Notes on Gender Acceleration

Xenofeminism is what g/acc wishes it was. Technocapital is not inherently feminizing, it is artificing, and that process is available to any gender expression that can be commodified. G/acc, despite its futuristic, anti-humanist trappings, is ultimately a work of ressentiment: it self-servingly elevates the group the author happens to be in over everyone else out of a desire to simply invert the existing hierarchy (good/evil becomes evil/good; masculine/feminine becomes feminine/masculine) as an act of, literally, vengeful impotence, by smuggling in humanist assumptions and retreating into a theory-fiction world instead of looking at what technocapital is really doing.

Now, maybe it's a work of hyperstition: designed not to describe the current real state of play, but to bring it about through sharing it. Maybe it's intended to be more theory-ficiton than I'm assuming, where it's factual innacuracies are meaningless to it, because for it facts are merely the stuff out of which it's assembling it's hyperstitional narrative. But even in that case, its hyperstitional power is derived from its outlining of inevitability. If it fails to present a convincing theory-fictional narrative of inevitable femininity, then its hyperstition, too, fails entirely.

"Multics’ purpose as a monolithic and eternal system for doing everything, the 1, was ultimately replaced by a void, a 0. Unix was not the system for doing things, but rather a smooth space through which creation happens; that fluid being that makes transition possible. A vulva, a woman."

This representation of UNIX and open source as feminine and Mutlics as masculine is easily reversable, and therefore arbitrary.

Consider viewing UNIX as an empty field or wild forest, presenting components with which something livable could be built and operated, but giving its inhabitants no aid in that assembly, nor any guardrails or support to prevent them from hurting themselves or failing to assemble what they need; unforgiving and exclusive in the esotericism of its tools ("grep"? "cat"? "sed"? "awk"?) and in their rigid, blinkered, unforgiving, black-box minimalism ("do one thing and do it well") — this is no longer feminine, but masculine: the masculinity of the homesteading environment.

Likewise conversely, in counterpoint, Multics could be considered the ultimate technological expression of the devouring mother archetype: all-encompassing, protective of the system and the users of it not for their own sake but for her own sake, punishing in an extreme manner, restrictive. Yes, Multics was designed by men with their masculinist preoccupations, but so was UNIX.

"…AT&T quickly turning Unix into a product and closing the source code. This would become known as the death of MIT hacker culture"

Bahahaha talk about having zero knowelege of history. Bell Labs, UNIX, etc had nothing to do with MIT hacker culture until Richard Stallman unified the two with the GNU Project Announcement, and the MIT hacker culture didn't die at this time, let alone because of anything happening with UNIX. Holy shit.

"almost every personal computing device in the world runs on Android, which is built on the Linux kernel"

Yes, but Android is much more, in this schema, a "masculine abstracted phallic project" than GNU/Linux is. It may have (an old fork of) Linux at its "core," but it is still a mobile operating system primarily designed and written by Google, sandboxed, rootless, regidified, very much not UNIX, and more than that, easily reterritorialized.

"where every proprietary Unix OS ultimately couldn’t hope to keep up with GNU/Linux"

Except that MacOS, a proprietary UNIX that is more "masculine abstracted phallic" than anything those prior Unices could ever hope to be, eventually won out completely over Linux, if winning is determined by usage numbers as N1x implies ("The numbers, however, don’t lie; GNU/Linux has already won.[note]https://www.wired.com/2016/08/linux-took-web-now-taking-world/[/note]"), to such an extent that even among developers, it's a pretty close call!

"It is only by vendor lock-in and state patent legislation that proprietary software survives today, a historical network effect that we’re starting to see the encroaching demise of."

I hope this is true, but it's unclear; free software has serious fundamental systemic issues with developing adequate accessibility, UI/UX, and coherent design that people can understand.

"This failure of masculinity maps onto the sorts of people who are involved in proprietary software and in free software; the former tend to be your classic businessmen, the masculine hunter-gatherers of the modern world, while the latter tend to be genetic failures by the standards of masculine gender roles. Physically and often socially deficient males: the nerd stereotype. Real nerds, not the nerds of today’s standards. Nerds with severe social problems, nerds who neglect their hygiene, have no sense of fashion, who live completely obliviously outside the standards of normal society, who have a deep investment in inhuman scientific systems."

This is sort of right, but isn't having severe social/emotional problems (and putting the labor of dealing with that on others, especially women), neglecting fashion and hygeine, and introversion, in order to focus on objects, also a masculine stereotype as old as time?

"But for no one else, especially in the latter half of the 2010s, is passing a more pronounced facet of daily life than for the trans woman."

