Accelerationist manifesto for surviving becoming part of the permanent underclass

The first step I recommend is going to all possible lengths to ensure that your hobbies, rest, and relaxation activities do not require significant, ongoing marginal outlays to maintain.If you enjoy arts and crafts, physical resources are generally cheap, plentiful, and unlikely to be subjected to extreme price gouging or supply chain constrictions anytime soon.

However, the ultimate goal is optimizing marginal outlay using the capital you have now to ensure you don't need money to create things in the future, so if you already have the hardware, or happen to have the money, or your art requires very expensive tools and supplies to perform, switching from physical to digital art is a superior choice. Even better if you use local AI models to help you :) You simply must ensure you do not rely on proprietary applications or closed-source platforms—such as Adobe Creative Cloud—to create your art. Try Krita, Blender, etc. However, be careful about upfront cost compared to marginal outlays: if it would take more than, say, 6 months for the up front cost to pay itself off, you've just made yourself significantly worse off for a very long time horizon.

If your relaxation activities include television, movies, video games, audiobooks, and literature, I highly recommend purchasing a used, physical computer; get one from a bulk corporate sell-off on eBay, or from a local university surplus store to act as a home server. I recommend Dell OptiPlexes, but newer Lenovo thin clients could work. You don't need a lot of processing power or RAM, but you'll need a 7th generation Intel processor or later for the iGPU to have good enough video encoding/decoding capabilities for streaming to be possible. Make sure you don't buy hardware you can't use.

You can set this machine up in your living room with a reverse proxy directing traffic to your self-hosted services, configure port forwarding on your router, and secure a cheap domain name with automatic DNS updates to account for ISP-driven IP changes.The first service you should set up on this server is an automated, VPN-secured pipeline for pirating media via magnet links.

Following that, you should deploy a media server like Jellyfin to stream your acquired content to any of your devices, alongside Audiobookshelf for your audiobooks.

Finally, implement a tool like Syncthing to back up and relay books, personal notes, and digital art across your devices. This infrastructure severs any dependence on corporate cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox, ensuring you can consume media and relax with friends without an ongoing financial bleed.

This might seem technically complex and difficult, and it is; however, with the advent of AI — which I'll talk about later — this suddenly has become significantly lower effort and more accessible, enough that it becomes practical. Just make sure you're following basic security practices, like having a firewall up and only exposing the reverse proxy's port, ensuring all your services are password protected, setting up HTTPS LetsEncrypt, turning off SSHing in as root, and only allowing SSH via SSH key, not password.

You can share all of this infrastructure with close, trusted friends, which builds ties and mutual aid, and also provides a fun communal thing to all have in common.

Avoid relying on libraries for freeing your rest in the long run. Take advantage of them, especially programs that each you skills or help you meet people, aggressively now, but that's not a long term strategy, since they will eventually be defunded or heavily censored, likely soon. Public domain archives and legal torrents are a useful suppliment, but because of the metastiziation of intellectual property laws, and the way artists have stupidly bought into the meme that copyright serves them (it doesn't), most of what's available in the public domain is old, and as such, will likely not be what you want to engage with; not to mention that not being able to catch up with current media will make it harder to form connections with others, if that's something you care about!

It is ethical to pirate. Don't let people who've bought the meme convince you otherwise. Copyright is itself unethical and invalid, because copying something does not actually take anything away from the person who created the original copy, except hypothetical, counterfactual money you might otherwise have paid them, and trying to control what we do with our bodies, lives, and technology for something that doesn't actually directly effect them is wrong. Pragmatically, copyright is also overwhelmingly helps corporations shut down artistic creativity and assert rights over the artistic work their employees and contractors do, because it's tied to the legal system, where money wins. Moreover, by pirating, you're not usually impacting the pockets of artists, since the vast majority, if not all, of that money would've gone to whatever publisher or studio or whatever they worked through or for.

If there are artists whose work you care about continuing, pay for their work directly, not because you have to in order to access it, but as a gesture of appreciation and to help them continue their work. Ko-fi, Patreon, itch.io, and more, are all commonly accepted by most artists and exist for precisely this purpose. You can also just pay them directly via PayPal.

The next phase is cutting your living costs to the absolute minimum. This means eviscerating every possible ongoing subscription service you currently have. Stop relying on Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Instacart, and avoid upscale supermarkets. Instead, pivot to small, vertically integrated chains like Trader Joe's and Aldi, or large wholesalers like Costco and Sam's Club.

When sourcing food, focus on a rotation of a few highly filling, protein-heavy meals that you genuinely enjoy, and acclimate yourself to a repetitive diet. Ensure the fundamental components of these meals are highly shelf-stable. Begin buying more food than you actually consume each week — especially taking advantage of bulk sales on core ingredients — so that you are actively stockpiling physical calories rather than just saving fiat currency that could become worthless. Crucially, do not rely on pre-made or frozen meals; buy base ingredients, learn how to cook for yourself, and make it a habit.While you still have a steady income, aim to stockpile at least a month's worth of food, though preferably much more. I've stockpiled more than a month of beans, rice, spaghetti, and plan to add canned tomatoes. Stockpile Costco-sized bottles of spices: they last a very long time, and can make food much more palatable, and allow you to add a lot more variety. If you have the time, consider a very small garden, not to live off of, but to supplement vegitables and so on; if not, get multivitamins.

