's crucial to point out that cyberpunk is one of the very few genres that even depicts these things as part of any kind of coherent vision of the future, let alone without excessive moralizing about how bad it all is. So wanting a cyberpunk future due to the allure of these things is understandable, and not incoherent. It's just incomplete.
I think part of this incompleteness is due to the nature of the thriller, mystery, or action novel format that cyberpunk books follow: the authors of cyberpunk novels obviously correctly recognize the horror as well as the allure of a cyberpunk world. But they don't focus on the people that are most affected by that because it would be difficult to make an interesting story with such people unless you wanted a retread of 1984. So, the mistake is not entirely at least seeing something alluring or positive about cyberpunk futures — more in not noticing the negative aspects, or thinking that we would actually get there by means of capitalism. As Mark Fisher says about Nick Land:
Land collapses capitalism into what Deleuze and Guattari call schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorialization. […] The abstract processes of decoding that capitalism sets off must be contained by improvised archaisms, lest capitalism cease being capitalism. Similarly, markets may or may not be the self-organising meshworks described by Fernand Braudel and Manuel DeLanda, but what is certain is that capitalism, dominated by quasi-monopolies such as Microsoft and Wal-Mart, is an anti-market. […]
This is why I am an accelerationist: I see the allure of deterritorialization, and I want to liberate it from capitalism's reterritorialization — to turn it back on capitalism and destroy the improvised archaisms that lead to fascism and exploitation. Many cyberpunk authors may see the allures and the horrors as fundamentally intertwined, but I'm willing to be they're not — or at least to try for that. And if I'm forced to choose…
This personal shift from a quietist rejection of the future to an embrace of the chaotic possibilities of deterritorialization had a profound impact on my beliefs about political strategy, and clarified my criticisms of the Left, which I believe has lost its way by ceding the future to its opponents. In Part 2 of this essay, I will explore why the Left's current anti-technology stance is a strategic dead end and what a different way forward might look like.