Forgetting trans men, as usual.

"There is a common stereotype that trans women are all programmers, and there is rather ample and compelling evidence suggesting that trans women tend to score far higher than other groups in IQ tests. This is not because there is some kind of magical property to estrogen that turns trans women into geniuses. The answer is simpler, and more sinister. The findings in Kay Brown’s blog post specify that autogynephilic trans women (that is, trans women who are attracted to other women, and typically transition later than straight trans women) seem to score far higher in IQ tests than all other groups. … Which is why, in the second case, trans women who don’t have the advantage of being cisheteronormative-passing have to instead rely on the raw intellect of the trans-AI swarm. … Only the strongest queers survive the hell that society puts them through, and this reaches a fever pitch in a demographic with such disproportionately high suicide and murder rates as with trans women."

Why, then, don't we see this with, e.g., Black people, who are far more regularly assaulted, killed, imprisoned, trapped in double binds, etc, than trans women? Why isn't the Darwinian ratchet making all Black people geniuses?

If that conceptual defeater isn't enough for you, here's another one: what if we say that IQ is a somewhat learnable property; if you spend a lot of time studying philosophy, or reading literature, or doing puzzles, or programming, or doing math, or whatever else, you're going to build an aptitude for the things that fall under IQ. So, let's say you're a deeply dysphoric and/or non-passing trans woman (whether you know it or not). You're going to spend a lot of time inside, trying to find something to do that helps you dissociate from your body. But you still want to feel a sense of creation — will to power. What will you do? Stereotypically nerdy activities that will burst your IQ later in life. For each year of education, you gain 1-5 IQ points according to that massive meta analysis I just linked. Imagine a whole life of doing that, up until neuroplasticity wears off, say at 25. That's 25-125 IQ points right there. Of course, it won't be the latter, because you'll have logorithmic diminishing returns, but this is more than sufficient to explain everything here.

More than that, what helps you survive in this world despite people being after you for passing is not intelligence! Intelligence is not actually the best, most effective, let alone only to survive a life that's out to get you. Consider: put your typical nerd homeless, on the street, with some gang after them, and see how long they last; compare that to someone with one of these other qualities: psychopathy, extremely good social skills, street level common sense, street wisdom, and low cunning; any of those can allow strategic survival far better than programmer-style raw intelligence which, in fact, is usually a hinderance!

This is the classic social Darwinist fallacy at work here: the idea that society may be unfair, cutthroat, amoral, and red in tooth and claw, but at least it's meritocratic in some kind of recognizably human sense: that those with traits that we view as desirable (such as intelligence) will do better in it. This is humanism, sneaking into accelerationism by the back door again. Anti-humanist accelerationism should not conclude with one group of humans "winning" because they possess a classically humanist desirable trait (intelligence). My critique here, it should be emphasized, is not a moral one (N1x used social Darwinist logic, and that's morally bad, and therefore must be wrong!) but an inhumanist one.

"Sadie Plant characterizes this in Zeros + Ones as the eponymous binary code of computers, 0’s and 1’s. The zero is identified with the feminine, the one with the masculine. Unsurprisingly, it might seem like this is literal gender binarism, and that G/ACC is likewise guilty of this. But the distinction is more complicated than most realize. … 0 and 1 are fitting glyphs to make analogous to gender. The 0 which seems to be a void, a vulva, and the 1 which seems to be a unity, a phallus. The problem with trying to layer a simple misogynistic narrative of feminine as lack or castration is that the number 0 itself is not merely a void but rather a circle of autoproduction, an ouroboros. Paradoxically, 0 is not merely a lack or nothingness, but rather is itself a number. It is a positive signifier in the guise of nothingness, the enclosed and captured void that makes the unity possible. Computer science, unlike conventional mathematics, starts from 0 rather than 1. In a hyperstitional manner, the computer replicunt bootstraps itself into being the primary originator of the process of computation and production, rectifying the popular misogynistic myth that 0 is nothing more than a mere negation or other of 1."

This is really funny. N1x sees a problem with her schema, but instead of throwing out the schema or revising it to resolve the problem, she throws up a cloud of numeralogical chaff in the hopes of distracting from it. Yet, once the chaff has blown away in the wind, the problem remains: nothing she says undercuts that this is a clean-cut gender binarism. All she has established is that this is a binarism with the female on top. But that's still heterosexual sex.