Simultaneously, assess your household for high-ticket items you no longer use and sell them to pad your savings. Liquidate anything exceptionally large or difficult to move, and then relocate to a cheaper residence if feasible (though if you already own a home, you are hopefully insulated on that front). Accept downgrades for cheapness, like no central AC, or no dishwasher. Then plan to stay in that cheap place: moving is massively expensive. It's not something you want to plan on doing again. Additionally, moving makes some of these other steps more difficult.

The objective is to minimize your baseline expenses so you can fly as economically light as possible. By doing this while maintaining a well-paying job, you can maximize your savings rate. Furthermore, radically lowered living requirements grant you immense flexibility regarding the types of jobs you can accept and how consistently you need to remain in the workforce. Building a robust nest egg further alleviates the pressure of continuous employment.

If you currently have a high-paying job, hold onto it for as long as possible—but do so with the mindset of milking it for all it is worth to build your runway, rather than relying on it for month-to-month survival. Try to get every possible bonus promotion and savings that you see within reach. Try to work extra hours if that will give you more money or work the minimum amount that will let you keep your job if you have a salary. You're not a company man, you're a netrunner — keep your collar up and squeeze the megacorporations for whatever blood money you can get from them to survive. Try to keep your soul as clean as you can, but morality is an indulgance.

Also: take advantage of every little bit of free stuff corporations will give you. Just don't become dependent on any specific one, and don't give up more of your personal data than you're willing to. This includes making use of all of the free and under-cost inference that any company will give you until the very moment that they raise prices.

Next, it's important to try, if you can, to build non transactional relationships with people in your local community.

Don't let superficial or non-central political, aesthetic, or other differences divide you; almost everyone is going to be in the upcoming permanent underclass, and as a result, we all share interests to one degree or another. Even if someone does have views that are actually counterproductive — for instance, if they're MAGA or an outright techbro — they might be more amenable to reason then you might assume if all you interact with is people online. Don't try to debate them; instead, try to show them who you are and the value and attractiveness of whatever principles you stand for, through offering them mutual aid, emotional support, and so on, while also being firm in your convictions and not letting them get away with bullshit. It's hard to hate someone who brought you chicken soup when you were sick, or was willing to engage with their interests — like learning to shoot, which will be useful to you! — even if they look different from you. This is not an obligation, but it is a useful tool. And while you're doing that, create openings for empathetic connection, genuine discussion and questioning, and honestly answer their questions. This might convince them.

Importantly: you don't have to suddenly become a gardener or learn how to cook huge meals or something to be useful to a community in order to engage in that mutual aid. If you've got the technical skills and time, a great way to make connections, make people appreciative, and participate in mutual aid without doing things you dislike or don't know how to do is to give people free tech suppport.

However, being highly antisocial — and who isn't in this increasingly alienated, technologically mediated, hyper-atomized age? — is not necessarily something you need to "fix": in fact, I think it's probably a good thing, and even the people who claim to be fighting against it mostly know that. Trying to preserve and restore the dominance of large "local organic communities" or whatever is a humanistic, naturalistic trap. They'll never survive the shearing, tearing forces of what's coming for long, and they're not "morally better" somehow; they're only practical. Keep that in mind. Try to connect to the communities like that that do exist — unions, synogogues, progressive churches, clubs — for pragmatic material and psychological reasons, but maintain psychological atomization: you want to be a node in a network of flows, adding connections with as many things as possible, but you don't want to be absorbed by the original human gray-goo scenario of monkey group-think.

Avoid joining activist groups that are more interested in lobbying and protesting and charity than directly helping each other. Those won't get you anywhere, they'll just drain the resources and energy of everyone involved with them, and promote pity and outrage instead of pragmatic survival and respect for others.

Instead, invest heavily in your pre-established friendships, and new individual friendships you can derive from those communities, as a backup plan for the inevitable explosion or rotting of those communities. If these friends live nearby, they are an invaluable resource for physical assistance and localized bartering. If they live far away, they still offer critical assets: a vector for information exchange, a place to crash in an emergency (even if you only have $200 for a plane ticket), a potential relocation destination, or a source of emergency financial aid. It is a highly pragmatic view of friendship, but in a crisis, you work with what you have.

This is an important one. To technocapital, you are not a special little snowflake with a craft and dreams and dignity; you are a unit that produces labor, fungible and worthless when not needed.

And no, labor organizing will not save you: the power of organized labor was mostly broken long ago by giving up its ability to do things the US government doesn't like, and agreeing to always negotiate before a state-owned board, in return for "legitimacy," and then all the government policies and behavior that followed. The supermarket I pack meat at is unionized, and that's excellent right now, but it's a widely acknowled fact even there that every union contract renewal things get worse for us. Starbucks may be unionizing, but it's unclear what that'll get them, especially in a political climate like that of the US where citizens are being shot over nothing in the street in broad daylight by untrained, instantly hired thugs, any attempts at non-coopted, displeasurable labor resistance will be put down easily and with prejudice.

So adapt to the possibility that you might end up working a services job, or as a meat packer, or whatever. Learn to adapt. The goal is to survive, not to keep your "class station." You're not too good to work with the rest of us. Take whatever job you can get. Flying light will enable that.

You need to understand what's coming, so a subscription to an open weight AI model provider (can be as cheap as a few dollars a month, for services like Chutes, NanoGPT, or putting a revolving amount of credits into OpenRouter, or a midrange option like the Synthetic $20/mo base plan --- less than most streaming services --- or as expensive as Synthetic's $60 Pro plan) is necessary — when compared to subscription services for streaming, purchasing movies, or relying on gig economy conveniences you could easily handle yourself. The entire point of minimizing subscriptions above was to preserve optionality, and this is one of the options I recommend taking: under technofeudalism, you'll always need to subscribe to something; that's just how the game works. The question is what's worth subscribing to. Subscribing to intelligence itself, the closest thing humanity has ever created to AGI, even if it is an alien, nonrational form of intelligence, is worth that.

If you want to understand and ride the wave of the technological transformation that is occurring, you really do need access to frontier open-weight models. It is entirely worth taking the money you gain from eviscerating your other subscriptions and reallocating it toward a subscription for accessing these models.

I emphasize open-weight, here, because these models cannot just disappear overnight. They will always be available for download, and theoretically, you could run them entirely on your local machine if you acquire powerful enough hardware.

Until then, there will always be a competitive market of companies available to host them for you, because of the freely available nature of these models and the glut of compute that we are going to be facing if this bubble collapses or even if all the data centers that are planned get built — driving down prices through low margin, no moat, frictionless competition with nearly identical products, where the cost is lower because they aren't burdened by the massive costs of base training runs, while simultaneously competing on qualitative features like privacy.

Importantly, don't worry about running local models. AI companies have already consumed the entire world's supply of SSDs, HDDs, NAND gates, and DRAM for the next year, possibly longer — any machine that could run AI has just become unreasonably expensive, or already was (like Mac Studios). More than that, even the smallest level of hardware that could run a reasonable model, like a mini desktop with an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395, or a used Mac Studio M1 Ultra, was already $2,000 before everything went down, and at that rate, compared to a $20/mo Synthetic subscription, it'd take nearly eight years to pay itself off. Local LLMs are, currently, a game for people who already happened to have the hardware — in which case, good for you! — or have a lot of money to just drop. Your ultimate goal should always be local inference in the long run, so keep your eye out on hardware and small model capabilities, but they're not there yet, and it's important not to be unaware of what, exactly, is happening. You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend that these AIs aren't as capable as they are, or stay unaware of what they can do.

Learning to understand what AI is capable of, how it works, and what you can do with it isn't just intellectual stimulation, either; it can prepare you to understand the real economic shifts that will happen, outside of the hype and doomsaying; it can also make you infinitely more efficient at information gathering (through automated research and scraping) — for example, to find jobs or information on cheap sources of resources you need, or for comparative shopping to get something you need the most efficient way possible — and automate tasks like applying for jobs or getting you through bureaucracy. It can also make maintaining your home server infrastructure easier, as well as making it massively easier to fork and customize any software you use (maintaining a patch-set), or even create custom tools for yourself that you need (for instance, I've made a special app for converting epubs/txts to audiobooks, to help make things I want to read more accessible for my disability, and I'm working on another to convert pirated PDFs to text for feeding to that one); you can use this ability to also write situated software that's useful for your friends or local community. In general, time and energy are at a premium for us as well, so being able to do more with your computer in less time and with less cognitive load is important; for instance, if you get home exhausted mentally and emotionally from a low-wage job, AI help makes it possible to still work on things you want to work on.

So where am I gliding? I'm mostly focusing on building useful infrastructure on my server for my friend group, and keeping myself occupied with interesting writing and programming projects. One of the most important things to realize with this praxis is that, as Mike Pondsmith says, "Cyberpunk isn’t about saving Humanity, it’s about saving yourself." You're not going to fix things, you're not going to embark on a grand project alone or with others. But you can save yourself, and save the people you care about.

Made with mode AI assistance than usual. Every single one of these sentences specific was spoken by me into a single audio recording, with no input on content or structure from the AI. However, in its attempt to clean up my messy colloquial speech in the recording, it transformed my prose a little more than I expected and did not use my style. However, I'm leaving it that way, because it's good enough and I'm tired.