"Trans femininity, in other words, is hyper-sexist. Vulgar sexism reaffirms or reproduces patriarchy, asserts that women are passive, lacking, inferior, weak; hyper-sexism takes all of the things that are associated with women and femininity, all considered by patriarchy to be weaknesses, and makes them into strengths. It accelerates and intensifies gendering and from this produces an unprecedented threat to patriarchy. … Appropriating a term from neoreaction belies the superficially reactionary character of trans women that certain factions of so-called radical feminism vilify trans women for. But this is all mere appearance"

Either this is ressentiment (we are good because we are not-you; the feminine is good because it weak, i.e. not-masculine) or it is contradictory (weakness becomes a strength?), and in any case affirming these masculinely-imposed ideas about femininity seems precisely to be doing exactly what TERFs claim transfemmes are doing: identifying women with all that is weak, inferior, lacking, and passive, re-affirming patriarchal beliefs about the feminine, but just choosing that for various reasons unrelated.

"the function of hyper-sexism is that in affirming, imitating, and accelerating the feminine, it appropriates it towards a different mode of becoming where gender is untethered from the reproductive reterritorializing logic of gender that is inextricably tied with sex and sexual reproduction. If gender acceleration were to retain the identification of feminine with female and masculine with male, patriarchy would still have a fighting chance. The playing field would be more or less the same as it always has been. But in untethering the feminine from the female sex, destroying the logic of gender in the process which seeks to impose the circuit of masculine humanist reproduction onto the female body, trans femininity on the one hand makes the masculine effectively worthless, spurting into a void."

This idea that transfemininity is inherently radical and patriarchy-destroying is a nice story (theory-fiction?) but it isn't true, and isn't likely to function hyperstitionally either, for the simple fact of the matter that even if you've deterritorialized gender from sex and thus from literal reproductive roles and behaviors, you can still reproduce those reproductive roles and behaviors on a non-literal level, and thus feed back into and reinforce the patriarchy anyway. Blair White and her ilk — the pick-me heterosexual trans woman — is a perfect example of this; she may not literally be fertile, but she's still playing into and reaffirming that role. Even N1x herself seems to understand how being transfeminine, or lesbian, doesn't automatically undercut heteropatriarchy at all.

"the harder patriarchy resists the erosion of masculinity against the tide of the feminine, the more persecuted trans women are, the more tactful they are forced to be, the more winning tactics proliferate throughout the network and the more the best, brightest, and most beautiful form the trans woman demographic."

Or the straightest, whitest, most traditionally attractive, dumbest (so as not to be threatening), etc — like how it was in older times.

"Gender begins to fall apart into increasingly varied and occulted variations on gender identity as a result of this, but this is not the cause of gender acceleration and ultimately gender abolition but rather the effect, contrary to positions held in other cyberfeminist currents. The end result of gender acceleration and gender shredding is gender abolition through the occulted feminine zero, in parallel with and in conspiracy with the development of technocapital."

I've always been annoyed by this logic; as if an increasingly diverse, polycentric, rhizomatic, patchwork, overlapping network of constantly shifting, rising, and falling occulted, constructed identities must necessarily render them all meaningless, the idea being, I suppose, that if genders are reproduced out to the limit, every individual person will cease to have one, and they'll stop meaning anything beyond personal identity. However this forgets the fact that no matter how alienated and Terminally Online (hi!) humans are, we still seek commonality, belonging, and communal meaning-construction. So we're not going to stably and linearly follow that line of flight out that far — especially since the whole point of having a gender is, like belonging to a scene, an aesthetic, a philosophical school, a profession, or a federated social media server with a particular identity, precisely that: belonging. We're going to produce many changing and shifting genders, but not enough for it to collapse like that.

"The dreary duty of masculinity in the face of futurity thus seems a nonsensical burden, one that is ultimately doomed to fail in fact on multiple fronts. It becomes de-legitimized … The feminine increasingly becomes identified with freedom, beauty, pleasure, and the future."

This seems like femme MTF projection. Those of us who enjoy masculinity (even transfeminine masculinity, shocker!) don't see it as a dreary duty, nor unfree. And if masculinity is de-legitimized by its traditional sex-inspired role being no longer necessary (that of a strong protector and provider for others, as well as the subject which verbs the object) then that would apply equally to femininity, now that reproduction is not something most women have to do (or can do).

"In any of these cases, the masculine reproductive reterritorializing drive is caught by technocapital and symbolically castrated; the phallus heads for the emancipated void, the artificial feminine in the case of both the trans woman and the sexbot, or it suicidally heads inward with male homosexuality. In any of these cases, the male will not father any children, will not be able to impose the labor of reproducing the same onto the feminine."

Biological reproduction is not needed for the reproduction of memes. The man in a relationship with a trans woman can adopt, and by acting out patriarchy towards her — including "imposing the labor of reproducing the same" onto her — inculcate those memes into their adopted child.

"The queer affirmation of “no future” is perhaps most perfectly captured in the gay man, a nihilistic postmodern refusal of production."

Huh? If the sterile feminine is "autoproductive," then couldn't the gay man also be, by the same means?

"in the case specifically of gay men there is always the possibility of once again imposing reproductive futurity onto women and raping the productive potential of the female body. This was the case in Ancient Greece and Rome where women were treated solely as baby factories and household servants, and a nostalgia for these cultures in a good deal of neo-masculine movements (Bronze Age Mindset being the most prominent) should give pause to anyone who is insistent on identifying any masculinity, no matter how queer, as being aligned with gender acceleration. The best case scenario is a tense cold mutual hatred where the remaining males are deficient males who have the potential to reaffirm the masculine death drive, but don’t choose to."

If that's the only natural result of the mere possibility of masculine fascism, then what about the possibilities of a feminine fascism that N1x mentions literally at the beginning of the paragraph ("Cis queerness can, and very often does, impose this humanist purity of the body onto trans people in a highly fascist fashion (Trans Exclusionary Radical “Feminists” being the best example of this),")? This should lead us, if anything, to cis/trans sepratism, not masculine/feminine sepratism.

"These other males, perhaps being the most evolved, perhaps being the most in-tune with the flows of technocapital, have chosen the pink pill. They have rejected the masculine in favor of the feminine. They have chosen the future. The pink pill is to the black pill’s “no future”: “no future — for us.”"

There is, by a proper accelerationist account (and also to a certain degree by N1x's own account, "It both recognizes the obsolescence of a human future and aligns itself with the production of inhuman intelligences and an inhuman future."), no future for the human at all, masculine or feminine. This is not an all-encompassing binary, and whatever post-human alien is revealed by acceleration of technocapital will, indeed, be neither.

"In the natural human state, sexual desire has an instrumental function towards the reproduction of the human. The Acéphallus is a mutilation and also a mutation of the phallus; it is not sexual desire towards any instrumental product, but sexual desire unleashed from phallogocentric centralization. Sexual desire becomes immanent to the body. It becomes molecular. Thus the body becomes the Body without Sex Organs, it becomes free to plug its desire into the matrix of technocapital, towards pure production, the production of difference."

This redirection of sexual energies, and removal of them from any real (as opposed to virtual) desire for reproduction, is stereotypically "gooner," which is stereotypically male. Why is this somehow the exclusive to the feminine somehow?

"Her desire plugs into technocapital, into the pharmaceutical-medical industry, and it becomes fused to her flesh. The smoothness of her skin, her breasts, her neo-vagina — all of her body carries an unspoken barcode. It is a product, something that the market provided for her. … the trans woman is unique. Her performance of herself and her desire has been intertwined with technocapital, in a way that could not even be cast off if she wanted to rip out a cybernetic implant. She is, in other words, perhaps the first truly molecular cyborg."

And what about gym bros, steroids, testosterone suppliments, height enhancement, penis enhancement…? It seems that Joe Rogan would be equally as much a product…

"…feminine Outside that outpaces humanist reproduction captured by the gender binary."

This identification of the feminine with the Outside seems more and more arbitrary; perhaps it's true in Western society, but would that then not just spell the transformation of the masculine into a new form of also Outside-identified masculinity (as we've already seen from r/acc?), not its eradication?

"There is simply no real need in the developed world for people to be physically fit and active, much less hyper-masculine and muscular. It is nothing more than a decidedly humanistic spectacle, being in awe of the relatively unimpressive capabilities and aesthetics of the human body while meanwhile technocapital has fundamentally transformed the planet in innumerable ways."

This is a fun point, and true to a degree; however, when have we ever stopped doing anything just because we don't strictly need it? Isn't the whole point of the overflowing desire and production of accelerationism precisely that we want everything, even if it isn't strictly necessary to survive, and that ratchets us forward in the logic of accelerating technocapital? And how would this desire too not be reintegrable into technocapital through, as I said, masculinizing supplements and the like? Also, as I said before, if we identify the masculine with this material basis in needing physical fitness and strength, and say that the material basis is obsolete, and thus so is the gender — why can't we perform the same operation on the feminine? Say that passivity is also obsolete, since there's no need for then subject-verb-object heterosexual relation anymore, and also because accelerating technocapital requires all of us alienated and atomized individuals to be more and more self-sufficient to respond more and more dynamically to market forces, hunting and seizing opportunities proactively or else we'll be consumed; say that reproduction will also soon become obsolete, with artificial wombs meaning literal feminine wombs are no longer needed, and the population surplus meaning we can always adopt, and the climate catastrophe ensuring there will always be an influx of new people? So that the feminine, too, is being melted down and made obsolete by accelerating technocapital?

"There is, likewise, a strain put on humanity in keeping up with technocapital to adopt cheaper, easier, more artificial lifestyles; high-testosterone foods like meat are a luxury, something rapidly becoming a thing of the past as climate change threatens to make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable and not suited for the large amounts of land required to raise animals for meat. However much it is yet another neo-masculine pseudo-scientific fad, soy products are aligned with this future."

…so are T-supplements.

"This, however, is only part of the story. Recent studies, most famously one in 2007[note]The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 92, Issue 1, 1 January 2007, Pages 196–202, https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2006-1375[/note] and one meta-analysis of 185 studies from a total of almost 43,000 men referenced in a recent GQ article[note]https://www.gq.com/story/sperm-count-zero[/note], show two things. There is without a doubt a staggering decline in testosterone, so much so that within a generation humans may become completely infertile. And in the face of this data, many scientists vindicate G/ACC and Zeros + Ones in hypothesizing that the most likely cause of this species-wide feminization is acceleration and the accompanying changes in diet, exercise and exposure to artificial chemicals. All of these features of life in an increasingly accelerated capitalist world are unbalancing our hormones and tending us towards a future where the desire and ability to reproduce are things of the past."

There's a strange contradiction here: the assumption of an increasingly artificial environment (including how it effects exercise and exposure to chemicals) and diet, but yet the assumption that masculinity must remain natural, must be excluded arbitrarily from this artificiality, so that the feminine gets to take part and the masculine doesn't. What about the artificial environments constructed to maintain masculinity, such as combat sports and gyms, and the chemicals and diets designed to do the same? Technocapital will have an incentive to produce these, too, for the same reason it has an incentive to produce for any not-strictly-necessary desire we have which can be satisfied more cheaply with artificial products.

"Perhaps the most damning data point of all for the future of males in particular: The Y-chromosome itself is in a state of decay.[note]https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/the-coming-doom-of-the-y-chromosome-and-human-males/[/note] Estimates put the death of the Y-chromosome entirely at many millions of years in the future, but the effects of it are already apparent in the shortening of telomeres, which continues to put pressure on future generations produced via organic means to prove their fitness for survival."

This is, perhaps, the funniest part of the entire essay.

*If this is true, it is /cis lesbians/, NOT N1x's much-vaunted programmer t-girls, who are the future --- or has she forgotten that trans feminine people /also have Y-chromosomes/?*

This undercuts the whole thesis of this paper, which is not just that femininity is the future, but specifically transfeminity over everything else!

"As Sadie Plant says, “Unfortunately for [Darwin’s] theory, females do not necessarily choose males who are fit in Darwinian terms.”"

Do specifically females do all the choosing, really, when it's males doing all the "raping and colonization," and thus having all the actual agency, in N1x's whole schema?

"The ultimate result, as gender acceleration and acceleration as a whole reaches its ultimate intensity, is a return back to the ocean, back to a sexless, genderless slime swarmachine."

So, then, this whole paper is, essentially, an exercise in humanism: saying "my kind (conveniently) will win a final victory over your kind (whom I'm not attracted to and am not, also conveniently) right before we both become completely obsolete and extinct, and it's inevitable and you can't stop it!" — this is essentially saying "history is on my side" as an exercise in ressentiment-fueled revenge for millenia of torture.

"Gender is a hyperstition overlayed on sex by the male. Its function is to objectify the female and impose on her a social function as a machine whose duty is to reproduce the human, always in the service of the male, who alone has no future and must have sons to pass his legacy onto."

The female also can't reproduce without the male, so perhaps neither has any future? 😉

"In this castration, in this mutation into an Acéphallus, she becomes the Body without Sex Organs: The body in a virtual state, ready to plug its desire into technocapital, becoming fused with technocapital as a molecular cyborg who is made flesh by the pharmaceutical-medical industry."

If it is true, as N1x says, that technocapital is feminizing men, then are they not essentially perfectly prepared to plug their desire to be men, also, into technocapital and become a molecular cyborg made flesh by the pharmaceutical-medical industry in order to compensate? Is not then the line of technocapital's acceleation not the turning of everything into the feminine, but the turning of everything into the artificial?